Photo  by Håkan Dahlström

This is a guest post by Alia Haley.

Blog marketing is the latest sales tactic that is being studied, tested and implemented by net users. If you want your blogs to get good traffic, you need to develop a strategy for blog marketing. Blog marketing differs from other marketing patterns, in that you need to read the pulse of the reader to attract him or her to your blogs.
Here are some tips on how to develop a blog marketing plan for 2012.

Analyze Viral Content

Any blog post that goes viral has a certain pattern, if you dissect it closely. Viral blog posts cater to the most common and tricky problems and offer great solutions to them. Most of these viral videos and blogs are funny, well written and hit an emotional chord with the reader. The content has a specific soul and is motivated to attract the reader’s interest.

Pay Attention to Design

Well designed sites are pleasing to the eye and compel the visitor to revisit the site for more. You can study the content, structure and user interface to well designed site and get some motivation from them. You also need to pay attention to fonts and themes. Too much of marquee stuff or Flash may not agree with the intelligent reader. So, pay attention to the design and structure of the blog.

Balance Quality with Quantity

The quality of the blog is equally important as is the stuff that is in it. Check out on unwanted content and edit whatever is unnecessary. If your blog as too much of stuff, the reader is confused as to what he or she should read. Similarly, do not give too many links to the other stuff, unless required.

Give Catchy Titles

Blog titles make all the difference in the amount of traffic that it generates. Catchy tiles are sure to arouse the curiosity of a passerby who will be interested in clicking on the blog. When he or she reads it and finds it equally interesting, then you have a reader for life. Thus taking time to give great titles to your blogs will go a long way in increasing traffic to your blog posts. The titles aptly should convey what is in your blogs.

Understand your Audience

While blog posting, it is crucial to understand the audience you are targeting, whether it is kids, housewives, youth or the elderly. Accordingly, the blog should have stuff that interests this sect of people to gather more traffic. It is very important to study their interests, likes and dislikes before going ahead with your blogs.

Keep Updating

To retain the traffic to your blog posts, you need to keep updating your articles and present interesting stuff relevant to present times. This needs constant updating of your knowledge as well as your work. You need to post something new every day to prevent the interest levels from receding.

All in all, having proper blog marketing in place is sure to reap positive results and a heavier traffic, if you implement this sincerely from a business perspective.

About the author: Alia Haley is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and luxury. Beside this she is fond of cell phones. These days she is busy in writing an article on Luxury yachts and Citizen Watches.

Yesterday I installed a new theme for Nick’s Traffic Tricks and I am still getting a few things in place i.e. as I write this the custom footer widgets are not in place.

Things I liked about the layout

• It looks good, especially considering the price of $37.
• It’s built on the Thesis Framework, which allows me to customize the main content area’s width to 640 pixels (to accommodate the videos I post.)
• Before I bought it I emailed the creator of the theme and he responded very quickly.  I’m fairly confident that if I had a problem he would respond again quickly.
• It bring more attention to my optin forms.
• It makes it easy to have a few text ads on the right side with a darker color behind them.

What do you think?

Love it or hate it?

I am testing out a new video format and I am a little concerned that it takes too long to load.

Would you mind watching the 20 second video below and tell me if it takes too long to load?

20 second test video

You don’t want just any traffic; you want traffic that clicks on your ads, buys your products, and signs up for your email list.

You want traffic that converts.

So, how do you get traffic that converts??

5 Most Important Questions

These questions are at the core of every successful online business, and if you can answer them then you can get traffic that converts.

1. What exactly am I selling?
   You cannot make money without a product/service to sell.  Subway sells sandwiches, the New York Times sells advertising space, and I challenge you to find a successful business that doesn’t have something to sell.
2. Who desperately wants what I am selling?
   99.9% of people have no interest in what you’re selling.  So who DOES want it?  Who desperately wants it and will actually pay for it?
3. Where can I find lots of these people?
   Where do they get together online/offline?
   Where do they live?
   What forums, blogs, newspapers, magazines do they read?
   What groups or social organizations do they belong to?
4. What other products do these people buy?
   Where do they shop?
5. How will I connect those people with the product I am selling?
   How can I leverage the forums, blogs, newspapers, magazines they read and get targeted traffic?
   How can I bundle my product with a product these people are already selling?
   People who buy my product will likely know other people that want my product.  Should I invite customers to be affiliates?

