This is part two in a three part series on the steps for building blog traffic. If you are looking for quick and simple ways for building blog traffic, or more involved ways with bigger returns, keep reading for some great information.

1 – Participate in related blogs and forum websites.

Whatever niche or industry you are in, if you are interested in building blog traffic then you need to participate in blogs and forums other than your own. There are going to be online communities full of people just like you including bloggers and forum posters that are already active. Depending on how specific your focus is, you may need to broaden your horizons a bit when reaching out to other communities in order to find a large community that you can fit in with. A great way for you to find out where these people are is to use a website known as Technorati, which will help you conduct searches. Then you can sort by authority and start participating elsewhere on the net to build some authority for your name, blog and website as well.

2 – Tag all of your content.

Technorati is the first place that you should be using to tag posts. It is recommended that you have the tags directly on your page, pointing to the technorati searches that you are specifically trying to target. There are a number of other good places that you can ping as well including Flickr and del.icio.us as well. Tagging your content is going to be really valuable in giving your website bumps from big name sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit. You do not want to submit all of your posts to these websites, but you do not want to offer about one out of every twenty in order to get your name out there in a big way.

3 – Launch without any comments, and then add them in later.

There is something a little sad about a blog that does not have any comments, because it feels really dead and unpopular, but if you launch your blog without allowing comments, then nobody is going to know that you’re not getting any visitors, because your lack of comments is only because you do not want any. When you start to get more subscribers and readers, THEN and only then should you open up the ability to comment, so that you can begin to see some decent commenting. Comments are a way that many readers judge the popularity of a site, after all. If they view your blog and see that you are accepting comments but not getting any, they may take this as a sign that it is not worthwhile for them to stick around, and this won’t be good for you.

Photo credits: [177]

Originally posted 2009-09-21 03:01:37. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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When you think of WordPress you probably think of blogging. That’s how most people use it. They sign up for a free blog and start posting about a variety of things. Some blogs are very specific and targeted while others are just general every day kind of blogs. You might not be aware of it, but some excellent looking websites are also using WordPress without using it as a blog at all.

Ease of Use: WordPress is designed for the masses. That means there’s really no specialized knowledge necessary to sign up for a blog and get started. If you want to go beyond the free blog and take advantage of their premium features, they’re thrilled. So they lead you through it step-by-step to make it easy.

Deciding to go from a free blog to hosting a domain with your blog as your site is fast, inexpensive and easy. At that point, your .com address contains the blog, which you can arrange pretty much any way you want.

Built-in Tools: Using the blogging and content tools provided by WordPress, it’s easier for many to create a great looking website than it is to use a more complicated piece of software. To create a WordPress site you don’t need an HTML editor or some “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) software to help you build the site. You can still use these, for the most part, but you can also do the same things right through the WordPress interface, including using CSS.

You also won’t need a tool for uploading like an FTP client, and you won’t need to learn a complicated file manager or control panel. If you’ve chosen a theme and made a few blog posts, you already understand how making changes in WordPress works. There’s really no learning curve in going from free blog to website.

Search Engine Friendliness: WordPress blogs, if they’re using keywords and contain relevant content, can rank high in searches on those keywords. Google tends to favor some sites over others, while completely ignoring some domains. Content on WordPress tends to be favored. So your website, as long as you actually do concentrate on keywords and content a bit, will probably have a better chance at showing up in search engines than if it were hosted somewhere else.

Popularity and Community: If you’re not paying WordPress and website experts to do your website for you, then the idea of setting up a website anywhere, let alone on WordPress, is probably daunting. But because WordPress is so popular and used by so many people, it’s easy to get help with a problem.

If you have your website set up with Host X and you’re having problems with the PHP, you can wait to hear back from them or do an online search and try to find the exact problem in the exact server configuration in detail. But the WordPress community has active forums where you can ask questions. And chances are your blogging question has already been asked and answered, so your problem could be solved with a quick search.

