One area that is commonly overlooked is the feed. Much like the blog itself, the feed can be enhanced to make a blog more profitable or effective for subscribers. In particular, this post will look at the subject of the feed footer and how it can be used for something beneficial. If you’re like me you may have installed one of a handful of WordPress plugins to work with the feed footer, but neglected to keep this up-to-date and useful for subscribers.

10 Ways to Get More Out of Your Feed Footer:

1 - Add a Copyright and Link to Yourself

Most blogs have the feed stolen at least from time-to-time, if not every day. By having a copyright in your feed footer and a link to your blog you’ll at least be doing something to prevent others from taking credit for your work. Now when they scrape your feed they’ll also be publishing your copyright and your link.

2 - Include Ads

Ads in footers are used by some bloggers, but they’re still not that common. FeedBurner and Google offer easy options for putting AdSense into your feed, or you can sell banner ads or text ads. If you don’t have the option of the desire to sell ads in your feed footer, you could also include affiliate links or banners to promote specific products or services that relate to your content. Don’t expect any ads in your feed footer to have extremely high conversions, but you still may be able to get some additional monetization this way.

3 - Cross Promote Your Other Blogs

Many bloggers, myself included, run more than one blog. By promoting your other blogs in your feed footer you can help to convert some of your readers from one blog into readers of the other blog(s). You can simply link to the blog homepage, or you could point out popular posts from your other blog, but it’s also a good idea to include a link to your other feed so if people want to quickly subscribe without even visiting the other site, they can. Your loyal readers will value your content and they will be quicker to subscribe than others.

4 - Give Something Away to Your Subscribers

Feed footers are also a great way to provide a giveaway to encourage new subscribers. One example is Chris Garrett, who gives away a free ebook to subscribers. Chris’ feed footer includes a link to the ebook, so it’s an easy, hands-free way to use a giveaway to build subscribers.

5 - Link Exchange with Other Sites

This is not something I’ve ever done, nor am I aware of other bloggers that are doing it, but I think it could be a mutually beneficial situation for those involved. The idea here is to find a few other bloggers in your niche, preferably with roughly the same number of subscribers, and each one can include a short list of recommended blogs in their feed footer, with each one linking to the others’ blogs. Of course, if you do this be sure that you’re partnering with other blogs that you can honestly recommend.

6 - Point Out Popular Posts

Popular post lists are commonly used in blog sidebars to point visitors towards content that they’re most likely to appreciate, but they can also be used in feed footers. I used this method a long time ago on my primary blog with moderate success. While the listed posts didn’t get floods of visitors from these links, they did get some traffic, and it can be a helpful way to point out some of your older content to subscribers who may not have been around when it was posted. I think it’s key here to rotate the posts that are linked every now and then to keep it fresh and give subscribers something different to see.

7 - Sell Your Own Products or Services

If you’ve extended your blog to include products and/or services, why not use the feed footer to promote the products/services? This is not something that I’ve done in the past, but I plan to try it in the near future. your subscribers have come to know and trust you as they read your blog on a regular basis, so they’re probably a great market for your products or services. Including a brief promo in your footer is a rather subtle way to advertise yourself and it doesn’t need to come off as being to pushy to your readers.

8 - Encourage Social Media Votes

Many bloggers are interested in social media traffic. Why not put a brief statement in your footer to ask for readers to vote for your posts if they appreciate the information and if they think others would like it as well? FeedBurner’s FeedFlare can allow you to easily add some links for voting, but you could also include your own message to encourage votes.

9 - Promote a Newsletter

A growing number of bloggers are also building newsletters through their blogs. If this applies to you, you could gain some additional exposure for your newsletter by mentioning in your feed footer and giving some basic instructions for subscribing.

10 - Teasers for Upcoming Content

From time-to-time on my primary blog I’ve mentioned an upcoming post and asked visitors to subscribe if they wanted to be sure to not miss the upcoming post(s). From my experience this works fairly well for gaining new subscribers, but teasers in feed footers can also prepare those who are already subscribed for the upcoming content. Having subscribers is one thing, getting them to actually read your feed is another. If they’re looking forward to a particular post, the chances are much better that they’ll actually pay attention to your posts. Of course, if you do this you’ll want to be sure to update the teaser when it’s no longer applicable.

WordPress Plugins for Working with Footers:

PostPost - While there are a number of plugins for editing footers, PostPost was the first one I tried and I have never wanted to use another. It looks like this plugin hasn’t been updated in a while, but it still works for me on newer versions of WordPress with no issues. The reason I like PostPost is because it’s very simple. You have an options page in your dashboard that lets you control what is shown before and after your feed, as well as before and after your posts on your blog. The only option I use if after the feed. Simply enter the HTML code of what you want to be displayed, and you’re done. Links, banners, whatever you want, it’s very easy.

