Blog And Traffic: Keys to Traffic

Selasa, 29 Maret 2011

Tips For Adding It Up

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Don’t count yourself! If you are frequently checking out your own blog, be certain that you take that into account when interpreting your statistics. This often occurs early in the lifespan of a blog when you are tweaking the layout, etc.
Look at page views! The number of people who come by your blog is important, but the amount of time they spend there and the number of different pages and entries they read will give you a really good indication of whether or not they are responding well to what you have to offer. Generally speaking, those blogs that post good page view and time numbers tend to have more repeat visitors.

Using Your Counter

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The first use of your counter is simply to monitor your traffic. You will be able to find out how many people are visiting your blog, when they are coming and from where they are coming. Raw traffic numbers help you to determine whether your traffic building efforts are succeeding.

A second use for counters is to learn a bit about how people are finding you. For instance, if you check the referrers for your traffic using your counter service, you may discover that very few visitors are coming from one search engine while others are coming in drovers from another. This will give you an idea of where you need to better concentrate your efforts.

Additionally, the referrer logs will often tell you what people were searching for when they found your site. This can be very valuable information. If you notice an influx of people searching around a particular phrase, you may want to make sure to construct a post on that subject, for instance. It will also give you an idea of whether or not the people who are visiting your site are actually finding what the things for which they were looking.

Getting traffic is great, but it is even better when you know it’s happening. If you operate without a functioning counter, you will have no way of knowing whether or not your traffic-building efforts are paying off.

Getting A Counter

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This article focuses on free traffic production strategies, so we are only going to address free counters and stat services. If you are running your own blog on a domain you own, your host may provide you with tracking tools you can easily use. These tend to be more comprehensive than those offered by free services and should be used when possible.

Free counters are readily available. Sitemeter is a popular source for free counters. You can find them at http://www.sitemeter.com. Sitemeter counters will let you know how many visitors you are getting, where they are coming from and other critical information. There is an additional data available to those willing to pay for an upgrade in service, but for many bloggers the basic free package will suffice.
Signing up for a free counter is an easy process at Sitemeter and most other free counter sites. Placing the counter on your site may require some manipulation of your template and will require that you copy the HTML code provided by the counter service into your template. Sitemeter, for instance, offers very simple directions on doing this for a variety of blogger sites. Those more experienced with HTML will be able to add the counter in a matter of moments.

Adding It Up

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A counter of some sort is a necessity for your blog. It will allow you to monitor your traffic, to determine its sources, and will provide you with information that can help you to improve your blog to produce even more traffic.

Tips For Forums

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Use forums to your advantage! Don’t just look at forums as a means by which to promote your blog--use them as a community and learning tool. There is a lot of great information and expertise being shared in forums and you can benefit as much from that as you can from the increased exposure for your blog.
Choose strong forums! If you are going to make use of a few forums in your “sigging” and learning strategy, choose well-populated and vibrant communities. Check to see how often new posts are being made and how many people tend to be at the forum. You have a limited amount of time, so you should spend it in areas that will do you the most good.

Using Your Signature

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Your signature will automatically attach yourself to all of your forum posts, assuming you have your settings correct (check your settings at the control panel to be sure).

Resist the urge to post a series of “me, too” responses to threads in an effort to get your signature out there. Forums succeed because users impart real information and opinion. Make yourself into a valuable contributor and it will, in turn, make people more interested in pursuing the link in your signature.

Active participation in forums can be a surprisingly effective way to generate traffic. Not only will other forum readers check out your blog, you will also find that search engines will spider forums and collect your link, adding to your total backlink numbers.

Writing Your Signature

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You want to use your signature as a means of promoting your blog, but you don’t necessarily want to convert into a block of advertising space. Subtlety is a good idea! Include your name and a link to your blog with a brief description.

Signatures are usually authored via a control panel at the forum. It is worth noting that most signatures will not be written in plain text or in traditional HTML. BB Code and other similar styles will be used. Invariably, the forum will offer a quick guide to the code so that you can construct a signature easily. It is important to make sure you have done this correctly--you want to be sure to have created a “live link” for your site.

