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Link Building Strategy and Blog Goals

December 29, 2007 By Bruce Hopkins 1 Comment

Linking building should be an important part of any website. Not only do links provide multiple avenues for people to find your site, they also are one of the most important factors search engines use when ranking your pages within their search engines. I’ve always worked at building links as I can but I’ve been thinking lately it would be useful to develop a strategy for building links.

I’m a fanatical reader of DailyBlogTips and this post on Blog Goals for 2008 is what has gotten me to thinking about where I would like to see this blog go over the next year. I’m too late to win the theme that was being given away in that contest, but I already own a developer license of the theme being given away anyway so that is not a big deal. But setting goals is really a good activity for any blogger

One area where I’m really weak in is the amount of backlinks that Google reports for this blog. Google never reports the actual number of links, but it should be showing more than I currently have showing. Yahoo is actually a better resource for determining the number of links you have to a particular site. SO one of my goals for this year is to create and follow a link building strategy. I currently submit links every chance I get in the form of Comment posts and on other sites that accept link submissions. I also utilize the social sites to help drive traffic and create backlinks. While this is effective, I’m sure I can do a better job in this area. I’ve been using Google Docs a good bit lately and this platform works out nicely to help monitor my link building. I will set up a spreadsheet and list any websites where I can obtain links. I also need to do a better job of contacting other webmaster in similar niches and request link trades. If I monitor my progress and make good choices then I should be able to build up a significant number of new avenues into this blog over the coming year.

Another of my goals is to increase my subscriber count into the 4 digits. I’m sure this is an obtainable goal. The first step to obtaining more subscribers is to write frequent content. As long as I keep posting regularly then I’ve noticed my count continues to rise.

Contests are also an excellent method to increase the number of subscribers to your blog. Winning the Web has an excellent post on how a contest can help your subscriber count. I will be watching the progress of this site over the coming months as he has some really good ideas on how to effectively market a blog. Another method that is effective in building of subscriber counts is to submit your feed to RSS directories people will locate your feed and some will subscribe. This practice also has the added benefit of building additional links to your content.

My third goal is to increase my page view counts. We currently run about 50K page views per month, but I’m sure I can do better than that. I would like to see that number doubled at least in the coming year. I’m sure if I accomplish goal number 1 and 2 then this goal will take care of itself.

I neglected this blog a little this past year as I was working on other money sites and just did not spend enough time on this site as a result my numbers for this site did not grow. I’m now changing my focus as many of my other sites are now on auto-pilot and won’t require as much care to continue to bring in traffic and revenue. This gives me more time to work on this blog which is what I will be doing. I will post at minimum of three times a week on this blog with cornerstone articles which should really help to bring in more SE traffic and to gain more subscribers.

 

 

Filed Under: Blogging, Internet Marketing, Personal, SEO Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Buy your way to A-List status

December 5, 2007 By Bruce Hopkins 9 Comments

I was reading John Chow today and noticed he has a review up for the contest running over at Winning the Web where the first prize is a $400 dollar review on John Chow dot com. There have been multiple plugs all over the net about this contest. I’m sure what we have here is a Joint Venture between some big name A-listers in the make money niche of the blogsphere. Right now Winning the Web is on the recieving end, but I’m sure John Chow, Shoemoney and who ever else is involved has some benefit on the backend.

Actually if you think about this its a great idea. We are seeing more contests on different blogs throughout the net and its really a great way to build traffic. I’m sure some Internet Marketer will be selling you the best way to build your blog up to flip eBook soon. Don’t buy it just think of some unique way to build up traffic and RSS subscribers with some method such as a contest. Maybe that is John Chow’s and Shoemoney’s angle, they will be the ones selling the eBook :-)

As many of you regular readers already know I’ve been working on improving my understanding of the Blgosphere and what it requires to gain a decent amount of exposure to a Blog. I’ve never really tried to monetize this blog or really any true blog up to this point. I have websites that are built using blogs that I earn money from, but I don’t really consider them a blog where I post to every day in hopes of gaining RSS subscribers. I use WordPress on quite a few domains, but I consider those just content management platforms and not really Blogs. Watching actions such as these play out on the web can teach you a lot about how to really launch a site and gain a lot of traffic in a short amount of time. Whether you use that traffic as a method to generate revenue from advertisers or in anticipation of selling the site is a decision you would have to make, but it would be very possible to utilize these or similar methods to build a high traffic site.

This contest requires you to subscribe to their feed to win the prize. With all this exposure how many people do you think the site will have as subscribers in the next week or so. This contest could very easily create subscribers in the 10s of thousands. I doubt all of them will stay around after the contest is over, but chances are quite a few will. Even if they don’t everyone will not unsubscribe at once and that will give the owner time to auction off the site. I’m sure there are quite a few companies that would pay some decent bread for a blog with 10,000+ subscribers. Would not be a bad profit for a couple of thousand in expenses and a couple of months work.

So get out there and think of ways to buy your way to A-list status.

Filed Under: SEO

Social Networking Site Stats

November 28, 2007 By Bruce Hopkins 2 Comments

TechCrunch has posted some statistics for Social Networking Sites and how they are doing in terms of traffic and users. There is some interesting information in the report. I’ve used this types of sites to drive traffic to various sites for a couple of years now and they can be effective for generating traffic. As a rule the traffic from these locations do not tend to stick around long, but its not always the case.

I’ve noticed that every time I make a well thought out submission to one of these sites to promote a various blog post, I always pick up some subscribers. The key is to not spam the Social sites, but to provide content that fits in with the interests of the particular social site. I only submit related articles to this site which match the interests of the people there. I’ve found as long as I spend enough time reading various hot topics on the social sites I get a better feel of what to write when I submit one of my articles that will generate the clicks to the full article.

This takes a decent amount of time to learn, but once done properly it can really help your blog to grow. I don’t claim to have this down to a science, but I do know that certain topics seem to do better on certain sites. For example almost everyone knows Technology type posts seem to do a lot better on a site such as Digg than ones on Marketing. At the same time Sphinn is focused more towards marketing and will produce better results for Marketing articles. Netscape or Propeller will do better with human interest type or weight loss articles. Propeller has shown to do fairly well in quite a few niches and I still get traffic to certain articles that where submitted over a year ago from this site.

The key to making effective use of Social Sites for generating traffic is to match the social site to the niche you wish to promote. The more time you spend as a member of the social site’s community, the better feel you will have for what they want to find out about. It may be a little work and take some time, but the payoff can be tremendous. Remember the Golden rule when submitting to Social Sites “contribute, don’t spam”.

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