Photo Credits: josef.stuefer

Originally posted 2009-05-22 05:58:31. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Joining a blog carnival is capable of allowing you to improve your blog. Have you ever heard of what a blog carnival is all about? Let us go into what it takes for you to join a blog carnival including what the benefits are for participating in a blog carnival.

What is a Blog Carnival? Well, A blog carnival is a collection of articles and blog posts based on a particular subject, but rather being written by a single blogger, they are created by a number of different bloggers and then posted in the same place. The blog carnival involves posting all of the articles and blog posts together on a single blog, which is the host blog. The host blog may be the organizer for the blog carnival or it may be someone completely different. A lot of planning goes into the blog carnival concept in order to make sure that the results are ideal.

The organizer for the blog carnival will generally do the posting of the carnival on a neutral site that is designed to list the existence of blog carnivals such as blogcarnival.com for example. The website is then responsible for listing current, past and upcoming blog carnivals in a format that is easy to use and navigate so that bloggers can find appropriate blog carnivals to suit their needs. The carnivals are typically broke down on these websites into a wide variety of different respective categories and the dates that they will be run on.

So, what benefits are there that you can take out of the blog carnival?

1. You will gain an increase in traffic. This one should be fairly obvious to you. When you are participating in a blog carnival as a blogger, you are going to be making a post that falls into line with the subject of the blog carnival, and then you will send a copy of the post to the organizer of the host, and a link to where you have posted the post. The host will include the link to the post in their blog carnival post. When readers read the blog carnival post, they will click on the link and follow it to your post. Then they will increase your traffic accordingly. You can definitely increase traffic to your blog by participating in a blog carnival, and it only gets ten times better when you host your own blog carnival.

2. You will gain new readers. This one is a little less obvious but still easy. When you increase your traffic, you will be increasing your readership, not only just the number of people that visit. If you are posting informative blogs consistently and your visitors see this, they will find reason to keep reading.

3. You will gain new links back to your blog. These links will increase your ability to get traffic, not only from the blog carnival itself but also from the rest of the internet as well thanks to search engines.

Photo credits: ~jjjohn~

Originally posted 2009-09-18 03:57:39. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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One of the most well known publishers around the globe right now is Packet Publishing, and thy specialize in the development of CMS web applications and open source technologies as well. CMS stands for content management system, and WordPress is an example of what a CMS is capable of. Packet Publishing has put out hundreds of different books on CMS systems including Drupal and WordPress. Its latest effort in this approach to reach out to people about the world of open source is a resource known as WordPress Plugin Development. Developing plugins for WordPress may not be the easiest topic in the world, but it is certainly an advantageous one as it can help businesses and other bloggers improve the capabilities of their blogs through customizations beyond what the current collection of WP plugins would be capable of.

WordPress Plugin Development is a truly practical book that is designed to teach people how they can write enhancements for the WordPress platform using real live examples. Rather than just giving small snippets of code with no real understanding, this book offers the entire script, and a complete walk through for the entire process. If you are looking for a true hands-on approach to writing scripts and publishing WordPress plugins, then you should rest assured that WordPress Plugin Development will allow you to write your own WordPress enhancements in absolutely no time at all. As long as you have a pretty good working understanding of PHP, you should have no trouble writing WordPress plugins of your very own.

Creating add ons for content management systems like WordPress is about more than simply writing the underlying code, and WordPress Plugin Development explains this well. You also are going to want to think about things like security, compatibility and deployment. This WordPress Plugin Development book will teach you how to master the code base used for WordPress plugins, the plug in architecture, the API or application programming interface, how to manipulate data, how to handle permissions and user roles and posts, how to use filters and actions for the creation of more sophisticated code, how to customize menus, as well as sub menus and the plugin panel for admin, how to use jQuery and AJAX, how to better integrate your plug in using tinyMCE and panels, how to publish completed plugins, how to word with third party APIs and also how to localize your installation.

