Blog Traffic Exchange

Many blog owners spend a good portion of their time trying to figure out how to generate traffic to their blog. This is especially true when it comes to a brand new blog that is not yet really rich in meaningful and effective content. Generating visitor traffic to your blog is an endeavor that is going to take some basic effort on your part. Thankfully due to modern technology, the task of attracting interested people to your blog is a lot easier now than in the past.

The most common online blogging platforms are WordPress and Blogger. Both have hosted blog solutions, but WordPress also has an open source solution for installing the WordPress platform onto your own domain name. If you put the following tips into practice, it is more than possible for you to begin attracting traffic to your blog as early as on the first day. Within 24 hours of creating a blog you can begin to generate traffic, and if the purpose of your blog is to sell a product, you could be making sales just as quickly.

1 – Every blog has an RSS feed.

By submitting your RSS feed to the most popular online feed services, you will be able to attract website traffic very quickly, especially if you are focusing your blog content on specific keywords that have lower competition in search engine ranks. All that you need to be able to do is to submit the URL for your feed to a wide range of different free services as soon as you actually have a live site to promote. Some of the most widely recognized feed sites are:

- Feedage.com
- Feedagg.com
- Feedraider.com
- Feedfury.com
- Feedsubmitter.com
- Feedest.com
- Search4rss.com

2 – Social bookmarking involves creating bookmarks for your blog.

Additionally social bookmarking is meant for displaying information about what your blog centers on and what it has to offer. It is important that you use social bookmarking responsibly rather than spamming these websites. Simply write a short post that explains in a little bit of detail why your site or product will interest the people that you want to visit it. There are a myriad of different social bookmarking websites out there, including but not limited to:

- Digg.com
- YahooBuzz
- Technorati.com
- Del.icio.us
- Propeller
- StumbleUpon
- Reddit
- Mixx
- Fark
- MyBlogLog

3 – Social networking, on the other hand, is a little different.

When you create an account on a social networking website, you put together a profile that allows you to connect with other people, creating powerful partnerships and even a fan following in the right circumstances. These networks and relationships will facilitate the capability for you to promote your sites and protects, although much more subtlety than through other sources. Here are a few of the most popular social networking websites:

- FaceBook
- MySpace
- Classmates Online
- MSN Groups
- Yahoo Groups
- Xanga

Photo Credits: 1

Originally posted 2009-02-04 18:25:52. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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• Blog Plug-Ins to Get More Readers Wordpress specifically has a number of plug-ins for blogging that will allow you to attract more readers to your blog. Some of the best blog plug-ins for increasing traffic to come in three main categories: Social networking and bookmarking Posting across many different platforms RSS feed helpers BTE Related Websites:......
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There are a variety of reasons for why WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms on the internet. Many people try different blogging platforms, but they end up coming back to WordPress because it offers so much greater functionality. Here are five of the greatest reasons for why WordPress is the best blogging platform to use regardless of whether you are brand new to blogging or have been blogging for years.

1 – The Plugin Functionality –

WordPress has a seemingly endless supply of plugins that can be downloaded, installed and utilized for absolutely free. The installation of these plugins is easy, and involves uploading the plugin to your blog space and simply activating it through the admin section in your WordPress site. Whatever you end up needing in terms of functionality, there is more than likely a number of plugins that can be downloaded and installed to improve the capability of your blog.

2 – The Theme Functionality –

Most people are going to be interested in customizing their blogs. There are literally thousands of completely unique themes out there, offering one column, two columns or three columns, graphics, color combinations and a variety of other details which allow for complete customization of your blog to suit your needs, the theme of your blog and the needs of your readers.

3 – Auto Ping Functionality –

Many scripts may offer this particular possibility, but many free blog hosts do not offer auto ping, meaning that you are going to need to ping yourself after every single post that you make. On the other hand, WordPress can do the pinging for you, which makes your life significantly easier and saves you a lot of time in the process.

