It is true, however, that some things tend to be more effective than others. My personal experience in this business has shown this. And I’ve seen new bloggers over-emphasize certain things and they end up wasting time.

So, I’ve devised a chart to rank certain popular traffic generation methods in terms of effectiveness, scaled from 0 to 10. 0 means it is mostly a waste of time, and 10 means it works insanely well.

Now, first off, let me note something for you…

This is my OPINION. As I set at the outset, nothing is set in stone here and some people make things work better than for others. M’kay?

Alright, some details…

Launching A Product With Affiliates

For me, this was the single most effective traffic generation I ever did. For me, it was the second launch of Blog Masters Club. I had people like Darren Rowse (Problogger), John Chow, Robb Sutton, and many others…. all of them were promoting for me. That, of course, brought a lot of traffic over as people checked me out.

Plus, there’s a not-so-hidden truth about this (and perhaps some just don’t have the balls to say it, but I will)… when they’re trying to get their readers to buy, they naturally say good things about me. Right? It is extremely powerful social proof in the niche. Even if the reader doesn’t end up buying from me, I’ve benefited strongly from all these people saying great things about me.

It is what Jeff Walker has called “the launch echo”.

Guest Posting

Guest posting continues to be effective, however I believe that effectiveness is waning in some niches. In the blogging niche, it is waning because guest posting is now so common that readers don’t tend to click on the bio link at the bottom.

The “trick” here is to stand out. A solid example is Derek Halpern, from Social Triggers, essentially “guest posting” on blogs in the form of video blog evaluations. Two things to note here:

1. It is a video, which automatically stands out in a sea of written posts.
2. It places him in automatic authority position, since he is now evaluating the blog of a person who is the authority of that particular “tribe”. Those readers see that person taking advice from Derek, which automatically places Derek on a pedestal.

Smart marketing, and I’ve told Derek as much in our private chats.

SEO

SEO is effective, of course. That said, it is a lot of work. You have to specifically target long-tail search phrases that people are looking for and where you have a chance to outrank.

I’m not going to get into a whole thing on SEO (it is, in itself a huge topic), but needless to say, done correctly, it draws traffic.

Videos & Podcasting

Multimedia works well. Videos hold attention very well. Plus, online video is becoming more and more mainstream as it is now finding its way onto televisions through devices like Apple TV or Roku. Essentially, web-based video is slowing pouncing on the territory traditionally dominated by cable TV stations. And people are USED to sitting there and consuming video. They like it.

Video can also be a double-edged sword. It can still bore the snot out of people quickly and do you no favors. Also, like any web content, a video has to be SEO optimized in order for people to find it.

Podcasting is not nearly as mainstream as video, but it is still a powerful traffic generator when done right. Pat Flynn has generated a lot of traffic from his podcast. While I’ve not done it personally, I know enough about it to relay this advice… iTunes is a search engine. So, your podcast has to be SEO optimized according to the rules of iTunes. So, if you have a podcast with compelling copy, targeted search optimization, good topics… you can pull in listeners. Make it professional and use the platform to routinely pull people to your site for various incentives.

Blog Commenting

With this one, we’re starting to get into the less effective ways to draw traffic. See, blog commenting works, but it is basically a big game of back link generation. It isn’t going to work any miracles. It takes time, and it takes a LOT of commenting. But, the volume of backlinks can help your search rankings and, in turn, traffic.

The usual rules apply. Make the name field of the comment SEO targeted. And use real, human comments that fit the conversation and not stupid spammy ones.

Article Marketing

This one is losing effectiveness, in my view. Some many disagree. It still works, and like commenting, it is basically a big back link game. Some people do article marketing and notice no real effects. Others do it and it has a noticeable effect on traffic. But, Google is smart and they’re not fond of being gamed. So, while this tactic still has some effectiveness, it isn’t the magic pill it was once thought to be.

I’d recommend doing it, but don’t expect it to be a traffic miracle. Do it for back links. And you might draw some people over from the big directories like EZineArticles.

Social Media

A lot of bloggers overemphasize the traffic generation power of social media. They do it as their primary way of promoting their blog. But, the truth is that it has limited effectiveness when compared to the time demands.

To really draw people from social media, you have to be VERY active. Because you can’t just one-way flow links out there and get attention. You have to actually interact and provoke conversation and that takes time.

For most people, Twitter feels like talking into a sea of noise. Even your “followers” don’t notice most of what you say because of all that noise. It reduces effectiveness.

Facebook has a much higher level of user engagement. But, still, building up the fan base is an uphill climb unless you have other platforms to build inertia from. Your best bet is to get really active in related groups. Also, hold creative marketing campaigns to build up page fans. Giveaways can work. Watch what mommy bloggers do on Facebook. You can learn a lot.

Writing More Often

Writing more often can help you a bit when your search rankings since Google loves often-updated sites. But, in and of itself, writing a lot is NOT a traffic generator. For most new bloggers, increasing post frequency to build traffic is just an exercise in frustration.

Simply put, nobody knows about you. So, you’re talking to yourself. So, you have to do some of the other things mentioned above to get “out there”. Go where the people are, engage them, and attract them to your blog.

