If you started blogging back in the late 90′s up into the early 2000′s then you are most likely a successful blogger today. Back then, it was the newest and greatest thing to do on the web. Now-a-days it takes much more effort because everyone and their mother is doing it. The problem isn’t necessarily that the market is saturated. The problem is that society is used to blogs now, and people can be very critical about the content that they read.

As of 2010, bloggers have to take on a new approach. The most effective approach today is patience and time. You can really build a blog into a success if you have the time (approximately a year or two), and the patience to see that timeframe all the way through. Of course time means nothing if you are not adding value to your blog in the form of research and content. But that is not what this article is about.

Growing a blog can be fairly easy in action, but can get very tedious in practice. What I mean by this is that the basic act of commenting on blogs every day to drive traffic, and posting articles on your blog can get very tiring when you feel that the momentum is not growing automatically. But that automatic momentum takes time to happen. Eventually, you will get visitors and comments without having to go to blogs on a daily basis. You still should comment on other blogs and not “sell out” on those that have made you a success, but it isn’t necessary for traffic at that point.

If you are already an established online presence somewhere other than your blog, you can utilize that presence to drive traffic to your blog. Let’s say for example you have a forum with hundreds of members. You can send out newsletters to those members letting them know of your new blog. You can post advertisements on your forum and bring in clicks. Using outside sources that are already established is one of the fastest ways to bring in immediate traffic and commentary to your blog. Of course, not every blogger will already have online experience or existing websites elsewhere.

Specials & Promotions

So you all know the power of free. That’s what guys like me who teach blogging talk about a lot. We tell you to offer an ebook for free in order to build your newsletter. But did you know that free ebooks and contests are not the only way to new readers and traffic? As a freelance web designer and seo expert, I have been able to offer promotions (not free) and trade my discounted time in exchange for traffic and subscribers. Say for example I were to offer a 30% discount on internet marketing services only to my newsletter subscribers. That would equal a valuable incentive to sign up.

Take into account what you have a talent in. What are you good at? Offer that expertise or service as a special or promotion and build your list.

Newsletter List Building Minus Unsubscriptions

When you first get your newsletter all set up, you are eager to make that system work to earn you some affiliate cash. But wait! There is no rush. If you are only in this for the money, then you will not listen to me anyways and your list will suffer. So will your income.

Why Wait? Look at it like this. Let’s say you have 40 subscribers. You send out a weekly or bi-weekly newsletter, and one or two subscribers unsubscribe using that handy link you provide in your newsletter. In my expert opinion, that single newsletter only being displayed in front of 40 people was not worth the loss of a subscription. You want your material to get in front of as many people as possible!

How can you correct this problem? How about you just build your list, and don’t send out a newsletter? I know that seems counter-productive. Especially because you obtained those subscribers with the intent of sending them a newsletter. But wouldn’t it be more effective if you waited until you had 500 subscribers before you sent your exclusive article out to them? It would save you some creative material, and inside of your newsletter on top of the free stuff you can link to affiliate offers. You can even offer the newsletter as an advertising option on your website because you have a decent sized audience.

There is nothing to be gained from greediness. Patience wins the prize.

Offer a community

You will notice that right here on my blog, I offer a free marketing forum. It is like a whole new extension of my blog but an entire community in and of itself! I have noticed that I get members signing up in my forum that have not taken part in my blog commentary at all. My reach has expanded greatly and all it took was a little creative thinking. The forum is a separate entity, and it has it’s own list. If you don’t have the subscribers in your blog newsletter, then you may very well have forum members that have opted to receive messages from the forum. In that case, you have an entire 2nd list to market to!

By offering a community with your blog, you are making your blog web 2.0 in the social sphere. Think about why Facebook and MySpace have had so much success. They provide reasons for members to come back on a daily basis. You may not want a forum, but you may like the idea of opening up a profile blog space for members to write something of their own right on your blog site. You can even offer revenue sharing for regular guest posters on your blog. There are free handy plugins for WordPress that allow for that functionality.

How’s your expert status?

I have been riding the opportunity for expert status for a long time. I have even appeared on a major news talk radio show as a call-in expert. Today, I decided to pick up the “Writer’s Market” book from the library to help me locate some trade magazines that may be interested in featuring my articles. Aside from the obvious exposure, some of these magazines pay $1,000+ per expert article.

Being an expert practically entitles you to traffic on your website or blog. Once a reader finds you in a trade magazine that they subscribe to, they have become your loyal reader as well. You will want to gain that potential source of new readers. You can also publicize your published works in trade magazines on your site. That way, when readers on your blog discover you, they can locate your column in the trade magazine which will solidify your expertise in their eyes.

