People always wonder how they can make more money on their blog, how they can increase the amount of RSS subscribers their blog has and how they can get known in the world of blogging and become a blogging success. There is always one answer to all of these questions as you will see here.
How can I earn money through my blog?
Increase the amount of traffic your blog receives you can then use Google Adsense or another advertising program to receive money per each click your website receives. If your traffic is over 500 unique a day perhaps experiment with affiliate programs such as Commission junction or Clickbank if you don’t feel like promoting products from these websites then why not promote a one of company product using their own personal affiliate section. Many companies do use affiliates to sell their own products, such as SEO Book and Web CEO.
Once you have that stable amount of high traffic to your website you can then choose from hundreds of different ways to monetize your blog and increase your monthly earnings.
How can I increase the amount of RSS subscribers my blog receives?
Increase the amount of traffic that your blog receives although some of the traffic you receive will be untargeted traffic hopefully a high percentage of this will be targeted, depending on the strategies you have used to increase traffic to your website. If your content is good enough, which it should be anyways to have a good amount of traffic then people will already be contemplating subscribing to your feed before they even finish your article.
How can I get known in the world of blogging as a success?
Increase the amount of traffic that your blog receives, well this is actually an impact of increased traffic not exactly the strategy used to become a blogging success.
By increasing the amount of traffic your blog receives, this will in turn have an affect on many other aspects of your website such as the earnings you make, the increase in RSS subscribers and the overall increase in your blogging community. People will start to talk about your blog others will hear about your blog before you know it your blogs gone viral.
Increased traffic should only lead to more traffic this is if you’re using the right strategies, every month since my blog was first created my traffic has increased and so should yours. This will eventually lead to your blog being quite successful this is when you will become a blogging success.
As you have seen the answer to each of these questions is increase your traffic I realise that the point I was trying to make could have been made much quicker and it may not of taken up a whole page of writing however I felt that it may surprise you or at least make you understand that increasing traffic is one of the most important factors of blogging success.
So lets get on with the 12 tips I promised you, these 12 tips for increasing traffic to your blog have been selected as many of them are strategies I or a person I know have used also they are all free marketing techniques.
Social Media Marketing
Many of you will have realised that I keep going on about Social media marketing, especially within the past week or two. Well that’s because I have been experimenting with SMM as I never used to use this marketing strategy and well I have received some very nice traffic through this method so I would advise anyone who isn’t already marketing their blog through social media marketing to give it a try. I have already written an article which explains what social media marketing is (Have you tried social media marketing yet) and an article discussing the good and bad points of social media marketing focusing mainly on the targeted and untargeted traffic that social media marketing brings.
Increasing traffic through social media marketing can be very simple; you can spend 5 minutes or 20 hours a day focusing on creating a network of users with similar interests to that of your website, reviewing other people’s profiles, stumbling other people’s articles, digging other people’s articles and so on. Either way you are bound to increase traffic by some extent.
I have also put together a list of social media marketing websites which I would advise anyone to try out. I do however make clear that instead of marketing your website on every social media website that you should perhaps focus on 2 or 3 social media sites and become a top user of those social media sites first.
Digg
This is a social media site for people to discover and share content with others these include a wide range of topics, personally I feel it’s a little to wide to get noticed.
StumbleUpon
Stumbleupon is one of my favourite social media websites where you can discover and review other peoples websites/web pages based on your interests. They also have stumble upon groups similar to Yahoo and Google groups as well as giving you the option to review other people’s stumbleupon profiles. You can make me your friend here
Reddit allows users to generate links and rate other peoples links up and down.
Del.icio.us
Delicous is a social bookmarks website where you can add bookmarks to your own personal list.
Twitter is another personal favourite of mine, mainly due to the flexibility that it presents you. The overall marketing capability of Twitter in my own opinion is not as large as the likes of StumbleUpon however I do feel the ease of communication with fellow bloggers more than makes up for it. You can follow me here
Propeller
Propeller is very much like Digg where you vote for articles which are of interests to yourself to get them on to the front page where they will then receive thousands of hits.
Slashdot
This is primarily a tech news site but they also cover other areas such as games, entertainment and politics. The idea here is that you submit your own stories which are then published after editors approvals.
Newsvine
Newsvine is a community driven site which allows you to add news stories or write columns.
Sphinn
Sphinn is another of my favourites with a similar theme to that of Digg. Sphinn is dedicated to SEO and other internet marketing fields. The same concept is used from Digg here; you submit stories and then people “Sphinn” the story if they like it and “Desphinn” the story if they do not. With a close knit community Sphinn is definitely a place I recommend for any marketer.
