Getting Traffic To A Niche Blog

How do I get traffic to my blog is a frequently asked question in the forums
And whenever I see this question I think, even a blog post is not sufficient to cover the various methods of getting traffic to a niche blog or website. It's just too big a topic

But this picture may help towards answering the question

RSS Feed For Traffic Increase Website Traffic With RSS

RSS feeds are something you need to get into as a niche marketer if you are serious about getting traffic to your blog.

It really is amazing how easy it is.

If you use any of the standard blogging platforms like blogger or Wordpress, you already have an inbuilt RSS feed generator. So why are you not leveraging it?

I have been an enthusiast of RSS feeds for a while now and have written a few posts on RSS feeds on this blog.

And I have always used RSS Feeds in conjunction with other traffic generating methods. After all it's about multiple sources of traffic

Anyway I put RSS to the test on a brand new blog I set up a few weeks ago

First, I focused on getting content to the blog, so no advertising, no monetization, no link building, just content with some on page optimization.

It's a wordpress blog so I suppose it already has some potential to get traffic. And I was getting about 7 to 10 visits a day which is pants but not bad for a site with no incoming links. Having said that a lot of the traffic was people trying to post spammy comments :(

Once I had 10 good quality posts up I decided it was time to test out the RSS feed theory. So i submitted my feed to a bunch of feed directories and then went on to other things.

What happened to my blog traffic? Getting 100 to 200 visits a day

I wouldn't believe it if I didn't test it out myself.

I think the RSS feeds work because some of the feed directories have do follow links and help your search engine position.

Also people use your feeds to generate content for their sites. Especially now that autoblogging is on the rise

The question arises. How often should you submit your RSS feeds to the directories. I submitted only once to each directory and I think that one RSS feed submission per directory is enough.

But even submitting once to all the feed directories can be a big drain on your time, especially if like me you have a bunch of websites

To get round this I use this RSS submitter. It's reliable and really easy to use

So something to consider guys. Submit you RSS feeds to the feeds directories for traffic

Till next time

Generating Traffic Using You Tube

You tube is phenomenal with regards to users and traffic. I can confidently say that 90% of you reading this post have viewed a youtube video this month. And over 50% have viewed a you tube video this week. Just take a moment to think about it. You tube has such great user base and you can tap into this traffic and get some to your website or blog

And a lot of marketers like you and I have gone out and got camtasia and made our videos and posted them to you tube and waited.... Expecting a stampede of traffic to our sites. And nothing happens.

Part of the problem is people want to watch videos that have already been verified by other viewers. And the means of verification is number of views.

Take a moment to think about it. If you have two videos with exactly the same title on you tube. One has 5000 views and the other has 23, which do you click on?

For most of us we click on the one that already has a lot of views. The presumption is if a lot of people are watching 'that' video, it must be the better one

So how do you get the necessary number of views to attract real viewers to your videos.

The answer is so simple I was stunned when it occurred to me. We keep banging on about sources of targeted traffic. And during our analysis of different traffic generating methods we discard some because they do not get us real traffic that converts.

Why not use these methods to generate views for your you tube videos?

Methods like traffic exchanges for example.

Remember the aim is not to get real visitors initially but to get your number of views up.It is the high number of views that then attracts the real targeted traffic who will watch your video and hopefully click through to your site

Website Traffic Analysis Hits Versus Unique Visitors

Website traffic analysis is crucial if your website is your source of income. And a lot of us do have tracking of one sort or the other on our sites

I was on one of the affiliate marketing forums a few days ago and someone kept talking about how many hits he was getting on his site and why this was not converting to clicks....something along those lines

And reading through the thread and other similar forum threads, it occurred to me that a lot of the people responding could not distinguish between website hits and unique visitors.

You could get one unique visitor on your web page and record 15 or more hits for that visitor

A 'hit' refers to how many individual small packages of information on your website are loaded.

So if you have a web page with 8 different images, an RSS feed and a PDF, each of these are individual elements on your page and constitute individual 'hits'. One page load, 9 page elements, 9 hits, one visitor.

For the serious marketer, what you are looking for is the number of unique visitors you are getting on your website. Its the visitor that clicks the adsense ad or follows your affiliate link, or signs up to your email list. It's the visitor that you want to know how they found your site and which keywords appeal to them and where they go once they are on your site. It really is important to make the distinction between hits and unique visitors when doing your traffic analysis

Blog Feed on Forum Profile

A lot of you that regularly visit niche traffic sale are members of a bunch of internet marketing and other forums. And a lot of the time, people sign up to forums to take advantage of the signature link.