Obviously this book is jam packed with a lot of information about crafting and publishing your own WordPress plugins. The author walks you carefully through the process of creating simple but effective solutions for your content management systems. The scripts may become a bit more complicated, but WordPress Plugin Development teaches how to create secure and hardworking code that is functional and capable of helping you take advantage of everything that the WordPress blogging platform has to offer.

Buy: WordPress Plugin Development (Beginner’s Guide)

Originally posted 2009-05-20 05:50:49. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Keyword analysis is an important part of search engine optimization or SEO, because your keywords will play a vital role in numerous different facets of your website design, creation and ongoing development. Before going into the details about what keyword analysis is, you should first understand a little bit about the SEO process, or how it is that SEO works. The main steps that are involved in the search engine optimization process are to map out a keyword strategy, to optimize the structure of the website, to develop the optimized content and web pages, to launch the link building and advertising or promotional campaign, to analyze the results, and then to refine those results to create even better results.

You should understand at this point that the first step in any good SEO campaign is the keyword analysis step, as this helps to map out what your plans are for the entire search engine optimization campaign. You want to analyze your keywords and then map them out in relation to your website theme and website content. There are a number of different tools available on the internet that will make this process infinitely easier, and Google offers several for you to choose from. Some keyword analysis tools cost more than others, so make sure that you shop around and choose an answer that will suit you not only in capabilities but also in price as well.

You can start off by using free tools for keyword analyzation on your website. Two of the best tools to begin with for this purpose are the external keyword tool from Google, and the free Word Tracker tool. Any time that you are planning a new website you should use these tools to come up with a main keyword phrase that represents the entire theme of your website, and then you should break it down into sub keywords and keyword phrases that come with less competition attached to them. This is possible with the external keyword tool from Google. When you load up the web application, you just have to enter your main keyword phrase into the box and click a button and you will get a whole host of different keyword ideas that you can play around with.

You should be brainstorming in order to find out what keywords and keyword phrases best suit the main keyword phrase for your website, coming up with a sizable list in the process. Next you should discover the core keywords that relate the most closely to the theme of your website. Next you are going to want to create a cluster of keywords, using some low profile keywords to dilute them. Finally, you should be adding this cluster in to your articles and web pages in order to improve the keyword ranking for your web site and in order to improve the search engine optimization for each individual web page.

Photo Credits: fakelvis

Originally posted 2009-05-18 05:44:45. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Why should you have to pay for obtaining traffic to your blog? There is no reason why you should spend a lot of money making your blog friendly for readers, considering that some of the best ways to get blog traffic are free. Attracting free blog traffic can easily net you traffic that is just as high a caliber as paid blog traffic, so spend your money someplace else. Here are two sure-fire ways that you are going to attract free blog traffic, meaning that it will not cost you a penny to bring people to your blog.

1 – Optimize Your Posts for Readers

Simply put, you need to be able to write posts that people are going to want to read. This is something that should come to you as common sense, and yet many people reach out to search engines while forgetting that they have real readers with real interests. You need to use the principles behind writing good online copywriting in order to create headlines and copy that are actually interested to the people that are reading.

If you make a habit out of writing posts that people find to be enjoyable, then these readers are going to reward you in the form of returning to your blog pages on a regular basis.

Your posts should be made to be conversational, topical and pithy. You should make them short and you should stick to a single topic with every post. You should also aim to write regularly and often as well, so that both the readers and the search engines are going to visit and revisit your blog more and more often.

2 – Optimize Your Posts for the Search Engines

Here are some of the most important rules that you need to follow when it comes to getting your posts listed in search engines for the keywords that are most important to you:

1. You need to make sure that the URL of your blog contains the primary search engine keyword that you are looking to optimize for.

2. You need to make use of the primary keywords in the title of every single post that you make, meaning that your titles should always be keyword rich and keyword-driven.

3. You also need to make use of your primary keywords in the body of your post, as well as your secondary keywords. Keep in mind that when using keywords, you want to write keyword-driven content, and keyword-centric content, without writing content that is clearly stuffed full of inappropriate keywords. Write content that centers around the keywords so that the content flows naturally for the best results.