Have A Traffic Strategy

There are numerous other ways to build traffic that I haven’t even mentioned. Facebook ads, ad swaps, paid email drops, etc.

Most bloggers find traffic difficult because they are always focusing on the low-hanging fruit. And they don’t want to work very hard or pay anything.

The best traffic generators are the ones most people don’t want to do – because it takes more creativity and takes more work.

Traffic isn’t this big invisible force field, oppressing new bloggers. Please, nobody organize an “Organize Cyberspace” protest to protest the oppression of “big evil sites” keeping the little guys down. Nah. Its just a matter of some being willing to do what it takes.

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Rarely is the direction of that blog review reversed. And, like everybody else, I also value an expert third-party perspective.

Derek Halpern seems like he’s come out of virtually nowhere in our niche, from “who’s that?” to a guy a lot of us are paying attention to. He’s actually not a newcomer to this stuff at all. He has a lot of experience when it comes to building traffic and converting traffic into leads.

Well, Derek has been making the rounds a bit lately by doing blog critiques. He did one for Chris Brogan, Pat Flynn, and more recently, Corbett over at Think Traffic. Derek and I chat every now and then on Skype anyway, so when he offered to do one of these critiques for DavidRisley.com, I took him up on it. I’d be an idiot not to.

This is especially good timing for me because I’m only a few weeks into the new design here. So, in this video, Derek offers his advice on a number of ways to increase the efficiency for this site. First, here’s the video (see below), then after the video, I’ll offer a few comments of my own.

Get out a piece of paper, because you might want to take some notes. He packs a lot into this…

(NOTE: If you’re reading this somewhere other than my site and can’t see the video, click here.)

So, here’s a little summary of his suggestions for me:

1. Resource pages for top navigation, with a drip content launch of them (See video for more details on this). The good news is that I was already working on these pages before my call with Derek, so SCORE for me. He provided some tips on the structure of those pages, though.
2. Include the links to my reports in the main sidebar above Popular Posts. Now, I think Derek and I sometimes got the terminology confused between “guides” and “reports”, but I’m pretty sure he meant to link to my reports there.
3. Test out getting rid of the related posts beneath my articles. In order to give more weight to the opt-in.
4. Put separate opt-in forms on the guides that I’m creating, thereby allowing me to deliver a custom autoresponder sequence and a custom launch process into the Inner Circle. Now, I think this is a great idea. The good news is that I had already thought of the separate tracking on those pages… but it had NOT occurred to me yet to build in a custom evergreen launch to lead people into the Inner Circle. That’s great.
5. Put an opt-in into the footer in order to grab people who scan through the comments.
6. Consider dropping the RSS link at the top. Or at least removing the duplicate links and inserting nofollow’s on those links.

Now, a quick “how to” on the custom tracking for opt-ins mentioned above…

With Aweber, the opt-in form HTML has a hidden form field called “meta_adtracking”. By default, Aweber throws some useless numerical form ID into that field. What you can do is replace that with a unique identifier so that you know exactly what form people used to sign up for your site.

See, you can create separate forms (even for different lists) if you want, but you can also just recording the ad tracking. So, for example, on my About page, I have 3 opt-in forms on there. The forms are identical, so there’s no reason to create 3 different forms in Aweber. Instead, I just assign different a different adtracking ID to each so that I can run a search in Aweber and tell exactly which of those forms were used to subscribe.

Alright, moving on…

One of the things I like about Derek is that he is really good at thinking about the psychology of the person on the site. This is something that I definitely focus on, and I personally find that element of design and marketing simply fascinating.

I encourage everybody to watch the video, and then begin really concentrating on your reader’s mindset. When your site is designed to tailor the reader, you get more traffic and more conversions. And isn’t that the name of the game here?

I recommend that you check out Derek over at SocialTriggers.com and sign up for his newsletter. In fact, he is opening up his private email list to DavidRisley.com subscribers for a limited time. This is only the 7th time he’s opened up this particular list. This isn’t some weird scarcity play… you’re actually getting on a list which he personally replies to when you email him. So, for that reason, he doesn’t keep the list open all the time (I can’t blame him).

Time to get busy, baby!

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I went to my social media accounts and asked. The very first suggestion that came in (quick reply) was from @CavemanHomeComp who suggested – suprise! – the very post that I’m writing right now.

So, I’m going to put together a lightning-round of tips for how I think bloggers should use social media to promote their blog. And, at the end, I’d like you to chime in with a comment and let me know what tips I forgot to include that have worked for you.

First, a word of note…

Don’t Expect Miracles

I find that many bloggers place way too much emphasis on social media. They think that hanging out on Twitter is some kind of killer traffic strategy.

It isn’t.

Yes, you can drive traffic via social media. Many people have done pretty well at it, in fact. However, I don’t want people to fall into the trap of thinking everything revolves around social. Those bloggers who hang out on Twitter all the time usually don’t get much traffic at all.

Social media should be a “value add” to other traffic-building efforts. It should not be THE traffic building strategy.

The Lightning Round

So, here we go…

Twitter first.