RSS Footer - Joost de Valk has a very popular plugin for this purpose called RSS Footer. Joost’s plugin will let you add whatever you want to your footer and it will default to a link back to the original post, which is great for fighting scrapers.

Feed Footer - The Feed Footer plugin has been around for a while and is another popular option. It works basically the same, add whatever you want to your footer.

How Do Your Use Your Feed Footer?

Now that we’ve looked at some options for how you can use your feed footer, please consider taking a moment to share your own experiences with your footer.

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You’ll notice below the list there is a link to submit news and a link for the news feed. First, the feed will be kept separate from the main RSS feed, so if you’re subscribed to the main feed already you don’t have to worry about getting unwanted news updates. Nothing will change unless you subscribe to the news feed.

If you have something that you would like to share in the community news, please feel free to use the submission form, that’s what it’s there for. You are welcome to submit your own posts as well as those of others, but not everything will get posted, they’ll all be moderated for relevance and quality.

If you have any suggestions, please let me know. (There may be some upcoming changes to the styling of the news list. It’s 2:15 AM and I can’t think straight at this point).

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Design Bump

Design Bump is a niche site for web and graphic designers. The audience of the site is similar to that of Design Float, another popular site in the niche. Design Bump has grown a respectable audience in just a few months of existence.

PrettySocial

Pretty social is a niche social news site for women that includes news on fashion, health, beauty and celebrities. You can submit and vote on stories in typical social news style.

SugarLoving

While we’re on the topic of social news sites for women, SugarLoving is also worthy of a mention. Topics of stories include love and sex, fashion and beauty, home and garden, mind and beauty, and more.

Earner’s Club

Earner’s Club is a social news site dedicated to internet marketing, making money online, and related topics. There’s a lot of good content here if this is an area of interest for you.

Tip’d

Tip’d is a social news site for finance-related content. Social media expert Muhammad Saleem is the Community Director for Tip’d, which is off to a great start.

WPscoop

WordPress users and designers will be happy to know that there is a niche news site especially for WordPress-related content. If you can’t get enough of WordPress, be sure to check out WPscoop.

PetZume

PetZume is one of several niche sites that focuses on pets and pet lovers. The site is well-designed and there is a lot to do, including watching videos and creating your own page.

Have Any Suggestions?

Many of the sites on the categorized list of social media sites have been suggested by readers. If there are others that you would like to see included please leave a comment or use the contact form.

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1. To Promote Your Own Work

As I already mentioned, this is often the first assumption for those who are new to social media, and it’s an obvious reason. Whether you’re going to submit your own content or not, having a strong profile can help to get more attention to your blog, or to your posts on other blogs.

At some social media sites it can be frowned upon to submit your own content, primarily Digg, but at others it’s perfectly acceptable by the audience. Even if you’re not submitting your content at Digg, you may want to send shouts to some of your friends when someone else has submitted your content. Twitter is also commonly used to quickly send out a link to a new post, and this is very effective for those bloggers who have a large following.

2. To Promote Your Freelance or Guest Posts

I do a good bit of freelance blogging and for the most part those who are paying me are going to be measuring the results in terms of how many people see the posts I’ve written and how many links they draw. For this reason, getting a freelance post to become “popular” with social media can keep the blog owners happy and keep more work coming.

While I don’t stumble the content on my own blogs I typically will stumble my own posts on other blogs (if I think it’s worthy), and I see this as a way of increasing the value of my services. If the blog owner is paying for results, I can help to get those results by promoting the post via social media. The same thing can be applied to guest posts on other blogs.

3. To Help Friends

As you build your blog you’ll no doubt develop some relationships with other bloggers. One of the great things about blogging is that others in your niche aren’t necessarily competition. Being able to help your friends to get some extra exposure is a nice benefit to having a strong profile.

4. Just for Fun and Socializing

Social media can be noting more than entertainment if that’s what you want it to be. If this is the case for you, building a strong profile can help to enhance your experience on the site and it can open up opportunities for you to meet more people.

5. To Be Recognized as a Leader

By having a strong social media profile you may be able to improve your recognition by others in your niche, specifically if your strong profile is at a niche social media site. In this case, you may be seen by others as being a leader in your niche because of the influence that you have at the social media site.

6. As a Compliment to Your Blog

One trend that’s becoming more popular, especially with Twitter, is for bloggers to use social media as a supplement to a blog. Many bloggers post a link to their Twitter profile on their blog and they’ll send out tweets when new posts are published. In these cases, the bloggers are using the profile as a way to expand the reach of their blog.

7. For Consulting

Social media consulting is becoming a more common service as more companies and website owners are recognizing the importance and impact of social media. If you hope to offer consulting services, having a strong profile is almost essential. It will give you the credibility that others will expect from a consultant.

