PureBlogging

In order to make money off of your blog, you need to make sure that people are reading your blog. The more traffic that you have on each post, the more income you are likely to be able to make from blogging. That means that you need to be doing everything that you can in order to drive people to your blog posts.

Here are ten basic promotion tools that you should be using to drive people to your blog:

1. Craigslist. There are many different ways that you can use Craigslist to get people to land on your blog posts. Whether you’re creating online blogging events that you promote through the site or simply advertising a great post in the “general” section, this tool always snags a new audience for your work.

2. Link to yourself. In every post that you write, you should be directing people to other posts that you’ve written. You can do this through “related links” at the end of your post or you can do it simply through direct text links. Don’t just link to posts within one blog but cross-link to promote your blog’s work on the other blogs and websites that you write for (as appropriate to the terms of your blogging contracts, of course).

3. Email signature. Your email signature should have a link to your blog. It should also have a second link to a specific favorite article that you believe a majority of people that you email would be interested in reading.

4. Business cards. Most bloggers don’t carry business cards but every blogger should. These should be handed out whenever you get the chance. They can be placed at coffee shops and added to media kits. Yes, bloggers should have media kits.

5. Social bookmarking sites. You should be active on at least one of the major social bookmarking sites (Mixx, Digg, etc.) You may also want to be active on a social networking site (LinkedIn, Facebook) where you can have a link to your blog. Make sure to regularly promote your own blog posts through these sites to continually attract a bigger audience for your work.

6. Comments on others’ blogs. Hopefully you already know that this is one of the most important tools that you can use for bringing new traffic to your blog. Most basic comment sections include a place for you to add your blog link – and you should.

7. Ping Technorati. Many bloggers are failing to make use of Technorati which is a great site for getting some basic traffic based on keywords. Claim your blog on the site so that it will be regularly updated every time that you add a new post. Then make sure to use Technorati tags at the end of your post.

8. Blog links on your resume. Many people neglect to include links on their resumes which is unfortunate since most resumes are sent through the Internet. Add a direct link to your blog as part of your contact information at the header of the resume. Also include links to specific posts that highlight the skills that you are emphasizing throughout the resume. Even if you don’t get the job, you might get a new reader for your blog.

9. Add your blog to your bio. You probably have to publish your author’s bio on a semi-regular basis. Make sure that it has a direct link to your blog so that people who are interested in who you are can make their way to your blog to find out.

10. Boasting. Most bloggers diminish what they do when they are asked about it. They say they blog, but they kind of laugh it off. Or they vaguely say that they write for the web. Word-of-mouth is the single biggest tool that you have at your disposal in terms of promoting your blog. You should be taking pride in what you do and spreading the word with confidence every chance that you get.

You probably didn’t get into the business of blogging because you have a passion for marketing. In spite of this, you need to get a grasp on great promotion in order to draw people to your blog. Using these basic tools is a good start but you should also be regularly using new creative approaches to boost your blog promotion.

Question of the Day: What other promotion tools are a must for bloggers to be using?

Great job everyone! The Comment Contest took a little longer than I thought but you guys finally came through.

PART 1 (Comment # 3500):
The comment # 3500 was posted by Phillip from Affiliate Lounge. If your looking for information affiliate marketing be sure to check out his blog.

PART 2 (Spread the Word):
The randomly selected winner for Part 2 of the contest is… egon from Contestu.com. If you’re looking for more contests be sure check out his site.

Congratulations guys! Send me your PayPal/Entrecard email addresses and I’ll send out your prizes.

Thanks again to everyone who participated. I really appreciate you taking the time to get involved. Now, anybody have an idea for the next contest?

Make your blog more appealing with cool widgets. The following are some of the many cool widgets for bloggers. However, I recommend you don’t overload your sidebar with tons of widgets. Overloading your sidebar will make your blog less appealing; just a few cool widgets is all you need to create a more appealing blog.

1. Contactify will allow you to give your blog readers a way to contact you without revealing your e-mail address to spambots. Another great benefit is this cool widget for bloggers cuts down on spam!

2. Do you offer a free newsletter? Invite your blog readers to sign up by adding the Newsletter Registration Form to your blog.