4 – The Trackback –

The trackback feature is an important one if you want to know who is reading and responding to your blog, and if you want to be open about who you are reading and talking about in your blog. If you link to a post in another blog using WordPress, WordPress will automatically make a comment in the post that was linked to in order to facilitate communication between the two different blogs.

5 – The Overall Feeling of Simplicity –

WordPress is an extremely user friendly blogging platform. By using cpanel, you can install WordPress in a single click in most circumstances. After the WordPress blog is installed, you are pretty much ready to get going, provided that you do not want to do any tinkering beforehand with stats, themes and other details. You do not have to know anything at all about computers in order to set up a WordPress blog. When it is installed and ready to go, you simply have to log in to your WordPress panel, which is also extremely easy for you to use in most circumstances.

Ready to start using WordPress? I have tried lots of hosting providers and one is without a doubt the best in my mind. Host Gator. Use the coupon code BlogTrafficExchange to receive $9.94 on the package price.

Originally posted 2009-02-06 05:25:34. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Is this your first time starting a blog? Here is a ten step checklist for starting your own blog.

1 – Choose a subject –

Determine what it is that you want to blog about. You need to have a concept before you can start writing about, so that you can appeal to the right niche. Your blog will die if you do not take the time to come up with a good subject that you can blog about.

2 – Title –

Come up with a title that is catchy, entertaining and easy for people to remember. Make your blog title catchy and interesting if you want it to attract readers.

3 – Buy a Domain Name –

Now you need to buy a domain name that is both easy to remember and related to your title. Domain names really matter in this day and age because they let potential readers know what your site is all about. Once you have a title and a subject, you need to create a domain name that will help readers find your site.

4 – Choose a blogging platform –

Try considering both your needs and your budget when you consider blogging platforms. Some blogging platforms like blogger are free or inexpensive, while others cost a little more but offer greater benefits. Another excellent blogging platform is WordPress, which is free and easy to use.

5 – Find a Web Host –

Unless you are hosting your blog on someone else’s server, the next step is to find an adequate website host. You need to find a web host that is reliable and offers the benefits and level of service that you need in order to get the most out of your blog.

6 – Find a flexible theme –

Not only do you need to find a flexible design theme, but you need to find one that you can easily edit to make your own. The design of your blog is part of your brand and concept. With a little CSS and HTML know how you can take a nice theme and really make it your own.

7 – Sign Up for Web Analytics –

With web analytics, you can figure out if you are doing the right thing, and if you are attracting the right people to your blog. Web analytics give you the stats that you need to determine what’s hot on your blog, what’s not hot, what most people are coming for, and which posts are more useful than others.

8 – Make your first post –

Let readers know what your blog is going to be all about.

9 – Start putting together real content –

The real challenge is creating real content on a long term basis. Research your facts, be sure about your information, and share your opinions, giving real content to your readers.

10 – Socialize, build relationships and readership –

Now that you have content, start socializing, meeting people, building readership and really getting your name out there. This is the fun part! Have fun, make friends, share information and build readers in the process and you will be good to go!

11 – Join the Blog Traffic Exchange

Once you have 30 or so posts the Blog Traffic Exchange will help grow your blog. How?

• WordPress — Follow the instructions to install the Related Websites plugin.
• Any other platform? — Coming soon.

Photo Credits: 1

Originally posted 2009-02-01 10:20:48. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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WordPress specifically has a number of plug-ins for blogging that will allow you to attract more readers to your blog. Some of the best blog plug-ins for increasing traffic to come in three main categories:

• Social networking and bookmarking
• Posting across many different platforms
• RSS feed helpers

BTE Related Websites: For WordPress users the best way to get traffic is to use the plugin that I developed called Related Websites. The more bloggers that use this plugin, the stronger the whole system is. To get your links to show up on relevant posts, you must join and become a full member. This quality control is completely humanized so that the system is never compromised. You get strong related links for your site and in addition are linked to from other sites. What are you waiting for?

