Earlier I have talked and helped you in answering two questions that help you in choosing right social network for your blog.In this post I would talk off third and the last question- What niche do you cover in your blog?

Niche is important for deciding the right social site for your blog.Different social media users have different tastes. For example, Digg users like tech and news related topics.So, it is of prime importance to know the tastes of the social sites user. If you have a blog on history and you are using a social site with majority of users inclined towards geography then you will hardly get any purchase from that site.



So, just do a research on different media sites and try to find out what topics are liked by the users of a particular social site.But the qquestion that arises here is ,How can I know the tastes of the users of a social site?

Well that is not a difficult task but it requires a lot of work to research it.There are different methods I employ to research this but none of them is perfect.So, what I do is combine different methods to research.I use a combination of three methods to find the tastes of the users.By doing this I reduce the errors in research and thus try to reach a near correct result.I would talk about these methods in following paragraph.

Take a look at the frontpage of social sites you are researching-

This I think is simplest method and and gives best and nearest results among the three.Just take a look at the front page of the social sites and see what sites are appearing there.Note down the site title and niche.Do this for minimum of one week.After you are done doing this, just see what niche or category has most featured on front pages of a particular site. This is most suited for social bookmarking sites like digg.

Take a look at the tag cloud of the social site-

Tag cloud give you a broader idea about the likings of a social site user.You may wonder how tag cloud can help you in choosing the right social site for your blog?? OK, let me explain the things in some detail. Take a look on this image of one of the pages of stumble upon.

Click to enlarge

On the right side of this image you can see the tag cloud. Just see the words that are written in bigger font in this cloud.Then see whether your your blog is about this.For example, one of the words in tag cloud is business (written in bigger font). So, if your blog is about business the social site can be of your choice.

Take a look at the categories-

Categories can be quite helpful in deciding the social site.Just ask a question to yourself. Is there any category which describes your blog or in which your blog can be fitted? If you don't find any category for your blog then probably your blog is not suited for that social site.


Based on these three factors and others I have discussed in earlier posts you can reach to social media site of your choice.In any case go for 2-3 best suited social sites to get maximum from social networking.Social networking is all about communicating with your target audience and the first step is choosing a social site where you can find plenty of target audience.Once you are not taking this first step with caution ,you may fail in social network marketing.

Read more.....

Image via WikipediaEarlier in the series of this post ,I have helped you to answer one of the questions to choose most popular social network for your blog. Now I will move on to the next question- What do you want social sites to do for your blog?

As I have said earlier , social sites can be used in a variety of ways. They can be used to drive traffic to your blog, they can be used to build relationships and increase sales or they can even be used to build links for your blog. So, answer of this question is quite important for choosing right social media site. Let us expand this in foollowing paragraphs.



Social sites of choice if you are there to drive traffic-

This is probably most important reason why bloggers participate actively in social sites. The most efficient social sites in this regard are stumble upon and digg. Of course, there are some other second tier choices like reddit and newsvine. So, if you are there for traffic you should focus on these sites.You don't have to actively participate in conversations here, only thing you have to do is bookmark your posts and encourage your readers to do the same.

Social media sites of choice to build relationships-

One of the reasons why you need to build relationships with others is because you want to win trust or you want to highlight yourself as an expert of some field.For this you need to be personal with your target audience.You have to converse with them. And that is why, you have to choose a social media site that has a messaging interface to make connections with others.Facebook ,orkut and different forums in your niche are excellent examples where you can communicate with others.

Social media site of choice to build links-

Yeah !!! social media sites can be used effectively to build links and increase your pagerank.For this you need to research and find out which bookmarking sites don't use "no follow". Some of the examples of social media sites that don't use "nofollow" are furl and blinklist.There are still some more and I am working on it.I will produce a list of dofollow social sites soon.



So, you can see ,how the answer to the above mentioned question dictates the choice of the social media site. Most of the times you have many reasons to use social sites.For example ,you wish to increase hits on your blog as well as build links from social sites.In this case the choice can be different.Just find out what do you want from social site and choose the one that fulfills your need.In every case, focus your attention only on 2-3 social sites as it is not possible to focus on every site that comes your way.

Read more.....

Image by glenn.batuyong via FlickrOne of the reasons most successful bloggers are successful is because they market their blog through social networking.The reverse is also true, most bloggers fail because they don't market their blog socially.Social network marketing ,also called as social media marketing, is one of the arsenals that web 2.0 has given us to promote our blog.But most of you are not able to take full advantage of it because you simply don't have an idea how to use it.

