This is the simplest tip I’ll ever write about – it’s also the hardest.

How can you guarantee more traffic?

WRITE MORE POSTS!

Did I say it loud enough for you? Fact: There are a million different things you can do to try and optimize your blog, but if you don’t have the traffic it doesn’t matter. Each blog post I write will bring in at least 200-400 unique hits initially from google and twitter.

That’s a fact. If I write 5 posts a day I’ll get at least 1000-2000 unique hits.

Your theme doesn’t matter, the number of plugins you install don’t matter, the design doesn’t matter (much…) It’s how much quality content you can spit out.

I’ve managed to write around 300 posts in 1 year, I feel disappointed in myself. I took a few months off to work on other projects. My goal for the 3rd year is to write 3 posts per day 5 days a week, or 5 Posts for 3 days a week, or 60+ Posts a month.

Setting goals is important if you’re going to be successful.

What are your posting goals for your blog?

A landing page can serve many purposes. It is often used in Affiliate marketing and PayPerClick campaigns when trying to get visitors to go to your affiliate campaigns.

It can also be used for Split testing different marketing campaigns for an ebook, or online product.

For instance you can create a special link for a friend to blog about where everyone who visits that person’s specialized landing page and orders gives your friend a referral fee.

You can also setup different landing pages to see which ads get people to act.

First step in setting up a landing page in wordpress is designing the template for your landing page.

The easy way if you know your way around php and wordpress themes is just to make a duplicate of your ‘Page’ template and rename it to ‘landing page 1′ or something similar. Then edit that to look the way you want it. For instance it’s a good idea to remove the sidebar on landing pages.

On a landing page you want the focus of attention to be whatever your point is. The point of landing pages is to get a quick action from an internet user with a short attention span.

Get them to fill out your CPA form, or visit whatever program you want them to purchase from, or even just get them to subsribe to your newsletter.

Don’t give them distractions.

If you don’t feel comfortable editing your theme files, then you can try the AffiliateTheme which already comes with built in Landing pages that you can use.

Second Step (Optional)

If your landing page is for a special offer, or for a discount then you don’t want the whole internet finding your landing page. (Some landing pages you do want the whole world knowing about, some you don’t)

In this case I recommend using the Advanced Category Excluder plugin.

This plugin lets you create a special category that the plugin will ‘exclude’ from your website. It will make it so the page will not show in search engines, or anywhere else. The only way to find the page will be to know the exact link, so only those who receive the link will be able to use it.

(Special thanks to Slyvisions.com for the heads up on the Advanced Category Excluder Plugin and it’s use in Landing Pages)

Can you think of any other ways to create and optimize landing pages on Wordpress?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Do All Salesletters And Landing Pages Have To Look The Same? (copytraining.com)
• SEW Experts: Is Your Landing Page Relevant? (searchenginewatch.com)
• Top 5 PPC Landing Page Mistakes (steven-sanders.com)
• 5 biggest Mistakes for using the wrong PPC Landing Page (web-workathome.com)
• What is an Acceptable Cost Per Acquisition (costpernews.com)
• Adwords Secrets And Yahoo Marketing – Ideas About What To Post On Your Blog (content123.com)
• Recession proofing your affiliate business (revenews.com)
• Driving Traffic To Your Business Opportunity (CenayNailor.com)
• How to Land More Conversions with Landing Pages (solutionset.com)
• What Affiliate Marketing Mentors to Follow, and Why? (stepbysteptips.com)

Link building is an essential necessity for all bloggers, unless you don’t want to be indexed by google and drive a ton of traffic to your blog, then by all means – skip right past this blog post.

Here is a definitive – simple list of things you can do to get incoming links.

1. Give away Freebies
2. Contribute to popular forums, using your link in your signature.
3. Write a pillar or link bait article, and get it plastered on digg, reddit, and other viral sites.
4. Create video link bait that goes viral on youtube.
5. Post your link as the source on Question and Answer sites like Yahoo Answers.
6. Write a Wordpress Theme, or Plugin. Themes are great because you can link back to your site in the copyright area.
7. Do something unusual that gets you noticed on a popular news site.
8. Share the link love, link to others who may link back.
9. Insult an authority in your niche, might get you flamed but it may get you some good backlinks.
10. Become top commenter on do-follow blogs.
11. Produce killer content that people quote, and link to.
12. Use Ping.fm to post your blog posts across multiple social networks so people see it, and link to it.
13. Cross link from your other websites.
14. Provide a great service, or design a web app.
15. Make an ebook. Give it away for a great way to get new email subscribers for your blog.
16. Starting an affiliate program, is a great way to get a ton of incoming links, and authority.
17. Write guest posts for other blogs in your niche, make sure to add your link in the bio box.
18. Submit articles to article sites, linking back to your site in the bio.
19. Purchase Reviews, or ask people to review it.
20. Become DoFollow and Submit your blog to dofollow directories.
21. Write reviews, if you give a good review the site may link to you, if you give a bad review then other sites might link to your review.
22. Submit to free and paid directories.
23. Write list posts, people love lists(you’re reading this post aren’t you?), and lists get lots of links!
24. Make a poll or survey that people are interested in.
25. Create a wikipedia page about your blog, that links back to it.
26. Sponsor other sites, get them to review you.
27. Start a charity or non-profit.
28. Hold contests. Then post that contest at Blog Contest Site.
29. Release a firefox extension or plugin that is a must have.
30. Interview someone famous, or at least semi-famous. Even a popular blogger will work, your mom, though in most cases won’t work.
31. Writing meaningful, non-spammy, comments on do-follow blogs.
32. Ask for people to retweet, digg, or stumble your best articles.

What do you do to build links that I missed?

