Advice on Promoting Blog

To make money from blogging demands you to have large traffic, and to have large traffic demands you to work on promoting your blog early on. Here are some pointers on promoting your blog.

1. Search Engines Take Time
New blogs will take a few months to get significant traffic from search engines. Doing SEO is one way to improve on this. Other traffic sources, such as networking or social media, can boost up your visitor numbers quickly if you have the right strategy – so don’t focus on search engines only.

2. All Traffic Are Not Equal
Responses from visitors to your blog in terms of time spent, depth of pages, interest in content are best if they found what they’re looking for. Generally, these kinds of visitors arrive at your blog from either search engines, subscribers, and from recommendation from other blogs with similar niche. Traffic from social media has been commented to be less responsive and even unlikely to return back to their blogs. Try to consider what type of traffic is best for you when promoting your blog.

3. Post Consistently
Most successful bloggers post consistently and regularly even when they already have large search engines traffic drawn to their older posts. The reasons for posting new content consistently are to grow the number of subscribers, get new pages in search engines, and keep the blog fresh to get votes in social media. So why stop when you can get more?

4. Traffics Are Inconsistent
There are days that traffic goes up, and at times down. It’s natural. Be ready for anything or you might get upset. The most important thing is to get your mindset focused and not let down by a few hurdles.

5. Get More Repeat Visitors
The heart of successful blogs is repeat visitors. Unique visitors are great too, but nothing can guarantee they’ll be back. So, it’s good to really focus on getting more subscribers. They are also the most responsive in terms of giving comments, votes, etc.

6. Get Inbound Links
Having other blogs link to you helps in many ways. They bring visitors in, expose your blog more, and boost your search engine rankings. These links also signify that your content is valuable, trusted, and worthy to pay a visit to. Not only they help with search engine traffic but also build your credibility.

7. Get Traffic from Multiple Sources
Getting huge traffic from one type of traffic, say search engines, doesn’t guarantee it will always stay that way. For example, Google penalizes blogs that violated their guidelines. Likewise, other types of traffic can’t guarantee giving you consistent traffic all the time. So, diversify your traffic sources.

8. Don’t Ignore Small Traffic
Traffics that come from resources such as your comment or forum links are relatively small. But most of the time those visitors find your blog to be very relevant to what they’re searching for and are likely to become loyal readers. So, keep them coming.

9. Build Your Network
To be successful in blogging, you must have strong network. People in your network can provide you valuable advice, link to you, vote for your posts, inspire and encourage you, and even become partners in future projects. To build a strong network you must first be proactive and willing to meet and help others.

10. You Can Buy Traffic
You can buy advertisement to drive traffic to your blog quickly. PPC ads can be efficient and inexpensive if you bid on the right keywords. StumbleUpon also offers an advertising option where you buy traffic at $0.05 per visitor. Running these ads for a few months will drive significant traffic and give you good exposure at low costs.

Photo by mikebaird.

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This post is a summarized and adapted version from an original post by Steven at DailyBlogTips.com (Alexa rank: 14,599). The original length of 1274 words is reduced by 51% to 621 words.

How to get 1000+ Subscribers in 3 Months

Skellie at Skelliewag.org gave out the tips to get 1050 subscribers in just 3 months of blogging from scratch. She did it despite being the sole author of the blog and spent zero $$$ on marketing and promotion. And she said that it doesn’t matter what niche or audience you’re targeting; she did it although the niche has already matured and crowded with other blogs targeting the same audience. The gists of her tips are summarized here.

Know Your Target Audience
Most important of all is that you have to know who your audience is. You must write for your target readers and not just about the topics (because you may diverge away from the readers’ needs if you centered your content around topics to write).

Your target audience must be convinced that your content is written for their needs and unmissable. What they want is a 100% relevant content so that their times are not wasted. Even if your content is just 70% relevant, there’s a big chance that they won’t subscribe to it – because some of your content can be missed!

