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Ways to Promote Your Blog

May 30, 2009 By 8 Comments

I just spent 10 hours straight doing the design for Easyonlinemoneymaking.com (still waiting for the dns to update for my Host Gator switch, I’ll post when the results are live).  I figured that since I spent such an extended period of time actually being productive I would make a post about some of the “time fillers” that you can do to promote your blog when you don’t feel like pumping out posts or articles.

When I have spare time I usually do some or all of the following, mixing them up every 5 minutes or so to keep myself interested.  I love internet marketing, but I don’t always have the attention span to keep churning out the content so it is fun to do moderately effective traffic driving techniques rather than the high power but highly boring techniques such as article creation/submission.

Here’s where my spare time goes:

  • Adding followers on Twitter and starting conversations with some of my followers when they have interesting status updates.  My twitter: James Spinosa
  • Adding contacts on MyBlogLog and joining communities.
  • Adding friends on BlogCatalog and joining groups, discussions, blogs, etc.
  • Posting on various forums that allow me to have a blog feed, this is mainly to build up name reputation but it doesn’t hurt to get some traffic.  Don’t just spam them, post useful content.
  • Commenting on a bunch of related niche blog posts.
  • Tinkering with my advertisements to find better converting programs so I can make some more money.
  • Creating link bait lists, such as “Top 100 dofollow blogs” so that I can get some free links from other bloggers.
  • Staring at the ClickBank marketplace trying to reverse engineer the success for some of the products that I have no idea why people buy them.

While these may seem like a waste of time I actually enjoy them, and they do yield results.  Most of these are designed to get a one time visitor, but about 10% of people that come to this site sign up to receive my blog posts, yielding long term traffic.

In terms of things like blog commenting and forum posting, this will yield permanent one way dofollow links, which will make me show up for more search results.  The other methods like adding twitter followers, friends, contacts, etc. make it so that I have another set of people that get updates each time I post.

If you have spare time, you might as well use it for something constructive.  There is always some way you can be promoting your blog even if it isn’t through the traditional methods.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: , , , , ,

Why Digg Users Don’t “Digg” You

October 29, 2008 By 1 Comment

In one of my first posts on this blog, Using Social Bookmarking Responsibly, I talked about how people far too often abuse the system rather than work with it.  Lately I have been seeing more and more “Digg exchanges” both on Digg itself and various social blog networks such as BlogCatalog.  It isn’t quite to the point it was when DigitalPoint was running rampant with digg exchanges or the glory days or DiggBoss, but it also isn’t a pretty scene.

The thing I always find funny, is that the people that are trying to exploit this Digg traffic are typically submitting stories so far from the Digg base that it is comical.  I wish I could find one that I saw a month ago, because commentary on it would definitely make it to the front page.  It was a post a travel website that was about visiting Puerto Rico that randomly injected “We use Linux for our server and we love Obama AND Ron Paul!”, which at least shows they get the concept.

These are the reasons why your post will NOT make it to the front page of Digg, despite the fact that you would really like that:

  • Your post is plastered in affiliate links
  • You are a travel agency, cable company, fake rolex salesman, pharmaceutical company, or “mak mone on internet!” website.
  • You are far too obviously appealing to the Digg crowd by overstating your love for the current Digg fad.  (I love: Obama, Ron Paul, Linux, Macs, internet meme’s, hacking, microchips, Nader, Google, trashing Palin, sharks [don't ask me, lately that keeps making front page], Nvidia, dissing Fox News, video games, Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, anti-creationism, people “fail.”ing).
  • You cannot consider your mastery of the English language to even be “conversational” (Kind of like how my roommate speaks “conversational Spanish” on his resume).
  • You don’t include one of the above topics.
  • You post something with no chance of going viral, you need quality content such as Sneezing Panda
  • You are over the age of 60
  • You are under the age of 15
  • You are part of either: “The Establishment” or “The Problem”
  • Your posts all include that really annoying embedded Digg button despite none of them being interesting
  • You smell like a Republican
  • You can’t recognize any of the top 100 Digg’ers
  • You are “too cool for school”
  • Nobody cares about what you are trying to get people to Digg, since it is bogged down in ads.
  • Most important of all: You actually don’t realize that this post is sarcastic yet true.

So there you have it, if you wish to see 75,000 visitors on your website so they can crash your servers and then point you towards a Digg post on why you shouldn’t use Windows hosting, study this list and make the necessary modifications.

*cough* And on that note: My Barack Obama.

Feel free to sign up for my RSS feed or comment on this post :-)

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Using Social Networks for Links and Traffic

October 6, 2008 By 3 Comments

Social networks are a great thing for internet marketers, especially as they can be used effectively for any level of experience as an internet marketer.  One of my first reactions when I made my first website was to send out a message to all my friends via FaceBook and used that as a source of traffic for the first couple days.  I quickly realized that since it was simply people curious what my site looked like, that it wouldn’t actually generate revenue nor would it create lasting subscribers.  This is a lesson that I still carry with me as I continue to use social networks to my advantage.