1. Don’t be a firehose of links. Be a person. I see too many newbies to social media who end up just broadcasting links. Nobody cares about that, and the staying power of a tweet is damn close to none. So, be a real person. Interact. Reply to people. Have conversations. Then, when you have something new (like a blog post), link it up. People will listen more if they give a crap about who you are.
2. Use a Twitter bio which answers what YOU can do for THEM. In other words, make it benefit-driven rather than stuff all about you.
3. Don’t link your Twitter profile to your blog homepage. Wasted opportunity since most blog homepages are cluttery. Instead, link to a squeeze page (to get them on your list), a Twitter-specific landing page, or your About page.
4. Monitor your keywords. You can use Twitter search to monitor keywords related to your blog niche in real-time. When you see a valid question you can answer, chime in and answer it. What an awesome way to introduce people to you – helping them in their moment of need. Just don’t be a douchebag about it by peppering them with promo for your blog. Legitimately help them via your tweet. You can send them to your blog for more info. A good way to monitor search is to set up columns in your Twitter client for search terms and periodically see what goes by.
5. Use a custom background on your profile. Make it professional. Enough said.
6. Use your name. I’m one that thinks you should be yourself, not the name of your blog. If anything, you can have a separate account for your brand and make that account just a link firehose. But, people will bond with you as a person.
7. Don’t auto-follow. Let things happen organically. Followers who actually listen are a lot more valuable then followers who were only after your return follow.
8. Don’t auto-DM people. HHAAAAATTTEEEE that. Immediate douchebag label should be applied to your forehead if you do that. With a permanent tattoo.
9. Involve Twitter followers with your blog. Periodically give your followers some say in your blog by letting them suggest a topic. Or, you can ask a question and then feature their answers in the form of a blog post (along with their Twitter handles). The idea is to have your followers belong to a community around your blog, even if they are on Twitter. NOTE: See how I got the idea for this post? Werd.
10. Ask questions. Gets your followers involved and used to actually TALKING with you. You want them to interact and not be spectators, and you need to have tweets designed to do that.
11. Don’t blindly use retweet buttons on your blog. Just because you’re into Twitter doesn’t mean your audience is. As a blogger with the aim to promote, your needs are quite different than your audience’s (unless you blog about this stuff as I do). A lot of niches out there don’t care one bit about Twitter. In that case, a retweet button will hardly get used and you have a bunch of 0′s all over your blog and it makes it look dead. So, be strategic. Perhaps Facebook is a better way to get them to share your stuff.

OK, onto Facebook…

1. Share your posts on Facebook. Kinda goes without saying, but I said it anyway. That’s how I roll.
2. Put the Share button on your blog posts. Keep in mind that there’s a lot more people on Facebook than there are on Twitter, so chances are your audience has a Facebook profile (which they use often). Plus, when they click to share/recommend one of your posts, it puts a nice, fat link to your post on their wall, with thumbnail and everything.
3. Have a fan page. Well, whatever they call it now. I used to think “more the merrier” when it comes to my personal profile, but these days, I lean heavily toward keeping your blog presence and your personal presence separate on Facebook. Sure, there will be overlap and there’s nothing wrong with connecting to your readers personally on Facebook. But, you should have a page so you can set it up as an extension to the blog on Facebook.
4. Set up a custom landing page on your fan page. They keep changing the specs (ugh), but it is still a good idea. Use the page to tell them why they should click the Like button, and give them a call to action to do exactly that. If you’re a power user, see about finding a way to give them access to something cool after they’ve liked you on Facebook (just like building an email list).
5. Interact on your fan page. A lot of people set up pages which just end up being 1-way funnels for their blog posts. That defeats the point, and I know… because I used to do it wrong. It takes more work, but your fan page will be a lot more useful for you AND your “fans” if you interact with them just as much as you would your friends on your personal profile. In fact, you can involve your fans with your blog just like I recommended you do for Twitter (see above).
6. Find ways to strengthen the bond on Facebook by providing exclusive value. One good example of this I saw recently was Ryan Lee offering “speed consulting” for a short period of time – exclusive to his fan page. So, they could ask him questions and he would reply in real-time, right there on his page wall. Maybe I’ll try that soon.
7. Ask questions. Just like on Twitter, this is an involvement device. But, it is even better on Facebook because you can actually set up polls and everything.
8. Have a nice, custom image on your page. And that image should match, brand-wise, with what you have on Twitter and your blog. At least it is best to do so.

Lastly, a few more tid-bits. Bonus!

1. Don’t forget LinkedIn. I’m not really an expert on this network, but I’ve talked to enough people to realize the hidden power of LinkedIn. Well, not hidden, but usually forgotten by most bloggers and marketers. LinkedIn is an audience of professional people, with higher household incomes. Sound like a good group of people to network with? Potentially better than a bunch of teeny-boppers talking about weird stuff? You bet.
2. Check out Hootsuite. I’ve been using it for a few months now, and it is a nice 1-stop shop for managing all these profiles from one place. It also works in a nice column format (ala Tweetdeck), making it easy to monitor multiple things. That’s Hootsuite.
3. Think about lead capture. Ultimately, the big goal should be to get your social media connections to subscribe to your email list. So, find ways to do that. It is your list where you have the best opportunity to strengthen the “know, like and trust” factor and potentially turn this into a profitable thing.
4. This is a big party. Treat it as such. Social media, collectively, is just a bunch of people talking to each other. Now, in real life, you wouldn’t raid a party and start yelling your URL at people’s faces. So, for God’s sakes, don’t do it on social media. At least online, they’ll just unfollow or block you. In the real world, you might get your ass kicked.

