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July 22, 2008

10 Blog Traffic Tips by Six-Figure Professional Blogger Yaro Starak

10 Blog Traffic Tips

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 usually 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 an 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
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
enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at
http://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.

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: http://BloggingPaysBig.com

Posted by Willie Crawford at July 22, 2008 11:17 AM

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Posted by: cangel at July 27, 2008 09:53 AM

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