This is a guest post by Adesoji Adegbulu. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

I started blogging by reading a lot of blogs. Among all the blogs I still read are Mashable and TechCrunch. I never skip them on my RSS reader, and I feel that other people do the same.

The question then becomes: how did TechCrunch and Mashable managed to become the most popular blogs in a saturated niche like the tech one? They followed some basic but powerful steps, and I will talk about them below.

1. Narrow your niche but make sure it is not too small. Visitors of your blog must have a common interest. Just make sure that many people share that interest, else you won’t be able to make money with advertising and similar monetization methods. If Mashable only talked about “social networks for senior citizens” they would not be half as successful.

2. Stay focused on your niche no matter what. The worst thing you can do is to start jumping from one niche to the other, starting one blog after the other. TechCrunch and Mashable always had the single purpose of bringing you tech news, and they stuck with it.

3. Simplify things. TechCrunch and Mashable talk about tech, but they always try to make the content as simple and clear as possible. The result is that even non-techie people visit their sites regularly.

4. Fill a vacuum with your blog. Don’t be a copy-cat that copies a competitors post and re-edit it for posting on your blog. Generate original content. This is a must to stand out from the crowd. That is why people often times visit TechCrunch before visiting the tech section of the NY Times.

5. Lots of content. Quality certainly comes first. But if you want to have a profitable blog, you need both quality AND quantity. Take a look at how many posts TechCrunch and Mashable publish every day. You don’t need to do the same, but posting regularly is a must.

6. Build a community around your blog. Part of the success of popular blogs is the community of readers that they have. These are not mere visitors that come from Google. There are people who visit the site every day, tell their friends about it, tweet about it and so on.

7. Be transparent. You’ll notice that both of these blogs are completely transparent with their content. If they are not sure about a piece of news, they mention it. Another day TechCrunch even wrote a post admitting that one of their interns was bribed by a company to write a review about then (they gave him a Macbook in exchange…). So make sure to be transparent if you want the trust of your readers.

8. Persist. Do you think that TechCrunch became this giant in 6 months? Perhaps one year? Two years at maximum? Well, try again. In june of this year TechCrunch will become 5 years old. That is right. I am sure that on their first year or so it was a relatively small blog and the money was not flowing like a river. Yet Mike Arrington persisted, because he had a vision.

Adesoji Adegbulu is a consultant whose interest is on blogging, inspirations, entrepreneurship, Internet marketing and social media. You can find him on his blog, and ontwitter.

Selling advertising deals is one of the most profitable ways to monetize your website. Some time ago I wrote an article titled How to Find Advertisers for Your Website, where I covered the pros and cons of using this method, what you need to have in place before getting started, how much you should charge and so on.

The most difficult part of the process, however, is to actually find the advertisers. I included some places where you can look for in that article, but I felt that it would be useful to have one post listing all the ways you can use to find advertisers for your website. That is what the list below is all about.

Leveraging Your Own Site

Your own website should be the first port when it comes to finding advertisers. Why? Because people who are familiar with your work will be more willing to discuss possible advertising deals.

1. Put an “Advertise” link on the menu bar

If you have a navigation menu bar, you could include an “Advertise” link there, making it point to a page where you describe the advertising options of your site. This link will help you in two different ways. First of all it will allow interested companies to quickly find the page where you display your advertising information. Secondly, it will also let all visitors know that you do accept advertising deals.

2. Use an “Advertise Here” banner as placeholder

If you have unsold ad spots, you could include an “Advertise Here” banner as a placeholder on one of them. This banner will act just like the “Advertise” link on the navigation menu, but it might be more effective because it will show potential advertisers exactly where their ads will be displayed. Just make sure to not use an “Advertise Here” placeholder on all of your unsold spots, as this would send a negative message to advertisers (i.e., no one is buying any ads on your site, so why should they?).

3. Write a post welcoming advertisers

If you have a blog, you could write a post inviting advertisers. This technique works pretty well because it allows you to elaborate your offer. On the post you’ll be able to explain what kind of audience your blog has, what kind of traffic it gets, what are the advertising options available and so on.

4. Email your list

Do you have an email list? Then send the same information that you posted on the blog to these subscribers. The only thing you should not include is the price. Why? Because if you don’t include it interested people will email you asking for that, and this will give you their email addresses and an invite for a conversation, where you’ll have better chances of convincing them.