Related articles by Zemanta

• White Hat Link Building – Affiliate Summit West 2009 (revenews.com)
• The Best SEO Advice I Have For Bloggers (blogherald.com)
• One Way Links On Autopilot (howtospoter.com)
• Why You Should Use Zemanta? (howtospoter.com)
• Using Trends to Get More Links (nichetitans.com)
• 40 WordPress Plugins to Improve your Blog’s Performance (wpzoom.com)
• Linkbaiting – Generating “Honest” Links on the Web (newofferings.com)

This is my input on day two of  Problogger’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge. Day 2 Darren wrote about the benefits of writing list posts.

I have often stated how lists are a great format for pulling content together in a neat, and precise method that will grab the attention of your visitors.

Darren of course being the master blogger has written a good summary on the use of lists.

You can follow my homework assignment here:  “7 Tools, Scripts, or Apps to Follow and Unfollow on Twitter. ”

Read what Darren Rowse has to say about Writing Lists.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to Launch a Blog and Have Fresh Content for Weeks (problogger.net)
• How to Write Fast (problogger.net)
• Write a List Post [Day 2 - 31DBBB] (problogger.net)
• Create a Twitter Landing Page (montysmegamarketing.com)

To Follow or to UnFollow – That is the Question!

Right now Twitter is the most hyped social network on the planet. More people are joining Twitter everyday than any other website.

There’s no way to discount that kind of momentum.

Now maybe you’ve been with Twitter for awhile, or just starting out – but you will notice that many people and companies tend to start following those who mention their username, or who follow them first.

Here’s a round up of a bunch of tools, apps, and scripts to help you do the very same thing.

1. Twollow – a cool twitter tool that will automatically follow everyon that mentions specific keywords on twitter. It places limits though, so that you don’t get flagged or banned.
2. Hummingbird – a professional tool for quickly building your Twitter network, without being framed a spammer. Give it a try today!
3. TweetLater – This site has tons of great features. They have a pro and free version. Some of the features include: Scheduled tweets, track keywords on twitter, save and reuse drafts, send welcome DM’s to new followers, follow those who follow you, unfollow those who unfollow you, vet new followers, personal status feed, use on unlimited twitter accounts, and many more…
4. SocialTool – A service that keeps your follower list in sync across multiple networks (currently has options for facebook, and twitter). Also protects you from following spammers!
5. “How to Autofollow on Twitter” – PHP Script that auto-follows anyone that follows you.
6. staynalive.com- Another script that auto-follows those who follow you.
7. Raduboncea.ro – Same script, only this one is a python script and also sends a DM to those who follow you.

Related articles by Zemanta

• What’s Up With Automation in Social Networking (socialsavvyva.com)
• 4 Ways To Find New Twitter Friends (makeuseof.com)
• Exploring Social Media Tools Series (lorelle.wordpress.com)
• Geek Tip: Schedule Tweets in Advance (geeksugar.com)

Does Google PR even matter anymore?

Nobody knows when or how it’s decided, save a few select programmers at google. Does it even matter anymore?

I have 0 PR after having my blog up for nearly 2 years. I have many incoming links, I have a google index of 3,180, an alexa rank of 250,000 give or take, daily traffic equal to about 700 hits per day, and a yahoo index of 11,400.

My blog is also helping me earn over $1000 monthly working from home on a consecutive basis.

I’m at the point where whether I write or not I get traffic – when I do write an article I will spike and get between 2-4k hits on those days.

Each of my blog posts are pinged to many directories, and announced via ping.fm to all my social circles.

Yet, I have never sold or bought links. I have never blatantly spammed my links. I have never done anything to try and gain incoming links in a blackhat manner. All my incoming links are perfectly organic.

So, why do I have a 0 PR?

I would love Matt Cutts to write to me and give me a good reason. I’d also like a good reason why this site has been adsense banned, not that I need adsense I make more off adbrite, and honestly think it’s probably better going with a different company than google.

Especially when google hires Nazis like Matt Cutts and other programmers who basically have the power to say who can or can’t stay in their program based on stupid reasons, and won’t answer why.

It’s like the statement JP Morgan Chase Bank made today about the bailout:

“We’ve lent some of it. We’ve not lent some of it. We’ve not given any accounting of, ‘Here’s how we’re doing it,’” said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. “We have not disclosed that to the public. We’re declining to.”

Lets change this to Matt Cutts of Google (I attack Matt Cutts because he’s the PR arm and well known, maybe he won’t like being attacked and will answer my questions if not then he truly is a Nazi and I’m calling him out on it):

“We’ve slapped some sites, we’ve not slapped a few, we’re not giving any accounting of who we have slapped, or why.  We don’t care if people’s businesses are hurt by it – we’re google we can do anything. Oh and by the way about that “Do no harm” thing…haha just kidding!”

With all this said – the funny thing is I may be google slapped when it comes to PR but I do still get good traffic from the search engine arm – I just have no PR juice, maybe that will change – I’d be happy to write a retraction if I ever get an answer as to why my PR is still 0, and my adsense account was deactivated.

Do I have high hopes? Nah – maybe someday though Matt Cutts will see this and look into it, maybe he googles his name every now and again, maybe he will see me ranking high for the term Matt Cutts is a Nazi.

One last thing I use Nazi, not as white supremist, but as totalitarian. Hitler had full control, and could do as he pleased. Those at google think they have the same power when it comes to the internet – I’d love to see them get slapped with an anti-trust lawsuit by the USA – it’s only a matter of time.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google’s Matt Cutts offers three tips for ‘Company Blogging’
• The Secrecy of the Bailout Money
• Google’s Matt it again
• Do No Evil?
• Google Moderator launches (Matt Cutts/Gadgets, Google, and SEO)
• Talking About Twitter, Google, and Matt Cutts With Loren Feldman of 1938 Media

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

• FreeTrafficSystem Is Better Than Plain Vanilla Article Marketing
• Targetting Search Engines Other Than Google
• Did You Just Pay for That Freebie?
• The No Cost Service That Promotes Your Site For You
• Alpha is a Dumb Idea
• How to Get Over 100 Free PR Backlinks
• Basics of Search Engine Optimization Part 6
• Why Add you site to A Dofollow Blog Directory/Search Engine

I’m gonna keep this post short and sweet.

