Archive for the ‘ Traffic ’ Category

One of the easiest ways of increasing your blog readership is good navigation. But, what exactly is this and what can you do?

Picture the scene. A visitor lands on your blog’s home page from a search engine query or clicking a link in an article. Chances are that the post most relevant to them has moved. A quick glance down the home page doesn’t reveal the answer, so now what happens?

Answer – they leave your site. No RSS subscription, no further page views, no bookmarking to return at a later date. This is a disaster.

So take a look at your blog’s home page. If you were that visitor, what should be there to help you find the posts that you want.

Make it loud, make it proud
I have used most popular post and related post plugins on my blogs for years. They certainly do help – you can see that traffic is navigating around the site using these. However, these are small and sometimes difficult to see. So start off with something that new readers will not miss.

And that is a sticky post.Write a post and stick it to your home page so that it is always the first post that readers see. This way, if some posts are a little off topic it doesn’t matter. The sticky post is what they see first.

But what goes into that post? Well just review the posts that have been read the most over the last week or two. You don’t need this to be exact and you could tweak the list a little to push readers to key posts. Just write about the post and then link to it. I did this and my pages per visitor jumped up by over 20%.

Guide visitors around your site
So you have used a sticky to get a reader to a key post, now what? Well are any of the elements of that discussion dealt with in more detail in other posts? Maybe it is a high level list of tasks, each of which is described in detail elsewhere?

If so, link straight to those posts from the relevant paragraphs. If you have readers hungry for information, show them where to get it on your site. Search engines will also love this ability to delve deeper. Whilst you are at it, review your most popularly read posts and apply this trick to them all.

Automate the process
They might not work as well as manual links, but they can still help with traffic. So install a most popular posts plugin and replace the most recent posts list with this list. Show readers your best and most popular work.

Whilst you are at it, give them a list of related posts at the end of each post. Maybe you haven’t had time to update that post or they have the detail they need, but you are suggesting more reading to them.

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It might sound totally daft, but by the simple process of reviewing your traffic logs you really can increase the traffic to your blog. What are you looking for and what do you do to increase traffic?

When we are talking about increasing website traffic we can increase it in two totally separate ways. The first is by increasing the number of new visitors to the site and the second is by increasing the number of pages each of your visitors are looking at. Both aspects will increase your overall visitor count.

What are your popular posts?
So we pander to the search engines and to new visitors alike in the first stage of the process. Look through your traffic logs and see which posts visitors have been looking at the most recently. You might want to look back over the last 7 days or the last month, it is up to you and really just depends on what levels of traffic you have and the how current your posts are.

Then simply write a post that talks about the top 5 or so posts by traffic and link to each of these posts. It is a simple trick. but new visitors arriving on your website will see it and be directed to some of the best content on offer. You might like to make the post ‘sticky’ so that it is always at the top of the home page, or write a new such post often or even a combination of the two (for example, write it each week and leave that week’s post as the sticky post).

Why does this help?
And what does this do for the search engines? Well you are also directing the search engines to your most popular posts. You are making sure that they can always find your best traffic posts. This works because not all search engines give the same results.

Time to review your work
At the same time look at your most popular posts. Actually open them and review them to see what they are saying. Are there any other posts on your blog, maybe written since that post, that explain part of the post in more detail? If so (and especially if the detailed post is not getting a lot of traffic) link to the detailed post. This is having the same double effect – search engines are being helped to find the posts that you want them to find and real visitors are being guided around your blog in the direction of where they can find more information. And by starting on popular posts, you know that a lot of people are reading these.

Sort high exit pages
Also, if you are using a statistics tool that shows exit pages, you can do the same trick there. Look at the high exit pages and see if you can suggest further reading from them to other posts. If you can’t then there is an idea for a new post! See if you can reduce those exits and give readers something else to ponder!

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How To Advertise My Blog In Twitter

One way of promoting your blog is to give it a mention in Twitter. But, how do you do that?
By Keith Lunt, ©howtostartmyblog.com

The first step is to set up a Twitter account, just for your blog. Unless you want to hijack your personal Twitter account and confuse followers, then a separate account is best.

