Blogging For Dollars

The whole purpose of a blog is to put your content in front of as many viewers as possible, so many new bloggers are disappointed when their blog doesn't get a flood of traffic right off the bat. Quite simply, it's not that easy. Blogs have a number of built in features that make it much easier to get traffic that a conventional website, but that doesn't mean you don't have to provide some input to get the traffic flowing.

With that in mind this article covers 7 ways you can get more traffic to your blog. All the tips are tested and proven to be effective.

Tip One: Get Yahoo on your side.

By submitting to My Yahoo! you can get a good return of viewers to your blog. Submit your RSS feed to the My Yahoo! site and you are more or less instantly spidered and added to the Yahoo search rankings.

Tip Two: Get Google On Your Side

What's better than Yahoo on your side? having Google on your side of course. You can submit your site to the Google Reader and watch the results you get from being listed in Google's Blog Search.

Tip Three: Submit Your Site to DMOZ and other directories.

Google just plays favorites with some sites and the DMOZ directory is definitely one of them. They are a picky bunch, so you may not have your site accepted, but the resultant pickup in traffic if you do get listed is well worth the effort of submitting your blog.

Tip Four: Add some PING to your site.

Blogs have inbuilt ping capabilities, but you can increase listings by adding to their default list or using an online service such as Ping-o-Matic to get the word out every time you make a new post.

Tip Five: Know Your Keywords

When you first set up your blog you should have researched the hottest keywords for your niche. Don't forget them. Keep using keyword rich articles. Keep checking on how you are performing for each keyword. Keep tracking and testing. Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing to rank above you.

Tip Six: Get Social

Social Networking is without a doubt the biggest change in the way the web works since someone connected one network with another and thought they might be onto something. It's about participation. Use sites like Digg and Stumble Upon to get yourself back links and potentially heaps of traffic.

Tip Seven: Piggyback on your oppositions success.

If there's a site ranking higher than you work out why and duplicate it. If they are a blog then post a comment or three and get yourself a cheap back link to your blog. If Google likes their blog so much then how much emphasis are they going to put on a link back from that site?

The key to real success with a blog is continuous sustained activity. Keep posting, and keep building back links to your site. Traffic can come in a flood if you hit the front page of Digg or something similar, but it is far more likely to be something that builds up gradually over time.

Blogging in some niches can be extremely competitive and you need every edge you can find to get ahead. The secret to online success is not that hard to find, but is a lot harder for people to accept. It's continuous hard work and effort. Having said that the hard work doesn't need to be difficult, it just has to be consistent. With that in mind you should realize that your site needs continual promotion to get to the top and stay there. If you don't do it, it won't be long before your site is overtaken by someone who is doing it.

The following tips have all been tried with real blogs and proven to work at getting a blog to the top of the rankings and keep it there. They do require a reasonably consistent effort. Search engine algorithms are getting smarter and smarter ever day and they know that a site that generates 50 links gradually over time is more likely to provide quality and up to date information than a site that appears and gets 70 links the same day. So build your sites network up over time using the following tips and tricks.

Tip One: Break out the Spray Paint.

Tagging is becoming incredibly popular online. Sites like Technorati allow you to define what terms your site is relevant to. It's a type of self-submitted search engine where you pick your own keywords. Think Pay-Per-Click but without paying.

Tip Two: Or...think Pay-Per-Click with Paying

If you are just frustrated with the lack of traffic you are generating then go to the quick fix and buy your viewers. With Pay Per Click you are getting visitors directly from Google and targetting them on the keywords you choose. It is the fastest way of getting targeted traffic quickly.

Tip Three: Get Active On Forums

Forums are the best place to find targeted visitors for free. If you are selling beer and walk into a florist and say "who wants beer?" you will get a far more reserved reaction than if you walk into a bar and say it, so pick your forum, see how things operate and then make a few useful and informative posts. Leave your blog link in the post of course.

Tip Four: Post Regularly

You don't just want visitors, you want repeat visitors. If someone returns to your blog and it has the same article as their last visit, it's probably the last time they will bother coming back. Both search engines and real people like regularly updated content.

