Welcome to Day 30 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

During these 30 days I’ve written in-depth about the top tactics for getting traffic. It’s essential to work at least the most important methods into your daily focus.

Quality of Traffic

Tons of website owners and bloggers think, “How am I going to get a lot of traffic?”

When really they should be asking themselves, “How am I going to get a lot of quality traffic?”

1 hit from a high source of traffic is often better than 100 hits from a low source. For instance, if a well-respected blogger such as Darren Rowse has provided a link to your site on blogging, he has given his internet stamp of approval for your website.

The visitor is likely to spend time reading what you have to say and he will also trust your products/advertisements. If Darren Rowse is raving about you, you don’t need to do much to sell yourself when that traffic comes through.

However, let’s say someone used a traffic exchange to get to your site. This is such a low quality source of traffic that the visitor may not stay but a few seconds, he immediately doesn’t have a lick of trust in your content or you, and he may have even stumbled upon your site looking for content outside of your niche.

Before you put together your strategy, ponder what I consider to be the highest to lowest quality sources of traffic in relation to the sections above.

Traffic Quality Chart

High:

• (Direct Links)
• Traffic from your email list
• Article Marketing
• Forum Marketing
• Guest Blogging
• Viral ebook
• Viral Video
• Search Engine Traffic
• Pay-Per-Click

Low:

• Social Bookmarking
• Traffic Exchanges

Your Focus

Unless you work 8-hours-per-day or hire help, it’s unlikely you can do all of these effectively. What we do know, however, is this. On a daily basis you should aim for generating traffic from at least one high quality source.

Objectives #1 and #2 are necessary for long-term traffic:

Your #1 objective should be linkbuilding.

Linkbuilding leads to both high quality direct traffic and long-term search engine traffic. Use all of the methods above, from viral linking campaigns, to guest blogging, to utilizing a blog roll in the right way, etc.

Your #2 objective should be either submitting search engine optimized articles to ezines (Article Marketing) or publishing them at your own website. Pros often do both.

Your #3 objective should be harnessing the traffic power of social bookmarking, creating viral media (ebooks and videos), forum marketing, Squidoo, and other things.

Goal Setting

As part of your strategy, set small goals. You can’t look at your traffic generation in absolutes. For example, vow to double your daily traffic each month instead of be upset that you’re not getting 10,000 visitors every day the second month your site’s up.

In other words, don’t expect these techniques to magically make your site as popular as an authority site that’s been on the net for 5 years over night. Although it’s possible if you generate enough incoming links.

Use these techniques. They work.

Hire Help

If you have the money, the best way to effortlessly drive traffic to your site by hiring help (outsourcing). There are skilled individuals on the net who provide services for building links, connecting you with JV partners… They’ll even write content for you for a low price. You can hire someone to do all the dirty work. I recommend Warrior Forum, an online marketing forum since 1997, for finding a contractor. Elance works well too.

Read more about hiring writers.

Warrior Forum is also a goldmine of knowledge. Talk to the members and use the search feature to find out anything you want to know about online business and generating traffic.

Traffic Building Checklist: Stage 1- Getting Started

• Have the right tools for the job (e.g. firefox browser, website stats, autoresponder, etc.)
• Pick a name for site & domain that is easy relatively short and is easy to spell & remember
• Pay for quality hosting
• Have really good content that others will find useful
  • Have your email visible on your site so people can contact you and ask them for feedback
  • Make a goal to add new content every so many day
• Navigating your site should be simple and straightforward. Ask a couple people not familiar with your site to test it out for you.
• Setup stat tracking. I recommend Google Analytics.
• Optimize your site for the search engines
• Setup an email list and make some sort of short special report to entice visitors to opt in to your list

Traffic Building Checklist: Stage 2- Getting Traffic

• Goal Setting- How much traffic do you have, how much do you really want, and how long will it take. A good goal is to have your traffic increase by 1.5 or 2 times each month
• Work on getting links to your site:
  • Find a few reciprocal links. Make a goal to do 1 or 2 a day
  • Find related blogs and forums and begin contributing to the community. Make a goal to leave 5 or more high quality posts a day.
• Using your website stat tracker to figure out what sites are sending you the most traffic.

Traffic Building Checklist: Stage 3- Taking things to the next level

• Goal Setting- Make a goal to contact 10-30 website owners in your niche and brainstorm together ways you can work together to get more traffic.
• Contact email list owners in your niche and suggest a cross promotional campaign to build both your lists.