I was thinking about ways to build my list larger, so far it’s growing pretty good. Offering a freebie download is always a good start.  I’m toying with the idea of writing one free elite PDF e-book weekly, and make it only available to newsletter members.

I believe this technique would work great because it’s a good way to split-test new topics. One ebook may not appeal to your readers, while another might appeal to a larger amount.

Anyone have experience with this type of technique?

Share your Experience and comments!

Today I’m gonna review a new product on the market called “Commission Blueprint” which was created by Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey.

Commission Blueprint is a training program on how to maximize affiliate profits using Clickbank and Google adwords.

The authors of the program state that the couse is a “no-holds barred step by step course showing every last secret” that they know.

The product consists of a one time $77 charge for 14 videos and more than 3 ebooks that provide extensive details and examples of the more technical material discussed in the program.

The second part of the product is a $67 a month membership site that the authors promise will continue to provide more training on maximizing affiliate profits. The membership site includes some nice resources such as templates, and sample landing pages for marketing campaigns.

A $4.95 trial membership is being offered to those who purchase the video package.

I highly recommend at least trying out the monthly membership, and definitely putting everything you got into making this video series work for you.

I’ve been using a lot of the same techniques myself for years, and have learned many more techniques that are making me a lot more money than I was before.

The Creators of Commission BluePrint:

Steve Clayton is an expert in marketing and technology and has served as VP for a fortune 500 company in Burlington, NC. Steve currently manages over a million dollars in adwords campaigns each year.

Tim Godfrey is an internet marketer who has been successful in the health and golf niches, and has run a very profitable online gambling site.

Commission BluePrint: Product.

The 14 Videos are narrated by Steve Clayton. There are over three hours of video explanations that show how Steve was able to become a super affiliate with Clickbank.

The product teaches step by step training on how to find the bst clickbank products and what you need to do to milk the products for every nickel and dime.

The videos start out a little slow, but by the end they cover a gold mine of information. Be sure to have a pen and paper handy to take some detailed notes.

Some of the topics covered include:

Keyword Research:

How to find 4-6 products and test them for profitability. Also an overview of the different statistics and definitions related to clickbank and adwords.

Domain Names and Hosting:

Choosing the right domain and hosting plan.

Creating Landing Pages:

How to setup and build good looking, high converting landing pages.

Managing Adwords Campaigns:

How to combine the statistics from adwords and clickbank to manage keyword ad campaigns. Steve also covers how to determine which keywords are producing and which aren’t.

Scaling your Affiliate Business:

Steve explains here how to increase your daily commissions, and optimize bids to increase profitability. Steve also explains when to copy your campaign over to msn and yahoo.

Steve also explains when to use email campaigns or JV with other marketers, how and when to use SEO, how to use opt-in pages, and how to create Thank You pages.

Cash Flow:
This section explains how clickbank pays out its commissions, so you can budget your money to better manage your adwords campaigns. Steve also explains why it may be beneficial to get a tax advisor or accountant.

What I liked Best:
Overall the information was very well organized and very thorough. Each part was presented in a logical method and order.

I enjoyed videos 3-14 the most as they contained the most useful information for me personally. I also enjoyed the free templates, and attractive opt-in page template which all looked very professional.

What I didn’t like:

The video takes a little bit of time to get to the real meat and potatoes so to speak, but once it hits ya, a major lightbulb comes on and you can start making some really decent money almost overnight.

I give this product a high mark, and definitely recommend trying it out for yourself.

Purchase Commission Blueprint Now!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Commission Blueprint That Turns Newbies Into Super Affiliates
• How to Get Started Affiliate Marketing?
• The Commission Blueprint to Your Clickbank Success

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… C: wait… SD: wait…

Image via CrunchBase

The top 3 laws of blogging.

Law #1 is write.
Law #2 is write some more.
Law #3 is never stop writing!

I know this sounds quite redundant. Writing is the untold key to successful blogging.

The more you write, the more traffic you get, the more money you make.

Yeah, I know sometimes it’s not easy to ‘just write’. Sometimes we want to do other things that we feel are ‘helping’ but aren’t as important.

Some common distractions that can ruin our blog:

• Twitter
• Re-designing
• Trying new ad networks
• Reading other people’s blogs.
• Thinking. Sometimes we try to hard to think up the perfect idea for a blog post, when it would be better to write 3 quick opinion pieces, or smaller articles
• Commenting on other sites. Yes this has a place, but again not as important as writing.

Get this in your head – if you’re not able to write 5 blog posts per day, there’s a good chance that you’ll never be a full-time blogger.

You’ll never be like John Chow, or Darren Rowse. They know how to keep quality content coming.

Sure it’s all been said before, I’m sure some of them have said the same thing many times.  For the person arriving from the search engines though, it’s only the first time.

If you don’t write, they won’t come. I worked so hard on so many things that just didn’t matter, and when I finally just decided to write as much as I can – my blog took off overnight.

Here are some ideas on types of posts you can write:

News Posts. Every blogger should make it a point of blogging about current events, even if you’re a niche and your blog is on pet grooming.

News posts are great and can bring a tidal wave of traffic. The best place to find news to report is google trends.

I talk about google trends a lot, If you don’t check google trends at least 1-2 times a day while writing, then stop reading my blog, and give up blogging.

Sure that’s harsh, but ya know it’s a tough world, and I’m not going to sugar coat this. You can be successful, or fail – your choice.

