Generating Traffic To Your Blog With LinkReferral

One thing a lot of people struggle with when creating a blog is getting enough traffic to the blog.  There are a number of ways you can generate traffic for your blog.  One way I have found to get great traffic to your blog is with LinkReferral.  This is a great site because what you do is your post your website up and then you review and visit other people’s site to get your rank up on the site so people visit your website as well.  It is a great way to generate a lot of traffic to your website.

You can increase the your rank by viewing other sites, submitting site reviews, doing forum posts, and selecting favorites.  If you are interested in getting more traffic to your blog check out LinkReferral.

Read rest of entry

How I Generate Traffic To My Blog – Part 1

There are many ways to generate traffic to your blog and I have mentioned plenty of them on my blog already, but what I plan on doing today is giving you a list of the methods I found work best.  I have tried many different ways and some of them give short term results while others have given long term results.  I think it is good to have a little bit of both so you get the maximum amount of traffic to your blog.  So below I will split my traffic generation into two categories: short term and long term traffic generation results.

Short Term Traffic Generation:

Yahoo Answers - If you are interested in driving traffic quickly and easily this is a good one for you to try.  What you do is you post answers or questions with links back to your website and write them in a way that interests readers to come visit your website.  You will get hits right away but they usually don’t visit again after the question is gone.

Facebook - I would say that the links you put in your profile are short term.  The reason that is is because all your friends will check out the new link to your blog / website when you first post it up because of the news feeds but then after that it will die down and you usually won’t get anymore new traffic.

Forums - Posting on forums can be a good way to get short term traffic to your blog.  As long as you are posting useful information on the forums and have a good signature with links to your website you will usually get some decent traffic back to your blog.  Usually a lot more traffic then some of ideas mentioned above but then again it is still only be short term traffic.  However one of the other benefits of this type of traffic is the linkbacks to your website which can help raise your PageRank.

Blog Comments – This is pretty similar to forum posts.  Basically you can get a bit of traffic to your blog / website but you are better off doing this to increase your linkbacks which in turn will hopefully increase your PageRank.

Link Exchange sites – Link exchange sites such as linkreferral will generate traffic to your blog as long as you are using them but once you stop so will the traffic.  Most of the traffic generated with this method however is not very good traffic because people are just interested in getting more traffic to their own website.  Since everyone has the same idea in mind no one really sticks around a website to see what it is about.

Twitter – As far as I can see so far this is a short term way of generating traffic to your blog.  May be after getting a very large follower base you can get long term traffic from this but in the mean time you get hits every once and awhile from this.

EntreCard - This is like linkrefferal in that it is basically a link exchange type program.  You can advertise on other peoples blogs and they can advertise on your blog.  It does generate traffic but majority of it is just traffic where people are interested in getting points so they can make more traffic.  It is worth a shot to try but it might not be the best solution in the long run.

Social Networking - This is a awesome way to get a ton of traffic to your blog.  If you can get to the front page of some networking websites you can see up to 50K unique visitors in a day!  This traffic is awesome but it will not last forever and its not easy to get to the front page.  I definitely recommend doing this step but don’t expect to see traffic for months and months after you post something on the website.

PPC Advertising - This is not something I have tried on this website but is something I have done with my full time job.  PPC stands for Pay Per Click advertising and what that is is when you pay for each click you get on your advertising to go to your website.  An example of this is Google Adwords where you see advertisements on the right of the search results.  If you click on them the advertiser has to pay for each click on their advertisement.  This is a very good way to get traffic fast to your website but it will cost you and you will only get it when you pay for it.

Long Term Traffic Generation (The Good Stuff!):

Search Engine traffic – This is really good traffic.  If you can do a bunch of SEO on your blog/website and get a bunch of your pages ranked highly in search engines for key terms then you will get a lot of traffic to your website without a lot of work.  This will always be constant traffic as long as you do not get banned from search engines.  So just be careful not to employ black hat SEO techniques and you should be fine.

Article Directories - This is another way to get long term traffic to your blog.  Once you have submitted enough quality articles to article directories you will constantly get traffic from them to your blog and it is good traffic because people are interested in what you have to say.  So if possible try to always add more articles to article directories.

