IfI’d like to apologize about my inactivity around here lately, It’s a shame really for me to have all of a sudden stopped publishing articles after things were going quite great, but with my college assignments rolling up on me, I’ve stayed offline. I’ve almost wrapped up everything, but It looks like I’m going to need another few days before I’m officially done and dusted.

Once college is out of the way, I’m going to be updating my blog more regularly as I’ll have a lot of time that I’ll be able to use to hook up some useful and cool articles for you.

So for now, sign up to my feed so you can be updated with whats happening! If theres anything in particular you’d like to see in this blog, then be sure to let me know! I’m all ears/eyes

If you have a Twitter account or if you’re thinking of creating one, then read this before you make the same big mistake as I have.

When the ‘Twitter Hype’ started, I used a different strategy to bring in traffic to my site with my Twitter account. It involved me in following anyone and everyone who was in the same niche as I was.

In a few days, I managed to get over 1,000 followers, which made me happy; but when I started using bit.ly to track the clicks that I’m getting from my tweets, it wasn’t what I expected to receive from the amount of followers I had.

I realized that the reason behind this was because I was only being followed by people who were using the same strategy as me; and since I was always bombarded with tweets that were trying to sell me something, they were too; which gave no exposure to my tweets at all and the chances were that they never paid any attention to the tweets that they were getting.

Today, I’ve unfollowed everyone but kept those tweeters that I like to hear from and limited myself to only follow 30 people for the time-being, otherwise I’m never going to see the latest tweets that I’m really interested in and are beneficial to me.

With this new strategy, I’m only going to want people to follow me if they have an interest in my tweets, not because they will expect me to follow them back.

If you have a Twitter account, I would recommend that you do the same, but keep your friends and those who you want to hear from but couldn’t because of all the useless tweets.

In the next few days, I expect I’m going to have a lot less followers, but when you come to think about it, It wouldn’t really make a difference since they were just a number, not a person.

What Do You Think?

If you use Twitter, then what strategy are you using? Are you going to unfollow everyone on your twitter account and only keep those who post tweets that interest you? What do you think?

Blog commenting is one of the most effective and easiest ways to build valuable one way backlinks. I’m about to show you how you can find do-follow blogs that are related to your niche so you can use it as an advantage to build one way back links through commenting on the blogs which will give you higher SERPS, link juice and traffic.

It is important that you only comment on blogs that are related to your niche for several reasons; no-one is going to want to know about your parenting blog in an electronics blog and search engines will give you higher SERPS when you are linked to by strong related sites.

What You’re Going To Need To Get Started

Before you begin building back links, you will need to have Mozilla FireFox installed. There are 2 FireFox plugins that you’re going to need to make this entire process faster and more effective, these are:

1. SEOQuake – You’re going to need this to be able to know the page value of blogs.
2. NoDoFollow – You will need this plugin to know whether the blog passes link juice or not.

Finding Relevant, WordPress Blogs

In Google, you will need to use the following statement so you can find only WordPress blogs that are related to your niche and allow you to comment (with quotations).

“your niche keyword/phrase” “powered by wordpress” “leave a comment”

For example, If you’re blog is related to making money online, then you could search (with quotations): “making money online” “powered by wordpress” “leave a comment”

This will allow you to find all WordPress blogs with the extract phrase “how to make money online” anywhere on their page and have the comment feature enabled.

Sorting By Page Rank or Back Links

With SEOQuake activated, you will now be able to see the PageRank, and the amount of backlinks the blog/post has pointing to it in Google’s Search Engine Results Page automatically. Since you will want to comment on blogs with higher page value, you will be able to sort the search results to show the highest page rank or highest back links first. I would recommend that you sort the results by highest back links first because the PageRank is only updated every few months.

To do this, you will have to click the down arrow next to “Yahoo LD”, as seen on the screenshot below:

Finding Blogs With Specific Domain Extensions

If you’re wondering why you would want to do this then its because Search Engines give more ‘link weight’ to specific domain extensions. You will be able to narrow down your search engine results to find only wordpress blogs related to your niche with a specific domain extension.