Regular on-topic Posts. These are the cream of the crop posts that you write. These have to be extremely tailored toward the topic of your blog. They need to be above and beyond, most news posts I work maybe 10 minutes on. Pillar Articles I work an hour or more on.

Series Posts. These can take a couple of days to write sometimes, but they are great for building sticky traffic.

Here’s another great idea for building your blog – tired of writing? Why not try adding some different media types. Why not record a video instead.

Video’s are great because you can upload them to a ton of different places, and will bring you a nice amount of traffic.

A nice tool which lets you upload your video to many different sites at once is tubemogul (it’s free) give it a shot!

Poll: Do you find yourself getting distracted when you should be writing? Also have you had similar results using Google Trends to bring in traffic?

Related articles by Zemanta

• What happened at Blog Expo?
• Assured ways to promote your blog posts.
• Notes from BWE08: Making Money Online With A Blog
• Why You Should Stay Away from the Make Money Online & Internet Marketing Niches
• Blogging, Internet Marketing, and Making Money Online – Blogs I Subscribe To
• Q and A With Darren Rowse
• How to Not Work a Four Hour Workday (What’s Your Blogger Schedule?)
• Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger Turns 4

Image via CrunchBase

Google Trends is the untold hero of my blog.

Google trends is my hero. I’d almost given up blogging. I actually was about to call it completely quits this past summer.

I was making maybe $20 per month, and working my ass off. Then I saw a post at digital point forums, someone said they’d heard someone had gotten a lot of hits by using google trends, they were wondering if this was really possible.

Not one to wait for an answer, I went out and did my own experimenting. I wrote a blog using the keywords “Hurricane Gustav Track”, now my blog has nothing to do about weather, but my blog got hammered from that one blog post.

I was sold. Since then I’ve been working feverishly posting google trends posts and have been very happy with my results. Let’s just say it’s gotten me out of the 9-5 and now I’m making a full-time living blogging.

Here is my easy to follow system for using google trends.

Step 1: Bring up Google Trends in your browser.

Step 2: Browse all the hot topics. Write down any hot keyword phrases that appear more than once, or are related to other keywords.

I’ve chosen: The #1 and #6 terms which are: “rahm emanuel freddie mac” and “biography of rahm emanuel” .

When there are multiple related words showing up in google trends, these are very hot topic items. You will get a huge influx of search engine traffic by targeting these keywords in a post.

Step 3: Research. Once you’ve chosen your topic, or ‘trend’ you now click on the trend, and it will show you news and blog posts related to this trend. I choose to look through the blog posts.

As you see I click on ‘Blog Posts’, then I find some blog posts to read to find more info on the topic.

Normally I ignore sites that list a whole bunch of keywords in bold – these are generally google trends spammers. Instead I look for sites that have a good description of the post that I like. Sometimes though it’s hard to figure out which is which without visiting the site. Unless it’s a popular site like Huffington Post.

I visit the related blog posts to get some ideas about what to write, I generally write down a few of the important keypoints.

Step 4. Write the blog post. I make it very informative. I make sure to use each related keyword phrase at least 2-3 times in the blog post. This will bring in more search engine traffic by helping you rank higher.

Step 5. Pingbacks. Lastly I add at least 5 links to related blog posts. I generally try to find posts that are running on wordpress, as I know wordpress blogs generally at least have the ability to get a link back via trackback.

Step 6. Use a picture. Many people when searching will find your site from google images. You should as a rule try and have an image with every blog post, not just those tailored to Google Trends.

Step 7. Analyze. Now that you’ve written your post – analyze your traffic and see where they’re coming from. You should notice a huge surge of traffic directly from google.

Using these techniques I’ve been able to take my blog to a whole new level. From less than 1000 pageviews daily to 4,000 to  10,000+ per day. I’ve also been able to bring in 1,000-2,000 unique hits daily.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Googlebait? Is Google Trends the new linkbait?
• Obama Wins, People Cheer, Google Trends Disturb
• Election day people searched Google mostly for free deals

Image by pixelposition via Flickr

The first major goal of blogging: Finding and Setting your Post Frequency.

You want to make a living doing this right? You’re in this for the long haul, am I right? You don’t want to be a one-night stand blogger, do you?

Then you must set short-term goals. My first goal was to make $100 per month off my blogs. The goal I’m working on now is to get 50,000 hits per month (currently i’m at 35,000).

Here are a few different types of goals you should be working on, if you really want to become a professional blogger. Traffic Goals, Monetary Goals, Posting Goals. These are just a few, I’m sure there are many more, but these are the generals that I will focus on during this discussion.

First we will take a look at posting goals. Frequency of blog posts play a very important role in how successful your blog becomes. The most successful blogs are the ones that have 5 posts or more per day.

Is that to say you can’t compete by writing less? No, sometimes quantity isn’t an absolute, sometimes it’s quality that really matters. I believe that we need to find a good medium between quality and quantity.

One thing that it took me awhile to recognize is that not every blog post needs to be perfect, sometimes just getting a post out there is good enough. With that said though, sometimes it is pertinent to go above and beyond on a few posts.

A few good examples of going above and beyond are these posts:

• 17 Kicka** Green Businesses to Start Now!
• Gas Prices Love and Hate them – 10 Reasons to Love them, and 9 Ways to Save on Gas.
• Obama: The First President of America 2.0?
• Is your Blog a Dead Beast? 16 Ways Bring it to life!
• 7 Ways to be Best Buds with an A-List Blogger!
• Blogs need to eat too! Feed your blog with 39 ways to build your RSS Subscriber base. So easy a slackjawed yokel could do it!
• Warning: Avoid these 7 Time Traps or your blog Will Fail – Guaranteed!
• 16 Places to get the dish on Joe Biden and Sarah Palin.

