Traffic is life and blood of any online entity. Bloggers are always wondering how to get traffic to their blogs. Newcomers specially, are to a good extent, oblivious to the different techniques they can employ to bring in traffic to their blogs. Understandable though, not everyone is jack of all trades. You’re only good at certain things. Blog traffic is an essentiality and chances are your blog will not survive for long unless fed with stream of visitors continuously. You’d eventually lose interest if no one cares to visit, as simple as that.

Even if you are good at creating quality content, it doesn’t guarantee success unless you market it properly. A while back, I wrote on the right way to earn money blogging for beginners. If you are a beginner to blogging, you would find the below article a good reference and starting point to set your blog marketing efforts in right direction.

An active and popular blog can add greatly to your online assets. It’s one of the fastest ways to promote yourself to others and create followers and buyers within a particular niche, however there is no way you can make any niche blog a success without significant amounts of traffic. So what can you do to get significant traffic to any blog? There are a few quick things you can do that will help instantly increase visitors count and help make your blog popular and profitable. However, I am not going to tell you all the fluff or the dirty shortcuts like emailing everyone in your contact list to ask to visit your blog or getting in chat rooms and mindlessly pasting links. Yes, people do do these things to lull others to their blog. The following ways will help your blog prosper and set your marketing efforts in right direction.

Be a Content Producer

How many times do you actually sit and write your own content? Content producing is time consuming. People avoid time consuming things. Website owners and bloggers are no different. Majority want to get done with without much effort. We’d rather copy others, just google information over, pick/steal someone else’s content or idea, spin/reword it a bit and post it with our name tag than actually creating something out. That’s why genuine good quality content is precious. People come looking for genuine content. And, that’s where an opportunity arises. Be a content source, content producer, create content and people will come looking for you. Write what you believe in, what you know, what you think will help your readers. It is one of the surest ways to get noticed. Generate good content found nowhere else and you’ll not only attract loyal visitors but also search engine bots! Search engines will love your blog as you’re enriching their value by adding your valuable content.

What to do

• Product likeable content
• Write Good blog posts. See writing tips for better blogging
• Write long posts, properly conveying your message
• Possibly Post more often. Majority of highly successful blogs generate good quality content regularly.
• Write something that fulfils a need, solves a problem, helps people learn, grow better.

Advantages

You’ll be deemed as an authority and credible source with your unique content Increased search engine trust & rankings Good content attracts traffic mystically Increased chances of repeat visitors Better ad conversion. People will like to listen to you.

Learn to Spread the word

Spreading the word is important. Telling others about your blog is obviously helpful. How do you spread the word? Where do you find others? To let others know your blog exists, put your blog link in all the prominent places where people frequent. No, I am not going to suggest to include your blog link in your email signature, your facebook, your gtalk, yahoo messenger status, your visiting to pull massive amount of traffic, although that does its bit. Every little thing helps you know. Still, very few would actually come clicking it and chances are most of them would be your acquaintances already knowing about your blog. Lets’ do something better.

Article Marketing

Article marketing works. Articles marketing is what every serious blogger should incorporate in its marketing strategy. All the seasoned internet marketers take advantage of this vehicle, why? Simply because it works and works in the long run. Beginners usually are unaware of the power article marketing holds and that’s probably why they fall short of properly utilizing it. Make a habit of submitting atleast two of your best written articles per week or every 10-12 days to article directories. You don’t have to submit what you have already written and posted on the blog. If you’d rather like to keep your well written stuff to your blog, no problem, just reword the information, modify a little, give it a unique touch, submit! Articles marketing is one of the most effective ways to get backlinks & spread the word.

Article directories to target primarily

Ezinearticles
Buzzle
Articlesbase – Generates no follow resource box links.
Goarticles
Articledashboard
ArticleBiz
ArticleCity
iSnare
Articleset

Advantages

• Search engine bots frequently visit and index article directories content as they are one of the leading source of good quality articles. Your submitted articles will be indexed faster and ranked higher in SERPS.
• There are much bigger chances of other bloggers and website owners noticing, picking and publishing your content. Many of them regularly head over there to get content for their websites. The prerequisite is they have to give the author its due credit. Your Bio will be put intact.
• Lots of good quality incoming links.

