gainfully unemployed » website traffic

How to Get Tons of Traffic to Your Blog in the First Month

chris — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:15:08 +0000

Getting a lot of traffic to your blog takes three basic things. First, you have to have something to write about. The “something” you write about needs to be helpful and informative to a group or community of people.

In other words, you need to provide some kind of value to people in order to make it worth their while to come to your blog to read your content and to hopefully come back in the future.

The second thing you need to do is write a lot of content. Write a post every day if you can. If you can’t, write one every other day. The more posts you write, the more chances there will be for people to find your work. Cast a wide net.

The third thing you need is to actively promote your work. Once you are done writing your article, you’re not done. If you want traffic to come to your blog, you need to reach out to others and let them know it’s there. The amazing thing that happens is once you win a few “fans,” it gets easier to get more. Once you start to get links from other bloggers writing about similar topics and a few social media links, you are well on your way.

I read a refreshing and honest article with some real world advice about gaining blog traffic by a blogger named Ryan Schmitz (his blog is Planting Dollars) who pulled in 5,700 hits in his first month of blogging. He writes about the quickest way to build a successful blog.

He also points out that you shouldn’t smack your visitors across the face with tons of advertisements or really think about making money early on. That part comes later.

Read 9 Ways to Be a Better Blogger

SEO Can Only Help Local Newspapers

chris — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:08:44 +0000

Search Engine Journal has a very good post about how local newspapers–and in fact, the newspaper business as a whole–can only benefit from harnessing SEO for their websites.

This article has some details that will help any blog owner, in whatever industry, make their site more visible to search engines and therefore visitors, while also creating a better user experience.

It makes no sense to me why a newspaper would not want to optimize search to each and every article the company owns rights to, even if only the first few paragraphs along with an opportunity to subscribe or pay too read the article.

Why not create a free trial to encourage sign-ups?

Why not flood search engines with all the thousands of archived articles to establish more of a hold on search engine audiences?

5 Steps to Better Search Engine Optimization for Your Blog – Get More Readers, Make More Money

Double Your Page Views with Related Post Plugins

chris — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 05:09:09 +0000

If you own a blog or run an Internet business, you probably spend a good deal of time trying to get people to visit your site. Once you get them there, why not keep them there? One way to do this is to provide your site’s visitors with the information they are looking for.

If you can do that, then chances are people will stick around for a longer amount of time and will look at multiple pages, rather than just glancing at the page they landed on and leaving. The longer people stay on your site, the greater the chances are that they will take action, either by signing up for your RSS feed, leaving a comment, or clicking an advertisement.

One way to make sure visitors to your website get the information they’re looking for is to use a Related Posts plugin. WordPress publishers can use the “Yet Another Related Post Plugin,” which is the plugin I use on this site. This will add links to other posts that are related to the post being read. A lot of the time, site visitors will click on one of these links for more information, thus creating more traffic for you, more ad impressions, and more opportunity for exposure.

Here is what you will see below the footer of your blog posts after you install the YARPP.

Those who use blogger or other web publishing or blogging platforms can use the LinkWithin widget. Both YARPP and LinkWithin are easy to install and integrate into your website. A few keystrokes and clicks and you will have created more traffic within your website. Linkwithin is very effective because it displays post pictures in addition to the links to related posts, which will help attract more attention and more engagement from your site visitors.

After I installed the related post plugin on this site, pageviews immediately increased by a third. Some days, it’s increased by 50 or 60% in relation to unique visits.

It takes a lot of effort to get visitors to your blog or online business. Why not keep them their a little bit longer. Using related posts plugins is the easiest way to create more page views, and the best part about it is that it helps your visitors navigate your site to the content they’re looking for.

You may have an older post that doesn’t get a lot of search engine love. This post may be “revived” when you write something related to it at a later date. Keeping a healthy flow of traffic throughout your website makes good things happen.

13 Ways to Pump Up Your Facebook Fan Page and Get Attention

Increase Your Blog Traffic with Article Directories

chris — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:57:20 +0000

One of the best ways to promote your blog or website is by publishing articles in Article Directories. Some of the better known directories are EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com. Publishing articles in these kinds of directories is smart for a few reasons.