These are my personal cream of the crop posts. But that’s out of 180+ posts since I re-launched this blog in March.

I’ve posted 25 posts just this past week (13% of my total blog posts in a single week.) My goal is to be posting as many as 50 posts per week by the end of the year. I would love to surpass the magical 1000th post by my 1 year anniversary of re-launching this blog. (Middle of march).

As you can see, I have a vision of where I want to go with this blog. Without a vision, you will never get any place. You may experience short-lived success, but you must have a vision.

FACT: The more blog posts you have, the more traffic you will get from long-tail search results. These are great traffic sources because they are new to your blog, they will bookmark it if they like it, and many may subscribe.

Let’s discuss: Please tell me about your posting frequency – do you have a certain goal? Have you even thought about setting a goal before?

Read the whole series:

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).

Related articles by Zemanta

• Really Simple Goal Setting
• Goal Setting Made Easy
• Set Your Goals, Then Reasons, Then Take Action!
• How To Get Motivated To Achieve Your Goals
• Goal Setting – Set Your Goals & Achieve Your Target in Your Life
• Think Of Visualizing As Remembering Or Picturing. Just Imagine.

Image via CrunchBase

Everybody is talking about the economic problems that America is facing(and not just America)…

We also are aware that the major players are the banks and financial institutions, but apparently the company that used to own the internet – Yahoo is looking to cut jobs, and is losing money. They are expecting a large dip in their earnings for next quarter.

Zillow another large company is also cutting jobs. I saw this coming, as I believe this financial crisis will touch the lives of every American, if not every person living on planet earth – or at least all of the developed nations.

On the bright side Internet Marketing firms are actually doing quite well, as companies and small businesses are transitioning to cheaper more affordable online methods of advertising. It looks like there’s still business for mom bloggers(and others).

Of course as always there is going to be more and more competition. Many are losing their jobs, and I’d like to see a statistic to see how many newly unemployed start trying to earn money via blogging or other online ventures.

According Sage Lewis at Search Engine Guide over 60% of online marketers are increasing their online marketing budget while removing 80% of their offline expenditures.

Check Sage’s video:

Related articles by Zemanta

• 1,500 face axe as Yahoo struggles
• Why You Should Stay Away from the Make Money Online & Internet Marketing Niches
• Yahoo profit drops, layoffs coming
• Jerry Yang’s Memo About Yahoo Layoffs: Uncertainty For Next Several Weeks
• Report calls Yahoo-Google ad deal doomed; companies disagree
• Yahoo! axes! (at least)! 1,400! workers!
• Yahoo To Cut Workforce By 10%
• Yahoo to cut 10% of its workforce
• Yang’s e-mail on Yahoo restructuring
• Jerry Yang Email To All Yahooers: 10% Of You Are Fired

Google Trends

Is Google trends the new linkbait?

There are sites popping up that create random text posts using keywords from google trends, and other sites of such, but when you view the listing in google it’s apparent that it’s a scam-site even before visiting.

I must say, blogging about Google trends topics is very smart. It’s obviously what people are searching for. I’m amazed at how much traffic I’ve gotten from google after using google trends – lets just say I went from 90% of my traffic coming from Twitter and other Social networks, as well as from subscribers of the blog, to now getting 75% coming from google, many of which decide to subscribe.

Now it used to be a great idea to come up with a really unique and popular pop culture post, that everbody links to. This would be called linkbait. It could be a list of things related to a specific topic as well. All that matters is that it’s widely popular, and spreads virally.

However writing linkbait, or trying to – is a hit or miss. Either your post becomes viral or it doesn’t. I’ve had a few posts go viral, but I must say that google trends is guaranteed.

You write a post on a google trends topic, and you will get traffic, and it’s very likely that you will also get linked.

Here are some tips to writing a good google trends article for maximum traffic:

1. The Number 1 trend isn’t always the best – sometimes the topic has peaked. If you click on the trend it will show you whether the item is going up or down.
2. Choose a topic that you’d like to talk about there are many to choose from, choose one that fits in well with your site.
3. Keyword saturation is key – you need to use the exact google trends phrase as often as possible, and insert at least 1-2 variations. For example today I posted about “Hummingbird Sex Position” I included the keyword phrase about six times, but also used the hummingbird sex technique, once throughout.
4. Always include related posts – you’ll get trackbacks that will help bring in more traffic.
5. Add a picture. You’ll also get traffic from google images.

Another great suggestion is to use a tool that helps me greatly, called Zemanta – it’s a firefox addon that suggests related images / blog posts, so that I don’t have to find them myself – it doesn’t always find related posts but it’s pretty good.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Banner Ads & Image Ads On Google Images
• Google.org Donates $14 Million To Prevent The Next Pandemic
• The New iGoogle: Early Adopter Perceptions Versus Joe the Plumber Realities
• Responses to my iGoogle review and thoughts on Google support
• Don’t underestimate Google
• Where My Traffic Comes From
• Popularity of “Google” in Google Trends?
• Trendrr Makes Graphs That Move With Time | The Startup Review
• How you can capitalize on google trends…
• My newest fascination: Google Trends
• Is Google Ad Planner Getting Its Data From The Google Toolbar?
• Riding Google Trends to the Top
• Google Trends is Behind the Curve
• ‘Trends for Websites’ Makes a Popularity Contest of Site Traffic
• Google Trends for Websites Sucks for Small Blogs
• Google Trends made my underwear turn Brown…

Google Trends made me crap myself…

I checked twice, and nope it ain’t chocolate pudding…

I’ve been blogging recently about google trends and the ability to make money by capitalizing on popular topics. As far as I’m aware blogging about popular topics is not yet against google’s terms…

So last week I blogged about Hurricane Hannah, and Hurricane Gustav, and a few other topics. Friday I posted my last blog post for the holiday weekend. I moved this weekend, so I’ve been pretty busy, and haven’t been online once.

