Increase Page Views for Your Blog Posts

Here are some hints to increase the amount of hits that your blog posts will get:

1. SEO optimization. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In other words, you want to optimize the chances that your post will be picked up by search engines. Pick a few key words to highlight your post. Work them into the title and first paragraph. But do not use the words to many, or your post will be tossed out by the search crawler. Just a few times is sufficient.

2. Determine whether the topic is even being searched on the web. Just because you have your post SEO'd, it does not mean you will get hits if people are not interested in the topic. Google Trends is a good place to see if your topic is being searched for. You can also try different combinations of searches and compare them. Perhaps you can find a search with higher statistics.

3. Promotion. This is either through you or others. Use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites to advantage. Stumble Upon also works quite well.

4. How active are you are as a write?. If you continually write articles, readers may be interested in reading some of your older material and may check it out.

5. Back Links from popular sites. This ties in to SEO. If your content is good, you may get lucky and start to earn backlinks from popular sites. Some higher ranked sites will take payment for backlinks. Would I pay for backlinks? Uh, no. But that is up to you!

There probably is a few other reasons that folks with more experience than I could bring up. Feel free to drop them in the comments.

Pay attention to these and you will start to see more and more traffic to your site.

Writing Efficiently

If you are serious about making money the internet, then you will need to do a lot of writing. If you want to make money blogging, then you will need to create a lot of content. A LOT of content. Decent and focused content will get your site noticed by search engines and earn the respect of your readers.

You will need an efficient program to generate all of that great content that is easy to use. Most people start out simple going to the online editor offered by their blogging program at blogger.com or within their wordpress program and type away. But are these editors the best ones to use? Are they efficient? For me, no they are not. So where do you turn? Write the article in MS word and cut and past it into the blog editor? Well this is not so good because MS word uses its own formatting and adds a lot of cruft to the HTML code. I generally avoid using MS Word.

There are a couple of offline word processors that offer good stability and allow you to cut and paste without messing up your written content.

The most well known and popular by far is Open Office. This program comes pretty close to doing everything that MS Word does. The best part is that it is free! Since Microsoft has tightened the availability of MS Word with Windows 7, Open Office is seen a jump in usage over the past year. It is available for download here.

Another lesser know free and open source program is known as Abiword. Abiword is much lighter than Open Office or MS Word. It can run on Windows or Linux. The feature that I like most about Abiword is that it will calculate your document statistics in real time. I do not like writing anymore words that I have to for some writing assignments, and once I hit that word limit, I cut the post or article off and wrap it up.

Google Docs offers another way to write your posts. Simple sign up for an account at Google.com and add it as a part of your Google applications. Google Docs is nice because you can access your documents from anywhere. I have found that it will add a little bit of HTML cruft when cutting and pasting.

So think about how you write your content, and how you can become a more efficient writer when it comes to creating content. Fell free to add any of your ideas as a comment. I would love to here them!