Your Next Move Is…

To post a comment and let me know…

What did I miss? Let’s help each other. That’s how communities work.

And, hey, if you liked it, maybe you can slap the buttons right beneath this sentence and share this out on Twitter and/or Facebook. If you’re into that kind of thing.

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I see it all the time in the world of blogging. A lot of bloggers out there trying to build up traffic, get recognition and make some money. They read blogs about blogging, which are (hopefully) written by people who have actually done that. Too often, however, I find that they get mired down in minutia.

Perhaps you know the type of minutia I’m referring to. Stuff like:

• “I’m going to keep tinkering with this theme until it is just right.”
• “I’ll launch my blog in 3 months, when I’ve got everything perfect.”
• “What little tid-bits of secret tactics are those successful bloggers doing that I’m not?”
• “I wonder if I have my meta tags right.”

The list goes on.

If one looks at blogging like that, it seems really complicated. It seems impossible to get off the ground.

I’m a big fan of simplicity. It isn’t that I can’t deal with complexity, but it is that I believe that complexity often means we failed somewhere along the line. When things seem really complicated, it means that too many arbitrary things have come onto the scene, which only invites more of it. Pretty soon you have wheel spinning, but little to no results. I think blogging sees this sometimes. There are a bunch of people out there teaching others how to blog. We’re under the gun to keep publishing things, so we find new, creative ways to essentially say the same things. Underlying all of that is actually a simplicity.

A Simplicity

So, let’s iron this down to basics. And that simplicity, I believe, comes in two related facts:

1. Blogging is a form of communication between real people.
2. Those are real, living, breathing, thinking people. They’re out there interacting. They have needs and wants. Your job is to interact back and serve those needs and wants.

If you’re not comfortable dealing with people, you’re going to have a harder time blogging at any higher level than a personal hobby blog. This is a people business.

At this point, you might be thinking, “OK, Dave, seems right, but how the hell can I use this information?” I’m glad you asked.

Applying That Simplicity

Instead of looking at this blogging thing as a bunch of comments, trackbacks, meta tags and themes, let’s just look at the people. You want to form a solid line of communication with readers. You want them to have a certain mindset when they look at your stuff. So, the purpose of all that you do should be to form that line.

Does screwing with your meta tags help you communicate with people? Likely not at all. It can have a minute effect on your search ranking, but you’ll get more bang for your time by just authoring a guest post and submitting it to another blog. Those are PEOPLE reading that blog. And you can TALK to them. So much more effective than “talking” with Google’s spider.

If we look at the topic of traffic generation, it simplifies if we look at it as people. There are people out there and you want them to check out your blog. So, what would you do in real life? Well, if you walked into a party and didn’t want to stand there and look awkward by yourself, you’d need to go where the existing conversations are and get in on it. That’s what we do at parties and it just makes sense. If you don’t, then you just have no friends – that’s all.

In the world of blogging, this would translate into guest posting (tapping into the existing conversations) and a lot of networking with other people, including other players in your niche. It doesn’t really matter how you do it, just do it. Twitter, Facebook, instant messenger, comments, forums – hell, use snail mail if you want. But, connecting with ACTUAL PEOPLE is your ticket to getting a blog going.

I mean, look at what most new bloggers do and you’ll see why it doesn’t work. They launch the blog and start posting. Then they post again. And again. And again. Check Analytics and see essentially no traffic. So, you keep posting. What?!?! You’re just talking to yourself! You’re the awkward little person in the corner at the party. You’re not connecting with people. You’re just talking in a loop to yourself and hoping people come by. Well, that’s a recipe for failure. You’re not thinking about people.

How I’ve Done It

When I launched this blog, I went into it with authority. I came out swinging with good content and I held nothing back. But, if I had stopped there, it wouldn’t have turned into anything. So, I started connecting with people. I would get into Twitter conversations with others in the blogging niche. I took those conversations into private and offline settings. I did guest posting on blogs like ProBlogger, John Chow and many others. I went to BlogWorld and met a bunch of these guys in person. I quickly went into product creation mode, created Blog Masters Club which then gave me potential fuel for JV relationships with these others bloggers. So, now many of these other bloggers have made a bunch of money off me. And I’ve promoted THEIR stuff.

It all happened because I didn’t just sit here on my WordPress admin panel and talk to myself. I reached out. I hopped on planes to go meet people.

I connected, then I served. With my audience, I serve. I write stuff all the time and just give it away. And when people buy things from me, they get served even more. And on the JV level, I connected with others in my niche. I promoted their stuff. I interacted. And, as I said, many have made money off me, too. And they like that.

