I was first enthralled with the idea of earning passive income online when I discovered Clickbank products about five years ago. So I created my first information product and started buying pay-per-click traffic which was directed to an awful landing page that I had created.

I lost money.

However, I had glimpsed the power of the internet, and knew that I could create a system to produce income. I want to show you how I created a profitable website, and how you can do the same thing.

Get-rich-quick schemes hardly work, if at all. It takes time and effort to build a successful income online.

Can you really make money with this stuff?

At first I had doubts about my online business’s lucrativity. Then some income trickled in from a website that I was working on. I was running advertising on the website and I got a click that paid me over a dollar.

It was then that I had my “Aha moment” and realized two things: that if I built a website of sufficient volume, I actually could make a living out of it, and if I could get a single click for a dollar, then I can get one hundred clicks and make one hundred dollars.

The only thing holding me back was volume. I needed to expand my website so that it would earn more income in shorter periods of time. Eventually my flagship site grew and thrived, perhaps due to the following factors:

* Varied article length – I mixed long with short articles.

* Varied content type – Aside from text, I also posted videos, pictures, free eBooks, etc.

* Community – My site had an active user forum with lots of returning visitors generating thousands of words of new content.

* Premium quality – I made sure that my articles were genuinely helpful to the site visitors. No fluff.

* Link diversity – Not a ton of links, but quite a diverse backlink profile. A couple from “real” websites in the same niche.

* Age – My site has been growing for over 5 years, building more trust with the search engines.

If you want to build a similarly lucrative site, review this list carefully. The idea is to build a “real” website that actually helps people, rather than just a bunch of text that is spam for the search engines.

There is plenty of time and room online for a one-website approach

Some topics online are probably out of reach for most people due to their competitive nature, such as “insurance” or “credit cards”. Those topics are off-limits, and other hyper-competitive topics should also be avoided. As for “real world” topics, it’s all about search volume and casting a net wide enough to bring in plenty of searchers.

One of my most important suggestions is to concentrate on one website then work on it every day for at least a year or two. If you try to run five or ten websites in the hopes of “diversifying” then guess what? None of them will go anywhere. Instead you will be stuck with ten worthless websites.

Profitable topic, sufficient volume, expert knowledge

You need an intersection of three things in order to chose a topic for a website:

1) Profit potential – The topic has to be able to generate decent income (avoid “free sewing patterns”, etc).

2) Sufficient volume – How many people are conducting searches about your topic in Google each month? Can that amount support a business?

3) Expert knowledge - Can you talk for two hours about your topic with some authority, without running out of key points?

You have to find a topic that fulfills all three requirements. Just having one of those things is not enough.

Don’t go after a topic that has profit potential, but of which you know very little. On the other hand, if write about what you just love, there may be no money in it. Instead, brainstorm a list of topics of which you have some working knowledge, then investigate to see if any are potential money makers. Qualify each topic, and see which ones have the potential to be lucrative.

One quick way to check for profitability is to search for you topic in Google, and see how many ads are displayed on the first and second result pages. Generally speaking, the more ads shown, the better. If the ads are “thinner” on those first result pages then you might consider a different topic.

Premium content sets you up for success

The web is full of spam. New articles are churned out by the hundreds of thousands each week in order to try to game the search engines and make a few cents off random clicks.

Building a real business online relies on standing out from the sea of web spam. In order to do that, you have to create amazingly useful and high-quality articles and not just a bunch of 400-word articles that are all perfectly optimized for different keywords.

However, volume is still important, being a key factor in netting plenty of long-tail traffic that will result in passive income. So one of your goals should be to have at least one thousand interesting, outstanding, and useful articles published on your website.

That is the real challenge in producing content: you want quantity and quality.

How to do it?

Start slowly, publishing one quality article each day. Push yourself to create better articles, while testing for responses to measure what your most useful and helpful articles are. Useful metrics for this include comment counts and bounce rate.

As you progress, your publishing speed will increase. Your goal is to publish three quality articles each day. Any more than that and you risk burnout.

Publishing three articles per day will result in more than one thousand each year. If you can maintain a high quality then this is more than enough volume to build an amazing business.

Two more tips about quality content:

1) Check out competing websites and see what content is behind their pay wall. That is the level of quality that you want to give away for free on your website. Don’t copy them, but use their paid content as a benchmark for your own free content.

2) Marketing and promotion are so tough that the shortcut these days is to create such amazingly good content that it sells itself. Take the energy that you would have spent on promotion and refocus it on creating high-quality on-site content instead.

Focus on building income and passive traffic rather than readers or social followers

It is so easy to get a quick burst of traffic from social media sources — such as Facebook or Twitter — that many people end up focusing all of their efforts on chasing more and more of that type of traffic. This is a notorious trap and if you fall victim to it you will likely never make much money at all.

In contrast, growing your daily search engine traffic creates a powerful foundation for your website. Social media promotion pretty much takes care of itself when you have amazing content and several hundred search engine visitors per day.