Forums

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Online message boards and forums are a great way to socialize and learn. They are also a neat way to promote your blog. There are forums devoted to almost every topic, and with very little research you are sure to find an active community of people interested in the subject matter of your blog. They can be a great place to interact, to refine ideas that may later become staples of your blog, and to enjoy yourself.

Most forums allow participants to have a “signature” attached to their comments. A signature usually consists of a name and a few lines of additional information about the commenter. These signatures can be a great way to let the world know about your blog.
The term “sigging” refers to using your forum signature as a promotional tool.

Tips For Community

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Be an active participant in the blogging community! Find some blogs on your topic that you enjoy and read them regularly. Comment when you feel you have something valuable to add to the conversation. This can inspire others to find you--and they are the kind of targeted traffic you really crave.
Engage your readers! When you find comments on your blog, respond to them. Keep the dialog going. Blogs are loved by many because of their interactive nature. If you can make your comment sections lively and interesting it will make for a better blog--and more traffic.

Allowing Comments

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In most cases, a blogger is well-advised to allow comments from others. This inspires the sense of interactivity and community that makes blogging so attractive.

You may have to deal with blog comment spam as a result of your willingness to accept comments. This can be a hassle, but most providers offer tools to help you combat the comment spam. If you can do a word or code verification, it will filter out most comment spam. You can also choose to moderate your comments, which means you will have to personally approve them in order for them to appear. This may sound like a good idea, but it can be a really time-consuming process if your blog develops a “talkative” readership. It can also slow down the commenting conversation, which runs contrary to your objectives.

Keep your blog an open forum. Allow as much interaction as possible. This makes your blog more interesting and gives you a great chance to interact with your readership. You can learn a lot about what people are interested in and how to improve your blog by reading the comments left by others.

Commenting

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One of the best ways to get others to find your blog is by visiting theirs and leaving comments about their posts and observations. Blogs are often something akin to mini-online communities and comments play a large role in the communicative function of blogs. Bloggers tend to check the blogs of those who have visited and you can develop some regular readers simply by making comments on other blogs.
In many cases, you can leave the URL of your blog in the comments, making it easy for all of that blog’s readers to find you, too.

Trackbacks, which are means by which one blog notifies another of a visit and or comment, can also be used for this purpose. Not all blogging platforms support track backs, but if yours does, you should avail yourself of the opportunity to use them.

The fact that links could be left behind in blog comments led some people to use this is a strategy for increasing their total number of backlinks in order to help with search engine placement. They would leave comments of a suspect nature (or even, in some cases, complete gibberish) along with an address simply to claim the backlink. Blogging services recognized this growing comment spam problem and have taken actions to minimize its effectiveness.

These safeguards include a “no follow” HTML tag that makes the link meaningless in terms of search engines. Some bloggers and services also require users to manually type in a code when commenting, freezing out automated blog spamming attempts and making the process of comment spamming less attractive.

Comment spam still exists, and it is a hated commodity in the blogging community. Thus, if you are commenting on other blogs, please make sure your contribution is legitimate and thoughtful. Feel free to provide your URL, but don’t turn your comment into mere advertising for your blog.

Community

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Blogs are a magnet for traffic, in many ways. Initially, their very structure and layout tend to be conducive to good results in the search engines. The constantly-updating nature of a blog intensifies that effect. Blogs have another traffic advantage that traditional sites are largely lacking. There is a vibrant and active blogging community that can also help you spur traffic.

Tips For RSS Feeds

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Don’t forget to update! Make sure you remember to either ping using a mass-ping service or to manually alert RSS aggregators about your feed every time you update. Otherwise, you are losing some of the potential value of the feed.
Make your feed a moneymaker! Some bloggers who are particularly interested in making their blog pay may want to consider using their RSS feed as a vehicle for advertising. Google’s Adsense program has operated a program to allow some Adsense publishers place ads in their feeds and other means of feed advertising are growing.