It’s a good trick to write clearly at the top of your blog to whom is it for so that they know right away without even reading the content yet.

Write Good Stuff, But How?
Content is the heart of your blog, so make it a great one. Write posts that give values to the readers, not just for the sake of making more posts. One post packed with values is worth so much more than many posts with little or no values.

If time is hard to come by, it’s okay to post less but make sure each piece have great values to offer. Make your readers’ time worthwhile. Readers will subscribe if they learn a lot from your content.

Expose Your Blog - To Your Target Audience!
There are two ways for people to get to your blogs – links or social media. These are the place to put your effort to build your blog’s exposure.

Links: There are two types of links:

1. Links you make in other blogs:

• Links from your comments in other blogs.
• Your forum or social media signature.
• Your by-line as guest-posts.

2. Links you get from other blogs:

• Write great articles that people will link to.
• Ask them to link to you or exchange links with them.

The most powerful links that you can make or get are from popular blogs, sites, and forums related to your blogging niche. Not all links are equal - some links are better (in sending readers to your blog) than others. But it’s better to have all these links than to have none or just a few good ones. It’s unmistakable that if you have great and valuable content, links will come naturally.

Try also to write as guest-posts especially in popular blogs. But first, show that your content is worth it.

Social Media: The tip on social media (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc) is simply to be an active user. If you vote for other posts, they tend to vote for your article as this is naturally the easiest way to repay the favor. Once your article has been voted, other people will easily build it up the ladder on.

Some principles that guarantees her success are to be friendly, treat every person you interact with respect, always help out in the best way you can, focus on mutual benefit, and give more than you take.

Other Little Things
Without all of the above, the little things won't work. But once you have the essentials covered, consider putting some effort on the extras

• Make your feed button easily visible (e.g. at the top part without scrolling)
• Add the option to subscribe at the end of each post.
• Put effort on blog design. Readers see that authors’ are more serious with their content if they are serious about their blog design.

My Comments
Compare Skellie’s tips to that of Tina Su's (who got 2000+ subscribers in 3 months). Their tips are pretty much the same, except that Tina recommends bloggers to think about why they want to blog first and then set blogging goals and targets before anything else.

Photo by chadh.

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This post is a summarized version to an original post by Skellie at Skelliewag.org (Alexa rank: 32,229). The original length of 1860 words is shortened to 655 words (65% reduction).

Amount of Traffic Social Media Sites Can Send

Submitting your content to social media sites can be quite an effective technique to drive large traffic volume and promote your blog. Provided that the content you submit is of high quality and reaches the site's front page, traffic sent to your blog can reach between a few thousand to tens of thousands within a short period of time (a few days). Here's a list of some of the popular/emerging social media sites and the volume of traffic their front-pages are capable of sending.

Image Credit: Pro-Zak.

StumbleUpon can send traffic in the amount of 1,000 to 40,000 within 3 days after getting around 50 stumbles.

You can expect between 1,500 to 30,000 visitors to your blog if your post is approved in Slashdot and gets to its front page.

A popular post on Digg's front page can get between 3,000 to 35,000 visitors within a short period of time.

The aptly chosen name I Am Bored can send traffic of around 2,000 to 15,000 of its bored members to your blog if your post gets to its front page.

Ebaum's World is a humor site with the ability to send its front page landers a good traffic volume of 2,500 to 20,000.

Posts on the community-based news site Fark's frontpage can get around 2,000 to 20,000 traffic volume.

News/stories on Reddit's frontpage receive traffic of about 2,500 to 15,000, depending on how far up and how long it stays on the front page.

Submission to MetaFilter requires a subscription fee, but once your post hits the front page, you can expect around 1,000 to 5,000 visitors.

The traffic that the social tagging site Del.icio.us sends is spread over time. Given that your article hit its front page, you can get between 500 to 5,000 visitors within a short period of time.