Start Writing First
Now, start Tweeting. This is not exactly the quickest way to get going, but you are building slowly for better results rather than charging headlong into oblivion. You want a dozen or so Tweets on your account at least before you start trying to tempt people to follow you and you want these Tweets spread out over a week or so at least.

Tempt In Some Followers
Now, continue Tweeting and start trying to tempt people to follow you. Look for other people who are Tweeting relevant Tweets to your blog and follow them. You are hoping that they, or their followers, will follow you. For everyone who does follow you, be polite and follow them back.

Remove Those That Don’t Follow You
And then you have the rather ‘fun’ task of slowly unfollowing all of those that didn’t follow you. You can do this by adding all of those that are following you to a list, then deleting all those that you are following that do not appear in that list. Just delete the list before you next do the same and then you can easily pick up changes.

Although you can follow up to 2,000 at a time, if people see that you are following that many people but are only followed by 2 or 3, then they are going to ignore you. You have to keep the followers / following in balance. You will never do it exactly, but keep it looking reasonably balanced.

Keep At The Whole Process
Then you just need to keep following more people and Tweeting every day. It is having plenty of followers that gives your Tweets exposure and writing interesting Tweets that generate interest. So what are you going to Tweet?

Well every new post can be Tweeted. In fact, using some clever WordPress plugins (if you are blogging with WordPress) then this can be an automated process. But just a load of Tweets with links in will not get people interested. Use Twitter to converse with other users about the subject of your blog and add a few opinion Tweets every so often, again on the topic of your blog.

If you can be Tweeting a few times a day and making what you write look like more than just plugs for your blog then in no time at all you should have a wealth of followers and some extra traffic for your blog.

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Finding out that someone is copying your blog posts can be a terrible thing and can cost you a lot of website traffic. But, what simple actions do you need to take to get the copies deleted and your traffic back up again?
By Keith Lunt, © HowToStartMyBlog.com

Recently I was notified that posts from one of my blogs were appearing on another blog, who was claiming them as original works. I had noticed that the traffic on that blog was dropping off rapidly over recent months and when I searched on sentences in my posts, the stolen content always appeared above my own. Google was favouring the reproduction over the original.

I reacted and thankfully most of the posts were removed. But a week later I had to do it all again as there were still some posts being displayed. In all, I spent almost a full day sorting the problem. By the end of it I had learned from my mistakes and knew how to do it better.

How is it done?
First of all it helps to understand how the content is robbed wholesale. In short, it’s the RSS feed. There are plugins available to do the job and I discovered which he was using, not that the information helped me. One answer is to just syndicate a summary by RSS, but is that as good for readers?

Don’t react too quickly.
If you discover this is happening to you, do not over react. Most bloggers stealing content are at it a few times a day, so show a little patience and follow these steps:

1) Add a new post to your blog – It seems daft when you know they will steal it, but that’s the point. Add to the post a copyright statement, your name and if you want your website address. Embed it deeply, say after the introduction paragraph. For example, By Keith Lunt, © HowToStartMyBlog.com.

2) Watch the offending blog – At some point they will access your RSS feed and steal the new post. Once they do that they have a post on their website which clearly shows it is copyright of you.

3) Find out who their hosts are – Just do a whois search on their URL and this will lead you to their hosts.

4) Search for a DMCA template email – This is the official complaint form. It sounds difficult, but it isn’t. Most of the content is just legal wording and then you provide the links to the copied content and the original content, using the recent post as evidence that they are stealing from you.

Once the DMCA email is sent to the abuse department of the hosts they have just 24 hours to sort the problem. In my experience it took just 40 minutes for the final posts to be removed. Better still, it is putting the onus on them to find any other stolen content.

What I wouldn’t do.
What I would not do again is to approach the website owner directly. Straight away they are alerted and will drop your RSS feed, but they can leave the older content up and then how do you prove who has the original?

