3 Overlooked Ways to Get Hundreds of Links and Prospects to Your Blog

Did you know that there are free ways that you can get links back to your blog overnight? That after a few days they can number in the hundreds?

No matter what you market on the internet at some point you'll face the issue of increasing the number of visitors to your site. What most people don't know is that there are literally hundreds of ways to get free traffic. Here we'll focus on three overlooked ways to get additional traffic to your site using a blog.

The third most overlooked way to bring traffic to your site with a blog is to read and comment on other blogs.

Now, maybe you've done this before but stopped, because you're becoming concerned about being considered a link-spammer. In that case, leave a link to your site after your comments, instead of in the comment form that hot links it.

In the near future, blogmasters will be able to use special code to prevent spam in their comments section, so this will become less of a concern.

Besides, getting clicks from people who read comments, or visits from search engine spiders through your comments, isn't necessarily your direct objective, though it’s

definitely a plus.

What you want to do via commenting is to enter the blog community that corresponds to your target market. Get to know who the players are and make agreements with them to

cycle traffic between you.

Or lurk to find out where your target market typically hangs out when they're online – you’d be surprised at how many inexpensive and targeted advertising sources you can

find through this method.

(If you're looking to get linked, there's another way that we'll go over next.)

This tip has earned me a few dozen links from prominent blogs in the past four days alone.

These links are worth ten times a reciprocal link because they send targeted traffic from established sources, and come from experts with records of proven results.

You can be sure these kinds of people will check you out before they linked to you, since they may be judged by the quality of the information they share.

The second method to more blog traffic is the most confusing for newer people, and this is probably the reason its benefits remain overlooked.

In the simplest of terms, Trackback is kind of a remote commenting system that incorporates linking. It allows the reader to follow a topic around the web to see other

bloggers remark on the same subject. It enables the publisher to remotely cite references to the issue on which they've written.

Once you've made yourself familiar with the blogging community you have entered, you can often pick up the pulse of conversations within your site's theme. Then, when you

see issues that you want to expound on, you can send the other site a notification to let them know you cited them on your blog. That link will appear on their site, and often draws visitors to you.

Bloggers who use Trackback often enjoy greater control over this function in their blogs than they do over linking, as they have the option to reject your reference - so there is

a lesser incidence of fraudulent linking. That also gives your link a greater chance of being displayed.

So why don't more people use Trackback?

One reason is that what is arguably the most popular free blog system, Blogger, doesn’t have Trackback. However, Haloscan.com can remedy this with their free service – it’s

a cut and paste away.

Many new bloggers don't get what it is and how it differs from commenting. And of course, the dynamics of it are a little more complex than I've stated. But learn to use

Trackback properly, and you won't need to beg for links to your site ever again.

It's harder to estimate an exact number of visitors that come as a result of trackback links. But if you posted five days out of seven, and was able to get a trackback link to

your site three times a week, by the end of the year you'd have almost 150 topical links back to your site, which are more valued by search engines than a typical link trade

with an unrelated site.

The most overlooked source of traffic for a blog is through article submission. To start with, turn your longer posts into articles and submit them to ezines or directories.

Look especially for directories that ask for the direct link to the article on your own site, and input the permanent link to the post on your blog.

Make sure that your Auto-Discovery tag is in place and it can mean hundreds more prospects, links and subscribers.

It's a shame this is the one of the least used traffic methods for most sites, let alone for blogs. In four days, this method generated just over 1000 visitors. 157 newsletter leads, 98 new feed subscribers, and 206 links to my site. You may not get these same results right away, but using these simple strategies can still get you more exposure than you have now.

These aren't normally the highest quality links, as they rarely make sure of anchor text. However, bloggers are citing me using Trackback, sometimes in lieu of linking to the site where they originally found the article, so some anchor text linking does occur - enough, in fact, to make this worth your while.

To see this in action, do a search on "Can A Ping Really Help Your Blog Get Top Search Engine Rankings", the title of an article I submitted earlier this week.

That article was published within a week of this one- the results speak for themselves. Many of these sites aren't the ones where my articles are normally published.

There are, of course, plenty of other ways you can leverage the content in your blog or RSS feed to increase the traffic to your site. The methods outlined here may be a bit outside the norm, but, as you’ll soon find, that’s part of the reason they are so effective.

About the Author:
Tinu AbayomiPaul writes the Free Traffic Tips blog. If you're still not blogging or don't quite get RSS, she invites you to take the free course on RSS and blogging at www.lauriemeade.com/free-traffic.html
Article Source: http://www.articles411.com

The Etiquette of Blogging

Blogging has become a major pastime in the USA and worldwide. The Blogosphere is a mix of personal and business websites with various raisons d'etre. But there has emerged a set of rules - a system of etiquette in blogging.

Newcomers to blogging may not know or understand these rules - so try not to damage their youthful exuberance if they mistakenly break one of these rules.

When you communicate with a blogger do not waste their time on anything that is not relevant to their content.

Don't use lowbrow language or four-letter words - whether it be comment or advertising proposition.

