Build traffic by networking with other blogs

In the previous post we saw how to market your cornerstone posts by using social networks, bookmark lists and recommendation sites. You may also exploit those networks in other ways, if you find blogs similar to yours.

How to network with other blogs

This is a step by step guide on how to network with other blogs.

1. Find a blog similar to yours


2. Comment on the blog


3. Link to the blog

You find a blog which is similar in size and status to your own. Observe the blog to determine whether the blog is updated as often as yours, whether the blog has good content and whether you would like to associate your blog with that blog. Commenting is always appreciated, and linking even more.

Find a blog similar to yours

This is done by using the social networking sites you should already belong to. I like to rate blogs based on the amount of entrecard credits it costs to advertise on them and based on their project wonderful traffic. If their entrecard advertising costs about the same as mine and if they get roughly the same amount of traffic, I know this blog has a similar status to mine.

While you may also try to interact with the huge blogs out there, it is a better idea to build mutually beneficial relationships with blogs of a similar stature. A huge blog like pro blogger has nothing to gain by networking with you. As an example, my main blog The Necro Files reviews heavy metal albums and horror films. I regularly interact with the following blogs:

• Karl Hungus


• the Vault of Horror

These blogs enjoy roughly the same target marget as I do. We each have something to offer to the other, and thus we enjoy regular interaction. A good guideline is to ask yourself: would you subscribe to the RSS feed of that blog? If the answer is yes, you have a networking buddy.

Comment on the blog

There are some great commenting scripts out there. I do not really receive lots of comments on my blog per se, but I do comment on other blogs regularly. Since you may provide a link to your blog in comments, this is a great way to spread the word about your blog.

Also remember that you may comment on social networking sites too. I tend to do this when a comment on my blog is not relevant to the topics covered on the blog of the person who left the comment.

Link to the blog

You want people to find your blog. The mutually beneficial way to ensure this is to help people find other blogs too!

• List a blog roll on your blog. This is a widget that has a list of blogs you enjoy.


• Write a review for another blog that is similar to your blog. A little bit of ego stroking never hurt anyone.


• Give a postive remark about a blog that is similar to yours in one of your posts.

Remember, always seek mutual benefit whenever possible. If you want something, you have to be able to give something in return.

Some useful links

• Dosh dosh explains networking within your blog niche.


• One cool site explains blogroll links widget for wordpress users.


• Pro blogger explains why you should join a blog network.

Build traffic to your blog by marketing your cornerstone posts

Marketing your cornerstone posts is part of the strategy of marketing your blog to people who are not reading your blog already. This is done by submitting your cornerstone posts to a variety of sites

• Blogger social networks


• Bookmark sites


• Recommendation sites

I will shortly deal with the ones I use.

Blogger social networks

For my main blog, the Necro Files, the most traffic comes from referral sites like blogger social networks. Most of my traffic comes from

• blogcatalog


• mybloglog


• blogflux

You need to sign up for these, and you do need to include a widget or some code on your blog. This is a minor inconvenience and is actually part of social networking fun.

Bookmark sites

Although many bloggers report getting steady traffic from these, I don't really. There is a quick and easy way to submit your posts to quite a few bookmark sites at the click of a button. It is called OnlyWire. Before you get all excited, many people have expressed concern about OnlyWire.

I have used OnlyWire for about a month. I enjoy the convenience of submitting my posts to a myriad of bookmark sites with minimal effort, and although I have not noticed a huge growth in traffic, it is worth it because I get various links back to my blog.

Recommendation sites

For the purpose of easy classification, I list the following as recommendation sites:

• digg


• entrecard


• stumble upon

Digg

This is a catalogue that offers users the change to digg or undigg posts. You may submit your own posts. I haven't had much success with digg, and unless your blog is of an overly technical nature, digg will not pick up on it easily.

Entrecard

A recommendation system most people have trouble with. I have had the most success with entrecard. The quick and easy way to be successful with entrecard can be found on Lisa's World, so I won't go into that further.

Stumble Upon

Also a moody system, which has given me loads of traffic on occassion. The key is to interact with other similar stumblers. Stumble Upon offers you a great opportunity to network with like minded Internet users, all of whom are potentially interested in your blog. You need to install a browser plug in. I use firefox so I am not sure if it works on Internet Explorer.

This is the second part of a series on how to build traffic to your blog. The previous post is build traffic to your blog by providing great content.

Useful links

• Dosh dosh guide to build massive traffic with stumble upon.


• Lisa's World guide to building massive traffic with stumble upon (different from the other link).


• Dosh dosh guide to the fastest way to build an audience for your new website.

Project Wonderful: easy way to put advertising spots on your blog

I recently joined Project Wonderful. Project Wonderful is an advertising network. You install the Project Wonderful widget on your blog. This widget hosts several squares of advertising spots. How many squares you want, the size of the squares - that is up to you. How do you make money from Project Wonderful?

Project Wonderful - how does it work?