Let your audience handle your tweeting and Facebook sharing. It’s better to focus on building precious search engine visitors.

Why is search engine traffic so important? Because it shows up every single day. Once you build it, once your site has established authority with quality content, the search engines tend to send you a steady stream of traffic with no further effort on your part. Your work ends after you build an amazing website and gain authority through incoming links.

Live on monthly earnings or cash out for a huge windfall

When my flagship website went over $1,000/month in earnings, I seriously entertained the idea of quitting my day job. A few months later the earnings had risen to $2,000/month, and so I turned in my two-weeks’ notice.

Then something completely unexpected happened: Someone offered me $200,000 dollars for the website. Since I can always build another website, I decided that this was a good deal for me, and I sold the site.

Now I am busy building my next business online so that the monthly earnings can cover my living expenses.

I’m not saying that every website created will generate huge amounts of wealth. But if you are serious about building an online income, the opportunity is certainly there for anyone gutsy enough to pursue it.

To recap, the most important points of this article are:

1) One website approach - Concentrate your effort into a single website. Avoid diversification.

2) Topic selection – Brainstorm workable topics and then screen them for profit potential.

3) Quality + volume – Build a highly useful website. Make it big by publishing multiple articles daily.

This is a plan for building a large authority website. Anyone can do it, but very few will have the drive and discipline to actually make it happen. So if you want an amazing six-figure payout then you have to build something amazing!

Photo credits: www.techfilipino.com, www.fivequidexpert.com, http://3.bp.blogspot.com

PATRICK MENINGA of Make Money With No Work has recently built and sold a flagship website for $200,000 dollars, and is eager to share his insights with you.

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AS a blogger, I’m sure you’ve already come across advice that extols the merits of using SEO. Since it’s one of the quickest and most effective ways to drive traffic to your web site, SEO is now considered as one of the most essential site maintenance tools. Properly applied, this can empower your website and make it much more appealing to your market.

Black hat, white hat: It only takes a devious or uninformed move to turn an innocuous SEO technique into something unethical or downright illegal.

Now you can easily find lengthy online lists and discourses on what SEO practices can benefit your blog the most, and you may have relied on a few of them. But have you ever considered that as some point, some formerly recommended SEO techniques may inadvertently turn you into a spammer?

Here are a few common SEO practices that have turned ugly.

Let’s begin with outright spam activity. First off, promoting your business via email and blog comments is encouraged and practiced by plenty of professional online marketing companies. If you do this the right way, you can generate widespread interest in your website quickly and very easily.

On the other hand, when your email or comments degenerate into a one-size-fits-all one-liner message + link, then that’s pure spam. Check out online regulations regarding spam, such as the CAN-SPAM Act. If your SEO techniques fail to comply with its rules, then you better find other ways to market your blog.

Flooding a comment box, forum post, or article with links to the same site is automatically considered as spamming activity, but sometimes it also takes just one badly placed link to create spam. I’ve seen this mostly in forums and comment boxes, where one-time posters leave one link in a remotely related discussion and never return.

IT DOESN’T WORK. Whenever Google detects spamming activity, it will simply send the site to the Google Sandbox for up to several months, and later remove it from the search engine index. If that happens, your site is doomed.

Keywords are the foundation of SEO. However, many misguided posters, writers, and webmasters simply incorporate random and usually irrelevant keywords throughout their content in the hopes of attracting as many visitors as possible.

If the keywords that you use are not what your market needs, then they won’t serve you at all. You can beat this by doing research first on what resonates well in your market so you can adopt the most effective keywords for your website.

Related to wrong and random keyword usage is keyword stuffing. How many times do you expect to see the keywords ‘web development’ in a single paragraph of 200 words?

Bad SEO practitioners liberally pepper their statements with the same or similar keywords, sometimes to the point that the entire thrust of the message is lost. It only makes the content sound forced. It’s much better to trim down your keywords and apply them strategically at the strongest points of your content, where they matter.

Once considered effective, this is now a highly dubious practice. Buying links to generate better online exposure poses more risks than returns because it is easy for your competitors to keep up with you and leverage their other assets against your business. At best, link buying can be used to support your entire marketing strategy.

As the term implies, cloaking is presenting different content to a search spider from what you show to your readers. What happens is that the search engine receives a set of scrambled but targeted keywords to increase the site’s ranking. It is also used by some webmasters to trick users into visiting their site.

For instance, a user will click on a website based on a search engine’s results and description, but will be redirected to another site different from what was described in the SERP’s. Obviously, this method is highly deceptive and could quickly get you banned.

Have you ever tried any of the methods listed above, and how did they affect your blog or website? Have you encountered anyone attempting to spam your website with these and other tactics, and how did you deal with them?

These practices may increase blog traffic at first, but in the long run they will drive more potential traffic away.