Everything you say to a blogger may be published and/or syndicated as well as read by top level journalists covering a topic shared by the blog.

Don't criticize a blogger for not accepting comments at their blog. Contact them by email if they offer one.

Minor mistakes like typos are often not corrected by bloggers because a corrected post would go out into the RSS feed again.

So don't point these out.

If you want to offer the blogger a proposition - such as link or banner exchanfe, or writing an article on your merchandise/services don't put it in the comments of a blog post. Send a personal email.

Target any propositions you might offer only to the interests and niche covered by the blogger. Bloggers want nothing to do with content that is unrelated to theirs.

Do not send a mass mailing press release. Any such announcement must be personalized and cordial.

Do not ask directly for links - just invite the blogger to review your material. They will respond if your ideas are right for their readers.

Try to develop a relationship with bloggers by reading and commenting on their blogs before you start making proposals.

See who is talking about your blog. Search your area of expertise with the blog searches on Technorati.com, Blogsearch.google.com, and Google alerts.

Write your own blog to show other bloggers you "get it." Use trackbacks so they know you're commenting about them at your own blog before you make overtures. (Trackbacks are an automated blogging feature that notifies a blog when another blog talks about them.)

Offer good content. Don't use sensational announcements about your product/service as if it was the greatest thing ever created. Instead explain how you can solve a problem for the blogs readers. Then mention your product/service.

About the Author:
Brad Humphries is an Internet Marketing researcher at Template Monster
Added: 06 Dec 2006
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/45084.html

Using RSS Data To Make More Money

You nay have heard the term RSS, however didn't know exactly what it was or how to use it. Now you will learn how to use this technology to keep your websites "fresh."

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site

Summary. It also has been referred to as a "pull" technology rather than a "push" technology. And, in fact, this feature is what makes RSS so popular in terms of today's Internet usage.

It's probably hard to argue that anyone who uses the Internet today hasn't heard of spam. If they have an email inbox it is probably full of it.

Spam, for the uninitiated, is the receipt of unwanted emails from people whom you did not request to receive information. Spam represents the "push" technology. That is, people "push" their email message at your inbox, whether you have asked to receive the email or not.

And that aspect of "push" technology is what many have come to believe is the death of email. It's arguable that email will still be around for quite a long time, even though there are still people who continue the illegal spam process. In fact, companies are making millions now just providing everyday users as well as huge corporations, solutions claiming to solve their spam problem.

RSS, on the other hand, can be said to be the exact opposite of the email "push" technology. Because you cannot "push" your message to subscribers. In fact, the only way that people can subscribe to an RSS feed is to do so voluntarily. And, at the same time, they can unsubscribe whenever they want.

That's why it's called a "pull" technology. Because subscribers "pull" information into their readers and, if the content isn't what they expect, they can unsubscribe whenever they'd like. So, unlike the email "push" technology, there is no one using RSS that is experiencing an inbox full of spam. All they have to do is to unsubscribe and they will never receive another message from the person who provided the feed.

RSS has become a popular way to make money on line too. And that is due in part to the popularity of the RSS "pull" technology. Here's one way of monetizing a website using RSS feeds.

Imagine setting up a static one page web site - a minisite if you will. Now, add either Google Adsense code or the new Yahoo version of the Google Adsense style ads that, when clicked by a visitor - you earn cash.

This gives you a nice starting point and, if you optimize your web page properly, there is a good chance you will get a high ranking in the search engines. And, the more people who see your page, the more likelihood they will click on one of the links on your web page and you'll earn revenue from the click.

But RSS provides an even greater potential. Because by adding an RSS feed to that same web page, you turn a static web page that only contains the information you placed on it, into a dynamic ever changing web page that others will likely come back more than once to read.

After all, once someone has read a one page web site, what incentive is there for them to come back? Plenty, if you use RSS feeds on your web page. It is possible to add 5, 10 or 15 feeds on your once static web page and now, you've got a page that automatically updates itself and provides something that people will want to come back to read time and time again.

You can easily convert any web page into a dynamic web page using free RSS creator software. One of the most popular free versions is called Carp and you can download it at this web link: http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/.

Once you've set this program up on your website and added the proper code to your website, then you will need to collect RSS feeds that relate to the topic of your web page.

Let's say that the topic of your web page is flower gardens. You could go to Google News and get their RSS feed code, place it into the appropriate position in your Carp coding you put on your web page and then adjust the code as follows:

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=flower+gardens&ie=UTF-8&output=rss

You can also get a similar feed from Topix.net and you'd adjust the code like this:

http://rss.topix.net/search/?q=flower+gardens&xml=1

Now, once you have uploaded your web page, your site will automatically pull in fresh information from Google and Topix about flower gardens. Simply follow this illustration for any web page you'd like to monetize and watch your search engine ranking soar and also your bank account!

About the Author:
Mr. Boettger’s consulting firm helps business market effectively without spending more money on advertising through a growth performance guaranteed system. An extensive DIY small business action plan is available free on their website at www.7StepConsulting.com
Article Source: http://www.articles411.com