Traffic and Link Building Techniques
There are some specific techniques that every blogger should perform to build traffic and links to their blog. Here are some of them.
Join Technorati and Claim Your Blog
You probably have done this already, but if not, be sure to join Technorati. If you are not familiar with that site, it is a huge directory of blogs, organized by tags. People can search for a topic, and it will bring up blog posts on that topic.
Your blog must be indexed by Technorati, so that you can get into their blog search engine. The best way to do that is by “claiming” your blog.
Once you have joined Technorati, you go here to claim your blog. They will give you instructions on how to do it.
If you have a WordPress blog, you should also add Technorati to your ping list. You will find this in your Admin area under “Options – Writing”, near the bottom of the page in the box marked “Update Services”. Add the following to the list: http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Every time you create a new post, Technorati will index your post. Technorati will use the categories of your post as tags for indexing that post. You can also add Technorati tags to your post by following the instructions here.
Once you have joined Technorati and claimed your blog, you will see many benefits.
1) People searching Technorati for the topic of your blog will find your posts.
2) You are building links to your blog in Technorati.
3) Every time a blog that is indexed by Technorati links to you, Technorati will track it, and this will help increase your Technorati ranking and authority. This is used by many other sites to rank blogs.
4) People can “favorite” your blog in Technorati. If you can get a lot of people to favorite your blog, you could show up on the “top favorited” blogs list. It’s not very likely that you will get on that list, because it is very competitve. So why should you care about being favorited?
Because some people use Technorati as a way to keep track of their favorite blogs, so you should give them the option to favorite you there.
Technorati WTF
While we’re on the subject of Technorati, they provide another method for building traffic with the Technorati WTF (it stands for “Where’s The Fire?”). This is a place where you can post short blurbs about a topic.
You can use this to post a short blurb pointing to one of your blog posts. People can vote these up or down, so give it a catchy title and description.
The problem is that the WTF’s don’t stay on the first page very long, unless they get quite a few votes. But at least it does give you another link to your blog, and I have gotten some traffic this way. If you are lucky and yours gets voted up quickly, it could bring you a lot of traffic.
Blog Carnivals
You can find a huge list of blog carnivals at BlogCarnival.com. A blog carnival is basically a regularly scheduled blog post which contains links to other blog posts about a topic.
Submitting To Carnivals
You should submit some of your best blog posts to some blog carnivals that are related to your topic. You can sort the list of carnivals at blogcarnival.com by “Next Edition” to see upcoming carnivals.
Once you submit, the carnival organizer looks at the post, and if they approve it, they will link to your post in the next edition of their carnival.
You will get a few visitors from some of these carnivals, but often there are so many links in a carnival post that not many people click through to read the articles.
Don’t be discouraged, though. In this case, the links you receive are more important than the visitors. This is a good way to get quality links that will help you to rank in the search engines.
If you are lucky, someone could read your article and decide to link to it from their blog too. One of my articles became very popular this way, and was linked to from a lot of different sites.
Hosting A Carnival
If you have time, it is also good to start a carnival of your own, or, you could volunteer to host an established carnival on your blog. Some of the carnivals rotate blog hosts and are always looking for blog hosts.
By hosting a carnival on your blog, you get people to find your blog. The people who post articles to blog carnivals obviously have blogs of their own. So if these people get to know your blog and like it, they may link to you later, or at least, you may have gained another loyal reader of your
blog.
Join Group Writing Projects
Keep a lookout for popular blogs hosting group writing projects. Not only did I get some great links from very highly ranked blogs, but my articles were picked up by quite a few other blogs, so I got additional links as well.
There really is no excuse for not joining whatever group writing projects you find out about. I don’t know why more people don’t join these. You are publishing quality posts anyway, right? So all you have to do is sumit them to the group writing projects.
If the project wants a certain type of post – maybe a list, or a post on a certain subject – if it is a popular blog, I certainly would write a special post just for the project. It is well worth it for all the links you get. You will get traffic from these projects too.
Topic-Specific Top Lists
Try to find a list of some kind for your niche.
Especially For WordPress Blogs
I would like to mention a few things that can help your traffic and keep visitors coming back, that are specific to WordPress blogs. This seems to be the most popular blog platform. If your blog is not a WordPress blog, maybe you could adapt some of these to fit your platform.