You can read my ultimate guide to using Sphinn here
HubSpot
Hubspot is primarily focused on being a social media website for marketers and fellow entrepreneurs.
Forums
Web forums are a great way to become an authority figure in your chosen market. If you know your stuff and have experience then I am sure that you can bring a large amount of traffic from popular forums in your market.
Forums can increase your traffic in two ways the first being through advising someone to visit your website through a post in a thread. As long as you don’t spam your link everywhere and ensure you are just advising people to visit your website when it is actually beneficial to them, then admins should have no trouble with this at all.
The second way of increasing traffic through forums is by adding your website link to your signature. Now a lot of forums do not allow signatures until a certain amount of posts have been achieved or that you have been a member for a certain amount of time first. However when you have the option of adding a signature make sure you take full advantage of this. Forums can be a great way of increasing traffic to your website.
Here is a list of Internet related forums that you may be interested in.
Digital Point
Digital point is built for internet marketers, search engine optimisation specialist and other internet market related webmasters.
V7N Forums
V7N is another forum similar to Digital point built to discuss everything about the internet. Both of these forums are largely active and full of friendly members.
Warrior Forums
Another forum similar to the last two, this forum is devoted to internet marketing.
Namepros
Name pros is more focused on domain names whether you buy, sell, park or develop domain names this is the place for you guys.
Niche Chopper Forums
Niche chopper forums is a great place for anyone interested in affiliate marketing. Niche choppers have a growing group of devoted, experienced and friendly affiliate marketers.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fundamental part of Internet marketing. If your interested in increasing your traffic and focusing on advertising your website to your target audience and don’t have any money for Google Adwords then I would advise you to perform SEO on your website.
There is a vast amount of SEO tutorials and SEO guides on this website to help you optimise your website as well as tips and guides on performing keyword research. You may want to download my free SEO and Keyword research eBooks too which explain many of the basics and more.
Blog Commenting
I have praised how good blog commenting can be on my blog commenting article however I felt it was also important to add it to this list of top strategies for increasing traffic.
Blog commenting is a great strategy for increasing traffic to your own website through the use of other blogs related to yours. The idea is that you pick a couple of very popular blogs which are in the same market as your own and you read their articles daily (preferably a blog you enjoy) after reading the articles each day you can comment on the article, praise them for their work or the best thing to do is ask questions or state your opinion on the article subject.
Read my blog commenting article for a more in depth guide to blog commenting.
Link Exchanges
Link exchanging is a method of increasing traffic and links to your website. The idea here is that you find other blogs/websites in your market and in exchange for those blogs to add your website link to their blog you also add their link to your blog. Link exchanging can increase traffic if the blog you have traded with has a large amount of traffic then your sometimes lucky enough to receive a couple of hundred unique a month maybe more.
Overall link exchanging is nothing to depend on; however it is another traffic source and could help increase your subscriber amount.
To do link exchanges you can use forums such as Digital point in the buy, trade and sell section also you could contact other blog owners through their own contacts page and ask if they would be interested in exchanging links with you.
Freebies and Competitions
Through promoting a free product that your giving away on your blog you can quite easily attract a large amount of people. I have tried this form of marketing a couple of times by giving away free eBooks, after doing little promotion on forums and social media websites as well as telling some friends I find that other people who have found the product will link to the product and tell others about it. I am not sure if this is because the product is free or because the product is good, I suppose it would have to be a little bit of both for someone to do it.
So your thinking that it would be a great idea to promote some free products on your site to increase publicity but you don’t have a clue what to promote, you have no products. Well why not write a small 10-12 page eBook on the market which you write about daily, surely you know enough about that market to write “A basics guide to” or a “How to” eBook.
eBooks are great promotional products and can easily increase the amount of traffic you receive to your website.
Another option instead of giving away freebies is to host a competition on your website. I would suggest promoting a free product as personally I feel that is much easier and the benefits are as great if not greater. However if you don’t have a product and cannot be bothered or don’t have the skills to create one then perhaps a competition would be more beneficial for you.
Be creative in creating your competition, try to be unique and create a competition that no one has ever created before. After you have thought of the competition idea, approach some companies for sponsorship and go about creating a well worth prize giveaway.
After you have come up with the competition idea, produced all the information needed for the entries and collected a prize package then its time to promote your competition on other people’s blogs, forums, through friends, family, social media sites everywhere.