They create direct click-through traffic to your blog posts, articles, or domain.
They can help your site become indexed by search engines more quickly.
They create back-links to your site, which helps it achieve higher search engine results in Google and Yahoo.

How do Article Directories Work?

You can publish articles about anything, but you want the subject to be specifically related to what you write about on your blog. The reason for this is that you get to place two links in the signature box at the end of your articles. This is pretty much the whole reason you want to write for article directories: building links to your work.

Once your article is approved, it will be live and should soon get some search traffic to it. This will in turn send some traffic to your blog via you signature links. Other web publishers can re-publish your work on their own websites as long as they include the links to your site, which can further increase the amount of links you get to your work.

How to Get Click Through Traffic from Article Directories.

It is always nice to see high rates of click-through traffic on your ezine articles. One way to increase clicks on your links is by writing in such a way that your reader still wants more information and will naturally want to click your link as a means to finding it.

In my last post I used the example of home brewing beer so I’ll continue that here. Your article may be about how to brew beer properly or some things to know for beginners. You may write in your signature something like this (with the link in quotes):

Read more about how to choose the best “Home Brewing Kits.” Also, learn more tips and tricks to getting started “Brewing Beer at Home.”

Both links can be to different posts on your blog, or one can be to a post and the other can be to the homepage domain. You want to also make sure to use keyword-rich anchor text. The first link in the above example could lead to a review of several “home brewing kits,” while the second may be to the homepage, which may be more general in theme, which is why you use the text “”Brewing Beer at Home.” It really depends on what your target keywords are. In this example, you would

Keyword-rich links are good for off-site SEO and will help your site in the SERPS. If you’re looking to gain traffic to your site, both direct and long term, article directories are a good place to start.

Article Length

400 to 500 words is the optimal length for these articles.

It can be frustrating getting started at Article directories–at least for me it was–because your work may be rejected for not reaching the publisher’s standards. They don’t want spammy or keyword-stuffed content, which is part of the reason these directories maintain their high quality reputations, which are reflected in PR and search engine rankings.

How to Attract Visitors to Your Website

chris — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 01:58:41 +0000

If you are doing any kind of business online, then your primary goal (after creating good, useful, relevant content) is to attract traffic to your website. After all, you want people to visit your site, see your work, and either become a sales lead, a subscriber, or a new user.

Unfortunately, there are hundreds or thousands of other websites, blogs, or individual pages competing with you for the all important top slots on the search engine ranking pages (SERPs). There are a lot of things you can do to make your site as search engine friendly as possible in order to attract visitors to your website. There are also a lot of things you should not do lest you get banned from the first few pages of search engine results.

Here’s a list of 4 things you should do:

Get your website listed in internet directories. Directories like DMOZ and the Yahoo Directory have high rankings and give your site legitimacy.

Try to get subscriptions to your website. This way, when you publish a new article, your visitors are notified and have easy access to your site. If you can collect email addresses, this is helpful too because you can get directly to your audience with a newsletter, for example.

Analyze your traffic. Google Analytics is a free program you can use to see what URLs on your site are the most popular, and what keywords people are searching that bring them to your site. This will help you immensely in shaping your site so as to get the most traffic.

Create relationships with the owners of other websites similar to yours. If you can do this, then this can be very helpful. This kind of promotion works well with blogs, but can also work well for an e-commerce website if you interest other webmasters with what you are doing.

4 Things you should not do:

Do not spam. If it feels like spamming, it probably is.

Don’t buy links. If you buy links from a link farm, chances are search engines will penalize you for trying to boost your rankings in this way. Get legitimate links by creating good content that others will link to. Also, comment on other websites and try to get a conversation going with others on the internet.

Don’t stuff keywords into your articles. You may be tempted to throw in your keyword phrases as many times as possible. As soon as your content becomes unreadable because your keyword percentage is too high, that’s when you know you’ve used them too many times.

Don’t solicit links from any old website. Any link to your website is probably a good thing, but it is better to get links from higher ranked websites that are relevant to your site. If you get links from sites in “bad neighborhoods,” this could hurt your site. Don’t worry too much about this, but only do “link exchanges” if there is a legitimate reason.

Creating a successful website takes time, effort, and work. If you do it right, you will reap the rewards. Remember, the cream always rises, so if you do good work, you will be rewarded.

Good luck. It’s tough out there.