5. Put a message at the bottom of blog posts

If you post often on your blog you could attach a message at the bottom of every post. Something like “Want to showcase your product to our audience? Then check our advertising options.” Obviously you should include a link to your “Advertise” page on that message. If you are using WordPress, you’ll just need to edit the single.php file to make this message appear on all your blog posts.

6. Put a message at the bottom of your feed

Similarly, you could also put a message at the bottom of your feed. This will make sure that both website visitors and RSS subscribers will see it. If you are using WordPress, you can create easily create a custom message to be displayed at the bottom of you feed with the RSS Footer plugin.

7. Examine who is leaving comments

It is a good idea to examine who is leaving comments on your blog. You are basically looking for people who work at companies that have relevant products to your audience. Once you identify someone who does (either by the link he will leave or by the domain on his email address), you’ll just need to contact him, asking if his company would be interested in becoming a sponsor. This technique works well because the person will already be a member of your community.

8. Examine who is linking to you

Apart from examining who is leaving comments on your blog you should also check the people linking to your blog posts. If you notice a link from a company blog, you could again contact the company asking if it would be interested in becoming a sponsor. If they liked your content enough to link to it, they will certainly consider an advertising deal.

9. Reply to all press releases and review requests

Once your website gets somewhat popular inside its niche you’ll certainly start receiving many press releases and review requests via the contact form. Instead of sending these to the trash bin, you should reply to all of them, stating that you found their product/service interesting, and that you believe they could benefit from advertising on your site because your audience would be a good match. Then give all the details about the advertising options, and wait to see if they are interested.

Exploring Ad Networks

If you can find companies that are already spending money on online advertising, your job will be halfway done. Advertising networks represent an excellent opportunity to do this.

10. BuySellAds.com

Just by visiting the homepage of this ad network you’ll be able to see a list of “Sample Advertisers.” Most of those are big online spenders. After that you can also check the publishers listed on the directory. Just click to visit the homepage of each site, and check what companies bought banners there. You’ll be able to find hundreds of potential sponsors.

11. AdBrite

On the navigation menu of this ad network you’ll find a link titled “Site Directory.” It is basically a list of all the websites that accept ads through the network. You’ll just need to browse through them, checking what companies are buying banners there. The interesting thing is that you can also filter the websites by niche, making sure you’ll only contact relevant companies.

12. ClickBank

ClickBank is not an ad network per se, but rather an affiliate marketing one. That being said, you could still signup as an affiliate and browse its marketplace looking for sponsors. Just avoid contacting the top selling products, because those already have hundreds of affiliate promoting them. Focus on the middle range of the marketplace.

13. SponsoredReviews.com

Once you signup as a “Blogger” on this ad network you’ll be able to browse its marketplace, which contains a list of companies who are willing to pay bloggers to review their products/services. Guess what? After that it will just be a matter of contacting them.

14. ReviewMe

This network works pretty much like the previous one. You’ll find fewer offers here, but it is still worth a look once in a while. Additionally, if you setup a low review price for your blog you’ll be contacted by interested companies on a regular basis.

Vising other sites in your niche

A very effective way to find advertisers for your website is to visit other sites in your niche, looking for companies advertising there already.

15. Contact the banner advertisers

First of all you’ll want to contact the advertisers who purchased banner spots. Usually these are companies who contacted the site owner directly, so they will be more open to discussing new advertising opportunities with you.

16. Contact the AdSense advertisers

If the site you are visiting uses Google AdSense, you could check the companies that are putting ads there and then contact them . Mention on your email that your saw the company ad on the XYZ site, and that you believe your site would be a good match for their products/services, too.

17. Contact the site owner

If your website is larger than the one you are visiting, you could also contact the site owner to see if he is not interested in purchasing one of your banner spots. This could help him to get more brand awareness and new readers. Secondly, you could also try to establish a partnership, where you refer advertisers to each other.

Using Google

Whenever you need to find something online, Google can help.

18. Search for relevant products and contact the organic results

Companies that sell products or services relevant to your audience will certainly consider the opportunity to advertise on your site. If that is the case, all you need to do is visit Google and start searching for these companies. If you have a site about baseball, for example, go to Google and search for “baseball bats”, “baseball gloves” and so on.

19. Search for relevant keywords and contact the AdWords advertisers

Apart from finding companies on the organic results you can also look for the ones already spending money on Google AdWords. These are the “Sponsored Links” that will appear on top and to the right of the organic search results. Notice that you don’t need to search for products here. Searching any keyword that is related to your niche should already trigger the sponsored links.