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You might want lots of traffic to on your blog and be working hard, but have you done the job correctly? Have you missed the one step that can be the difference between success and total failure?

If you are working on your blog to increase its traffic volumes, then researching the keywords to work on is the singularly most important step. Get it wrong, or don’t do it at all, and you could be without traffic totally!

And this is not just when you are building links. If you are hoping that search engine visitors will find your blog then you also need to do your research so that your posts can at least cover popular research and hopefully some of your categories and pages can be aimed at high performing keywords as well.

Why can it go wrong?
It is very easy to fall for the trick of thinking that people are searching for the terms you think that they are. I have had customers ask me to help them optimise their websites for search terms that I have then done research on, only to find that there is no search engine traffic.

If you spend a lot of time and effort preparing your blog and are working on the incorrect search keywords, then you are likely to see absolutely no change in the traffic levels. What do you do?

Researching the correct terms
The first thing to do with any blog is to think of a few basic search engine keywords and then use one of the traffic estimator tools to check that these terms do actually get visitors. These tools will not only confirm whether the terms are seeing any traffic, but they will also suggest longer search terms that include your keywords. And some of these will be easier to work on than the shorter terms.

Checking the strength of the competition
Next, with your candidates of possible keywords to use, you then have to try some of these searches for yourself and decide whether you think there is too much competition. This can be very difficult for the beginner and you might end up spending a lot of time on trial and error, but with patience you should get there.

An indicator of whether a lot of people are competing for the same keywords is whether the sites on the first page of Google look optimised for the terms. If they are, there will be the keywords in the header title and description and headings on the page. If these are absent, then the sites are getting to the top of the listings by accident. This means that with some work you should be able to see good results.

And that is basically it. Research your keywords, check them out and then work on them. With the proper keyword research you should see plenty of new traffic.

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Increasing traffic to a blog is a lot about being able to read and understand your statistics. So, how do you do it?

Recording Your Blog Traffic Statistics
First of all you need some way of recording and reporting back to you your traffic statistics. But, the problem is, that some of the time you will doubt the figures. That unexpected day when you have received no traffic, or a huge traffic blip. Are they for real, or are they errors in the reports?

For this reason it is good to use two traffic packages together. And the pairing I use and recommend start with Google’s Analytics. Sign up for a Google Account then to Analytics and install their code. The problem is that you can be overwhelmed with information, they record so much. But you get a lot of detail and it is stored a long time.

I partner this with WP-Stats. A simple plugin to install and activate, you just need the API key. This provides real time monitoring of your visitors showing the information that you need on a daily basis on a single report page. Works a treat!

Visitors And Hits
Now that you have your statistics, you can start monitoring visitors and hits along with search engine keyword terms and visited pages.

There is a big difference between page hits and visitors. Ideally, both are high, but 1 visitor can look at several pages and create several page hits in a visit, day or a longer time period. Ideally you want your visitors looking at many pages as it shows that your content is interesting and you are building up regular readers.

So, a high ratio of page views to visitors is ideal. But you also want a good number of daily unique visitors as this represents the new people visiting your website.

Well Read Post Pages
Have a look at the pages that are regularly read. Are they being found through searches or are visitors finding them by browsing the site? If some posts are very well read, make sure that the navigation of every page makes these easy to find. This way, not only will visitors be more likely to see the popular material, these posts will also be highlighted to the search engines, who might then rank them better.

Review Keyword Terms
Lastly for now, look through the search engine keyword terms to see what terms are sending you traffic. Could you write new, better posts that are directly related to these terms? Could you do some link building on these terms to make sure that your site is performing well on all search engines, not just on those sending your visitors?

By taking some time to look through and understand your traffic statistics you can be gently remodelling your website so that you are increasing the number of new visitors that arrive each day and increasing the number of pages that they are each reading.

With a little bit of time and effort, your traffic statistics will increase and your blog’s popularity will go sky high.