Again my regular readers know that this is not the best way to use forums to increase traffic. But I wanted to tell you an often overlooked and pretty effective method of getting links to your blog posts.

Before I go into it, getting links to your blog posts and signature links should not be your primary reason for joining forums. The primary reason for joining forums is to

• Build your reputation
• Learn from others in your niche
• Find out up to date information on your niche
• Exchange ideas

There are a lot of forums on virtually every niche online. And I am a member and regular participant in a bunch of forums

If you look in your profile page of whatever forums you are participating in, there often is a slot for you to insert your blog feed.

If you enter your blog feed here, a link to your latest post appears under your user name for every contribution you make on the forum

You must have seen them on the forums

On some forums these links have a do follow link to the particular post

So if you are a member of 20 forums and have your blog feed on those forums associated with your profile, that's a possible 20 instant backlinks, if you are active in those forums

You must remember to ping your posts.

Now I know some people are worried that if they post their blog feeds on the forum profile, competitors on the forums could steal their ideas.

But this is really not a big deal. The potential increase in traffic as a result of good SERPs position far out weighs any risk of your posts being copied.

Another bonus of this is some people actually click through on the latest blog link and visit your blog. If your content is useful, you may have a new follower.

So go to the forums you participate in and see if there is the facility to add your blog feed to your forum profile

Traffic Exchanges Useful Or Not For Increased Website Traffic

Most affiliate marketers have heard of traffic exchanges. They are websites where you first submit your site's URL and then you have to view other peoples' sites to earn credits. The more credits you earn the more often your site will be shown to other people who are... surfing for credit

Any mildly intelligent person will have read the above statement and thought...hmmm

Let me clarify

Traffic exchanges are great for getting traffic to your site. The more you surf on these exchanges, the more traffic you'll get. There is no doubt about this

In my early days in affiliate marketing, I surfed till my eyes went blurred from staring at the computer so long and my fingers...ouch. All that clicking to load the next site

And I got a ton of traffic

And boy did I brag about my amazing 'talent' of generating traffic to my brand new site

And then the penny dropped

NO CONVERSIONS!!!

You see the big draw back of the many traffic exchanges out there is they are full of people, just like you, surfing just to earn credits and ONLY for the purpose of earning credits

So where is the market for your perfectly set up website?

The aim of affiliate marketing is to get your site visitors to click on your affiliate links and BUY THE PRODUCT

So all that time spent chasing traffic that will not convert. I often wonder how much faster I would have got where I am now if I had spent that time elsewhere.

Like generating content for my site
...or writing articles to distribute to article directories
...or even building a reputation for myself at the networking sites and forums

So like I said earlier in this post....Hmmm

Some die hard traffic exchange users may be thinking....But there is autosurfing

This is when the traffic exchange website automatically loads sites after a time delay.

Certainly that could save a lot of time. but there is the other issues of malware. Some people have reported getting infected by some of these sites. Personally, and thankfully, I did not fall victim to this while I was using traffic exchanges....I think

So Traffic exchanges are great for increasing website traffic. But it is traffic that converts that you need to focus on and for this purpose, there are more effective methods

Till next time

Bloggers Be Selective About Your Traffic Generating Campaigns

As a solo blogger it is difficult, in fact impossible to individually act on all the good ideas out there. Lets narrow it down to traffic generation
There are so many possible sources of good targeted traffic
And yet the majority of bloggers have problems generating traffic to your blogs.

We know that the methods work, and you are probably thinking 'Well if the methods work and I am implementing these methods, why am I not getting thousands of visitors to my blog a day?'
The fact that the sale of any 'increase website traffic' product is almost guaranteed some success is testament to this

The problem is each blog traffic method needs some investment of time and effort to have a significant impact on your day to day traffic
It really is not enough to have two articles here and a bunch of comments there and oh bookmarked on Digg as well.

Each of the methods mentioned above has the potential to send a torrent of traffic to your blog... if done well!

But it takes time and effort to do this
So as a solo blogger, if you are here there and everywhere, no wonder you are not getting the traffic you want

Identify a maximum of three traffic generating methods and focus on them.

