I wrote the first part of this series about a month ago, and it’s taken me awhile to get back on topic. November has been a busy month for some of my other business ventures.

The rest of the series can be found here:

1. Set Goals or Die! Part 1: Posting Frequency Goals…
2. Set Goals or Die! Part 2: Traffic Building Goals..
3. Set Goals or Die! Part 3: Monetization Goals…(forthcoming).

I’ve been doing a lot of ppc campaigns, as well as some blackhat techniques(shhhhh)…

In the first part of this series I spoke about setting and keeping a daily posting schedule of at least 1 post per day, but 3 is an ideal number. If you can post religiously 3 posts per day, your blog will be at the top of your niche in just a matter of months.

Today I’m going to talk about traffic building. Traffic is also paramount to a good successful blog. In fact traffic is the lifeblood. We include with traffic building - building followers or subscribers.

Here are a few steps on getting a lot more traffic.

1. Help people on forums. The more help you provide on forums like digital point, blackhatworld, or one specific to your niche, the more credibility you will build. Apply your link in the signature and you’re sure to get a lot of new visitors and blog subscribers.

2. Use google trends. I’ve spoken about this a lot. Google trends is a great way to get some immediate traffic. If you have some other good posts at the ready, people will stay a lot longer and might even subscribe. One thing I’ve done though that I’d actually advise against is using this exhaustively.

I posted a large amount of posts related to google trends, and got a lot of traffic - but it wasn’t the best quality because it didn’t always match my blog’s topic. Use this technique sparingly - but use it. I’d recommend posting 1 google trends blog post for every 5 normal blog posts.

3. Build backlinks. A great method I use for this is comment kahuna. This software finds blogs that remove do-follow and helps you write comments faster. One tip though: When writing comments try to find a post related to a post on your blog, then for your link back link to that post, not to the front page of your blog. This will build your google PR better, plus the people who visit your blog will be looking for similar information and will be more likely to subscribe.

4. Moniter your traffic. Part of setting goals is monitering what you’re doing and seeing if you’re making progress or not. I use statspress reloaded wordpress plugin, alexa, and google trends to track my traffic. I think it’s best to use multiple tools so you can get a more realistic picture.

5. Tweak. To be successful in blogging you will always be tweaking your efforts. Find what works for you. There will be some things that work for one specific niche that would never work for another. Just keep working and researching new ways to gain traffic.

6. Newsletter. To build stickyness and repeat traffic it is highly recommended that you give away an ebook, and build a newsletter with it. You can see an example with my newsletter form at the top of this blog.

7. Set little goals. The best way to build anything is to set mini goals. For instance set a goal of 1000 unique hits for December. Then set a goal for maybe 1500 for the next month. Do what you need to do in order to get those hits and you will be pleasantly surprised that you might get a lot more.

Bottom line: Don’t get discouraged, and never give up. You will succeed if you stick with it. Most big blogs began as small blogs. Also most big blogs took at least a year to build to big. It takes a lot of time and effort but in the end it is so worth it. It’s recession proof. I make money each month regardless of the financial woes of the nation or world. That’s job security.

Feel free to add any traffic tips you might have to this post and help others out.

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Consider this a primer to making money with a blog.

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Image of Affiliate Money

Blogging can be very profitable. Can we all make as much as Darren Rowse or John Chow? Not likely, $43,485 per month is a lot of dough.

Can we make a fraction of that? You betcha. Would you be happy making just 10% of that?

Think about it, being able to earn $4,348 per month working from home, in your spare time.

Think about being an authority, someone people come to for answers. Imagine attending events related to your topic, so that you can live-blog the event.

Being a professional blogger has many perks.

The key to being a professional blogger is authority. Blogs are about building your brand - your credibility.

What is the number one reason people are coming to your blog? I can guarantee it isn’t because they may find the “adsense ad of their dreams on your site”.

Most people are visiting your blog for the information you provide. Information is the #1 use of the internet. Capitalize on that.

