I received an email from a blogger friend of mine, Andy Wibbels. He sent out a request to his newsletter for his readers to vote for his blog in an upcoming blog awards called the MarketingSherpa Awards. While the MarketingSherpa Award is no emmy, it is a good exposure and credibility tool for bloggers if you can walk away as a winner. Just being able to display the award on your blog helps to convince new visitors that your blog is worth reading.

Andy won a MarketingSherpa award in 2005 so he knows its value. For this year the competition is tough since there are so many business and marketing related blogs out there competing. Some bloggers, myself included, posted a notice to their blog asking for their readers to vote. In my case I posted a notice at Entrepreneur’s Journey and Small Business Branding. Andy though, went one step further.

Voting in the awards is not too difficult. There are many categories to choose from and a few fields to fill out but it shouldn’t take more than a minute. Andy wanted to make the process as easy as possible so he set up a simple frame based page which included a left sidebar explaining how to vote for his blog. You can see it in action here (voting for the awards has closed)-

http://andywibbels.com/sherpa/

Make The Effort

It would not have taken Andy (or his web techie) very long to set up the voting page. Andy took the small extra step to ensure it was as easy as possible for his readers to vote for him. It’s the little extra things like this that the top bloggers do to bring in more traffic that separates them from the pack. Most people wouldn’t bother, but Andy knows the value of an award and decided to work for it.

Do you go the extra mile with your blog traffic initiatives?

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I keep coming across more and more fantastic free plugins for WordPress (yet another reason to make the switch to the WordPress Blogging Platform). This plugin is a particularly handy one to help visitors who come to your blog from a search engine such as Google find the answers they are looking for, and thus spend more time at your blog.

Download Plugin: Landing Sites

When a person does a web search and one of your blog’s articles show up in the results it may not exactly match the topic they are searching for, however some of your other blog posts might. This plugin, called “Landing Sites”, allows you to include a short welcome message and links to more of your blog articles whenever a visitor clicks through from a search engine.

Confused? Okay, here is an example. Click this link - Niche Content Sites - and you will be taken to the Google search results for that phrase. On the page should be a link to my site - www.entrepreneurs-journey.com. Click the link within the Google results and you will be taken to my site but just before the article you will see a welcome message with links to more articles within my blog.

The welcome message is only generated when someone clicks through from search engines. So far I’ve tested it and it seems to work for all the big search engines except for Yahoo. MSN Search, Google and Ask.com all worked fine.

Your blog may or may not have good search engine rankings yet but regardless this plugin is a must have because it helps convert search visitors into retained readers. Search visitors usually have very specific questions and a VERY short attention span. The more you can do to provide potential answers to their questions and keep them on your site, the better your chance of establishing some form of relationship with them, once they start to see the value your blog represents.

Installing the plugin is easy - just upload and activate. Then you will need to copy some code into your blog template files. This is the trickier part and if you are not used to playing with your blog’s theme files be careful, maybe ask someone with HTML skills to help you.

Blog Traffic School Recommended Plugins

In Blog Traffic School I’ve included a list of every plugin I use on my blogs to improve my traffic. There are a handful of really powerful plugins, like this landing site one I just covered, that can have a dramatic impact on your traffic yet take only two seconds to install. The beauty of plugins is that they are free and automatic. Once you set them up they perform functions that are dynamic and powerful.

Blog Traffic School is coming very, very soon…

Yaro Starak
Blog Traffic King

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Want to know how to double your blog traffic in five months? - Just keep doing what works!

I can say this because I’ve just checked the statistics on my two blogs and compared the numbers from the month of May with the month of January this year. I more than doubled the traffic to both my blogs during that five month period. Here are the statistics -

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

Unique Visitors

January 2006: 40,000+
May 2006: 90,000+

Pageviews

January 2006: 200,000+
May 2006: 400,000+

SmallBusinessBranding.com

Unique Visitors

January 2006: 18,000+
May 2006: 40,000+

Pageviews

January 2006: 50,000+
May 2006: 120,000+

Bear in mind that during this time my business, BetterEdit.com, experienced two of its most busy months ever in April and May, I was writing the blog traffic school course, and I kept quite busy doing other things like travelling to Melbourne twice, playing sports and well, you know, living a well balanced life and all that.

What I mean to say is that I managed to double my blog traffic without spending my full working day on my blogs. You can grow your blog traffic significantly without being a full time blogger.