Link Exchanges - As long as the sites you are exchanging links with do not go under you can usually always get traffic from the links you have exchanged with other websites.  There are rumors that Google doesn’t like this type of traffic generation but I think if you do a little bit of it it cannot hurt your website rank and will bring in some more traffic.

Link Baited Websites – There might be another term for this but this is what I want to call it.  Basically what this is is websites that have linked to your website because they found it interesting and wanted to link to it.  If you can write blog entries that are very interesting to users they will most likely link to it and refer to it in their website.  This is great traffic because it is free and you don’t really need to work for it.

Banner Exchange - This is similar to link exchanges in that you exchange a banner with another website and there is a link on the banner.  It is good for long term traffic as long as both websites stay up and active you can always send traffic to each others websites.

So that is it

For now this is the list of things I have tried so far to generate traffic to my blog.  As mentioned in a lot of the paragraphs some of the traffic generated to the website is a lot better then other traffic but all of them are worth a shot.  I would try some of them yourself and see what works best for you.  And remember as long as you write quality content, lots of content, and do some SEO on your website you should get decent traffic from search engines.

Also if you guys have any other traffic methods you would like to suggest feel free to comment below and I can add your recommendation to my list and link back to your website since you are the contributor of the idea.

Read rest of entry

Generate Traffic To Your Blog Using Google Images

Creating traffic to your blog can be a difficult task. While doing some research and looking at my Google Analytics stats I realized there is another way to generate traffic to your blog. This is something most of you probably have never thought about and I didn’t think about it myself until I started getting traffic to my website through this method. Everyone knows that getting traffic through search engines is great because it usefully converts better and you don’t need to advertise your blog all the time to get this type of traffic. Have you ever thought of the possibly of getting traffic through the Google image search feature? If you haven’t this might be something to look into. Let me explain a bit further.

When you add a image to your blog you think you are doing this mainly to create an attractive website that people will be interested in; however there are other beneficial reasons why you may want to add pictures to your website.  This other main reason is because people can find your blog through the Google image search feature.  Have you ever seen the Google Image search feature?  There is a button at the top left of Google to search images when you search for topics and in the search feature you sometimes get Image results showing at the top of the search results.  See example below:

So how can you optimize your images so they show up in the Google search feature?  If you can get in one of these top spots when people do regular Google searches you could potentially generate a lot of traffic to your blog.  So how is it done?  Here are a few steps you can take to optimize your images so you can get some better traffic to your blog through Google Image search feature.

1. Insert keywords into your Alt tags – this should be pretty self-explanatory.  If you put descriptive alt tags on your images you are more likely to come up in the search results
2. Name your Images with Descriptive titles - this as well should be pretty obvious.  If you have unique titles for your images then you are more likely to come up in the results.  If you have a very generic title for your images then the likelihood of it being the same as other images is very good and therefore giving you bad image search results
3. Use relevant text around the images – It is helpful to have relevant keywords around the images because those keywords will likely show up in bold as well and the user who searches will more likely click on the images
4. Optimize the title and meta tags of your pages – this is something you should already be doing for all of your pages.  You should especially be doing this for the pages that have the images so that they come up in the results a bit more easily
5. User anchor text keywords in links to images – what this means is if you have a hyperlink to an image and its text make sure the text is descriptive and not something generic like “Click for full size image”.  That type of thing is generic and will not help.  If you put something like “Jessica Alba Hot Picture” you are more likely to get the right results
6. Make Your image folder accessible to search engines – you need to make sure that your images folder is accessible by search engines.  If it is not then the images will not get indexed by Google and you will not get in the search image results
7. Enable Google Image Search in Webmaster Tools – this is one that I just recently found.  If you are signed up with Google Webmaster tools what you can do is login to your account and go to the Tools tab on the menu bar and find the option to enable enhanced image search on the left sidebar.  Once you do this your images will hopefully be indexed a bit more easily
8. Monitor the Number of Google Images Indexed – this is an important step because if none of your images are indexed then you are not going to get any traffic from Google image search.  You can do this by going to Images button at the top left of Google and then typing – site:www.yoursite.com or site:yoursite.com.  It really depends on how your site is indexed for if you should have the www or not.  If it brings up results then those are the images indexed by Google.  If you get no results then you have no images indexed by Google and you need to work harder on the steps above to get your images indexed.

