No matter what goal you have for your blog, to earn blogging money or to make your mark on your area of interest gaining fame and fortune, you will need to get traffic to your blog.
The good news is that blogs have many built-in functions that attract organic search engine traffic resulting in more traffic to your blog without having to reverse engineer the Google, Yahoo or MSN search algorithms, or even worse, trying to trick them resulting in bad things happening eventually.
HOW YOU SHOULD BE USING YOUR BLOG TO MAKE MONEY
For any of you who are using InfoMarketer’s Zone to help build your own online marketing business, you know exactly how to use blogs to make money online and are already benefiting from the many detailed tutorials we have on exactly how to use your blog to turn profits from your own products, affiliate marketing and advertising.
The purpose of this post is to discuss traffic generation techniques for your blog, but here are some important points on what we mean by blogging money and how you should be using blogs in your internet business:
- Today I am experimenting with setting an entire sales site, content site and blog up using blogging software such as WordPress – using static pages along with blogging pages you can create your entire site for far less money using WordPress AND benefit from being able to syndicate and share all of your content
- Center your communication around your blog. I now feed email marketing, advertising, and existing customers into my blog as the central way of communicating with my customers. It’s effective, efficient and a great way to build a community mentality around your business
- Add personality to your business. It’s not always easy to add personality through static webpages or even emails – but by sticking to a daily blog publishing schedule, you can really form a personality that attracts a loyal audience of readers and buyers that otherwise you would not have achieved
- Once you have an active blog, you have dozens of ways to leverage your publishing to get more traffic, partners and sales…that’s what we’ll talk about next
BLOGGING MONEY TRAFFIC GENERATION TECHNIQUES
Even though the major blogs including Blogger and my favorite, WordPress, have many built-in traffic generation functions, you can do much more to get traffic to your sites…
Here are 5 blogging money traffic secrets we are using to generate hundreds of thousands of hits to our various sites each month leading to major improvements in opt-ins and sales for our various online businesses:
1. Post daily – pay attention to long-tail keywords. Most people don’t ever set up their own blog. Of the people that do, another majority (over 90% in my own informal review) do not maintain any sort of regular publishing interval and of those that do maintain a regular posting schedule, most of them do not post enough to get the biggest traffic gain from their blogs.
Having studied the impact of publishing schedules on traffic generation, the sweet spot falls somewhere between 3 posts per week up to about 14 posts. I realize this is a wide range, but the point is – any fewer than 3-posts each week I see a major drop in traffic, any more than a couple of posts a day I don’t see much incremental increase.
Right now, for my blogs, I’m seeing the best results at about 1 post each day – the study continues.
Finally, I get my blogging ideas from many sources including current news, magazine and ezine articles, discussion forum postings and questions, my own experiences and case studies, etc… I do then typically keep an eye on multi-word keywords that are important to my market and target those in the context of my articles. For instance, there is one keyword phrase I am targeting with this article – bet you can’t guess?
2. Make sure you have entered a "ping" list in your WordPress blog. Pinging is simply the mechanism blogs use to notify major search directories that they have added new content – you enter your ping list in WordPress by choosing Options –> Writing —> Update Services from the admin menu. There are some important directories you want to ping including http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2 , http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping, http://ping.feedburner.com, and http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping . We provide a complete top list of the most important directories to ping inside InfoMarketer’s Zone.
3. Using SEO Plugins Available From Your Blogging Platform. One of the advantages I see with WordPress is the solid availability of plugins that help optimize your blog for the search engines – here are a few of my favorites:
- Google Sitemaps Plugin
- Sociable Plugins (Places social network recommendation links by your posts)
- Ultimate Tag Warrior (Allows addition of tags by each post)
- Shortstat (Simple, nice stats function to help assess traffic)
- Related Entries (Suggested related tags from Yahoo)
There are constantly new plugins being introduced (typically at least once each week) that you can test for new search engine friendly impacts.
4. Using Forums and Articles To Promote Your Blog. You may have already heard advice about referring to your websites in articles posted to article directories and including your blog link in signatures or forum posts, but here’s a slightly different spin. What I do is search for discussion forum postings on exactly the topic or problem I have posted to my blog about. For example, if I had just posted "5 great desert recipes for diabetics", I would then head over to Google and search for "diabetic desert recipes discussion forum" and work through the many entries I would see asking questions or giving recipes on diabetic diets. Then, I would find the ones that had several hundred views with recent posting (signs of an active forum), then post 1 recipe with a link back to my blog posting. This may seem like a lot of work, but let me assure you, the results can be very sweet!
5. Blogrolls, cross-posting, tracebacks and more… OK, this has to be the most under-used, overlooked ways to generate more blogging money and traffic to your blogs – it’s so powerful and so unknown that I hesitate to even mention here since it’s guaranteed to generate massive, relevant traffic to your blogs. Think of all the websites and blogs in your market as a large community – a community that loves to share ideas, comments, opinions, resources – sees that as stronger than holding back.
So – each day I search for blog posts that are relevant to my topic and when I find good ones on high traffic blogs I publish content that refers back to them resulting in what’s called a "traceback" link to that blog.
Often (not always), by doing this you get several advantages – your blog shows up as a traceback entry in their comments and often the blog publisher will mention your blog giving you instant exposure and traffic. Recently, I made a comment on one of the top blogs on the internet – Seth Godin’s blog, within hours I had a comment on my blog from Seth – cool!!
Trick with this approach is to have an opinion – be respectful, but don’t be afraid to also be somewhat controversial or take an opposite point of view – assuming you can back your point of view with solid facts, experience or at least a well thought out argument.
There you have 5 blogging money secrets – now what’s holding you back from getting started?
Jeff
