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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Pillar Article Writing Week + Contest + 7 tips to Perfect Pillar Articles.

We all sometimes get stuck in the mode of just writing our thoughts, or small news articles, or informative but small articles daily.

This week I submit a challenge = Write 1 Pillar Article for each weekday for the Week of November 24th – 28th, 2008. You can write them each day, or write them now – and schedule them for that day, either way works. If you miss a day, that’s fine – just try your best.

I suggest working on them this week though, because next week is Thanksgiving, so it may be a bit hectic at times.

I will have a post for each day where you can come and leave comments explaining what your daily pillar article is about, and a link to it. (read to the end for the best part…)

At the end of the week I will be picking the very best Pillar Article, and I will give that author a free one month verbal recommendation advert in the sidebar with a link to the blog, and your pillar article.

I will also write a 500-1000 word review with pictures and the works.

You will also be given 1000 Free Business Cards that you can use as you like courtesy of Business-Cards.com:

Last but not least – the biggest REASON to Participate: I will stumble / digg Every pillar article submitted – and I also am suggesting that everyone else who participates do the same. This could mean each article could get a ton of traffic.

The last bit – please when writing your pillar article, put something like this at the end: “This Article is part of National Pillar Article Week” and please link back to this post so that others will be able to find out about the trend too – the more people who participate, the more stumbles / diggs everyone will get.

If you like, you could also write a blog post about National Pillar Article week, on your blog as well, with a link back to this post.

7 Free Tips for Absolutely Marvelous Pillar Articles:

1. Lists are a Blogger’s Best Friend. Not all pillar articles are lists, but lists are easy for people to follow, and the human mind just likes them. Lists are easily organized and many times lists, even crappy ones just get a lot of traffic.
2. Images are like defibrillators for your blog. Good Pillar articles if not lists, contain a lot of images to back up what is being taught or discussed.
3. Details, Shmetails. Pillar articles are detailed as can be, without fluff. Layout as much info as you can on a subject with as little un-needed info as possible.
4. Hot Topic – if ain’t hot then it’s just not. If you check out digg, linkbait and pillar articles are always on a hot topic that’s unique. They ar e also exhaustive.
5. Snappy Titles are better than Snapping Turtles. Well snappy, may be an understatement, but the title has to be exciting and draw in the reader – it must give them a reason to click on it.
6. Proof-read – Just do it.. Pillar articles are free of blemishes, so to speak. Make sure to use proper grammar and punctuation.
7. Sub-headings almost as good as Headings. Good Pillar articles also feature good use of sub-headings, and bold fonts. For instance look at this article how I’ve used h2 tags for sub-headings, and bold font for my main points.

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

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6 Techniques to get more RSS Subscribers to your Blog!

1. Comment on someone’s blog who has as many or nearly as many subscribers as you do – Tell them you’ve subscribed to their blog. They may reciprocate – a lot will.

2. Ask your Readers to subscribe. Make it easy and blatant. If people see links asking to subscribe all over the place then they’re more likely to subscribe.

3. Write Guest Posts for other Bloggers. This is a great way to get new subscribers – instead of puting your link in your bio, put a link to your feed url.

4. Bribes are always welcome. Offer something nice to your readers if they subscribe to your blog. This is always a good method to get new RSS readers.

5. Build your network, and then ask your network periodically to subscribe to your rss feed.

6. Start Podcasting. Podcasts are great ways to get more traffic, and get the word out about your blog. It’s also a great way to get new rss subscribers.

These are just a few methods – what’s your favorite method of bringing in new subscribers?

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

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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?

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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.

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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.

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Wouldn’t it be nice to be best Friends with an A-list blogger? How about ten A-list bloggers?

1. Comment often – Commenting on A-List blogs is a good way to get your name in front of them.Remember they are regular people like you and me, the more they see your name, and see that you contribute to their site, the more likely they are to say yes when you try and offer a joint venture, or a guest post on their blog.

