A few years ago when I stepped into blogging the only traffic exchanges we had heard of was the traditional banner exchange ones which would give us a few bites and hits while taking away our precious site real estate and making it look spammy, or another way was to directly contact other webmasters in our niche and exchange banners and links with them, surely they too got the same traffic as us so their was really no point of doing so.

I find it really embarrassing to see that I always thought it was the same old system, but from the time I became an active social media swapper I’ve been seeing a lot of upcoming blogs and websites, all of which have tapped into this new system of exchanging traffic, and from that time I’ve been really keen in applying to one of them and testing them out.

At first I felt that such sites were meant only for entertainment, bizarre, odd and breaking news type of content, so I wanted to wait until my new humor site was ready for launch, I signed up for all networks and pasted the widgets on my site, but then one of my friends who works for Mgid as a traffic expert forced me to try out Mgid for Dumb Little Blogger and the results were just too surprising.

My first day

The screenshot you see above is just the traffic I got from Mgid in a single day which altogether makes it 44 visits on a single day which is also the first the day of placing the widget onto my site.

The system is pretty simple you send a few visitors from your site onto theirs using the widget they provide and get 150% to 300% in return and my blog already had a steady stream of traffic so I’m sure I got 10 to 15 clicks on the very first day. This system surely benefits if you have a good loyal audience and if your looking to expand that.

What do you need?

As I’ve mentioned above you’ll surely need some initial traffic in order for this work and you’ll need to send a few clicks from your site to theirs in order for you to get multiplied traffic.

Its recommend you atleast get 300 visitors a day before you apply to them as sites like 2Leep do not accept the same site which they’ve rejected once, so be careful about when your applying or else you’ll loose your chance to gain this traffic.

I couldn’t get my new site into Mgid as they felt it had some ‘Not safe for work’ content, but thats very hardly any NSFW content in it, so make sure your site looks clean.

I’d say your skills to make attractive headlines will be put to the test and maybe thats where I’ve got success from, if you can see in the image below most of my posts are old ones which have had good and attractive titles.

As you can see the above two images, out of 15 links in their top news section 5 of them were my own links, it was not because I’ve sent huge traffic as many of these posts were old and hardly got any traffic, but due to their attractive headings they received a lot of clicks.

So this is where quality comes in more than the traffic, once you get a few hits you can turn it into hundreds of hits within a day by just making tweaks in your headings.

Getting more clicks on your widget

So in a traffic exchange the main policy is to give and take, so the more you give, the more you take, and for this positioning of your widget is something very much important. Most sites like Mgid allow only one widget per page, so I’ve planned to put it below my post as I didn’t want it to effect my user experience.

The best possible place was top place it below my posts and give it the name related content, many of my readers thought it was the content from my blog itself and clicked on it to explore and due to this simple tweak I got 16% CTR.

Monetizing on it….

This is surely one of the best ways to get traffic for a medium sized blog, but their needs to be a way in order to monetize, right now my way has been adsense and direct ad sales via Buysellads, but surely that is not the best option.

According to me Pay-Per-Click ads and performance based ads have very poor performance for such traffic, mainly because most of the visitors you get from here aren’t very serious about your content as almost all of them are casual surfers who blend in for whatever they find interesting.

I’ve been using adsense as till now only a minor part of my traffic comes from traffic exchanges, but I’m sure it’ll catch on to be 20% to 25% of my traffic real soon, so for that I feel CPM advertising will be something that’d really well as for such traffic page views will be high.

An efficient method of getting traffic

Out of the many blogs which use these networks today most of them use just one network, but its my suggestion that you sign up for as many as possible and put up the widgets one below th other in a way that it should look like one widget.

For a few of them who started doing this their traffic has been huge so far and its reached such a level that majority of their traffic comes from these networks. So if you can blend in these networks into looking like one and give a title such as ‘Related content’ your sure to improve your reader’s curiosity and keep up the user experience.

On to our readers

I’m sure many of you have come across these widgets lately and if your a serious blogger I’m sure you would have had a thought to put them on your site, all I can say is to give it a try and see how it works out for you and your site.

I’ll surely update more on this topic so to keep up I’d strongly urge you to follow me on Twitter and to subscribe to my RSS feed.

]]> http://www.dumblittleblogger.com/2011/02/05/mgid-vs-2leep-vs-wahoha-my-experience-with-traffic-exchanges/feed/ 23 http://www.dumblittleblogger.com/2011/01/15/how-i-got-26000-visitors-from-stumbleupon/ http://www.dumblittleblogger.com/2011/01/15/how-i-got-26000-visitors-from-stumbleupon/#comments Sat, 15 Jan 2011 08:23:35 +0000 Vishal Sanjay http://www.dumblittleblogger.com/?p=983

StumbleUpon has always remained a faithful source of traffic for bloggers with good content and I have always had 1000 visitors every month from it ever since I created my account, I also often had a feeling that I should have started earlier, today its my second source of traffic after digg and is one of the first places I go after making a new blog post.

Unlike others I have never concentrated on search traffic and now it stands in the 9th position, though I think that nothing can be as targeted and profitable as organic search traffic, my blog has moved and grown a lot faster with social media.

When I got started Stumble Upon was already pretty saturated and their was hell lot of competition, so a single submission would not get more than 8 to 9 hits or more than 3 likes which I’m sure would be from my blog itself, but since then I have made a lot of changes to my promotional plan which turned it all around for me.

Factors for StumbleUpon traffic

StumbleUpon’s algorithm is still not very clear, but due to a few experiments and experiences of mine and a few friends of mine I’ve put up a list of factors which you’ll need to consider to get StumbleUpon traffic, some of it is something all of you already know and we’ll be discussing about how to get them as well in this post.

No. of users who thumbed up is the basic ratings used by the StumbleUpon algorithm and its a means used by users to promote an article they like, at one point of time this was the most important factor and you could have done well with only a couple of likes, but this has been changed and the importance for likes has been reduced.

No. of users in your network as the value of your likes reduced, Stumbleupon started giving importance to your network that is the number of followers you have, the main principle behind this is that more the followers, the better you are, I asked all my friends to follow me on StumbleUpon and I successfully built a strong network.

No. of profile views is again something which proves influence and quality, but I seriously don’t believe in this as you can get a hell lot of views even if your profile is brand new, but most internet marketers believe this as a priority.

No. of reviews on profile and submission which is extremely important as one review can be equal to 25 likes, but reviews are tough to get. Reviews of you again is to improve your stumbleupon quality and you can take all of your articles viral if you get 10 reviews on you.

I’ve often seen one review make a submission go extremely viral, so I often ask my social media network to review my submission.

Type of users who like, review or submit your articles matters very much, reviews, followers and network is something one can use to determine ones authority on StumbleUpon, so I often ask a few influential friends of mine to submit my posts and I promote the posts which indirectly gains them exposure.