For initial traffic to this blog I utilized the sources that internet marketers and bloggers go to in order to get information, forums and marketing networks.  I have x,xxx posts on DigitalPoint and quite a few also on v7n and webmaster talk, all of which are great sources of targeted traffic as long as you use them correctly.  As for social networks, I mostly used MyBlogLog, MySpace, FriendFeed, Twitter, and BlogCatalog to get traffic and RSS subscribers, which has worked out quite well as I have noticed that quite a few of you are also submitting my articles to social bookmarking networks, which I appreciate.

When using these resources, simply realize that if you want to get the maximum use of your time you should research the audience that you wish to develop for your own niche.  In my case, it is quite easy as I am trying to help out all internet marketers and most bloggers would also consider themselves to be marketers to some extent, as everybody would like to make a few bucks off their efforts.  Obviously you won’t know thousands of people online, which is why you should search for people that have similar interests as you in public profiles, etc. and these are the people you should seek various relationships with.  The purpose of these networks in their essence, is to meet people with similar interests and discuss common issues, tap into this and you will have an interested target audience developing.

The key to balancing this relationship of network friend and your personal business interests is quite simple, don’t spam them with overbearing messages, etc. because that will scare people off, and offer good content that people want to read.  If you offer good content your business will expand by itself, it shouldn’t need too much of a push but social networks and social media are great ways to get some eyes on your content so that you can get a few people to stick and then let it spread from there.

Here’s a few of the sites I used:

The other thing to take into consideration with any type of social media/networking/bookmarking traffic is that it won’t be overly profitable.  Don’t expect large traffic numbers to equate to conversions of any sort, as traffic typically won’t click advertisements or buy affiliate products.

One interesting thing I have been watching as a result of this web2.0 traffic is how easily I gain and lose RSS subscribers, on days that I post I average 22 new subscribers, while on days I don’t post I average 17 lost subscribers.  On that note, feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed.

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Using Squidoo to Build Links and Make Money Online.

September 21, 2008 By 6 Comments

One of my favorite ways to build backlinks, increase traffic to my sites, and make money online is using Squidoo.  I’m sure most of you know what Squidoo is, but for the rest of the world, Squidoo is a social networking/content publishing platform that allows you to create “lenses” on whatever topic you would like to talk about.  It provides an easy to use template where you literally jsut say what you need to and add whatever modules you would like, therefore no computer savvy is really needed except for the simple <a href><a> to make the links.  As a result, many people that don’t want to take the effort to set up a self hosted blog or website have a way to get their thoughts out, which is great because that is really what the internet is for anyway; CERN (yes, the lab in Geneva) created the “world wide web” in ’93 as a free platform to spread information so it works as a great analogy.

Squidoo is 100% free to use, in fact they actually pay you to use it.  The company is the creation of the guru internet marketer Seth Godin.  It is set up as a co-op, meaning that all profits made are split between the company, the users, and charity organizations.  50% of the profits from Google AdSense ads automatically generated on the pages is sent directly to the lensmasters, 5% goes to various charity organizations (the lensmasters can also opt to donate their proceeds), and 45% goes to the company.   The amount of money that a lens earns is determined by a ranking algorithm to divide up the AdSense earnings.  Money can also be earned via modules such as Ebay, Amazon, or others which each pay on the same scale based on the commission Squidoo earns except for these sales there is no ranking algorithm, just directly attributable sales as if it were your own affiliate link.

The main reason why I use Squidoo is not because of the AdSense/module earnings, but for 3rd party affiliate sales.  I have a couple of Squidoo lenses that pump out a couple thousand dollars a year in affiliate commissions.  The beauty of Squidoo is that it is nearly effortless to create a lens, I have one lens that has made me $1500 in the past 6 months and it took me 7 minutes to create it.  The internal linking system makes it so that all of the Squidoo pages typically have a high page rank, and as a result they are weighted highly in Google.  This means with minimal effort, you can have a high PR web page that is sharing profits that can dominate the search results for some keywords.  Using this PR, you can then build relevant high quality backlinks to your own site and drive traffic or just directly drive affiliate sales.  There is also a great community within Squidoo, and this makes it an ideal place for marketers or average joes to go to make a buck, build backlinks, or raise funds for charity.

If you would like to see my Squidoo lenses check out my bio page, Lensmaster Page.  If you would like to sign up and start building links and earning money from Squidoo you can Sign Up Here.

***My RSS feed is now working, sorry about that guys.  I saw a couple people signed up for feeds but then when I checked Feedburner it was empty, apparantly feedburner doesn’t play nice with WP Super Cache so I had to play around with the caching a bit.  Should work great now, I would appreciate it if somebody tests it out for me :)

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