Blogs are ideal spots to find the information that people are looking for. Blogs not only provide fresh content, but through comments they also provide a way for others to share their information on a certain subject.

Search engines love blogs because of their frequent updates, and the more you update your blog, the higher up in the rankings your blog will rise.

Why your readers keep reading your blog:

1. Readers feel catered to rather than regarded as potential customers (unless you alienate your readers by posting faulty content, or misleading articles).

2. Blogs have a more human feel to them over regular websites.

3. People love to share their insights on subjects, and they can do this on most blogs via the comment section.

4. Blogs are easy to keep up with due to RSS feeds. Subscribe to a blog, and all you need to do is follow them in your favorite RSS reader.

Blogs are known to bring in repeat visitors more than any other type of website.

General websites may get bookmarked from time to time, but with a blog they may read your rss feed every couple of days and will come back when they are searching for some information related to your niche.

Regular blog visitors are  of a higher caliber than any visitor, so treat them right!

Blog visitors will leave comments, and help improve your blog. Google and other search engines even look at how many comments a blog post has when determining their rankings.
Blog visitors will also suggest your site to their favorite social media sites like: Digg, Stumbleupon, Myspace, Facebook, Propeller, Yahoo Buzz, Mixx, etc…

Blog visitors are also many times bloggers themselves, and many cases if they read a good article on your blog, they may write one similar and link to you as a courtesy.

I recommend trying to look beyond Adsense for your ad revenue when blogging. Adsense is surely a great way to make money, but it’s also a great way to lose money, there’s many who’ve abided by google’s terms of service and just as they were about to get paid got banned from the service.

Don’t lose your hard earned money.

Another reason not to use google ads is because they will take your reader away from your blog. Your visitor probably will be lost for all time, and won’t come back.

What’s the best way to monetize your blog?

Ask any big time blogger where they make most of their money, and they all agree that it’s through affiliate programs like MarketLeverage, Clickbank, or Pepperjam Network.

Many big time bloggers also make a substantial income with their own products, or services. Offer your own ebook, cd, dvd, video tutorial, etc and you can make a lot of money. Just make sure that the product that you offer is related to the topic of your blog.

Another great way to ensure the success of your blog is to build a newsletter and offer freebies for new subscribers. This should be launched from day one. Send your list top notch articles related to the niche, and from time to time add an affiliate advertisement. A good website for hosting your newsletter on is AWeber, or you can use a php program there are many free ones available.

Spread a few affiliate text links around your blog for good measure, and you will make a lot more than if you used google adsense. Just don’t overdo it, give quality content and a few affiliate ads, maybe make 1 in 10 articles be a review for a new e-book or product.

There are literally a million and one ways to make money from your blog - be creative and most importantly offer your readers a high level of value.

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Well, this may not be blackhat but it’s definitely gray.

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The key to successful blogging that I’ve been mentioning lately is focused dedication and continually writing new content. You may notice that I don’t always post new content every day to this blog, although I do try to. A lot of the content I create, I use on article sites, squidoo, hubpages, etc.

This is an easy quick way to churn out articles with reckless abandon:

1. Purchase Dragon Naturally Speaking, or find an alternative speech to text program.

2. Google the topic that you want to write about, or visit goarticles.com and search articles there.

3. Launch Dragon NaturallySpeaking and rewrite the article on the fly by putting the article into your own words. Most people can speak faster than they can type and this is a much faster way to write articles.

Please note that the key here is to make the article look different and not duplicate as far as the search engines are aware. It’s also to save you from any copyright issues.

How you make money with this technique:

Well you could post it to your blog and make money off your blog’s advertising, OR you can post your new article to squidoo, hubpages, associated content, helium, or any other site that pays for articles.

If you do it right you could potentially write 5-10 posts in an hour, if you submit these to Associated content as exclusive posts you could earn as much as $5 per post, plus an additional $1.50 per 1000 pageviews. In essence that’s $25-50 for an hour of work!

