Savvy Affiliate

Day 8 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

There is a lot more to making money online with a blog than simply throwing up content, adding in some AdSense ads, and expecting to have the next million dollar blog.  If you ever want to get traffic to your site, you must get other bloggers to notice you, respect you, and link to you.  To get links you must make friends online.  If you are an insular blogger, and don’t interact with any other bloggers you can’t expect to grow your site, and you will never make a lot of money with your blog.

Additionally if you put in an effort to get to know other bloggers you will find that they can quickly become friends in real life.  Many people you meet in your niche will share your interests, and you will like them…. as people.

Here are some tips on how to get more hooked up in the blogging community as a whole, and to build your online relationships.

1) About You - The more people know about you, the more likely they are to trust you ( caveat, if you have been convicted of say.. murder, you may want to leave that off)  So you should put some effort into creating an About Me page about yourself.  You don’t have to tell everything, please don’t go into too great of detail about your pets or how your kids are doing in school, but you should put up a picture of yourself, and perhaps why you started your blog or got into the industry.  People are much more likely to link with you if they know you by your name, rather than just webpage title.

2) Interacting With Other Blogs, No Lurking -  Whenever you take the time to read a blog, especially if you are returning visitor, you should take the time to let the blogger know that you like the site.   You can do this with a simple comment or an e-mail.  Although this isn’t necessarily true with the “A-List” bloggers, who are very busy and have thousands of readers, small to medium bloggers are more likely to read your page if they know that you are reading theirs.  You can quickly make friends by commenting on other blogs and letting them know when you like their posts.  They are likely to return the favor and interact on your site.

3) Build Your Digg Network - Social networking sites can be key players in getting early traffic to a site.  One way to make sure that the pages that you Digg are noticed by other readers is to build up a network of Digg friends.  When your friend Diggs a page it shows up differently to you than if a random person does it.  This makes you more likely to Digg your friends pages.  So add your real life friends to your Digg friends.  Add your blogging friends to your Digg friends.   Add me to your Digg friends, Skits2, and I’ll in turn befriend you and likely Digg your posts.

4) My Blog Log - See who is visiting your site by using My blog Log.  If people are frequently coming to your site, you should find out who they are.  Do they have a blog?  Maybe you should check it out.  Do they have Digg?  Befriend them for Mutual benefit.  You can reward your frequent visitors by sending them trackbacks to their pages.  Everybody loves backlinks, and if you send another blog quality traffic they will take notice of you.

5) Top Commentators - Make sure that you recognize your top commentators.  They are taking the time to write on your page, and they are adding quality and content to your site.  You should recognize them by displaying them on your sidebar.  This will encourage people to comment on your site, as they will get some SEO and hopefully some traffic out of it.

So are you doing all those these to increase your visibility in the blogging community?  Have you recently started any?  How has it affected your page?

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A particularly nice thing about Anlaytics is your ability to drill down your stats.

One of the vast improvements the new version of Analytics has is a good ability to combine different methods of sorting your visitors to really drill down your stats.   One particular method of drilling down that is useful is combining a Map overlay of your visitors along with a report on how they arrived at your site.  This can tell you some useful things, do you have good word of mouth advertising from your friends or offline promotions?  Have you gotten covered in a local newspaper somewhere that is referring you a lot of users?  Do you for some reason not get as good of search results in one part of the country as another?

How you can do this is by simply clicking on your map overlay and then selecting from the pull down menu labeled “Segment”   You have many options to choose from including Source, Keyword, Landing Page, Language, and Ad Content. 