Front page landers on Propeller are not guaranteed much to receive high traffic, unless you're in the Top 5, which can send around 50 to 3,500 visitors.

Breaking news that hit the frontpage of Newsvine gets around 500 to 2,000 traffic volume.

ShoutWire, an internet news site, sends about 500 to 1,500 traffic volume to submissions that get to the frontpage.

The new social news site Mixx has a steady trend of increasing traffic. Currently, its frontpage landers can receive around 50 to 250 visitors.

Sphinn, an internet marketing social site, is capable to drive traffic of about 75 to 200 in less than 24 hours to articles on the front page.

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This post is an adaptation on a rough guide provided by SEOCO (Alexa rank: 138,950) mainly based on client's statistics and data on Google Analytics. The original post of 744 words has been cut down by 44% to 421 words.

Tips to Increase Your Blog's Traffic

Susan Gunelius at About.com shared 15 tips to increase your blog’s traffic. If your purpose in blogging is making money online, getting large traffic is a must. The problem with the blogosphere is that it has more than 100 million blogs. So, how can you make your blog visible? The essence of her tips is summarized here.

1. Write often and write well with quality and meaningful content to keep readers interested.
2. Submit blogs to search engines to make sure it is listed (it may take time for it to go up the list).
3. Link to others using Blogroll. Owners of the blogs you link to will most likely link to you back and have their visitors use the links to go to your blog.
4. Use comments efficiently. Increase your readers' loyalty by responding and interacting with your commenters. Leave thoughtful and relevant comments on other blogs to draw others to visit your blog.
5. Syndicate your blog using a feed so that others can get updates to your blog easily. (Read more on how to increase your subscribers.)
6. Use links and trackbacks. Links to your blogs are powerful 'vote of confidences' that are counted in ranking your blog. You can create internal links from your posts to your other posts too (works best when you use the right keywords to link). Trackbacks are links in other blogs’ comments that link back to your blog. They’re created when you link to these blogs' posts in your posts. Some blogs either don't have or don’t allow trackbacks to appear.
7. Add tags to your posts. Tags increase the chance of others finding your content in search engines.
8. Submit your posts to Social Bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc). If your posts are excellent, others will vote for them as well and make them more visible to other millions of readers.
9. Do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Use the right and relevant keywords relevant that can draw large number of readers to your posts. Using keywords that’s not searched often will decrease visibility of your blogs in search engines.
10. Use images with the right keywords. Other people don't just search for contents, they search for images too!
11. Try to write posts in other blogs as a guest blogger. The more popular those blogs are, the more traffic they’ll send to your blog.
12. Participate in forums and social networking with people of relevant interest.
13. Promote your blog outside the blogosphere. Add your blog URL in your email signature or business cards. Basically, tell others about it.
14. Nominate yourself (or other blogs) for blog awards to get more attention to your blog.
15. Don't be shy to do all of the above.

My Comments
These tips are not explained in detail to give you the bigger picture of the overall strategy. It's important to understand them as a whole before going deep into details. You can dig(g) into each of these tips by Googling or Yahoo!ing more about them.

Photo by emdot.

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This post is a summary of an original post by Susan Gunelius at About.com (Alexa rank: 140). The original length of 1166 words has been reduced to 463 words (60% less).

How to Get 2000+ Subscribers in 3 Months

Tina Su wrote a clear guide as a guest post at Problogger.net describing her strategy to get 2000+ subscribers within only 90 days of starting a new blog from scratch, without having any previous blogs or blogging experience.

She laid out 3 important things one should do, in proper order, to build a successful blog. This guide is based on her own strategy and experience building a successful blog in a short time. I have summarized the essence of her article below.

1. Creating Concrete Goals
Before starting a blog, you have to know why you are doing it. In her case, she wanted to share her knowledge and experience in the topics of self empowerment and well-being as well as to build financial independence. Having the right reasons to start a blog will become a powerful drive and motivation for you to continue making sure that your blog will succeed.