New bloggers who don’t try to get creative tend to completely pass this up as a marketing tactic. You will find a lot of bloggers posting on EzineArticles and Associated Content as well as other well known article websites. They often never realize that it is very possible for them to appear in print magazines too! Never underestimate the power of print. These trade magazines tend to have a huge subscriber-base. That is afterall, why they can afford to pay $1k for a 3,000 word article.

Features and Options

People love options. I would classify options as a way of making it easy for your readers to come back to your site and read you more. Examples of effective features would be a “bookmark this site” link; “email a friend” this article; “share this article on Facebook”; and others. Features and options make your blog interactive, and allow your readers to find you fast or promote your blog for you. I would say that being user-friendly is the single most important part of your blog. Sure you may find a blog that you love and lacks even the basics of social bookmarking buttons, but would you take the time to go and manually promote that blog article if it wasn’t convenient?

You should never make it inconvenient for your visitors. I find it inconvenient when I want to comment on a blog, and they do not have a “subscribe to comments” feature. It makes me mad because I have no idea if someone was replying to something I said. It makes me look like a jackass that doesn’t really take part in that blog when it wasn’t even my fault.

Your readers are what will make or break you, so don’t make their life harder than it needs to be. Spoon feed them everything from easy access, to easy sharing. Besides, free is the best form of marketing.

Obvious ignorance

Chances are that if you got into this with money on the mind, then you looked up the short cuts to get you there quickly. Chances are also good that you did not research it totally, and are doing obvious spamming black hat seo methods.

If you are doing any of the following, please stop immediately:

  • Keyword repeating – the act of placing your keyword in an invisible layers like the <noframes> tag. An example would be “make money blogging, make money online, blogging for money, make money blogging, blogging money, online make money, make online money….etc”.
  • Keyword jamming – the art of placing keywords on the bottom or top of your site and making the font incredibly small. What a great way to get banned from a search engine.
  • Hidden keywords – placing keywords in invisible text like that of the noframes tag; font the same color as the background; placing keywords in comment tags or the style sheets.
  • Stacking keywords – you found out that alt tags are a great way to add keywords into your code. So you added keywords to every image you have, including spacers. Horrible idea. The alt tag is for describing the image. Leave the spacer alone as it is supposed to do nothing other than add space. As for the other images, actually describe what they are with a few words. They do not have to be keywords unless that image actually matches a keyword.
  • Dynamic automation – You may have thought it was a good idea to have the meta tags, on-page content, or title of a page change every couple of days. But guess what… Search engines already thought of this. Be realistic, and you will win. Be tricky, and you will end up with a useless domain.

There are many obvious pitfalls of bad seo technique. It’s best to simply ignore any of the techniques that are black-hat. And sure enough, there are many I didn’t even mention. Invest your time into your blog/site and figure out them all by yourself. You will love yourself in the morning.

Newsgroups aren’t 80′s after-all

Newsgroups are often associated with spam. But there are actually millions of loyal newsgroup users out there. The trick to becomming one of them is to actually take part in the newsgroups and not think like a marketer. Most people try and get away with providing some quick freebie with their url plastered across it. If you stick with that scenerio then you will most likely be classified into the spammer group.

You can actually take part in a newsgroup and establish yourself as an expert. Then, just like a forum or article would, the newsgroup will bring traffic to your blog. It is all about image and branding yourself in front of an audience. You can find tons of free newsgroups online, and you can bring them up right in your outlook express or windows mail program. What… you didn’t notice that newsgroup link in your email client?

Let affiliates promote

I know you want to sell things. But selling isn’t everything when you are focused on building. With that in mind, it is a good idea to have an affiliate program running to promote one of your premium ebooks or some other product. I always prefer my own affiliate program for control issues I have. But when you are first starting out, you may want to utilize the huge network that places like ClickBank already have in place. There are literally thousands of people who may end up promoting your blog and your product.

Affiliate programs are a great source of traffic for any website. You can offer the product right on your website, and hopefully the visitor will look around and become a regular blog reader. Maybe even a subscriber.

You always want to go where the people are. That’s why you turn to affiliate programs because there may be a single person who decides to promote your product, and they have an existing reader-base of 50,000. Ok, so that is a great scenerio to have, but it is realistic.

Are you building your blog properly?

Income blogging requires new strategies in this day and age

About the author

Brandon Connell wrote 393 articles on this blog.

I am an author, blogger, investor, musician, and internet marketer among other things. I believe that one person can do many things in life. Check out my local search marketing company at Leads2LocalSearch.com when you are done browsing here.

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