*One big tip on this make your comments stand out, build upon the original post, and make your comment provide extended value to their site, and even cite other posts that back up what you say, and you will soon become an authority.*

2. Follow them on twitter, and respond to them often, many of the A-list bloggers are on twitter, and contribute frequently.The bottom line is the more you provide to the conversation, the more they see your name, the more likely you are to get noticed.

3. Blog, blog often, and make it count. If you do happen to get noticed by an A-lister, it is likely they will subscribe to your feed, if you do receive their attention, you need to blow them away with great content so that they stay attentive to what you say.

Note this is often, just a good practice as it will ensure that you current subscribers stay very happy, afterall the more attention grabbing your blog, the more visitors.Even if you don’t build a ‘friendship’ with an A-lister, you may gain their attention enough to have them link to your blog, which will bring a lot of google-juice and traffic your way.

4. Diversify your efforts, as in all friendshipping efforts, you just may not be able to build rapport, they might not like you, something you said might push them away, or tick them off. Especially if you’re religious or political beliefs differ.

Don’t focus all your efforts on building rapport with one person, instead spread yourself across maybe 5-10 different high trafficked blogs that are relative to your content.You might make it a daily thing to post 1-2 comments per blog, or you could post like 5-10 comments per day on a different blog each day. For instance have monday be JohnChow, tuesday you might head over to Shoemoney, and wednesday might be Problogger Darren Rowse.

ONe more important tip – whichever strategy you implement, to be truly successful you MUST be consistant, the #1 cause of failure to any blog is failure to be consistant across the board.Blogging can provide a great income and be a lot of fun, once you get popular it can become a bit easier than starting out, but to get there is very hard work, consistant effort is a neccessity if you’re not willing to put in the hard work, then this business is not for you, and perhaps you should find something else that works better.

Harsh words, I know, but when you treat blogging like a business, it will begin to reap the rewards of a business.

5. Fake it till you make it! A lot of the stuff you blog about may be new to you, it may be confusing, you may not know all there is about blogging, or about plugins, or about social networks, and social media. The fact is you don’t need to know everything, but you need to act like you do – in a word. Confidence.

The “A” in “A-list” does not stand for Awesome, or A+ as in school work. It stands for Authority.

Whether or not you are an Authority on your Niche, you NEED to act like you are, and keep learning as much as possible, so that one day you will wake up and it will dawn on you…”Woah, I am an Authority, not just a BS’er!”

6. Your blog must say “I’m a professional Blog”.Here are a few tips for this:

• Must have your own domain name. It is true, some blogs have taken off from blogspot, such as Kumiko’s, but eventually even she wised up and registered cashquests.com.A domain name basically says that you’re here to stay(at least for a year, till it expires – hopefully you make it past that 1st year).A domain name also helps with search engine rankings, for your brand (and yes your name can be your brand like John Chow or if you’re name is overly popular you can brand yourself as anything you like, eg: Shoemoney).

  Lastly, wouldn’t it be terrible if you could’ve been John Chow, but started out at blogspot, someone saw that you were becoming famous, and they went out and bought yourname.com. Sure they might sell it to you for a couple thousand dollars.

• Your blog design must be professional looking, it’s a wise idea to get a professionally designed blog theme – if you can afford it. I recommend starting out with a free one though, until your blog starts to take off, then purchase either a commercial one, or a custom.Also, here is a good post citing the pros and cons of pre-made blog theme vs custom blog theme.
• You need subscribers, the more subscribers to your feed, the more trust you have, and ultimately the more, professional you will appear.Check out what Dosh Dosh has to say about why you absolutely need to build your blog’s subscriber base.
• You must hold yourself to a higher standard.Nobody wants to communicate, follow, read, rantings of someone who is fast to start a fight, or demean someone.(Exception would be political blogs, where most of your readers are going to either support your same views, or be against – politics is one topic that can’t please all sides.