RSS Feeds As A Way Into Yahoo

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There is a now well-known technique that may enable your site to be discovered and indexed by the Yahoo search engine in record time. This technique makes use of your RSS feed and is a relatively simple thing to do.

You must have a free Yahoo account in order to do this. Create an account if you do not already have one. The sign up procedure is fast and simple.

After logging into your Yahoo account, go to the “My Yahoo” page. There you will find an option to add content to your page. You can add content in the form of your blog’s RSS feed. It is a simple and intuitive process that will only require you to have the URL of your RSS feed (which is easily locatable via your blogging software or service).

One you add your RSS feed to your content page, Yahoo will track the RSS feed in order to keep your page updated with developments. As a result, you have instructed Yahoo to find and note changes made to your blog.

This strategy has successfully allowed many blogs to find their way into Yahoo results in record time. It has been referred to as the Yahoo backdoor and is now a practice commonly used when launching a new blog. With greater use by more people, its effectiveness may have diminished somewhat (especially in terms of search engine results), but it still is the fastest way to crack into any of the big three search engines.

Submitting your RSS Feed

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Having a feed will not do you much good if no one reads it! Thus, you must share your RSS feed with others. This can be done, in large measure, by using one of the multiple site ping services mentioned earlier. Pingoat, for instance, will request your RSS feed and will transmit it to a number of sites that aggregate these feeds.

You can also opt to submit your feed to any number of other RSS aggregators. A relatively long list of options, for instance, is currently available at http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-submission.htm.
A great place to manage your RSS feed needs is at Feedburner, which can be found at http://www.feedburner.com. This free service provides you with a number of tools that can make sharing your RSS feed easier and more effective.

It also offers free circulation traffic (just in case you want to know how many people are tracking your feed) and a lot of handy ways to help other subscribe to your feed.

Creating An RSS Feed

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Your blogging software will probably handle the process of creating an RSS feed for your blog automatically. For instance, those blogging at Blogger.com are automatically “given” an RSS feed (in Atom format) that they can burn and use. Other blogging services provide RSS feeds, as well.

If your blog service provider or software doesn’t automatically create an RSS feed for your blog, you can build one yourself. Those experienced with HTML may want to hand-code their RSS feed. Those of us who prefer a quicker solution can choose from a variety of software tools (many of which are freeware) to accomplish the goal

RSS Feeds

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RSS, or Really Simple Syndication (sometimes referred to as Rich Site Summary) is a means by which blogs can broadcast their content to a number of services and individuals easily. Some have gone so far as to argue that RSS is one of the chief reasons why blogging holds so much potential.

An RSS feed collects the content of your post (depending on your software, you can opt to syndicate the entire post, just a headline, or some other combination) and then sends it in readable, plain text, to any of the targets you might choose.

Bloggers often submit their RSS feeds to popular blog directories, RSS directories and search engines. Users can then find the feeds in which they are interested and “subscribe to them,” reading them with an RSS feed reader. They may also simply read your feed and then hop on over to your site.

RSS feeds are a great way of promoting your blog. There is also some evidence to suggest that RSS feeds can serve to boost the results of your blog in search engine rankings. They are also a wonderful way of getting noticed by at least one of the major search engines.

Tips For Traffic Exchanges

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Don’t participate as a key part of your strategy! The only time participation in a traffic exchange program makes good sense is if you are going to be cruising around the blogosphere anyway. There are plenty of things you can do with the time you have set aside for blog marketing that will produce longer-lasting and more beneficial results. However, if you are going to be checking out blogs for fun anyway, a traffic exchange program is a nice way of getting something for your time.
Don’t let the numbers fool you! Even though participation in a traffic exchange program can get you a slew of visitors, you should realize that many of those directed to your blog probably didn’t pay a great deal of attention to it. Building large traffic numbers is wonderful, but it is only meaningful if the people who took a look did so for some reason other than building traffic exchange credits.

Finding Traffic Exchanges

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There are numerous exchanges, each offering some slightly different twist on the same overall theme. They can be found easily. A simple Google search of “blog traffic exchange” will bring most of the major players in the field to your immediate attention.

Blog And Traffic