Part 1 - Customising your blog

Part 2 - Monitizing your blog

Part 3 - Building traffic to your blog

Getting traffic to any websites, blogs included, is difficult and requires dedication and hard work. Competition for eyeballs is fierce and to get traffic you need to take every opportunity to optimise you blog and provide a good user experience.  Here is a list of the tactics which I am employing to build content.

Write Quality Content

It seems obvious but having quality content will encourage people to visit your website and read what you have to say. Other bloggers will read your content and link to it from their blogs.  Furthermore, the more content you have on your site, the more content there will be for search engines to include in their search results. 

Pings

When you write a new article, it is possible to have your blog software ‘ping’ blog search engines such as Technorati, to have them index the new conent. This increases the changes of your new content appearing in search results directories and Search engines.

Submiting your blog to blog and search engine and website directories will help increase your search engine rankings and build traffic through click throughs.

Here is a list of blogs directories and search engines to ping

Social bookmarking

Users are increasingly using social bookmarkting sites such as Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon to record their bookmarks, search for recommendations and share new sites with their friends. Submit all your blog post to the most popular social bookmarking sites and place easy submission buttons on each post (see below). I have used the wordpress plugin Sociable to do this.

Commenting and Trackbacks

If you are blogger, it is important to become involved with the blogging community.  Commenting on other peoples blogs and leaving trackbacks will encourage click thoughs to your site and also make other bloggers aware of your existance. 

Another good way of becoming involved in the community is to join a service like MyBlogLog.

Offline marketing

Include your blog URL on all your communications, e.g.

• Business card
• eMail signature
• Letterheads

Link Exchange

Talk to blogs in your space and suggest a link exchange. Not only will this help your readers understand more about the subject matter, but it will also help with your search engine ranking, and create traffic.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engines, such as Google, have the potential to create a huge amount of traffic to your blog.

I have written a brief guide to search engine optimisation.

Social bookmarking sites are increasingly being used by people to record what they find online and share this with their friends.I have been very impressed with the results I have got from submitting my blog to social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and Digg.  Submitting my pages to these sites produced a definite peak in site traffic.  

Here are profiles of my favourite social bookmarking sites.

Delicious

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site which allows you to record your bookmarks and share them with others. They also have a useful tool which allows you to post your bookmarks to your blog on a daily basis which is great for creating content without much effort.  Each entry is tagged and people will use the site to research popular websites in a given category.

I have found that submitting my pages to Delicious have produced some traffic for my blog but nothing spectacular.  However it is a very useful tool.

Here is my Delicious Profile 

Digg

Digg is a site which allow users to submit articles off the web which are then voted on by the digg community.  As you might imagine the more votes an article gets the more popular it becomes and really popular articles can generates so much traffic for the originating website that their servers fail.

I have found that submitting my pages to digg generated a spike in traffic for a day or so after submission.  Here is my digg profile

Stumbleupon

Stumbleupon is a lot like delicious, but with added social network functionality. Users can bookmark sites which will then be recommended to other users with similar tastes.  Similarly to Delicious, these stumbles can be posted to your blog

I found that submitting my pages to stumbleupon had a massive effect on my traffic. Here is my Stumbleupon profile

Getting people to submit your pages to social bookmarking sites 

The best way of getting people to submit your pages is to make it easy for them.  Plugins like Sociable (which I use see below) and Addthis, allows you to easily place submit buttons on your website or blog post.

Make Money by bookmarking 

A company called Subvert and Profit enables advertisers to pay for votes on Digg or Stumbleupon.  Probably not very ethical and will possibly get you banned.  Probably not worth it for the $0.50 per vote.

Part 1 - Customising your blog

Part 3 - Building traffic to your blog

There has been quite a bit written on this and so I won’t pretend that this is a comprehensive list, just a profile of the methods which I have been using.  The revenue which you can gain from these methods obviously depends on the amount of traffic which you can generate.

Advertising

Google Adwords

Google offer an easy to implement advertising program called Google Adsense.  Simply sign up to the program and insert the ad generation code into your blog template (there are plugins to help do this).  Google will then serve ads to your website, relevant to the text on your pages.

These ads are pay per click, meaning that you only get paid when someone clicks on the ad.

Text links

Companies such as text link ads sell links will sell links in the text of your posts to advertisers.  This obviously advertises their products as well as building their pagerank. 

I have found this to be the most effective way method of producting advertising revenue.

Direct Advertising

If you start to get enough traffic to your site you can start to sell advertising directly.  Create a page on your blog which offers this as an option to businesses and state your rates. 

Pay Per Post 

Businesses are starting to wake up to the fact that bloggers have influence.  Subsequently there are now several services which enable bloggers to write reviews for cash.  This is quite a lot of work and nowhere near to a residual income, but money nevertheless.

• PayPerPost
• Sponsored Reviews

Donations 

One way which many resource sites make money is through asking for donations.  I am undecided about the ethics of this, but I suppose that it allows readers to show their appreciation.  PayPal offers service for people to pay donations which can be linked to from the site

Affiliate Program

Many online services and products offer an affiliate program.  This is where the link to an external website which offer a product and if the visitor makes a purchase you get a percentage of the proceeds.  Many major advertisers have affiliate programs e.g. Amazon (called the associates program) and eBay.

Here is an example of how you could use an affiliate program to make money from your blog.  Write a review for a book and then link to the book on amazon so that it can be purchased.  If a purchase is made, amazon will pay you a commission.  Here is an example of a review which I have written.

Sell your services 

Many bloggers use their blogs as a springboard to sell their services.  Yaro Starak for example uses his blog to sell his blogging masterclass services

Wants your blog to be picked up the the blog search directories? By sending blog search engines and directories a ‘ping’ telling them that you have written a new post, you stand a better chance of being found.

Here is a list of ping services to submit your blog to:
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping/
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2 euro.weblogs.com
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://bitacle.org/blogs/blogsm/PING

Having just read the Micropersuasion blog regarding the 10 best blogging hacks, I thought that I would give my opinion on the best ones:

Automatically posting Links from Delicious

If you click on the settings link on delicious , there is an option to automatically post the links which you have saved that day to your blog. This is a great way of creating content for your blog without doing any work!

Writely

Writely is a new web based word processor from Google which allows users to collaborate in creating documents and also post their work to their blog. I am using it at the moment as it is a much better WYSIWYG editor than that available in Wordpress. I probably haven’t event scratched the surface of it’s usefulness yet.

Plazes

Plazes is a new service which allows you to show other people on the web where you are, record exciting developments in your area and around the world. I do get slightly wary of people knowing where I live, but then you can always find that out from a phone book! I have put the little map on my blog so that you can all see where I am!

Blog SEO tools

Top Rank Marketing offer a set of free tools which allow you to easily put the buttons which let other subscribe to your blog and submit your articles to digg etc.