Build a strong social media network

Many of you would already know about the methods I use to promote my blog, I have huge social media mutual swapping network on Gtalk and we all send each other links to get votes and many times I get more than 120 to 150 votes on each social network.

This has worked out to be a fantastic way to build traffic and many of these guys generate tens of thousands of visitors each day to their sites using these methods.

As I’ve mentioned above StumbleUpon requires a hell lot of ‘likes’ and reviews in order to trigger a chain and that would seem very much impossible without such a network, I know many of you would consider it spamming, but their is seriously no way other than that.

Build an authoritative account

I used to always bring in 50 to 60 likes on each submission of mine, but sadly they never gave me more than 300 to 400 views which itself is less, this was because StumbleUpon underwent a change of algorithm and now more importance is given to the submitters authority and the voter’s authority rather than an assigned value to all votes and reviews.

After you’ve built your network on Gtalk you can easily ask other users to follow you, review you and review your submissions which could result in an authoritative account. Sometimes you can go extremely viral just after you make your submission even if you don’t get likes from anyone else.

Bring in ‘Likes’ and ‘Reviews’

After you build your network your surely going to have tons of requests for votes, so after making every new submission go out there on Gtalk vote on theirs and ask for likes and reviews on yours, before doing this I hope you’ve built an influential profile as that adds to the effect.

Many of these guys on your network will have good profiles themselves so you’ll surely trigger a strong chain which would undoubtedly bring in 1000s of visitors immediately and will continue for a few weeks.

This again brings in hell lot of exposure to your profile so each time you pull off a successful campaign your StumbleUpon presence keeps getting better and better. Right now I get a hell lot of traffic from it, but sadly I’m not able to post consistently which makes it non-consistent.

Instead of sending swappers to your StumbleUpon page directly for reviews I’d advice you to send them to a twitter page or to your post page where they can use your widget or goto stumbleupon from and like it, I recommend this way because direct traffic has lesser value or maybe the moderators may feel suspicious which may restrict your popularity.

Get on-site exposure

As I’ve mentioned above, the best exposure you could get is through your blog and StumbleUpon naturally adds more value to likes and reviews which come from your blog.

This can either happen organically if you can succeed in creating a strong community or you can send your swappers onto to your article page and make them like your article as thats better, but its time consuming and many of them may disagree and ask for direct links.

Its also recommended that you put up stumble follow buttons on your site and try to get as many followers as possible from it as most people who come from your site will remain loyal and may share similar interests.

Leverage and capture leads

StumbleUpon may give out hot numbers in your analytics view, but if you go a bit deeper you’ll notice a huge bounce rate, so the idea here is to make sure your site loads fast enough to make sure the user doesn’t click on the stumble button again.

You can cover up your blog with subscribe buttons and also fill it up with StumbleUpon badges, I recommend you to use the WP Greet Box which I think is really useful in capturing leads.

No matter how much traffic you get their are great chances that you turn 1% of them into subscribers and 3% into followers on StumbleUpon. That is why I mentioned that your presence gets better each and every time you go viral.

On to our readers

I’m sure many of you would feel that our methods above are spammy, well yes they are and I hope you get used to it as their are no ways out. StumbleUpon which is one of the best sources of traffic always keeps tweaking its algorithm usually to provide the best content for its readers, so quiet often we need to keep evolving.

Surely we’ll keep posting more on this topic so to keep up with such posts do follow us on Twitter and also subscribe to our blog’s feed and if you have any doubts, suggestions or queries please comment below or you can also connect with me personally.

Due to many stories and personal experiences in the past its common to have disbelief in any product which guarantees traffic and income, but at times we fail to understand that not all products are the same. The Amazing money making widget is one such product which has helped thousands of people around the world and comes from a very rich background.

Bryan Winters is the creator of this product, who himself is an highly influential internet marketer who earns thousand of dollars each and every month with very minimal work. He considers this software as a tool for any marketer to promote his or her affiliate program to increase their commissions by 300%.

Have a website on weight loss?  Pick a link about a Clickbank weight-loss product, click one button and voila’ you have a widget about weight loss. The author claims that is as the potential to bring in 40, 000 monthly visitors.

What does Amazing money making widget provide you?

• Once in place, you can generate UNLIMITED hands off viral traffic that continues to grow and spiral out of control.
• Realistically have thousands and TENS of thousands of people seeing your offers every single day.
• Your ‘traffic getting problems’ are solved forever when you launch my advanced methods (although advanced, they’re STILL dead simple).
• You can run this system from the comfort of home or anywhere with an Internet connection
• Along with the traffic your income potential is also truly unlimited
• You don’t need a list
• You can turn other peoples’ products into “your own”.
• You can have your own affiliates for other’s products

On to our readers

Till now I have no idea on how this software actually works, but almost all of them till now have had the same experience, without knowing how they keep getting traffic and leads. Maybe it wouldn’t be a waste to give it a try, moreover the site of the this product has revealed a lot for us to think it as spam. I have been using it and results are starting to show, I’ll make a post about this in a few days.

Do subscribe to our feed in order to keep updated with this section and also follow me on Twitter. This was a sponsored post, to get your product / services / business reviewed see here.

Facebook campaigns are widely used these days and account one of the highest advertising sales each year on the internet and are just behind Google Adwords. Same like Adwords you’ll need to think a lot and plan before you put in your money, I’ve had two unsuccessful campaigns, but fortunately I had used a coupon rather than my own money, and I think most of you should while your starting off as it helps you get a touch of it before you risk your own money.

Unlike Google, Yahoo and Bing, Facebook allows you to use ads to spread viral and keep getting the traffic consistently forever, but the complications in launching one are above all the three, though Facebook as a lower competition than them. So this guide will teach you how to launch a Facebook advertising campaign which is effective in generating traffic, sales, builds a network and also at a cheaper rate, which requires planning and equal implementing, unlike Adwords you need to keep monitoring your ads almost everytime, in order to make sure that you aren’t loosing money.

The 3 types of audience

On facebook ads you can target three types of audience and its recommended that you always go for the smallest. Here I’m not talking about interests and age groups, but the targeting levels which Facebook itself provides us. The first one is the fans, the second ones are those who aren’t fans and the third is the friend’s of those fans.

Its the fans and the friends of the fans you must target, what I mean to say is if I’d launch a campaign for my blog I’d firstly search for one or two in my niche, for now lets take Shoutmeloud and SmartPassiveIncome as they are both related to my niche and are hugely popular, so I’ll have the reach of the total of both their fans who’ll be shown my ad, if I target their friends then it would multiply by a hundred times, but the efficiency of targeting would reduce.