Let me know if you’ve had success with this technique!

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Is Network Marketing a Viable Home Based Business?

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How does it stack up against Franchises, and other Small Businesses?

Right now the economy is in crisis, people are losing their jobs left and right. Now more than ever people are looking for an opportunity, they need to find a way to earn money immediately.

Before joining my network working company(MyWorldPlus), I researched many different home based business opportunities. The advantages of network marketing far outweigh any other home based businesses that are out there.

Here are just a few things that made network marketing stand out for me:

Business startup costs: In most traditional businesses and small businesses start up costs can be a bit daunting.

For instance franchises like McDonald’s are great businesses but they cost over $100,000 just to get started. On the other hand joining a reputable network marketing company, you’re looking at startup costs as low as $50 in some cases.

While some home-based businesses may also have low start up costs, there generally is a requirement to keep buying supplies and you will always have overhead. In network marketing you will need few supplies and hardly any overhead.

Business sales: In network marketing you are generally able to start making sales on the first day. With most network marketing companies you don’t even have to worry about taking payments customer enters in their own information into the company’s website and that’s about it.

Not only is order taking easy, but so is order fulfillment. Most network marketing companies handle all the packaging and delivery, so that you can spend most of your time making sales, signing up new distributors, and training your downline.

On the other hand if you’re in the business completely on your own, it is your responsibility to set up the system to take orders, process those orders, package your products, ship the products and many times even make the product. On top of all of these items you need to make the sale as well. If you can manage all that great, but most people with that lifestyle have no time for themselves or for their families.

In a traditional home-based business as your business grows your free time disappears. As your customer base increases you have to increase the amount of time and effort that you put into your business. For instance, if you own a cake decorating business it is exciting to get a new customer, each new customer means more time in the kitchen and less time doing the things that really matter in life.

Legal: Laws govern just about every business transaction, it’s important to make sure that your home business follows these laws. Most businesses you will have to pay to register your business, get insurance for your business, incorporate, file business license, etc. In network working if you choose a reputable company and follow their policies, you will generally be within the law.

But these are just a few of the reasons the network marketing is by and large the easiest and best way for a person to start their own home business and begin getting paid today.

If you’re ready to try Network Marketing, why not give MyWorldPlus a shot? Take a free Tour Today!

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ElfYourself 2008: 3 Days till ElfDay!

Image by xcaballe via Flickr

Just a year ago OfficeMax debuted its highly successful holiday hit website: ElfYourself.com.

ElfYourself.com was a promotional viral video with a twist - users could upload their own pictures and create dancing elves to send to family and friends as e-cards.

Sounds pretty simple, eh? That simple site got over 100 million unique visitors throughout the 2 month campaign.

Enter Greg Spiridellis, CEO of JibJab Media. He saw ElfYourself and saw some great potential. ElfYourself.com resonated with him because it matched some of the offerings of JibJab which also lets people personalize e-cards with their own images.

Spiridellis looked up ElfYourself’s traffic stats in Quantcast and saw the following:

In the one month that ElfYourself.com debuted and got hammered it rivaled facebook in traffic, which is pretty darn extraordinary. JibJab’s ceo thought they could do it a few bits better. In Februar Greg Spiridellis cold-called the chief marketing office of OfficeMax proposing a partnership.

Under the partnership JibJab would create new dancing elves around its ‘Starring You’ platform. JibJab is planning not one but three different dances including: Disco Elves, Country Elves, and Jazz Elves.

They are also planning on capitalizing on the opportunity to sell digital downloads of the videos, and printed images on cards, mugs, mousepads, and more.

Elfyourself.com could turn from an expensive marketing ploy into a huge money-maker. OfficeMax agreed to JibJab’s proposal and is scheduled to relaunch in about 3 days.

[Source: TechCrunch] Disclaimer: I’m in no way being compensated for this post it’s purely an interesting blog post - however if you work for OfficeMax and would like to compensate me by all means drop me a message.

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