8. To Charge for Submissions

Like it or not, some top social media users charge others to have their content submitted (see Invesp’s interview with a top Digg user). In some cases this goes hand-in-hand with consulting. You may be paying for someone’s expertise and guidance, or you may be paying for them to submit the content to help the chances of becoming popular.

9. To Avoid Being Left Behind

Other bloggers are using social media and their profiles as a way to expand the reach and effectiveness of their blogs. Simply put, if you’re not doing this, you are at a disadvantage. If you want to avoid being left behind you should become active at a few choice social media sites.

What Are Your Reasons?

Why do you work on building a social media profile?

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When I started blogging I had no intentions of doing it long-term or making money from a blog, I just wanted to add some content to a static website, so I added a blog. However, a few months later I started to see how much potential existed. I now have three blogs that make money directly (although this one only makes a small amount), plus I do a good bit of freelance blogging for additional income and my primary blog indirectly promotes my design service. My blogging efforts have always been part-time (at least for now), so I know that it’s possible to have some success on a part-time basis starting from scratch.

Tips for Building a Blog Part-Time:

Have Realistic Expectations, but be Aggressive

During the time that I’ve been blogging, I’ve come across a huge number of bloggers who start out with so much enthusiasm and passion for building their blog and earning a substantial income. Unfortunately, most of them no longer have the same dedication to their blog or expectations for the future, because the reality was disappointing to them.

If you start out by expecting to earn six figures by working part-time hours, you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed, even if others would consider your results successful. Those who have realistic expectations of what they’ll get out of their blog and what they’ll have to put in will usually be able to stick around long enough to see the fruits of their labor.

Although I think it’s important to realize how much work and time is involved in building a blog, I also think it’s important to be aggressive and to go after success. Those bloggers who I know personally that have done very well did not just put in some effort to see what would happen. Aggressively go after success and it is very achievable.

Approach it for the Long-Term

As I said earlier, building a blog takes time. If you go in with the approach that you’re building an asset that will help you more in the long-term than it will in the short-term, you’ll have an outlook that prepares you for success. Very few bloggers are able to build a strong blog overnight, and if you’re willing to put in a lot of hours early on without a whole lot of reward, you’ll be paid off in the long run. If you’re looking for a short-term answer to making money online, there are better methods than blogging.

Find Your Motivation

Building a blog part-time will require you to make sacrifices in order to dedicate time to your blog. Maybe you’ll lose some time with family and friends, or maybe you’ll have to temporarily give up something that you enjoy. During these times you’ll need to have something that motivates you to keep going. By knowing specifically why you want to build a successful blog, you can always keep that motivation in mind when you’re questioning why you are making sacrifices.

Focus on Building it First, Making Money will Come Later

When it comes to monetizing a blog, I’ve tried both approaches - monetizing from the start and waiting several months before attempting to monetize. Actually, when I waited to sell ads at Vandelay Design I was actually monetizing the blog through design services and freelance writing, so it’s not like I was making nothing for the 6+ months with no ads.

After trying both approaches, I think my next blog launch (whenever that may be) will have no ads for a while. Making money from ads with a new site is possible, but the space used for ads may be better off being used to promote something on the site and helping to encourage growth.

Whether you sell ads at first or not, the main focus should be on building a strong blog, not on making as much money as possible. A blog that’s full of valuable, well-targeted content will have plenty of opportunities to make money, but if your focus is on the money rather than the content, the results are likely to suffer.

Set Your Weekly Schedule

Some bloggers encourage a very structured posting schedule and others prefer more flexibility. Personally, I think it all depends on the blog and the style of the blogger. However, even if you’re not scheduling your posts, it’s helpful to have a rough schedule of when you’ll be working on your blog each week. Building a blog takes time and effort, and it’s easy to let other things take priority if the time isn’t scheduled.

Get the Support of Your Family

Depending on your current family situation, your blogging efforts may impact others in a big way. You may be willing to make some sacrifices, but others will also have to be willing. It’s important that those in your family are made aware of your intentions and why you’re doing it. I know I wouldn’t be able to dedicate the time that I do if my wife wasn’t behind me 100%. We both make sacrifices right now, with hopes that it will pay off in the long run.

Set Monthly Goals

As a part-time blogger you’ll need something to keep you going from time-to-time, and you’ll also need some direction in order to keep yourself on the right path. By setting measurable monthly goals you’ll always have something to be working towards, and it will be easy to see how you are progressing.

One of the keys to setting goals is to set the right goals. If you’re main priority is making money, then income should be one of your most significant goals. Other things like pageviews, subscriber growth, inbound links, etc. can ultimately help to make you more money, but don’t lose focus of what’s most important to you, whatever that may be.

Get Involved in the Community

One of the biggest factors in building my primary blog was the help and support of others in the blogging community. Whatever niche you are in there are certainly other bloggers that would be valuable members of your network. Take some time to comment on other blogs, use Twitter, write guest posts, even visit some forums.