  Though you can even be professional here, for instance, I usually refer to Bush in private as “the idiot”, “Dumbass”, “Retarded Drunk Monkey Boy”, but I might be a little more tactfull on my blog…or perhaps not(I’m using this as an example – and perhaps a sneaky way to vent & be unprofessional.))

• Don’t over-do the plugins or widgets.Yes you can have too many plugins.Widgets and plugins are great, they add a lot to your blog, but they can also break your theme, and some plugins can conflict with each other and break your blog for a time, which equals less visitors.
• Again I reiterate consistant effort, and you need a schedule for posting, which should include at least 1 post per day. Just figure you need at least 300-1000 posts to be on the level of the A-list bloggers, and if you post 1 a day, it might take you a whole year, maybe even two.Did you know to be on the level of Problogger (20,000 posts in 4 years!). That’s a bit much but you have to be posting consistently to measure up!Personally I strive for 2-3 posts per day or 14 minimum in a given week.

7. Last but not least, flattery goes a long way, as long as you’re sincere about it!You want to be sincere and let them know how much their tips help you, or you could simply link to their posts often, and re-iterate a lot of the things they say.

This might benefit you in pingbacks / trackbacks, but most importantly it is a good way to catch their eye, and let them know that you’re a reader.

Most professional bloggers want to make their readers happy, and knowing that you are enjoying their blog, linking to their blog, will catch their eye, and if they see something they like they might link to it.

One last bit of advice, if you do manage to become an Authority, think you have what it takes to guest blog on JohnChow, Shoemoney, Problogger, DoshDosh, etc… The best way to do it is write a list of topics you’re passionate about.

Write a sample post relating to one of those topics, be sure it includes lots of pictures as the best posts do use images in almost every post, (mine lack it sometimes because it’s hard to upload photos while I’m at work, and I usually write a lot of posts while on break. )

Your post needs to be extremely informative, and use a lot of line breaks, and be easy to read, as well as easy to scan. The more insightful, truthful, and witty the better. Adding humor is also welcome, but don’t go overboard.

Once you’re ready you should write up a professional letter and send it to their email if you can find it, if not submit it by their contact form, most of the top bloggers list at least one way or another to be contacted.

If you don’t hear anything back in 7 days, you should submit another letter, and ask them if they’ve considered your offer, if not – ask them if they could give you some tips on how you can better your chances of being accepted as a guest blogger(or insert another goal, if you want them to sponsor something, like perhaps your weightloss).

One last tip – give them love – digg their best posts, stumble a post if you like it, or share it on one of the many networks out there……And on that note, please do me a BIG favor and Digg this post. I would really appreciate it, and you’d definitely get on my good side.

Cheers!

Oh yeah, here’s some related articles:

• Confessions of an A-List Blogger
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Twitter continues to Amaze me – Doubled my subscribers in 2 days!

I wrote yesterday how I got about 15 new subscribers in one day using twitter.

I woke up today, and checked my stats. Today I had 63 subscribers, up from 47.

My blog had approximately 600+ hits yesterday.

The most I’ve ever received on any of my online entities.

This truly is awesome, I am a twitter believer.

There is a downside though, with twitter comes a lot of distractions, the same can also be said of friendfeed, pownce, etc…(which I’m also trying to tap into a little bit.)

My major advice is to be devoted to your blog above all else. Twitter is great, and can give you some great ideas as to what to blog about, but the bottom line to being successful is to blog, and blog often.

I try for 2 times per day, 3 would be great, but even once per day if you’re really busy. If you go long periods without writing you’ll never build a true following, and you will lose a lot of your current readers.

Yesterday, I also asked about people who ‘Google Themselves‘. I got a lot of responses in comments, as well as a few on twitter.

As an experiment, I’ve decided to make a change in the Title of this blog, from ‘There’s a Blog in My Soup’, to “There’s a Blog in my Soup: A Blog by Patrick Curl”.

My goal is to see if that raises my ‘brand’, in the search engines.

Also if this is your first time reading my blog you might want to check out, my latest pillar article, on 40 some odd ways to increase your rss subscriber count – which I will be updating regularly.