If I had to do it all over again…

If I had to do it all over again I would do lots of things differently:

1. I would start building an email list from day 1
2. I would have started networking with others in my field from the start
3. Read the whole list of things here

Welcome to Day 29 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

Introduction

Today’s I want to talk about going where the traffic is.

This may sound like a strange idea but bear with me as I believe it to be a worthwhile concept.

This concept was originally introduced to me by Willie Crawford and basically states that if you want to increase traffic to your site then find related sites and look for ways to leverage their traffic.

For example if you want to get more traffic to your Poodle Manicures site then go find the most popular sites about Poodle Manicures and look for ways to leverage their traffic.

Examples

There are numerous ways do this. Here a few of the common ones:

1. If they have a blog you can:
   1. Post meaningful comments and get a link back to your site
   2. Write an informative guest post and get a link back to your site
   3. Request a link exchange with their blogroll
2. If they have a forum there are several ways to use this get traffic.
3. Ask them if you could buy some ad space to advertise your site
4. If they have an email list offer to write an informative email to be sent to their list and get a link to your site in return. This is similar to the guest posting idea for blogging.
5. Post a funny video on youtube with a link to your site

What are your thoughts?

Welcome to Day 28 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

Start with a great product

I cannot stress enough how important it is that you start things with a great product.

Whether it’s an email course or a seminar that you are selling or website with baby names you must have a quality product.

Your success in getting traffic depends on this.

Getting others to bookmark your site and come back to it is a difficult task if all you offer is crap.

Google and other search engines are increasingly able to track visitors behavior on various sites including how many pages they visit and how long they stay.

Google can even determine how often visitors hit the back button when visiting your site. This factors in to your sites’ ranking in the search engines.

The point is if you offer crap you will have difficult time getting consistent traffic.

Be Remarkable

Be remarkable – What does this mean exactly?

Most people think that remarkable means neat or really cool, but it also means something is worth making a remark about.

Being remarkable means your product or company does something that causes people to remark about it to someone else. It’s word of mouth advertising. People of their own free will talk to their friends and family about your product or company or web site.

There is great video explaining the power of being remarkable:
http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/seth-godin-sliced-bread-and-other-marketing-delights/

Remarkable websites get a ton of free word of mouth traffic.

A good example of this is GoogleFight.com which is a silly site that serves no purpose except to entertain. I heard about the site from my wife who heard about it from some 13 year old boys. I have told many people about this and now I am telling you about it because it’s remarkable.

Choosing a Name

Choosing a name for your product, company, and website are very important. You want to choose a name that is memorable and easy to spell. When I buy domains I nearly always purchase a .com as it is easier for people to remember.

Eben Pagan has 3 great videos on marketing and the third video deals almost exclusively with choosing good names.

View all 3 videos:
http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/3-great-marketing-videos-from-eben-w-pagan/

Choosing the Right Domain

Choosing the right domain is an important decision. But there’s more to it than just picking the right name if you want to rank high in the search engines

In the last decade or so over 300 million domains have been registered:
http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/

Of all the search engines out there Google has risen to be the undisputed 900 pound gorilla when it comes to search engines.

I believe it’s number 1 in large part because of it’s commitment to giving quality search results. Google is constantly refining its ranking process.

The problem facing search engines like Google and other search engines is web spam.

Web spam consists of sites that are put on the Internet with absolutely no valuable content. What they display is total rubbish. Their sole purpose is to get visitors to click on their advertisements.

Their presence degrades search results for everyone.

The last thing you want is for Google to mistake your newly purchased domain for web spam.

In order to avoid this we need take a look at what web spammers do and then make sure we not do those things.

One thing they do is usually register their domains for only 1 year.

I recommend registering your domain for 2 years. If you have money to burn then register it for longer. Registration length is one thing Google looks at in ranking sites.

I also recommend getting a .com and not a .info for your domain. A huge percentage of .info sites are web spam.

Some experts have speculated that it is best not to have secure registration for your website (where your personal information is hidden).

Hiding contact information is something web spammers frequently do.

Learn more about web spam:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/051111-230626

In picking a domain, try to get something with your keywords in it.

For my site on Poodle Manicures site I might look for something like:
PoodleManicures.com
BestPoodleManicures.com
A1PoodleManicures.com

Generally speaking, shorter domain names are better. They are easier for people to remember and less prone to people misspelling them.