Most advertising affiliates work with click-through rate or some other means of measuring traffic to determine your income. Project Wonderful determines your income from the amount an advertiser is willing to spend to advertise on your blog.

Advertising is sold on daily basis. The amount of money an advertiser is willing to spend acts like a bid for that advertiser. The highest bidder wins, and his ad is displayed on the square.

Each square may have individual bids. Bids pay for daily advertising, regardless of traffic and regardless of clicks. Highest bidder wins, Project Wonderful takes a percentage and you get to own the difference!

This is a wonderful way to generate income, if you'll pardon the pun. You can adjust the minimum amount you would like advertisers to bid on your site. My advice is to keep this initial value low - no more than $0.01 or $0.02 for a site that gets less than 50 hits per day.

Installing Project Wonderful

The Project Wonderful widget is a javascript widget. For those who use blogspot, follow my simple how to ad internet marketing programs to your blog guide.

The steps involved are as follows:

• sign up for Project Wonderful


• once you are a member, sign in to Project Wonderful and click on 'My Ad Boxes'


• way at the bottom of the page, you will find a link 'create a new ad box'. Click on it


• adjust the amount of rows and columns you would like in your widget. You can also set the size of the ad squares you like here


• grab the code, and put it on your blog


• it might be a good idea to upload a custom 'your ad here' image. Just ensure that the custom image is the correct size. In my case, the 'your ad here' image of my main blog, The Necro Files, is 125 x 125 pixels. I made my images with The GIMP. The GIMP is small, cheap and relatively easy to use. You can also use it on Microsoft Windows. Try it!

Advantages of Project Wonderful

• the minimum payout is only $10


• you can earn as little or as much as advertisers are willing to bid per ad


• once you have an account, you can advertise on other Project Wonderful widgets too

Drawbacks of Project Wonderful

The only drawback I can think of is once you have a widget on your blog, you can't adjust the minimum bidding amount while there are active bids. This is not really a disadvantage. It makes sense not to adjust the minimum bid while you have ads running. The only way you can do this is by stopping all the ads - which I don't want to do because those ads are already paid for.

Fortunately, you can easily add another Project Wonderful widget to your blog! I left the minimum bid at $0.00 for a widget with less than optimal visibility, and added a new widget with a slightly higher minimum bid.

Simple, fast and you can earn from day 1.

How To Add Internet Marketing Programs To Your Blog

In a previous post, How To Monetize Your Blog, I introduced the ways I use to monetize my main blog, The Necro Files. These include mainly advertising programs and affiliate marketing.

This post deals with using affiliate marketing.
I will give you a step by step guide in setting up one of my affiliate programs, namely BidVertizer.

Affiliate Internet Marketing Programs I Use

You will note some of the following ads on The Necro Files:

• Google AdSense ads


• BidVertizer ads


• ShoppingAds

If you want to sign up for any of these programs, just follow the links and see if you meet the requirements.

How do you put affiliate program links on your blog? I use Blogspot for hosting my blogs, so simply use the Blogspot authoring environment.

Using Blogspot To Display Affiliate Links

1. Sign up for your chosen affiliate program. In this case, it is BidVertizer.


2. Get the code from your affiliate program. Bidvertizer uses JavaScript code.


3. Add the code to your blog. In Blogspot, this is made easy because you add a new HTML/JavaScript widget and paste the code in there.


4. Publish your blog and you are done!

Adding Affiliate Code To Your Blogspot Blog

Even with a well-designed interface like the Blogspot dashboard, it is sometimes confusing for new users where to click. I made some screenshots of the procedure for adding affiliate code to your Blogspot blog:

1. Sign in to your Blogspot account.


2. Click on Customize.
   


3. Click on Add a Page Element. You need to click on this in the section where you want your affiliate ads to appear.
   
   Also note that you may need to adjust your browser settings to allow Blogspot to show you pop-ups.


4. Click on HTML/JavaScript.
   


5. Paste the code from your affiliate program into the Content text area.
   
   You do not need to supply a title, but it does make it easier to edit the code later. If you don't supply a title, the widget will just indicate it is HTML/JavaScript.


6. Click on SAVE CHANGES.
   


7. Publish your blog and you are done!

It's that easy.

Beyond Affiliate Marketing

Realistically speaking, affiliate marketing offers you about 1% of your traffic in click-through. The reasons why this is so low is that affiliate marketing links are often impersonal, readers can identify the ads easily and avoid them and often the links are irrelevant to the personality of your blog.

We can conclude two things from this lesson:

• you need to generate traffic to your blog


• you need to diversify sources of income on your blog

You generate traffic by marketing your blog. We will deal more with marketing your blog and diversifying your sources of income in future posts.

Note: This post contains affiliate links.

Useful Internet Marketing Links

• Four Ways To Make Money From Single Blog Post Pages


• Ten Alternatives to AdSense.


• Wikipedia page on Affiliate Marketing.

Bloggernoob: Review Of a Money Making Blog

While I managed to set up my own blog, The Necro Files, for making money, my success so far does not equal that of Bloggernoob. Instead of dealing with affiliate programs and advertising devices, I decided to review this blog instead.