Today I got online, and I noticed that on Sunday alone my website had roughly 3000 unique hits. That’s more than I’ve ever had in a single day. I posted some really good blog posts on Friday about the new vice presidential candidates(Sarah Palin and Joe Biden), and so I thought perhaps that’s where the traffic was coming from…

I was dead wrong, I checked my counterize statistics, and apparently Tropical Storm Hannah, has become Hurricane Hannah, and has become an overnight hot topic. Having been one of the first to blog about it when it first hit the trends site I have been able to get a lot of traffic to my Hurricane Hannah blog post.

How many hits?
Tropical Storm Hannah – 18035 hits since the post was written (This was a whopping 22% of my traffic since the blog began!).

Folks, since my website has had about 90,000 hits total since March, that’s huge. My Hurricane Gustav track blog post brought in around 3818 hits(or 5% of my overall totall traffic).

My link bait post on the Presidential Candidates (16 Places to get the Dish on Joe Biden and Sarah Palin) brought in 2897 (this is 4% of my overall traffic – ever)…

So my question to you is:

Do you still doubt the power of Google Trends?

My advice is get in on this action before google does something to block it, they always seem to fight it when people find good ways to bring their site traffic.

Image via Wikipedia

The past few days I’ve been experimenting with google trends.

Google trends are hot topics of the moment. I wrote one tiny post using the keyword phrase Hurricane Gustav track, and have gotten about 500 hits in two days.

Not too shabby, I can always use more traffic, and I have impression based advertisers who pay me for each view of my website, which is nice.

I was quite amazed at this technique myself, as I never expected it to be this valuable.

The more amazing thing is the fact that I was also able to round up about 35 new subscribers overnight. I didn’t think the traffic would be that sticky but apparently I’ve got myself some new readers.

I’m definitely going to be using google trends more and more to bring in more quality traffic, and keep you posted on the outcome.

One note- Hurricane gustav is still bringing in a lot of traffic, my advice would be to write a blog post about Hurricane Gustav track, and see how much traffic you get from it.

On a side note -I do feel bad for those in the path of Hurricane Gustav, and making money off a hurricane isn’t that great, but they’re used to hurricanes and if I went through something like Hurricane Katrina, there’s no way I’d move back to the gulf coast region. My thoughts and prayers are definitely with the people down there.

Lets hope Hurricane Gustav proves to be a let down as far as hurricanes go..

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Trends Day 2 update…131 hits from google…
• Hanna and Gustav to Get Together Over Florida?
• Gustav On GOP’s Horizon?
• Raymond J. Learsy: Hurricane Gustav and Our Strategic Petroleum Reserve
• Tropical Storm Hannah brews could she become Hurricane Hannah?
• Barack, John and Gustav
• How you can capitalize on google trends…
• hurricane gustav track, get the latest updates on hurricane gustav

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

Using google trends to increase traffic…

Using google trends is pretty easy and straight forward, it’s also a great way to find new niches for new blogs and topic web sites.

1. First thing you want to do is go to google trends.
2. Next you’re gonna want to click on ‘More Hot Trends’ on the bottom right. This will give you a huge list of 100 hot trends.
3. Next you’re going to want to choose which trends to blog about, I think it may be best to only pick no more than 5, 2-3 per day should be good enough.
4. You can click on each trend to bring up a side by side google and google blog search on the topic, you can go to the blogs and just rephrase what they say, don’t copy and it’s best if you use more than one source.
5. When writing your post make sure you use the exact trend phrase that they give on the trends page. This is the keyword that you will want to get ranked for. You want to use it in your title, in a heading(h2 or h1) and at lease 4-5 times in the body of your blog post.
6. Be sure to link out to other blogs on the same topic, as you will get pingbacks and that will increase your rank.
7. A good tool I use to help me when blogging is called Zemanta and it makes it easy as pie to include related articles, and images.
8. On posts that you make on google trends that aren’t related to your blog, be sure to put up a disclaimer explaining what your blog really is about and giving people a method to subscribe easily – this is a good way to build future traffic to your blog, I’m sure many who visit will share some of the same interests that you do and will be interested in hearing more about them…
9. Don’t over do things, don’t do this everday, and don’t make it the only thing you do…This is a nice way to bring in some fresh traffic and increase your money however it’s not a great way to run a successful blog – use it sparingly and just as a tool in your arsenal, for example I’m planning on doing it one day per week, starting next week. I will keep posting updates on my successes and failures using this tip.

Follow these easy tips and I’m sure you’ll be successful using Google Trends to bring in more traffic.

Related articles by Zemanta

• AdWord Keyword Tool How to Use it to Hone Post Titles and Choose Blog Topics
• Find a Niche
• Searching from the Address Bar
• Semantic search engine – not your “average Joe” search task

Google Trends update:

Yesterday I mentioned delving into google trends as a way to bring new traffic.

Yesterday I wrote a post about Mackenzie Phillips, Del  Martin Dieing, and Hurricane Gustav track. Each of these topics were at that point in the top 5 google trends.

I know I planned to write 25 posts on google trends topics, however I had some errands to run offline and was unable to get back on – don’t worry I’ll be doing a lot more of these.

I found out that it’s a very wise thing to do, in fact I’m thinking about instituting a trendy wednesday. Every wednesday I’ll focus my efforts on google trends topics.

The results have been astounding – I got 131 hits to one blog post on hurricane gustav. All these hits were either from google search or google blog search, which definitely proves that the point is valid, perhaps if I’d worked on a longer post with more mentions of hurricane gustav I would’ve ranked even higher.

At any case this does prove something pretty remarkable, and that I’m going to be delving a lot deeper into, over the coming weeks.

