Sunday, August 31, 2008

Free Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic

1) Comment on Blogs
Look for large traffic Blogs in your niche, visit them and leave your comments on their blogs posts. You may use blog search engine like www.blogsearchengine.com, www.google.com/blogsearch and www.searchengineblog.com to find blogs in your niche.

2) Submit Articles
Write articles that are related to your blog and submit them to popular article directories such as ezinearticles.com, Isnare.com, Articledashboard.com, Articlealley.com and goarticle.com. Quality articles may drive you a lot of free targeted traffic.

3) Participate in Community Forums
Use google to search for forums that are related to your blog. Look for forums that has over 10,000 members and read the rules of the forums to see whether you can promote your blogs and websites in your signature. Join forums that allow you to add a link to your blog in the signature and start participating in discussion. You can ask questions, answer other members questions and post your articles, ideas and thought in the forums.

4) Submit Your Blog to Directories
This isn't working to me but some bloggers claim that they gain a good amount of traffic from their listings in directories.

5) Post Often
You can lose traffic if you seldom update you blog, try to make it at least 5 posts per week. This not only will maintain your traffic but possibly attract more readers.

6) Write about Blogging
Write helpful and quality articles related to blogging can attract other bloggers link to your articles and gain may be truckload of free traffic.

7) Post Breaking News
If your found a breaking news of your niche very earlier, post it to your blog. It may give your blog's traffic a boost.

8) Social Bookmarking
Bookmark you blog posts in the large social bookmarking sites like Netscape.com, Digg.com, Simply and Reddit.com.

9) Run a Contest
Start a contest on your blog. Think about the prizes that people really want. It will create a viral effect and bring in new visitors.

10) On-page Optimization
Make sure your blog's title tag and description tag contain your targeted keywords. When you have posted plenty of quality blog post and done a lot of blog promotion, don't be surprise to see your blog ranks top 10 in Google and get free search engine traffic daily.

Google Devalues Paid Links

After reading about the paid links issue in Matt Cutts blog and Digitalpoint Forum. It seems that paid links will no longer useful for Google SEO in the future as Google is going to change their ranking algorithm to make sure that paid backlinks will have not effect to Google ranking. Google now tries to figure out how to separate paid links from natural links and they also allow anyone to report paid links to help them distinguish paid links and natural links.

Furthermore, Google will take action against on websites that contains a lot of paid links. And for websites and bloggers that sell text links, here's what Matt Cutts, Head of Google's webspam team advices:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hidden-links
" If you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t affect search engines. There’s a ton of ways to do that. For example, you could make a paid link go through a redirect where the redirect url is robot’ed out using robots.txt. You could also use the rel=nofollow attribute."

Google will make SEO harder. If you frequently buy paid links to boost your Google ranking and PR, I think you should stop now to avoid your site or blog penalized by Google.

Payments to webmasters and bloggers for a text link appears on their sites and blogs are definitely considered as paid links. For paid directory listings, there are still no clear specifications whether they are seen as paid links. In my opinion, they will not be considered as paid links since Google and Yahoo also have their own directories accepting paid listings. Can we report them paid links? For blog sponsor posts from reviewme.com and Payperpost.com, they are likely to be treated as paid links as well since one of the goals of Google is to stop people from using unnatural backlinks that can artificially boost up their websites ranking. The devaluation of paid links by Google will sure affect the ways webmasters make money online in the future.

To get traffic from Google and make money from your website and blog, I think the best ways now is to make sure the majority of your links are natural, continue to grow natural and relevant inbound links and update your website or blog often with unique and useful content.

Google SEO Tips: Content Updating is Getting More Important

Google's ranking algorithm has never been consistent, recently, I discover that the frequency of content updating on blog and website is getting more useful in increasing Google ranking as it uses to be. I think it started about a month ago.

The search term "make money online" is a good example to strengthen my point. If you often use this search term, you'll notice the websites listed in top 10 result fluctuate from time to time. The frequent fluctuations have lead to websites with decent number of backlinks that have stayed in first page for long period of time gradually one by one drop from top 5 to top 10 and from top 10 to top 20; and allowing more blog with frequent content update to get into top 10 listing. I have been in the niche of "make money online" for more than a year and never see it happens this way. It is obvious that Google has changed their ranking algorithm again and place more weight on content.

So if your website have experienced a drop in Google and you think that you have not done anything wrong. The frequency of content updating may be one of the main reasons. You may take a look at your competitors website to see whether they have started adding fresh content often. If yes, you may think about updating your site in on going basis as well. It will give you a better chance in re-gaining your Google ranking.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

6 Ways to Make Money Blogging

1) Cost-Per-Click (CPC) Advertising Programs
CPC advertising programs are the best money making programs for most of the bloggers. They are suitable to all kind of blogs with family-friendly content regardless of their traffic level and age. CPC programs work well on blog because they display contextual ads that are highly relevant to blogs content and bloggers will earn anywhere between 10 cents to 50 cents for each contextual ads click by their visitors. With proper CPC ads optimization and consistent amount of traffic, a blogger can earn a steady amount of money displaying CPC ads on his/her blog. Google AdSense is no doubt, the undisputed king of CPC advertising programs and Yahoo Publisher Network is the closest alternative of AdSense.

2) Cost-Per-Action (CPA) Advertising Programs
CPA programs is quite similar to CPC programs except CPA programs don't pay bloggers for each click on the CPA ads hosted by bloggers. The blogger only makes money when the visitor takes an action on the CPA advertiser website. The action can be a sign up, making a purchase, generating a lead, downloading a product and more. CPA networks pay a lot more than CPC programs, for a visitor sent by the blogger from his/her blog to a CPA advertiser website and the visitor taken an action on the advertiser site, the blogger can earn few dollar to fifty dollar depend on the niche. But CPA ads tend to work well on large traffic blogs only. AzoogleAds.com, Commission Junction and Advertising.com are some of the largest CPA networks.

3) Promote Affiliate Programs
Marketing affiliate programs is very common nowadays. You sign up with affiliate program of an online company, then decide whether to use the company's text link or banner ads on your blog to promote the company's products or services and earn affiliate commission when a visitor make a purchase through your affiliate link. Affiliate programs can be promoted without a website and blog too.

4) Pay Per Post Programs
Pay per post programs started last year. The programs pay bloggers to write a blog post about a sponsor's website. The paid blog post can be a review or an introduction on the advertiser's website, products or services. The blogger will be paid a least $5 for each sponsor post. Blogs that have massive traffic, high Google PR and large number of subscribers can charge a few hundred dollar for just writing one sponsor post. Here's are the two most popular Pay per post networks that offer this type of earning opportunities:

www.reviewme.com
www.payperpost.com

The downside of pay per post is that writing too many sponsor posts that are not relevant to your blog content can seriously affect your traffic.

5) Sell Text Link Ads
Selling text links on your blog can be a great source of additional online revenue. It is not difficult to get started, just go to Text-link-ads.com to sign up an account, then decide which part of your pages you want to display paid text links, set your price and you are ready to take order. Text-link-ads.com will handle all the promotional works. Another company that offers the similar services as Text-link-ads.com is Reverselinks.com

6) Hosting Web Poll
Vizu Answer offers a pretty new way to monetize your blog's and website's traffic. The pays the publishers on a cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) basis for hosting targeted web poll. The money a blogger can earn from hosting poll is depending on the page views. The more page views, the higher the earning.