On July 6, 2008 Luke Zet from www.progrecious.com has write an interesting article on how to increase Alexa Traffic Rank on his site. One of his tips is installing the Alexa Toolbar & Widget. So, what I’ve do is test the tips that’s he is giving. On the same day, i have install the Alexa Toolbar that he’s recommended to and monitor the result. On the same day that I’ve install the toolbar, my Alexa traffic rank is 324412 and i do this testing for 1 month starting on July 6, 2008 and see the result.

Here are the result on my testing on Alexa traffic rank toolbar:-

July 6, 2008 - 324412

July 9, 2008 - 319923

July 12, 2008 - 307662

July 16, 2008 - 297502

July 19, 2008 - 295991

July 23, 2008 - 286246

July 31, 2008 - 273502

August 6, 2008 - 270908

And now its up to you guys to do what you think that you should and want to do. Whereto you want to install the Alexa Toolbar or not.

To your blogging success.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Image via Wikipedia

Today’s blog traffic tip is a technique you can apply to your blog, and if implemented well, will achieve the following:

- Make your blog a destination point
- Increase your blog’s “stickiness”
- Bring traffic to your blog regardless of how (in)frequently you update
- Consistently attract incoming links

Best of all, you only need to implement this technique once for it to work well. If you do it twice, or thrice, your blog will be well on it’s way to becoming a superstar in the blogosphere.

Sounds like a miracle technique doesn’t it? Well read on to find out what I am talking about…

THE HOOK

If you are at all interested in pop music you will be aware of what is known as the “hook”. The hook is the element of a song that is just so catchy it makes you want to hear the song over and over again. It forces people who otherwise should not be singing to sing along while listening to the track. The hook is angerously powerful.

In terms of blogging the hook has the same characteristics that it has in music. A hook brings readers to your blog over and over again. It’s addictive, fun, or valuable and unique.

HOOK VS PILLAR

So what’s the difference between a “hook” and a “pillar”, the technique I talked about in previous articles and the core concept behind my course, http://www.BlogTrafficSchool.com?

A pillar is generally easier to produce and most successful bloggers will produce multiple pillars each month, some each week or even every day. A hook on the other hand is something so compelling and unique that you are lucky if you pull it off more than once a year.

You could think of a hook as a pillar on steroids. It has all the same characteristics but everything is magnified with a hook. It takes more work to pull off a successful hook, but the rewards are significant when done right.

Still confused?

Essentially a hook is something, and it can be a blog article, but often it’s a piece of software or a digital download, that provides tremendous value. The idea is this one resource brings in traffic to your blog because it helps a lot of people.

Word of mouth spreads a hook all over the place, with hundreds of bloggers linking to it, and people sending emails to tell their friends about it. A good hook comes up in conversation as the accepted way to get something done - as the best solution to a problem.

HOOK EXAMPLES

The professional blogging site, Performancing.com, released a plug-in for the Firefox Internet browser that allowed bloggers to post articles directly from their browser without logging into their blog software. This one piece of software is unique and very valuable to the whole blogging community and therefore was a hook for the Performancing blog.

The team behind Performancing no doubt worked hard to get the software designed right, it would not have been created over night. Their hard work paid off and when their plug-in was released they enjoyed a huge flow of traffic, exposure and incoming links. I still read blogs that mention the performancing plug-in when they first discover it. This demonstrates the long, ongoing traffic creating effect of pulling off a successful hook.

Performancing has gone on to release many more great tools for bloggers, including Performancing Metrics, a statistics tracking service for blogs, the Performancing Exchange, a place where bloggers and blog employers can advertise blogging jobs, and the latest, Performancing Partners, an advertising system designed to help connect blog publishers with advertisers.

All these services are hooks - they are not easy to set-up, provide tremendous value, leverage community and make Performancing a destination blog.

COMMUNITY BASED HOOKS

I’ve talked about the importance of building community at your blog in previous newsletters. Another form of a hook is a forum where all the fans of a hobby congregate and talk or trade. If that forum is hosted as part of your blog, then it is a hook, bringing people back to your site every day.

A forum or a chat room, a classifieds section, or a bulletin board, are all community services that can make your blog into a destination point and help your traffic grow without you directly creating the content - the community does the work for you.

It’s not by any means easy to build a successful forum or community service. It takes a while to gain traction - it’s about as hard as it is to  build traffic to a blog, so if you decide to go down the path of building a forum adjacent to your blog as a hook strategy, be prepared for some hard work.