I am writing a series of post where you can learn about social network marketing and thus, you will be able to promote your blog socially. This is the first post of the series and in this post I will just outline the things that you would discover in the rest of the posts of this series.But before I would do this, it would be nice thing to define social network marketing.

What is Social network marketing?

"Social network marketing is a process of building relationships with target audience, to market principles and ideas for the purpose of societal benefit by winning trust."

If you take a close look onto the definition ,you will find three key factors of social network marketing-

1. Building relationships with target audience.
2. Marketing for purpose of societal benefit.
3. Winning trust.

These three points are key to social marketing and through out this series I will expand upon these three key factors only.

Now the next question that would be hovering in your mind is- What should I do to market my blog through social networks or social media sites? Well, social media sites are complex to deal with as you have to deal with a variety of people having different behaviours and opinions.But this can be made easy if you can follow a couple of steps.These couple of steps are part of social media optimisation.

Social media Optimisation-

Social media optimisation is simply the things you do to market your blog or products socially.You have to follow just a couple of steps (with a few sub-steps) to successfully market your blog socially. These steps are-

1. Choose most popular social network that suits your blog's need.
2. Apply some social media marketing tactics.

Choosing the most popular social network-

One of the mistakes most of you do while using social media sites is, you don't research to find out which network site is suited for your need. I have seen many bloggers using all the social networking sites that come their way.So, they will stumble, digg , and reddit and will twitter also without researching what they really need to use.

Choosing the most suited social sites is not hard either. Just you have to answer some questions-

• What do you want your blog to do? Whether you want to make money through adsense or through affiliate or you just want to get noticed or is it just a fun for you.
• What niche do you cover in your blog? Whether you write about computers or making money or news orany other thing in this world.
  
• What do you want the social sites to do for your blog? Whether you want to build links or get subscribers or generate some traffic through social sites.

The answer to these three questions are vital to select suitable social sites for you and your blog.I have separate posts on these questions where I shown you how answers to these questions affect the choice of social networking sites.

Applying social media marketing tactics

Once you are done choosing a social site for you, the next step is applying some tactics to make your social network marketing campaign more effective. I have categorised these tactics into three steps-

1. Creating the hook- This is basically a tactics to tell others , how you are different from your competitors.
2. Communicating like a skilled person-The way you should communicate online to make an impression and win trusts of others.
3. Redirecting the users to your blog- It is quite easy to redirect users to your blog once you have won the trust. But you need to be careful while doing this as you may loose the trust by doing it wrong way.

I will discuss these three points in separate posts.

This post was just an outline about what you will learn about social network marketing in this series of posts. Social network marketing is crucial for success as a blogger.Without networking it is impossible to be successful so, you must learn the art of networking on popular media ssites.

I hope you would enjoy this series and be benefited from it.If you fear loosing a part or whole of the series , you may subscribe via email to get the posts delivered in your inbox.

Read more.....

Image by ocean.flynn via FlickrAfter reading out the title you may have guessed , I would talk about search engine optimization.But in this post I would not say a word about it. I would not talk of keyword research or anchor text optimization or anything else about SEO. Instead I will talk of how you can apply SEO techniques to get more hits (not high search engine rankings).There is some difference between getting more hits and getting high search engine rankings.You will unfold the difference between the two somewhere in the following paragraphs.

Optimizing just your home page is biggest mistake-

I have seen many bloggers who have optimized their homepage quite well but if you take a look at inner pages they are poorly optimized.Even the best of your keywords can't drive loads of traffic if you have just optimized your main page.To drive more traffic from search engines you need to optimize many of your pages. Just create many entry points to enter your blog.

Let us take an example. Suppose you have one page beautifully optimized and it gets 50 visitors per day from search engines.50 visitors from one page is impressive ,isn't it?But since you have just one optimized page , you will not be able to go beyond that number. Will you? Now what happens if you have 10 such optimized pages.Do the simple maths and calculate.You will get 500 visitors and what if you have 50 optimized pages.My god!!! you have thousands of visitor just from search engines.....

So, the first lesson is optimize SOME OF YOUR inner pages apart from your home-page.

Optimizing all your pages is not easy (possible) either-

To succeed as a blogger you have to update your blog frequently, means, you have to write daily ,right? Right!! So, you are already in a pressure of writing daily and once you start optimizing each of your pages ,you will feel additional pressure. The pressure of doing keyword researches and building links for all your posts.

But all SEO experts told you to optimize your all pages, isn't it? Ok ,they are right. But they write for all the pages on internet and they most importantly write for websites which are not updated as frequently as blogs. So, a website owner can afford to optimize all of his/her pages but same can't be said about blogs.

