Guide To Blogging

Archive for the ‘Getting visitors to your blog’ Category

Whether you’re blogging for money, personal enjoyment or as a way to promote a cause etc at times we all struggle with our blogs: from coming up with a new post, to finding ways to get new visitors to our posts. It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogging guru or a newbie we could all do with a little help at times.

One of the major benefits of blogging, over a maintaining a web site, particularly if you blog using a WordPress blog is those wonderful little things known as plugins - a plugin enables you to make your blogging life a little easier as they often automate certain things; from recognising and removing spam to making it easy to add videos to your page.

But…

With so many plugins available to you how do you know which one is right for you and better still, what type of plugins will actually get your blog working for your rather than the other way around.

If you’re interested in either earning more money from your blog or getting more traffic to your blogs posts and pages there are a few different plugins you can use.

Heck, just search the interenet and I’m sure you’ll find more than you bargained for…The problem with that though is…

How do you know what really does work? Do you really need to pay X amount of dollars for a plugin,piece of software that can be found for free (or a lot cheaper with a bit more research?) and most importantly, how on earth do you get it work for you?

There is a simple answer to all of the above…

Blog Tripler

This one simple package does all you need it to do, plus a whole lot more and withing minutes can actually have your blog working for you - helping you earn more, get more visitors and promote your cause etc

Take a look at just what it offers and why blogging newbies and gurus alike are jumping at it. Blog Tripler

While setting up and maintaining a blog can be relatively easy for the creator, sometimes, depending on the theme your using, navigating through that blog can be a nightmare for the user - and that’s where a sitemap can come in handy.

When I set up a blog I use two different sitemaps - one is the google xml sitemap generator which creates a sitemap of your blog and submits it to google, ask.com, msn and yahoo - which is very handy - you can find more information on it here Google Sitemap

The other one - and this is the one that’s really handy for visitors to your blog - is the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - this one allows you to set up a seperate page on your blog - customised to suit your needs - which allows your visitors to see at a glance just what is on your site.  For an example you can see the sitemap to this blog here (sitemap) To set it up it’s simply a matter of installing the plugin - customising it to suit your needs, then creating a new page and pasting in a line of text.

For more information and to download the plugin go to Sitemap Generator

In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger‘’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it’’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

There is little point in writing a blog if no one comes to read it. Blogs are automatically search engine friendly because of their fresh content and clean formatting, but there are a few easy techniques you can use to improve your rankings.

A few words about keywords:

1. Choose your Keywords wisely.

You can choose to write on a topic, or for a key word or phrase, that is immensely popular and has a ton of competition, and never stand a chance of getting in the top page or two of rankings. Or you can choose similar but more targeted keyword or phrase with less competition be in the top 10 listings.

2. Key Word or Phrase? That is the next question.

Most people do not use a single word for a search engine query. The often search a phrase or even type an entire question. This is not necessarily the most efficient way to search, but it is the most natural. So do not think you need to limit yourself to single key word. A key phrase of three - five words is entirely appropriate.

3. Choose your URL wisely.

Once you have chosen your keyword, it is time to choose your URL wisely. Whether your blog is hosted by your blogging software, on your own domain or subdomain. You want your primary keyword to be in your domain name (URL).

4. Keyword Placement

Besides having your primary key word in your URL, you also want it to appear the header tags and titles of your posts.

5. Keyword usage in the body of your post

When writing each post you of course want to use your primary keyword(s) in the text, but don’t over do it or you’ll sound like spam. Always write in a natural, reader friendly manner. This is also the place put a few secondary keywords as well.

6. Keywords in Links

Keywords that appear in links are more important than those in plain text. So where appropriate, when linking to another blog or website, use your keywords in the text of links.

7. Keyword Categories

Another natural place to put your keywords in your Category names.

Keywords are not the only thing search engines consider when ranking your blog. Here are few other areas to consider:

Links

Links that point to your blog and posts are very important to building pagerank.

1. Search Engines and Directories

Being listed in search engines and directories provide great single direction links. So make sure you submit your blog, first of all to dmoz.org. This is end all, be all to internet directories and is a place that most search engines pull from to find websites to spider. After than submit directly to the major search engines, that way they know you exist. Finally, submit to the blog search engines and various free directories.

Here is a well respected list of Blog Directories by Robin Good.
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55

2. Articles

Turn some of your blog posts into articles and submit them to the article directories. This will get you more linkbacks.

3. Comment

Leave appropriate comments on forums and other blogs with a link to your site in the comment.

Updates

1. Update your blog.

The more fresh content you have, the happier the spiders are. Some blogging software will even let you write posts in advance and schedule them to be posted on certain days.

2. Ping

After you update your blog, you’ll want to “ping” the search engines to let them know you have new content. That will get your site spidered more often. You can us the Ping-O-Matic Tool (http://pingomatic.com/) to ping a lot of search engines all at once. Alternately, if you use Feedburner, for your RSS distribution, they have a tool that will automatically ping the search engines when you update your blog.

Follow these few easy guidelines and see your blog listed in the search engines in no time.

Cheryl Hartzman is a successful work at home mom who specializes in providing advice and opportunities to others who want to earn a living working at home. For more information about working at home, visit her blog at http://wahcenter.blogspot.com

Copyright © 2008 Cheryl Hartzman. All Rights Reserved (Article may be reprinted if all text and links remain intact and unchanged.)

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Cheryl_Hartzman

As per a comment posted here the other day I recently joined BloggrZ.com and from what I’ve seen of it so far it’s going to be a wonderful new service for both those that love to visit other people’s blogs as well as those want to build the readership of their own blogs.