3. FeedJournal is a cool widget that allows your blog readers to read your blog in newspaper form. Not only can they read your blog in newspaper form, but they can also save the file on their harddrive for later reading.

4. Publicize your upcoming events and/or appearances with the Upcoming Badge. You can customize the badge to show up to 10 upcoming events and/or appearances.

5. Increase your sales with the vFlyer Listing Widget.

6. Display your most popular blog posts, page views and visitors on your blog with the Visit Widget.

7. Do you communicate with your customers and/or clients through Skype? Add Skype Online Status to your blog’s sidebar .

8. The Alexa Traffic Rank Badge reveals your blog’s Alexa ranking.

9. We’ve all seen Wordpress bloggers display “related posts” at the end of their most recent blog posts, right? Well, now there’s a Related Posts Widget for Blogger blogs as well.

10. Another widget for Blogger blogs is the Top Commenter’s Widget. This widget shows your commenters you appreciate them, and by displaying this widget on your blog, you might start to see more comments on your blog posts.

That concludes my list of 10 cool widgets for bloggers. If you know of any other cool widgets for bloggers, feel free to share them in the comments section below.

I have been here on PureBlogging posting for approx the last 3 months. In that time I have also been writing on my own blog www.crenk.com, which has been going from strength to strength. I have always wondered why, in those 3 months, Pureblogging hasn’t increased their subscriber numbers too much and Crenk has rapidly. Pureblogging is focused on helping bloggers increase their subscriber numbers and site metrics, but can’t even increase our own at this point in time.

I’m writing this to find out a few things about Pureblogging. I know Pureblogging has a loyal readership, but can this blog move up and go to the next level? or will it stagnate? I personally think that we have a great group of writers on Pureblogging, but none of them actually care too much about improving the site and competing with the likes of Problogger, Dosh Dosh and BloggingTips.

I want to throw it over to our loyal readers and actually ask them, what they think about the site? Where can we improve? What new features do you want to see on the site? And any other suggestions you might have.

There’s a problem that many bloggers run into when building their blog traffic. You’ve followed the suggestions on this an other blogging “how to” sites: you’ve written a lot of great content, you read and comment on other blogs that are on the same topic, and you’ve submitted your site to the directories and social bookmarking sites. Despite your efforts, Google doesn’t seem to know you exist. You’re listing, if you can find it at all, is buried under a mountain of other sites, some ofwhich don’t seem to be even remotely relevant to the search term. It can be very frustrating, but fortunately, there are solutions.

You need to define your niche with less competitive keyword phrases.

If you have been blogging about a subject, you probably can come up with a cart-load of phrases that describe your blog. (If not, David wrote a nice post about how to come up with phrases back in December.) The bigger problem is knowing where to position yourself to have the greatest chance of success.

The ideal keyword phrases will generate a decent amount of traffic, but they don’t have a large amount of competition. Your best success will come with keywords that will send more than 100 people to your site every day, but have less than 30,000 competitors. I know, 30,000 competitors sounds like a lot, but most of those competing sites are there because your keywords showed up one time on one page, and they’re buried so far down that a team of miners couldn’t find them. While 100 people a day may not sound like a great deal, it is a good starting place, and if you can get listed well with several keywords each sending 100 people a day…that’s not bad.

Finding the search traffic is relatively easy. If you go to Word Trackers free keyword tool and type in your keywords it will give you a list of your keywords and all of the variations using your keywords. Beside each keyword phrase it lists the number of times that phrase is searched for each day on Google. However, that doesn’t tell you how much traffic you can expect from that keyword. Because of all of the various ways people search, your traffic could be very different from the number of searches for any phrase.

For example, if you were writing about healthy eating and entered that phrase into the keyword tool, you would see that 1,523 people search for “healthy eating” each day. It has been shown that the #1 spot in Google gets the vast majority of traffic. So you would expect between 1,000 and 1,500 visitors from Google (if you were #1). That doesn’t take into account the variations. If you look at all of the different ways “healthy eating” is used in searches, you see that there is a lot of potential traffic there. You have to dig a little deeper to find out how much traffic you could expect.