So, What the hell should I do to drive traffic through search engines-

From above paragraphs it is clear that you can't drive traffic by optimizing just your home page and optimizing all your pages is not possible. So, the big question is - What you should do to drive traffic to your blog from search engines?

Here comes the secret-

Classify your blog pages into three tiers or strata. Your home page comprise the first strata ,some of your long, tutorial type posts (pillar posts) will come in the second strata and short posts and newsy posts in the third strata. I have shown this in the figure below.

Once you have classified your posts ,focus your attention on tier-1 and tier-2, that is, your homepage and your pillar posts.Optimize these two tiers with best keywords and get some links for them. Make sure all your pillar posts are accessible from your homepage and all relevant pillar posts exchange links between themselves.

So, what is the use of tier-3? Well, tier-3 (the short articles and newsy items) are just meant to provide internal links for your home page and your pillar posts. They feed your important posts with links without getting link from them.Thus, your pillar posts get one-way internal links from these posts. Isn't this cool.

If you write a pillar post each week, you will have 24 posts in six months and if you can manage to write two, you will have 48 pillar posts.If you can optimize all these posts you will create 48 entry points for your blog. Another good news , you will have a lot of newsy items or short posts to get your pillar posts linked.


Does creating entry points drives more traffic to blogs-

In the first paragraph i have said, "there is difference between getting more hits and getting high search engine rankings."I know you are getting confused here because you have been told that higher ranks mean more hits.OK let me clarify the things.

Let us suppose you are in the top ten (1st page) for a term in google results page.Well, you have 10 other sites to compete with even if you are in top ten for your targeted keyword. Furthermore, these competitors are often the toughest one.I know you can still get some traffic competing with them but my point is to leverage your high rankings to get maximum you can get from search engines.

How can I do this?

You have to simply focus your attention on search snippet. A search snippet looks something like this-


You can see here, a search snippet has two parts-

1. The title which is written in blue colour.
2. Description which is written in black.

Both these parts are quite important as it reflects the stuff in your blog.Many people decide whether they should click the link or not on the basis of this snippet.Thus, if you can assure people that you have the stuff they were looking for ,you can make them to visit your blog.

Make sure you have written an intriguing and 'killing' title. Also , make use of meta tags to describe each of your page.This way you can get more traffic from search engines.

These are all little things but are most often not given the attention they deserve.If you have some fantastic ideas to share or otherwise my points were not clear to you then you are most welcome to start a discussion here in the comment section.I look in to every comment i get and personally answer those.

Read more.....

Image via WikipediaEvery blogger wants traffic, only some of them constantly and seriously try to generate it and still fewer get it.This is the real picture of blogosphere in terms of traffic generation.If you are quite serious to generate some quality traffic for your blog ,then check out the links to the posts of some successful blogger and learn some unique and innovative ideas to build traffic.







Traffic building through offline blog promotion- By Darren Rowse

Most of the bloggers and webmasters are centered on online blog promotions.OK, online blog promotion can bring in some traffic to you but to really get piles of visitors on your blog you have to complement it with some offline blog promotion strategies.Darren has pointed out some good reasons to consider offline blog promotion and also has listed some great tips to do so.You can find the post here.


Traffic generation through google image search- By Maki

You read it right!!!!! Traffic from google image search is something that I have never thought of getting.Although I get some traffic from google inage search but I can't expect heaps of traffic from this.But, Maki , the man behind doshdosh has some ground-breaking tips to build a great deal of traffic from google image search.He has discussed a series of steps optimize your blog for google's search engine for images. You can find the article here.


Traffic generation through stumble upon- By Mani Karthik

This may sound like a repetitive and regurgitated list of tips but believe me Mani has got some useful techniques to get traffic from stumble upon.The post has been written on bloggingtips and can be found here.


5 traffic generation tips from Skellie Wag-

Skellie has got 5 great and unique tips to build traffic for your blog. All the five tips are singular and has great thoughts behind them.Read this post here.


30 Traffic building tips on daily blog tips-

This post is a bit different from others listed above.It contains views and ideas of thirty people on traffic generation techniques.Many of them are quite innovative and easy to follow.Check out this post here.


These are the unparalleled posts on the topic of traffic generation.Read them, follow them and enjoy getting more hits on your blog.If you have got some unique ideas on traffic building ,you can share it here through comment section.

Read more.....

Image via WikipediaPromoting a blog is one of the most tedious tasks as a blogger.This becomes even more unmanageable when you are a part time blogger like me.Promoting a blog is an ongoing process and you have to promote your blog as long as you write on your blog.

