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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Monetizing Your Blog Part 2 - Visitors to Your Blog

By Simon Hemmings

I published Part 1 regarding Blog content and how to retain the visitors.

Today we look at Visitors who are the life of our blogs without them we would rant to ourselves

Visitors.

Put simply without visitors, traffic or hits to blogs, in most cases is a waste of time.

All the gurus online give us all sorts of suggestions as to the best way to gain traffic (visitors) from picking the right blog URL, to submitting our blog details to different directories.

As mentioned in my first blog, to get traffic can be summed up as " Become Known"

However, getting there takes time and we have to measure our readers and tracks where they come from, for this I can break into two reasons:

(i) So that you can tell if your readers are actually growing. If it's not, then something has to be done to correct this and

(ii) Once you know where your referrals are coming from you can play to your strengths.

How Do You get Visitors?

Here are a few suggestions:

Leave Comments.

Visit other blogs of a similar interest to your own and leave comments relative to what has been written in their post. Please don't spam, be polite and most bloggers will do you the courtesy of a return visit.

Exchange Links.

Some bloggers may be willing to exchange links with you. Don't always expect a long established, high traffic blog to necessarily exchange links as they probably won't. It'll most probably be like for like at first. Begin with others of similar level and work your way up.

Forums.

Get involved with a few forums. I've often write posts in DreamTeamMoney. In DTM I have my own thread under Yeepage.com, newbies may not get this approved early in your blogging life but when established you can look into it. If you respect the rules and use forums correctly they work in your favor for your blog.

Keywords.

It's important to think about keywords when you are writing your blog posts. These should be included in the title and the body of the post where possible but without over doing it Keywords will in part bring referrals to your blog from search engines.

Search engines bring some of the best traffic to a site as the keywords are used. Getting them to do this is what SEO or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is what is needed to get them to your site.

As far as I am concerned there are two main aspects to this.

(i) Keywords and

(ii) Getting good links to your blog.

It topic is be to big to write about, but for basic blogger this is adequate.

Blog Directories

Blog Directories generally do not get huge amounts of traffic but generally these are quality readers which are better. However there is another side to these directories. They provide links to your blog and, and as mentioned above links are important to SEO. Therefore it's worth submitting your blog to some directories.

By adding a vote button to the bottom of your posts you can increase your ranking within. Vote buttons and a few blog directories can be viewed below and bottom left respectively.

Technorati

I've given this a separate heading because it does produce visitors in various ways. I suggest that, if you haven't already done so, you join Technorati and claim your blog(s). It is all self explanatory once you register.

Blog Carnivals

'A Blog Carnival is a type of blog event. It is similar to a magazine, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that links to other blog articles on the particular topic.'

You can submit your posts, or articles, to Blog Carnivals (which are on other blogs). If accepted there will then be a link to your post (or article), which may then send referrals to your blog.

You can also host Blog Carnivals on your own blog. This generates interest and often an increase in traffic when they are published.

You can find more information, and an index of Blog Carnivals to which you could submit posts, at Blog Carnival. Or go who has regular Carnivals.

Not tried this yet, but I may publish this article in Leo's next Carnival.

Socialise.

You can do this by joining websites such as MyBlogLog, myLot and a myriad of others. Find one that suits you and use the facilities they have to get known. Contact other members, leave them worthwhile comments on their blogs, join their communities and generally be nice to people - just as you would at any social gathering in the real world.

Link Baiting.

Often mentioned by long standing bloggers. It simply means writing a post, or providing some sort of information, that will make other blogs want to link to this. In other words, other bloggers will mention your post or information on their blogs and will link to it. This will (a) send you visitors and (b) give you another link to your blog. This is important, and also good for PageRank.

Link in your posts to other persons blogs.

This may sound a odd way to attract more visitors. Basically you are adding a Link to other bloggers within your post.

Now you might think that linking to other blogs will only be good for the other blogger you are linking to. However, by giving a little you often get traffic in return. Try it!

There are many more ways to attract traffic but I noticed I finished at ten, Mmmm maybe I should of called it "TEN Ways to get Visitors" If you have any other ideas please add them as comments to the bottom of this post.

If you can do the simple things mentioned in Part 1 and on Part 2

Summary of Part 1 and 2

Post content of value > Attract visitors > Keep visitors on your blog > Make them want to return.

If you can do this then you can start to look at making money online - which I'll cover in Part 3 later in the week.


A blog for webmasters and bloggers alike, daily updates on SEO and any other articles interesting and of course some money making schemes too

http://yeepage.com

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