Stay tuned for further updates on google trends.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Get more traffic to your blog with 5 minutes of work
• Blog Search, Included in Google History
• Wondering Where The Missing URLs Are From Google’s Index?
• Google adds search tool to measure searches on particular phrases
• Let’s get Trendy – Google Trendy….
• Google Checkout Trends Knows Your Shopping Habits
• Find a Niche
• Popularity of “Google” in Google Trends?
• Using Google Trends To Determine ‘Community Standards’ Of Obscenity

I just read of a study on getting traffic from google trends, and thought I need to get in on some of this action, so here’s what I’m going to do in my first experiment. I’m going to write 1 blog post each on the top 25 topics of the day.

Tomorrow I will check back and let you know what I’ve received in teh way of traffic. These won’t be extremely deep posts, just small ones with the intent to build keyword density.

Wish me luck on this experiment.

My list of trends to blog about:

Related articles by Zemanta

• Google Trends for Websites Adds to Comparison Sites Confusion
• How to Choose a Topic for Your Next Blog Post

Performancing Ads – 125×125 ads on the cheap…

In the past few days I’ve added Performancing ads to this site. You may notice them on the top right of my blog. Performancing ads aren’t just like every other ad network out their.

First off it’s a 125×125 pixel ad exchange.

Secondly you can set your own price for your ads per week.

Thirdly you can even earn credits by showing ads that you can use to advertise your own ads. I’m completely sold and recommend everyone signup now.

You can give me some love and signup by my affiliate link, I’d be extremely greatful: Make Money With PerformancingAds

Your Ad on this Blog for $2.50 per week!

As a bonus for anyone who’s quick – I’m letting you purchase an ad on my blog for $2.50/week. That’s less than the cost of a milkshake at McDonalds. You can go here to purchase your ads. Please note this offer expires at the end of August.

My blog pulled in over 1,250 unique hits today alone, so you can definitely expect to get some decent exposure from advertising on this site. As soon as all my ad slots are taken I will be raising the weekly price to $6/week, per thousand daily unique visitors.

Each blog post I post goes out to a network of 5405+ twitterers, 657+ on facebook, 205+ subscribers, and all my other networks via pingfm. I highly recommend signing up w/ Performancing ads today, and advertising on my site.

Related articles by Zemanta

• How To Set Up Performancing Ads Exchange Ads
• Make Money Online with Performancing Ads
• 10 Reasons To Try Out PerformancingAds
• How To Add Performancing Ads To Your Blog
• PerformancingAds Link Love
• Performance Ads A Hit!

Ping.fm is my new best friend, and it should be yours too!

What is ping.fm?

“Ping.fm” is a service that allows you to post to all your microblogs and social networks at once. “Ping.fm” is a much more efficient way to post.

We all have many friends and contacts across the many multiple social networks. Some friends are only on one or two of the different networks, and being able to post to all at once just makes sense. “Ping.fm” makes it so everyone is in the know about your lifestreams.

“Ping.fm” currently supports many networks including the following:Bebo, brightkite, facebook, twitter, wordpress.com, blogger, friendfeed, identi.ca, jaiku, hi5, kwippy, linkedin, livejournal, mashable, myspace, plaxo pulse, plurk, pownce, tumblr, xanga, and I’m sure “Ping.fm”" will add many more before it’s all said and over.

“Ping.fm” has many options for posting, you can apply a filter for each network, or choose to post as a blog post, microblog, or status update. You can use triggers to send “ping.fm” updates to only certain networks that you choose. You can also choose to only send “ping.fm” updates to the networks setup as microblogs as well.

You can also post to “ping.fm” by many third party services including: Aol Instant Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, IGoogle Gadget, Facebook App, Iphone app, mobile app, or email, or just via their site.

Along with that there’s also a new wordpress plugin for “ping.fm” that I found yesterday called “pingpress.fm“. It replaces such services like wordplurk, or twitter tools by sending an update to all your networks each time you post a new blog post, it’s pretty genius. Definitely a great tool to have around for your lifestreaming needs.

The Pingpress.fm plugin can be downloaded here.

“Pingpress.fm” is a great way to increase the traffic to your blog. Since using “pingpress.fm” I’ve gotten about 15 new subscribers in one day, and noticed a huge increase in my traffic.I highly recommend using “ping.fm” and “pingpress.fm” if you want to take your traffic to higher levels.

Be sure to try out “ping.fm” and “pingpress.fm” and let me know what you think.

Special note – updating all these services also means replies will only come to those networks, which is why I recommend combining “ping.fm” with friendfeed for the best results.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Six Ways To Update Your Status
• Save me from the Twitter clones
• Ping.fm Centralizes Status Updates, But Is It Enough?
• Efficient Social Networking
• Ping.fm Posts To All Your Microblogs At Once
• Ping.fm Ping Many Services With One
• Ping.fm: Update MySpace and Blogger, Too
• 50 Online Applications and Sites to Consider
• Ping.fm: Update All Your Lifestreams from One Site (Invites)
• Managing Social Networks

Corporate Blog, or Corporate Blog Network?

A corporate blog, is of course a wonderful way to build seo, and recognition of your company. Most corporate blogs only have a few writers, and blog posts are often few and far between.

Enter the corporate blog network.

What if you had everyone in your company write 1 blog post daily? Say your company is a call center and you have 1000 employees. You give each employee who wants to blog, 45 minutes to do their research and blog. You could even do this just as a test project and only accept a certain number of applicants.

One good thing would be to train them on blogging. Blogging is NOT just about writing blog posts. It is about socializing and bringing a conversation to the table. To be successful at this, you would need to hold regular training and teach them how to use conversational marketing techniches and build relationships.

You’re best bloggers are a goldmine, and if you can afford to, it would be well worth it to make them full-time bloggers, give them weekly requirements, make sure they’re in the know with company happenings, and they could also be the managers of the lesser bloggers.