• Master them
• Implement them
• Tweak them
• And analyze your results from them

You have to remember you will still be generating posts for your blog as well, so you really cannot afford to spread yourself too thin

Some methods of increasing blog traffic are

• Search engine optimization - both on page and off page
• Article marketing - Use article directories that do follow
• Pay per click- but only if you are sure of your pages ability to convert
• Forum participation - Don't spam them. Contribute useful information at the forums
• Social networking -Again focus on networking sites that have groups in your niche and preferably have do follow links
• Social Bookmarking - Build a huge reputation there and get momentum for your bookmarks

And most important post regularly

Again identify the three methods you think you can focus on and master and run with them

Increase Website Traffic With No Follow Social Bookmarking

'No follow' social bookmarking sites are not particularly useful for SEO. But you can generate a ton of traffic using 'no follow', yes 'no follow', social bookmarking sites

I was going through one of the social bookmarking sites I frequent and someone had sent me a shout. Well I get a ton of shouts everyday but this one caught my eye.

So I clicked on it and it was a link to the same story bookmarked on another site.

On finally reaching the page, which was a blog post submitted 3 days ago, I noticed it had received 500 visitors. And it was not a particularly useful or informative post.

Hmmm.
'I wonder what sort of a backlinking strategy he has' I thought

So I fired up my backlink analysis software and.... Nothing. No backlinks.

'Golly! My backlink analysis software must not be working!'

So I did the Yahoo links query again nothing

On digging [no pun intended] further, It appears that most of his traffic seems to be coming from social bookmarking sites

The tip as mentioned in crucial tips for social bookmarking is the number of friends or followers you have.

Another tip which this chap seems to be using is one given by Jeff Johnson in his training lab which is 'bookmark your bookmarks'

Just another little tip on generating traffic to your sites

Don't Follow The Do follows

The amount of posts in the forums on list of 'do follow' this and 'do follow' that just seems to me to show an unhealthy obsession with do follow links.

Please before anyone shoots me down, I am not saying 'do follow' links are bad. On the contrary I think if you can get a highly relevant do follow link to your site from a high PR site, Yippee.

But lets face it, How often does this happen? A lot of the 'do follow' lists are PR 3 at the most sites which I suppose are okay for the link, or are they?

Let's take a closer look.

These sites with 'do follow' links tend to attract hordes of webmasters all seeking the PR boost that a link from these pages can give to their sites. So you end up with a not so significant blog post with over a hundred comments.

But hey, do we not know that the more links there are pointing out of a webpage, the less PR value each link has?? Hmmm

So I say forget about whether the links are 'do follow' or 'no follow'.

Just post quality content on sites that are not overrun with comments.

A high traffic, 'no follow' blog, which is not over-run with comments, on which you can add something useful to the conversation is probably going to get you more traffic, from human visitors clicking on your link, than a post that is comment 125 on some 'do follow' site

Some Free Methods To Promote Your Website

"What are some free methods to advertise my site" is a question that comes up frequently in the forums, yahoo answers, askville and virtually any web 2 site visited by Internet marketing newbies.

So lets just go through a few of the free methods that actually work

On website

Factors You should implement on your web pages

Great content.

Nothing really beats this. You must have genuinely useful and unique content. I recently reviewed the website of an affiliate marketing beginner which was on [no surprise] making money on line. [I don't know why newbies seem to go for the Internet marketing niche. How can you teach it when you have yet to make any money with it?] Anyway this poor blokes site was so dull and just did not speak to me. You need to avoid making this error.

Master your topic, and generate great content on your site. There is no boycotting this crucial step. You may be wondering how having great content can attract visitors. it's all about search engine optimization. The more unique and useful and relevant your content is the better you will do in the search engines.

On page search engine optimization.

Again really important if you are going to get anywhere in the search engines. We are not talking here about invisible text or keyword stuffing or such black hat methods. The focus now is on naturally generated content and latent semantic indexing [LSI]. Read basics of on page SEO for more on this.

Visitor Participation.

In the current era of web 2, Internet users expect to be able to "have there say" on the majority of websites. Comment boxes are a goldmine for any website or blog. Apart from satisfying your visitor's need to be heard and have an opinion, your comments box has two really useful functions

1. Ideas for new content. They tell you what they want to read about. Seems like good fodder for new posts
2. Increased content. Doing well in the search engines is very much about content. Content on your pages and the content of the sites pointing to you. By allowing visitors to comment on your articles or posts you are naturally updating your content. How is that for updating your site without having to lift a finger.