If you are looking for some shortcuts then I fear I might disappoint you.I have no secrets to disclose on the topic .But if you are quite serious to promote your blog and ready to schedule the task on a daily basis then you will find this post useful.


Leverage your current visitors to promote your blog-

People are quite focussed on the things that they don't have.Same applies to blogging also.You might have been thinking of your low traffic or subscribership.But real key to blog promotion is to concentrate upon what you have.A bunch of visitors can bring in huge traffic to you if they spread just one of your post virally. This is the true value of the visitors you have.


How can I promote my blog through current visitors?
Now this is the question which needs to be answered.The ways to promote your blog this way are-

• Produce quality content-How can a visitor promote your blog if you don't have a content worth promoting.Content is the soul of your blog and a blog without quality content is a dead blog.
• Use "Tell a Friend" script in the post-footer -"Tell a friend" script is a piece of javascript or php code that enables your visitors to email your posts to their friends.So, only thing you have to do is to encourage your visitors to use this script to email your posts.This can be more effective if you give away free gifts to your visitors to tell their friend about your posts.Although right now I am not using this method to promote my blog but I am planning to use it pretty soon.
• Encourage your visitors to submit your site in social bookmarking sites-Social bookmarking sites like stumble upon(SU) are the best place to promote your blog.Just encourage your visitors to add your posts to social sites if they liked it.

Make many entry points to get into your blog-

Entry points for your blog are the highly optimized pages which rank high in search engines for their keywords.Thus, if you have many entry points you have more prospects of getting visitors to your blog through search engines.In my opinion 10-15% of your posts should be optimized for search engines.If you write 10 posts a week then 1-2 posts should be written with search engines in mind.

What should I do to make entry points to my blog-

• Give some time to research your keywords.
• Place your keywords tactfully.
• Maintain a keyword density of 3-6%
  
• Build links for your optimized pages.

Promote your feeds to promote your blog-

Your blog and feed are the two faces of the same coin.So, promoting your feeds can actually help your blog to grow.Infact, my feeds get more hits than my blog and many of the visitors who discover my feed actually come to see my blog.

What can I do to promote my feeds-

• Submit your feed to feed directories.You can find a list of feed directories here.
• Make sure autodiscovery feature is working.Most of the blogs have an innate autodiscovery feature but sometimes it may not be working.
• Leave your feed's link in your signature whenever you comment in forums and other blogs.

Distribute your articles in article directories and forums-

Submitting your articles in article directories has two benefits-

1. It build links for your blog.
2. It refers some of the visitors to your blog.

Forums, I think, are not being used properly by bloggers to promote their blog.Writing some very good comments on forums can bring in some traffic for your blog but it will be only a few even if you are commenting in high trafficked forum.To really get some purchase from forums write an article which is value packed,,addicting, attractive (you can add some more adjectives here !!!) I had once written an article on about 10 forums to promote my blog on "Tourist Places in India" and next day the traffic came rolling in.

Identify some forums having good traffic and post a new thread with a beautiful article in it and see the magic.Seriously,this has worked quite well for my blog and it can work well for you too.


Build a community to promote your blog-

The simplest way to build a community is to join communities at mybloglog and blogcatalog. Other ways of building community are-

• Email other bloggers when you have produced a quality post and let them know about your post.You can even email entire post to them.Don't email all your post but only those which you think are promising.
• Comment on other blogs.This is the simplest way of building relationship with fellow bloggers although it may take some time.
• Giveaway links to other blogs and don't expect anything in return.
• Write a guest post on an established blog of your niche.
• Be active in social media sites.
• Answer your emails and comments on your blog.

Although there are many more methods to promote your blog but those I have discussed are not frequently used by most of the bloggers.If you have some unique idea to promote blog you may discuss it here in comments.

Read more.....

Image by ocean.flynn via FlickrToday one of my reader emailed me asking the best way to drive traffic for blog.His exact email was like this-

"Blogs like any other website get traffic from either search engines or referring sites (Other blogs + Forums) or social bookmarking sites like Stumble upon. What do you think is the best way to drive traffic to blogs? On which means a blogger should particularly focus upon?"

After reading this mail i was a bit befuddled as all three methods has its own importance and to choose one of them as best is certainly going to be a tough ask. Earlier I thought to reply him saying all these method are important and you should focus on all the three.But then I thought to answer him through one of the post with comprehensive details of each of these three methods of driving traffic to blog.


Driving traffic through search engines-

Driving traffic through search engines is free if you optimize your blog yourself.All you need is basic concept of organic search engine optimization.Even if you don't know ABCD of optimization you can learn it on the net. I am a health care professional and learnt a fair bit of optimization on the net.My point is if I can learn it probably anybody on this earth can learn it.