You’ll find that blogging is extremely interactive, and it’s pretty hard to build a successful blog without surrounding yourself with other bloggers. People help those that they like and they also tend to follow the blogs of other that they’ve gotten to know on a deeper level.

Find Your Style

One of the biggest mistakes bloggers can make is trying to be like the leading blogs in their niche. There’s nothing wrong with learning from others and observing what works, but make a strong effort to find your own identity and go out of your way to be unique. Do whatever it is that you do best and give others the opportunity to take notice. This is especially important in crowded niches where readers have plenty of other blogs that they could be reading.

Focus on Quality Over Quantity

When it comes to quantity of posts, there is a huge variety. Some bloggers post a few times per month, and others crank out several per day. There is no right or wrong, but make sure you’re allowing yourself enough time to create the highest quality content possible. One really strong post per week is better than 3 or 4 mediocre posts.

Limit the Number of Projects at One Time

As a part-time blogger you’ll be stretched for time as it is. Most likely you’ll have plenty ideas of other projects that you could be starting, but resist the temptation to take on too much, at least until your blog is established. Often, building the blog’s audience in the early days will take more time that it will to maintain the blog in the future, so your schedule may open up a bit if you can be patient.

This is something that I struggle with personally. I currently have 3 blogs and although I post to each one a few times per week, I know that they’re not as strong as they would be if I had fewer responsibilities. In my case, I’m able to manage the three, but it’s not an optimal situation for a one-man operation.

Know What You Want

In terms of income, there is a huge variety of goals from one blogger to the next. One person may want to make $300 a month and another may want to be John Chow and make $30,000 a month. It’s important to know what you want so you can always keep that in mind when you’re working on building the blog. Don’t let others tell you what you should be making or what you should be after, it’s a decision you’ll have to make for yourself.

Celebrate Minor Victories

Because building a blog part-time can take a great deal of discipline and persistence, it’s a good practice to be able to appreciate and enjoy even your minor accomplishments. What you do to celebrate or acknowledge your achievements is up to you, but it’s important that it gives you a sense of satisfaction, yet still motivates you to do even better.

Pay Attention to How You Use Your Time

Efficiency is critical for part-time bloggers. There’s very little time to waste, so pay attention to how you are spending your time and what is producing results. Use a to-do list and daily goals to keep yourself on track and you’ll find that you get more done and you waste less time.

Find Multiple Sources of Income

Selling ad space isn’t the only monetization option for bloggers. I highly advocate mixing in some other sources of income, such as some type of relevant service. Doing freelance writing for other blogs can also help hold you over until your own blogs are producing more income.

Learn from the Best

Take some time to really examine the leading blogs in your niche, or even in other niches. Take notice to what they’re doing to create success and see how you can apply it to your own blog. Make an effort to get to know some of the leading bloggers in your niche, you never know what you’ll be able to pick up from them. Personally, doing freelance work for blogs like Smashing Magazine and Freelance Switch has helped me to get to know some successful and influential bloggers and I’ve learned some things about what it takes to create an A-list blog.

What’s Your Advice for Others?

If you have some advice of your own for part-time bloggers, please leave a comment.

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A Little Background Information from My Experience

When I started selling ads I wanted to handle everything myself, rather than using a third party service that would take a portion of the ad revenue. This is a personal choice that will vary from blogger to blogger, but I’ve since changed my approach and I’m now using a third party service on all three of my blogs. At some point the convenience and ease of this approach made it worth the money to go with a third party. I don’t think any approach is better than another, it’s just a matter of what works best for you in your specific situation.

Banner Ad Marketplaces:

The following services will not only help you to display the ads on your blog, but they’ll also help you to sell ad space. Although they take a cut of the revenue, the idea is to save yourself the time of managing the ads and to take advantage of their marketplace to earn higher dollar amounts, which may offset the commission that they take.

BuySellAds

I started using BuySellAds here on Traffikd several months ago, although I was skeptical of the service at that point. Like I mentioned earlier, I handled everything manually at my primary blog, so I figured I would test out BuySellAds here. Since that time I’ve launched a third blog, DesignM.ag, where I decided to go with BuySellAds from the start, and just this month I switched the ads on the Vandelay Design blog to use BSA as well.

BuySellAds takes 25% of the ad revenue, which is reasonable, but their system makes the process easy for advertisers and for publishers. It’s nice to check your email and see that an ad has been sold and is already being displayed (you can set them to require your approval or to display automatically) without any effort of your own.

My experience with BSA has been very positive overall. The customer service is excellent if you have any problems, and it’s very easy to get set up quickly. From my observations it seems like most of their market belongs to tech-related blogs or tech-savvy audiences. For bloggers who want an easy hands-free approach to selling ads, I recommend trying buy sell ads. One of the nice things about their service is that it’s not limited to 125 x 125 ads, you can specify the dimensions of the ads.