To sum up what you need to do is
1. Create a competition concept (unique and fun)
2. Think of a prize package for the winner (any runners up prizes?)
3. Conact potential sponsors
4. Create the competition rules
5. Write up the overall competition, including rules, prizes, time length e.t.c
6. Promote, market and advertise
Article Directories
Article directories can be a great method of improving your search engine rankings as well as increasing traffic to your website. Article directories allow you to submit your own unique articles giving you a massive variety of different subjects.
The way to use article directories is for link building and increasing traffic to your website. You can either write article teasers which are written to entice readers to click through to your website for the full article or review or you can write large in depth articles which readers will be amazed at and then click through to your website, both have their advantages and disadvantages so I advise you to try out both strategies.
Here is a list of article directories, the main one to use would be eZine articles.
The best article directory on the internet, this directory should be the first directory that you submit your articles to. Ensure you read the terms and conditions and make sure your articles are up to editorial approval, as this can take quite a while for newcomers (average 7-9 days).
www.articledashboard.com
www.ideamarketers.com
www.goarticles.com
www.articlecity.com
www.articlesBase.com
www.buzzle.com
Write unique and informative content
This may sound easier than it actually is writing unique and informative articles that people will bookmark or tell their friends about is actually quite hard in reality. The main reason for this is the fact that there is so much information already on the internet; it is hard to find any subject that has not already got an article written for it.
However you can still make your article sound unique by adding your own personal opinions, preferences and experiences to the article. Your readers will reward you for this, by linking to the article that they enjoyed so much because the reader wasn’t a robot. They didn’t tell you the key points, they expressed their importance obviously however they added their own opinions and experiences to the article as well, to make it unique and entertaining. This isn’t always easy to do however if you try and add your own opinion in to every article you write it will sound unique and more personal.
I have written a pretty in depth and useful article on unique content if you would care to read it.
• Make it personal
• Make it entertaining
• Make it useful and informative
Blog carnivals
A blog carnival is a collaboration of articles related to specific topics that the host picks. The host then invites others to add their best relevant articles or articles they have found to be useful. This then provides a list of relevant articles which bloggers have found useful and informative for the host to add to their website.
Blog carnivals are good for increasing traffic and also increasing links to your website. Using blog carnivals is easy all you need to do is go on to www.blogcarnival.com and search for blog carnivals that are related to your articles subject and submit your article to their blog carnival.
Directory Submissions
Directories are websites which list other websites. You usually find general directories which have both a free and paid submission choice. The free directory submission will generally take a couple of weeks to be approved and they try and tempt you in to purchasing a paid submission which is usually approved between 1-5 days.
Directories help to increase traffic and help link building for your website.
How to submit your website to a directory?
Find a directory and ensure that you find the most appropriate category for your website to be added to. After you have done this find the submit button and enter your details.
You are usually asked for the websites URL a title, description and keywords. In this part it is important that you include an eye catching, optimised title as well as a enticing and optimised description for your directory submission. This will help ensure your website is ranked high and that you can maximise the amount of people who will click through to your website.
There are thousands of directories to submit your website to some of which are just paid and some which have both the free and paid options.
If you don’t have the time to submit your website to directories yourself you can pay other companies to do this for you. One that I would recommend is submitedge you can purchase their directory submission service here.
You can find a list of directories here
Sponsor a website theme
Another way of increasing traffic to your website and increasing the amount of links your website has is through sponsoring a website template or theme. Many web developers sell their footer links on their website themes and templates for obvious reasons; however it may just be worth doing.
If you can find a great looking template, that is sure to have a large amount of publicity and is cheap enough for you to purchase a place in the footer it may be worth purchasing.
Sponsoring wordpress themes seems to be the most popular themes to sponsor, however you need to make sure that you’re not going to be ripped off, that the theme will be marketed and that it has the potential to be a popular theme.
Guest posts
The last tip for increasing traffic I have is writing a guest post for other blogs in the same market that you are in.
Guest posting on popular blogs will help to increase traffic to your website; many people who click through from the guest post will already be interested in your articles and way of writing that they may subscribe to your feed.
You may think that popular blogs wouldn’t want you to post on their blogs but really they do, they don’t care whether you’re already a popular blogger yourself. All they care about is the content; if it is good unique content then they may just select you.
To be able to do a guest post on another blog you will usually have to pitch your idea to them. You need to be clear with the idea you have, relate the idea with their blog and sell it to them. Make the connection between your article idea and their blog.
Wow this turned out to be a big article; I really hope these tips where of use to you. There are hundreds of ways to drive traffic to your blog, its all about being unique, creative and focused. Persistence is the key to success.