So hopefully these tips above will help you generate some extra traffic to your blog.  I know it has worked in the past for many other people and can work for you if you just give it a try and try to follow these guidelines.  Good luck and let me know how successful you are at this technique!

Read rest of entry

Do Beautiful Women Generate Traffic?

You know the age old saying – sex sells? Well is it true does sex actually sell or is that all just made up. I am pretty sure it does sell so if that is the case then would putting beautiful women on my blog make me get more traffic and in return more money? I’ve contemplated this for ages now and really haven’t done nothing about it. At first I thought I would put a picture of a pretty woman at the top of my website as a banner but then I thought that would be tacky and didn’t do it. Since then I really have tried putting images of beautiful women on my website to see if it actually worked. So instead of just talking about it over and over again and doing nothing about it I’ve decided to put some pictures of beautiful women in this post and see what happens. Who knows maybe this post will become my most popular post overnight (here’s wishing!).

So without anymore delay here are some beautiful women. What do you think?

Is this going to get any traffic? We will find out pretty shortly. Please feel free to comment below if you’ve tried this trick yourself.

Read rest of entry

How To Generate A Ton Of Traffic With A Social Media Plugin

So one of the many ways you can generate traffic to your blog is by usingsocial media websites such as Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, etc.  And as everyone knows traffic = money in the blogging world.  So what I’ve done is setup profiles as best as I could (more work still to be done) on some of these social websites and then what I did was install a social media widget on my wordpress blog that would link to all my profiles. The benefit of this is that when people visit your site they can click on your social media profiles and follow you there and then hopefully return back to your site at a later date or share your page with others and make your site more popular in the long run.

How To Install The Social Media Plugin?

First of all you are probably wondering what the name of the plugin is. Well the one I’ve installed on my blog is called – Social Media Widget.  I found it by doing a Google search for social media plugins for wordpress.  It is a pretty nice plugin that is easy to install. In order to install it you can do the following steps:

1. Download the plugin from the link above
2. Upload the social-media-widget folder and all its contents to /wp-content/plugins
3. At this point you’ll need to activate the plugin so when you are logged in to your wordpress admin section you will click on plugins on the left and find the plugin and check the box and activate the plugin
4. Then you’ll go to Appearance -> Widgets and activate the widget (Social Widget) in the appropriate sidebar.
5. At that point you can customize all the options and save it
6. You’ll now see the widget on the right or left sidebar of your wordpress blog

What Features Does This Widget Include?

Well there are couple of great features I think it includes such as:

• It supports a TON of social media sites
• You only need to link to the ones you have profiles for. You can turn off the rest of the icons
• There is numerous icon sizes from 16×16 to 64×64
• There are 4 different icon packs. They are all very awesome I might add
• You can even create your own custom pack of icons if you want
• Choose from multiple types of animations (including Fade In, Scale, Bounce, etc)
• Set whether or not the profile pages open in a new window or not
• Align the widget however you like (left, right, center)

How It Will Generate You Traffic

So at this point you may be asking how will this simple widget generate traffic to my blog?  The answer to that is pretty simple. Once people find your site they have the opportunity to click on your social media links. At this point they can follow you and share your information with others. Then they can come back to your site once they see interesting information showing on your social media sites and they can also bring their friends along.  The more word of mouth you get the more traffic you get. And then the more traffic the get the more money you’ll make as long as you monetize your blog properly.