You can do this only if you have no age, gender or geographical restrictions for your audience, even if you do you can, but you’ll need to target more number of networks. This is extremely useful when you want to compete with someone, as you’ll be stealing their fans, very soon you can impress your fans more than your competitor.

Fan pages Vs Landing pages – make your pick

There are two places you can send your advertising traffic to, the first is your own site landing page, secondly your facebook fan page. Both are equally important and have their own advantages, but it depends on your needs on what works better. According to my analysis a Facebook ad redirecting to your landing page results in a bounce rate of about 67% on an average, so only 33% of the traffic actually spend time, only 10% would return to your site and 5% would make a sale instantly. It is profitable as you make instant sales everyday, but as I said it depends on your needs.

The second option, which is leveraging traffic to your fan page is also profitable, its common to see about 80% become your fan and a few of them will visit your site and even fewer would generate leads. One thing positive in this that you can always get back those visitors and this is true sense of viral marketing, its recommended that you keep your page active as once you get a few thousand fans many of them will share your links helping you go more viral.

So as you can see both are equally good in their own ways, the first method allows you to boost instant sales and get immediate returns, but most of your traffic has no return rate and their is a huge exit rate. The second method helps you grow your followership by a huge rate, it is sure to keep bringing in more and more traffic and also helps you build a solid brand, though sales will be low initially you can make up to it later, there is no guarantee that you’ll earn back all your investment initially, but you surely will in a few months time.

As I said this decision is totally based on your needs, if your looking to promote your blog or something which has constant updates or mainly runs on pageviews, then I’d strictly recommend you to use your Facebook fan page, but at few instances you can make it convert by leveraging it to your blog, this is by optimizing your landing page for Facebook traffic. If you are advertising an affiliate link or page or any product of your own, then direct to landing page will be the best.

Landing page / Fan page optimization

After you’ve made up your mind on which of the above you want to use, its necessary to optimize it to highest extent to get the maximum conversions. I have also mentioned above that both the circumstances can be defied of their principles if you optimize your landing page/fan page, but such optimization takes a hell lot of creativity and a lot more graphic design skills than most of us could afford.

So if you can’t do so, then its better to stick with your plans above and optimize your selection, either fan page or your landing page, in case of a fan page there are many apps and methods to customize it efficiently. You can do this easily with the help of Facebook’s static FBML, tabs, videos app and a few banners. Just a few a changes would give your fan page a staggering new look, this takes very little technical skills and more of creativity. To learn more on this do refer to our article – Creating a unique and innovative Facebook fan page.

If your directing your traffic towards your landing page, its seriously not advisable to direct it to your home page. For increasing conversions you must create a whole new separate landing page for Facebook traffic, it requires a catchy design which would look social like Facebook, you need to find a way to welcome Facebook users and make it easy for them to invite their friends. I know that my description isn’t clear enough, but I myself have no idea on how to optimize this, it takes huge creativity and skills to pull this of successfully, you can always hire someone to do it, as you are spending money on this.

For the landing page, the design and optimization isn’t everything as your targeting and efficiency of your ad too matters, so you can’t consider your landing page to be everything, but yes it surely does help increase leads.

Target less and increase ad volume

As a marketer its a common sight to see many people targeting all of their audience and all of their services with a same ad, this causes huge bounce rates and at times very little returns. So what most experienced marketers do is launch about 10 campaigns for just a single feature, each targeting different demographies, likes and interests.

For example, if your advertising a dating site, the effect would be really low if you title it ‘meet new boys and girls online’ and target both boys and girls with it, but if you create two separate ad campaigns, one targeting only girls and the other targeting only boys, then you’ll surely get good conversions. This one was just a basic example, but the true effect comes when you start a multi-level campaign when each feature gets different campaigns. It was of great effect in Adwords, but Facebook too is no different.

The idea is to promote the same page to people of different geographies, interests, age and genders with different campaigns, each having a personalized approach to its audience. This allows you to save on the wasteful impressions and clicks which would mostly takeaway half of your budget.

Create an attractive ad

Hope most of you already new about this, the main aspect for you to gain clicks would be the attractiveness of your ad, this is the most important aspect to improve your click-through-rate after effective targeting, so you must never lack behind on this as you may loose all your effort you’ve put above with this one thing.

You can just add a title of your product and your logo and make it your ad, you’ll have to be more creative and use attractive words, because thats what makes the difference. The image you upload may not have to be your logo or anything containing your name, just something related to your niche is enough. Its common to see many people trying to explain too much in the description, but its better to keep it small, but something which gets a user interested, after you get his interest you’ll have pages to express yourself.

On to our readers

These are few of the basic tips for you to get started with, but one can become an expert only with the help of experience and thats why Facebook provides coupons for advertising. I’m sure many of you will have your own tips and tricks that you’d like to share with us, so please do share your Facebook experience. To keep up with future posts of this sort do subscribe to our feed and also follow us on Twitter.

The Comscore’s top 1000 list consists of those sites which have floods of traffic and the ones which have made their owners millionaires if not billionaires, right now it seems almost impossible to create such a site without a solid idea or investment, but I feel its not impossible, you can surely reach near top 1000 with just a bit of investment, but a lot of hard work.

Its a heavily priced momentum if your planning to work this out as a freelancer, here in this post we’ve listed few common things we find in those 1000 sites, all of these aren’t any practical ideas for creating new sites, but your ideas a=can be based on these common principles, but I have managed to mention the lucrative niches for each of them.

User generated content

For reaching that level you’ll need a hell lot of content, due to which you’ll pull up your search traffic, but this hell lot of content is just too much for you or your team to produce, you’ll have to use your users to produce this content and this is sure to work out as this content can be made massive and legitimate, moreover I believe that even search engines believe in such topics.

Your frequency of posting will sky rocket bringing in 100s of thousands of readers each day, but this won’t happen before you bring in your site to a certain level atleast a few few thousand visitors because even your users would think twice to post something in a place where no one would see it, so initially its upto you to build up content, to show your users that they aren’t alone.

Most forum owners hire people to post on their forums for a bit of money and they actually use the same in order to get their first bit of traffic, you can do the same or you can even aggregate content from other sites, but this content has to leave as it might degrade your search reputation. But you can prove your popularity among readers by aggregating.

After you’ve got your first few thousand users in your site, try to get the most out of them by rewarding for creating content, which is what forums do by giving a share of revenue for all their threads, but you can reward users with reputation, prizes, freebies, money or upgrades, almost all work well, but the important part is to promote this efficiently via advertising or any other free method.

Mainstream publicity

If your service or site is unique and worth a mention then you’ll surely stand to have a mention in mainstream media and publications, this is surely going to build a solid user base and also helpful to build your brand image. This does need a small recognizable audience, but it truly doesn’t require a highly popular blog.

