This article has been reprinted with permission of Yaro Starak of Blog Mastermind. In it you’ll find 10 great tips about getting traffic to your blog, and remember more traffic is more money Enjoy!
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 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. Click the link to get more information about Blog Mastermind
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I’ve taken the plunge and finally joined an affiliate network. Pepperjam was my choice, I got suckered in by all the good marketing they’ve been doing and that nice $10 bonus just for signing up!
It’s a crazy month of July over at Pepperjam Network. Not only do you get a $10 sign up bonus but they have increased their affiliate payouts for July from $5 to $7 for every new successful publisher referral. Furthermore they have introduced a blogger program.
The blogger program allows a publisher that has a blog to earn money for writing posts about Pepperjam Network or any Pepperjam tools. You get paid $10 per post and can write a total of 5 posts a month. That’s an extra $50 a month!
I have already joined an my $10 has been placed in the bonus section of my account. Look out for more updates as I delve into the world of affiliate marketing with the Pepperjam network!
Hey guys, I know I’ve been M.I.A. these last few weeks, but I’m back and ready to give you tons of updates on what I’ve been working on these past few weeks. Let’s first get back into our routine.It’s another “lovely” Monday and so it’s time for the entrepreneur of the week where we focus on young successful entrepreneurs as a means of motivation for those of us still trying to be successful.
This week’s entrepreneur is Ephren Taylor of City Capital Corporation and at the tender age of 25, is the youngest African-American CEO of any publicly traded company EVER. Quite an accomplishment where you’re the boss and younger than all your employees. Guy’s like Ephren Taylor show signs of entrepreneurship at a very young age. In fact, he started his first business at the age of 12, where he created 3D video games and sold them to his friends for $10.
At the age of 17, Ephren went on to build a million dollar ($3.4 million to be exact) technology company called GoFerretGo.com, which was then rated #4 of Teen Companies Nationwide by YoungBiz magazine. The guy really has a lot of very serious achievements under his belt. Finally, in 2006 Ephren Taylor became CEO of City Capital Corp, where he oversees over $150 million in assets for a number of clients for clients from Wall Street investors to professional athletes.
Ephren runs a blog where he gives pointers on how to create wealth beyond six and seven figures. I would suggest subscribing to it. Also take a look at the video below where Ephren appears on the CNBC show The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch.
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Well it’s another Monday, and time for our weekly motivational post about a young entrepreneur. I’m a little late in getting this post together, it was a bit of a hectic action packed weekend so I ended up procrastinating quite a bit. Our featured entrepreneur this week is really exceptional as well and I think his accomplishments thus far will really motivate a lot of us especially those in the field of software and publishing.
The entrepreneur this week is Ben Casnocha of Comcate. Ben is 20 years old and has already started his own software company (Comcate) at age 14 as well as written his own book! Comcate develops software designed to help local governments resolve citizen complaints.
That’s a pretty interesting niche one that can really only come from some sort of personal experience. Ben says he realised how poorly governments dealt with customer service issues from his own experience and that gave him the idea for Comcate. That was his second company.
On top of this Ben has been named one of the nation’s top 25 entrepreneurs under 25 by Business Week. His blog has been named one of the top 25 in Silicon Valley by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Furthermore while running Comcate he still had time to captain his San Francisco University High School basketball team and be editor of the school newspaper.
Ben Casnocha is now enrolled at California’s Claremont McKenna college and markets himself as entrepreneur, author and college student.
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I started my entrepreneurial journey back in January 2008 and have just taken the time to really observe the different ways people are making money online and determine which might best suit me. I must say I have learnt quite a bit from my ever growing blog library and rss subscriptions. Now I think I have an idea of the route I wish to take in building an internet business.
At first I must admit I was quite caught up in the Google Adsense hype. The possibilities seemed endless but from my own experiences with adsense I realise that it still entails quite a bit of effort and seems most unrewarding. My true realisation came after reading this post at bloggingexperiment.com by Max Davis the new owner of the blog.
After reading that post I have decided to begin creating my own products and leverage the strengths of others to help make my product and business successful. My goals for this month then, are two develop the product I intend to market as well as build some credibility in the particular niche and of course build a list.
Currently I am developing two free products (newsletter and free ebook) to use on some of my existing websites so as to capture some leads and eventually market a paid service/product. I will make sure to let you guys know how it goes right now I’m just working on structure and gathering information.
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It’s yet another Monday an at developingeyes.com we like to start it off with a little inspiration and motivation with our entrepreneur of the week. In this series we acknowledge a young entrepreneur that has found some level of success in his/her particular niche. The story is meant to motivate us as young budding entrepreneurs so that we keep striving and working towards our own success as well.
This week’s entrepreneur is a bit more successful than what I’ve been writing about in the past but may still be a bit unknown to quite a few of us on this side of the Atlantic. Suranga Chandratillake is co-founder and CEO of Blinkx. Blinkx is a video search engine based in the UK and San Francisco, that indexes over 18 million hours of video online. According to their website:
Today, blinkx is the world’s largest single index of rich media content on the Web, delivering more content from a broader range of sources than either Google or Yahoo!
One of the main advantages Blinkx has over the other guys is software that turns speech into text and tells you how many times that word has appeared in a particular video. Blinkx has also taken on contextual advertising using a service they call AdHoc. Think of it as an "Adsense for videos".
The ads take many forms, clickable links that scroll across the screen, banner ads and interestingly a list at the end of the video that shows all the products mentioned in the video you just watched! This is some very interesting stuff and I think has a very good future ahead as more and more videos appear online. A story on Suranga and Blinkx can be found in the Business 2.0 September 2007 edition or on the business 2.0 website.