Drilling down and targeting your users can lead to much better advertising campaigns.  If you pay to advertise your site, for instance with AdWords, having this ability can greatly improve your effectiveness.   If, for instance, you have a blog about Japanese cars, and you often post affiliate links to car dealerships, but you find that no one from Michigan ever buys your products, you can stop advertising in Michigan.   If you are from Google and you are trying to promote your search engine, no point advertising in Redmond Wa.  ( if you actually are from Google.. can I buy some page rank?  I would particularly like to rank well in “Make Money Online” and “Best Affiliate Programs.”  … Any chance?  )  Google anlaytics is in fact an amazing tool for improving your search engine marketing

For a lighter use you can use this to find who is Googling you.  I first discovered the drill down functionality when I saw someone had hit on my “About” page with the search term “Scott Hartshorn” Wa.   Since there aren’t that many Scott Hartshorns, and even less that live in Washington, I could rightly assume that they were in fact looking for me.  After trial and error I managed to drill down and find that they were from where I went to college.  My best guess is they were a college buddy just Googling me for fun.  Now if Google would give you the IP address of everyone who visited your site I could narrow that down even more.  Apparently however they are trying to limit the kind of reverse cyberstalking of which I was doing. 

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Looking for a way that you can make some money and get some attention for your site at the same time?  Well over at Daily Blog Tips you can Get Paid To Blog

Although he hasn’t posted what his criteria are for accepting writers, or how much he is planning to pay, it may still be something worth following up on for you.

The best thing you will get out of this is access to all his readers.   Daily blog tips says that they have over 10,000 daily page views and 3000 RSS subscribers.  If you are posting regularly on that blog you will have a great opportunity to highlight some of the content on your own site.   Although working on your own page can be much more valuable than selling your posts, when you can do both at the same time you should jump at it.

So would you ever blog for someone else?  How much would you need to be paid to post 4 times a week on some one else’s blog?

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The Ping Is A Powerful Tool For Driving Traffic, Use it Wisely

Linking to other blogs is critical to getting traffic for your own site.   Why is it so important?  Well if you are using any modern blogging software, when you link to other blogs it sends a ping to that site.  When the site is pinged, if track backing is enabled, a link to your own site will be placed in their comments.  Although the link is usually no good for search engine rankings, it can still be very powerful

1) Trackbacks on other sites direct their readers to you - One way of building your readership is just to go where they are located, namely other blogs.  If you track back on other sites, especially popular ones, some readers are likely to follow the link back to your site.

2) More Importantly, trackbacks direct the other bloggers to you - One of the main reasons to ping blogs is not to get their readers attention, but to get the attention of the blogger.  If I ping a blog and the blogger follows my link back and likes what he sees I have gained a lot more than if I just get a trace back from one of the readers.  If the other bloggers like your site they are likely to reciprocate your links.  I would much rather have a couple links to my site in someones main post with good anchor text than lots of trackbacks trying to get their readers attention.   I found this out in a post where I pinged Lorelle on Wordpress.  She followed my link back, and made a very insightful comment on my blog, answering a question much better than I would have been able to.

3) Don’t abuse your pings however - Although it can be good to ping other bloggers, you shouldn’t abuse this power.  Many bloggers consider too much pinging to be spam.  You shouldn’t ping the same blog repeatedly, and you especially shouldn’t ping the same post multiple times.  If you are ping spamming a site they are more likely to block you than trace you back and become a reader.   So be sure to make use of pings, but not too much

Do you use trackbacks enough?  Or do you think you could use them more?   Try giving a trackback to this post.  My readership may be light, but I do trace my pings back to their source.

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Looking For The Top Keywords?

One of the tricks, (although you can’t really call it a trick, since it’s pretty obvious), to getting search engine traffic is to write about topics that people are searching for.   Since it can sometimes be hard to know what people are looking for, it is handy when people publish lists of the topped search keyword in a given time period.

This is one of those lists.

Go to search engine guide and check out the Top 500 Searches of the past week.  Maybe you will get some ideas of keywords that you should be targeting.

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Is Do Follow Worth It?

There has been a growing trend among bloggers to activate the Do Follow Plugin.  Basically the do follow plugin deletes the rel=nofollow tag that is added to all comments on Wordpress links.  The theory behind this is that you should encourage bloggers to comment on your page.  And the point of nofollow is to penalize spam, not hurt bloggers.

 I have been considering whether or not to join the Do Follow movement.  A post by LastBlogger makes me want to consider it. 

Basically he decribes Do Follow as having been a great link bait for him.  He made it on one of the larger Do Follow lists  and as a result has been slowly but steadily building up links because of it.  Slow steady is the best way to build links to avoid being penalized.