To do this, you will need to add “site:.com” (without quotations) to the statement, and change .com to any domain extension you want, for example:

“your niche keyword/phrase” “powered by wordpress” “leave a comment” site:.edu

Finding New Published Blog Posts

Commenting on new blog posts is great for receiving traffic, this is because your comment will have more exposure since there aren’t many comments made yet. It is also good for search engines since new blog posts get crawled more often compared to old ones.

You will be able to do this by going into Google’s advanced search and collapse “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more”, then simply choose the date to be past 24 hours; as seen on the screenshot below:

Is The Blog Do-Follow or No-Follow?

Finally, once you’ve set up your search query to find valuable blogs related to your niche, you will have to find out whether the blog is Do-Follow or No-Follow.

To do this, you will need to have the “NoDoFollow” plugin enabled, you will have to visit the blogs you want to comment on and then right click anywhere on the page and select “NoDoFollow”.

Then, scroll down to the comments section, you will then either see Blue or Red box’s on the author names. If the box on the author name is blue then the blog will be do-follow and is spreading link juice to its commentators, if its red then the blog is not do-follow, so you will not get any backlinks if you write a comment.

Getting The Most From Your Comments

There are a few things that you could do to get better results from your comments, seo and traffic wise. One way that you can get a better seo ranking is through using your ‘keywords’ as next to your author name (thanks to Corey Freeman); and to get more traffic, your comment will have to be useful or at least you have to create conversations with other commentators. Since nearly every blog with a good PageRank will have to approve comments before they are published, you will need to write useful comments otherwise, it can be marked as ’spam’.

What Do You Think?

What do you think of this method to find valuable, do-follow blogs? How are you finding blogs to build backlinks? Share with us your thoughts!

If you’re tired of having new visitors all the time and struggling with getting returning visitors on your blog, then this post is perfect for you. What you may not know is that there are different types of blog posts that can affect the decision whether a visitor will come back or not. Below are a few different types of content that you can use to get returning visitors:

Tutorials and Guides

Although that tutorials and guides take a lot of time to put together, the benefits you will get from it is over-whelming. If you put enough exposure on your tutorial or guide, then you will most likely have started a word of mouth cycle that will flow for years. If someone was to ask me where they can find Photoshop Tutorials, I would know exactly where to send them because of the tutorials that I’ve benefited from on a specific site. You can easily create guides for almost anything, e.g. How To Create A Mailing List, How To Install A WordPress Plugin…etc.

List of Resources

This type of blog post is commonly used because of its effectiveness. Visitors commonly bookmark these blog posts so they can come back for them. There are many different types of lists that you can publish, and its easy; take my 7 Simple Ways To Increase Blog Comments blog post as an example, for when-ever one of you face the problem of having no blog comments, then this will have more than one solution to your problem that you can come back to. You can also publish a list of external links that lead to tutorials, guides or anything resourceful to your readers, e.g. 101 Beautiful Desktop HD Wallpapers for June.

What happens next?

If you watch TV shows, then you probably have been left out in the cold at the end of every episode because they show you a scene that makes you want to know ‘what happens next’; they do this by showing you something that grabs your interest and since you’re curious, you’re going to come back later to find out what happens next. This can easily be applied to blogging by splitting up a lengthy blog post into several blog posts through-out several days. Your visitors will most likely come back to your blog to read the other parts of the blog post; this can also encourage them to subscribe to your RSS Feeds so they’re instantly updated when you publish those blog posts.

What do you think?

Those are the 3 main types of content that can be easily used to keep your visitors coming back to your blog. What do you think of these methods? Are there any other methods that you use to keep your visitors coming back?

Facebook have finally launched vanity URLs ( as of Friday, June 12th at 9:01pm ) to the public for free at no charge. You can now get your own facebook vanity URL ( e.g. http://www.facebook.com/abdulkawi ) if you have registered with them before 09 June 2009. If you haven’t registered with them before that date, then sadly you will have to wait, the reason being is to prevent new users from name-squatting. I was too late to be able to register ‘abdul’ but I’m still happy with my surname. Did you get the name you wanted?

Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it. If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a username immediately because of steps we’ve taken to prevent abuse or “squatting” on names.

Choose wisely because this is the point of no return; you won’t be able to change your URLs once you’ve selected one and you won’t be able to transfer urls (so you cant sell them). If you haven’t yet, then get to it quickly before your business/name is taken; with millions of facebook users, its a gold rush.

The madness has already started, so go here to register your vanity url.

Has this affected you?

Did you manage to get in time to get the url you wanted? What did you register?

What most visitors don’t like is to see a blog that looks like a ‘ghost-town’, and that’s exactly how you’re blog will look like if you don’t get your readers to interact with each other.

If you’re having trouble trying to get your readers to comment on your blog, then I have listed 7 simple ways that you can introduce to your blog to encourage your readers to comment and increase your comments count!

1. Start a Conversation Within Your Blog Post

I have recently came across this method, it’s something that I should’ve done for each of my blog posts. It is best to start a conversation within your blog post so your readers can leave a comment after they’ve finished reading. You can start conversations by simply asking a question within your blog post or add a statement at the end of your blog post that interacts with the reader, e.g. “What do you think?”, “What would you do differently”…etc.

2. Participate To Keep Conversations Flowing

This is a powerful way to keep your readers coming back and continue to comment on your blog posts. You will have to almost reply to all of the blog comments that you receive, you will need to socialize with your readers and continue conversations to keep them flowing.

3. IntenseDebate Plugin

I’ve installed this plugin today, and It’s perfect! It lets your readers interact as a community with ratings, replies, logins, avatars and has an awesome layout! This will keep conversations going and start new ones. Interested? Check it out here.

4. Show Your Appreciation

One of the main reasons that you will get comments from other bloggers is because they want a back-link and to promote their own blog/site. You can show your appreciation by placing more attention to your commentators site/blog. You can do this with three WordPress plugins, which are: Top Commentators, Recent Comments (already comes with WordPress) and CommentLuv. Check them out.

5. Top Commentators Incentives

This will involve you giving away incentives/prizes to your top 3 commentators per week. You could give away free ad-spaces, retweets, vouchers…etc to encourage your readers to compete to be on the top commentators list by commenting on your blog posts. Its a great way to give your blog posts a kick-start of conversations.

6.  Comment On Your Commentators Blog

This is almost like an ‘exchange’, whenever a blogger would comment on one of your blog posts, you would do the same to their blog, not only will you benefit with a back-link, but you will also keep that blogger happy to keep coming back to comment more on your blog.

7. Sharing Your Link Juice

Finally, having your authors links become ‘DoFollow’ will introduce a larger audience of who will want to comment on your blog for back-links. This is great to increase your blog comments because your sharing your link juice, which is what almost every commenter wants in return.

What Do You Think?

Are any of these methods working for you? Are there any other methods that you have hidden up your sleeves that you want to share with us? Share your opinions and ideas with everyone!

If you’re a blogger then you will know its not easy publishing fresh content on your blog everyday, and you become afraid from publishing short blog posts. I’ve always made it a habit of only writing posts by length and quality, but recently I’ve learned that you can still have a quality post with 300 words that your readers will love. These short posts will have to be very precise and informative; although that it will lack size, feeding your readers is better than starving them with no content for days at all.

Pros

- Keeps your readers updated.
- Easy to write, saving you a lot of time
- Easier to read, you can get your message across to your readers quickly.
- You won’t end up going off-topic unlike long posts.
- Its what search engines love.

Con’s

- You may leave your readers in the ‘puzzled’ zone if you’ve mentioned terms that they’re not familiar with and that you could have went into depth with.
- Your readers will also want know more information about key points you haven’t covered (it can be argued that this is good if it makes them interact by asking questions using the comment feature).
- It can become a habit which stops you from putting the effort to write long posts.