How did I do it?

By repeating what worked to grow my blog from 0 to 1000 daily visits during last year. All the best techniques from the first six months of my blog’s life were applied for the next five months which resulted in my blog growing from over 1000 unique visitors a day up to a regular 2000 visitors per day - even as high as 2700 one day!

Of course all these techniques are covered in the soon to be released course, Blog Traffic School and you can get some free advice right now by joining the blog promotion tips email newsletter.

Yaro Starak
Blog Traffic King

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I’m not letting anyone into Blog Traffic School who doesn’t first agree to the number one rule -

Rule: You Must Be Prepared To Write, And Write Often

You see blog traffic is dependent on one thing above all else - content. All the tips I provide in the course are useless if there is no content in your blog. All the activities in the course are designed to drive people to your blog, but if there isn’t anything there once they get there, well they won’t stay will they. I provide lots of tips on the type of content to write, but ultimately if you are not prepared to sit down at your computer and devote at least an hour or two per day to your blog you won’t be reaching any blog traffic goals very quickly.

Ignore The Blogosphere

I remember when I first discovered RSS feeds. I read reports of some bloggers who boasted a feed list of hundreds of blogs, which they watched each day. I think Dane Carlson said he had close to 500 or even more on his bloglines feed reading account. Whatever it was, it was a lot.

I started watching blogs too. I noticed many other bloggers were monitoring many feeds each day and filling their blogs with links to stories they found interesting on other blogs. It seemed like a circle of recycled content going from blog to blog.

As I started to watch blogs I found myself becoming overstimulated with ideas, most of which I never got around to acting on because there were even more new ideas the next day. I followed the pattern and blogged about other blog content, regurgitating the already recycled news which was going from newspaper to online news portal to blog and blog and blog. True, each blogger made things interesting by including their own point of view, but I noticed that the traffic results for me from regurgitated news wasn’t as good - heck, I wasn’t even interested in reading the same news on my own blog that I had just read somewhere else.

What did I do?

I stopped reading the blogosphere.

For a while I didn’t bother with my RSS feeds and only occasionally dropped in on some of my absolute favorite blogs, maybe two or three at most. Instead I went to work pumping out articles. I had enough ideas in my head for original content and I thought it would do my traffic a lot of good to sit down and write, rather than watch what everyone else was doing.

At one point I remember someone asking me how many feeds I subscribed to. I responded at the time by saying -

“oh, only about 10 - 15, and I don’t keep up with them very well. I spend most of my blogging time actually blogging, rather than reading other blogs”.

The person who asked the question said that I was probably being smart since it’s easy to procrastinate from writing your own blog by reading what everyone else is saying. He was right, at least in my case.

Reduce The Noise

The other thing I found advantageous about not reading hundreds of other blogs per day was that I cut the noise down in my own head. I wasn’t overstimulated. There are so many people blogging today that if you try and keep up with what everyone is saying you will end up paralysing yourself. You will spend all your time reading blogs and convince yourself that no matter what you do, what you want to blog about will have already been blogged about by someone else, so why bother writing at all!

The sad fact is that as the blogosphere grows it is somewhat true - your tiny voice is competing in an ever expanding pool of millions of other tiny voices, so to be heard you need to be special. By sitting down and making an effort to produce your own original content more often, you help your blog become that extra little bit special.

Of course I’m not saying avoid the blogosphere altogether. Just don’t let your reading of other peoples blogs impede you writing original thoughts on your own. Chop down your feed watchlist to only the cream of the crop and keep things simple.

If you are very new to your industry or very young and yet to gain experience and really don’t have that much which is original to say, then your job for the short term is to learn, in which case it’s okay to just read other blogs for a while as long as eventually you do take actions. The only way to generate original ideas for blog content is to study, learn and experience. That last one in particular is good - start doing some practical testing in whatever industry you are in and then blog your results, good or bad.

Watch The Watchers

What you will find is that a few bloggers become the de facto “aggregators” for their industry so instead of watching 50 blogs you will only need to watch the one blogger who watches the 50 blogs for you and reports back with the best stuff.

And of course remember, if you want to be a Blog Traffic School student, you better have some original ideas of your own. I expect you are a fan of the topic you blog about, so it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with original thought about something you love, right?

Yaro Starak
Blog Traffic King

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