20. Search for websites thanking their sponsors/advertisers

Many websites publish periodic posts thanking their sponsors. You could use Google to find these posts, as they will come with a list of companies you can contact. For example, you could search for “thanks sponsors” on Google. Alternatively you can also filter the search to specific websites that are related to your site. If you have a tech blog, for example, you could search for “site:techcrunch.com sponsors”, which will give you a list of all the posts on TechCrunch.com that talk about sponsors.

Using Social Networks

Social networks are among the most popular websites on the Internet these days. As such, companies are starting to direct their advertising efforts there, and you could use that to find sponsors for your site.

21. Sponsored Tweets

Twitter created one of the fastest growing online platforms, and many companies started to leverage the “sponsored tweet” idea. They basically pay a certain amount of money for people willing to send a message talking about their products or services. Most of these companies require people to disclose the ads with hashtags. Two popular ones are #ad and #sponsored. If you search for those hashtags on Twitter, you’ll be able to find a huge list of sponsored messages. After that you’ll just need to contact the companies who sponsored them.

22. Facebook Ads

Facebook is the largest social network on the web, and they also have a self-serving ad platform that works similar to Google AdSense. As a result many companies are purchasing ads there, and you could try to find some that are related to your own niche. You just need to browse around the site (while logged in), and the ads should appear on the right sidebar. On some pages you’ll also find a link titled “More Ads,” which will send you to a page with a list of advertisers relevant to your profile.

Bonus Tip

This tip helped me find dozens of advertisers over the years. It is a really simple but very effective one. The tip is: create a folder on the bookmarks of your browser named “Potential Advertisers” or “Potential Sponsors.” After that you’ll just need to pay attention while browsing the web to companies and/or websites that have something related to your website and that could be interested in advertising there. Whenever you come across one, bookmark it. If you use the Internet a lot you’ll find that this bookmark folder will grow very quickly, and it will just be a matter of getting in touch with the companies listed there.

I always keep an eye on the sales of websites and domain names, and it looks like the marketplace is heating up.

The first evidence comes from Flippa. Sometime ago a reader sent this question to the Q&A section: Where And How Can I Sell My Blog?. As you can see from that post, one of the places I recommended was Flippa. Some readers argued in the comment section that Flippa lacked big buyers, so that it was not suitable for selling big websites. I mentioned that this was not the case, and this week we got some hard proof.

The Retweet.com website was listed for sale there. The auction received 45 bids from several buyers, and most of the bids were over $100,000. The winner ended up using the “Buy It Now!” feature, paying $250,000 for the site. Not bad huh?

Another auction to keep an eye on is that of Sex.com. The most valuable domain on the web will be auctioned this coming Thursday, March 18. The starting bid will be $1 million. Interestingly enough if you want to attend the auction you must present a certified check for that amount, else you won’t be allowed in.

For those who remember well, the domain had already set a record when it was sold for $14 million in 2006. How come it is so valuable? Well, just consider that they never developed a real site there, and yet it was making over $15,000 per day in 2008.

I suspect the number of high profile deals will increase in 2010 and beyond, and the marketplace for smaller websites should become more active as well.

Time will tell!

This is a guest post by Henri Junttila. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Do you want thousands of new subscribers and lots of traffic sent to your blog virtually overnight? I’m sorry to say this, but it’s not going to happen. I do have something else for you though. It will require hard work, but if you plan it right, you’ll reap the rewards.

The title may have given it away, but in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I am talking about article marketing. I’ve practically built my online income with article marketing, which has allowed me to move to Spain with my girlfriend and our dog.

Many will claim that article marketing doesn’t work, but I’ve used it and it has worked beautifully. In this article I’ll explain exactly what I’ve done and how I made it work.

The sooner you realize that you will have to work your face off if you want to make a living online, the faster you’ll start heading towards your goals.

Article marketing is just one of the tools at your disposal for driving targeted traffic to your blog, that is, if you do it right.

What is Article Marketing?

I’m going to explain this in very simple terms, because I personally view article marketing as a very simple process, so there’s no need to complicate it.

You write an article of about 300 words, you submit it and you’re done. We can always go into more detail, but that is the basic strategy.

This article assumes that you know the basics of how to submit articles, use keywords and links. If not, you can check out this post, which will help you with that.