Try this article to get you started with your forum building:

How to Build a Popular Forum Community in 5 Steps
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/41/building-a-forum-community/

DON’T BE DISCOURAGED

Remember a hook is a challenging technique to implement well. Most sites that have good hooks are the result of a team, or special talents. To build software or create a resource that is truly unique takes resources, timing, strategy and a good dosage of luck too.

In my career online I have created maybe one or two truly successful hooks. One was a forum(MTGParadise.com) that people started trading cards at so they kept coming back to trade, the other is my blog Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, which has the hook of my entire back catalogue of articles to help people build an Internet business. Both these two hooks took at least a year to build up to the point where I could really call them a hook.

Building a hook takes time. Keep at it for the long haul but make sure you see HOW the hook will work, don’t just assume it will work. You need to see the psychological pull, the addiction or fun or value that your service or content or resource provides. If you don’t have that, it won’t work.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Effective use of time is the main ingredient in creating a thriving blog or website. In this post, I want to explain some high-impact traffic generating techniques you can use that minimize time and effort without minimizing results.

1. Don’t write guest-posts — exchange them. Generally, a guest-post on another blog means one less post on your own blog. This doesn’t have to be the case. Exchanging guest-posts is an idea introduced to me by Trent from The Simple Dollar. It’s exactly what it sounds like: you write a guest-post for another blogger and, in return, they write a guest-post for you. While you’re out promoting, your blog is still freshly updated. It’s an arrangement that allows you to have it all at once.

Like any exchange, though, it should be equal. If the blog you’re swapping guest-posts with is too small, you’re not going to get much in return for your work. If the blog you’re swapping guest-posts with is too big, they won’t see how writing for your audience will benefit them in proportion to the work they have to do.

The obvious solution is to target blogs that are in (roughly) the same stage of growth as yours. This is not the only solution, however. You might still be able to get exposure on a big blog if you ask for less from the other person. For example, you might ask an A-list blogger to write 100 profound words in exchange for 500 from you. The extra exposure will be worth the extra work, and by making it easy for the other person, they’re more likely to accept the exchange.

2. Promote your site during daily tasks. Unless you’re incredibly dedicated, you probably use the internet for more than just blogging. It’s worth thinking about how you might be able to turn seemingly mundane tasks into promotional activities.

• Put your blog’s URL at the bottom of your emails, so each message you send will promote your blog.
• If you participate actively on forums, add your blog’s URL to your forum signature.
• If you use Google Reader, you could share a post from your own blog with others who’re likely to be interested in it.
• Put a link to your blog on your social networking and social media profiles.
• Set Twitter to publish links to new posts from your blog.

3. Practice in-post networking. This can be as simple as finishing a post with a question to a few other bloggers: what do they think about such and such? You’ll probably want to follow-up with an email to make sure they didn’t miss the trackback. While you shouldn’t expect everyone you call upon to write a post relating to your idea, some might — particularly if your original post was food for thought.

Opinion-based topics are likely to get more uptake, especially if you call upon bloggers who’re likely to have strong thoughts about what you’ve written. If it only takes an extra minute to ask the question at the end of a few select posts, it’s definitely worth doing. Aside from the potential traffic benefits, engaging with other bloggers enriches your niche as a whole.

4. Release a ‘Best of’ eBook. Freebies generate excitement, links and traffic. An eBook of your ten best posts is a great way to introduce your blog to new readers. If you’re not too fussy about production values, you can put an eBook together in 15 minutes. Other eBook options are: publishing a post-series (I did this recently), collating your best posts in the past year, or collating your best posts on a particular topic to create something with a theme.

5. Build a mailing list and use templates. Whether you want others to link to you, vote for your articles or answer a question, emailing others to ask them a favor is time-consuming yet rewarding. Often, time-constraints stop bloggers doing this often. But if we look at what makes emailing a number of people time consuming, we can see that it doesn’t have to be.

First, create a few different mailing lists you can use in different situations — for example, one for social media votes, one for questions, one for sharing your work, and so on. Keep them in a safe place. By saving your mailing lists, you can make sure this is a job you only need to do once.

Secondly, for each group email you need to send, develop one template you can use. Even though you might end up sending the template email to a large number of people, aim to make it sound personal. This can usually be done just by greeting the intended recipient by name and addressing them as an individual rather than a group. Put plainly: you don’t want your template email to read like a template email.

Remember that templates are one person, one use. If you cut and paste the same email to ask for social media votes, for example, the process is going to seem uncomfortably mechanical.

Source : Skelliewag

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

When I first heard about blogs I struggled to get my head around the whole concept. What made a blog different from a normal website?

I quickly grasped the key differences - the diary style articles, the comments and the easy interface for adding new content. It all made sense until I hit something called a “trackback“.

“What the dickens is a trackback?!?” I thought.