Secondly, traffic from search engines is laser targeted if you have researched your keywords and used it smartly.Through google analytics I have found that people coming to my blog through search engines spend a fair bit of time on my blog.

The only con I see in search engines is it takes some time to rank high in SERPs.You have to optimize each and every page and build links which certainly is not a one day process.Most of the times it takes several months to rank high in search engines if you are not applying some black hat SEO.(which I think you would not be applying)


Driving traffic through referring sites-

Number of visitors coming from other blogs and forums constitutes the second best source of traffic after search engines for this blog. This traffic is also targeted and most of the times they do return and comment.But to get traffic from this means you have to endlessly comment on other blogs and forums which is certainly not suited for a part time blogger like me.But if you have got some time this can be the single best source of traffic for you.Ten comments a day will be suffice.

Driving traffic through social bookmarking and media sites-

Today this mode of traffic generation is being talked highly.But frankly speaking I am quite disappointed with the quantity and quality of traffic I am getting from these sites.Stumble upon gives some visitors to my blog.But most of the times they spent only a few seconds on my blog.The average time a visitor from stumble upon has spent is 11 secs. which is certainly not assuring.

In my opinion traffic from social sites are absolute garbage.They are like swarm of bees that come to you and never visit again without watching what you have to offer.The only use of such traffic ,as I see, is in beautifying your traffic stats.

Although I am not only one who will tell against social media but still there are some folks who get some quality traffic from this media but they are very few.

Some additional points-

The biggest challenge that you get while driving traffic is when you have just started your blog, as a new blog has neither a high search engine rankings nor it gets purchase from social media.In this case comments on other blogs are the only source of traffic.I know that will not be the huge amount of traffic but every traffic you get will keep you motivated.Just add some useful comments on every blog that comes your way when you are new.

Once you start getting some traffic from search engines you can relax a bit and keep your comment rate down.

All these three methods work in conjunction but to choose the best one from these is certainly difficult.The best practice would be to monitor your analytics and see what works best for you.For me and most others search engines work best if you optimize the pages cleverly.

Read more.....

Is your blog not getting the traffic you have expected? Are you getting occasional or no comments on your blog? Are you blogging without being noticed? If your answer to these questions is 'yes' then probably you have not mastered the art of commenting or haven't commented on blogs at all.


I myself have been a kind of blogger who doesn't care of commenting on other blogs because of time constraints. I started commenting only recently and I can see the results coming as a spike in my blog traffic. Also I have been able to come closer to some of the bloggers of my niche.


I have noticed that not all comments translate into traffic or relationship. But there are some specific types which bring in more traffic and buzz than others.Based on my own experience and after talking to some of the bloggers I have come up with a list of some tips to master the art of commenting which I will discuss in paragraphs that follows.


Be an eager participant rather than just a comment maker-

An eager participant adds value to the post and injects some useful thoughts into the post through his comments. And one who is just a comment maker will write one-liners like, "Great post" or "hey! visit my site example.com" or something similar having no value.These sort of comment do more harm than benefit in long run.It is better not to comment if you have no ideas or thoughts. Commenting just to make comments doesn't help in anyway.


Treat Your comments like very short posts-

Yeah !! Comments are not just thoughts they are actual content and may contain some valuable information like actual blogposts. Just think, if you have to write 5-10 lines on a topic on your own blog what those lines would be? Those 5-10 lines you think off is your comment.Of course, the information you deliver through those lines should be unique.

Remember the words that has come before your eyes million times- 'Content is King'. Producing quality content will boost your blog's reputation no matter whether you are pouring it in your blog or somewhere else through comments.


Don't cross the fine line between being critical and being harsh-

Different people have different views or opinions on a topic. As a blogger I would love to get some critical comments simply because they add a different angle of perception on topic. Most of the bloggers I know don't mind critical comments either.

But criticism should be constructive and should be done in a humble way. Don't bash the blog author with aggressive words.Be polite while presenting your angle.While criticising a point or post as a whole make sure you support your views with some solid facts and citations. A poorly supported critic may bounce back on you and hurt your reputation as a blogger.


Try to build relationship with blog author and readers-

Much of the bloggers success depends on his/her potential to build relationships.Although there are many techniques to build relationship but the best I reckon is to get a bit personal in your conversation.The more personal you become the more chances are there that you will get closer.Be helping and expect or demand nothing in return.


Make your comments stand out of others-

OK you have poured in a great piece of advice or information in your comment but what if it doesn't get noticed.The whole effort will go in vain. Most blog readers read a few comments and then skip others.This is particularly true if a post contains a large number of comments.Let us suppose there are 100 comments on a particular post.Now the readers will not be able to notice all of them if you are not making your comments stand out.