What Is Bloggernoob All About?
Bloggernoob is a money making machine. It appears to be a part time project with very clear targets set. The owner of Bloggernoob is clearly very gifted when it comes to marketing.

Bloggernoob regularly offers competitions - not silly ones where you can win an affiliate link, real ones where you could win awesome gadgets like a pmp. This is an excellent way to promote your blog.

Bloggernoob features a baby to indicate that the blogger is a noob – a newbie. This is very clever, although I rather prefer babies like this:



What can I say? There's no accounting for taste.

Why Is Bloggernoob Successful?
Firstly, I really like the layout of the site. It is uncluttered and easy to navigate.

Bloggernoob manages to entice readers to visit the site with off-site marketing. Joining a blogging network is definitely paying off for Bloggernoob.

The adverts are part of the blog organically. A reader never realises that adverts are on parade.

The Medicine
Let us consider Bloggernoob against Pro Blogger's 4 Pillars of Writing Exceptional Blogs. These pillars are as follows:

• Be Extremely Useful


• Write Great Headlines


• Make The Post Scannable


• Write In Plain, Concise, Common Sense Style

Is Bloggernoob Useful?
To be quite honest, Bloggernoob is more interesting than useful. I would suggest that Bloggernoob explain more about the art of making money with blogging.

Does Bloggernoob Have Great Headlines?
The headlines are usually succinct. One can clearly gather what the posts are about by skimming over the headlines. Bloggernoob does have great headlines.

Are The Posts Scannable?
The posts are not really scannable. It could be argued that Bloggernoob has short posts, so making it scannable would not really enhance the blog. However, I would still suggest more lists and perhaps a few bold keywords. It is always a good idea to pay mind to the inverted pyramid style of writing.

Is Bloggernoob In Common Sense Style?
This is where Bloggernoob excels. My posts tend to be filled with jargon because I am used to academic writing. My posts are often structured in a draconian manner, but due to the jargon much of the message could get lost.

Bloggernoob manages to stick to the point. The posts are devoid of jargon and definitely in a common sense style.

Conclusion: How Bloggernoob Could Improve
A suggestion from Contestime is to keep a running statistics bar somewhere on Bloggernoob. I agree, it could be interesting to see how much money Bloggernoob is making day by day, week by week or any such time division. It is one more reason to return to Bloggernoob regularly.

Bloggernoob is after all about making money, and I haven't seen such a running tab on any meta blog. It could give Bloggernoob that Unique Selling Point.

My Own Suggestions On How To Improve Bloggernoob:

• Try to work on the structure of the posts a little. The writing style and the headlines are great, but the posts could be made more scannable.


• Some of the posts have glaring spelling errors. This could be easiliy remedied with any word processor.


• Bloggernoob could use more interlinking to previous posts. This is a great way to lower your bounce rate. Link back to previous posts that were particularly successful.


• Lastly, some of the posts could be more useful. I feel the target audience of Bloggernoob is comprised of people who not only want to see how much money Bloggernoob is making, but also how he did it.

Bloggernoob shows that with great marketing, your blog could be noticed. This is my entry for the Bloggernoob pmp contest. If you have any ideas on how to improve Bloggernoob, please enter too!

Some Useful Resources
10 Steps To Writing A Successful Series On Your Blog
20 Types Of Blog Posts
How To Write For The Web

How To Monetize Your Blog

When you monetize your blog, you have several options. I will list the options I use in this post, and spend the next couple of posts on each of them. These are the methods I use for my main blog, The Necro Files. While I haven't made shiploads of money yet, the income from these methods has been increasing steadily.

The Main Methods to Monetize Your Blog
You can either allow programs to place ads for products or services on your blog, or sell items from your blog.

• Advertising Programs


• Affiliate Marketing

Advertising Programs
This is when you allow programs like Google AdSense and BidVertiser to add their advertisements on your blog. Google AdSense places the "ads by Google" boxes to your blog.

BidVertiser is very similar, but it pays out in smaller amounts, which means you get paid more often. You usually get paid per click. This means each time a reader clicks on their ads, they pay you a small amount. It all ads up!

Affiliate Marketing
When you allow a company like Amazon or Ads by ShoppingAds to advertise their products on your blog. You don't get paid per click, but they pay you commission on each item that is sold from your site. Affiliate marketing makes out the largest portion of income from my blog. I subscribe this to the fact that I write reviews for products.

Some Thoughts On Advertising Programs
Advertising programs are convenient. I added the Google Adsense ads to this blog using the same code from my main blog. BidVertiser is slightly more complex in that you have to add the URL of your other blogs to their network, but it is not really much more effort.

How Do I Add Internet Marketing Programs To My Blog?
We will touch on this subject in the next post. In the meantime, you can have a look at these links I found useful:

Useful Links
Collection Of Articles On Ways To Monetize Your Blog
How To Make Money From Your Blog
Ways To Make Money Online