The moral is that you might want to consider joining the Do Follow movement.  I’m considering it if for now other reason than the links.

What do you think?

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Want Traffic? Write About What They’re Looking For

As every blogger is sure to be aware, Technorati is the place for blogs.  What Google is to the entire internet, Technorati to to blogs.  And as most bloggers are sure to have seen, but might not be aware of, Technorati always displays its top 10 blog searches in the upper left corner.

Currently those top searches are

• Ron Paul
• YouTube
• Jerry Falwell
• Myspace
• Falwell
• Galilea montijo
• American Idol
• Michael Buble
• Paris Hilton
• Joost

But what does that mean to you?  Well if you want searchers to come to your site, you need to write about what they are searching for.  Monitoring Technorati’s top 10 is a great method of seeing what are popular searches.   Look for any recurring themes in your area.  For instance, this site could very well write about using Joost or Myspace to drive traffic to your page.  I could write about creating a viral video and releasing it on Myspace.

Need some more uses for Technorati?  Lifehacker has a post on the Top 10 ways to Search With Technorati

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Having Trouble Developing Traffic? How Many Of These Tips Are Your Following?

1. Prominently Display Your RSS Feed - Although they can be difficult to monetize, subscribers will be by far your most loyal readers.  They will likely account for a fair percentage of the number of backlinks you receive on any given day.  As a result you should endeavor to get as many subscribers as possible.  What better way to do this than to make sure your RSS feed is easy to spot?
2. Post Every Day - Your regular readers will come to expect something of you.  They will expect posts to appear at a regular frequency at approximately the same time everyday.  If you disappoint your readers by having irregular posting or having several days without any posts they are much less likely to come back.
3. Share Your Site - Although social networking traffic isn’t much for money, it can be a great way to jump start your site and to start getting some return visitors.  Make sure that you are using sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon to their fullest.  Try using plugins such as WP-Notable to encourage readers to share with others.
4. Blog Carnivals -Try submitting your site to Blog Carnivals.  This will help it develop some traffic and get some backlinks.  Better Yet, Host a blog carnival for your niche!  The hosting sites always get some links back to them and develop some traffic.  Plus your hosting post is some easy content
5. Group Writing Projects - Taking part in group writing projects can drive huge amounts of traffic and backlinks to your page.  By far the most linked to page on SavvyAffiliate so far is the one which I wrote for Probloggers group writing project, - Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use

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Comment On Blogs and Commend Their Best Posts, They Will Return The Favor

I have recently posted how bloggers should leave trackbacks or commentsto nearly every post that they read.  Doing this will help improve your standing in the blogging community and will help drive traffic to your site.

However given that this is nearly impossible to do, what is the next best thing?  If you are a prolific blog reader, or use a tool such as Bloglines or Google Readerto allow you to read a blog without visiting it in order to save yourself time, it is very hard to comment or trackback to even a large fraction of all the posts you read.  So what is the next best thing?  Always do it for the good posts!  

I have gotten into the habit of always making sure to comment on the best posts that I read.  More than that I always share the better posts!   Previously I had just used Digg and Stumble to more or less toot my own horn.  I sent out my own posts, got a few links, but never saw any significant traffic boost.   However I realized that it is almost always self defeating to try to game a service!   Instead of trying to use Digg and the other social networking sites solely to drive traffic to my own page, why not use them as they are intended.  I always take the time now to publicize the best pages, and am working on building up my friend network in Digg hoping they will do the same for my site.

So what benefit can you get by Digging others sites?  Well besides the fact that bookmarking a large range of pages will help make your account stronger, allowing the times when you selectively push your own site to be more beneficial, you can gain blogging status by Digging and Stumbling another bloggers post.  When you like a post, do more than just socially share it.  Tell the blogger that you liked it enough to share!   If you had a reader who liked your site enough to share it, and who liked your site enough to tell you that they liked it, don’t you think that you would trace the reader back to their own site?  Don’t you link that you would give them some link love?

In the end blogging is all about building relationships.  One of the best way to build relationships with other bloggers is to truthfully tell them when they write good posts.  And to reward them for their posts by helping to drive traffic to their site.

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