I’ve been receiving quite a few emails lately from people wondering if they will be able to recommend Blog Traffic School and earn commissions as an affiliate for any sales generated.

To answer the question - Yes, you definitely will.

One of the main reasons there has been a delay to get the course out to you is that I’ve wanted to make sure the affiliate system works seamlessly with the membership system. It’s taken a while but I have found the solution and it’s almost ready to go.

I will release more information about the affiliate program once I have been able to test it and make sure all the features I wanted are working. If all goes according to plan there will be some unique and powerful tools available to affiliates and members, which I suspect many of you have never made use of before (generally only top affiliate Internet marketers use them).

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The team over at Performancing (a blog for professional bloggers) have launched the Performancing Exchange -

Performancing Exchange is a classifieds style marketplace for the professional blogging community. It’s free for now…

At the exchange you can list blogs for sale, buy a blog, find a blogging job or hire a blogger.

I wanted to launch something similar to this about six months ago but it was a case of too much on my plate already. The Performancing team are in a better position to do a good job of this so I hope it will take off.

At the moment there aren’t many entries but it is new, given time I expect it could become a great blog marketplace.

Blogging Exit Strategies

One of the topics I cover in Blog Traffic School is about Exit Strategies - what you can do when you no longer want to blog or it’s time to move on to a new blog. The most common exit strategy, and one of my favorites, is to sell your blog. You get a nice cash boost and can leave knowing you were rewarded for all the months you spent blogging.

Marketplaces like the Performancing Exchange make finding a buyer that much easier so let’s hope things take off so when it does come time to sell your blog you will have plenty of options.

Yaro Starak
Blog Estate Agent.

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Any blogger who has taken their blogging seriously has earned some amazing results. Personally I have been literally blown away by the opportunities that have come my way as a result of just blogging. What makes it even more amazing is that nearly every opportunity was offered to me without me actually asking for it.

Here’s some examples of how blogging has benefited me:

• I have been approached for consulting work yet I am not a consultant nor do I advertise myself as one.
• I have been asked to be on the board of directors of start-up Internet companies.
• I’ve been mentioned and linked to from various other blogs and websites, including some high profile sites, and listed as an expert in my field (although once again I never sought out the publicity).
• Online and offline magazines have contacted me asking for contributions to their publications.
• I’ve been approached to join blog networks.
• I’ve been offered paying contract projects.
• I’ve been invited to be a speaker at small networking events and even large seminars.
• Other business owners have contacted me for advice or just to network with me, opening doors to literally hundreds of business opportunities and relationships.

And of course I’ve also made money, established a readership and given myself a fantastic platform of credibility and reputation to leverage for future business projects.

It’s hard not to like blogging. The return on investment is pretty spectacular if you do it well.

Yaro Starak
Blogging Benefactor

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I was recently putting together a lesson for the final class in the Blog Traffic School course. This lesson is part of what I call the “advanced” materials - topics focused on taking your blog beyond the 1000 daily readers we aim for in Blog Traffic School, which are discussed in the concluding sections of the course. Essentially everything in Blog Traffic School can be used to grow your blog beyond 1000 readers, but for this particular lesson I wanted to focus on the things I have found that really brought my blog above the 1000 daily visitors mark and into the 2000+ daily readers milestone.

As I sat back and thought about it I realized there was one very powerful traffic source, one that many bloggers don’t think about too much, which accounted for a lot of my traffic once my blog had matured - the search engines. I say it had to “mature” for a reason, you see my blog received barely any search traffic for at least the first 4-6 months of its life. I had purchased a new domain name (entrepreneurs-journey.com) for it and while it was very easy to get my blog at least listed in the search engines, quite a few things had to happen before I started ranking well.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an area that most bloggers will never get into in any real depth. At the highest level, very technical minded people are testing and tracking things to optimize search rankings for their websites and blogs. These people use controlled tests, playing with all the variables that make up a website - the words, code, links and so forth. Once they have results the rest of us can study their findings and apply the latest “theories” as tests for our own search engine rankings. Some things work well, some don’t.

In a lot of ways search engine optimization is an art form. It has fundamental principles which make you feel like it is a science - and a lot of people working in SEO will tell you it is and they will purport to having complete control over search engine results - but they would be lying. In reality everyone who works in SEO is guessing. Yes they have some very sound principles to work from but ultimately no direct control over the deciding factors - the search engine algorithms, which is as it should be or the system could be corrupted by those in power.

Why Does SEO Matter?

So what does all this have to do with your blog? As I stated once my blog had matured and grown past its first birthday I noticed that my articles started to show up in the first page of search engine results for some pretty relevant terms for my blog’s niche. While they don’t individually provide a lot of traffic, collectively it is a steady stream of new visitors - and this is the key - these are mostly new visitors.

Search engine traffic serves to bring in new visitors to your blog. Now I of course thoroughly recommend you work on building a loyal readership for your blog, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want new visitors coming in as well. Attracting new visitors is how your blog grows, and converting those new visitors into regular readers is the process you should be aiming to complete.

How To Get More Search Traffic To Your Blog

That’s the million dollar question isn’t it! Okay, first up if you know nothing about search engine optimization and you have time to really get your teeth into it, read this article series I wrote - The Top 8 Search Engine Optimization Techniques.