How Do You Track This

The best way to track to see if you are going more traffic from social media sites isGoogle Analytics. At least that is what I like to use. It has so much good information it is hard to give it up. It will tell you all the vital information you need to know about your visitors of your website. Almost too much information. At least more information then you could ever ask for. So this is how you know where you traffic is coming from. You signup for google analytics. You sign-in.  View report on the website you want to look at. Click on Traffic Sources on the left. Then look at the sources on the bottom. You’ll see a bunch of sources hopefully (if you are getting some decent traffic).  And you’ll notice some of them will say (organic) or (referral) next to them.  The social media sites you are getting traffic from will most likely be referral sources. you can then look to see how much traffic you are getting from your social media profiles. If you aren’t getting much don’t worry it takes time. Keep modifying your social media profiles. Keep advertising them and keep working at it. Nothing happens over night.  Blogging takes a ton of work.

Summary

How do you make a lot of traffic with social media plugins? You first make sure your have some social media profile pages setup. You install the plugin. You setup the plugin to the way you want it. You can advertise it in a blog post (like I have).  You can keep making sure your social media profiles are up to date and new content is added.  You can track it using Google Analytics. Then you can see where the traffic takes you. It’s a great new source of traffic you never thought you’d have in the first place! Try it yourself and see how you like it.

Read rest of entry

The Worst Way To Generate Traffic For Your Blog

Get rid of the sidebar calendar. Choose your niche wisely, not to big and not too small. Use blog carnivals. Use trackbacks. Interact with other bloggers. Participate in online forums.

What is the worst way to generate traffic to your blog? Well unfortunately or fortunately I know a bunch of them because I’ve tried them and they’ve failed.  The good thing is even though they failed I learned now to use them more and move onto more efficient ways to drive traffic to my blog. So here are a couple of ways I’ve generated traffic to my blog and why I think they are a waste of traffic sources.

Worst Ways To Generate Traffic

• Yahoo Answers –  before I thought it was a fantastic way to generate traffic to my blog. Now I think it sucks and this is why.  It takes soo much effort to get so little traffic. At least in my mind it does. Maybe I’ve been using it wrong but I got traffic and a decent amount at times but it took me too much work to get that traffic. I like to work as little as possible to generate my traffic and I had to think of clever ways to get around Yahoo’s blocks, write tons of answers, and questions and all for a bit of traffic that wasn’t really that targeted. It didn’t convert very well and in the end I just didn’t like it
• Link Exchange Website -  ones like LinkReferral.  There are other ones as well that I’ve participate in in the past but the names of them are slipping my mind right now. However the point with these sites is that you link to their site and they link to yours and you guys get points for things, etc. Honestly I think its a shady way to get traffic and search engines like Google don’t like them. You can get banned from Google Adsense when using sites like those. I thought before I was a great way to generate traffic and now I know it isn’t. You get traffic that will bounce 99.9% of the time and you won’t really increase your rank. So don’t use it! Update – the name of the other link referral site I was talking about was EntreCard. Don’t get tricked by it. It may look fun but it won’t help your blog
• Payper Click - At least for me this isn’t a great way to generate traffic to my blog. Why? Because it costs money! Why do I want to spend money generating traffic to my blog when I can send free traffic to my blog through natural search engine results? So That is why I don’t like this method for traffic generation. In my mind it isn’t worth it. I guess it could be worth it to jumpstart a new website and you had money but besides that I don’t think it would be great.
• Banner Exchange - I use to like this way to generate traffic and now I don’t anymore. I don’t like to bother communicating with people to put up the banners and then find out that the other person tricked me and took down their banner.  All the effort for probably very little traffic in the first place. What if the blog you exchange banners with has less traffic then you? Then its a lose – win situation. They get traffic and you don’t. Overall it takes a lot of effort for little traffic and isn’t fun in the end

Summary

You need to be careful when picking source of traffic. You need to be smart about it and pick something that will bring in traffic on a steady basis with little to no work. You don’t want to have to work on getting the traffic 24/7. You need to focus on other aspects of your blog. Like writing content, networking, monetizing, research, etc. Traffic generation is really important for your blog growth but it can’t consume all your work. So be smart about it and do it right!

Read rest of entry

Blog Traffic Secrets – The Fastest Way To 1000 Visitors Per Day

Website Traffic Secrets Every Blogger Should Know

Today’s post is about that most important ingredient of Blogging Success – WEBSITE TRAFFIC.