In the end, it is still much better to create substantial content, products, and services that will offer your target market specialized value, then promote it in a systematic, strategic, and ethical manner at a slower but steadier pace. And it only takes one false move to destroy months or years of building your brand’s integrity, so protect it at all costs.

Photo credits: asdfing.com, artdriver.com

Carmela Maraan has written on various topics ranging from marketing, advertising, blogging, and creative writing to adult material. She is enthusiastic about expanding her repertoire as she views the world as one huge library. During her free time she is also a voracious reader, an irrepressible singer, and a mom who hardly sleeps.

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Google Analytics is a monster tool for tracking traffic patterns, sources, trends and more. It’s so extensive that it can easily help jack up your web site visitors from 100 a month to 10,000. IF you know how to use it right.

This is a real-life story which was inspired by some SEO work I recently did for one of my clients. In the past few months it has become increasingly obvious that Google cares about more than just links, and my hope is that this story will give you some ideas about how to make your own sites better and more popular.

Successful link bulding isn’t just about slapping on the most popular keywords, but about understanding which keywords work for you.

A quick background

My client had originally come to me with about 2 or 3 keyword ideas which they were pretty much set on ranking for, whatever it took. Now many SEOs would have been rubbing their hands in glee, but before we went full throttle I convinced the client to let me do a little research for them.

If you launch into a campaign without doing your research first you could make your life a lot harder and eventually shoot yourself in the foot. So here’s what I did and found:

The research process

I always look at a selection of key areas for clues about what is going on. Here are the main points of interest for this client in particular:

In the last 3 months (Jan – March)

1. Only 13% of traffic arrives via the home page.
2. Approximately 1,000 keywords account for 80% of the traffic.
3. There were 5 particularly high traffic pages with very high bounce rates.

So What?

The next question then is what to actually do with this info, and how does it help with your SEO?

Well, the first lesson is that for this particular site, the home page isn’t that important as compared to the site as a whole. There are dozens of smaller pages which are collectively bringing in tons of highly targeted traffic, so my first move is to work on improving these pages and their rankings.

Spending all of their SEO budget on 3 key phrases wasn’t a good idea either — those 1,000 keywords or so that bring the majority of their traffic are where the money is at. You obviously can’t build decent quality links to target that many keywords, but with the right site architecture and a campaign of quality link building to build authority you can certainly help things along.

Finally, those all important user metrics were letting the site down — the 5 pages I had picked out needed improving, because if we could lower the bounce rate and improve the content the client would keep more traffic and probably find that their rankings improved too.

The plan of attack

Step 1: Fix the holes in the bucket so to speak, starting with the weaker pages.

Step 2: See if there is any way we can improve the site in general, navigation, layout, content etc.

Step 3: Split test! We tried a few different ideas and recorded the results, eventually finding a winning combination which resulted in the bounce rate being lowered by circa 11% overall.

Step 4: Look at what keywords people are using to reach each of those 5 weak pages, decide whether the existing content is a good fit for those queries and consider changes which could keep more users on the page and on the site. The key here; call to action.

Step 5: Link building — we weren’t interested in building keyword links through brute force; we wanted a selection of very high quality, natural-looking links, to the home page and to some deep pages. We wanted to make the site more authoritative, and allow those 1,000 or so keywords to rank even higher, not to mention gaining a few more.

The results

Those 5 pages have gradually improved and now they have much lower bounce rates and tend to get more organic traffic too — which is probably not a coincidence.

They are now getting their traffic from around 1400 keywords, and traffic has increased. Plus, by lowering bounce rates all round they are retaining more traffic too.

We are continually building lots of links that actually drive traffic, so they are also getting an extra little bonus from that, and their organic traffic has clearly grown overall.

Conclusion

This just goes to show that SEO isn’t just about links or rankings, it is about understanding where your traffic comes from and enhancing what you already have. Using Analytics this way is very powerful — it takes time to get your head around it, but it pays off in dividends.

If you work hard to improve your site, make the most of whatever traffic you get and back that up with quality link building, and you will see the results for yourself.

About The Author

Hi, my name is Mark. I am a freelance SEO consultant and link builder, I help small business owners (and bloggers) to get more natural search traffic and to build a more successful blog. Please check out my website ToMakeALiving.com and get in touch to find out how I can help you.

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What does this mean for you?

The SEO world is literally a war ground. You fight for the top spot on search engines and you will do whatever it takes. Companies invest millions in SEO and more tactical ways of achieving the top spot. Google wants the playing field to be fair-and-square, and so there is a reason why they are always changing their patented PageRank algorithm criteria.

Every person deserves the chance to own a site and be seen. The web is a VERY BIG place with millions of websites. It can be daunting when you are just getting started, kind of like going against Goliath I suppose. Those giant physical corps. can easily overshadow your sweet little shop, but it’s much harder online – if you know a little of what to do…

With individuals spending hours ‘cracking the code’, and companies investing millions in research, marketing and SEO, large sites will begin to monopolize the top search results. People have the right to be a competitor in the market and start their own site, yet how do you expect to succeed let alone get a voice when the ‘big folks’ have, and will, sweep you clean?!