Finding Ezine or Newsletter publishers

It is not much different to article marketing and guest posting. It is however very under utilized marketing tactic and very few marketers leverage it properly. We can call it a subset of email marketing. You just have to look out for good ezine pubishers in your niche and offer your content to be included freely in their ezines with a link back to your blog. It sounds a little more time consuming but worth the hassle. There are ezine publishers having very huge lists. You know what that means? They have Hundreds of thousands of subscibers and their marketing efforts are focused primarily on list building. As a newbie, you may not have so many loyal followers listening to you. List building takes efforts and good time. By sending your articles to ezine publishers, we’ll be making use of their lists by offering valuable content and thus its’ a win-win situation for both parties and the subscribers. As always make sure your Bio is convincing enough to give people a reason to click & check your blog. Its’ similar to a classified ad. Remember, if you have provided a real value in your content, people will definitely want to know more about you. Check out this helpful link describing how to write for Ezine publishers. How to Write Articles for Ezine Publishers

Publishers to target primarily

Amazines.com
BestEzines – You can submit your ezines for review here.

You can also Google newsletter publishers in your particular niche.

Advantages One of the best way to gain exposure & repeat visitors Able to take advantage of others’ list even if you don’t have one. Increased chances of repeat visitors

Guest Posting

Guest posting is also similar kind where in your contact bloggers or website owners in your niche and offer them your articles to be published on their blogs. Many blog owners are looking for content and they will generously publish your articles with the Bio included if they find that their the information will be helpful for their readers. Check with bloggers if they will accept guest posts on their blog. Better go through the blog, see if there are already any guest posts. Also look for any specific terms the blog owner have set for guest posting before sending your article. Some would not accept affiliate links in the body of the article. Some may not accept a link anchored in a keyword. Generally all of them insist that the submitted content must be unique and must not have been submitted elsewhere.

Bloggers to contact primarily

Problogger
CopyBlogger
Daily Blog tips
Search Engine Journal

and of course, contact Electric Ego also. I do publish quality guest posts.

Advantages

More exposure, faster and better way to reach new audience
Check out tips on writing blog posts http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/blog-promotion/a-guide-to-promoting-your-blog-through-guest-posts

Make connections & Engage in conversations

Visit blogs in your niche, the ones that attract sizeable amount of visitors. Engage in conversations, make comments that make sense. Simply saying ‘thanks for the useful post or info’ will not do. Just like you, other bloggers also like to feel appreciated/elated, feel good when someone visits and contributes. Don’t always look for Do follow blogs (there are not many with substantial amount of visitors these days). If a blog incorporates Do follow or CommentLuv or similar things, its’ better. However, do not make ‘no follow’ an excuse for not commenting. It doesn’t take much to comment, does it? Even if you are out there reading or researching for your new article, why not spare few seconds of your time to comment before closing the tab. Some blogs wouldn’t mind if you enter your real name or your keyword in the name field. Also, remember you don’t just have to link to your home page. You could just link to one of your articles.

Blogrolls, Trackbacks and blog carnivals

Apart from regular interaction with other bloggers via comments, link to their posts if you can in your posts. Almost all of blogging platforms will send trackbacks to the original source if you link to them linking them to you. If people find that you’re linking to them, chances are many of them will heartily throw a similar gesture.

What to do
Each day make a habit of frequenting blogs in your domain and comment on atleast 10 of them. It won’t take sizeable amount of time. Plus start taking parts in blog carnivals or offer your articles to the blog authors taking part.

Meet Social Networking, sharing, bookmarking, Time killing

Social media web has evolved exponentially in the last few years and it is still a force to reckon with. Utilize social media marketing to bring in an avalanche of traffic to your blog. People love to connect online. Social networking fulfills that need. People love to share stuff. Social bookmarking helps in that. People love to kill time online. Social time killing aids in that. Lol…Social time killing isn’t something as of now..but yes, over indulgence in social media may have its repercussions. You may end up wasting much of your precious time. Twitter is a good example. Telling the whole world what you’re doing at the moment isn’t a wise thing all the time specially if you are not doing nothing more than tweeting. Creating a web presence in social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter is important only until it doesn’t make you an addicted online junkie.

Sites to target primarily
1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. StumbleUpon
4. Bebo
5. hi5

Community driven

Vox
Squidoo – Go get your lense created.
BigAdda (india specific)
Gather
Ibibo
My Opera
Spicypage

Social bookmarking

Digg
Del.icio.us
Slashdot.org
StumbleUpon
Reddit

Advantages
Although most of the bookmarking sites have switched to nofollow links. Still, those links are followed and indexed by search engines (though may not treated as backlinks). Spreading the link is still important and helps. Many of them will give you valuable one way backlinks and increase your domain trust in the eyes of search engines. Faster indexing.