There are two tools that will give you the information you need. The first is the GTrends Tool from Wordtracker. This one incorporates Google Trends, and it estimates the actual number a visitors that the #1 listed site will get daily. Google Trends is good for seeing the trends in the search traffic, but it doesn’t tell you how much volume is really there. TheGTrends tool compares the volume of your phrase with phrases where the volume is known, then makes an estimate of how much traffic you could expect.

The GTrends tool also tells you how many competitive sites are listed in Google. That will save you a lot of time from looking up each individual phrase in Google.

When you enter your keyword into the GTrends tool it gives you list of phrases and search traffic (just like the normal keyword tool), but beside each phrase is a bar graph icon. When you click the icon it shows you the number of competitors, and the estimated number of visitors that the #1 site will get each day. In our example, “healthy eating” has 1,523 searches each day, but because of all of the variations the #1 listed site gets an estimated 7,143 visitors each day. (It also has over 8 million competitors.)

There is another tool that can help automate the process for you. GTrends Made Easy is an application based on the GTrends tool. For each keyword you enter it gives you the number of estimated visitors and the number of competitive sites. The free version will allow you to search up to 150 keyword phrases at a time, so you can cut and paste your phrases into the program. It lists all of the phrases so it is easy to look down the list to find phrases that will give you enough traffic, but with less competition.

For instance, “healthy eating” has a lot of traffic with a huge amount of competition. Look further down the list and you start seeing smaller niches that are not nearly as competitive. “Healthy eating recipes” will send 140 visitors a day, and it only has 35,000 competitors. “Healthy eating for children” send just under 100 visitors per day and only has 21,000 competitors.

If you target these smaller niches you can start generating more traffic to your sites quickly. Over time, with continued work and posting, your site will climb the Google ladder and your traffic will continue to grow.

If you really want to have a successful blog, doing the same things that everyone else is doing will not cut it. Your blog will just be another “me, too!” blog. If you write the same kinds of articles with the same kinds of headlines as everyone else, you will not succeed.

There is a flood of mediocre blogging advice out there. Rise above it and look to yourself to make your blog succeed. Here are some thoughts regarding this:

• Know why you’re in the game. Know why you blog. Know the purpose of the blog. Write it down. Make sure everything about the blog fulfills its purpose. Know what you expect to get out your blog, what you expect to accomplish with it. This is Step Number Zero. If you don’t do this, if you don’t know this, nothing else about your blog will be strong–nothing. This is your “true North” on your compass. “Making money” isn’t good enough. Everybody needs to make money, no duh. I have news for you: the money is a side effect. What’s more important is knowing what you want from blogging.
• Know who you’re blogging for. Know what they love, hate, fear, and covet. Know how to push their buttons. If you don’t, you can write all the “Cosmo” style headlines you want, and your blog will never be a success. When you know who you’re writing for, you can create content your audience cannot live without. “Everybody” is not your audience. People just like yourself are not your audience.
• Put as much of your personality into your blog as you possibly can, so that there’s no way anybody but you could do it. For over 99% of the blogs out there, I could switch author names around and you wouldn’t be able to tell. You call that successful? I don’t. People don’t want your blog, they want other people whom they like. Be that person in your blog.
• Be a producer, not a consumer. Spend more time creating your own unique material, instead of just reading everyone else’s and then linking to it. Have you every made a copy of a copy on copy machine? If you keep making copies of copies, what you end up with looks vague and distorted. You want to be at the beginning of that chain, not at the end. Producers are leaders, consumers are followers.
• Think big, take chances, do things that frighten you and push you out of your comfort zone. Ask for that interview, that guest post, that link. You never know until you try. Show some guts.

This a rare blog post, in that “following” the advice in it makes you a leader, rather than just another follower. None of this stuff is easy to do. In fact it is very difficult. The harsh truth is that most blogs suck. Most bloggers say they want to succeed, but then they want nothing but easy answers and magic formulas. Since this post is not another top ten list, most bloggers will already have stopped reading it.

But you know, at this point in the over-saturated blogging advice field, information that helps bloggers become leaders, rather than just another kind of follower, is really about the only advice worth our attention.

PS - thanks to James and Harry for the wake-up call and the inspiration.

Photo by Fransisco Antunes