Avoid fancy spellings or strange names. This is especially important if you are advertising outside the Internet, like on signs, billboards, on radio, etc.

You want people to be able remember your domain. Keep it simple.

Hosting Matters

Picking a good web host that will not go down at random times is very important.

I mean what’s the point of working so hard to get traffic to a site if your hosting is unreliable?

Read about my experience with a bad web host and what I recommend.

Welcome to Day 27 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

Introduction

Producing an informative video and submitting it to YouTube along with your website’s URL can send a hurricane of traffic in your direction.

Case Study:

Blendtec makes high-end blenders costing hundreds of dollars. They got a lot of attention with their “Will it Blend?” videos on youtube.com. They have videos of the blenders blending everything from golf balls to credit cards to glow sticks to even an iPhone. The video of the blender blending an iPod ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8H29jU8Wrs ) has been watched nearly 5 million times.

Don’t forget about the other video sites such as veoh.com, MySpace Video, and a South Korean-based video sharing site called CyWorld.com that actually gets more traffic than YouTube.

For a full list of video sharing sites:
http://www.nickstraffictricks.com/list-of-video-sharing-sites/

Also consider carefully titling your headlines with highly searched keywords and adding a whole lot of search engine optimized content in your description.

Search engines love video sites and so do web surfers.

Your videos don’t always have to informative. Many of the most watched videos are just silly and took very little to produce.

Welcome to Day 26 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

Introduction

Today I want to talk about how to use free stuff that you give away to get more traffic.

If you have an ebook, special report, piece of software, or any digital info that is of value to others you can give it away to others and get traffic in return.

The goal here is to give away something of real value and get readers to forward it to their friends.

To keep things simple we are going to assume that you’re giving away an ebook though these ideas apply to other things as well.

Creating the ebook

You must start with something of value, cannot stress this enough, people will not forward something to their friends unless it has real value.

In creating the ebook make sure that it contains a link to your site in the header/footer and at the beginning (the most read page).

For software be sure to also place a link to your site in a place where the user can see it and click on it.

NOTE: Make double sure the link is clickable and that your site does come up correctly. Never put a url in it and assume people will open up a new browser wind and type in the url. People are lazy.

Put in a copyright statement encouraging others to pass on the ebook as they wish as well a disclaimer statement.

Copyright Statement Example

Here is what I put on the first page of Nick’s Traffic Tricks:

This report is free. You may give it away. In fact, I encourage you to give it away.

This report can be sold but I recommend not selling it as anyone can get for free at NicksTrafficTricks.com/nicks-traffic-tricks-2008/

This guide can be combined with any package or bundle, sold or given away.

The only thing I require is that the report is not modified in any manner.

The strategies in this report can be to generate a flood of traffic to almost any website.
However, what you do with these techniques is up to you. Because I don’t know you, don’t know your skills and – most important of all – don’t know how persistent you’ll be, I can’t make any guarantees.

In the introduction & conclusion portion of you ebook, ask people to send it to others. Sometimes it works best to simply ask others to send it to others.

When you link to your site make sure the link is enticing, promising additional information.

Many ebooks have an appendix at the end. Instead of putting an appendix in your ebook put the appendix on your site and link to it. This not only sends traffic to your site but also allows you to keep your appendix up to date, adding further value to your ebook.

Keep your ebook relatively focused on single subject. If it solves a problem make sure it solves it well and solves nothing else.
Viral ebooks tend to small and easy to download, making it easier for others to download and email to others.

Add page numbers, have fonts be standard size

Have a minimum of 3 people proof read it.

Packaging

If you link to the ebook in pdf format then when people click on the link to the pdf it will automatically load the pdf in the browser.

If instead you link to a zipped file (which contains the pdf) they will be forced to download it to their computer, making it easier for them to read it later and forward it to others.

In the zip file also include a file that links to your website.

To do this open a new file in NotePad and save it.

An example filename might be Traffic_Tricks_Blog.htm

Be sure that the filename contains no spaces, is something that gets the viewers attention, and ends with .htm

Inside the file type the following:

<HTML><HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.nickstraffictricks.com">
<TITLE></TITLE></HEAD><BODY></BODY></HTML>

What this chunk of HTML code does is tell the browser to immediately redirect to:
http://www.nickstraffictricks.com

Simply replace http://www.nickstraffictricks.com with your own url and then save.

Be sure to test your redirect!

Now everyone unzipping the file will see a file and if they open they will be sent to your site.

