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.

Holiday Drop in Traffic

Holiday traffic is something we all have to deal with when want to go out and get Christmas gifts for our loved ones. Cars cutting each other off, angry words and shaking fists. Ahh, the joys of Christmas.

Traffic is also something we have to deal with as Christmas approaches if we want to make money on the Internet. As Christmas approaches there is a definite drop in Internet traffic. This is because the online shopping is done. No time ship, so instead of online shopping, most people are hitting the pavement to actual stores to do their shopping to fill in any last minute Christmas requests.

If you are suddenly noticing a drop in traffic to your site, take it in stride. It is most likely because most people are not shopping online and are using the search engines much less. This is especially true during the evening hours. I have observed a modest drop in traffic to my sites over the last week. This was quite different from the weekend after Thanksgiving when my traffic stats went sky high (well at least for me!)

I suspect that traffic will pick up once again when the holidays are over.

There are a couple of things you can do to get around the traffic loss during the holidays. If you still have the writing bug, go ahead and write away! If you focus on current news events to drive traffic to your site, then the hits will certainly take a hit. It may not be worth your time to try to catch the latest Google Trends.

Look to write about content that will last through the ages. Focus on writing what is called "Evergreen" topics. These are things that are popular throughout the year. You can hone your craft by taking the time to learn about something new and focus in on that topic.

The Magic 100 Post Threshold

I run a couple of blogs that are centered on specific content. These are all located on blogger.com, so I do not pay a penny for them, other than the time that I spend posting on them. Hence the name of this blog, penny blogging.

I chose a specific topic are that I am interested in, or interested in learning more about, and use the research that I use to create blog posts the gain more knowledge about the topic area.

Or, if you are fan of a particular celebrity, you can use that person as a platform to spout your views on his or her behavior in the limelight. I myself am not particularly fond of that method, since I do not wish to take advantage of other peoples fortunes or mis-fortune. But it one of the easiest ways to build traffic, especially if you watch google trends to develop your content.

If you want to increase your google page rank (If you are reading THIS blog, then YOU ARE!), it is important to use labels and link back to content that is located within your site to the targeted content. I do not practice this a whole lot here, but if you want to make money online, then you should put this into practice. See, I just did it!

There are also other ways, like getting links from high rated sights. Some MMO bloggers make you pay for the link backs from there higher rated sites to help boost your sites rankiongs. I will not waste my money paying for a link, but if someone were to make an offer, I certainly would take the money ;). On the whole, the whole link back method that MMO bloggers use is a pretty big pyramid scheme, on a grand scale, and on the Internet.

The best way to get page rank, is content. You need at least 100 good quality posts, that contains useful information. This takes time, but can easily be done of you sit down and jot a few notes centered around a specific topic. Then develop a list of titles for your topical posts and just write them down. Title 1, Title 2, Title 3, etc. Then create a series of articles of about 100 to 200 words each.

The great thing about most blogging software like wordpress and blogger.com is that you can write all your articles on a Saturday afternoon, and then schedule their release over the next week or two. This way it looks like you are an active blogger. Your blog newsfeed is kept up to date and your readers will keep coming back for more throughout the week.

Before you know it, you hit 100 posts. Once you hit that 100 post threshold, you will start to see your daily hit count go up!

A Project Wonderful Experiment

The other day I decided to take a little plunge and advertise one of my blogs on the highest rated traffic site on Project Wonderful. This is Friendster Layouts, and they sport well over 1 million unique hits per day. I was able to advertise for just a dollar! Imagine, advertising to 1 million viewers over a day for just one dollar.

Sure it is untargeted marking, like putting a billboard out on the information superhighway. But a million views is a million views. Actually, after my total one dollar expenditure I ended up with about 1.3 million surfers seeing the ad. Project Wonderful takes care of those statistics for you.

A total of about 130 unique people clicked through my add visited my blog. That came out to about half a penny a click through. Not too shabby at all. I seemed to have picked a a few new readers that have subscribed to my feed as well. I guess it was worth the dollar.

Maybe I will try this with one of my other blogs sometime down the road. It may be a little while since I am rather cheap when it comes to advertising!

Return Traffic

Traffic is the most important aspect for any blog that you wish to monetize. A blog is basically a searchable database that is indexed by Google or Yahoo, and your goal is to populate that database with as much juicy information as you possible can. You want your content to rank higher than others so it is important to center your "data" around a few popular terms that will get noticed. There are certain techniques that you can use to get your rankings higher, that may be covered in a later post.