Most of the blogs allow certain html tags ,like, bold, italic etc. Just make your important points bold. Things written in bold can draw the attention of readers as they are easily visible stand out of the things written in normal text.



I think comments are the most potent way of building relationships and network, the most vital thing to become successful blogger. Unlike social bookmarking sites comments help you drive targeted traffic and that is why I think every blogger should learn the art of commenting.

If you have anything to add or otherwise anything to share on the topic you can let me know through comments.I will be more than happy to hear from you.

Read more.....

Your blog can be used effectively to get repeat visitors to your blog. As an internet home business owner, getting a person to visit your blog for the first time may already seem hard work, but what do you need to do to entice the same reader to visit your blog continuously. How do you get repeat visitors to your blog? It certainly is not hard work, but it does require a conscious effort from you to learn a few easy yet effective techniques to make this happen. If there is something that I can share with you, it is that if you can succeed in making your new blog visitors feel really at home, well half the work is already done.


First impressions Last

It is a common knowledge that the first impression of an event, a person, or an activity last forever. In internet marketing, this is still valid when your reader visits your blog for the first time. It is important therefore that your blog’s font size is large enough with a good and nice design. If you have a unique design, this is even better and it may lead to a certain branding that people can identity as yours. Remember always that your blog is being read by many readers, not just yourself, so how you personally like your blog to look like may not be that important after all.



Don’t Over Focus On Your Keywords

Many people tend to place too much emphasis on SEO in their blogs as they wish to get top search engine ranking for their internet home business site. It has been an acceptable practice that when you write to repeat your keyword or keyword phrases and sprinkling them throughout the article post. Although this is a good practice to follow and eventually your search engine ranking does improve due to this blogging technique, there is unfortunately a downside to it.

Your readers may eventually get a little bored with your posts and stop visiting your blog. You should therefore try to focus on a narrower topic but mix it with other content to attract your blog visitors, new and old. You should also consider content swap in which you exchange blog posts with other bloggers.

This offers your readers fresh content as well as present a different style of writing too. It is a first step towards getting your repeat visitors to your blog and ultimately to your online business opportunity.



Squidoo Lens, Blog and RSS Feed

There is a relation among your squidoo lens, your internet home business website and your blog. With squidoo, you can create a lens or a free page. This lens consists of various modules that you can choose from. Every module contains a different category such as text, eBay opportunities, Reader Feedback, RSS Feed, Your Tube videos etc. However, many marketers seem to neglect the RSS module.

Simply putting your blog RSS Feed address into this module allows your latest blog posts to appear in your squidoo lens. To create a good lens, it is important to choose a topic that is related to what your blog offers to your readers. It is easy to create a squidoo lens but it is important to make a good one so as to generate free targeted traffic and repeat visitors to your blog.



Blog Frequency

You really need to blog frequently if you want to see repeat visitors to your blog.. The more often you blog the better it is, but I would say you should blog at least weekly. You can also consider blog posts from other bloggers, which provide your readers some variety and a different perspective to your usual work at home business ideas.

You must remember that your visitors subscribe to your blog because they like what you have written, the service you provide and the internet home business ideas your blog offers. So if you don’t blog frequently they may be tempted to just unsubscribe. Remember that your subscribers contribute to your free targeted traffic to your blog, so not only do you need to bring in new visitors, but it is important also to keep those in your subscription list satisfied as well.



Value Readers’ Comments

Your readers’ comments on your blog posts are important and you should review and reply them as soon as they are received. A comment posted by your reader may arise as a result of his agreeing, disagreeing with you or seeking clarification on what’ your have written.


There are some very good techniques that you can use to encourage your internet home business readers to give their valuable comments on your blog. A good blogging technique that I have learned is to engage my readers’ feedback and responses. You can do this by asking a question in your post, usually towards the end of your post. Do remember that writing a blog post is a lot different than writing for a newspaper article, in which you present all possible scenarios of the topic to a very passive audience.


In a blog, you should try to encourage and engage the reader to provide comment and feedback and share his experience on the topic. Inviting participation like this is good for getting your traffic and your visitors. The reader may be interested to find out more about the topic and like to read up on the new responses that are received. Getting high traffic and repeat visitors to your blog in this way is common, if the topic is thought provoking, interesting ant the right blogging technique is used.

Read more.....

Social bookmarking sites like stumble upon are proven way of getting more hits on your blog. But to really get much purchase from social bookmarking sites you have to constantly indulge your self in these sites and be active as long as you blog. But there is a shortcut with stumble upon which I will talk about in this post.