I’ve talked about this kind of thing before, and here is some further reading for you to check out:

• The Key To Launching A Brand New Blog
• A Step-By-Step Blog Launch Plan And Roadmap

So, take a moment and ask. Are you spending more time messing with the minutia rather than connecting with actual people?

Keep your eye on the bigger game.

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It is an interesting issue, and one that I think many bloggers deal with. PCMech is in a very saturated niche – tech. There are LOTS of tech blogs out there, and all of them are acting like little “me too” reporters. They talk about the same things incessantly. To a degree, that goes with the territory. After all, when you have that many sites talking about the same topics, there’s bound to be lots of overlap.

So, from a strategic perspective, I’m faced with a task of making PCMech relevant again in a niche where it is all too easy to merely blend in.

It comes down to a simple ingredient: EMOTION.

If you’ve read the Six Figure Blogger Blueprint, you see how I talked about the facets of a good market to blog in. I talk about the importance of picking a market with a unifying goal or fear. I’ve talked before about the scale between optimum survival and ultimate succumb, how people are in a constant effort to move away from succumb and more toward survival… and how our jobs, as marketers, is simply to tap into that basic human drive with our blogs and products. Help people LIVE better and you’re off to the races.

When you think about it that way, then certain niches are going to bewilder us. Some niches lend themselves just to news and entertainment, not toward particular goals or fears. These types of niches are usually the hardest to monetize.

So, we look at the tech niche and see it has this problem. It is essentially a NEWS niche. So there are two problems:

1. The monetization option, usually, is to rack up a lot of traffic and throw ads all over the place.
2. It is much harder to stand out because other tech sites with large editorial teams (like Techcrunch) are always going to be more on top of things than we are. From a pure news standpoint, I’m at an automatic disadvantage. I risk becoming just another “me too” armchair tech reporter. Meh.

The answer is to put GLUE on the blog, and that glue comes in the form of emotion. We need to tap into the emotions of our readers. We need to cater a sense of emotion around what we talk about on the site.

I’ve seen other tech blogs try this, but too often they go toward the negative. They’ll try to incite flame wars between Apple and PC, for instance. Admittedly, it is easy to do and we’ve done it before. However, markets based around complaints don’t form good businesses. It does me no good to get 20 comments bashing Apple. Those people will never buy anything from PCMech. They’ll just act like little fanboys. Instead, we need to cater a positive emotion that suits the type of audience I want.

For PCMech, that emotion is going to be excitement and enthusiasm. I want to foster an audience of enthusiasts for what we can accomplish with technology. I don’t want to pigeon-hole the site into building PCs (which is how it has been). I don’t want to be about tinkering with the insides of our computers because that market is dying. It needs to be about getting things done using technology – ALL technology. And with the “get things done” idea, we are tapping into GOALS of the niche by enabling them using technology. It comes right out of the Blueprint report.

If we see a cool new web app that can help our readers do something, we’ll talk about it. New hardware that does something interesting, we’ll talk about. A cool how-to to show our readers how to do cool things in ways they might not have known, we’ll do it. But, another motherboard being released? Boring! Quite frankly, nobody gives a shit.

By doing this, it makes the site more valuable.

1. I will have an audience with an underlying emotional motivation, and that’s POWERFUL because it creates fans and, potentially, customers.
2. With the right topics and the right tone in covering it, it now makes PCMech stand out against the typical news sites. Instead of reporting, we’ll aggregate, filter, and make it usable.

It’ll be interesting pulling this off. There are other writers on the site and I have to get them on the same page, too. They aren’t marketers and might not understand why I want things done certain ways. But, we’ll get there.

How can you apply this to YOUR blog?

Emotion is the glue. If your blog doesn’t cater to something with an emotional center to it, the blog is going to have a tough time in today’s internet. How can you adjust your writing to tap into an emotion or generate one?

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The biggest commodity online today is ATTENTION. So, if we break it down into a measurable pseudo-quantity we’ll just call “attention units”, we can then look at our blogs from that perspective.

Our blogs are supposed to be magnets for attention units. And once attention units are being flowed at the blog, the blog should funnel them efficiently. Not bounce them off or waste them. If you’re leaking attention units, it is a waste.

So, our goal is to attract as many attention units as we can, and KEEP them once we’ve got them. In this post, I’m going to look specifically at the leak points and how to plug them. We’re going to “top kill” the hell out of those leaks, and we’re going to put BP to shame in the process (which wouldn’t be very hard, given the circumstances).

The Bounce Rate

One of the major blog leak points takes place before you even have much of a chance. A new visitor comes to your blog, says “meh”, and immediately leaves. In other words, they “bounce”.

The percentage of overall traffic that bounces is what is called your bounce rate. The game is to reduce that bounce rate. It is quite typical to see bounce rates over 50% with blogs, and this isn’t anything to be concerned about. However, if you start getting into the 70+% range, you might want to look into it.

The main thing to keep in mind with bounce rate is that it is natural. The reality is that not everybody who arrives on your blog fits your target audience. If that is the case, you WANT them to leave. However, if they do fit your target audience profile, you want them to quickly see that the blog offers something of value.