Performancing Ads

Performancing Ads was launched a few months ago, and they seem to have been pretty successful so far. Performancing, of course, is a Technorati Top 100 blog with a large and established audience of bloggers. I haven’t personally used the service, and the terms listed on their website are somewhat vague, in my opinion. With Performancing Ads you can either sell 125 x 125 ads, or you can participate in a traffic/ad exchange with other publishers. Published opinions of their service are very mixed.

Blog Ads

Blog Ads is an invitation-only ad network. Their commission of revenue is 30% for those blogs in their network. You can get accepted into their program by being sponsored by someone that you know, or you can contact them and they’ll notify you when a sponsor becomes available in your niche.

Ad Serving:

In addition to the marketplaces listed above, bloggers can also take advantage of ad servers that are available to help them manage and track results, although they will not sell the ads for you. Some of these options are more involved than the average blogger would need, as they are intended to be a comprehensive solution for larger sites.

OpenX

OpenX (formerly OpenAds) is a free, open source ad server with plenty of potential. It offers advanced inventory management and targeting tools as well as stats and reporting. It’s a great option for those who have serious online businesses, but probably more than what’s necessary for the average blogger.

Google Ad Manager

Google Ad Manager was launched a few months ago and has been perceived to be an “OpenX killer.” Google Ad Manager is also a free ad management service with all kinds of options. When it was launched I signed up for an account to give it a try, but I decided it was more than I needed at this point. It has lots of options for companies that have a team of people selling ads and just about any tool or report you can imagine. My opinion is that small bloggers are better off with a simplified solution since all the bells and whistles won’t even be used.

OIO Publisher

OIO Publisher is a bit of a unique option as it is an ad server and a WordPress plugin (meaning, you don’t have to be using WP, but it’s a simple solution if you are). The cost for a lifetime membership is $47. OIO Publisher will help you to sell ads without the middleman, and it will help you to manage the ads on your blog. I did use OIO Publisher for a while, but I only used a fraction of the options available. I have a few friends who have very good things to say about their experience with OIO Publisher.

Atlas AdManager

Atlas is another advanced option along the lines of OpenX and Google Ad Manager. The emphasis is on forecasting and related tools.

WordPress Plugins:

For blogger using WordPress, there are a number of plugins that are available for ad management. Most of these options are simple and not as feature-rich as advanced ad servers, but that’s usually what bloggers need, without all the features they won’t use anyway.

WP125

I looked for a while for a simple plugin that would handle and rotate banner ads, and WP125 was the best option that I found. I used it on my primary blog for a few months before deciding to go the route of BuySellAds. WP125 is very simple to use. All you do is activate the plugin and enter ad details, such as the banner URL, the URL the banner should link to, and the date the banner will expire. If you want to sell your own banners, I highly recommend this plugin, although it only supports 125 x 125 banners.

WPAds

WPAds is an older plugin that hasn’t been updated in a while. It was one of the more popular plugins for ad management, but be careful if you’re using a newer version of WordPress, as it may not have been tested.

UBD Block Ad Plugin

The UBD Block Ad Plugin (from Unique Blog Design) is not one that I’ve used personally, but it looks promising. The features and functionality seems to be very similar to WP125.

Show125

Show125 is also similar to WP125 and UBD Block Ad Plugin. From the WP control panel you’ll have easy management of your ads without getting into the coding.

What’s Your Experience?

If you sell ads or use affiliate banners on your blog, what tools do you use?

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There have been several guides written in the past on the subject of increasing or maximizing pageviews, of course some are better than others. Some of the advice given falls into the category of tricks that can hurt the usability of the site and have adverse effects in the long run. For example, using partial feeds is sometimes recommended so that more subscribers will click through since they can’t read the content without doing so. Also, splitting up posts onto multiple pages is another tactic that’s sometimes used. Methods like these are those that I personally stay away from (although splitting posts onto multiple pages can be justified in some situations).

My approach to increasing pageviews per visitor is to try to give them a reason to continue on the site rather than by using a gimmick. Helpful sites will experience happy visitors that stick around, and that will produce better long-term results, in my opinion.

When I redesigned my primary blog, Vandelay Design, several months ago, one of my primary goals was to increase the average number of pageviews by putting more useful information within easy reaching distance of subscribers and first-time visitors alike. My average pageview stats on the blog have never been anything too get excited about, in part because many visitors come from social media sites, but I wanted to see a noticeable improvement. Starting almost immediately after the redesign, and continuing now for several months, the average number of pageviews has increased by about 0.5 pages per visitors. That’s certainly not drastic improvement, but it does result in more than 100,000 extra pageviews per month with the same number of visitors.