Before I start ,I must tell you that this is the unethical way of getting more hits on your blog but as such, you will not break any rules or violate any terms of services. The trick I am going to tell you makes use of a pitfall in stumble upon which you can utilize to get more hits on your blog.

Now get ready to discover the secrets as I am going to tell you the secret of getting more hits on blog in a stepwise manner.

Step- 1 –

Register yourself for stumble upon with five different usernames. Five is the minimum but if you have enough time you can make as many as 10 or even more accounts. But 5 will also do.

Step- 2 –

Add friends with all your accounts. So, if you add 50 friends with each of your five accounts you will have 250 friends and if you make 100 friends you will have 500 friends through your 5 accounts.

The friends you add should be interested in the niche in which you are blogging.This is important as it will give you the maximum results.It is easy to find interested members if you make the use of tag feature of stumble upon.

Step- 3 –

Just start stumbling your own posts once you have completed making friends. Add your posts to stumble upon through all your five accounts. The unique feature of stumble upon is that even 2-3 stumbles can bring thousand of hits on your blog.This is what this trick makes use of.

The posts you have stumbled will appear on the "pages liked by friends on your friends" page. And that will act as hits on your blog. Furthermore , if any of your friends like your post and stumble it then it will feature in their friends page and so on.

I think the working is quite simple and very effective to get more hits on the blog. Once again I would like to remind that this is unethical way as users are not liking your pages but it is you yourself who is adding your pages to stumble upon. But it doesn’t violates any TOS and rules of stumble upon or any other site. In fact stumble upon allows you to add your own posts and blogs unlike digg and other social bookmarking site.

Read more.....

How to get more hits on your blog? This question does haunts every blogger's mind.Most of the times a newbie blogger is not able to do things right in order to increase hits on their blog and when they realise their mistakes often it is too late.In this post I will tell you some realistic approach to increase traffic on your blog.

I will write the post like a questionairre and answer the questions to make you understand the traffic building techniques. Here comes the question no. 1.

What is traffic?

"Traffic is total number of visitors visiting your blog or site."

Most of you would have answered this question like this and it is correct, isn't it? OK, lets play with words here.I will define traffic as-

"Sum total of new and returning visitors on your blog or site."

Words have changed but the meaning is same.But this definition has given you one clue,which is-

Traffic = New visitors + Revisitors

My point here is , since , new visitors and returning visitors are entirely different groups ,so, the strategies to increase hits from these two groups would be different.This is something bloggers don't think while building their blog.

Now,kick off to the next question.

From where does the new visitors come ?

Many of you would have answered this question quite comfortably. But let me answer this question for people who don't know the answer of this question.
New visitors generally come from following sources-

1. Search engines


2. Referring sites


3. Viral way

Now you know that new visitors come from generally three sources as listed above.In the coming paragraphs I will tell you how to increase hits from these sources.

Next question-

How to get more hits from search engines?

To get more hits from search engines you need to rank high in search engine results pages(SERPs) and this can be done with search engine optimization.Follow the link to know about search engine optimization.

There is another way of ranking high in SERPs.This is through paid listings but you have to spend some bucks for this which is not a good option for most of you.So, just stick with search engine optimization.

Next question-

How to get more hits from referring sites?

Visitors through reference come from three sources-

1. Comments on other blogs and forums-You can get whole lot of hits by just commenting on other blogs and forums.But to drive traffic through comments you nust know the right way of commenting.Read my post "5 tips to get most out of comments and forums" to know the right way of commenting in blogs and forums.



2. Social bookmarking sites-This the one of the most powerful source to get referred visitors to your blog.But it works only if you have unique and quality content.Your visitors will only bookmark your blog if you give them a reason to do so.So, always produce original and quality content.



3. Trackbacks-When a blogger likes or dislikes your posts then he/she may write about your post or blog in his own blog.This can bring some visitors to your site.



4. Web and article directories- This works only when you submit your website to quality directories.Uptill now I have never got a single visitor from low quality directory although I do submit my blog to even low quality directories to build backlinks.But in terms of traffic it is useless.Submit you blog to as many quality directories as you can and do it gradually.

Now lets quickly jump to the next question-

How to get more hits viral way ?

Well , for this you need to create unique and appealing content.Give your readers a solid reason to tell others about your blog.If you are continuously writing good articles, people will tell others about you and your blog.This is the most powerful way of generating traffic but most difficult also.

So, now you know how to increase hits on your blog from new visitors.Apply all these techniques in conjunction and you will surely be able to drive traffic to your blog.