So, how can we minimize this leak?

1. Have a clear byline in your blog’s header. It isn’t enough just to have a logo. You need to have a brandable phrase which clearly tells what the blog is about. Avoid being “tongue in cheek” with your byline at the expense of it not being clear to new arrivals. Just because it makes sense to you doesn’t mean it makes sense to others. The byline of this blog is “Confessions of a Six Figure Blogger”, which clearly shows that this blog is about blogging for money.
2. Simplify the homepage. When you give new arrivals too many options, they’ll often just leave. It might seem counter-intuitive. A newbie might think that lots of stuff means “busy site so it must be cool”. Well, no. You need to practice the motto, “Don’t make me think.” Most blogs have too much on the homepage (including my own, in fact). Try reducing the clutter, and instead drawing the eyeballs into a primary target (such as a list opt-in). Hint: I have some design adjustments to this blog in mind which will execute this strategy.
3. Show related posts on single post pages. Many people will arrive on your blog on one of your posts, not your homepage. So, the goal here is to get them to do something else once they’ve read your article. Related posts are a great way to do it. Place them at the end of your post to give them a place to go once they’ve finished reading. There are a number of plug-ins out there for this, however the one I’m using is Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
4. Make your About page interesting and easy to find. My own stats and testing constantly show that the About page is one of the more popular pages on the blog for new arrivals. It is valuable real estate. So, make sure it is visible and easy to find. Secondly, make your about page interesting. In other words, don’t just make it some factual piece of boredom like a resume or an encyclopedia entry. Make it HUMAN. Tell a story. Treat it like a sales letter – for you.
5. Make your text scannable. Readers are lazy. If they see a big, justified blog of text, they will just leave. Instead, structure your posts to use a lot of small paragraphs, bullet points, headers, etc. They should be able to quickly scan a post and get the point.
6. Use professional images in your posts. Large, professional images really help with the professionalism of the blog. And that makes people stick around. I suggest getting an account with Istockphoto, buying some credits, and using it. You don’t need to go crazy with it, but if you are posting a nice feature post to your blog, it is worth the couple bucks for a nice image for it.

Leak Points

Once you have people on your blog, reading your posts, there are still points of leakage and wasted opportunities. Let’s fix ‘em.

1. Optimize your money posts. Most blogs have certain posts which, for one reason or the other, excel in terms of traffic and end up being major, long-term traffic magnets. I call these “money posts”. If you have money posts on your blog, you should strongly consider treating them differently than your other posts. They’re like homepages in and of themselves! Check out this post on how to leverage your money posts.
2. Subscribe options on your About Page. I just looked and I’m not even doing this! (Shame on me). The About page, as I said above, is high-traffic real estate. If done right, it serves as a sort of sales letter for you and your blog. So, right there on the about page, give people options to get onto your mailing list, RSS feed, etc. Just makes sense, right?
3. Promote your OWN products. I understand that, for many bloggers, the idea of having your own stuff to sell seems like a daunting task. But, let’s look at it from a leakage standpoint… When you have ads on your site, each one is an invitation for your reader to LEAVE your site. Hello?! At least when you promote your own stuff, you’re keeping them within your empire.
4. Relevant offers during the subscription process. When somebody opts into your mailing list, you can think of that as a sale even though no money is changing hands. They’ve just decided you’re worth their time. So, present relevant additional options to them. On the page where you tell them to confirm their email, tell them “while they’re waiting” they can follow you on Twitter, fan you up on Facebook, etc. On the page they see after they’ve confirmed their email, present additional relevant offers. Display your ebook(s), your products, etc. This is a PRIME time to get your reader to do things because they’re very receptive at that point.
5. Relevant calls to action on posts. You should always give people something to do after reading a post. It could be reading another post, getting onto your list, or even buying a relevant affiliate product. And if you can keep it relevant, all the better. For instance, if I have a blog post about building an email list, a call to action to refer them to Aweber makes a lot of sense. Or if you have multiple e-books, give them an opt-in for the most relevant e-book to the post they just read.
6. Collecting email addresses on comments. People are using their email address when they post a comment on your blog. Why not give them a one-click option to get onto your list? This is a perfect opportunity to do it because, by commenting, they’ve proven they’re an engaged reader. My recommendation for this is Action Comments, however it only works if you’re using the built-in comment system. Unfortunately for me, I’m using Disqus.

The Key Is… Step Into Your Reader’s Shoes

Underlying all of these “top kill” techniques above for your blog is the simple necessity of thinking like your reader.

As bloggers, it is far too easy to have tunnel vision with your own blog. After all, it is your pride and joy. You think it is good, but for some reason it may not be resonating with your audience. And that can be reflected in your bounce rate.

You need to get really good at looking at your site from an outside perspective. Where are your readers coming from? What mindset are they in when they arrive? What are they looking for? How do they interact with your blog?