What do you think?

Do you think that writing small posts is as good as long posts? Has it had any effects on your blog when you started writing small blog posts? I would love to hear what you think!

If you’ve always been worried about the risks involved with Google AdWords, then use this free $50 Promotional Voucher to implement what you’ve learned so far with selling on AdWords, and If you’re like me, this will give you the confidence to invest whilst taking risks (so you’re not running around the room pulling your hair out). I’ve signed up for this today to experiment on selling an ebook related to fitness, I’m not too confident in making a lot of sales through this since It’s my first time with using Google AdWords to promote affiliate products.

To redeem the voucher, just enter the following code in the “Promotional Code” field: MAR6-748X-XRAR-5769-XQ
Expiry Date: 31/08/2009.

If you’re going to give it a shot, then be sure to let me know how it goes here. Best of luck!

This promotional credit must be applied only to new Google AdWords accounts within 14 days of creating the account and is valid only for new Google AdWords customers with self-managed sign up accounts. Advertisers will be charged for advertising that exceeds the promotional credit. Advertisers will need to suspend their ads if they do not wish to receive additional charges beyond the free credit amount. Subject to ad approval, valid registration and acceptance of the Google AdWords Program standard terms and conditions. The promotional credit is non-transferable and may not be sold or bartered. Offer may be revoked at any time for any reason by Google Inc. One promotional credit per customer. Advertisers with self-managed sign up accounts are subject to a $5 activation fee that will be deducted from the promotional credit.

WordPress is one of my favourite blogging platforms, and it has over 13 million users, so there’s no doubt that its the best out there. Below are 18 Wordpress Plugins that I have installed on my blog that make my life easier everyday. If you’ve already got an established blog or you’re starting one, then I’d recommend you install these plugins to get the best out of your blog!

Akisment

Tired of all the spam comments? This plugin will do you wonders, it already comes with a fresh install of WordPress, so all you have to do is activate it! Spend your time writing content rather than deleting spam comments.

WordPress Crawl Rate Tracker

You can now see what pages Google, Yahoo and MSN are crawling and how frequent they’re crawling them. This will allow you to discover which of your pages are most important which is determined by higher crawl rates.

WordPress Greet Box Plugin

I love this plugin, Its put a lot of attention to my rss feeds which is what every blog needs! It greets your visitors from the page that they’ve came from, e.x. if they found your site via Digg, then it will show your visitors a link to Digg your blog post that they’re reading.

Broken Link Checker

After time, blogs become populated with a lot of published posts that may contain internal and external links. With this plugin, it will automatically check for any broken links through-out your entire blog so you can fix them without loosing page value and sending your visitors to dead pages.

MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate

You will have to pay for this plugin, although that its quite expensive, it makes like so much easier when you are selling so many different products on your blog. You will be able to update your affiliate links on your old posts if they’ve changed, make specific keywords become affiliate links, create redirects to your affiliate links and there’s so much more! If you’re into affiliate marketing, this should be in your tool bag.

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

This is one of the most popular plugins for WordPress, put this with Google Webmaster Tools and you’ll never have to worry about updating your sitemap manually because this does it for you every time you create a new blog post or page.

Auto Social Poster

We all know that social bookmarking sites are one of the best ways to get back-links and traffic; so to make life easier, this plugin will automatically submit your blog post from the moment you publish it to up-to 34 different social bookmarking sites that you select. Its worth the money, saves time and gets you a lot of traffic!

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

Normally, whenever you edit a post, your blog will be pinged to different sites, this is really risky because if you constantly edit and publish blog posts in the same day, then your blog could get blocked for spamming ping requests. With this plugin, it will only ping sites when it needs to, such as only when publishing a blog post, adding a new blog page. You can also make manual ping requests whenever you want to.

Optimize Database

You can now defragment your WordPress tables automatically with a few clicks since WordPress “doesn’t clean itself up the way it should sometimes”.