I looked around for a definition and nobody could provide an answer I quite understood.

When I really want to learn something I go ahead and do it. I took action with my new blog and sent some trackbacks to other bloggers. Later as my blog become popular it was sent trackbacks. Having experienced both receiving and giving a trackback I understood what it was all about and felt much better.

WHAT IS A TRACKBACK?

About now is the time to write a nice and simple definition for you so you can get your head around trackbacking. I’ll try, but this is a concept that is difficult to fully grasp until you actually do it.

Here goes -

A trackback is a form of blog conversation that links two or more relevant blog entries together. One blogger writes an article that references or is relevant to another blog’s article and fills out the trackback section. When the blogger publishes the article the blog leaves a trackback on the other blog’s article, which usually appears in the comments area as a truncated summary with a link.

If you are still confused, and I suspect you probably are, the only solution is to initiate a trackback yourself. In the next blog article you write be sure to reference another blogger and send him or her some trackback lovin so you can get your head around the concept.

HOW TO SEND A TRACKBACK

Each blogging software system handles trackbacks differently. Bloggers can also choose to switch trackbacks off or require every trackback be approved before going live, so don’t be surprised when you send a trackback and it doesn’t show up, it may have nothing to do with you.

Some blogs will trackback automatically, or attempt to, especially if they are the same format. For example a WordPress blog trackbacking a WordPress blog. In that case as long as you include a link to the other blog’s post your blog will attempt a trackback (sometimes called a “pingback”).

Usually you have to manually enter a trackback URI into the blog entry you are creating. You can find the trackback URI at the end of most blog posts (take a look at your blog posts for the term “Trackback URI” or similar).

By the way -

URL = Uniform Resource Locator, a fancy name for ‘Link’
URI = Uniform Resource Identifier, another fancy name for ‘Link’

I use WordPress and for each blog post I make there is a trackback input box section for entering trackback URIs. I copy and paste the trackback URI from the blog entry I want to link to and when I click publish my blog will send the trackback. My blog will also confirm when a trackback has been sent after publishing my post.

If you are still confused send me an email and I’d be happy to help.

HOW TO GET TRAFFIC FROM TRACKBACKS

If you trackback someone else’s blog post you are leaving a link that points back to your blog. Someone who reads the blog article may click through from the link and visit your blog.

In some cases, if they are not using the “nofollow” tag, you get some PageRank juice (not sure what PageRank is? Read this short introduction - http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/275/pagerank-explained/) which will help your search engine rankings.

DEFINITION: NOFOLLOW

The “nofollow” tag is a line of code that some blogging systems, such as WordPress, implement automatically. The tag is added to every link left in comments and trackbacks so the search engines don’t follow the link (humans however view it like a standard link so can follow it like normal).

It’s supposed purpose is to stop people spamming blog comments purely for links but it really doesn’t work that well as a deterrent.

You can read more about NoFollow here -

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/181/blog-trackback-lies/

If you are a WordPress blogger you can install a plugin that removes the NoFollow tags for you. I use it on all my blogs. You can read more about it here -

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/236/no-more-nofollow/

TRACKBACKING FOR TRAFFIC

Trackbacks are good because they bring traffic to your blog when you trackback other blogs. Being the “victim” of a trackback is also good because it means another blogger has read your blog and deemed something you wrote worthy of including in their blog. There is a good chance if they trackbacked you that they also made a direct link to your blog too.

This helps your social proofing (remember the first newsletter?) because it provides evidence that other people are reading and responding to your blog articles. However the real power of trackbacking is an awareness building tool to get the attention of other bloggers.

When you first start blogging not many people will know your blog exists. By trackbacking other bloggers you demonstrate interest in their content which is a surefire way to make them interested in you and your blog.

It’s very likely that the blogger you trackbacked will follow the link and see what your blog is all about. If you have been following my advice and have written some pillar articles your new visitor will like what they see, very likely subscribe to your blog and if you are lucky may even trackback you or mention your blog in a future entry on their blog.

If nothing else, by trackbacking a blogger you will forever occupy some of their mind-space, which in the future may open up all kinds of doors and opportunities for traffic.

TRACKBACKING ETIQUETTE

It’s a fine art to use trackbacking as a traffic building tool. Many bloggers make the mistake of going trackback crazy before their blog has any content. This may bring new readers in but they won’t stay long or bookmark you because you don’t give them a reason to.

It’s also important to know your place in the blog hierarchy. The really popular bloggers are trackbacked constantly so you won’t likely get their attention by trackbacking because you will be one of many. You need to carefully pick and choose who you trackback and when you trackback if you want to use it for building your blog traffic.

Source : Blog Traffic King

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!