You’ve got some tools to employ to help you figure this stuff out:

1. Surveys. Use them. Find out what your users need and want, and as much as possible, have them tell you this in their own words. I recommend SurveyMonkey or Google Spreadsheets.
2. Analytics. You absolutely HAVE to use a robust statistics package on your blog. To not do this just leaves everything to guesswork. My personal recommendations are Google Analytics and GetClicky.
3. Click Testing. I recommend using a tool like Crazyegg to run some click tracking tests. This will determine where their attention goes. You might also want to check out Attention Wizard, which can do visual attention prediction. With UserTesting.com, you can get real, live people to interact with your site and give you feedback.

You owe it to yourself to take the time to really fine tune your blog and plug the leaks. To do that takes data, and the tools above will help you get that information.

With that, happy leak plugging! Let’s hope you have better success than BP. (ugghhh)

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1. Iran to Kill Bloggers?

However, there is another super-easy tactic you can use to increase anticipation: Showing them what’s coming before it is published.

With that in mind, here is some code you can copy/paste into your blog theme in order to easily list out scheduled posts.

Obviously, this tactic will only work if you do indeed future-post stuff. If you’re a “shoot from the hip” blogger who has no idea what you’re going to post until you post it, this won’t work. That said, you might want to pre-plan your content. Makes it easier in many ways, but a side benefit is that you can toy around with this simple idea.

This code can be put anywhere into your theme. Essentially, what you’re doing is create another Loop and just changing the parameters via your own query.

<?php
$my_query = new WP_Query('post_status=future&order=DESC&showposts=5');
if ($my_query->have_posts()) {
while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post();
$do_not_duplicate = $post->ID; ?>
<li><?php the_title(); ?></li>
<?php endwhile;
}
?>

You can change the number of posts being displayed by altering the “showposts” value (currently set to 5). Also, this code only displays the title. You’d probably also want to display the date so that they know when to expect the post.

Note that you would NOT want to include the permalink in this listing because you want them to wait until the post is actually live, right? Plus, without sufficient user permissions in WordPress, they’ll just see a 404 if they try to view an unpublished post.

One place you could use this would be in your sidebar, however I am also using this as a custom page template for the member homepage of the Inner Circle to show members what’s coming inside the program.

Again, increased anticipation. And, in the case of a membership site powered by WordPress, increased retention.

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That means thinking strategically about what you’re doing and how you’re developing.

In everything that you do, you should be thinking about how it is increasing your leverage and increasing your assets. Increasing your assets results in increased leverage.

So, what do I mean by assets?

In offline circles, we usually think of “stuff”. Things like houses, cars, computers and furniture. However, in the field of online business, these things aren’t as significant. They don’t really increase your leverage. In other words, you cannot USE these things to grow your business online – at least directly.

So, what are the assets we need to build for our online business? Things like:

• Your List. Very definitely leveragable. The size of your list is often directly proportional to the size of your income. An email list and a solid relationship with that list is one of the most important things you can have and leverage online.
• Content. As bloggers, we are consistently creating content. Done correctly, it turns into a leveragable asset. More on that in a bit.
• Products. Unfortunately, most bloggers seem to drop the ball on this one. Products are highly leveragable. Not only can they be marketed and sold in order to bring in revenue, but they can be given away, offered as bonuses, etc. Products are essentially any self-contained body of knowledge which you can give to somebody else. Video courses, e-books, printed books, membership sites – it all fits the bill. Without having products to leverage in your growth, you’re essentially building nothing.
• Data. People often underestimate the importance of simple data as a leveragable asset. For example, the data you can glean simply from your Google Analytics stat reports can be very useful to see what works, what is popular, where people are coming from. This is important data that nobody else has. Ever run a split test? Those results are useful data. Ever given something a try and failed at it? We all have, but guess what? That’s useful data that can be applied next time.
• Relationships. Although not physical, your relationships with other people in your niche are points of leverage.
• Knowledge. It is important to always be increasing your own personal pool of knowledge, because this, too, is an asset you can draw from. It increases your leverage.

Surely there are other examples.

Now, I mentioned content. We’re creating it pretty routinely, but are you thinking about leverage? Most bloggers just write something and quickly publish it. You’ve got to post something, right? Sure, we all have to do that sometimes. But, don’t do it ALL the time. You NEED to be thinking about leverage. How can you use content again and again? How can you get maximum “bang” from your content?

This is why a large portion of the content I produce is not in the form of free blog posts. I can do other things and get more leverage. Such as…

• Webinars. I am doing a larger number of webinars, both for Blog Masters as well as Inner Circle. All webinars are recorded. That gives me a 1-hour video of high quality content. I can take chunks of those videos and use them elsewhere. I can use them as products in multiple forms. I could create a DVD from them if I were so inclined. I could get them transcribed.
• Videos. A simple 2-minute video is distributed using TubeMogul to, let’s say, 10 different sites. That’s 10 outposts for my blog from a single 2-minute video. Plus, I can post it on the blog and use it as a blog post.
• Reports. I take content and put it into a PDF report. It doesn’t even matter if some of the contents of the report could also be found on the blog. By putting it into a report, I’ve increased my assets. My leverage. I can use that report as a list builder, a bonus, etc.

Get the idea?

So, are you just typing some stuff and hitting the “Publish” button?

OR… are you building ASSETS?