Sociable – Social Bookmarking for WordPress

Your visitors will be able to bookmark your blog posts to social bookmarking sites that you have allowed on your blog. This is a great way of getting free traffic from your visitors, you wont have to do anything more other than provide your visitors with content.

TweetMeme

Twitter is a great and simple tool of getting traffic to your blog, with this plugin, you can let your visitors retweet blog posts. It will bring in more traffic to your blog because if your visitors retweet gets seen by his/her visitors, then may visit to read your blog post if they’re interested.

WordPress Thread Comments

I don’t know why WordPress doesn’t have this pre-installed but if you’re looking to have threaded conversations in your blog comments section, then this is a plugin you must install. It will allow your users to reply to other comments within the same comment.

WordPress Cumulus – Flash Tag Cloud

I never liked the text word tag cloud, it always seemed unorganized and unattractive, but now with this plugin, you’ll be able to turn your word tag cloud into flash to draw more attention to your tags.

Google FeedBurner FeedSmith

If you haven’t got this installed then I suggest you do, It has a lot more of advanced features compared to the original one that comes with WordPress. You wont be loosing any subscribers because this will transfer them.

Search Meter

Have you ever wondered what your users are looking for when they come to your site? Now you can find out by tracking what they search for using your search form! This will give you more ideas what to write about and what information your visitors are looking for at your blog.

Popular Posts Widget

This is a great plugin to direct your visitors to quality content to ensure them that you’re blog is a source of good information. It also puts more attention to your quality posts.

WordPress Database Backup

If you haven’t backed up your WordPress Blog recently then I suggest you do so because there a lot of risks that out weigh your benefits of not backing up. There are a lot of factors that can easily destroy your blog if you don’t backup, one of which could be your host going down or even a hacker gets to your site. This plugin makes backing up easy.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

This plugin is great to put more attention to your similar blog posts and to get your visitors to spend more time on your blog. Effective and very easy to install.

What About You?

Those are all the WordPress Plugins I’ve got installed, but how about you? Do you have any other plugins that you’ve installed to get the best results from your blog? Share them with us!

Whilst your busy advertising your blog, what you may forget is that the majority of your traffic is either accidental or useless. Before I go into depth, I would like to being by quickly explaining to you the difference between Quality Traffic and Bad Traffic.

Quality Traffic (also known as good traffic) is simply visitors who visit your site purposely and have the knowledge of what kind of information to expect on your site. For instance, lets say that you’re out looking for help on how to make money and you’ve found my blog whilst you’re browsing. From that moment you would be considered as ‘Quality Traffic’ as since your our targeted audience we can convert you to a potential returning visitor and generate sales from you before you leave.

On the other hand, Bad Traffic is visitors that may have accidentally stumbled on your site or were lost and found your site whilst they were browsing for a different topic; you would not be our target audience and the chances are you’re not coming back. Ways to get bad traffic can be auto-surf sites, promoting your site on non-related niches and misleading people with titles. This type of traffic will increase your bounce rate.

To be able to make more money blogging, you’re going to need quality traffic with a higher rate of returning visitors and a lower bounce rate; this should increase the ratio of converting your visitors to sales. If your constantly getting new visitors and a small percentage of returning visitors that you wont see again for another month or at all, then this clearly shows to you that your blog is either not beneficial to them or they aren’t your target audience as you may have managed to pull someone interested in gardening to a money making blog.

There are hundreds of different ways that you can get targeted traffic to your site, but I’m going to be focusing on the main 10 ways that will get you targeted traffic, before I begin, you must remember that the whole purpose of targeting is to get your site known in places where your target audience is similar to where your advertising.

1. Social Groups, Forums and Blog Commenting

Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and other site that has a feature with groups will allow you to target your traffic effectively. Since this is a free source of advertising, you will be able to join these groups and effectively sneak in your link whilst taking part in conversation. At the end of the day, if your post is read then you will know its your target audience and if they do visit your site, you have the opportunity to convert them to returning visitors or sales! This is really similar to Forums, you would need to join forums that are populated and are in the same niche as your site. As for Twitter, you can easily target who to follow by using the Search feature to find related tweets to your niche.