4. Finally, you should use your keywords within the anchor text of any links that you place in the body of your posts. This will give the keyword more emphasis for search engines that spider your website.

Photo Credits: Ed Yourdon

Originally posted 2009-09-16 03:51:34. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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This is part one in a three part series on the steps to increase traffic to blog. If you are looking for quick and simple ways to increase traffic to blog, or more involved ways with bigger returns, keep reading for some great information.

1 – Choose the right platform for your blog, or custom build your own.

The right content management system or CMS is going to make a serious difference in how you increase traffic to blog. If you really want to set yourself apart from other people then you need to find a custom blog solution, or one that you can actually make unique. You want something that you can completely customize to suit your users such as WordPress for example. This will suffice for a long time but then the best way to go from here is to completely customize something your own self for the best possible results. This is the best way to make sure that your blog is completely custom tailored to suit the needs of your readers, which is the best way to increase traffic to blog in the long run.

2 – Host your blog on your own site.

Hosting your blog on a site that is not your own is one of the biggest and worst mistakes that you could ever make. A blog that is on your own domain will attract attention, links, publicity, trust and good search rankings. When you keep your blog on a separate domain however, you are really shooting yourself in the foot. From the worst to the best, your options are a hosted blog, a blog on a unique domain, a blog on a sub domain, and then a blog serving as a sub section of your main domain.

3 – Keep two audiences in mind when you are writing your title tags.

First and foremost, you need to be writing your title tag for the people that are visiting your website, or the people that have a subscription to your RSS feed. Title tags should be short, on topic, snappy and catchy, this is absolutely imperative if you want people to pay attention to what you have to say. You are also, however, going to want to think about search engines when it comes to titling your posts because search engines can help you drive additional traffic to your blog as well. One great way that you can do this is to write your post and your title first, then run some keyword searches to find out if there is a keyword phrasing or a specific ordering of keywords that will help you target your blog posts to the right people.

Photo Credits: nottinghamgamecity

Originally posted 2009-09-14 03:38:55. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Niche marketing is a type of marketing that falls out of the normal realm of mainstream business, or that involves focusing on one specific product or one specific type of need that allows niche marketing businesses to boom. Niche marketing is capable of meaning different things to different people because the idea of mainstream is something that can have a wide variety of different definitions. If most of the people do not belong to a certain niche, then you can consider it a niche market, and while this is not the general definition among everyone, it gets the job done. So when you are marketing within a niche, you are generally aiming to target a very limited selection of all of the people out there – So why should you do it anyway?

Here are five reasons for why you should choose a specific niche and stick to it!

1 – When you dive into a brand new niche market, you generally will not have a whole lot of competition to contend with. This is one of the biggest reasons for why people choose niche marketing in the first place, because it makes your SEO much more effective and will allow customers to find you much more easily.

2 – Niche markets can really appeal to target customers, and target customers are generally much more willing to drop money when it comes to having their specific needs met, meaning that by catering specifically to a niche market you can generally earn more income through your business.

3 – Some niche markets, despite being small, are actually quite highly sought after which means that identifying a need that no one else has met yet can help you find a literal gold mine. People who have that need will flock to your product if it really does provide a solution for them.

4 – Niche marketing will make it possible for you to really focus your efforts and endeavors as you will become a true expert within your own personal niche, and you will be able to build a name for yourself this way. You can produce a lot better when serving only a single niche rather than spreading yourself too thin.

5 – Most niche markets do eventually become mainstream types of markets, so if you are willing to work at it hard enough you may actually be able to take your niche market to the mainstream, which will allow your business to grow and expand exponentially. You will skyrocket your profits much better this way than if you were to simply jump into a mainstream market from the beginning. Rather than attempt to cover a serious mainstream market where the competition may simply drown you, put your money into a small niche market that you can grow with, and you will be tromping the big guns in the business in no time at all.