Everyone wants and thinks they deserve to get noticed, and luckily Google understands! Well sort of… in my opinion, even if they didn’t really care, Google always wins. The more competitors there are fighting for the top spot for advertising space, the more money Google will make anyways.

With billions of websites online, many users are finding poor quality sites that are full of errors, shabby links and lurid ‘content’. As the world’s most visited search engine Google must stay competitive and weed these guys out.  As a result of the rapidly changing criteria out there for page rankings, real sites are now required to pull-up-their-sleeves, really tweak their design, watch for typos, and post quality useful content in order to gain search relevance, and an audience.

Even though this helps users navigate the pits from the real stuff, there is a downside with Google’s patented PageRank. Established sites that have so much to deliver are now potentially heavily affected if they don’t go back in and invest more  time in SEO to get back up in the ranks. Time is money and the time spent on the research could be much better spent elsewhere…

An upside would be the fact that novice beginners would have a more equal opportunity in getting in the game. Since there are many spammy folks out there, Google’s continuously evolving and elusive PageRank does do its best at keeping them at bay.  There are a plethora of budding entrepreneurs who have excellent ideas and products to share with everyone, and they should be heard too.

So what can you do?

Have one eye on your analytics and site, and the other on Google. Do a little research on how to get your blog posts to stand out, practice a few SEO tricks,  Like I said, it’s a war and a war for the strong hearted with passion, perseverance and determination.

Have any stories to tell? Let me know in the comments or contact us via:
Yourthirdspace.

Hi. I’m Nathan – Co-Founder and blogger of Yourthirdspace.I blog about quotes, life, Photoshop tutorials, health, web, and tech. This is my passion. I love to share what I know and benefit others whilst at it – As that’s the purpose of this article. I’m a designer with coding knowledge and enjoy the fine arts (music to theatrical). Would be glad to hear from you.

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Do you want to know how we used the three things above to spike our traffic from 20 visits a day to over 2,000? It’s time you start thinking outside of the box when it comes to marketing and promoting your blog — way outside of the box.

Your Problem: No One Cares About You or Your Blog

(Except your mom — and she could be jiving too)

Q: What do you call a million people all shouting the same thing at once?
A: The Internet.

If you’ve ever tried to drive traffic to your blog, then you’ve probably felt like one of the million people all saying the same thing: “Hey — come listen to what I have to say!”

It might work. But one-in-a-million isn’t very good odds. So, even though you provide good content, you utilize every social media site around, and you get fresh ideas daily from sites like Blogussion, nobody really seems to care.

All of those things are good — and that’s exactly your problem. They’re just good. Good isn’t good enough. You are remarkable — and it’s about time you started acting like it.

Nobody cared about us either. Until…

It was the summer of 2010. My buddy (and budding business prodigy) Nick Tart and I had just finished interviewing 25 of the world’s most impressive young entrepreneurs — including Alex Fraiser himself — for a book. The only problem was that just a select few really cool people knew about it.

We had tried spreading the word with emails, articles, and comments — but we were only making ripples where we wanted to make waves. That’s when we had a kooky idea: make a stop-motion music video to promote our book.

I got to work writing music and mixing in audio chopped-up from the interviews. Nick Tart got busy buying Sharpies and making cut-outs of all 25 young entrepreneurs. Overall, we put in around 68 hours into the song/video and the results made it completely worthwhile.

They speak for themselves:

Quit Moping Around & Create Something Remarkable

But You Don’t Like Making Stop-Motion Videos…

Good for you. They’re a pain. To find your personal promotional perfection, don’t look around at what other people have done. Look at your own life. What do you like to do for fun? What creative things did you waste your time on as a kid?

In our case, those were silly stop-motion videos, but in yours it could be anything from finger paint to play-doh to wooden blocks. Simply create something that you would want to tell all of your friends about.

And don’t play the “I’m not creative” card. If you’re one of the left-brained among us, then you can still use your technical prowess to make something awesome, like a big row of dominoes that spells out your URL.

From Hobby to Purposeful Content

Of course, you can’t just make a video of your stamp collection and expect it to be a promotional boon for your blog. You have to redirect your hobby so that it fits your purpose like a glove. Recognize your assets and your message — then start thinking creatively from there.

In our case, we realized that the audio from the 25 young entrepreneurs we interviewed was one of our biggest assets. So, we decided to incorporate some of the best audio clips into a song. We also knew that more people would recognize these bloggers by their faces and accomplishments than by their voices — so we decided to incorporate a visual component too.

You can do the same thing to promote your blog. Think about the possible ways that your creative stream overlaps with your blog. Find an idea that’s unique and exhilarating and then go for it! A few nights of hard work and you’ll have your killer promotional content.

