Archive for November, 2008

4) Generate Traffic

In order to make money from your blog you will need visitors to pass by every once in a while and then yhese may buy from you once in a while!  There are many strategies to driving traffic to your blog and it is a combination of the total that will provide the very best results for increasing visitors.

Social Bookmarking is a popular ‘promotional’ method used by almsot every professional blogger, this process allows you to get the word out about yours and other peoples articles and points of interest.  The facility to bookmark on a central service as opposed to on your pc offers a pathway for people to follow links of interest and occasionally allows some Page Rank to pass over to your page.

Article Marketing is another popular form of driving traffic to your posts,  By writing (not copying) articles that are compelling and offer ‘slipperiness’ to your subject, you can seduce your prospects to click on your article links and visit your blog.  Very few (if any) article directories offer any Page Rank opportunities.  The most popular article drievtory by far is Ezine Articles, I refer to these sites as content clusters and the sheer volume of unique content and semantically structured writing makes the site extremely Google friendly, so your article sits within an authority framework with high PR.

Link Building is another form of traffic funnelling and in the process gaining a certain amount of PR on occassion.  Submitting your site to Directories results in one way links to your domain which offers more opportunities for being discovered for search terms and phrases.

There are many many different ways to generate traffic to your blogs, there are also many methods that have been in favour and have subsequently fallen out of favour!  Just write about your niche and then see what happens with a little social bookmarking.

RSS (really simple syndication) is a facility whereby each post that you write is pinged (like a digital transmitter speaking to digital receivers) to all of the Search Engines and RSS directories, resulting in frsh indexing from GoogleBot and the other lesser known and cared about SE Spiders.

3) Fresh Content Daily (as unique as possible)

It is not essential to post articles to your blog every day but it is vital that your blog is freshened up and posted at least two to three times each week.  Once you have determined your niche you must be able to write with a flow, if you find that you are having to think and research your posts before you put them up then this is going to slow your overall approach to making money online or to educating your prospects.

WordPress offers you the ability to write posts ahead of time so if you are really inspired and the creative writing juices are flowing then you may be compelled to write a weeks worth (2-4 posts) of articles in a single day. These can then be queued up to post at pre-determined intervals so that the rest of your week is spent on marketing, social posting, link building, outsourcing or maybe even a little time for family!