So, do you know exactly what you’re selling?

If you cannot answer this with a definite “Yes” then you don’t have a business and a lack of traffic is not your real problem.

Before you do keyword research, seo, build backlinks, etc you must know precisely what you are selling!

But Nick, I really want to get traffic first and then figure out what I’m selling.

You want traffic that converts into sales and that means knowing exactly what you’re selling and precisely who will buy it (and 99.9% of people do NOT want to buy it).

Wouldn’t it be a shame if you spent hundreds of hours building a website and thousands of dollars with an SEO company, only to find that your top Google ranking drove tons of traffic to your website but the traffic never bought anything?

Case Study: My Famous Quotes

One of my first domains was myfamousquotes.com and I thought “I’ll get traffic first and then figure out what to sell later.”

Years later it gets consistent traffic but struggles to make more than a couple dollars a day because I cannot find anything that visitors to the site desperately want.

Biggest Absolute Failure

In 2008 I did an experiment to see how fast I could rank for the low competition keyword phrase: Biggest Absolute Failure.

As I recall, it only took a couple hours and 3 years later I am still #1 in Google.

But guess how much traffic that #1 ranking generates.  It’s 1 visitor per week.

And even if it were generating loads of traffic, what would I sell to people searching Google for Biggest Absolute Failure? I have no idea!

But Nick, what if no one will buy my product?

Then you have learned something important.  If no one wants your product then stop wasting time with it and find something else to sell.

But Nick, How do I find a product that people will spend money on?

Excellent question.  You have to notice the people around you and what they regularly spend money on.

Also notice what causes them pain or discomfort and makes them say, “I’d pay $100 if someone would help me fix/remove/cure x.”

Another route is to look at what products are currently selling well and sell those.  I have a few videos that cover how to do this:

1. Video: How to do market research with Google
2. Video: How to do market research with ClickBank
3. Video: How to do market research with Amazon

So, do you know what you’re selling?

Seriously, do you?

Further Reading

• 23 Reasons Your Blog Isn’t Making Any Money (And What To Do About It!)
• 45 Tips to Make MORE Money with Affiliate Marketing
• Why Your Blog Is NOT A Business

[Photo by milos milosevic]

It has become quite common on the Internet for some people to let loose with their anger whenever they are the slightest bit inconvenienced or when others do know & meet their exceptions.

They use words & language and exercise no self-restraint in a fashion that they’d never do when talking to someone in real life.

Too often we forget that for every blog comment we submit and every email we send that there is a real person (with real feelings) on the other side reading them.

I know this has nothing to do with traffic generation but this video is worth watching because there is a serious lack of etiquette on the Internet.

A personal experience

Some time ago one of my visitors tweeted and stumbled a few of my blog posts. I thanked him and responded to several questions via email.

He had followed me on twitter but I had not followed him back; I only follow people that I am genuinely interested in. A few days later I saw this tweet:

@NicksTraffic after all I’ve done to help you out, I find out you’re not even following me you SOB. Lose my name and number you shit

He had never asked me to follow him and I had never said I would. Yet he was ticked that I didn’t meet his expectation.

I should have ignored him but instead I emailed him and explained why I had not followed him on twitter. He responded with an angry email telling me to f*** off.  I decided at that point to ignore him.

But I cannot count how many hours I have spent wasted thinking about what he said, why he said it, and how angry I felt.  Even as I type I can feel the frustration rising within me.

So please, don’t say things to complete strangers on the Internet that you would never say to them face-to-face.

Today I had the bright idea to update WordPress to the latest version, update a few plugins, and try out a new theme (which I didn’t end up using).