What I mean by this is that it does not require any quality nor quantity, all it requires is influence on the media, which would make them write about you. To increase your media contacts its advisable to attend conferences and meetups in your area and niche, try the big ones as they usually have the presence of media and try to mingle and showcase your service to all, this way you’ll surely get media attention and you’ll have great chances of being featured in their entity.

The above method doesn’t work everytime, and it rarely works if you fail to have something special in you, your product or company, so you may get success once in ten encounters, moreover this maybe just once or twice, but you can’t create a massive buzz which would come if you are featured in many publications. This is not possible until and unless you have a huge audience or work extremely hard following up with the media, but there is an easier alternative.

One method which most startups use these days is hiring publicists, which is expensive, but your sure to get featured in many media entities online and offline all around the world. There are individuals as well as agencies which do the work, both come up to the same cost, but you’ll have to pay an hefty sum if your planning to permanently hire someone, which is not advisable unless you have a huge range of products and upgrades coming up each month.

Try being controversial

Recently there were many sites which made it near the top 1000 list just by getting into a few controversies due to which they got mentioned on big mainstream media channels, a few include fake blogs such as the fake IPL player, the apple blog and the fake Steve Jobs blog, all of these made small fortunes with relatively less amount of work, even though their lifetime was limited for a few days when their secret remained unknown.

The above method is known as ‘flogging’ and is very profitable if used with proper creativity, but we want a permanent and secure source for creating controversies, so now lets take the case of Perez Hilton which is known to post rough comments on celebrities, and this is the main reason behind their popularity as most celebrities accused them in public which drove huge amounts of traffic. This method can prove to be disastrous at times when your small play turns into a big tide against you, but for success you must be ready for risks.

In the beginning the only thing you ought to do is to be against the tide in each and every case, take a social evil in your society or start a campaign against a corrupt politician, their are various ways all you have to do is just use your creativity. Remember one thing that the stories you tell may not have to be true, I believe in the quote that 25% of the news we get is made up, so it truly makes no difference.

Capitalize on the traffic

Following the above three methods I’m pretty sure that you’ll have a big defensible traffic and just enough to grow and build on that. Firstly this is the time to monetize your site with whatever method your planning to use as by now you would have exhausted a lot of funds and its time to generate returns. Secondly this is also the time to grow your traffic to bigger levels by using your existing audience,

Most big networks do this by spreading out into bigger networks such as Facebook and Twitter using which they leverage more traffic into their own site, and once you have a audience your sure make huge growths with this strategy.

The wisest way is to create apps on Twitter and Facebook itself as they too can be effectively monetized, with just a few bucks in an ad campaign would do miracles with this and the viral effect won’t stop. The last thing in this phase is to spread out into different devices such as Iphone, Anderoid and others as these are a few which aren’t yet much saturated.

Creating a wall – Building a solid brand

By the time you reach this level you should have financial resources and an influential audience, this is to make sure that the audience you’ve grown stays back and your known as a rock solid brand all over the world. The best way I’ve known is to hold contests and giveaways which aims at spreading your message across different networks.

The main idea I give people is to set up a bait which can be a giveaway or a contest or some really unique feature and then promote it and send it viral either via organic marketing or hardcore effective advertising.

This will help boost your image as this time most publications will be reached organically and soon whatever new product or service you launch will be a hit. You’ll have millions of visitors each day taking you into the list. The last phase is extremely expensive and requires huge management skills, but I bet you’ll have it all once you reach there.

On to our readers

These are few of my principles in order to reach that level, I’m damn sure that I won’t be able to take this blog till there, but I do have ideas for many unique sites for which I’ve already made marketing plans.

There are a few sections in this posts which seem dirty or unethical, but believe me thats necessary in order to succeed online, moreover your not hurting a soul by following those. Do let me know your thoughts on this post and do subscribe to our feed in order to keep yourself updated with the latest posts.

‘Flogging’ basically means fake blogging, which is the parody of any popular brand which is in the form of a blog, this can be anything companies, celebrities and even other popular websites. Recently in India there was an incident in India were a blogger claimed to be a team member of the Kolkata Night Riders IPL team, this started giving him about 150,000 who stayed for about 15 minutes on an average, this was the biggest hoax ever and earned the blogger, Anupam Mukerji thousands of dollars within six months, there are many others as well one is the fake Steve Jobs blog which created world wide buzz.

I guess most of you understood what flogging really means now, its the use of others brands in order to drive traffic to your blog named after them, you get all the traffic and also keep all of the revenue, the only thing missing here is the popularity for yourself, but thats something you can compromise on if your getting traffic with so much ease.

Find a brand and research about it

Its firstly time to find a brand to fake and work out for you, so the first step is to find famous companies and celebrities in the society, and its also a necessity that their are no other unauthorized blogs in there names.

Right now this niche is entirely unsaturated so within just a few minutes of search you’ll find a hell lot of brands, so select a few and do a detail search on each one of them.

Try to figure out which brand is more active in the eyes of the media, and the main question you must ask for each brand will be will I get enough to write about, search with great care and remember that in the end you’ll be going for only one out of a million. After you select it, you must start your research and learn about him, her or it so well that you must actually feel them in yourself while you write.

Build it up – making it full proof

Next tough process will be build up your blog, ofcourse a normal WordPress would be the best, but the customization cannot be that simple, especially if you choose a top-class brand. Your design must look professional as well as personal to match up with your celebrity or company, for this you can outsource or make it yourself, this is actually the only thing in the process which costs money or takes a hell lot of time.

Remember that the main aim here is to sound original, that means you’ll be linking to all social media profiles of the brand or the ones named after them, your about me page must tell the clear story about the same. Even a bit of differences can cause major doubts in the minds of the visitor, and it may also result in the failure of your hoax.

Optimizing and marketing it – the kick ass part

If you’ve chosen something famous yet unsaturated niche then you surely won’t need any marketing for your blog, the only thing you’ll have to do is optimize it for search engines, the first thing is to buy a domain which is relevant, this can really prove your blogs reality, but there are a few circumstances when you fail to secure a keyword rich domain, then use your creativity and try something different, but if its totally irrelevant then its better to change your niche itself.

The keyword in your domain name itself is enough to get you ranked on search engines for the particular keyword, so if your celebrity is very popular you’ll get a share of visitors who search by his name. To increase your SERPs you must also tag and describe your site and all its posts with the help of plugins, this also brings in relevant traffic to your site instead of just anyone typing spammy keywords.

This is sure to bring in visitors, but not floods of visitors, so for this there is another easy step, that is optimize your blog for social media, when you can create an entire fake blog, why not a fake fan page, twitter account and other social media accounts. Moreover these are places where fans usually search for their mentors. Just promote each post on social media and with search traffic you could be triggering something powerful known as the snowboard effect.