By installing the BloggrZ Toolbar you can easily explore other blogs and get your own blog visited. You can set your preferences as to what type of blogs you’re interested in (these can be updated at any time) and a simple click of a button will let you explore the blogging world based on your preferences.

As taken from the about page:

BloggrZ.com allows you to submit blogs that will be reviewed by all through BloggrZ Toolbar and BloggrZ.com website and will be promoted, based on popularity, to the main page of BloggrZ.com. Anyone can submit a blog. The blog will then be shown through toolbar and will also be available on BloggrZ.com website for votes and comments. When a user submits a blog it will be placed in the “Recently Submitted” area until it gains sufficient votes to be promoted to the main page.

Through the use of BloggrZ Toolbar, bloggers get to explore other blogs, get their own blogs explored and increase readership. Blog-explorers, on the other hand, get to view the online world through bloggers’ eyes. The toolbar remembers the preferences set by a user and shows blogs based on those interests. Preferences can be updated any time.

When you love blogs so much, why stumble all over the web? There is a better way to easily discover great blogs and let your blog get discovered. All based on your preferences. Get your BloggrZ Toolbar today! BloggrZ.com always keeps you within the blogosphere.

It’s well worth a look in my opinion. BloggerZ.com 

When it comes to building your online business/blog Web 2.0 is all the rage. These social sites (from blogs and forums to bookmark sites like digg and stumbleupon) are a great way to meet and interact with like-minded people or just make new acquaintances.

Before we turned to the internet to network with others people used to pass out their business cards by the handful, and now online the same premise can be applied with Entrecard. You too can have your own online business card that promotes your blog and allows you to network with other blog owners.

Other Entrecard blog members can in turn either drop me their business card or build up credits to advertise on my sites widget etc.

If you want to know more take a look at this video

Are you someone that enjoys blogging but wonders how you can start building traffic? These tips should help you. All of them are free.

First you need to have several quality articles before you begin to market it. If people come to your blog and there is very little content you might not get them back. Whatever your blog topic is, write enough articles that will capture the interest and attention of the readers you are targeting. If your reader sees a benefit from reading your blog, they are much more likely to subscribe or come back to your blog again.

Also I would have a recent picture of yourself and an introduction with your contact information easy to find, along with a more extended profile people can click on to learn more about you. Make it as easy as you can for people to contact you. By having your picture and profile on your blog it allows people to get to know you on a more personal level.

One of the first things you can do is start to leave comments on other people’s blogs. I would only do it for blogs that are about the same or a similar topic to yours. So if you blog about cats you can look for other blogs related to cats or pets. You can find other blogs easily by doing a google search. Just type in “cat blogs” or whatever your subject is. Be sure to leave good comments and ones that contribute to the discussion you are making remarks about, then you can have a link back to your blog.

You can do this with as many blogs as you wish as often as you like to start building traffic.

If you aren’t already a member of online discussion forums, search google and join ones that match your interests. As blogging is so popular now some forums have folders specifically for blogs and you may be able to share your blog there with others and do link exchanges. Be sure to read the rules for each specific forum.

Forums that allow link exchanges and posting your blog will certainly increase your traffic. This is especially good for new bloggers. You can build up relationships with them and if they are relatively new to blogging also you are helping each other out. Again it is best to focus on helping other bloggers who have blogs with a similar topic to yours.

Forums usually allow you to have a signature line after your posts. Contribute to the discussions by adding good content or helpful suggestions and you can have many people clicking on your link.

Once you have several good articles you can “ping” them. Pinging is a service that automatically lets many services know your blog has new content and these services will crawl and index your site. This should be done each time you add new content to your blog. Pingoat and ping-o-matic are widely used.

You also want to submit your blog to as many social bookmarking sites as you can. One of the best I have found is Social Poster. This will submit your blog to some of the largest sites such as Digg, Reddit, and Stumble Upon, among many others. It will take time to join each of these sites but well worth the time and effort. Once you have joined as many as you wish the submission is quite fast and easy.

Another method you can use is blog carnivals. These are blog events that focus on particular topics.

One way this works is that a blogger will write details about what topic they wish to have for a carnival, and invite others to submit their own articles for submission to the carnival, which will be like an online magazine. The carnival will have a title, specific topic, links to all the contributions that have been received and often opinions and remarks on the articles.

The most important thing is to be consistent. When you are first starting your blog you should post every single day, for at least the first while. After that you can write a bit less often, but I recommend no less than 3 or 4 times a week, and use the submission services mentioned above each time you have new content.

Well it’s been a couple of weeks or so now since Blogrush hit the scene with a big bang, it seemed for a few days there every man and his dog was talking about it - I know I added it to a couple of my blogs pretty quickly but now that all the initial hullabaloo has died down it’s probably time to sit back and decide whether it’s actually working or not.

For me personally I have received traffic via widgets on other people’s blogs (and in my statcounter I know which blogs they are so I can tell if they’re related or not etc) so to that end I guess it has worked as they are potentially people that may have never found me otherwise, so I guess it gets a tick there.

Behind the scenes there’s been some improvements already (and they are still ongoing) with the introduction of the flavours (so we can choose from a selection of colours for our widget - to match our blogs colour theme etc) which is a good thing.

All blogs will undergo a manual approval process - another tick

Those that have been members for a little while now would no doubt have received an email from John Reese (creator of Blogrush) speaking out against the cheaters and what action(s) will be taken to stop it from happening - so another tick from me

Currently the dashboard is partly under construction (though the stats are back) for the new Beta v2.0  so it’s a wait on see for that. But overall at this stage at least I’m glad I joined- if nothing else it has delivered me some traffic which realistically is the whole point of it.

For those that haven’t yet joined or want to know more about it you can find out more here: Blogrush