RSS Feeds: Lots of people prefer to read blogs in feeds rather than having to visit several different blog sites per day. This doesn’t actually get them coming through as traffic, but they read the post and will follow links and other such information. If you don’t have your blog available as a feed, then you’re missing out on those readers who prefer feeds over surfing to your blog regularly.

Some of the more popular WordPress plug-ins for RSS feeds do different things. Some are designed to allow you to add a copyright to your posts like ©Feed, which also “fingerprints” your feed so you can search for plagiarists who are duplicating your content. Feed Footer lets you copyright as well, and also lets you add advertising in the footer of your feeds.

The type of plug-in that lets you use ads is great for those into monetizing their blogs and can help offset the loss of clicks or advertiser revenue by adding it to the feed. Feedvertiser lets you place ads in your feed, as well. Feed Control lets you exclude certain posts from the feed, while Better Feed lets you ad the © notice, a del.icio.us link and a “read more” link to lead people to your blog.

Feedstats lets you see the stats on your feeds, and SlashComment adds a little note to the end of the feeds about the number of comments on the post.

Social Bookmarking: For social bookmarking and networking within your blog, the one of the best plug-ins is called Share This. Unlike many other plug-ins that will let you social bookmark at Digg, Reddit or del.icio.us, Share This create a drop-down box where the reader can choose from about 14 of the most popular Social Bookmarking sites online. The Social plug-in, however, has the record for offering 61 social bookmarking links to your reader.

The RSS Flashfeeder to MySpace combines the RSS feed help with social networking, by letting you send the last two posts of your feed directly to your MySpace page.

Crossposting: These plug-ins let you make a post in your WordPress blog and recreate in your other blogs without having to copy and paste. One plug-in, Dj-Email-Publish, sends your new post by email to many or your other blogs, like those on MSN.

For those with blogs at popular sites LiveJournal, Vox and Xanga, each has a separate crossover plug-in that allows the content in your WordPress blog to be automatically cross-posted to that other blog. Live Space Sync lets you send your content to all the contacts you have in Microsoft Live.

Getting the word out about your new post is made much easier by using these handy blog plug-ins.

Photo Credits: 416style

Originally posted 2009-05-29 05:26:46. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Blogger is one of a number of different blogging platforms out there, but it is not the most ideal way to go for most blogging purposes. While there are benefits to using blogger when you are just starting out when it comes to blogging, using blogger is a mistake later on when you are trying to grow and develop your blog. Not only is blogger not ideal because it is a hosted blog that you do not have as much control over, but there are also a number of features that some blogging platforms offer that blogger hasn’t even come close to offering. The reason why blogging platforms like WordPress are considered to be ideal is because WordPress offers a number of extremely important features that Blogger isn’t making available yet.

First of all, you can set a WordPress blog up to automatically ping RSS and blog feed directories each and every time that you make a blog post. This is an extremely powerful blogging feature, at least if you are looking to generate a large amount of traffic for your blog right away. On top of this, because WordPress will be doing all of the pinging for you, you will be creating a lot of automatic backlinks to your blog almost instantaneously.

Think about how long it would normally take you to build a website, get the search engines to pay attention to it, earn backlinks from other pages to improve your search engine listings and to start earning traffic. Instead of having to do all of this work yourself, consider creating a WordPress blog that will do all of the work for you automatically.

Secondly, WordPress allows the use of categories, which are a really powerful way for you to improve the structure of your website, not only for human visitors but also for search engines as well. If the main topic of your website is widgets, for example, then you can create a category for blog posts about black widgets, another category for green widgets, and finally a category for orange widgets. Then when you add posts to your blog, you can decide which categories the post belongs to. Then your blog will automatically archive all of your posts not only by the month and the date but also by the category that the post most closely corresponds to.

If you have a visitor that is especially interested in widgets of a certain color then, they can easily find all of your posts on that particular subject rather than having to go through all of your archives to find a certain post.