Tip Five: Joint Ventures

Before internet marketers got hold of them, blogs were about sharing your interest with others who liked the same things. Contact other blog owners in the same niche and make an offer. Perhaps you offer to exchange posts for a few days or provide an advertising exchange.

Tip Six: Adjust your Signature

Whether it's your email or your signature at a forum you post on regularly, if you are not putting your blog address at the bottom of everything you send out then you are not promoting it as well as you could be.

Tip Seven: Go Offline with your Promotion.

Where can you put your blog address that everyone offline that the most people will see it. Offline promotion of websites is not new and some people have gone to the point of getting arrested while wearing a T-shirt with their domain name on it to get a little publicity. You don't need to go that far, but think about what you can achieve offline to get people visiting your blog.

As with all things online, it doesn't need to be new to be effective. To begin with stick with the tried and proven methods and your blog traffic will be slowly improving over time.

What is RSS? RSS stands for more than one thing. Usually, RSS stands for "really simply syndication," but it can also mean "rich site summary," or "RDF site summary" -- RDF standing for "resource description framework." That answers the question of what is RSS, but what can it do?

What is RSS in the context of really simple syndication? It is a tool that allows sites to give a quick summary of important links and descriptions in XML format. This essentially allows them to syndicate their content by allowing other blog owners and webmasters to use this summary as part of a list of summaries on a specific topic.

Blogmasters and webmasters collect these various summaries with something called a feed aggregator or a feed reader. Rather than asking "what is RSS?" this tool will ask "where is RSS" -- and then find it. An aggregator finds RSS feeds to aggregate from selected large sites - such as Yahoo and MSN - and selected smaller sites, such as hand-picked personal blogs and news sites.

The blogmasters and webmasters then take the script generated from the aggregator and insert it into their blogs. This then creates an RSS feed that automatically pulls news items and blog posts whenever they appear. Whenever the blog or site page is refreshed, it will display the latest items.

This is good for two reasons. If you use your own RSS feed, you can get your content syndicated across the Internet without actually paying to submit dozens of press releases and contact dozens of blog owners and webmasters.

Additionally, using RSS feeds is good if you own a blog and want to add fresh content. This will allow you to constantly put new content links and summaries on your blog without spending the time to hunt around for related information. All you will have to do is select a feed aggregator and select a potential feeds from a list of news sites and authority blogs. Additionally, you will be able to input your own selections, allowing you to create custom feeds.

So what is RSS? RSS is a simple way in which to drive traffic to your blog and to display summaries of other blogs.

How can RSS benefit your blogging activites? RSS can benefit your blogging activites in two different ways: it can help you generate traffic and it can help you retain traffic. RSS can benefit your traffic-generation efforts by adding fresh, optimized content to your blog automatically; and it can benefit your traffic retention rate by providing better, updated content for your blog visitors.

Also, how can rss benefit your blogging activites in other ways? If you own a blog, you will have to constantly update it with fresh content, so you can ping more often and so you can get higher rankings for your targeted keyphrases. Aggregating and using RSS feeds can benefit your blogging activities significantly by allowing you to add fresh, targeted content to your blog without actually updating it yourself. Whenever a search engine visitors your blog, it will record your RSS feed updates as fresh and possibly unique, targeted content.

How can rss benefit your blogging activities in other ways? If you own a blog, you can further enhance the amount of unique visitors you get by using RSS to syndicate your updates. In addition to netting you several backlinks on blogs and websites (which will increase your offpage search engine optimization score), it will also net you some unique visitors through direct links from other blogs and sites.

How can rss benefit your blogging activities by recycling traffic? If your site aggregates a number of important authority sites via RSS feed, you will become an authority site aggregator at the very least, which is useful for people looking to find authority sites on your given topic.

In summary, how can rss benefit your blogging activities? RSS can benefit your blog by generating traffic - by improving your actual search engine rankings and by increasing the amount of direct click-thrus you receive - and by helping you retain traffic - by positioning your site as an authority aggregator and by providing better, original content for blog visitors.