2. Use Questions as Link Anchors, Not Keywords

Although that linking to your site with keyword anchors will help your site’s SERPS, you would be able to drive targeted traffic by turning your link’s anchor to a question. For example, instead of having “make money online”, you could easily drive more traffic by having “Do You Want To Make Money Online? Let Me Show You How!”. This actually grabs the attention of viewers and if they have the same exact question, then you have provided them with a solution and a reason to visit your website. This technique is only good to when the link is visible, if for instance its in a web directory, then you may be better off using your keywords as your anchor because it may only be seen by search engine spiders.

3. Article Marketing

If you have the ability to write blog posts, then you should be able to quite easily write up a 300-500 word article,with this, not only will your site have better SERPS but the targeting is amazing, especially if you play your keywords right. Your articles don’t have to be very informative or detailed, it just has to be enough to hook your readers and lead them to your site, you can do this easily by solving the first part of their problem in the article and the rest on your site. Your articles will only be read by readers who have an interest, your target audience. To get more out of your content, submit your articles to as many directories as you can.

4. Paid Per Click Advertising

This is a premium way to get targeted traffic, although that its quite expensive, it works very well and has worked for a lot of people for as long as you know your stuff about keywords. You would only get clicks from those who find your ad as a solution to their problems. There are thousands of paid per click advertising programs, but I would only recommend going with Google AdWords.

5. Torrent File Sharing

This method is overlooked by many people, if you have a download-able file that you released, then you can easily upload a torrent with your site’s link in the title to pull traffic. Since people will find your torrent through using the Search feature, they will be targeted visitors. You would not have to use your own downloadable file, it could be someone else’s for as long as you have permission.

6. Video Sharing Sites

YouTube is the biggest and most popular video sharing community, as for that, there is a massive potential to getting thousands of visitors to your site. You can simply download an existing YouTube video, or make your own and then upload it with your site’s link on the video screen so it will be seen for whenever they are watching it, YouTube lets you do this as they have a video editing feature. Starting your own channel is also great if you can put the time to work on getting more subscribers. Remember to only upload videos related to your site’s niche.

7. Questions & Answers

The biggest questions and answers community is Yahoo Answers! (I also like Blerp), these sites can generate you a massive traffic spike in the short term and still generate you traffic over-time. As I’ve mentioned on previous posts, solving peoples problems will get them to come back for more or even generate you sales. You can use these sites as your benefit by searching questions that your blog is related to and then give them an answer to solve it, e.g. if someone asks “how do i make money online?”, you can answer that by giving them a teaser of how they can make money online and then include a link-back to your site about making money for where they can find more information.

8. Link Exchange or Renting Links

Link Exchange is a good way to get targeted traffic for free if your site is still small, the only major side back about this method is that since you also have to include a link back, you will loose targeted traffic to your competitors since your sites will be closely related. If however you have the money to invest, then you can rent links quite easily on sites related to your site by using Text Link Ads.

9. Squidoo Pages

I haven’t tried this method as to get targeted traffic, but I have heard great reviews and it works wonders. Readers are targeted just like articles, just make sure to write something related to your niche and have link-backs to all your pages if its possible, for example, If I was to write a Squidoo page about how to make money online, then I would link back to my site with information on how to get traffic, how to improve SERPS…etc.

10. Word of Mouth

Its the most powerful tool that can get you targeted traffic, if you can pull something off that will get people talking about your site/content then it will go around to everyone who has the same interest and it will keep flowing until it becomes ‘old-news’, unless its consistent/resourceful (e.g. Google).

That’s it! There are more many other ways you can use to build traffic, but I would recall those 10 methods as the most effective ways to get targeted traffic. Once again, remember that everything you do must relate to your site. Focus on building traffic that are your target audience and will convert to eventually make you money! Are there any other methods that you use to increase your targeted traffic?