Capitalizing on your work – the fun and easy part

Monetizing a website is usually the fun and easy part no matter what type of website it is, I mean, who doesn’t want to capitalize on their hard earned traffic. This is really not the same in this case, just imagine adsense inside the blog of a very famous and rich personality or company, what would you feel as a fan, thats actually the main problem which arises here.

For atleast 3 months or until you have a steady traffic avoid putting up ads, and even if you do not more than three zones per page. The traffic you’ll be getting is usually untargeted, so its recommended that you put up CPM advertisements instead of the traditional adsense CPC ones. There is also another way to make money that is via donations, this works out well if your brand is a famous star, fans these days are so crazy that they can’t avoid donating money for their stars, this is again a wonderful option.

This niche also gives rise to a new opportunities, one of them is affiliate marketing, when your brand has released a new product or service, people would love to hear your own words on it and in the same way they may even buy it via your affiliate link, definitely earning you a few bucks atleast. The idea is to write reviews about the latest releases and ask people for suggestions and give suggestions, you must also recommend readers to buy the product to see its quality.

On to our readers

I guess most of you will agree that this is one of the easiest niches when it comes to blogging, this can be illegal at times, but the profits are so huge and I’m sure you can risk that. This all depends on your creativity and innovation on how you take your hoax ahead, its also important that you don’t get too greedy for fame and money as these are the two imposters which can spoil everything.

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Christopher Columbus once said that success comes for not those who do different things, but for those who do things differently, it was very true if you take his example and a few other success stories give us the same moral.

When there were too many static sites with nothing more than the same content saturating the web, a few visionaries took to blogging and this was way back in 2005 or 2006, at that time there was no platform like wordpress, so most of them did face initial hardships and thats what helped them the most in the long run, today most of the successful bloggers are those who started at that time. This includes Jeremy Schoemaker, Darren Rowse, John Chow and Michael Arrington, most of us describe their success as beginners luck, but its truly not that way.

Right now blogging too has become saturated, thats why 75% of the newbie bloggers fail to achieve there goals and I also feel that this is the best time to innovate and move on the something different. According to me the uprising trend today is video blogging and podcasting, which has been successful for many people already. Right now this is twice as double work than making a blog post, but if you can work hard now maybe you’ll be like Darren Rowse or John Chow in a couple of years. This guide is a brief How-to on podcasting, most of it is based on my research, although I did have a few experiences when it comes to podcasting,

Creating a podcast (the technical part)

Creation of a podcast is 3 times harder and two times more time consuming than a simple 1000 words blog post, but its not rocket science either, while creating a post other than some small technical parts only the content was something that mattered, but here the technical part takes its own expertise and skills which one learns only with practice, I’m extremely sorry if I’m discouraging you but you need to know the A-B-Cs of these toys even before you think of creating your content.

First thing is your most basic needs such as mikes, speakers and a camera if your including video and I’m sure most of you know this and hope I don’t have to spend more time on this, after you have all these you need the highly sophisticated softwares for mixing, editing and recording your podcast, a recommended few are Propaganda, Audicity, Gabcast and Hipcast.

The above softwares are the best in the business and they require a hell lot of practice, you don’t need any sort of training, but still you need to experiment a lot to master the art of these creations, if you can’t handle such sophistications then you can find a few easier softwares meant for beginners, but they won’t have much flexibility and customization options, so you can use them as a beginner, but you need to change as and when you grow, the best you can find for this purpose is MyPodcast.

Creation of content

After you feel comfortable with your hardware and software, its time you put all your skills to serious use, firstly you must have already planned what niche or topic you want your podcast to be on, you must also decide the time length of each and most importantly the frequency on which you’ll be producing.

This plan has to be in order for you to work properly, this is although very basic, so you’ll also need to include the amount of information you’ll be covering in each podcast and before every edition you need to keep editing that list.

After this,  research about your topic and create content, it can be on one single subject related to your niche or it can be varied, but you can’t keep changing the format. Make a list of all the things you’ll be covering and try to showcase as much information as possible, if its a video podcast then you’ll need to include pictures and videos of the topic, as audience would like to see those than just hearing you speak about it.

Lastly you must organize your podcast flow, you need to organize when to put up what type of event, divide it into parts are organize each properly and in the end organize it back together and edit it.

You also require a proper script, you don’t want to start shooting and stammer and take breaks in the middle right, moreover its a waste of more time by doing so. Create a script, read it once or twice and have it in front of you during the the creation process. If your making a video podcast you must also take care of the background, make up and even siting arrangements, you must also edit the video in the end to make sure it is not a static image.

Creating a podcast feed – RSS or XML

A podcast feed is necessary in order to distribute your podcast to multiple directories, if you have a high posting frequency its a huge headache to inform them all, but with a feed everything is done automatically. For this purpose there are many podcast generators, a few include PodcastGen and PodcastBlaster.

Their are also two other best generators, but for which you’ll need to have a blog, the first is PodPress which also helps you to add Itunes tags directly, moreover your readers can listen to your podcast from your wordpress post itself, the second one is Feedburner smartcast which has the same Itunes feature and any feedburner subscriber can listen to your podcast.

Distribution and marketing of your podcast

Thanks to the 100 million sold Ipods your biggest audience will remain Itunes, so after creating the feed the first place to submit it will be Itunes, you must download the latest version of Itunes on your PC and submit your podcast feed, the feed is checked everyday so if yours is of good quality its sure to be accepted, and your podcast will reach a wide audience from there on.

Other than this there are many other directories as well and many of them are as popular as Itunes, many popular ones are Podnova, PodcastDirectory, Podanza, PodcastBlaster and Blinkx. If successfully get accepted into all of these you can surely expect instant success and very soon you will have a decent number of audience, it all depends on your description, tagging and style, the later popularity comes from the quality of your content.

In case you own a popular blog then embedding your podcast into your blog is the first place to start your promotion, this is useful only in the beginning, after a few days your podcast will be capable of promoting your blog. I have already mentioned about Podpress, which is the only tool which you’ll need for this.

Monetization – the fun part

Because this is a new segment their aren’t many ad networks or agencies which provide publisher brokering services, but this is a positive problem, although you won’t have any income before your popularity touches a certain height, which will surely happen sooner. Though methods are less, opportunities are already high and increasing.

In this post I’ll provide you with most of the methods for monetization, but let me make it clear that this segment is growing and it as of now it still isn’t as profitable as blogging. The best source of revenue is the same as advertising and I’ll provide different options and methods for the same, but their are also a few which blogging didn’t provide us.

1) Podvertising networks are the most used methods today as they are easy, flexible and most have a wide range of audience, basically they are same as podcast directories, but other than hosting, displaying and promoting podcasts they also help publishers monetize their work through either pay per view or share in advertising revenue.