Frequent Updates.

Be it a blog or a traditional website, the search engines want the pages with top ranking to have updated content. You need to go into your sites and update your content from time to time. Edit articles, add new posts, edit a profile.

No longer is it enough to build the site and then forget about it, while it continually generates money, hand over fist for you. Just does not happen these days.

An option to ensure that your websites have frequently updated content is to put an RSS feed on it. Feeds are frequently updated so it will appear that your site's content is being updated if part of it's content is via an RSS feed

Off your web site.

These are things you do elsewhere on the net to help increase the visibility of your website. Unfortunately there is so much focus on this that on site factors tend to get neglected

Back links.

These are links that point form other websites to pages on your site. The idea is to get as many back links as possible from relevant websites to boost your website's position in the search engine results pages [SERPs]. Again the higher your site is in the SERPs, the better your chances of getting free traffic from the search engines

Social bookmarking sites.

Our post on social bookmarking and niche marketing websites goes into some detail on this. But the short version is build a network on bookmarking sites and then submit your URL to these sites. The bigger and more targeted your network, the better the results

Free Classifieds.

Not a favorite of mine. The free classified sites are just over run with really poor quality ads. So one wonders what sort of people use them. At the end of the day you want to promote your site to people who are ready to buy. There are a few free classified sites that are worth looking into. They are Gumtree [if you are targeting a UK audience], Craig's list [probably the largest of it's kind], and USfreeads.

Free directories.

Directory submission has become less popular lately than it used to be. Questions have been raised about it's SEO value especially with regards to google. Having said that directory submissions are still a free and easy way to get word out there about your website. If it's a blog you are trying to promote, there are free blog directories online, just perform a google search

Blog participation.

This is not the same as blog spamming. The relevant word here is participation. Blogs are great for interaction because the majority of them allow readers to leave comments.The comment box often requires you to enter your name and email address. Some go further by inviting you to enter your website's address. This could result in a link to your site. This comment boxes are great for helping you build a reputation for your website.

Find blogs in your niche that have a large following and frequently participate in discussions [I have participated in a 200 comment discussion on one blog post recently] on these blogs. Be sure to make your comments factual and useful. Let readers of your comments get the feeling that you are someone who knows what you are talking about, an authority on the topic. Your own sites will soon get a reasonable readership based on the comments you have left on other blogs.

There is a ton of other methods you can use to promote your websites free but the handful described above should get you well on your way

Are Blog Carnivals Any Use

Blog carnivals are not new to most of us online marketers but for the newbie, a blog carnival is an article referencing blog posts as sources of information on a particular topic. It is a major blog event.

The carnival host decides on a topic to host a carnival on. Submissions are invited from the public. Webmasters who have blog posts on the topic submit their posts to the carnival host. He then reviews all the submissions and picks a handful that are considered high quality. The host then posts an article with citations from the accepted posts.

A carnival in any niche reflects the pillar blog posts on that niche, or at least that's the idea

So say there is a blog carnival on Niche marketing. Blog owners who have posts on niche marketing can submit there blog posts to the carnival for consideration for inclusion in the carnival

When the blog carnival is published it usually contains a little introduction followed by snippets of the accepted posts with links to the full post at the authors blog

So what does this mean. In a word, backlinks

But are blog carnivals worth investing in to help promote your blog?

Again, in a word, yes. Blog carnivals are very popular and tend to get a ton of traffic when published. Getting one of your blog posts cited in a carnival is like putting your link right under the noses of your targeted visitors.

If your post is decent, a single inclusion could take you from average blogger to super blogger status.

The down side is competition. Getting a blog post accepted in a blog carnival is similar to getting your site into dmoz.

Writing pillar posts that are well thought out with excellent information is a must but unfortunately does not guarantee inclusion

To find out when next a carnival in your niche is scheduled for go to http://blogcarnival.com/bc/

Forums For Backlinks And Traffic

Forums marketing is something that a lot of Internet marketers are aware of but not many are using effectively. And the key term here is effectively. Forums are great for niche marketing sites in a number of ways

• Online Reputation. By participating actively in forums in your niche you can actually establish a reputation of being the guy in the know. It really all depends on the quality of your postings on the forum. There is a forum that I visit everyday where one of the members has really caught my attention. The chap just posts some amazing stuff. I find myself scanning threads for his responses because there is bound to be something useful in it. This is the kind of reputation you want to build in your niche forums.