Let Your Content Roam Free, Like The Wild Buffalo

People are incredibly lazy (as a former lazy person myself, I can vouch for this). Even if you’ve created a mind-blowing song/dance/paint-by-numbers-drawing for your blog, nobody’s going to share it unless it’s really, really easy for them to do so.

Here are the three ways we made our video more viral than pink eye:

1. Facebook Comments
   This is a new tool that lets you put a snazzy little Facebook comment box underneath any scrap of content. It’s great because it encourages feedback, community, and it posts a link on the person’s wall.
2. Tweet Button
   Everyone tweets. Even your grandma. That means that one or two tweets about your promotion aren’t going to make a big dent in things. But if you can attract a whole flock of Twitterers with a sleek little ‘Retweet’ button, then you’re in business.
3. Posted on YouTube
   We uploaded our video onto YouTube so that people could easily embed it onto their websites and Facebook profiles. YouTube is also the second biggest search engine in the world and it’s especially popular with younger people — which happens to be our primary demographic.

Here’s the video that helped us go viral:

There are very few reasons not to be remarkable.

If you can think of a few good reasons to be average, then ignore everything you just read. Otherwise, get out there and start transforming something you’re passionate about into a perfectly mind-blowing promotional campaign for your newly-remarkable blog.

Ready to jump in with DIY marketing? Or are you convinced that your hobby is too weird, dorky, or illegal to be transformed into eye-catching promotional content? Hop on down and join the brain-storming in the comment box below.

Photo by Fergus Ray Murray

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One of the major problems many people face is getting traffic to a blog, and the truth in the online world is that traffic is very essential to any online business you do; it is traffic that brings about people that buy.

This post will be talking about 5 ways you can significantly increase your website traffic.

1. Blog Commenting

I just began to realize the power of blog commenting. Blog commenting is a powerful way to get traffic to your website especially if done wisely and on a large scale.

One major thing about blog commenting is that it also helps you build a great brand when people begin to see your comments every here and there.

It is very important to make use of avatars when trying to get traffic to your blog through blog commenting because this will help people take note of you when they begin to see you everywhere every now and then. Being the first person to comment also helps a lot because most people are likely to visit the websites of a few of the first commenters and they rarely visit the rest.

When commenting to get traffic, quality is better than quantity because a lot of bloggers will delete your comment if you write generic comments and readers tend to click on valuable comments more than any other comments because they believe someone with this type of great comment will also have something similar on his blog.

2. Guest Posting

7 of the top ten referrers in my analytics data are from my guest posts and all of them sent me over 150 unique visitors. Guest posting is really effective and the power of a guest post should never be underestimated.

One thing I have come to notice with guest posts is that people prefer quality over quantity; if your guest post is a great one then you will get more visitors from it than just writing anything.

Many people tend to write just any guest post because they believe since the blog is not theirs then their best post should be on their blog, this is not supposed to be because of several reasons. One major advantage of submitting quality guest posts is that it helps you build a relationship with the blogger and his readers but if you just write anything there is a probability of the blogger declining your post, and if he doesn’t his readers will not visit your blog. The better your guest post, the better your result.

3. Blogging Communities

This is one underutilized traffic generation strategy many bloggers don’t use, many bloggers tend to give excuses that they are busy, If you are busy then you might want to be submitting your guest posts to blogging communities every weekend.

Some of the best blogging communities are MMO Social Network and Blog Engage; these two networks have sent me hundreds of visitors over time.

One major thing to consider when trying to get the best from blogging communities is that you have to have high quality posts and you also have to build relationship because people tend to vote up people they know and if you have an high quality post people will be more inclined to visit your blog.

4.  Forum Marketing

There was a time I signed up to the warrior forums and with only 50 posts I had already gotten over 70 visitors to my blog, I didn’t post a link to my blog in my posts, it was in the signature.

You can get great results from forum marketing if it is done properly, one great thing to consider when trying to market your blog through forums is that it is very important to try as much as possible to help others and not just spam people for your benefit.

If your aim is to go to forums to go and spam then within a short period of time you will be banned but if you focus on helping as many people as possible the end result will be you lasting longer in the forum, having more friends and building more stronger relationship and you will also have more traffic and authority.

Some great forums to get started are the Warrior Forum and Digitalpoint Forum.

5. Mailing List

I wouldn’t have put this on this list but it is also a very effective way to get traffic to your blog. I was checking my overall stats today and I discovered that my mailing list has sent me hundreds of visitors, this is a good number because I only sent my posts to them a few times.

One of the major benefits of a mailing list is the instant result it provides, people tend to respond faster because they are closer to their email than any other thing.

I have also observed mails I sent and I discovered that your titles matter, I have had sent emails have as low as 15% open rate and I have also had emails have over 35% open rate but what matters most is the title. If you have a cool and attractive title then you will get more results than having generic titles.