There are literally 100s today but the best and most recommended are blip.tv, Bluebrry, Podango, Podshow, Podtrac, Revver, Talkshoe and YouTube Partner Program.
2) Podcast Networks ‘Got audience, we’ll provide you the sponsors’ such as Mevio, Podtrac and WizzardMedia are adding 100s of podcaster’s into their network, they usually don’t have much requirements, all they ask for is quality content and medium sized audience and then they categorize them and sell ads on those podcasts usually on a CPM basis or general sponsorships priced according to popularity.

There is also a CPA basis which is given to only big podcaster’s, in this method a particular coupon code is promoted which could be used for the purchase of a certain product of the sponsor and you’ll be paid on the basis of the number of times the particular coupon has been used.

3) Direct advertising sales happens to be one thing common in both blogging and podcasts, blog owners have their own advertise here page and place links next to their ad zones, similarly most podcaster’s monetizing this way announce in the end either with plain closing text or by telling themselves about the advertising opportunities, this seems simple but its not ineffective as tons of mails would flow in if you place a mail id just for a few seconds.

Its really not a good idea to tell about your advertising opportunities in detail, just a small sentence telling ‘for advertising opportunities please visit this link or email us at advertising@podcast.com’ will be all that takes. Once you have a bit of audience this small trick works like wonders. Because your all on your own, in such a way you can provide any type of advertising, video, stripe ads and small text at the bottom of the screen and anything else you feel innovative. The only drawback here is the sale process which takes plenty of mail exchanges and hours of time, which would usually require someone else to do so.

4) Making money the traditional way with the help of donations isn’t such a bad idea when it comes to podcasts, blogs failed at it because they failed to give potential donors what they want, but their are many who succeeded with this method and something which was different in them was their content, they provided their readers more than just content something like a freebie or an amazing trick which is really unique.

I can’t guarantee that you’ll make good money with this, but I can surely tell you that podcasts have a better chance with this than blogs, the reason is clear podcasts are easier to understand and much easier than sitting and reading pages of posts so this creates a natural satisfaction inside any viewer, so it increases the rate of a donation. Whatever it is I’m strictly against depending on this as the only source of revenue, it can be used during startup stage and as additional revenue when your grown, but not as the only source.

5) Make money by making your content premium is the best way of monetization is every niche and all types of internet businesses. If your podcast is of very high standards people will surely pay to view what you’ve got. This method will definitely end up in a failure if you directly opt to this, its necessary that you have a bit of popularity first, get some loyal subscribers and some well maintained social reputation.

After you feel you’ve achieved this you can successfully opt to this, you’ll surely not get the majority of your viewers, only 20% to 30% will be ready to pay the premium costs, but that alone can double or even triple your income.

There are two recommended ways for you to do this, you can make your podcast completely paid after you’ve achieved the above conditions, directories like Itunes does not allow paid subscription to podcasts, so you’ll have to use premium tools such as premiumcast.com. The other way and the most efficient way is to provide one part of the content for free and charge for the other. There are a few shows which are free for the first quarter and need subscription for the rest, its usually organized in such a way that the lesser known content is provided first and the finer once in the rest, to make people subscribe.

On to our readers

Podcasting is serious business, it can help you make tons of money if done in the right way, I am planning to write a lot more on this topic so to keep up with further posts please do subscribe to our feed and also follow me on Twitter.

Before we start off, a small mere question to all of you, if you find a Mcdonalds outlet and some other unknown restaurant which offers better food at lower prices, both of these close to each other, which one would you mostly prefer visiting, I’m sure all of your answers would be McDonalds, same way when you consider cars, Toyota’s would be much more preferable than any unknown brand with the same features and low cost.

What is a brand? According to me, a brand is a certain face the public sees of a company which isn’t physical but visual and its this face which determines the consumer’s decision on two products of the same kind. There are a certain things which contribute to a company’s brand, the first few are its name, logo, tagline, designs and and ambassadors. Even after you’ve got all of these, it also depends on how you market and promote all of the above elements. But the true brand comes with the quality of your product and service and your name spreads virally with the word of mouth.

A good quality product or service is essential, but you’ll fail at business if you let that promote your business, you’ll need to get the first initial audience and grow at a fast rate, take Toyota and McDonalds itself, you’ll see that both made the best products in their industry, but they didn’t wait until their customers tell others, they both had widespread campaigns, good logos and taglines and high profile celebrities to endorse their products.

Your blog’s are no less than a mainstream business, today both are based on similar principles. When your blog reaches a certain level, you need to start promoting your brand rather than your posts. Moreover it takes investment, innovation and outsourcing to achieve in the large scale. It takes quality to reach a certain level and all these years I was in the impression that it takes quality to stay there, but I guess I was wrong. There is a famous local clothing brand in India, the quality of their cloths are just worst, but still they profits keep increasing and they continue to get great success all because of their huge distribution network and powerful brand.

Where does John Chow come in?

The major part of this post is based on John Chow’s case study, because he is one of the best men I’ve known who have built a strong brand and manipulated his reputation. Firstly his site hasn’t got anything special for readers, especially nothing for being a top MMO blog, but still he manages to get readers again and again and exploit for his own need.

I’m not against him, I’m one of his biggest fans, I really love his style and ever since I started to blog I have been following his foot steps although in an ethical manner. His secrets are not yet revealed to anyone, I just use my research, assumption and imagination for such cases, all of you may not agree with this post, but all the features here are really great to build an efficient brand for your blog.

The features of a powerful brand must be as follows,

Blog contests are one of the most efficient ways to build a strong brand for your blog and generate defensible traffic, and these days many people are doing the same, except that most fail at reaching their goals, and at the same time I’ve seen many blogs who reach sky heights with their contests. Most of them were big ones and provided huge prizes, but its until I realized that the main part of the success was on how they promoted the contest.

I have seen many people giving away single products or advertising spaces as prizes in their contests, which isn’t such a bad idea as its totally risk free and moreover its possible to do create such contests more often, but on the other side I see many blogs which host contests for one or two days on one single post, this is what I call as a waste of money or resources, as this is literally of no use. No matter what type of gifts you provide the main aim must be to keep the participants engaged for a longer period.

Firstly I would like to clarify a few misunderstandings in blog contests, if your asking for user content and judging the best one as the winner you can call it a contest, if you are randomly choosing a winner it can be called as sweeptakes and if your giving prizes to the first few to do something it’ll be known as a giveaway.

Now when you’ve got an idea for a long lasting contest ready, the only thing that would matter now is its promotion as more than content, promotion gets the value. I have organized a few successful giveaways in the past and almost all have achieved their goals. Promoting a contest isn’t really tough, its because internet users just love freebies and its this love which brings them from different corners of this world, so just a bit of promotion can lead to a viral chain.