Worthy Mention: Socialmarker. This one handy little website will instantly ping your blog content to all the major social networking websites, give your site backlinks, back link traffic & saving you many hours. Socialmarker makes it easier to publish to multiple social bookmarking services. Leverage social media wisely and you’ll have loads of visitors coming to your blog in a very little span.

Meet Blog & Feed Directories

Another good method to get some blog traffic is to submit your blog and RSS feed to blog & feed directories. Blog directories act as an additional network of traffic by generating back links for search engine optimization and creating an additional path for visitors to be lead to your blog. People searching around a specific niche will often go through blog directories in the hopes of finding compelling and worthwhile content that will answer questions and give them an interesting source of information on a particular topic.

Which directories to target:

Technorati – Not much effective these days. Still worth a try until I remove it from the list.
BOTW Blog Directory – Best of the Web Directory
Blog catalog
BlogFlux
Bloggernity
BlogPulse
Blog hub
Blogging Fusion
Blogarama
EatonWeb
Getblogs
Globeofblogs
Blogged.com

Many of the blog directories & feed submission services below will require you create a free account before posting your blog or blog feed.

Feeds directories to target

2RSS.com
Dr. 5z5 Open Feed Directory
Blogdigger
Blo.gs
Feedage.com
RSS Feed Directory
Leighrss.com
Syndic8.com
Yahoo RSS submit
Topix

Worthy mentions: Pingoat – Ping multiple blog services instantly.
Pingomatic

Yahoo Answers & Groups

Bloggers often overlook this one. Yahoo answers can be a very good source of traffic if you utilize it wisely. Spam it and you won’t likely benefit. Yahoo groups also a bit difficult but worthwhile to target. Start looking for qustions in subject matter of your expertise. See how you can help. Think you can fit in your blog there in the answer? Have a post solving any particular problem raised? or Just see if its’ possible to create a new blog post solving a problem. Yahoo answer links are no follow but the content is indexed in an instant both by google and yahoo. Good thing is you can put helpful links anywhere in the answer and in the research box. Also, many bloggers have those automated content generating scripts employed in their blogs that regularly scan and pull content from Yahoo answers.

Begin incorporating the above ways to attract traffic and you’ll soon see the effect. Remember, the success of your marketing will largely depend on two factors:- 1. How disciplined your efforts are. 2. How wisely you make use of above methods And, lastly, nourish your blog as a baby, don’t let it die. Feed it regularly and it’ll grow stronger over each day, day by day. I wish you good luck in your blog promotion efforts. Happy promoting!

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1. Keep it Simple

Reading text from a screen takes most people around 25% longer than reading from printed media, plus it’s a lot more tiring. Make your blog more attractive to your readers by using simple language and dedicating each sentence and each paragraph to a single idea or concept.

2. Front-load Content

Front-loading your content basically means putting your conclusion first, the bit everyone’s interested in, followed by the usual who, what, when, where and how. This lets your readers scan the first sentence to determine if the information is of interest and whether or not to keep reading.

3. Bolden Key Words

People reading from a screen typically scan for content that is of interest. By making the most important words in each paragraph bold you are allowing readers to quickly work out what the blog post is about. The highlighted words should make sense even if they are read out of context.

4. Use Sensible Layouts

Present information in lists and left-align all your text. Lists are always preferable to long paragraphs as they are easy to scan, more likely to be read and typically more succinct. Left-aligned text is also easier to read than centered or justified text.

5. Use Informative Sub-headings

Use informative sub-headings that make is easy for the reader to find the information they are looking for. Sub-headings visually break up large blocks of text whilst also allowing readers to scan the content for items of interest. Typically one sub-heading should be used for every 2 – 4 paragraphs.

Happy blogging!

Article Source : 5 Top Blog Writing Tips : ArticleBase

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Here’s classic case scenario, Let’s suppose some of you have been thinking of earning some money and figure out that starting a blog would be a good idea. You enthusiastically start working on it, get few articles ready (or copy content),  think of a nice catchy name, select your favorite blog publishing tool, get the blog ready in 10 minutes. You put up some ads on it and wait for the moolah to come rolling. Few days pass by, and there is nothing happening. Nobody’s visiting your new online home. Few more days pass by, there is still no money. Soon, you lose the enthusiasm and fed up with it. Your blog is now sitting there, stale, stagnated whereas your are back to your routine of watching TV in free time.

Welcome to the club of frustrated blogger. You might be wondering you’re probably not lucky enough to cash in on the blogging popularity and that blogs are not for you. You lead youself to believe in disappointment that may be blogs are not as popular these days as they once had been.  The fact is blogs are still popular and not just among humans, among search engines, online & traditional publications also.