There is another aspect to getting traffic that cannot be ignored. That is the idea of return traffic. To get return traffic, then your "data" must be presented in a coherent form that the reader will understand. If you sprinkle in the right kind of humor into your post, then they just may bookmark your site, subscribe to your feed, or subscribe to an email from your site. This is probably the toughest part for theblog publisher. The writing part takes a lot of practice.

Also, do not be bashful about asking people to subscribe to your feed, or email updates! So here goes, if you like what you read here, go ahead and sign up for my feed here, or subscribe for automatic email updates! Thanks.

One Honest Money Making Blogger

There are a lot of money making bloggers out there that make up numbers to show how rich they are becoming by blogging. The truth is that most of them are full of it, and the ones that do actually get big incomes, spend nearly as much promoting there site, or paying others to promote their site.

This is going to be a no BS money making blog. I will not make stuff up, and you will get the straight and honest numbers. There will be some experimentation involved, and I will tell you what is working for me, and what is not. I have little experience at this, other than what I have read and learned from others.

My main technique for making money on the Internet will be through blog farming. I will create a bunch of blogs centered on several keywords, to increase their Google page rank, and hopefully derive revenue through the search engines. I will spend no money hosting sites, and will do it all through free blog services like blogger, and its derivatives.

At a few of these sites, most likely maybe only this money making blog, I will do a little more promotion and possibly paid review and postings. I have not decided yet if I should do this for this money making blog. If things are going badly, or possibly as a little experiment, I will take this aspect on.

I will spend just a dollars per month using Project Wonderful, but that is it. Only what I make through Project Wonderful will be eligible for being spent on advertising. To give you an idea of the numbers so far, I make about $0.10 a day from Project Wonderful. Thus,I will spend about $0.10 a day. Yep, that is just 10 stinking pennies. I will be adding a few more blogs to my Project Wonderful account in the near future, so I expect those numbers to come up.

All other revenue will come through the Google Adsense program, unless something bad happens and I am banned. This has happened to some in the past. So far this of month of December, I have made a few dollars of income. It is up considerable from what I made last month. Each month I am going to try to improve my income. I will officially start posting income reports beginning near the beginning of each month. Since there really was not anything for November, I wont bother. It was a little over $5 if you really want to know.

There are many different methods one could use to attract web traffic and keep them coming back. I am not worried so much about drawing an avid readership on any of my blogs, but if you keep coming back then THANKS!

I have a core group of about 10 blogs set up, some are more mature than others, and the stragglers will catch up soon. Just got to keep posting and plugging away.

Starting a New Blog

There are a number of steps you want to take to get some traffic coming to your blog right when you start. Even though you have a tiny number of posts, and there is nothing indexed in the search engines, it does not hurt to put your site out there, you may gain a loyal reader or two.

Here are a few strategies I have been following on getting my blogs noticed.

1. Get an Entrecard. This is probably the best way to get some early traffic coming to your site for free. After you get an account with Entrcard, simply add their widget to your sidebar and this will allow sites to advertise on your site. In turn you are given credits to advertise on other sites. All of this is done for FREE. Also, to get best results, be sure to create an 125x125 image with a sexy babe on it to get males (majority of blog population) to look at your Entrecard. If you drop your card on other sites, about 1 in 10 will pay you a visit back.

2. Sign up for Feedburner. If you want to establish a readership then get a Feedburner account and install the "subscribe" chicklet on your blog. It does not hurt to also place an option that allows people to sign up via e-mail. Both of these can be accomplished under the "Optimize" tab on the Feedburner page. It also does not hurt to monetize your feed. In addition, I also activate "FeedFlare" to allow readers to "Stumble" or "Digg" your posts. I also use "Pingshot" so you do not have to manually update via the different ping services. Note that Feedburner has recently been bought out by Google, so many of their features are currently being integrated together.

3. Visit other blogs, especially new ones, and leave comment on other new blogs. I have found that about 1 out of every 5 comments will garnish a visit or two from the other blog. The chances are higher with a new blog, since the owner is likely to pay a visit. They are not quite as high with a blog that has mid ranged popularity. However, if you leave a nice pithy comment on a high traffic blog, you are likely to get at least a visit and may garner a new reader or two.

4. Sign up for Blogcatalog, and participate in their forums and discussion groups. Leave pithy remarks. You will soon be noticed.

5. Start writing. Posting, and writing. Soon your blog will be picked up by search engines and the traffic will start rolling in.