You can do this for affiliates stuff too. Just don’t abuse it. If you irritate people they won’t pass on your ebook.

Distribution

Now that your ebook package is ready there a many ways to distribute your freebie and start receiving traffic:

1. Make a page on your site outlining the ebook and its benefits with a big DOWNLOAD HERE graphic and ask your friends to put it on their sites.
2. Put a link to your freebie in your email signature
3. Post on WarriorForum with a link to your freebie
4. Upload your freebie to Scribd
5. Use forums to distribute your ebook. Read Traffic From Forums
6. There are many people with large email lists in your niche. Find out who they are. If my niche was Poodles I would Google poodle email list or poodle newsletter or poodle news and see who comes up in the search results.
   Chances are they have a sizable email list. Subscribe to their list and respond to one of their emails.
   What you’re going to offer them is to have their affiliate link at the top (header) of every page and you keep the link to your own site in the footer. All the list owner has to do is send an email to everyone on the list with a link to your ebook. The list owner wins by having an affiliate link in the ebook being distributed and you win by having everyone on the list read an ebook with a link to your site!
7. Find other people selling related products and offer to have your ebook bundled with their product. In return give them a link in the header of your report.

Welcome to Day 25 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

Introduction

Today I want to talk about link swapping (more commonly called reciprocal linking).

One thing to keep in mind is the difference between one-way links and reciprocal links. Reciprocal links are where two sites link to each other usually for the purpose of boosting each others ranking.

Google has caught on to this and doesn’t value these kinds of links as much as a simple one-way links.

While reciprocal links aren’t as valuable, they are easy to get and can be used in moderation to increase your rank in the search engines, especially when you’re first starting out.

Getting incoming links from search engines is a commonly understood benefit.

But another benefit is that visitors will see the link and if it looks interesting they’ll click on it.

Link Market

A good place to find other people interested in reciprocal links is:
http://www.linkmarket.com

Just make sure that the people you partner with have PR (PageRank) greater than 0 and are related to your site’s topic.

Also visit the site and make sure it’s something you want to link to.

Blogroll Trades

WordPress blogs have something called a blogroll which is a bunch of links that appear on (usually) every page of your blog.

You can find people using the blogroll and offer to link to them if they will link to you.

WarriorForum

If you have never been to the WF (WarriorForum) then you are missing out.

WF has a section where you can buy, sell, or swap links with others:
http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-reciprocal-links-buy-sell-swap/

What are your suggestions for link trading?

Welcome to Day 24 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

Introduction

There are many different ways to get traffic to your website quickly, but none work quite as well as getting traffic from classified ads.

There are two different ways that you can accomplish this.

Online classified ads have been popular for almost as long as the Internet has been around.

At one time, these classified ads would send so much traffic to your website that it could bring your server down.

People don’t look at classifieds online quite as much as they used to but it is still a great way to get some targeted traffic on your pages.

There are plenty of free services that have favor in the eyes of Google where you can post your ads and get a decent amount of traffic.

Done correctly, this is well worth the effort.

Putting classified ads in local newspapers is also a great way to get traffic to your website.

Not many people do this, however, but by placing a cheap ad and directing them to a page with a simple offer on it, you can make a killing.

The key to this is to start small and test your ads to see which ones pull the best.

Once you have a winning combination, you can roll your profits back into purchasing additional ads in nationwide newspapers.

Welcome to Day 23 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

Introduction

Today I want to talk about a relatively new service called Twitter.

Twitter is a social networking service that asks a very basic question: What are you doing right now?

People are allotted 140 characters to answer this question. It’s a micro blogging service where people can share with each other what they are doing.

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/nickstraffic

Twitter Video

Watch as Sam Harrelson explains the basic functions of Twitter:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYHUOESHpVk[/video]

If you use the firefox browser then I recommend using the TwitterFox extension:
http://www.naan.net/trac/wiki/TwitterFox

Welcome to Day 22 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

What is a Squidoo Lens and How Do You Optimize It?

For all of us who spent years, it seems, learning SEO techniques in order to drive traffic to our sites, Squidoo is a brand new game.

To optimize your Squidoo lens, you cannot rely on the old SEO techniques. And yet, SEO is part of the Squidoo game.

First, a little background will help you understand Squidoo. Squidoo allows you to create a lens that focuses people on a specific topic. When you set up your account, you set up keywords or tags as Squidoo calls them. You don’t have to understand the concept of keyword density.