You can manage the tone of the blog, by making sure that each blog post is edited first for professionalism, language, and grammer. If someone isn’t cutting it, whether they’re not proofreading or using the best language skills, you can drop them from the program and add new bloggers.

If you’re a company that sells products you could have each blogger blog about certain makes / models, give reviews, etc.. The key here is building keywords. You want as many related and relevant keywords pointing from google to your website as possible.

6 Conversation Marketing Tactics to get you Started!

1. Link out to other’s blog posts as often as possible.

2. Comment on related blog posts EVERY time you have an a+ article. An a+ article is a top notch article that you’re certain will bring value to your site. Usually it’s lengthy and in-depth. When you comment, instead of using your website address, use the address directly for that blog post.

3. All bloggers working for the corporate site should have full-profiles on as many social networks / social media sites as possible, and they should have as many contacts as they can add without distracting them from their writing. The top three networks to focus on, are facebook, linkedin, and myspace.

4. Use video. Social media is huge right now, and getting a video on youtube can bring huge results – especially if it’s humorous. You may also have your corporate staff do interviews with bloggers.

There are many bloggers who would love to interview a CEO of any big company – all you need to do is ask. Also note – When submitting videos, don’t just limit them to youtube, submit them to all the big video sites.

5. Along with conversational marketing should be an emphasis to get people to subscribe to a newsletter AND to your blog feed.

6. Use Twitter. Twitter is huge right now, and there are plugins that will automatically post blog updates to a twitter account. There are many plugins and tools for twitter. You should use twitter, and so should all the corporate bloggers. Twitter is a great place to get feedback, and build relationships. There are also some clones, and similar sites, some good ones include: friendfeed and plurk.

Are you Using Social Bookmarks like a Pro?

When you add a social bookmark link, whether it’s one of your own or not, you are helping other people sort the web, so to speak.

By tagging each link that you submit, others looking for the same material are able to find only the best information on a given topic.

By building a network of friends, and working to expand your network as far as you can, you can in turn build your brand recognition, and your website’s traffic as well.

If you have really good content to share, or really targeted content, it will get shared between many different users. Don’t ever discount Social Bookmarking – it does work.

Now that you know what social bookmark links are – are you using them?

You should have a script or program setup where every page that you want traffic to is easily bookmarkable.

The best way to do this is add a script or plugin (if you’re using wordpress or another such blog platform). You can use third-party widgets two good ones are: AddThis and Sharethis

You could lose out on a huge amount of traffic and clicks to your website if you’re not using bookmark icons on every important page. Here’s a good video overview to make social bookmarking even more clear:

Social Bookmarking in Plain English:

Social Bookmark Strategy: Diversify.

When you do decide to add social bookmarking links to your blog or website, you absolutely must go big – add at least 10-20 of the most popular sites. The major ones include digg, stumbleupon, reddit, mixx, delicious.

You absolutely must build networks of contacts on these social bookmarking and news networks, the more the merrier because they will be able to see the links that you bookmark, and they will share them and it will make for something pretty darn exciting – if a web page goes viral on a social bookmark site it can bring as many as 50,000 hits over a 1 week period.

Image via Wikipedia

Have you tried out the Google Nemesis program?

If you sign up with Google Nemesis, and comment on this blog post, you’ll get FREE web hosting for 1 year, and a free domain name. Not to mention the fact that you’ll be entered into a great contest to win a Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, Iphone, or equivalent prize.

Not to mention the fact that many people are using Chris X’s brilliant tactics and software in Google Nemesis to make thousands daily(yes daily, not monthly).

Read my complete review on Google Nemesis.

Obama is somewhat of a newcomer on the political scene, and yet he has garnered a huge following.

He has beat great odds to become the number 1 candidate for presidency. He is even beating McCain out by many points in states that normally go to republicans, like Montana.

Why is this?

Because Obama has embraced web 2.0.

He has embraced sites like facebook, twitter, and youtube. He, and / or those on his marketing team know the power that social media holds. Not to mention many fans of Obama can be found embracing social media – for instance this popular video by Obamagirl.

Obama, is also the only candidate suggesting a cabinet position aimed at web / technology.

I personally believe that Obama’s use of web 2.0 and social media may be the beginning of a paradigm shift in America. I believe that we may be on the verge of a new era in US politics. Call me optimistic, but I believe with social media, politicians will hold less power, and more power will be put in the hands of the people.

Most Americans believe that we’re headed in the wrong direction. Many believe that a huge catastrophe is on the horizon. Whether natural or economic, our future is not certain anymore.

All things change, and many things always need change but go unchanged. I believe for America to survive that there will come a day of reckoning where the great minds of the country will have to get together and re-organize our country from the ground up.

The reason we have a representative democracy and not a full democracy is mostly because in the days of the founding fathers it would’ve been a logistical nightmare. They didn’t have the lines of communication that we have today.

If you’re a skeptic on the power of social media, you really should check out opencongress.org it is a refreshing social network brought to us by: Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.

This is a great site for following the politicians that you want to follow. You can see their voting patterns, history, etc. You can also see other politicians like them, or those who are totally the opposite.

You can follow the issues that matter most to you, like Access to Health care, Abortion, etc…

You can actually vote on the issues, and bills that you’d like to see pass legislation.

The site doesn’t get as much publicity as it should – yet. But I can see it becoming a huge playing field for bi-partisan politics to take hold.

Those who aren’t net-savvy may miss out here on this great opportunity to share their voice / opinion, but I believe this is a great start to a new democracy 2.0.

To read more about the features of OpenCongress.Org check out this article at ReadWriteWeb.

Here are some good related articles:

• The Facebooker Who Friended Obama
• Obama and the Facebooker
• Chris Hughes, Facebook co-founder, Has Big Role in Obama Campaign
• How Barack Obama won Facebook