Getting traffic to blogs used to be a difficult task and I started noticing a difference over time. It is the tips in this post that is helping me get thousands of visitors to my 3 months old blog every week, use them to your advantage and you will be amazed at how they work.

It is also important to know that getting traffic takes time and requires constant effort, if you are dedicated to making the effective use of the above tips then in no time you will be getting a lot of traffic on autopilot.

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What does it mean to create a trend? A trend is really a specific direction that something or someone develops over a given amount of time that begins to spread to many others. In the case of blogging we, bloggers, should think about starting a trend for our blogs. Creating a trend will allow us to effectively stand out from the immense blogosphere. I strongly feel if we don’t have that urge to create a trend, why even blog, so let’s get started and spread our passions!

We can adapt many known practices to blogging

This thought initially came from hearing my professor lecturing one day in my advertising class. It had stricken me that if we push for creating a trend then followers and competition will increase. This is a thought process that has been practiced in our markets all across the world, so why not adapt that to blogging.

I am pushing for you to really dig deep into your passion, thought process, and overall vision. You, your content, and your community will all be affected. The post itself is a long read, but I hope you enjoy and looking forward to your feedback.

We all should be standing out in the blogosphere or the web if are striving for that ultimate success or happiness. I know that we each have a different definition or scope for our success or happiness, but we need to stand out.

Why should someone see, visit, or even care about you versus “them” or someone else? This comes down to your “unique selling point” and your overall marketing strategies. Our marketing strategies seem to all be very similar today, but many are brainstorming how to “twist” these proven and practiced strategies around in strictly benefiting them, their blog, and their community. So what’s this twist?

It’s setting a trend. They are creating a trend to promote them and their content in ways that will directly and indirectly positively affect them. Time to stand out.

Let’s now break this “creating a trend” concept down.

1. Bond to Your Passion

Your passion should be the reason you are blogging, creating quality content, and striving to be happy and having others feel the same way. I really want to emphasize that this needs to be your passion and not something that you thought would be great to do because you saw potential, etc.

Conversations with people may present more insight than you thought

For instance, while having a casual conversation with Daniel Delaney from Vendr.TV the other day, I asked him if he started Vendr.TV because he saw it as a potential or untapped niche or if he did it because it was his passion? His response was that it was his true passion and he wanted to make sure he rocked it out.

Once, we have our true passion we can then begin bonding to it. Bonding to it? Yes, act as if this passion is your child and strive to make it grow the best and healthiest ways possible. Don’t like the analogy, then bond to your passion by staying close with it and always checking whether whatever steps (big or small) you’re taking that they actually fit.

Allow time for your passion to truly find you and be ready to roll with it if you aren’t already.

2. Push for Originality & Creativity

Here are where things get interesting, messy, and filled with many ideas while brainstorming. Even while you might see this as “not for me” because this is not how you role with things, you should think about these general ideas:

• Showing Your Voice
• Quality & Unique Content
• Word-of-Mouth

These are some general ideas of how we make our blogs different than others, whether they be in the same niche or not as us. Digging deeper, we must go beyond these ideas and begin to think about making that trend I’ve been talking about.

For a quick example you can use already established tools like Twitter, Facebook, Skype, related blogs, people, and Google to help integrate in this “digging deeper action”.

Missing the necessary “funk” could lead to a slow death for you and your blog

Now, originality and creativity are terms that have to come from the inner part of you. And to get to the point of starting a trend, think about the ways and methods you will put into immediate effect in order for people to make an immediate realization or generalization. This could be very simple or very complex depending on the level of creativity, originality, and needed hustle.

We’re now in a spotlight and waiting for everyone to come piling through the doors to see and hear what you have for them.

We all have some sort of originality and creativity to help us and our blogs stand out from the typical crowd into our very own spotlight.

3. Influence on Auto-Pilot

Things are on auto-pilot when you have everything programed in, figured out, and it’s just a matter of being along for the ride. Additionally, you are able to spend time focusing on more specific things such as reaching closer to your community.

Now, that you are closer to your community and your community feels this relationship the term “influence” starts to take shape. You now begin influencing your community, which influence other people all seeing what you have just done. What you have done meaning your original passion that you’re bonded to. This intial reaction from the infleuence is really inspiration that leads to a trend.

People are inspired by you and what you have merely done with your passion or finding out that their passion relates to yours to go out and “compete”. So many are aspiring to be like you and this influence will be on auto-pilot to continue that trend you either intended or not on starting.

While your influence continues to grow the trend, how do you make sure you stand out?

4. Being the Leader-of-the-Pack

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.

Now, you are at the point of being what I call the “leader-of-the-pack” where you are at the top of this trend/movement.

A quote by the honorable George S. Patton is highlighted directly above (to the right) and raises a terrific point while you are the leader-of-the-pack.

Since we have have built this trend we now have the responsibility of maintaining it. We must treat everyone who has been influenced to be apart of the trend as competition. But, we must not fear of this competition. We should only fear of us losing our touch. But, we are really at the point to effectively stand out in whatever niche or area we feel we are in. It’s really all up to you though.