Take a moment to do some math. A website/blog that draws 25,000 visitors per month with an average of 1.5 pageviews per visitor will have 37,500 pageviews. If you were to experience a 25% increase in number of visitors still with 1.5 pageviews per visitor, you would have 46,875 pageviews. However, by increasing the average to 2 pageviews per visitor you could reach 50,000 pageviews without even gaining a single extra visitor.

Websites and blogs that naturally generate more pageviews (as opposed to using tricks) will generally be more useful and more user-friendly. Focusing on these issues will help to build loyalty from visitors and they’ll be more likely to come back when they need something specific, because they’ll know where to find it.

Challenges for Increasing Pageviews for Bloggers:

All website owners face challenges when attempting to improve the average number of pageviews. Bloggers face some of the typical challenges along with others that are unique to blogging.

Loyal Readers

Believe it or not, building loyal readers can sometimes decrease the number of pages those visitors see per visit. Some loyal readers will read everything you publish. In this case, it’s likely that they’ll see one page before leaving to go somewhere else. If they’ve already read your old posts it’s possible that they stop by each day just to see a new post and never browse through the archives or follow internal links.

Although these readers may just visit one page before leaving, that certainly doesn’t mean that loyal readers are bad for a blog. Not even close. However, if you do have a lot of visitors that come back each time you post something new, be aware that this does present some challenges.

Social Media Visitors

Most items that get significant traffic from social media are blogs of one kind or another. Social Media visitors are well-known for their short attention span and their quick trigger to leave a site. Encouraging more pageviews for Diggers or Stumblers certainly is possible, but it is also a challenge.

Outbound Links

Many bloggers use a lot of outbound links, and it’s a good practice, especially for new bloggers looking to get noticed, but it also leads some visitors away from you blog, never to return. While outgoing links aren’t something that you should avoid, you need to also realize the impact that they can have in terms of losing visitors and you should have some efforts in place to keep visitors that don’t want to click on outbound links, rather than just losing them too.

Tips for Improving Pageviews:

Use Internal Links Within Posts

Sidebars are often used for a bulk of the navigation of a blog. Unfortunately, many visitors don’t pay much attention to sidebars, and subscribers who are just reading a feed won’t even see them. By using links within you posts in appropriate places you can get those links in the eyes of more readers/visitors and place them in a way that will use the context to encourage click-throughs.

Link to Related Posts at the End of a Post

There are a lot of related post plugins that you can use if you want to automate this, but I personally prefer including some manually created links to posts that I want to highlight. I do this a lot on my primary blog, with good results, but it’s something I need to do more of here at Traffikd. By creating the links manually you can have more control over which links are included (some plugins aren’t very accurate) and you can usually make the links more noticeable to readers, as many tend to ignore lists or related posts.

Make Sidebars as Useful as Possible

While many visitors will ignore sidebars, some will pay attention to them, and for this reason it’s an important part of the blog design/theme. Focus on providing links to content that will attract visitors, rather than just placing a list of categories or archives by date. I like to use a popular post section, but I’m bad at updating the list when new posts become popular.

Keep Pages Loading Quickly

If a blog’s pages load very slowly, visitors will eventually stop visiting more pages, sometimes sooner rather than later. A blog that has quick-loading pages is a pleasure to browse and it encourages more clicks.

Make Use of Pages, Not Just Posts

The most visited page/post on this blog is the list of social media websites (although it does need to be updated). It’s easy to focus on creating new posts and forget about the opportunity to set up pages that are more timeless. Think of some ways that you can extend your blog by using pages. A good example is Creating a Blog from Scratch at Blog Design Blog. Vinh uses a page to link to several related posts on a common topic, and it serves as a landing page that can funnel traffic to other parts of the blog.

Cover Related Topics

If you write series of posts or just write on related topics you’ll have more opportunities to use internal links to point to older posts.

Improve Old Posts

Many bloggers, myself included, tend to overlook opportunities to improve old posts. If you have posts that draw decent amounts of search engine traffic, go back to those posts and look for places where you can link to other posts and pages on your blog. These could be newer posts that didn’t exist when the original post was published, but they may be very relevant and helpful for visitors.

Focus on Being Useful

In general, make an effort to give readers a positive experience and you should see improvements in pageviews. Often the focus goes to creating new content and we overlook how visitors are able to interact with the site, and its general usability. Focus on making a great overall blog and the results will come.

What’s Your Experience?

This post does cover some things that I’ve learned through my blogging experience, but it’s also a list of things I need to work on myself. What have you experienced to impact the number of pages that your visitors view?

For more on growing a blog, see:

• 7 Ways to Extend a Blog
• Using Pages Instead of Posts for Social Media Traffic

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ScribeFire Blog Editor

There are a number of offline blog editors that work with the major blogging platforms, but if you’re looking for a blog editor to use from inside Firefox, give ScribeFire a try.