Blogging is popular since it serves multi-functional roles. At first blogging was used by many to have their personal space in the internet. It serves as their personal journals and diaries. But blogging has evolved into a new phase, bloggers get paid to blog. Yes, you read that right, many companies seek out for bloggers to have them get paid to blog for them. Now blogging can generally be considered a profession when it was once just a random hobby.

If you are a beginner and think that this is a much complicated avenue for you to venture on, think again. Blogging can be easy for those who are very willing to learn. Blogging for beginners should never be a problem because blogging comes easy.  The only difficult part is finding right way to monetize your blog. Thousands of beginners start off blogging with a desire to earn something from it. Majority ends up disappointed. If you are having a hard time starting your very own blog, research a little bit. There are a number of online free blog hosting platforms and tools that help you set up your own blog in as easy as 5 minutes. If you are looking to set up a quick blog with the desire of just penning your thoughts down or as a part time hobby, Live Journal and WordPress are excellent choices. WordPress is great blog platform and it’ll hardly disappoint you. It’s excellent for beginners and has a very little learning curve.

Once you have decided to choose blogging as an alternative not only for personal purposes but for also generating money, then make sure that you know the basics for blogging if you are a beginner. Google’s owned Blogger could be good for you. It’ll give you your free blog instantly and with an ready made option to add Google ads.

Blogging can be one of the ways to earn money. However, its not easy to earn money blogging. You have to be very disciplined, must write well so your blog stands out of the crowd (that helps obviously).  One of the key point is you have to have a content generation strategy.  Having a proper strategy or plan of adding fresh content to your blog will ensure that you do not run out of content. If you are good at writing, it should be little problem.  Still, you must have a plan for backup content in place for times when you are busy or just not willing to write anything.

Its’ hard to make substantial money with blogging if you are a beginner and even if you are good at writing.  The right way to earn money in a case like this would be to find a company to write blog for. You can also become Ghost writer or Ghost blogger should I say.  You can serve as a blogger hired for a company to make money. This way you won’t have to care about generating traffic or get into other technicalities as such blog template designs, ads placements & tweaking etc.

There have been countless of testimonies from bloggers who earn big time writing for others with a cheaper start off and maintenance expense. In blogging the probability of success increases manifold as long as you dedicate yourself & remain disciplined. The possibilities to get paid to blog are endless and it would be more of your benefit to go and try it.

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All you have to do is to put your unique token number in a new post and publish it. You could place the code anywhere in the post (generally it is preferred to keep within the first few lines or within excerpt). You can even make a new post, something like Technorati claim or Technorati verification and placing just the claim token code as content in the post. It does not have to be in Title even. Once you have published the post with the token in it, visit http://technorati.com/account/.

Sign in to your Technorati account.  Under your profile page, you should notice Technorati cliam status and a button to verify claim token.  Click on ‘verify claim token’ and Technorati will go and look for unque code in your blog.  If all goes well, Technorati will visit your blog, find the token and verify it.

You may sometimes get an error message with Technorati mentioning that “we have encountered a problem reading your site’s data.” If that occurs, make sure your claim code is correct and is reflected in your blog’s RSS feed.  For blogs, having feed excerpts enabled, make sure the code appears in excerpt.

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Just like every other technology, video blogging has its sets of merits and demerits. Vlogging has few advantages over text-based blogging, and it is little wonder that it is catching on all over the globe. Video blogs very effectively grab the attention of web surfers, and people are much more likely to become excited about the dynamic content of a video blog than they are likely to find a written posting very thrilling. The more enthusiastic viewers are about a site, the quicker the word of mouth spreads, and the more traffic the site will get.

Of course, there are plenty of disadvantages to video blogging as well. Hosting a vblog requires quite a bit of server space, which can make it difficult to get started. You may use free video sharing sites to circumvent this limitation. Creation of a video is also a bit time consuming. If you wish to show off your own videos, you will need a good quality camcorder, professional quality video editing and conversion software and a power packed computer with a broadband connection. It takes more time to process and upload a video file than it does to dash off a quick bit of text, which means that running and updating a video blog can be quite a bit of work. In addition, web surfers sometimes grow frustrated with the slow loading times of the files on many video blogs. Whether you opt for a video blog or not depends on what kind of subject matter you want to cover, and how much time you can devote to video blogging. Before you decide to pursue a video blog, consider if there is an easier way for you to get your message across.

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