I was searching around researching for my new blogging product and I came across this great post from Seth Godin with 56 ways to get traffic for your blog.
Here’s the Top 10 that really stood out for me:
1. Be topical… write posts that need to be read right now. 2. Announce news. 3. Write short, pithy posts. 4. Include comments so your blog becomes a virtual water cooler that feeds itself. 5. Write about stuff that appeals to the majority of current blog readers 6. Write posts that each include dozens of trackbacks to dozens of blog posts so that people will notice you 7. Digest the good ideas of other people, all day, every day. 8. Write about a never-ending parade of different topics so you don’t bore your readers. 9. Write stuff that people want to read and share. 10. Assume that every day is the beginning, because you always have new readers.
Blogging has become a regular part of life for many people. For internet marketers in particular, it is a great tool for finding new customers. One of the main reasons for using a blog is to drive traffic to an online business. it is low cost and search engines love the new information that is regularly updated. If you want free search engine traffic then blogging is one of the quickest and easiest methods you can use.
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You’ve heard about blog and ping to drive traffic to your blog, right? This is one of the main reasons that blogs have increased in popularity in the attempt to make money online.
Blogs are the easiest, most accessible content management systems available and because they are easy to update, search engines love them as well and reward regularly updated blogs with more frequent visits from the spider. Just run a search of any topic in any search engine and you’ll be greeted by blogs occupying the prime spots in the results pages. Also, submit your blog to a blog directory and more people will link to your blog as well.
Blog entries can also be converted into RSS feeds automatically. This means the content syndication is made easier if you’re using your blog to launch your content.
But blogs are not just an internet marketer’s main weapon to make his business successful.
By monetizing your blogs, they can become an income stream on their own, and an affective one at that. Given the traffic and the page rank that blogs command, it will be easy to imagine the earning potentials of these wonderful creations once they are optimized well for monetization purposes.
Here are 5 great ways by which you can monetize your blog to make money:
1. Use your blog in place of your sales page. You can actually pre-sell, or even directly sell, your products through the entries in your blog. This can be in the form of an announcement, or even a positive review or a strong recommendation. Since people are expected to flock on your blog, might as well create a channel by which you can instantly convert those visitors into paying customers.
2. Don’t have your own products to sell? No problem. Sign up with any affiliate program over at www.clickbank.com , www.cj.com, www.linkshare.com or www.paydotcom.com and you will be given an appropriate affiliate link. You can promote this affiliate link through your blog entries and you can earn some generous commission for every sale you will manage to refer. Best of all, you can join as many affiliate programs as you’d like. You’re not limited to just one program. Each affiliate program you will join will provide an income stream for your web log.
3. Integrate a PPC program to your blog. Enroll with AdSense or any other ad hosting services. You will get paid every time a visitor of yours will click on the ads that the service will display on your blog. And since you’re sure to generate a large volume of traffic for your blog, you’ll be able to win a lot of clicks and a lot of dollars to boot.
4. Find sponsors. If you want a surefire income, build the reputation of your blog by regularly posting quality entries. Once you have achieved at least 50,000 unique visitors per month, and a page rank of at least 4 (quite easy by today’s standards), you can sell valuable real estate in your blog to some willing sponsors. An easy way of sourcing out some sponsors is by advertising in www.adbrite.com and displaying your blog’s relevant stats.
5. Once you have achieved the reputation mentioned above, you can also sell links to other webmasters. Since your number of unique visitors will be high and your page rank will be desirable, your blog will be an important commodity for webmasters who are looking for quality links.
Check out http://www.WordpressPublisher.com for a great new piece of software that is being launched in August 2008 that will help you get great new content onto your blog regularly.
PC Mag takes on the question of who owns content, especially where RSS Feeds are concerned:
Every day people put virtual truckloads of information into the public domain. Books are published. Newspapers printed. A lot of that ends up on the Internet as well, along with the words of bloggers and other online denizens. All of these people make content public so that others can hopefully benefit from it.
Once it is out in the public domain, who owns it? Well, the author of course, or in some cases, their employers. That makes sense when we’re talking about a web Wage. But sometimes, in order to make it easier for people to find and read the information, it is delivered as an RSS feed. RSS breaks down the information into article-sized chunks and streams it out so that news-reading tools can grab it and display it for users.
This article raises some interesting points however while it is frustrating to see your work republished without recognition and with RSS Feeds becoming more popular the problem only gets bigger.
This is a rather black hat technique though and the reality is still that unique, relevant and recent content is still more valuable in the long run. Taking the time to add your own mark to each post is valuable in establishing your credibility.
The new Dilbert.com website has just been re-launched and one of the upgrades that is sure to be popluar is that you can now access the poupular comic via RSS Feeds.
You do have to wonder if Dilbert himself worked on this project.
Just about anything is possible.
Tell us what you think might have gone wrong if Dilbert had been involved?
A recent article examined the reasons that people feel compelled to blog. From the post and the comments it received, it became clear that quite a few people are blogging to make money. Apparently, however, it is difficult to make money in the long tail.
The bigger question however is “who defines the long tail”?
The blogosphere is a broad and amazing place and while there may not necessarily be money directly in the long tail of the blogosphere if you are properaly leveraging your assets then the long tail might just be a mechanism for driving people towards the true money making venture. Given all of the different options that are available for monetising blogs and capturing web surfers attention.
A friend who is just launching a new barbeque site (http://www.charcool.com – I’ll give him a free plug) said to me, “it doesn’t matter how many people walk past your shop, until you have got them in the door, you have no idea if they will want to buy or not”.
I think he hit the nail on the head and in the blogosphere, part of your challenge is getting people to look at the sign in the window and walk through the door. Only then can you start to worry about converting them to customers.
If you look at the long tail of the blogosphere and expect to find money there, then you will probably go home disappointed. However, if you look at the blog as an advertising medium designed to get people to at least pay attention, then you have achieved the first part of a difficult challenge. There is a lot of good content on the internet and there are a lot of people. If you have good content then you just need to attract the people and the blog is a very effective way of doing this.
Monetise you blog if you can but don’t expect to make your fortune from it. Just look it as a tool in your marketing bag of tricks.