“ScribeFire is a full-featured blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. You can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, upload images, and post to multiple blogs.”

TimeTracker

Running a successful blog requires efficient use of your time. The TimeTracker add-on will make it easy to see how much time your spending in your browser.

“Do you spend too much time on Firefox? Do you open tabs faster than you can close them? Cannot get things done? Keep track of how much you browse with TimeTracker.”

Sage

While there are plenty of choices when deciding on an RSS reader, Sage will function from within Firefox and integrates with its bookmark system.

“Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed reader extension for Mozilla Firefox. It’s got a lot of what you need and not much of what you don’t.”

LinkChecker

Many bloggers use a lot of links withing their posts, but testing the validity of those links can be tedious and time consumer. With the LinkChecker add-on you can quickly and easily find dead links in your posts.

“Check the validity of links on any webpage.”

Rank Checker

Rank Checker is one of my favorite add-ons because of its potential and its ease of use. Aaron Wall created rank checker and he even provides a brief video that will show you everything you need to know about using it.

“Want to know where your website ranks in the search results? Our Firefox Rank Checker extension allows you to easily check your website rankings in Google (US and international), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live search.”

SEO Link Analysis

For doing some research and analysis on your own website/blog or on a competitor, SEO Link Analysis will provide you with plenty of information quickly.

“Link data in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Webmaster Portal is pretty static, they give you the pages a site has links on, and let you do all the analysis with other tools. That sucks if you want to do a quick analysis of a site, or want to get a quick overview of inbound anchor texts for a site. This Firefox extension gives you a bit more information when opening such pages, it gathers the PageRank for the linking page, the anchor text used on the link, and checks whether the link is nofollowed or not.”

Link Diagnosis

Another excellent add-on for link analysis, Link Diagnosis will give you some of the same information as SEO Link Analysis. Try them out and see which one works best for your purposes.

“This tool can show you all the important information about your competitor’s links. The report includes pagerank, anchor texts, no-follow information and more.

* see Google Pagerank of every backlink
* see Anchor text of every backlink
* see if links are no-follow
* see most popular anchor texts
* see charts with breakdown of pagerank and link types
* CSV exports
* Firefox 3 support”

Zemanta

Depending on the type of blogging you do and the content that you produce, Zemanta may be a fun and efficient tool for improving your process.

“Zemanta expands the author’s regular blogging dashboard, populating it on the fly with content suggestions relevant to the current text. It presents images, links, articles, tags in a simple interface. It encourages re-use and linking to other content with as little effort as possible – a single click.”

Clipmarks

Clipmarks is part bookmarking, part social sharing. If you do a lot of surfing, like most bloggers do, this could be a handy resource to keep track of things that you find and to share the best with your friends.

“Instead of copying and pasting links, Clipmarks is like adding a pair of scissors to your browser, letting you capture exactly what you want others to see (text, images or video). Your clips are saved on clipmarks.com and can easily be syndicated to FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook or other sites. You can also post anything you clip directly to your blog (supports Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and more) or send it directly to friends or co-workers via email. Clipmarks also gives you a way to help the environment by printing only the parts of a page that you need. By printing just what you need, you’ll save ink, paper and trees, thus making a contribution to a cleaner environment.”

Copy as HTML Link

If your use a lot of links in your posts, Copy as HTML Link could give you a nice boost in efficiency.

“Creates an HTML link to the current page using the selected text and copies it (into the clipboard) for pasting into other applications.”

Which Add-Ons Do You Use?

Which Firefox add-ons do you use to help in your blogging efforts?

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Search engine visitors are probably more coveted by bloggers than any other type of traffic. Sure, social media gets plenty of attention (including in my own articles) but most website owners and bloggers would strongly prefer search engine traffic if they had the choice. The problem is that many bloggers don’t feel that search traffic is realistic, because it takes time to develop, and patience is a difficult thing when you’re trying to build a blog.

We’ve probably all read our fair share about the Google sandbox effect or how it takes time before your blog will start seeing significant search engine traffic. I was aware of that too, but seeing the results of sticking with a blog on a consistent basis has been a rewarding experience.

My opinion after about a year and a half of blogging is that most bloggers give up, or at least lose consistency, before any real benefits can be earned through search engine traffic. With so many bloggers desiring elusive search engine visitors, many get discouraged and give up, when if they had been more patient and kept working it could have happened with time.

While my blog still gets a considerable percentage of its visitors from social media, organic Google search traffic is now the number one source most months (unless there is a big rush from StumbleUpon). During the month of September the site received over 62,000 search visitors, mostly from Google. Considering just six months earlier the best month was 17,000, that’s a pretty substantial increase.

The graph below shows search visitors from July 2007 (when I started actively posting) to the end of September 2008.