Photo Credits: meganamyswart

Originally posted 2009-05-15 05:38:19. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Regardless of whether you are writing a blog simply because you enjoy having a lot of people reading your thoughts, or if you are writing a blog because you are looking to generate income, one of the most important things that you need to do is maximize the SEO or search engine optimization potential for your blog so that you can maximize the return on your investment, where the return is anything you want it to be, and the investment is the time and effort that you are putting into keeping your blog going. Without the right amount of search engine optimization, your blog is going to be doomed to simply float around without ever gaining the number of hits that you are hoping to achieve.

What blog SEO is, is the maximization of your blog’s positioning in the results for search engines. Let us say that you are writing a blog about mystery novels. If someone types “mystery novel blog” into the search engine search bar, you are going to want to be one of the first few results, maximizing the chance that the visitor will come to your blog rather than visiting someone else’s. Thousands of blogs may come up, though, so how do you ensure that yours will be at the top of the list and not buried deep in the limbo known as everything following page 2?

Most people never go past the first 30 entries or so when searching, so if your results are not coming up on pages one through three, nobody is ever going to find your blog. If your mystery novel blog is result number 3,493, then nobody is going to be able to find you.

The most important thing that you need to know about good SEO for your blog is link building. You need to improve upon the number of links that are floating around on the internet and pointing back to your blog. You can trade links, submit links on website directories, purchase links or add links to your forum and message board signatures. Over time, you will create enough solid one way links to your blog that your website will go up in the search engine rankings. But using the right link name is vital if you want all of this hard work to go to good use.

The links that you should be using in the example above are things like “top mystery novels” and “mystery novel reviews” or “hot mystery novels”, because these are the things that people will actually be searching for. Make sure that the links to your blog are being named after how people will actually search for you, otherwise your links will not be effective.

With a solid effort on the search engine optimization front, your blog will be able to garner the kind of traffic that you were hoping for, and link building is going to play a truly vital role in this process.

Photo Credits: Lall

Originally posted 2009-05-13 05:07:48. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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If you are trying to learn how to get traffic to your blog, then you will benefit from the tips in this series, which are designed to show you the necessary steps for how to get traffic to your blog. When you have the right tips, tricks and resources in your arsenal, then that is when you can truly be successful in gaining traffic to your blog. There are twenty tips in all that you need to keep in mind when it comes to learning how to increase blog traffic. In the first post of this series we touched on the first seven, followed by an additional six in the next post, and here are the final seven tips.

1 – Create a blog roll on the side bar or at the bottom of your blog site so that you can publicize links for your favorite blog sites online. Let the bloggers know you put them in your blog roll and you may just get a little bit of reciprocation in return.

2 – Post links to relevant blogs and blog posts in your posts when you are creating blog content. Creating links and references to other blog entries and blog websites will actually increase traffic to your blog just as well as to the blogs you’re linking. This is especially useful when track backs are used because it lets the blog owner and their readers know that you mentioned them.

3 – Learn how to write blog entries that are short without compromising value and that are interesting, even in a small space. This will allow you to improve your ability to blog more frequently for an increase in blog traffic. Don’t be afraid to continue offering comprehensive studies and lists as well, occasionally.

4 – Put effort into the promotion of your most popular blog postings when you are blogging. Write a post that details your top 10 or 10 most popular blogs of the best. Refer to your best blogs in newer entries when the subjects are relevant, or reference old posts while updating the information they contained.

5 – Create a newsletter that operates separately from your blog, and invite your blog readers to become subscribers. Now you have a new way of advertising your blog, as you can link back to your blog in every newsletter that you send.

6 – Utilize offline methods for promoting your blog just as often as online methods. Make sure that your auto signature, your business card and any other marketing or print materials that you have are adorned with your blog address so that people can find you online more easily.

7 – Pay close attention to your blogging traffic reports. Learn from the statistics that you receive and use that information to update the keywords that you use accordingly. The more that you are able to fine tune your writing to your blog traffic reports, the better the results will be.

Photo Credits: Martino’s doodles

Originally posted 2009-09-11 03:39:32. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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