You don’t have to worry about H-Tags, meta-tags, or long tails either. This is because Squidoo is set up to handle these issues for you. The SquidTeam takes the tags and other information you fill into the automatically set up pages for you and create the html that optimizes your Squidoo site for you.

Anyone who has ever lost sleep trying to optimize their site is in for a real delightful surprise with Squidoo. SEO is built into the site design. All you have to do is use the Squidoo tools and your site basically optimizes itself.

You can add in attractive modules that give you an advertising edge. Among the modules you can add are YouTube, Guestbook, Polls, RSS Feeds, Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Plexo. You don’t need to know the first thing about html or coding.

Squidoo is a flip from the way websites used to work. The deal then was to get lots and lots of SEO pages in the hope that the sheer numbers would get the site to Google’s first page. The content mattered so little that there was a booming business in article spinners and automatically generated pages.

Squidoo is all about content and looks at quality over quantity. The lensmaster (that would be you) takes the best of what’s online and using the tools, focuses the reader on the topic by offering the most comprehensive information possible.

The more concise and up-to-date your lens is, the more attention you can attract. Think of a Squidoo page as a minisite. You take a single topic and you focus on that topic, digging deep into the topic.

The secret is to make the site informative. Because Squidoo does the SEO work for you, you can focus on rounding up all the information related to your topic. This makes your readers’ experience comprehensive. Rather than dig through hundreds or thousands of Google pages, the reader can simply get all the information from your Squidoo site.

Optimizing Squidoo’s Lensrank

On Squidoo, the focus in on generating traffic using content and credibility and increasing your lensrank. The higher the lensrank, the higher your credibility.

You can strategize your lensrank to move it up the ranks in Squidoo. There is a special reward for breaking into the top 100. There is a special showcase for the top 100 lensranked pages.

The current top 100 include some pretty narrow subject such as laptop bags, Webkinz, and Coach handbags. In other words, your topic is not nearly as important as your technique.

The winning technique for optimization include letting your personality show through the use of the interactive modules that are part of the Squidoo experience. The end goal is to have your Squidoo site as interactive as possible.

Interactivity gets your lens more attention on the search engines, a high lensrank, and a bigger and better subscriber base.

You should use some of the old-fashioned ways to draw traffic such as participating in online discussions. Forums are a great place to meet people who might be interested in your Squidoo information.

You put your Squidoo lens in your sig file and mention it in your posts. If you have a mailing list, use it to get the word out.

Blogs and email sig files are also excellent places to mention your Squidoo lens.

If you already have a website, write about your Squidoo lens and link it to Squidoo.

This is part one of the traffic exercise – getting the word out. People will go to your Squidoo to see what it is all about. Of course, just like with the old SEO world of regular websites, you have to keep it fresh to have people return. If they don’t return, soon your lensrank will begin to drop.

The bigger the lens, the better. Up to a point. While it only takes 10 minutes to build a Squidoo lens, you need to keep adding to it. Add a module at a time, write a short article. It only takes 250 or 300 words to make a nice entertaining article.

But as I said above, big is only good up to a point. The reason for Squidoo is to keep people from being overwhelmed. If your site is too big, well, it can be overwhelming.

But you have all this interesting stuff! Well, what you do is build another lens and link them together.

Building a Squidoo lens is easy. Because the Squidoo team have all the engineering done for you, you don’t have to play around with creating the site. You can focus on getting the word out.

More traffic begets higher ranking, and in turn this attracts more traffic. It’s a lot easier to have one thing to focus on. With Squidoo, the one thing you need to focus on is getting as many traffic streams as possible flowing into your Squidoo lens.

Using Squidoo’s Optimization Tools

In order to optimize Squidoo, it helps to understand its structure. Once you know how Squidoo functions, you will be able to use it more efficiently and effectively.

When you set up Squidoo, the very first step is to choose a title for your lens. You don’t have to know html or anything about setting up a web site. You simply answer the lens wizard’s first question which is “What is your lens about?”

Your answer will be the title of your page. However, don’t fret about the answer right now because you can always change it at a later date.

The next question will be what your site’s tags are. The tags are nothing more or less than keywords.

You then get to pick a main keyword to use as your lens title – this will be part of your site’s URL. The URL will be like this: www.squidoo.com/yourkeyword. And guess what? You can change this too.

The last question in setting up your lens is if you want to donate any of your page’s revenue to charity.