• Human visitors. In most forums you are allowed a signature which most marketers use by including a link to one of their sites or a site they are promoting. Not all forums offer this feature and some forums insist that you have a certain number of posts before they allow you a signature. All this being said, once you are able to get a signature, put an anchor text link in it to a website you wish to promote. I suggest your own site, preferably a page with an opt in form on it. If you are someone that posts accurate and useful answers, your forum signature can result in a ton of traffic to your site, simply from people clicking on that link in your signature. You have to have captured their interest with the quality of your answers before this will occur. I think this may be why a lot of marketers say forum marketing does not work. I think they do not understand that just putting up any old rehashed shpill and adding a signature does not do it anymore. There are hundreds of signatures with thousands of links in each of the forums online. You have to start thinking, In what way can I make my signature the one to click on?
• Backlinks. The SEO lifeblood of any niche marketing site. We all know that to win the SERPs war for our chosen keyword, we need a ton of relevant backlinks pointing in to our web pages. And forums are a great way to get in coming links. But not all forum links are created equal. Some forums, actually the majority of forums, have started using the no follow attribute. I know this because my backlinks analyser tells me which links are do follow or not. So if you are using forums purely for backlinks for search engine optimization, you will need to do a little research to find which forums in your niche do follow and which do not.

Before we finish this post, forum etiquette is something you need to pay attention to as well. The large forums have forum moderators whose job it is to ensure that the forums are not used inappropriately. Forum etiquette is a big deal. The penalty for misusing the forum can vary from your post being deleted [not too hash a slap on the wrist] to getting banned from the forum. Hmmm! all those posts and links gone overnight.

Promoting Your affiliate marketing sites on forums. has a funny video on forum etiquette

Till next time

35 Backlink strategies. Do I Need That many?

Recently read a post on a forum about 35 backlinking strategies. And the list is quite good. Some of the methods do not get you a do follow backlink but hey, live visitors can follow links too.

The post got me thinking about this fevered search for as many backlinks as possible.

Acknowledged, at the moment, backlinks go a long way in your quest to 'dominate the search engines'. And as at least half of the marketers out there are 'slaves to Google', the quest for backlinks is big business.

But seriously, do you really need 35 methods of building backlinks to your site to make things work?

This business is supposed to be about passive income. You know! It's about setting it up and letting it run. And it actually does work.

Yes admittedly, the set up process involved building the site and getting some incoming links, but then it really should be self perpetuating once the initial work is done. Leaving you free to build your next campaign

With 35 backlinking strategies, wow you are going to be busy for the rest of your life, and still only have one online campaign running.

With my websites, On page search engine optimization is the major focus. Yes then I build some backlinks using 4 or 5 time proven methods. And that's it.

Your online projects that need frequent and long term attention should be your blog and your membership site be it forum or training site.

Till next time

If You Must Buy Website Traffic

In the last post we talked about why buying traffic to your sites is not such a great idea. And highlighted the loopholes in buying traffic

But are there are reliable, ethical sources of traffic that can be bought. If you must buy traffic what are the options open to you?

Pay per Click: Absolutely definitely hundred percent legitimate. And you will never get penalized for this. With a well worded PPC campaign, you can start getting traffic to your site withing 15 minutes of setting it up. Obviously you pay for every single visitor that gets to your site via your PPC ad and they may not convert. PPC can also quickly become rather expensive so before doing any PPC I advice you get some training. Now there are several PPC services out there but the two major players are Google AdWords and Yahoo search marketing. I think investing some money in learning about AdWords is money well spent. I use this free course when I decided to go into PPC. Gave me the basics which gave me a good platform to build on.

Ezine Adverts: Not sure that advertising in ezines converts as well as it did a couple of years ago, but if you want to get your advert in front of people interested in a particular niche, then advertising in a popular ezine in that niche would be one way to go about things

Personally I think that free traffic via the search engines is the ultimate source of visitors that convert. Obviously It takes time to build your search engine ranking to the level where you get a significant number of visitors consistently but the bottom line is SEO should be one of your key skills as an affiliate marketer.

I guess I am supposed to recommend an SEO guide here

This article, On Page Search Engine optimization, should get you started

Till next time

Buying Traffic, Is It A Good Idea?