My Story

I’ve been into Internet marketing since 2007, but I didn’t start making money until 2009, which was when I figured out that I had to focus on something for more than one week to make it work.

I started with niche websites, but I quickly moved on to article marketing. I mainly point my traffic from articles I submit to EzineArticles.com to small affiliate sites where I help people improve their lives by choosing great products.

I have also used article marketing in building a list and responsive traffic with great success, so the benefits are numerous.

I’m a big believer in only promoting products you can stand behind. I use the products I promote. Even my mother uses them, so I’m very confident in them, and that shines through in my writing.

Since starting article marketing in July 2009, I have submitted a few thousand articles to EzineArticles.com.

I realize that this is an incredible amount, but realize that I worked hard in the beginning. I wrote a lot, but I then started leveraging the income I made and started outsourcing, which I will talk more about later on.

Why I Only Submit to One Article Directory

I know many will argue that I should submit to several article directories to build links. If you want to do that, that’s fine, but my strategy is different.

I’m after the direct traffic that I get from the largest article directory available, which is EzineArticles.com.

You can, of course, mix it up by submitting to many article directories, but you would mostly be doing that for the links, and to be honest, that isn’t really as effective as it used to be because the search engines are getting smarter.

I have tested the amount of traffic I receive from different directories and by just submitting my articles and letting them be, EzineArticles is the definite winner.

Plus, I like to keep things simple, because the more complex you make things, the more you’ll procrastinate, overwhelm yourself and in general get stuck.

5 Common Article Marketing Mistakes

If you ask bloggers about using article marketing to increase their blog traffic and subscribers, you’ll no doubt run into many nay-sayers.

The truth of the matter is this: most bloggers are never going to make it online until they change their mindset. It isn’t until you start working hard that you can make anything work.

When you switch your mindset from blaming to taking action, the tools you use become secondary.

This doesn’t mean that you can use any tool, but as long as you use something that has been proven to work and you do it right, you will accomplish great things.

I’ve helped a handful of people get into article marketing and worked with a few consulting clients, and these are the five most common mistakes I see over and over again:

1. Consistency. This isn’t an overnight thing, nothing online is. If you want to succeed with getting more blog traffic and subscribers, you have to do it consistently, no matter what you do. I’m not going to lie to you and say that you’ll get massive amounts of traffic by submitting 10 articles, or even 100. But if you work hard and keep writing, you will see results.

2. Testing. When you’ve written and submitted a few articles. You can use the traffic reports that EzineArticles provides you. You can look at which articles are doing well in terms of traffic, which keywords they are getting traffic from and what kind of click-through rates they are getting. All this is valuable information that most bloggers don’t use.

3. Keywords. If you want to keep receiving traffic from your articles for a long time, you should check out what keywords your audience is using to look for content, and what they are looking for. The only tool you need for this is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I use it all the time with awesome success.

4. Complexity. Like I said above, the more you can keep things simple, the more you can get done. Don’t fall for new traffic generation strategies until you’ve gotten one to work. Write a set amount of articles each day, submit them and keep doing that consistently and you will see results. I use article marketing myself and taught my girlfriend how to make $300/month, so I know it works.

5. Strategy. Last, but not least, you have to have a strategy and plan in place. Getting more blog traffic is all well and good, but how are you going to turn them into subscribers and what are you going to do after that? Long gone are the days of making money through slapping ads on your site, so you have to have a plan on how you will monetize your blog traffic.

Crafting Your Sign-Up Incentive

Before you start increasing your blog traffic and sending visitors to your website via article marketing, you want to have a plan in place, just like I said above.

The thing that has worked great for me is to craft a sign-up incentive. This just means that I have a free e-course that I give away, which is the Discover Your Passion in 5 Days course.

By looking at my sign-up page, you can see what I’m doing. Nowadays, you have to really convince people to get your free stuff, because there’s so much of it out there already.

Make people want what you have to offer, then send relevant traffic to your sign-up page to convert visitors into subscribers.

This is the first step, you then want to start thinking about what you can do to monetize your subscribers, but that is another topic and one that Daniel covers well here at Daily Blog Tips.

Most bloggers have trouble increasing their traffic, so that is the first step. But if you already have a product in mind, I suggest you work backwards from that.

For example, if you have a cooking blog and you have an awesome ebook on cooking that you intend to sell.