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The Importance Of Mailing Lists

You may or may not use a mailing list for your blog, or website. If you don’t you are missing a huge slice of traffic and profit. Here is why.

You can use a mailing list in many ways, even alongside an RSS feed. Some people think that because you have an RSS feed that a mailing list is not needed, but that is not true. They both have their advantages and both can be used together.

RSS Feeds Are Immediate
An RSS Feed gives immediate information to your readers. As soon as the bookmark updates, they can see if you have posted anything new. They are also in control of when they look for new posts. These feeds look far better than mailing lists, so why use both?

A Mailing List Gives More Control
Well with a mailing list, you are in control of what you send and when. If you have found a special offer or valuable piece of information then you can highlight it within the newsletter, but getting the readers to read that particular RSS Feed entry is down to your skills of writing a good, succinct, title.

The benefits of sending a weekly or monthly newsletter are great. You can send to your list a summary of recent posts, along with a few extra adverts that might not fit in with an RSS Feed. You can highlight the main post that you want to draw people in with at the top of the newsletter and other lesser posts further on.

The Hidden Extra Values
But a mailing list once it grows has a bigger appeal than just that. If you are hoping to profit from blogging it can also have a marketing value on top of what you might expect. I am not advocating selling the names under any circumstances, that could destroy the list and is unethical. But there are subtle ways to make cash.

If advertisers discover you have a list of people that like to read your blog then they might be interested in placing a small advert in the newsletter. Or maybe if they have an affiliate product on offer you can write a post about it, selling the advantages, and then include a mention of the product in your newsletter. Maybe even just send a newsletter about this one post to really highlight it. As long as you are only sending odd newsletters, every couple of weeks, this should not offend.

A Newsletter Is Easy
Running a newsletter is easy. Sign up to a free service and grab their signup form. Put this form onto somewhere obvious on every page and promote it. Maybe even one of those bars that scroll up above the rest of the page to really attract attention.

Reassure your readers that you will not spam them and will not sell their email addresses and make sure that they newsletters you send are of valuable and sell your blog and themselves. Make the newsletters something that your readers will want to receive.

This way, the mailing list will give you the opportunity to run an excellent newsletter that increases your website traffic and adds value to your website.

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The Importance Of RSS Feeds

If building your blog traffic is the key to the success of a blog, then the RSS feed is part of the system that will make it work. But why, and how?

As a blog owner, hopefully you know and understand exactly what a RSS feed is, but just in case you don’t, here goes.

Sharing With RSS
Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, feeds are an easy way of sharing content. The blog owner is in totally control of what is shared and it makes keeping up to date a really easy task.

Increase Return Visits
For the blog owner, it can increase traffic back to your website. Primarily it is increasing the repeat traffic to your blog, which is very important traffic. If a reader is willing to come back time and time again to see what interesting new content you have placed, they are valuable dedicated readers. Not only does this increase your traffic levels, but they are then also likely to start joining in by placing comments, book marking with sites such as Digg and Stumble Upon and sharing your ramblings with their friends directly and through sites such as Twitter.

Best of all, because they are long term readers not only do you get to interact through comments and replying to their comments, but they also have more trust in what you say and are more likely to respond to affiliate promotions.

Increase New Visitors
But RSS Feeds are not just about existing visitors. Some websites like to share the content of other websites and they do this by utilising the RSS feeds. By displaying your RSS Feed content on their website they are possibly showing it to new readers, who might become your visitors.

How Do You Install RSS?
So, how do you use them if they are so fantastic for generating traffic? Well any decent blog software will have an RSS feed built in, but there are also tools such as Feedburner that gives more options.

Then, make sure you have a big, obvious RSS Feed icon on every page. Make it obvious, somewhere that people will look to and always notice it. Also, add a page about using the feed – how to subscribe, what it does and so on. Invite your readers to subscribe and keep up to date.

You Choose Your Options
It is up to you how you run your feed. Options will permit you to have, for example, just the most recent 10, 20 or whatever number of posts you want to include. Some people like to just include a summary of the post, fearing that others will use the feed to steal content, whilst others like to share as much as possible to get the best advantages.