First, here are some good plugins:
The Top Commentators plugin allows you to show a list of your top commenters. This encourages people to comment on your blog. This helps traffic because it rewards your loyal readers for frequent commenting, so it encourages them to come back often
I love the What Others Are Saying plugin. With this plugin, you can display the latest posts of the blogs on your blogroll. After installing the plugin, you just add the RSS feeds of your blogroll members. When you add someone to your Blogroll in WordPress, you will find a spot for their RSS Address under the “Advanced” portion of the Add Link or Edit Link page.
This is another instance where linking out really helps you. You are generously linking out to the latest posts of your blogroll. These people will see that you are sending them traffic, and they will be likely to return the favor in some way – by linking to you, adding you to their blogroll, or in whatever way they see fit.
The Subscribe to Comments plugin allows people who comment on your blog to check a box before they submit the comment, which will notify them by email if anyone comments on that post after they do. This brings more traffic, because people who check this box want to be
involved in the discussion. When they get an email that someone else has commented, they may come back to make another comment in reply. Pretty soon they will be in the habit of coming back to your blog often and commenting a lot.
By default, WordPress blogs mark all comments with the “nofollow” tag. This tells Google that the link is not a link that is vouched for by you. Originally this was thought to be a way to reduce comment spam because commenters would not get a link that was any good for search engine ranking by commenting.
If you moderate your comments, you should only be approving ones that are not spam. So there is no reason why your commenters should not get a little link love in exchange for commenting.
The Dofollow plugin removes the “nofollow” from the URL links in your comments. If you make it known that you have this plugin installed, people may make more of an effort to comment, because their comment will mean a link for them.
I don’t see this as a “bribe” for commenting. I see it as common courtesy in giving back something to my commenters. I appreciate the trouble they are going to, in leaving thoughtful comments, and I want to give them a little something in return.
Besides these plugins, here is another helpful hint for WordPress users:
Ping List
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
Every time you make a new post, all the services in your ping list will be notified, and your new post will spread by RSS. Several of these are services that in turn notify more services of your blog posts. This is why it is important to have a good ping list.
Free Advertising
Free online advertising is something many webmasters are looking for. My friend Nick, has a good free advertising service called Adgridwork.com. This free marketing service will help you to promote your website even if you don’t have a marketing plan. How it works? Well, it’s very similar to Adsense ads. After you sign up, you create your advertising campaign. You choose the layout, colors, keywords, target website etc. After you create your ad, the system will give you a Java code so you can place it on your site. Once you do that, Adgridwork will start showing ads from other members on your site. But your ad will also be shown on other members websites. If you don’t place the code on your website your ad will be inactive.
Not only you don’t have to pay but you can actually make money with this internet marketing service. All you have to do is convert the free traffic you will get in free money.
There are many ways to make money online but the most popular way is make money with Google Adsense. If you have Adsense ads on your website you can choose to have not contextual ads from Adgridwork so you will be OK with the Adsense TOS. Take a look at Adgridwork and you will see that it is a good resource for free advertising.
Email Marketing
If you want to make money online, it would be a good idea to have an Autoresponder. Now, most people I know use Aweber and GetResponse. And they are both very good email marketing services. But they cost money! This would not be a problem if you already are a moneymaker, but what if you just starting your try to make money online?
Well, after a lot of searching for a free email marketing solution, I finally found one.
It’s name is Zookoda. I think Zookoda.com is the best free email marketing service. Actually, I think it is the only website offering real free bulk email marketing service.
You see, there are some sites out there who claim to offer free targeted email marketing, but they do not! Usually this is a trial. All you can do is send an email at 20 – 100 opt in leads. And that’s it!
If you want to use all the features you have to pay. Maybe Zookoda is not as good as Aweber and GetResponse, but hey, you can’t have it all. After all it’s free!
The only problem you might have with Zookoda is that they disabled the option to import your opt in list. When I sent them an email about this, they told me that they had to do it because many people were abusing the system and used it to send spam.
So, you have to build your opt in list from the beginning. All you have to do is add the HTML code they give you at your website or blog.
Anyway, just try it and see for your self.
