11 Tips To Boost Blog Traffic
The blogsphere is huge and with over 100 million blogs and growing, it is not an easy task to attract visitors to your blog. As you probably know, more traffic means more money and this means a great deal for a lot of bloggers. Many bloggers go to great lengths to attract more visitors to their blogs and while some succeed, most are still struggling to attract decent amount of visitors if any at all to their blogs.
In order to attract more visitors, you can employ some of the tips below to drive more traffic to your blog. You may choose to employ some of these tips or all of them but for best results, you have to test and track which tip or tips work best for your blog.
Why Are Blogs So Popular?
Isn’t it unbelievable that blogs which are the online equivalent of a personal diary can become as popular as they are? While many people may not fully comprehend the reasons behind the surge in popularity for blogs, a lot of them are setting up blogs to experiment and see for themselves what the hoo-hah on blogs are all about. Many went on to become blogging converts and although most will not continue to blog regularly, they become part of the blogging culture, contributing to the masses of people who visit and read blogs on a regular basics.
Personally for me, I started off participating in forums and gradually moving on to reading posts on blogs. It is from these blogs that I visit which gave me the idea to set up my own family blog. While the initial idea is not to monetize my blog, I gradually discover a whole new world of monetization opportunities with blogs. Well, that is another post for another day. 
As for why blogs are so popular, I can only speculate on a few possible reasons.
Ways To Market A Blog
There are many ways to market a blog. Depending on your business model and budget, one can go for either the free or paid options. Personally for me, I feel that for new bloggers, it is best to go for the free options first. Once you understand and master the various ways to market and promote your blog, you can then go for paid options to market and expand your blog’s visibility.
First of all, you must understand there is no best or assure way to market and promote a blog. The degree of success for each method depends on a number of factors such as the niche your blog is in, the quality of your blog and so on. That is why it is important for you to get a good web analytic program to track your traffic sources.
Can You Really Make Money Blogging?
If you are new to blogging and making money online, you may find it hard to believe that there are people who do this full time for a living and they are making good money out of it. Unless, you have been online for a period of time, you will never be able to understand how ordinary people can make a full time income through blogging. As a matter of fact, there are many ways for a blogger to make money through blogging.
Personally for me, I make money online through affiliate marketing, Google Adsense, paid reviews and selling of text links on my blogs initially. Nowadays, I am focusing my efforts on affiliate marketing, selling of products and services instead. As you can see, there are many ways to monetize a blog such as:
Optimizing Your Wordpress Blog
November 13, 2008 by Albert
Filed under Make Money Online Basics
Now that you have got your Wordpress blog set up, the next thing to do before you make any post is to optimize your Wordpress blog to make it more search engine friendly and visitor friendly. It is especially important that you know a fair bit on how to optimize your blog properly for search engines in the first place.
Otherwise, if you will to make changes later in the future, you will waste a lot of time and effort building links that are no longer valid when you change your URLs. While this tutorial is not a complete guide to optimizing a Wordpress blog, the few tips listed below will ensure that you will go on a good footing in the SEO game initially.
Which Blogging Platform To Use?
October 29, 2008 by Albert
Filed under Make Money Online Basics
As a blogger, you will be spoilt for choice in selecting which blogging platform to use. You have a choice of having a hosted or non hosted blogging platform. Hosted blogging platform refers to blogging platforms such as Blogger or Wordpress.com which will host your blog for you. Non hosted blogging platforms refer to blogging platforms that are hosted on your own hosting servers which in other words meant that you need your own domain name and hosting.
There are many blogging platforms around, and the best of them have to be Wordpress currently. Although I may be biased in saying that but having used Wordpress for quite a period of time, I find that no other blogging platforms offer the same power and flexibility that Wordpress offers.
Setting Up A Wordpress Blog
October 24, 2008 by Albert
Filed under Make Money Online Basics
Wordpress is simply the best blogging platform out there for beginners and experience bloggers alike. For those of you who are looking to set up a wordpress blog on your own domain and hosting, you can get a feel of the Wordpress blogging platform over at Wordpress.com. Basically, what you need is just an email account to sign up for a free hosted wordpress blog to get started.
This simple tutorial is to guide those who are new online to sign up for an account with Wordpress.com and set up their very first free hosted Wordpress blog. Just follow these simple steps and you will be well on your way to your first Wordpress blog.
Setting Up A Blogger Blog
October 19, 2008 by Albert
Filed under Make Money Online Basics
If you are keen to explore blogging further, it is advisable for you to get a feel of what blogging is about by starting a free hosted blog at one of the free blog hosting sites such as Blogger. As Blogger is one of the most popular free blog hosting sites around, I have set up this simple tutorial for those who need help on their first steps towards blogging success.
As Blogger is owned by Google, you can use your existing Gmail account to log in to Blogger and create your blog. Although you can use your Yahoo! Or Hotmail accounts to register for a Blogger’s account; I find it best to use my Gmail account for accessing my Blogger’s account.
Should You Start A Blog?
Many bloggers when they first started out failed to recognize the significance of asking themselves this seemingly harmless and simple question. As I started to get more serious and learn more about blogging, I can’t help but notice that if I have had sit down and give some serious thought before starting a blog, I may not have run into so many roadblocks in my short life as a blogger.
While starting a blog is relatively easy (you can get tons of information online on starting a blog), you should consider carefully certain points so that you can integrate your personal plans and goals into building a business plan for your blog that is assuming you are going to monetize your blog in the future. Otherwise if you are starting a blog not for commercial reasons, then you can forget about reading the rest of this post.
How Long Should A Blog Post Be?
As a blogger, it is important to understand some of the key factors that keep readers coming back for more. Post length is a factor that you should seriously look into when writing content for your targeted audience. It is still a widely debated topic among bloggers when it comes to deciding how long should a bog post be. There a few points that you should take note when deciding the general length of blog posts on your blog.
If you intend to monetize your blog with Adsense ads, it would be advisable to keep your blog post to a minimum length of 250 words. One of the most profitable locations for Adsense ads is inside the content of a blog post. If you are going to place Adsense ads inside your blog post, 250 words is the minimum to ensure that your words can wrap around the Google ads.