WordPress and other similar blogging platforms offer a wide variety of additional options and features that Blogger simply cannot offer. While blogger is an excellent jumping off point for brand new blogs in certain situations, it is by no means a good answer on a long term basis.

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Originally posted 2009-02-04 05:50:54. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Most of the open source blogging platforms out there are going to come with at least a few different basic blogging designs. Some platforms call them themes, others call them templates, and others still have completely unique names for them. Most of these basic themes or templates have nothing inherently wrong with them, but customization is somewhat necessary otherwise everyone would have a blog that looked exactly the same as every other blog. Most blogging templates are really basic, and adding your own flair to them is easy. Still, many people get the whole customization thing wrong, and need to be steered in the right direction. There are some basic mistakes to how people go about customizing their blogs, and hopefully we can dispel some of them in this series on principles for good blog design.

1 – Whether you really want to or not, it is vital that you have some information about *you* in the blog. Either create an about me page, or have some information about yourself displayed in the sidebar of your blog. This should be a prominently placed section so it can be easily found, and it should be truly about who you are, rather than read like a resume.

2 – Make sure that your personal contact information is readily available, and even more importantly, easily visible. You need to at least have an e-mail address visible, and a phone number would be even better. If you want to prevent spammers from harvesting your e-mail address, use an image to display it rather than text. You can always use a free web based e-mail address such as a yahoo, gmail or hotmail address to keep from having your true personal address displayed, if you like. By posting real contact information, you are going to make yourself appear much more real. Although people may not really find reasons to contact you, you’re still indicating to your readers that you are available, which is a good thing.

3 – You should absolutely include a picture of yourself in your blog. All blogs, even business blogs, are personal, and the people who visit yours are going to want to know who you are and what you look like so that they can get to know you, and can benefit from the personal nature of your blog. It is much easier to build trust between yourself and your readers if your picture is visible and your readers feel like they know you. You do not absolutely need a picture, but it is still strongly recommended that you do have one in order to get the most out of your blog.

4 – Some of your blog posts are going to be more popular than others. Once you recognize which blog posts these are, keep them from being buried by finding a way to highlight them.

Continued in part 2 of this series.

Photo Credits: 1

Originally posted 2009-02-06 08:15:26. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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• Increase Blog Traffic Today, pt2 Here is part two in our series for learning how to increase blog traffic today. 7 - Sign It With Your Blog - Add a link to your blog website in the signature file for your e-mail accounts as well as forum accounts and other accounts where signature files are......

• 5 Reasons To Allow Guest Post In Your Blog Blogging involves lot of work and content generation is one of the hardest part in blogging. It definitely requires to dedicate time and energy, more important you must be passionate about the topic you write, so that you could continuously flood with useful content. As an individual running a blog,......
• Do Network Marketing Blogs Really Work? [/caption] It has been known for some time now that network marketing blogs are the way to go when it comes to marketing on the internet. Most people realize this so they dig in and start trying to blog. For many people this is very short lived because they blog......
• Best Personal Financial Planning and Personal Investment Articles this Week from Personal Finance Blogs Carnival of Financial Planning - Edition #139 - April 30, 2010 Welcome to the April 30, 2010 Edition #139 of the Carnival of Financial Planning. The Carnival of Financial Planning takes a long-term view of personal financial planning for individuals and families. We focus on efficient and sustainable personal financial......
• Network Marketing Blogs - Social Proof Without The Spam Network Marketing Blogs - Connect You To Your Prospect [/caption] Social Networking is a very persuasive way to get your prospects to join your business. In fact it is one of the most powerful ways to convince someone you actually know what you are talking about. Network marketing blogs are......
• SEO Training - Commenting On Relevant Blog Posts Welcome to this edition of training for better SEO. Let's take a look at blog commenting. We should begin by noting that blog commenting is not just an SEO technique. If you look at it that way, you are probably being a spammer and not as effective as you might......

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