Finally, we are back to square one in bonding to our passion. No, this is not simply a repeat.

5. Spreading Your Passion

Bond to your passion by staying close with it and always checking whether whatever steps (big or small) you’re taking that they actu­ally fit.

Sticking to your passion will only continue to spread this trend. This will then most likely spread your passion, which goes back to my first point of that this should be the main reason we all blog.

What will be your trend and how will you stand out?

Let’s go starting make our very own trend and spread our true passions!

Related posts:

1. Stop Blogging About Blogging Already

2. How to “Blog On Purpose” and Stand Out From the Crowd

3. Creating Interest Within Your Community With E-Book

One of the best ways to market your blog and attract heaps of visitors is through social media. Obviously this is like picking up a gun and firing off a round of buckshot as there are so many options for you to choose from. But social media packs a powerful punch, so it behooves you to pick your poison sooner rather than later, and start building your networks.

In case you missed them, here are parts one and two of this three day series.

In my case, my main choices when it comes to social media are Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Facebook respectively. Occasionally I utilize YouTube and LinkedIn as well as a few others, but primarily the first three are my focus.

What Your Main Objectives Are

When you are marketing on social media you need a plan. Remember back in part 1 when I told you about working with goals? Well, that goes especially big for marketing through social media.

• Build your network: Low numbers equals low traffic. It’s not going to do as much good having 10 people in your network when you could have 100. In this case you should think “The more the merrier!”
• Build relationships: It doesn’t matter how big or small your network is; if you don’t foster a relationship with those followers it’s a wasted effort.
• Create brand awareness: That means be a regular on the scene and make folks see you. Create a “social media” schedule as well if need be. A half hour a day can do wonders.
• Provide excellent value: Call attention to helpful information (yes, it can be from your blog). Help other people in your network. Pay attention to them and what they’re doing. Make them feel noticed and appreciated and in turn they’ll notice and appreciate you.

Useful Tools to Help you Leverage Social Media

Some people prefer to do it their selves, and some like a little help through tools. However you choose to get your marketing done through social media is up to you, and there is nothing wrong with using a few tools.

I actually use a few tools myself to help me with my marketing and they really have simplified the experience.

• Seesmic

  Great for Twitter account management, especially if you have more than one Twitter account. You can monitor and respond to all three from the same interface. When you get a tweet and go to respond, it has a “smart” feature that automatically chooses the account the tweet was sent to.

• Su.Pr

  A StumbleUpon URL shortener that allows you to track how many clicks you get from Twitter and Facebook on a link. It also allows you to stumble those links for extra StumbleUpon traffic. Just be sure that in between links you stumble, you also stumble other blogs and content as well. Otherwise you’ll end up pissing off the StumbleUpon community.

• Ping.Fm

  Allows you to send your blog posts to all the social networking and social bookmarking sites that you’d like, all at once. There is also a plugin you can use if your blog is WordPress called Shorten2Ping that will send each new post you publish straight to Ping.Fm, which then sends it out to all your networks.

Give SEO a Little Kiss

While I don’t give a huge amount of focus and time to SEO, there are a few key things you should make a priority. These simple tweaks will increase your search traffic, which is really some of the best kind of traffic you can go for as a blogger.

These people are searching for information, and if they land on your blog it’s because you can provide it and Google recognized that pertinent little fact. That’s a good thing and search traffic has a higher likelihood of converting to subscribers or customers.

Simple SEO Tweaks to Improve Your Search Ranking

As hard as SEO is to master, there are some pretty basic things you can do to make an impact in the search engines that just aren’t hard at all to figure out.

• General keyword research: You don’t have to dig too deep unless you want to, just do some general research and find some good keywords related to your niche that you can target. It’s OK if they’re competitive but I wouldn’t go for the ones that are ridiculously competitive. Then make sure to use them in your blog posts on a regular basis.
• Keywords in your title tags: Google likes it when you include relevant keywords in your title tags. You can use the All In One SEO plugin if you need a bit of help in that department. It makes things super easy.
• Anchor links: Google gives relevance to anchor links, so use some of those keywords throughout your posts, and convert them to Google friendly anchor links to other relevant blogs or posts.
• Inbound link building: This is done by using article directories, guest posting, using social media sites, and creating killer content that people just can’t help but talk about and link to on their own blogs and social profiles. You can also submit your URL to directories and submit your RSS feed to directories as well. Also things like press releases can help with inbound links.

And there you have it: my little secret sauce to help you market the you know what out of your blog. No, it’s not new or unheard of. Nor is it by any means a comprehensive list of marketing tactics.

There are literally thousands of ways to market and drive traffic to a blog, but they are simply too numerous to cover here. But this handful of methods is simple and effective, and that’s what counts.

And if you couple then with a solid marketing schedule that you stick to, as well as a solid marketing plan, I foresee quite a bit of bloggy growth in your future!