A website without visitors is a very lonely place

I am often asked: ‘If you had to start over online, from scratch – what would you do to build up your traffic again as quickly as possible’

A very good question and one I have been giving quite a bit of thought to recently, especially as I have started to coach others in my new Blog Mastermind program.

So assuming you are starting from scratch or your funds are limited here is my Kick Start Strategy For Bloggers – both in video and an expanded transcript below.

My Kick-Start strategy can be explained in 3 words:

Twitter, Facebook, Lists

This strategy allows you to leverage your time and talents for maximum results with out having to spend a lot of money and it is my Marketing Strategy of choice for all new bloggers and even established bloggers for that matter.

I say it on the video and I will say it here again — this strategy is SIMPLE but don’t let the fact that it is simple put you off. Simple WORKS!

Of course if you have money to invest or you already have an established blog then the ‘rules’ are slightly different – but for a start-up blogger this is the way to go.

Twitter, Facebook, Top Lists

I’ll explain Twitter first:

The first main thing you have to do with Twitter is set up a profile. It may sound a bit simple and you know, “Duh,” but it’s not. You’re going to have to have a profile picture. Don’t just set up your profile, just create an account, and just start tweeting, thinking people are going to follow you. To get rapport with your audience and a quality FOLLOW (rather than an automated Follow) you need a profile pic and quality interesting tweets.

Set up your profile so you show where you live, something interesting about you.

For me that could be I live in Sussex, England, I am dyslexic, I am a Young Entrepreneur and I make 6 Figures online aged 21

So once you’ve got your profile, you want to start adding people.

There are a number of ways to do this – including automated ways (which Twitter frowns on) and of course the manual way. I will admit I have used automated methods in the past – but these days I am more selective and while I still use tools, I use them to help me manage the twitter accounts easily. (Tools for example that allow me to forward plan tweets).

When I first started I found some of the biggest names in my niche (Blogging and making money online) and I followed whoever they where following.

Now, when people see “Michael Dunlop’s just added you,” they’re going to see this really a cool guy, offering some cool stuff, and will think, “Hey, I really want to follow him.” They’ll follow me back, and they’re going to check out my site, and check out what I have to offer, and, obviously, see my regular tweets. To help manage Twitter I use software out such as Twitter Adder and Market Me Tweet. (Highly recommended you check out)

The next thing is, of course, start tweeting. So many people have Twitter accounts but for some reason, they just don’t tweet. The more you tweet, the more traffic you’re going to get. If you tweet twice a day, say you get 100 visitors each time you tweet, that’s going to be 200 visitors. If you tweet 10 times a day, you’re going to get 1,000 visitors. (Simplified – but the more you tweet and the more interaction you have with your followers and the more respect they have for you – the more traffic you will get)

A lot of people only tweet while they’re awake – but with software like Market Me Tweetyou can plan to tweet 24/7. If you’re tweeting while you’re asleep, that’s a whole audience that probably don’t get your regular tweets.

Using software to Follow, Un-Follow, Tweet and mange your Twitter account saves some much time and frankly if you are serious about Twitter then you will need to invest in these inexpensive tools. My personal favorite is Market Me Tweet, the only Twitter Application that allows you to Brand, Market, and Manage, all in one!

There is also Twitter Adder which I have had great success with in the past. BothMarket Me Tweet and Twitter Adder allow you to add more people, but Market Me Tweet also gives you a bunch of extra branding options.

This is Important: Make your tweets interesting, newsworthy, fun, inspiring – and naturally include links to wherever it is you want your followers to visit. Personal Fun Tweets are also OK – but remember at this stage, your goal is to get traffic to your website.

Facebook and Facebook Fan-pages

This is something that’s really starting to take off as a method of Traffic Generation. You have a popular blog – create a Fan Page for it

You want to create a fan page, telling a bit about you, and your website, and why to become a fan. Invite all your friends. When your friends join, they’re going to see that you’ve joined this group, and then think, “Oh, my friend’s joined, I’m going to join that.” And then it just sort of goes viral and spreads.