Now get ready for the next and the last question .

How to increase hits on your blog from revisitors?

Again this completely depends on your content quality.If you are writing quality content every now and then ,then people will come back to your blog in search of updates you have made or new posts you have written.I have written a series of posts on "how to write articles on your blog?" I am providing you with the link of first post of that series.You can get links to other posts on this series in this post.

Now I can guess that you have fair idea about traffic generation techniques.Apply all these ideas and wait patiently.Remember getting more hits is not an overnight process unless you are spending some bucks on advertising.Be patient and try to do everything right you will surely get traffic !!!

Read more.....

Most of the successful bloggers get tons of traffic from comments and forums.But what most of the bloggers and SEO experts will tell you is to just drop a comment in some blog or forum and leave a signature with your blog/website url.But question here is , is that all you can harvest from commets and forums? The answer is, NO !!!! 99.99% of bloggers and webmasters underutilize the potential of comments and forums to drive traffic and increase page rank of their sites.

In this post I will tell you 5 tips to milk most out of comments and forums.So,apply some glue on your seat and get ready to learn those tips.Here comes the tip no.1.

#Tip-1- Find twenty blogs or forums with high readership and page rank and another twenty which don't use "no follow" tag in comment section.

Why this is important-Let us start the explanation with an easy question.Why do you comment? Most of you would have answered this question like this-

"We comment to get traffic and increase google page rank."

Very well !! There is no doubt that this is correct answer.Now, what will happen if you are commenting in a blog or forum with low readership or those which use "no follow" tag? Yes, you guessed it right, you will not be able to get traffic and increase page rank.So, it is important to select blogs and forums before commenting.

How can we know that a blog has high readership or it doesn't uses "no follow" tag?- The answer to first question is easy.A blog or forum with high subscribers volume and comment volume has invariably high readership.To find out whether a blog is using "no follow" tags or not is somewhat tricky thing but I will tell you about this in some other post of mine.

So,now you have selected your target blogs and forums.Once your selection is complete just go on to tip no.2

#Tip-2- Don't Spam.Make useful comments which help the readers and start a conversation between you and readers or/and blog author.

While going through many blogs I come across many spammy comments ,like,

"Great post!!!! Keep it up."

And some even worse than this-

"Hey visit my blog www.example.com".

Most of the times these comments are not able to make their way out of moderation filter if blog author has kept moderation on.So,my advice here is don't spam, it will not help and sometimes even harm you.

How to make useful comments? A useful comment is one which starts a conversation between you and readers.There are three ways one can start a conversation in blogs and forums-

1) Ask questions relevant to theme of blog/forum post.

2) Write about some point which you think blog author has missed.

3) Throw away a tip or trick which you think can help the readers.

By doing this, you generate curiosity in readers mind and if they become curious enough they will visit your site for details.

# Tip-3- Use anchor-text to link to your website from a comment on blog or forum and make it bold.

While using anchor-text is very much important both for readers and search engines as it gives a basic idea about your blog/site, making anchor text bold is important generally for search engines.

You might be knowing that search engines give particular importance to text written in bold.So,when you make your link bold then that link will be treated as special by search engines and your site thus will get some extra weightage over others.

I don't know why people don't make their links in bold even when almost every blog and forum allow them to do so? Believe me this is a very good SEO technique which very little people know.So, next time whenever you are commenting on a blog just make your links bold.

#Tip-4- Don't just place links of your homepage but also of relevant inner pages.

Again this is very little known technique.I have seen most of the bloggers placing links of just their homepage.But I will suggest you to place links of inner pages also as this can boost page rank of your inner pages as well as homepage.

This is particularly true when you have successfully started a conversation.When you start a conversation you post comments on the same page time and again.There is no point placing one link time and again on same webpage.Instead place unique links every time you comment on same webpage or thread.

#Tip-5- Ping the url on which you have commented.

Here you might be thinking what pinging has to do with comments.OK, then let me explain things in some detail.Well, you have posted an excellent comment on a blog or forum and also placed a link of one of your pages.But this link will be of no importance in increasing your page rank unless search engines index that link.This is where pinging can help you.Pinging ensures that your link will be indexed and will be indexed faster.

Let us take an example,Suppose you have commented on a page ,say, www.example.com/2007/08/post.html.Once you have commented ,just go to any pinging service and ping this url.I use autopinger.com for this purpose as they ping about 50 pinging services at one click.


Now I think you will be able to get most out of comments and forums.I can assure you that these five tips will certainly prove beneficial to take your blog to next level.

HAPPY AND ADVANTAGEOUS COMMENTING !!!!

Read more.....