Once you are motivated with the right reasons, you have to create a set of clearly defined goals or targets that you can measure. An example of a clear goal is ‘I want to have 500 unique visitors within the first month’, rather than just saying ‘I want to have huge traffics for this blog’ which does not set any measurable quantities.

These targets have to be clearly defined so that in time you can look back and evaluate your progress. Having clear targets also help you to focus and put all effort in to plan and make sure they’re achieved within a set time frame. Tina herself writes her blog progress and evaluates her goals in a separate journal periodically. Clear targets, proper planning, and focused effort are keys to building a successful blog.

It is important that you build your blog on a specific niche and know what audience you want to target. The blog then have to be centered around this niche and target audience, not centered around what you want to write (if you want to build a successful blog with loyal readers). Having too many topics to write about would confuse people reading your blog, and won't make them stick around or come back to visit in the future.

2. Building Quality Content
The most important part of a blog is its content, so it’s crucial that you focus most of your effort building quality content. But this should be done only after your have set clear goals.

To know what content is quality content, you have to think back on blogs that you read regularly or subscribe and why do you like them. Most of the times, these popular blogs that people like have high value-package content, practical solutions to readers’ needs or problems, or that they simply entertain, inspire or motivate readers with their own unique content and writing style.

If you were to write your own blog, wouldn’t you want your blog to have these qualities? Observe good qualities in other blogs and try to model upon them. As a basic rule, one should write with the intention of creating work that have values and benefits to others.

Other tips from her blogging experience:

• Bloggers must have total honesty and strong intention to produce the best content possible.
• Using personal examples can add positively to readers’ experience as they can relate more realistically to you or to their own stories.
  
• Using pictures appropriately can enhance your posts.
• Exercise good writing techniques and habits, be concise rather than verbose, and edit your articles thoroughly before posting.
  

3. Promoting the Blog
The next stage is to expose and promote your blog to others - there’s no point of having quality content if others don’t know about it. The techniques that Tina used to promote are very much straight forward, starting from people closest to her. But again, without having quality content in your blog, promoting it doesn't make any sense.

• Email & offline - telling families, friends, co-workers, new people she met, friends on social networking, and basically everybody she can, to subscribe to her blog.
• Connecting with readers - responding to every comments and emails, treating each and every reader nicely and warmly, or visiting and participating in niche groups in social networking e.g. facebook.
• Leaving your mark - giving thoughtful and relevant comments in other blogs especially with related topics, without spamming. It's very likely that people would want to know you (and your blog) more if you participate lively in other people's blogs.
  
• Networking - reaching out to other bloggers and building a good network with online friends and new bloggers as well. Be genuine when introducing yourself to others without asking them directly to promote your blog. People in your network can have strong potential to promote your blog to others.
  
• Linking - create link to other blogs genuinely without asking them for favors in return. In time, the favors will come by itself as others start noticing your 'kindness' in linking to them.
• Social media & networks - become power users in social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, etc. by promoting other blogs’ quality posts. As your profile becomes more well known, others will start noticing you and have your quality posts promoted as well, as what you have done to other blogs’ posts. Network with others in these social media sites to build up your profile. She doesn’t recommend people changing their names or avatars as this confuses people and affect negatively to building a good network – in fact, she keeps the same profile and name across all media sites to help people recognize her easily.

My Comments
Having had some, but little, experience in blogging, I'd say the strategy of having the right reasons and goals is really the make-it or break-it point of building a monetizing blog. If this basic foundation doesn't exist, you'll just be dragging yourself trying to make it through, pointlessly. You might want to read her original post as she spiced it up with personal stories that make you aware of what you have to have to do well quickly, online at least.

Photo by .Tatiana..

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This post is a summary of an original post by Tina Su of ThinkSimpleNow.com (Alexa rank: 40,156), writing as a guest post at Problogger.net. The original length of 2670 words has been cut down to 938 words (65% reduction).