The more traffic your site gets the higher your chances of making a sale. Or at least so we are expected to believe
And in a bid to increase website traffic it is really tempting to buy traffic

We have all seen the ads. £30 for 10000 visitors to your site or something along those lines. And some reading this post may have actually gone ahead and bought the 'traffic'

The long and short of it is these kind of traffic brokers usually do not deliver high quality targeted traffic to your sites. Let us take a closer look at some points

Traffic conversion. What proportion of this bought traffic actually ends up taking a desired action ie clicking on an affiliate link and making a purchase, or clicking on an adsense ad, or joining your opt in list. From reports from other webmasters that have bought traffic, conversions are just about nil. So what is the point of paying money for a ton of 'traffic' that does not make you any money?

Traffic source. where do these 10,00 visitors come from. Think about it. If you had a list of 10, 000 people that are interested in a certain product or niche, and they are real people, and they are ready to visit a site and take action. well would you be selling this traffic for 30 bucks. I think not. You would probably run out, set up your own website and send the traffic to it. And retire a rich happy man :) But more seriously, you have to think very carefully about the source of the traffic. there are paid to surf sites where people are paid to visit sites. And there is even software to automate surfing. i really do not think this kind of traffic is going to convert

So on the issue of buying traffic from the mass click brokers, I think the answer to the question asked in the title of this post is no. It is simply throwing away your money

But having said that there are other forms of bought traffic that do convert and are real visitors and we will be covering these in a later post

Till next time

Social Bookmarking Sites And Niche Marketing

Social bookmarking sites are yet another tool in the armamentarium of niche marketers to try to increase traffic to the money making niche sites

And for most newbie affiliate marketers, that stampede of traffic that is supposed to occur once the sites are bookmarked just does not happen

But social bookmarking sites do work. We just have to learn the rules of the game and then ...Result

So here are a few social bookmarking tips that I have picked up from the many ebooks and videos I have watched on the subject

• Mass submissions: To be generally avoided. In the past it as great to submit to as many social bookmarking sites as possible. Simply for the backlink value. But now the majority of them have no follow links. I know, you have seen the forum posts that have this wonderful list of social bookmarking sites that do follow. Well try submitting your bookmark to them and use SEO elite to try and analyze the bookmarked webpage's backlinks. Need I say more. So select just a handful of social bookmarking sites that you want to work with and stick to them, at least till you get the results you want

• Bookmark other people's sites: If all your bookmarks point to the same set of websites, then things begin to look a litttle fishy. Bookmark other people's sites as well as your own. It helps build relationships fast and could garner you some bookmarks in return. I suggest bookmarking sites that are not in direct competition with yours :)

• Build relationships: This is the reason why you want to work with just a few bookmarking sites rather than the whole horde. You need to build relationships at the bookmarking sites, make friends, increase your profile, that sort of thing. It takes spending time in these sites to build a large enough group of friends to make a significant ifference to your bookmarking results. [By the way, this is what I am working on at the moment] You must have heard of the concept of the power digger at digg. He posts an article and it's like magic. Within a few hours he gets double figure or triple figure diggs for his post. It takes time and a lot of networking to attain this status

So knowing all this what am I going to do?

It's straight forward really, build relationships

Using the old methods I have managed to get one digg per post on this blog. And you guessed it, that digg is mine. Occasionally you will find a post on this blog with two diggs, those days are like christmas

With following the methods in this post, perhaps I can improve on this

Internal Links And Search Engine Optimization

So when it comes to SEO, we are told to get as many relevant backlinks, i.e links from other peoples' sites to our sites' as possible. Preferably links with our keywords as the anchor text

But what about the internal links on our sites.

To my aplomb I found out that the internal links on your site make a huge difference to your rankings

I have a 30 page website the homepage of which has been ranking in the coveted number one position in the Google SERPs for about 40 keywords, that I am aware of, for the last two years

Well, a couple of weeks ago, I did something silly

I decided to update the site. Really Silly!!!

I changed the titles of the inner pages on the website, not really changed but altered the arrangement of the words

Problem is the original titles of the inner pages had my main keyword first and then the keyword for the subniche that the individual page was targeting second

• e.g affiliate marketing backlinks

All I did was change to subniche keyword first and then the main site keyword second.