Onsite exposure

Before starting a contest its necessary that you have an existing audience base as a contest cannot be a means of gaining initial traffic, but a way to grow your blog to bigger levels. So after you have an initial audience, the first thing you must do is to leverage your loyal readers to your contest, so the way to do this is to write a blog post announcing your contest and make sure you do all of your usual promotional methods for it. After awhile your sure to get a few participants depending on the traffic of your blog.

Later on start placing banners all over your blog and links at the bottom of all posts, which must all lead to your contest post, this way you’ll be announcing about your contest to all your random visitors from Google and other sources and this is surely a full fudge promotion of your contest.

Its recommended that you do all of these before or immediately after launching the contest as you want everything to begin with a big bang, so this way your blog will surely fill up the conversations in the social space.

User incentives

Most of the successful blog contests which have gone viral have either had a huge existing audience or have used their small loyal reader base to bring in more readers from outside. This can be efficiently done with the help of incentives for those who help your promote your contest. It might be of any sort, maybe blogging about your contest, or tweeting or sharing on Facebook, anything which you prefer most favorable.

Most people do this simply by announcing a separate reward for a section known as the best promoters and the prize to one of the many who would have written about your contest. This surely builds a huge following for not only your contest but a long term one for your blog. It works really well if you offer a cash prize for this, as your key target would be bloggers and webmasters, who would be really forced to participate if they find a new way to earn money.

Networking

The top two methods are actually more than enough to bring in enough participants and engage them till the end, but they are not likely to work really well in case you have a small contest offering small and un-motivational prizes, because it usually creates a big buzz in the beginning, but looses effect soon after launch.

So the ones who can keep your contest active till the end are your loyal readers and friends, as they’d do anything to get a personal thank you from you. Your blog’s regular readers can enter in this list, but you cannot effectively make use of them unless they are part of your community, thats why I recommend that you make your readers a part of your community.

Thats why I’ve recommended above that its best to start a contest after you’ve built your initial audience, or an existing network of bloggers or webmasters in your social sites. I’d mostly prefer mailing all my subscribers and then informing friends and fans on Facebook, and this would surely generate huge amounts of initial buzz for your site.

Contest blogs and forums

In case you haven’t heard of any, there are a hell lot of blogs and forums which write about the latest contests taking place around the web and these are usually user updated. A few of them include Online Sweepstakes, SweepsGoat, Sweepstakes Advantage and these are few of the most popular ones. I had posted but my free giveaway on all the three including a few others and I did get a few visitors from all. This didn’t really work for me at first, but I know many who have had great success with these.

This failed to work for me because the main audience here included tech and web design related surfers and blogging and make money online related contests didn’t stand a chance. So this is truly worth a try and its recommended that you submit it two days before the start of your contest as most of these sites take upto 2 days for approval.

Advertising

Nothing comes for free and even internet marketing the same principle is used, for promoting your contest nothing will be more targeted and efficient than an ad campaign on different platforms. This is advisable only if your planning a big contest which includes tons of money as cash prizes, because the conversion rates are usually low for small giveaways.

Firstly I’d start off with Facebook and Adwords and the traffic should lead directly to your contest page, if you’ve got a few more bucks to spare you can try blog advertising as well. This is sure to drive huge traffic and the conversion depends oon the type of keywords you target for your campaign.

Joint ventures

Your blog will be pushed to an all new audience if you’ve tied up with another blog or network, one fine example is my friend Sushant of Smartbloggerz who recently held a highly successful guest blogging contest, his contest would have been success even if he had just used the above methods, but he also chose to tie up with Myblogguest from which he got a huge response.

So joint ventures are really helpful, just contact a few fellow bloggers who have the same traffic as yours and ask them for a tie up, list a few terms and conditions on promotion, marketing and benefits and also on the expenses of the contest, if you have  few products or services you can promote them by giving it away as a prize on your friend’s blog.

1000 visitors a day is a big milestone for many bloggers, but less than half successfully achieve this, most of us believe this as a great achievement mainly because this gives a rise to more revenue opportunities, as most networks accept blogs once they reach this level. This isn’t really tough and its possible for all blogs in all niches, but it requires some materials and planning which you can’t buy or outsource. I say this because if you own a blog, you’ll need the personal touch to build a community for yourself and this isn’t something which can be outsourced, maybe this is one of advantages faced by other internet businesses.

The methods I’ll be talking about here are all free, but very time consuming, as I said above you cannot outsource it or buy it, but you can make your work easier by using a few paid softwares and services. As I mentioned above there are a few things which are necessary for traffic, some are as follows -

1. Frequently updated, good quality content
2. Sticky blog posts and faster loading blog
3. Onsite social media optimization (Its necessary to you place bookmarking buttons and badges to give exposure to your profile).
4. Good looking design to get repeat visitors.

The above requirements are the key to the success of any blog, without these you won’t find it of any use to promote your blog, I believe in the saying that blog promotion is the mixture of both monarch and democracy, content is the king and promotion is the prime minister and it requires both to make a stable country.

Like other traffic generation posts, this isn’t something where I’ll write 100s of methods to drive traffic, I’m just going to mention a few techniques which are practical and have the potential to build long term and consistent traffic. Most of them have been used by me and a few are those which I’m still working on,

Blog commenting

I have written about this in all of my previous posts about generating traffic and I have got great response from my readers as well and I must say that all of them had a pretty good success with it. I usually comment on all of the latest posts on Techcrunch and Mashable and those two make my major source of traffic, I get a hell lot of negative replies for each comment, but the number of visitors I get is really unbelievable and a huge number of visitors turn out to be supporters after one visit.

Its still not very targeted, my audience is found on both those sites, but less than half of the visits would be interested in checking out my and 20% would make a repeat whereas only 1% of the total visits would become active and loyal readers of my blog, this isn’t really bad and my blogs growth was all due to this.

You can improve this by commenting on blogs which are in the exact same niche as the visitors will be solely interested in your content and if you can find relevant articles and send towards your articles, then your visitors are going to laser targeted, I kept doing this before, but I felt that it was really time consuming, but its really efficient if you’ve got time to spare.

Forum posting

Other than blog commenting I am very active on two of my favorite webmaster forums that is Digital Point and Warrior Forums, both these forums have proven to be really beneficial in the long run and I’m just as active even today. Digital Point doesn’t have much restrictions on self promotion, but I make sure I’m as secure as possible, because if I get banned I’m liable to loose all the hard earned reputation.

Almost all of the forums these days allow links in the signature and thats my major source of traffic, before I used to place links directly inside the threads, but I got banned for that. But even today I post summaries of articles as threads and give a link to the main article on my blog and their doesn’t seem to be any restrictions on that.