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I recently started a new “passion project” – a blog in the travel niche.

Like most projects, profit oriented or not, entering a new niche teaches many an interesting lesson.

Big Authority Sites Kickin Your Butt?

The travel niche is one where the search engine rankings are dominated by authority sites. In many instances, you can have keywords that are super low in organic search engine competition, but who’s Google front pages are dominated by 10 “review” type sub pages on big old domains that can take a lot of work to beat.

It can be the name of a tiny restaurant in some remote area with only 100 people searching it a month, and as long as someone’s been there and written a review, you’ll find a Tripadvisor.com page, an Igougo.com page, a Yahoo travel page, AOL travel page, and if you’re lucky a Wikipedia page too. It can make it tough when you’re writing on a keyword that has almost no competition, but the best 10 sites are almost unbeatable if you have a new blog.

Of course they got this way because, being so big, having so much content and such a strong root domain that’s aged and with so many backlinks, anything that gets published on them hits the search engines with force.

They’re Taking Over The Web!

And the thing is, it’s not just the travel search market. We all lament the annoyances of having to compete for rankings against the ubiquitous and inevitable Wikipedia pages, Amazon pages, eBay pages, big article directory pages, social network pages, and so many others.

It’s more annoying still when you think that with every passing day, more and more of these authority type sites are appearing in every market on the web. Do you ever think that there’ll come a time when any profitable market will have it’s organic and paid advertising results dominated by big unbeatable authoritative websites? Do you fear a time when it becomes impossible for us little guys to compete?

Of course, it won’t be the end of the world. There’ll be other ways to generate traffic. BUT, the point of this post is that we’re NOT at that point yet… it’s NOT too late!

Making YOUR Blog An Authority Site

Any of us can do what it takes to make our website an authority in our niche, provided we continually work at it, and invest for the long term.

In fact, this has been the positive element of the lesson taught by the travel niche.

It’s been interesting to watch the speed and ease with which our blog’s content can now attain rankings in the search engines the older it gets, the more links we build to it, and the more posts we add.

It’s taken, so far, 5 months of solid link building, and creating about 50 pieces of content on an ongoing basis. But sure enough, we’re starting to be viewed as “an authority”. How do we know?

Our new posts get indexed in the search engines within half an hour with no linking but internal links… Our search spider activity is high. For more and more keywords each day, we manage to beat out those big bad authority sites.

A recent post we made served as a great example. It was a post we wrote on a little restaurant in a town called Bucerias in Mexico. While the competition NUMBER is tiny, on the front page we’ve got authority sites like Tripadvisor, Chowhound, AOL Travel and a big portal site for the area. All except one of which our site was able to beat with a brand new piece of content and zero backlinks. Why? Because we’re slowly becoming an authority.

If you take the time and invest for the future, build your backlinks continually and grow your content as your domain ages, it’s not too late for YOUR site to become an authority regardless of what niche it’s in.

And once you’re at authority status, the benefits aren’t just easier search rankings. Your new popularity will see more people mysteriously finding you, more people wanting to partner with you, more people wanting to advertise with you, more people seeking you out on the social networks, and so on and so on.

New authority sites are blooming in your niche right now whether you see it or not. Make your site one of them and you will reap the rewards.

Andrew Hansen is an affiliate marketing strategist, CEO of Dreamlife Softwares and blogger at AndrewHansen.name. His free techniques and strategies at http://affiliateblogprofit.com/free show how to blog for easy affiliate revenue by dominating untapped, profitable search markets.

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So, I’m going to share the secret formula. The secret sauce. This is everything you really need to know. And it is…

1. Make lots of good content.
2. Get it out there, while focusing on authority sites.
3. Point it all at your blog.
4. Get an email list. Use it. Mobilize your subscribers and point them to your blog.
5. Say “hi” to other players in your market. Form a relationship and see what happens.
6. Rinse. Repeat. Repeat some more.

And there it is.

Open Wound, Insert Salt

Did you expect something more?

There is NO secret to driving traffic to your blog. None. Zip. Nada. Nyet. Zilch.

Why do so many people look at successful bloggers and think they’ve unlocked some mysterious code? There isn’t some magic keyword that nobody has discovered yet which is going to drive you traffic. No secret tactic.

There just isn’t. Those bloggers who get lots of traffic just produce a lot of good stuff and then put it in front of people. No magic required. No secret knowledge.

You guys should know by now that I’m here to help bloggers, but I’m also a straight-shooter. So, here it is:

If you’re not willing to do the work that it takes to create good content and put it in front of people, to make a list, to network with others – then you’re not going to have a successful blog. It just won’t happen.

The Stuff That Works Is Always Simple

It is human nature to seek the complicated. But, most things boil down to a series of utter simplicities. And building traffic is one of them.

You’ve seen all those weight loss systems out there. All various complexities and via’s on the simplicities of losing weight. The simplicity is “eat less, move more”.

Same goes for traffic. Through all the buzzwords like article marketing, keyword research, linkbacks, trackbacks, retweets, viral – all of it boils down to the simplicity.

Apply this, and soon you’ll have people asking YOU what your secret is.

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