• e.g backlinks affiliate marketing

Didn't touch the home page

All the inner pages have links to my home page

Anyway, the next crawl of my pages by the google bot came along and it's like a really dark kind of magic.

My homepage disappears from the first page of google. For all of the keywords that it previously ranked for

OMG!!!

Going from position 1 to position 60, 70 or ... Does not bear stating

It's obvious what happened here.

The internal links of my site were giving my homepage a BIG SEO BOOST for the keywords my homepage ranked for.

Because those keywords were high up on my internal pages!

By pushing the keywords further down on my inner pages as viewed by the search engine bot, SEO juice kind off ebbed

The content of the internal pages linking to your home page does really matter with regard to SEO so be warned

Till next time

Traffic Analysis Niche Marketing Essential

Traffic analysis is one area that a lot of newbie niche marketers or affiliate marketers fall down on again and again

Traffic analysis is crucial to taking your business forward

The formula for success in this business includes your niche site, traffic and conversion

The aim to to get traffic from the sources that provide visitors that convert

Building a niche site and just driving any traffic from anywhere just will not cut it

Yes you may get the occasional conversion; and more often than not that conversion is an adsense click [Peanuts] rather than an affiliate sale [real money], but you will be going through a large amount of traffic to get the conversions

What any niche site needs to have to be profitable is traffic that does convert!!!

So how do you know where this traffic is coming from?

From your traffic analysis software

I know a lot of people are put off because they think it involves buying yet another product. I mean this business is supposed to be about making money, not spending it!

But there are good traffic analysis products that are free and quite accurate

My recommendation is Google analytics. Analytics is easy to use and very up to date

Once you set up analytics all you really need to do is focus on your bounce rate and your length of visit data

A source that has a bounce rate of over 50% is one that I don't really spend too much time cultivating. Especially if you combine this with a length of stay of less than 30 seconds

You could argue that a high bounce rate means that they are clicking on your affiliate links and going to the merchant's page, perhaps to make a purchase

But no-one comes to a website and within 30 seconds has read your content, decide to buy and clicks through to the merchants site with credit card in hand. It just does not happen that way

So get analytics
Monitor your traffic sources
Pay attention to the bounce rate and length of stay
Then focus on the traffic generation methods that are providing you with interested traffic

And if you are willing to pay a small amount of money for a more robust software then consider Site Tracker

Till next time

Top 10 Blog Traffiic Tips. Guest Post By Yaro Starak

In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else's blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that's about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called "traction", which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major "pillar" articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good "how-to" lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don't have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that's the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger's article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it's sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it's so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it's worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it's worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your "Resource Box". You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it's certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

The Problem With Yahoo Answers

Any regular reader of this blog will know that I consider Yahoo answers one of several methods you can use to generate traffic to your niche marketing sites

And It really does work a lot of the time.

There is an increasing frequency of complaints about Yahoo answers in the forums lately. And one often repeated complaint is account cancellation for no apparent reason

And I must say it really is for no apparent reason.

My Yahoo answer account which has been built up to a level 3 with about 15% best answers was suspended today because someone complained about an answer I posted

No worries except that I do stay well within the TOS of Yahoo answers.

But I am not one to worry about these things so I got to thinking what lessons can we learn from this

• Back up your answers. If like me you are someone who bothers to put up detailed answers to questions asked, Saving a copy of your answer in a document is a must do. Even if your account never gets suspended, which is highly unlikely, the answers you have given can be tweaked and then used as content for a blog, or an article

• Never depend on one source of traffic. The idea is to create multiple streams of traffic so if one source gets cut off, like me, you'll not be too concerned. You must continually expand the methods by which people find your site. Obviously Yahoo answers is a very good source of traffic but you can see that there can be problems with Yahoo answers as with any other traffic source.

• Keep Moving. So often we read on the forums about this or that person's Yahoo answers or Google adsense account has been suspended. And there is this plea for help 'How can I get my account back' My answer to all these posts is move on! One door closes, FIND AN ALTERNATIVE! In the short time since I got the email, I have found several question answer websites that look pretty good. I have found one that allows anchor text links from within the body of your answer. Still need to find out if it does follow. But my point is you can either get busy arguing with whatever body about getting your account back or you can get busy building your business in other directions

So although this post is titled 'the problem with Yahoo answers', I still do believe that it is a good source of traffic but not one to be totally dependent on

Til next time