For finding forums related to your niche, I think Big-Boards will be the best option, find one which has great traffic and analyze its terms and conditions before creating an account as their are a few which don’t permit self promotion. After you’ve chosen a few forums, get active there everyday and try to build a reputation in the community. This way your sure to bring in a few loyal visitors and grow your network as many of them whom you have helped will try to connect with you.

Facebook

My third major source of traffic and my most efficient one till now has been Facebook, this results in very less new visits, but still its a great way to get recurring visits and to update your most loyal readers. When I first started off on Facebook I started to add my my school friends and then started adding a few bloggers I knew, so with this my network started to grow slowly.

At one point of time I began adding all the bloggers I knew to my network and this helped me grow further as Facebook as a good recommendation system. Once I made a few new friends, I used to write on their walls introducing myself and my blog and I was successful in making connections with a few big bloggers in my niche, I also had put a badge on my blog which got in a few of my readers to connect with me.

After I had built a big Facebook account, I wanted to have an influential presence there, so started to comment on all the posts of other bloggers and started to chat with them actively and when the time was right, I started to ask them for exchanging social media votes and commenting on each other’s latest posts and stuff. I started to get huge amounts of traffic from Facebook and I successfully started to send all my posts viral on different networks.

Twitter

Twitter is no big surprise as a good promotional method, maybe I was too skeptical about it, because I could have built  a huge following if I would have been active on it as soon as I had created an account. In the past few days, the number retweets on my posts have increased significantly, and this is mainly because I’ve started to gain quality and targeted followers.

Facebook does play a key role in my rising Twitter traffic, mainly because I use my contacts there to exchange retweets and I have syndicated my Twitter account on Facebook, so all my tweets can be seen by my Facebook friends and this way I’ll get a hell lot of comments on all my tweets.

Another technique I used to increase retweets was with the help of retweet.it, I site which allows you to exchange retweets with others with the help of credits earned for retweeting others submissions. Getting retweets isn’t really hard and anyone can generate tons of traffic from it today.

Linkedin

Linkedin happens to be one of the most powerful ways to drive traffic to any blog and in reality it happens to be much more powerful than Facebook. But since I have a habit of moving where the crowd moves, I neglected this as well, but now I’m trying my best to build a influential Linkedin profile. Its highly recommended that you have a well established Facebook account or in any other social network before this.

First thing to do after creating your account is to find your existing friends with the help of your email or Facebook and try to leverage a few friends on Facebook to Linkedin as well and put up a badge on your blog for your visitors to connect with you, so after you’ve made a few connections, you’ll start getting requests automatically as Linkedin spreads connections faster than Facebook.

After you get your first few connections start interacting in groups and answering questions, because this is sure to bring in much more of them. After you make a handful start having an influence in your network, by commenting on their statuses, mailing them and just letting them know you.

All of the above steps take atleast a month to be done properly if you work everyday and then you can start promoting yourself. First thing you have to do is to let all your connections know about your blog, then start doing status updates with links to your new posts whenever you post something. Create a group for your blog and invite everyone to join that, this is one of the mediums for you to actively promote your posts.

Other than this, other ways to drive targeted traffic with Linkedin is with the help of answers and other groups, all this helps generate huge amounts of exposure to your posts and unlike Facebook you will not be limited to the same readers, but you’ll also get a few new ones.

Keyword research

From the beginning I have never concentrated much on search engine optimization, but still I’ve got good traffic from Google, which I think is because of my uniquely titled posts, so what I mean here is that if I could have got traffic without any keyword research, just imagine how much traffic I would have got with it.

Keyword researching takes hard work and patience, and the results aren’t immediate, but once get the skill you’ll know the power of it. For those of you who haven’t done this before, let me tell you that keyword research is a process of searching for a keyword and analyzing its popularity and competition with the help of softwares, one of the most used is the Google Adwords Keyword tool.

So with a few minutes of search you’ll find a few keywords which are saturated and a few which are not, but you won’t stop with that, for any keyword you’ll have to figure out a long tail version of the same, for example the keyword ‘Make Money Online’ maybe saturated, but you can still try ‘How do I make money online’.

After you’ve got your keywords, then its time to make a post on that and this post must be based on the exact same keyword and must contain these words a number of times in the post and in the tags. The title must be exactly same or similar to the long tail keyword you choose. After a few hours or days your post will surely rank for this keyword, but the placement of you post depends on the competition, your page rank and search volume.

Videoblogging

Written posts are surely going to die out someday as most people these days prefer Vlogs, but this might be somewhere far in the future, but currently videos are one of the greatest ways to promote your blog or business online. In the past 2 months, I have made 2 long videos, which have both received average amount of views and the most surprising part is that both generate upto 60 visitors a week even today and if you haven’t seen them, let me inform you that they are of very low quality as I was screencasting for the very first time.

Videos are really easy to make, just a bit of practice can make you can expert, so I’m sure you’ll be able to make one video post every week. Its necessary that the videos are related to your niche and make sure you put your blog’s watermarks all around your videos. This is going to give more than just traffic, because this is going to generate a hell lot of brand exposure.

If its the traffic your concerned with, then don’t worry, because most video sharing sites allow you to give direct links in the description area, which of course can lead to huge amounts of traffic. Creating videos and optimizing them for site exposure can be really easy, but promoting the same is a total different story.

Almost all videos  receive a few average views if they are submitted to the major video sharing sites, which can be done via Tubemogul, but they are not enough to generate traffic to your site, so for this purpose, first thing is to post the video as a post on your site and then do a basic promotion for the video on all the sites with help of social media.

After you’ve got a few views, you can start commenting on other videos with a link to your own, this is sure to be effective and Youtube has a feature known as video responses which help generate thousands of views. All these steps can generate views which can make it go viral because most sites rank videos on the basis of views and ratings, so ultimately, its your video’s quality and content which matters.

Social bookmarking

I’m sure most of you would have expected this to be on the top of the list, but I really didn’t want to do so, because social bookmarking does give me traffic, but not as much as the above 7, this is mainly because social bookmarking sites these days are reserved only for the big blogs in the internet and almost all of them are currently saturated.

So its kind advice to all of you to forget Digg, Reddit and if possible even Delicious, because most of the submissions there don’t get more than one vote. Thats why I believe that you must increase the use of small social sites such as Dzone, Blogengage and Twittley, but I still believe that sites such as Stumbleupon still have lots of opportunities mainly because their design doesn’t let it get saturated.

As I mentioned above Facebook plays a key role in my blog’s promotion on other networks as well, most bloggers see my links posted there and they immediately head out to vote up my posts and comment here.

On to our readers

This is not our first post on this topic, but each time we have managed to update you with something better, this post took a hell lot of work and I hope you could gain something from this, If you have any suggestions or opinions or anything related to this topic please do feel free to use the comment form below and also don’t forget to follow me on twitter and subscribe to our feed.