My opinion is that this is probably not unusual for any blogger that maintains consistent posting and focus on providing content that will attract links. I have a few minor changes that I’d like to make to the site to increase search traffic some more, but for the most part this is just an example of what can result from some persistance.

I know there are other bloggers with far more significant numbers, but in most cases the graph will follow a similar trend, with search traffic steadily increasing over time (the slight decrease that you may have noticed in the graph at the end of 2007 was a result of changing hosts and having some duplicate content because of going from www URLs to non-www URLs. Once that was cleaned up things got back to where they had been). Over the summer Darren Rowse posted a similar graph of his search traffic.

Drawing search engine traffic is not easy, but it’s very achievable with some effort. My approach to drawing search engine traffic has been pretty consistent from the start. While I’m not an SEO expert, I do understand the importance of building a search engine-friendly website/blog, and that is a necessary foundation. I don’t dedicate much time to things like keyword research and on page optimization once the site has been built. Those things I’m sure could help, but most of my time with the blog is spent developing content, some of which is intended to draw links and boost search engine rankings. Social media has of course been a critical factor in this as well.

If you’re a new blogger that’s frustrated with a lack of search engine traffic, I hope the graph of my search engine traffic trends (and Darren’s graph) can serve as some motivation to keep working.

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News-related content may be the exception, as these blogs often just report on current events and the news is what draws the interest from social media users. In this case, breaking the news is more critical than an idea for content development. However, most single-author blogs don’t have the luxury of breaking news, and so idea development is therefore a necessary priority.

Whether your approach is to entertain readers and social media users, educate them on some topic of interest, or stir up some controversy to get them thinking and reacting, the idea behind the content will be the driving factor that impacts everything else.

The Results of Not Focusing on Idea Generation:

1. Content won’t be unique - With so many blogs in most niches and many that are going after social media traffic, a lack of emphasis on idea development will likely lead to content that is not unique, and will therefore struggle to interest social media us

2. It won’t have a hook - The best content for social media marketing will have some hook that captures the attention of readers and draws them to respond by voting for it on social media, linking to it, leaving a comment, or taking some other type of action. This usually doesn’t happen by accident.

3. Any visitors that arrive are unlikely to come back - Without unique content you may still be able to draw some social media traffic by leveraging your existing readers and/or your network, but the visitors that arrive as a result will usually be unimpressed and will have little motivation to come back.

4. The content will struggle to draw links - SMM is commonly used as a means for link building purposes, however, simply drawing some traffic from social media will not necessarily result in tons of new inbound links. Unique and original content is necessary to achieve this. Without dedicating time for idea development you’re unlikely to maximize your link building activities.

5. You’ll have to rely heavily on your network for social media success - Many social media marketers will ask their friends and contacts for votes on specific sites from time-to-time. If you have content that’s lacking in originality, you’ll have to rely heavily on your network because the content will be less likely to generate the response you’re looking for on its own.

The results with strong idea development are just the opposite.

Steps to Building Better Ideas:

1. Brainstorm - Great ideas sometimes just hit you, but other times you’ll have to work to come up with them. The first essential step in developing great content is dedicating time to nothing but generating ideas.

2. Keep a journal - When you’re brainstorming you’ll want to keep track of your ideas, good or bad. Those that may not be ready for further development may however lead to another idea that has better potential. With an active routine that involves brainstorming and a journal, you’ll always have some existing ideas and you won’t lose track of your best ones.

3. Observe - You’ll want to analyze what content is working for others with social media and use that knowledge to develop your own content. Of course, original content will not copy the ideas of others, but you can learn a lot about what works and what doesn’t. You’ll also need to analyze your own results to continually improve.

4. Spend time on titles and headlines - Don’t underestimate the impact a post title or a social media submission’s headline can have on its success. This is an area that I personally struggle with, but those who do a good job with titles have a huge advantage.

5. Take some chances - Although you can learn a lot from analyzing the success of past content, sometimes you’ll need to take some chances in effort to hit the homerun. Not everything will be successful with social media, so take some chances and don’t worry about it too much if they’re not successful. Those who are new to social media marketing often get disappointed too quickly. You don’t have to have an exceptionally high success rate to get very positive overall results.

6. Focus on quality ideas not quantity of ideas - The best ideas and the best content will get tremendous results with social media. Rather than having five mediocre blog posts, take the time to really develop your ideas and focus more on quality that quantity.

7. Throw out many more ideas than you use - None of us are so skilled that all of our ideas are good ideas. That’s just part of brainstorming. If we’re focusing on quality rather than quantity, it’s natural that most of our ideas will never be developed. Don’t be afraid to throw out an idea, it’s better to move on and dedicate your time to another idea that has a better chance for success.

Related Posts:

• Social Media Marketing and the Need for Focus
• Social Media Marketing: Getting Long-Term Results
• How to Target Social Media with Specific Posts

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