You can now work backwards and create your sign-up incentive. You want to do this without giving away what you’re selling, so your sign-up incentive might be something like “7 Deadly Cooking Mistakes People Make and How to Avoid Them”

4 Proven Tips for Article Marketing Success

There are common elements in any successful article marketing strategy. I’ve written thousands of articles. During this time I’ve picked up a few things and learned from experience what works and what doesn’t.

1. Relevancy. If you want to not only increase your blog traffic, but translate that traffic into subscribers, you have to keep everything relevant. Let’s go back to the cooking example. If you have a cooking blog with a free cooking ebook that you’re giving away, you should write and submit articles around this topic, because it’s relevant and the people that come to your website are looking for the information you’re providing. It’s a perfect match.

2. Headline. If your headline isn’t grabbing your visitors by the collar and dragging them to your article, your success may be limited. Crafting effective titles is an art-form. It’s not something you’ll pick up instantly, but when you keep working on it, you’ll start to understand it more and more. In the beginning, I was horrible at writing headlines, but I’ve gotten slightly better. Practice makes perfect, right?

3. Resource box. Once you’ve gotten your reader interested with your headline, and they’ve read through your article, now it’s time to keep them interested and take them back to your blog. Tell them what you have to offer in the resource box. For example, if you have a free cooking ebook that you’re giving away, your resource box should go something like this “If you want to learn the 7 biggest cooking mistakes people make and how to avoid them, click here and grab this free report”.

4. Balance. Article marketing is not about writing a few articles and stopping. It’s hard work, like I said above. But you have to find a balance, because if you’re too focused on quality, you will not be able to write many articles. On the other hand, if you’re too focused on quantity, your articles will get rejected. As you write more, you’ll find a balance and be able to crank out 5+ articles a day easily.

How to Take Your Article Marketing to the Next Level

There comes a point where you can only do so much. This is where you want to think about how you can leverage your article marketing and put it on auto-pilot.

This is by no means the push-button, leave it and go to Hawaii kind of stuff that you keep hearing about. I am talking about once you’ve started making money, you can start outsourcing and using more advanced strategies, such as:

1. Research. Once you have a big repository of articles, you can look back and see what has worked and what hasn’t. If you see one article getting a lot of views, try to figure out why that is so. Has it been re-published many times, does it get a lot of links or did you stumble upon a good keyword?

2. Steal. After a while you will start running out of ideas. A great place for keywords and posts is to look at other people’s content. EzineArticles gives you free research data below every one of their articles. You can see 15 articles under the Most Viewed column, which gives you an idea of what gets traffic and what keywords work. Use that to your advantage.

3. Outsource. We as humans have limited capability. You can’t write 50-100 articles a day, but you can leverage what you have. I outsource a lot of my article marketing campaign so I can focus on my blog, and partly because I’m just plain lazy. You get to this point by planning and not being afraid to monetize. If you provide value to your visitors, you can and should produce your own products and services.

Let’s Be Honest For a Moment

I’ve given you practically everything you need to increase your blog traffic and subscribers with article marketing in this article. Now it’s up to you to take what I’ve shared and put it into action.

You can run around and look for more information, or you can buckle down and run with it. It’s easy to keep looking for that perfect information that will make everything easier, but it doesn’t work that way.

Trust me, I’ve been there and done that. If you want to make a living online and have a successful blog, you have to work hard and persevere.

The only way you’ll succeed is by doing something that you’re passionate about and that gives meaning to your life. That is why I recommend that you find your passion.

The reason I have been able to do all this is because I love writing, helping people improve their lives and, of course, making money.

You can have a wildly successful blog. I believe pretty much every one can, but there’s something that separates the winners from the losers, and it’s the fact that winners are constantly moving towards their goals and taking action.

Henri Junttila owns the Wake Up Cloud, which is a self improvement blog that helps conscious people make a living online following their passion. Remember to subscribe to his RSS feed for more awesome articles.

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question, just write a comment below.

It is Friday, and as usual I was going to write the weekly Q&A column. I went to check my backlog of questions today, however, and I found that I had cleared it, so it is time for more questions. If you have one, just write it as a comment below.

The title says “blogging related” questions, but you reality you can ask about anything related to blogging, Internet marketing, SEO, web publishing, and so on. You can even ask personal questions if you want, provided it is something that our readers would also want to know.

Stay tuned for next Friday’s Q&A!