Build traffic to your blog by providing great content

Building traffic to your blog is the key to making money from your blog. It is not as simple as it sounds, because if you market your blog to your regular readers, you are preaching to the choir. You need to market your blog to those who are not on your blog, while still keeping the loyalty of those who are regular readers.

A useful site for Wordpress users

If you are using the excellent Worpress software for blogging, you owe it to yourself to visit One Cool Site. One Cool Site offers simple and clear advice on topics you might be puzzled by, like how to resize pictures without losing quailty. In fact, they even offer ten great tips on how to build traffic to your blog.

Great content is the key to traffic

It is not that hard to get a single post on Stumble Upon or on Digg. What is hard is to prevent your blog from showing a peak in traffic, which returns to 10 or 20 hits per day shortly after. You need to build consistent traffic.

The key to enjoying consistent traffic to your blog is to provide great content. We have already dealt with the format you should use, namely the inverted pyramid style of writing. We will cover how to write great content here.

• Write at least five cornerstone posts


• Market your cornerstone posts


• Network with other blogs


• Encourage other blogs to network with you


• Link back to your other cornerstone posts

I build traffic to my main blog, The Necro Files, by using tips from dosh dosh, ProBlogger and One Cool Site. This series of posts on how to build traffic to your blog is based on their advice and my own experiences using their advice.

Write at least five cornerstone posts

A cornerstone post is a post that teaches your reader something. Most how to make money blogs are based around cornerstone posts. It is a tutorial that is extremely useful.

This proves to be a problem for certain niche blogs that do not cater for readers who want to learn how to do something. My main blog reviews heavy metal albums and horror films. It is difficult to write a tutorial on those topics. Here are a few ideas for five cornerstones:

• write a series of posts on the same topic or the same product


• write a series of posts on related products


• write a series of posts which give information to your readers about your topic

I have written a few successful series, sometimes months apart. The idea is to use one of your cornerstone posts as a flagship to promote the other related cornerstone posts when

• you link from your flagship cornerstone post to your other cornerstone posts.


• you link to the flaghsip cornerstone posts of a different series

This solves the problem of getting one day of peak traffic and the next day very little. Readers who like your flagship post will want to read further, so they follow the links and browse around your blog. While you are publishing the cornerstone posts, one per day, you also create anticipation for the next post. This is a great way to win readers and create a buzz around your blog.

Some useful links for building web traffic

• The dosh dosh web traffic building tips.


• How to get internet traffic from web logs from the Internet Summit.


• Ten traffic promotion tips from One Cool Site.

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.