The whole process took about 2 hours and I had to disable Akismet & GASP (my spam blocking plugins) during that time.

And during those 2 hours I got 49 spam comments!  Holy freakin’ cow!

I usually only get 3 spam comments per day.  With the plugins re-activated I expect the comment spam to return to normal levels.

(By the way, all the updates to this blog should be complete.  But if you notice anything weird or not working please let me know.)

Most WordPress themes allow you to have widgets in your sidebar. And there are several widgets that will help you get more return traffic & page views.

RSS and social media

One of the simplest ways to get your RSS button and twitter buttons noticed by visitors is to you put them in a widget on the sidebar.

Offer assistance

In my sidebar I have a widget called “How Can I Help?” which contains links to posts where you can e-mail me or leave a question on my blog.

Having a section like this helps you engage with your community and increases the chances that people will come back to your site.

Offer free stuff

People love free stuff so it’s a good idea to have a sidebar widget with links to different free things that you give away.  And you don’t have to give away your own stuff; you can give away other peoples’ ebooks as long as you have their permission.

If you added something new to your free stuff category each week you would increase the number of return visitors to your site.

Facebook Fan Of Page

Utilizing Facebook is a good way to build community and get return traffic to your site. All you need to do is log into your Facebook account, create a fan of page, and then get the code from Facebook to insert your fan of widget into your sidebar.

What’s new

Returning visitors to your site are most interested in what’s new on your blog. And WordPress has a built-in widget for this called “Recent Posts”.

Most commented

5% of my posts receive 95% of the traffic and the Most Commented Widget makes it easy to display a list of most commented posts in my sidebar.

(See more cool WordPress plugins that Nick uses.)

Top commentators

The top commentators widget allows you to reward people who leave the most comments on your blog. There is even a famous back linking strategy based on the top commentators widget.

A couple weeks ago I began testing the hello bar which puts a small bar at the top of every page of your website and invites visitors to click a link that you choose.

I had it set up to send visitors to a squeeze page when they clicked on the link.

After a few days of testing I concluded that it did help me get a few more subscribers to my email list but there were some things that I didn’t like about it.

For instance, I thought the text was kind of small and instead of requiring visitors to click a link to go to my squeeze page, why couldn’t I have the actual sign-up form in the bar?

Below is a screenshot of Tim’s blog and the red bar that you see at the top is the hello bar:

Something better

A couple days ago I got an email from Ana Hoffman telling me about an awesome alternative to the hello bar called ViperBar.

What I love about this plugin is that it lets me put the email subscription form right in the bar instead of sending visitors to a separate page.

I also like the fact that it’s a plugin for my blog and not an external service that my site relies on.

Here’s a screenshot of my blog with the ViperBar:

RSS Too

The ViperBar also lets you invite people to subscribe to your RSS.

How cool is that?

When you’re first starting a new blog it can be tough to get comments, tweets, etc.

But if you build a community (or tribe) of bloggers you can start getting traffic and tweets in no time.

Read:  How to Drive Traffic To a New Blog Through a Commenting Tribe

Special Thanks to Ana Hoffman for this fabulous idea.

For the last few days I’ve been testing a new comment spam plugin called GASP (Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin) and it has reduced the amount of comment spam that I receive.

It works by adding a checkbox that the commentor has to check before the comment can be submitted. Next to the checkbox is a short message “No captcha, just check this box to confirm you’re not a bot. ”

The checkbox is dynamically generated in such a way that it makes it difficult for spambots to successfully submit a comment.

What about Akismet?

Akismet did a good job of identifying spam and marking it as spam. Unfortunately it would occasionally mark legitimate comments as spam too. Because of this I would look through all comments marked as spam to make sure there were no legitimate ones and this took some time to do each day.

This problem was compounded by the fact that some spammers are quite crafty with their comments and it may take me awhile to figure out if it was spam. And I have better things to do with my time.

Thanks to Kristi

I first learned about this plugin from Kristi Hines and her site kikolani.