So let’s talk about you… do you use social media to promote your blog successfully? What about SEO? Is it working for you? Drop a comment in the box below and let us know if you’re struggling with anything.

Related posts:

1. Marketing the “You Know What” Out of Your Blog, Part 2

2. Blogging With a Battle Plan: My 3 Phase Marketing Plan

3. The Field of Dreams Myth

In this post we’ll talk the first two actual methods of promoting your blog that I love to use. Obviously this list could likely go on forever, but in the interests of saving us both a bit of time, I’ll just focus on the things I know work very well. You can insert other methods you run across elsewhere at your leisure.

This is part 2 of a 3 part series. Here is where you can find out why a marketing plan is important, in case you missed it.

Guest Posting

Just like what I am doing here, (courtesy of Alex) you can guest post on other folks’ blogs. There are of course some guidelines to follow if you want to get the most bang for your blogging buck.

You’ll want to choose blogs that are fairly well trafficked themselves.

Sure, it’s nice to guest post for your friends who may not have much traffic or readership. Unfortunately, it’s not going to help you grow your own blog too much.

However, if you’ve time to spare and that’s your thing, go for it. Just make sure you also include several blogs on your itinerary that can help you in your growth efforts.

You’ll want to pitch those blogs appropriately.

Simply popping of an email saying “Hey! Can I like… guest post for you or something?” and not including anything else relevant in your proposal likely won’t get you very far. Bloggers want to know who the heck you are, what you’ve done, and what you can offer them.

Especially when you’re hitting up blogs who may have a pretty high profile in the blogosphere. They will simply hit the delete button and ignore you. At the very least they’ll respond with a negative and your efforts at guest posting will fall flat.

You’ll want to create your very best content.

Hopefully that really goes without saying, but seriously… don’t give a blog that is willing to feature you anything less than your best stuff. I know it’s tempting to use your best stuff on your own blog, but really… you’ll get a lot more mileage from it elsewhere, at least when you’re first starting out.

Throwing together crappy content just to get a link on a high traffic blog is a quick road to getting the snub. They definitely won’t have you back a second time, and if it’s poorly written they probably won’t even post it at all.

Think of it like a job interview and always put your best foot forward. Blog owners will thank you and likely be happy to feature you again in the future.

Obviously this isn’t a comprehensive guide, but it’ll give you some key basics. And you can get more key basics straight from Alex himself.

The Unbeatable Benefits of Guest Blogging

Posting on others’ blogs is highly beneficial to your own blog. Many of the benefits below cannot be achieved if you do not get out there and post, so hopefully what I have listed below will get you a little motivated to get out there.

• Exposure to new audiences you wouldn’t otherwise get.
• Extra traffic that you can then (with your own great content) hopefully convert to subscribers.
• Link juice from obtaining a link from a blog higher up in the food chain than you.
• Experience writing for different audiences that allows you to cultivate your own “voice” even better.
• Amazing friends and new connections that can help you in your blogging journey.
• And then someday… the chance to pay it forward to another new blogger who needs a boost.

Blog Commenting

One of the best ways to get is to give. And in the blogosphere, one of the best ways to give is by participating in the community of a blog you love to read. You participate by leaving comments relevant to the post, and interacting with both the blogger and the other readers. AKA community.

What you DON’T want to do

• Don’t spam a blog with irrelevant comments just for the sake of a link.
• Don’t drop silly one-liners like “Great post!”
• Don’t leave comments with poor grammar and spelling.
• Don’t comment on blogs you don’t actually like to read.
• Don’t comment on a blog just because they commented on yours and you feel obligated.
• Don’t leave disrespectful or inflammatory comments.
• Don’t drop links in your comments except exactly where it says to input your link.
• Don’t comment on every single post on a blog. (Unless of course you really did enjoy every single post… but that’s not likely!)

What you DO want to do

• Do leave comments that are relevant and meaningful to the post.
• Do leave comments that are thoughtful and unique.
• Do read other folk’s comments to make sure you’re not just rehashing what’s already been said.
• Do participate in community with your comments… like answering questions of other commenter’s.
• Do subtly suggest your expertise and/or intelligence with your comments.
• Do make sure to leave a link to your site where appropriate. Keywords in the ‘name’ field are fine if you see it’s allowed.

So how about you? Is blog commenting and guest posting a part of your promotional arsenal? Or have you been a little nervous on putting yourself out there in the blogosphere to really start with these two methods?  Share your thoughts in the comments below, and we’ll see how we can help.

And there ends part 2 of our epic little saga. Don’t forget to check out part 3, where I talk about the final two promo methods I personally use.

Related posts:

1. Marketing the “You Know What” Out of Your Blog, Part 1

2. Blogging With a Battle Plan: My 3 Phase Marketing Plan

3. How to Achieve the Same Benefits of a Guest Post by Leaving a Blog Comment