You can also use tools to exclude certain categories from your feeds. I like to drop the uncategorised posts from my feeds – I categorise every main post so anything filed in uncategorised is usually off topic and I don’t want to trouble regular feeders with them.

It is up to you how you use the RSS feed, just make sure that you do as they are invaluable in building your website traffic.

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Tips To Increasing Blog Traffic

What is a blog if it hasn’t got a decent amount of traffic? It’s like a book on a shelf that no-one ever reads that is gathering dust. The writer is proud of their work, but there is no-one to share it with.

And that is why we all want to increase blog traffic, let alone if we are using any money making schemes then these work best with lots of traffic! So, how can we increase traffic?

Pretty Links
Often quoted, but in actual fact my highest traffic blogs go against this. But, in some search engines, by having the keywords in the page URL might just be an advantage.

Commenting
Leave sensible, useful comments on other blogs that add to the blogs and you might see more traffic. Tie this in with monitoring your traffic so that you know where people are coming from and you will know which blogs to continue commenting on.

Guest Posting
This can apply both ways. Request guest posts on other blogs so that their readers come to you and invite guest posts from other blogs in the hope that the authors will mention their post on their blog and some people will come across to your.

Tweet!
Twitter can give a lot of traffic, if used well. You can use plugins to automatically tweet every blog post and a link, so make sure that the blog post is inviting and can be found my many people. But make sure that you are also writing a few tweets each day that are interesting and keep followers entertained, reducing the ration of tweets with links to those without.

Write Often
Writing often means different things to different people, but by writing 3 or 4 times per week you are providing quality content that will tempt people back time and again.

Social Bookmark
Encourage your readers to make use of social bookmarking, allowing them to like, favourite, tweet and so on your posts. Do this by adding a suitable social bookmarking plugin to your blog, and mentioning it at the end of every post!

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Do you check your visitors reports daily? Can you be missing a huge traffic source? Read now why you should be checking your traffic logs daily to increase your website traffic!

My own experience
A couple of days ago I posted a quick new post to one of my blogs. It was nothing much, just a discussion on something that I had seen and it made me write a post that I had not previously planned. I very practically merely deleted the email that prompted it and got on with whatever I was doing.

Now, I am glad I wrote that post. Why? Well because I have been looking at my traffic reports and seen what has happened to my web site traffic since I posted that entry. In the days since that post was made, traffic has risen rapidly as more search engines have listed the post, with yesterday’s traffic round 4 times the level of the traffic for the days before that post was made.

What good does checking do?
But what is significant round checking traffic reports? Well, if I had not checked them, I would never have noticed how much traffic that one entry is attracting. I would not have seen how a lot of variations of a few keywords are now driving people to that web site. I may not have noticed that the post that was only a quick reaction to an event has not quadrupled by web site visitors in days.

By checking the web site traffic stats, I now that this one post has achieved for me what I have laboured long and hard for with other techniques – a huge rise in visitors.

How do we follow this up?
So what could I do? Well, now that I have identified the visitors spike and know exactly what the cause was, I might repeat it. In a day or two I could add a further post along the same lines, extending what I have already got.

Because I am checking my visitors statistics I have the knowledge of what is fetching the visitors to my website and what I need to do to keep it coming. That traffic may not be exactly what I was aiming for, but it is relevant visitors.

The power in the knowledge
Having the knowledge of what pages new traffic are finding on your web site and how they are finding them gives you the power to create more along those lines. It means that I might now take actions to write more posts along that theme that will drive yet more traffic in – perhaps another similar post will double the current visitors levels!

It also means I know what 75% of my visitors is interested in reading around and I might adjust my advertising and offers, if merely on that page, to suit them.

Check your stats today!
The knowledge of why people are visiting your web site is a great piece of marketing equipment. But, it is something that changes rapidly. If you don’t look after it, it is gone. So check those stats often to make sure you know where your visitors are coming to you from!

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