In that article I have collected the most relevant things you can do to help your blog’s SEO, however there is a lot to do and you may not be up for the task. If you don’t have the time or energy for in-depth SEO then here is my advice for you -

Focus your energies on one thing - get links from authority sites.

What are authority sites? They are websites that have a lot of links from other authority sites! Aha - catch 22 you say, and yes in a way it doesn’t sound fair does it. Authority sites are websites, and blogs are included, which the search engines consider to be authority sources of information. Generally if the site has lots of traffic, links from other authority sites and people doing searches keep finding the answers they want from these sites, you have the formula for authority status. It’s a hard thing to pinpoint but virtually every niche online has a handful of authority sites. Right now I bet every website you visit on a daily basis (perhaps besides your own) is an authority site for it’s niche.

When authority sites link to your site then your site gets some of that “authority” juice. It’s that juice that will help your blog climb higher in the rankings.

For the sake of clarification I want to state that your blog’s search engine ranking is dependent on a lot of variables and just focusing on authority links is only part of the picture, but in my opinion it is the most crucial and the most difficult to accomplish. To get a link from an authority site, or preferably lots of them, and from many different authority sites, you really need to be doing spectacular things or saying spectacular things or helping people in spectacular ways or have a spectacular PR person working for you. It’s by no means easy and it doesn’t (nor should it) happen over night. This is something that you build up to over time.

So essentially, once again my advice to you regarding your blog’s search engine rankings is to become spectacular. As simple as that

Yaro Starak
Spectacular Blogger and The Blog Traffic King

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I spend a lot of time discussing blog traffic techniques that focus on what you can do online. While online techniques should form the core of your strategy to grow your blog, ultimately it’s offline communications that will take your blog traffic to the next level. How does this happen? Through word of mouth.

We all know how powerful word of mouth is. If you look back over the history of the most successful websites, those that have millions of visitors, it’s usually because they generated tremendous offline word of mouth that resulted in a “tipping point” for their traffic. No amount of search traffic, or backlinks or social bookmarks or pay per click advertising, or any mechanical traffic method can match the pure power of word of mouth to bring new visitors to your blog.

The thing is, you can’t directly control word of mouth with a high degree of influence. That’s the nature of the beast. Word of mouth is powerful because it’s people talking to people, friends chatting with friends - and sometimes directly, sometimes more covertly - recommending something to each other. If word of mouth is heavily influenced or someone attempts to exert control over it, it loses it’s power because the recommendation becomes tainted. The credibility of the information is lost. People don’t take action when information appears to be a sales pitch, a con, or an advertisement.

There is an art to making use of word of mouth for marketing purposes and in this case, for marketing our blogs. While you can’t directly control word of mouth, you certainly can take action to encourage it. It’s a subtle art, finding ways to generate word of mouth for your blog. The best way of course is to do something worth talking about, and as I have mentioned in previous blog articles, this is the core of successful publicity - and ultimately publicity is all about generating word of mouth. I’ll assume you are already working hard to be a remarkable blogger, doing remarkable things to generate word of mouth.

One Powerful Word Of Mouth Technique

I’ll end this article with one very simple, yet potentially powerful technique to stimulate word of mouth for your blog. You may be surprised at how simple it is, yet most bloggers don’t do it. Have you guessed?

Talk about your blog.

Yep, it’s not complex, it’s not rocket science. You are the perfect conduit for word of mouth since you make up 50% of the key ingredients required - you need at least two people - and you are one. All you need to do is find one other person and you have all the ingredients necessary for word of mouth marketing.

Since you will be promoting something of your own making, it’s harder for you not to appear to be making a sales pitch, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still powerful. All you need to do is mention you are blogging to your friends, your family, even random strangers you meet as you live your life, and I guarantee they will be interested. The fact is, right now, just being a blogger is interesting because blogs are new, cool and still somewhat curious to most people.

Talking about your blog can generate exponential exposure, as your friends tell their friends about your blog, and so on and so on, creating a pyramid growth pattern of word of mouth. Remember too, this will be natural word of mouth, you won’t be involved once you have planted the seed of awareness in people. Your blog will just “come up” in conversation as they talk about you, or about the Internet or any topic that might trigger a thought about your blog. All you need to do is create the initial awareness.

I remember a recent trip I made to a local real estate agent when I was doing some research about property. The admin person at the office turned out to be a guy in a band who knew about blogs because he was a heavy user of MySpace. We talked for a few minutes and of course I told him about my blog. Now I don’t know whether he eventually visited my blog, but I did provide him the URL. If he did, he may even be reading this article right now and may have told some of his friends or family. That one conversation could have resulted in hundreds of people eventually coming to my blog as the word of mouth spread from person to person.

That’s the thing with word of mouth - you can never be sure exactly when or where or who is involved, all you can do is encourage it, then sit back and watch your blog traffic grow. What’s important is that if you aren’t talking about your blog now, if you are ashamed or shy or whatever, that you change this attitude and start being vocal. Tell everyone you know about your blog - it’s one the easiest traffic techniques you have available at no cost - and it can potentially be the most powerful.

Yaro Starak
Blog Traffic King

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