There are other ways to grow your Fan Page quicker such as this tip I learned from Joshua March of http://theiplatform.com when he spoke at Yanik Silvers Young Mogul Day. He said to find someone high profile in your niche, a bunch of them, and ask them to become a fan, because all their followers will then see them becoming a fan and a good number are likely to follow your lead.

Again – as I mentioned above this only works if what you are blogging and tweeting about is interesting, newsworthy, fun and inspiring. No big name is going to become your Fan unless they can see there is something worth being a Fan of.

Do this right and literally overnight, you’ll get hundreds and hundreds of people joining your fan page. Something really powerful you should consider doing.

The next thing is, obviously, posting messages. Like, again, with Twitter, so many people have Facebook and Twitter, they just don’t post. Constantly post. Not just your own stuff. Tweet other people’s things and Facebook other people’s things, and they’ll then do the same for you.

More Help with Fan Pages:

Facebook – Create a Page

How to Make a Facebook Fan Page

8 Essential Apps for Your Brand’s Facebook Page

Michael’s Power House Of Traffic – Top Lists

Now the really powerful stuff starts. I shall pull my sleeves up for this one.

Top Lists, Top Lists, Top Lists!

If you have been following me you will already be familiar with some of my Top Lists (and I am including links below)

For me the list could be “Top 30 Bloggers.” or “Top 30 Richest Internet Entrepreneurs,” or “Top 30 Female Entrepreneurs.”

But lets say you are in the Food or Restaurant Niche – then the lists could be: “Top 30 Celebrity Chefs,” or “Top 30 Restaurants In London,” Or of in Golf Niche it could be “Top 30 Richest Golfers,” or if it is Celebrity Niche it could be “Top 30 Richest Latino Actors.”

The next thing you want to do is either create the list yourself or outsource it. I admit it – a lot of my lists are outsourced but when I started I of course could not afford that and did all the work myself. Lists can be quite Time Intensive (several days work some times) so I uses services such as TaskUs.com. Or you could use SitePoint.com or DigitalPoint.com to find somebody there who would go and do the work for you.

Beware – sometimes the first language of the person doing the work may not be English and you may have to do some editing – but you can be paying as little as $50 for this List Creation – so don’t expect complete perfection.

Make sure you’re clear with what you want. Give them an example. Like, “Here’s an example of who I like, they’re worth this much, I want a picture this size,” and just tell them how many of them you want. You may want 10, you may want 20. For some of my lists I ask for 500 [laughs] . You make it up, they’ll price you accordingly.

Also note that while I outsource the Research the Introduction, Title and Promotion of the list is all done by me.

Now, something I have to point out to you is the importance of using software such asTweetmeme, which basically counts every time someone tweets it, and it also gives a button for people coming to the page to tweet it, as well. Now, this is really cool, because more people that tweet, the more people that will tweet. Because they’ll think, “Oh wow, everyone is tweeting, I should join as well.” By association, they’ll feel like they’re part of it more.

Imagine if overnight, there was were 1,000 retweets on your post and 1,000 people who retweeted had just 100 active followers then thats a potential audience of 100000 people. I have had some of the biggest stars on Twitter Re-Tweet my posts – and once I was even on Trending Topics for a few moments (which is the top ten things spoken about on Twitter at that moment) – so hopefully you see how powerful this can be.

I sometimes think it is amazing all the things I accomplished before Twitter came along, but these days with Twitter and Facebook so much more can be accomplished quicker – especially when combined with Top Lists.

Prior to Twitter my online promotion has got me interviewed by sites and newspapers around the world. I was in AOL News. I was in Yahoo! News. I was PC Mag and all these other ones, and even in some French sites and Brazilian newspapers. Looking back it was ridiculous that this teenage kid could do so much – but I did and mainly it was because of the power of Top Lists and the way I hustled traffic.

Now with Twitter and Facebook it has never been easier to become a Global Sensation.

It may seem these three strategies are really simple. That’s exactly right. It’s just the fact that so many people don’t implement it. And some of the best things in life are just that simple and great [laughs] .

Read rest of entry