At this point, you end up in the lensmaster workshop. This is where you get to design your lens with modules. There are dozens of modules so you just have to focus on a few at a time.

You also have a bio section. By the way, this is a very important section so be sure to maximize it. Be clear about what you have to offer here. Be descriptive. Squidoo is a place where personality counts.

The secret to Squidoo is that the whole point is about being the ultimate expert on your topic. This means that you have to let your bio show that you know what you are talking about.

It’s an internet thing. But the reality of the internet is that it’s a great place to be invisible. You can post an avatar and hide behind a screen name and no one while know who you are.

On Squidoo, you have to let the world know who you are. If you don’t come across as knowledgeable you will have trouble convincing people that they should believe anything you tell them.

Once all these things are taken care of, you need to use some of the modules which are Web 2.0-enabled.

It might be a real learning curve for you to realize that it is all right to use outbound links on Squidoo. In the old world way, outbound links were no-nos. After all, they took people away from your site.

Squidoo not only encourages outgoing links but rewards you for them.

Long Tail Techniques for Squidoo

You can use long tail techniques with Squidoo. Long tail is hailed as the new economic model for the internet.

The phrase first appeared in 2004 in a Wired magazine article. Amazon and Netflix (both available as Squidoo modules) are examples. The focus is on selling small amounts of hard-to-find items to many customers.

There is an old phrase that comes to mind. “It is a lot easier to get $1 from a million people than it is to get a million dollars from one person.” This is the essence of the long tail.

The long tail phrase is actually a statistical term. It is also known by other names in statistics. A couple of the more popular other names are heavy tails or Pareto tails. Basically it refers to the few people who tail off from a larger population.

Here’s an example. You go to Amazon and see a best selling book. There is a link to similar books and you follow that link. The linked book has further links. You keep wandering along the trail following the path deeper and deeper into Amazon.

The fact is that most of Amazon’s sales comes from the books outside the top 130,000 titles. What this means is that more people want the harder to find books than want the tops sellers.

Part of this is because in most places, it is just not possible to get these titles. But in Amazon, these books are available and the long tail can leave the crowd and follow the trail of rarer books.

For you on Squidoo, what you need to do is offer the information that is off the beaten path. Find a dozen or so long tail keywords and build a Squidoo lens for each long tail keyword or create a lens with 2 or 3 long tails.

You have to do a little search to see what people are actually searching for so you can answer their questions. This will make you popular because these items and this information is hard to find.

A Squidoo lens can be a one stop shop for all the information available on a topic or it can be used as an entrance point into a smaller world of information.

In the Wired article, Chris Anderson wrote, “If the 20th-century entertainment industry was about hits, the 21st will be equally about misses.”

What this means is that in the world where availablity was an issue, only the best sellers went out to the people. But in the internet world, everything is available so people will reach out for the hard to find.

Because their chances of getting the hard to find in their home towns are slim, they easily turn to the world’s marketplace – the internet – to find the information that they really want.

Anyone can read a bestseller. Only the dedicated shopper can find a rare book. On Squidoo you can benefit from this by doing their searching for them.

Welcome to Day 21 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

Introduction

In a previous post we talked about how to get more traffic by placing comments on other peoples blogs.

Today I would like to expand a little on that idea.

Placing relevant and useful comments on others’ blogs can be a great way to share information with others and get traffic to your own site.

When you leave a comment on a blog post you usually supply your web address and name in addition to your comment.

Tips & Tricks

• Make only relevant and worthwhile comments. Crappy comments get removed and may get your IP banned. If on the other hand you appear to be an expert and leave a comment that is wildly insightful people will likely click on your name and visit your site.
• When choosing the name you wish to have associated with your comment, choose wisely. Use good and relevant keywords that will entice people to click on your link.
• In your comment include a single link to your own site where the reader can find additional information about the topic at hand. If the link isn’t totally relevant then it doesn’t belong in the comment!
• Comments appear on a blog post in the order they were submitted. So the first comment is at the top of the stack and is read most often. Its link will be clicked on more often.
  So it pays to be the first commenter. Many blogs offer a way for you to be sent an email whenever a new blog post appears, making it easier to be the first commenter.
  Some bloggers (like me most of the time) post stuff at roughly the same of the day each day. Figure out what that time is and being the first commenter will be cake.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has created an excellent 7 minute video showing the power of leaving good comments on blogs:

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glqCf7f_JrA[/video]