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I came across this in a book I was reading which had a section on entrepreneurship. The book is called New Era of Management by Richard Daft. It goes on to talk about five types of entrepreneurs. There were a few I knew about before but some are new to me. So I’ve decided to share it with you in today’s post. Let’s see what categories we fall under.
Idealist
The idealist entrepreneur is the most common type of entrepreneur shown above. He/She likes innovation and enjoys working on something new or creative or something personally meaningful.
Optimizers
The optimizer entrepreneur comes in a close second and is content with the personal satisfaction of simply being a business owner.
I think everyone would have some sort of satisfaction being a business owner but if that’s what mostly feels important then I guess you fall here.
Hard Workers
The hard workers entrepreneur category includes persons who enjoy putting in long hours to build a larger more profitable business. They like the challenge it presents and of course reap the most rewards if the business turns out to be a multi-million dollar enterprise.
Hard work comes with all businesses but as we now see not everyone works hard for the business to grow as this group of entrepreneurs does.
Jugglers
The juggler entrepreneur likes the concept that the business gives them a chance to handle everything themselves. They are usually people with lots of energy and exist on the pressure of meeting deadlines, paying bills and of course making payroll.
Who doesn’t like pressure? J Last minute deadlines are lovely! I’m sure a lot of you have ended up in a situation where the deadline is approaching quickly. Maybe you’re a juggler
Sustainers
The sustainers entrepreneur category consists of people who like the thought of balancing work and a personal life. Most often they do not wish the business to grow too large where it will cut into their personal life too much.
These guys just need enough to survive. No big hopes and dreams of a multinational corporation or interviews on “The Big Idea” J
So there you have it five categories of entrepreneurs. I’ve been trying to figure out which category best describes me, but I think I have attributes of the first four types. I love creativity and innovation so am I an idealist? I think everyone would feel satisfaction as a business owner, a natural sense of pride would always come with entrepreneurship.
I definitely would love to see any business venture I undertake grow as large as it possibly can so then I’m a hard worker? Yet I work well under pressure I’d say I thrive on it a bit so then I’m a juggler.
I guess I am hybrid entrepreneur. What type of Entrepreneur are you?
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Welcome readers, It’s another Monday and so it’s time for our weekly motivational story of a young entrepreneur. This week’s entrepreneur is only 14 years old and is by far the youngest I have ever come across online (or anywhere for that matter). I just heard about him myself last week, but I am sure most of you trying to make money from blogging must have heard of him before.
This week’s entrepreneur is Carl Ocab of carlocab.com. Carl is a 14 year old BOY from the Philippines. His major claim to fame is ranking number one in google for the keyphrase “make money online”. When I checked it he currently ranks fourth which is still far beyond anything I have accomplished.
Carl is really doing it big and still going to school. He blogs regularly after school and writes with great authority on his topics, much better than many of the make money online blogs run by adults I’ve come across. I think one of the things Carl has going for him is his family’s support. Many of his posts introductory make reference to his father who he says is a marketer himself.
Carl also has a free ebook called the kidblogger’s master plan, that he uses to make money online and replicates any number of times in different niches. Yes people he is 14 years old, and he started at 13. If this doesn’t motivate you to work harder I really think you should call it quits now. Check out Carl’s blog and read his posts he has some solid advice there and I would recommend subscribing to his blog and getting the free ebook.
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I know most of you may have heard about this by now but if you haven’t here goes. Brian Campbell of Internet Marketing University has made the claim that he will make $10,000 in 37 days from facebook. Even further he has invited everyone to join his group and follow him as he goes along.
This is pretty interesting stuff. He’s either going to be a huge success or embarrass himself horribly, either way its a good way to learn. I’ve already joined and became a fan of Brian on facebook so I can see what he does. I have some ideas as to how he might do it but I’ll still wait until he reveals his plans.
This post is of course a bit late. The end of the 37 days is May 16th 2008 which really just gives Brian a little over two weeks left to generate the money. Let’s see how it turns out!!
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Good day readers, I must first apologize for my absence, I had to go away on business for my 9 to 5 job and I did not prepare adequately by writing posts in advance :s. But let’s get back to business.
It’s another Monday and we will begin our week with a motivational article about a young entrepreneur doing what we all hope to accomplish someday to some degree.
Today’s entrepreneur of the week is Brian Taylor of Kernel Season’s. Kernel Season’s began out of the dorm room of this 29 year old. The company makes seasonings for popcorn ranging from white cheddar to marshmallow chocolate. Imagine marshmallow chocolate popcorn, sounds good to me .
Brian says he made popcorn every night and created his own personal spice blends to add to it, his friends loved it and people came knocking on his dorm room door asking for the special seasonings.
Brian hired a team of flavour specialists to help perfect his seasonings and now has his seasonings in a reported 70% of groceries and movie theatres in the U.S.
This is some pretty good stuff here. Making money from something as simple as popcorn seasoning. You can read more about Brian Taylor and Kernel Seasonings here and maybe even try out some of his seasonings for yourself. Oh and his company reportedly made $5 million in sales in 2006!
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Enjoy!
This week’s entrepreneur is Ephren Taylor of 
The entrepreneur this week is Ben Casnocha of 
This week’s entrepreneur is a bit more successful than what I’ve been writing about in the past but may still be a bit unknown to quite a few of us on this side of the Atlantic. Suranga Chandratillake is co-founder and CEO of 
Welcome readers, It’s another Monday and so it’s time for our weekly motivational story of a young entrepreneur. This week’s entrepreneur is only 14 years old and is by far the youngest I have ever come across online (or anywhere for that matter). I just heard about him myself last week, but I am sure most of you trying to make money from blogging must have heard of him before.
Today’s entrepreneur of the week is Brian Taylor of 
