4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic

One of the most common complaints that I hear from bloggers is the fact that no matter how hard they try, they can’t grow their blogs past 100 or so daily page vies. Those early days are indeed the hardest, because you need to put hard work in without the certainty of achieving results.

If you are in that same situation, here is a simple strategy that will certainly increase your blog traffic and make you break the 1,000 daily page views mark. In fact, the strategy could be used even if your are already over that number but have reached a traffic plateau lately.

Just make sure to execute the 4 steps as planned and to spend the two hours and a half every day (obviously if you have more time available you can expand the time spent on each of the four steps proportionally).

First Step: Killer Articles (1 hour per day)

Spend one hour brainstorming, researching and writing killer articles (also called linkbaits, pillar articles and so on).

Notice that your goal is to release one killer article every week. If that is not possible aim for one every 15 days. So the one hour that you will spend every day will be dedicated to the same piece. In other words, expect killers articles to take from 5 up to 10 hours of work.

If you are not familiar with the term, a killer article is nothing more than a long and structured article that has the goal of delivering a huge amount of value to potential visitors. If you have a web design blog, for example, you could write an article with “100 Free Resources for Designers”. Here are some ideas for killer articles:

• create a giant list of resources,
• write a detailed tutorial teaching people how to do something,
• find a solution for a common problem in your niche and write about it, or
• write a deep analysis on a topic where people have only talked superficially

When visitors come across your killer article, you want them to have the following reaction: “Holy crap! This is awesome. I better bookmark it. Heck, I better even mention this on my site and on my Twitter account, to let my readers and friends know about it.”

Second Step: Networking (30 minutes per day)

Networking is essential, especially when you are just getting started. The 30 minutes that you will dedicate to it every day could be split among:

• commenting on other blogs in your niche,
• linking to the posts of bloggers in your niche, and
• interacting with the bloggers in your niche via email, IM or Twitter.

Remember that your goal is to build genuine relationships, so don’t approach people just because you think they can help to promote your blog. Approach them because you respect their work and because you think the two of you could grow together.

Third Step: Promotion (30 minutes per day)

The first activity here is the promotion of your killer articles. Whenever you publish one of them, you should push it in any way you can. Examples include:

• letting the people in your network know about it (don’t beg for a link though),
• letting bloggers and webmasters in relevant niches know about it,
• getting some friends to submit the article to social bookmarking sites,
• getting some friends to Twitter the article, and
• posting about the article in online forums and/or newsgroups.

If there is time left, spend it with search engine optimization, social media marketing and activities to promote your blog as whole. Those can range from keyword research to promoting your blog on Facebook and guest blogging.

Fourth Step: Normal Posts (30 minutes per day)

Just like a man does not live by bread alone, a blog does not live by killer articles alone. Normal posts are the ones that you will publish routinely in your blog, between the killer articles. For example, you could publish a killer article every Monday and normal posts from Tuesday through Friday. Here are some ideas for normal posts:

• a post linking to an article on another blog and containing your opinion about it
• a post informing your readers about a news in your niche
• a post asking a question to your readers and aiming to initiate a discussion
• a post highlighting a new resource or trick that you discovered and that would be useful to your readers

While killers articles are essential to promote your blog and bring new readers aboard, normal posts are the ones that will create diversity in your content and keep your readers engaged.

Daniel Scocco

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How to Increase Blog Revenue with Retargeting

Retargeting is one of the fastest growing forms of paid advertising on the Internet.

What is it? Retargeting is the process of serving ads to past visitors of your website. As a website owner, you can put a little snippet of Javascript on your website that anonymously drops a tag in each visitor’s browser. Within an ad network, you can then bid to show ads to all of your past visitors.

For example, if you sell shoes online, you can tag everyone that visited your website, as well as everyone that has purchased shoes. You can then choose to only show ads to people who have visited your site in the last 7-days and who haven’t yet made a purchase.

As an advertiser, this one of the most targeted forms of advertising. You know that all of these people are in-market for shoes. Because these ads are hyper targeted, advertisers often bid two or three times more per click to serve ads to these people than they would via contextual ads.

So How Do You Make Money with Retargeting as a Blogger?

If you are running ad network placements on your blog, chances are, your site is already filled with retargeting ads. In almost all cases, this is a good thing. Ad networks are experts at optimizing your effective CPMs. If a retargeting ad is generating higher clickthrough rates than contextually targeted ads, then the ad network will automatically show more retargeting ads. This will bring up your effective CPM.

If you want to boost your revenue from retargeting, make sure to include both text and image ads are enabled on your site. Most retargeting advertisers will run both text and image ads, so you want to be prepared to be able to show more retargeting ads in the event that these types of ads generate the highest clickthrough rates.

Secondly, consider attracting more US traffic. Retargeting is particularly popular in the US, and many advertisers in the US are trying to increase their retargeting spend, and the only way to do this is to bid more per click, which increases the retargeting ad revenue per click even higher.

Other Ways to Use Retargeting

There are all kinds of nifty tricks you can use to build blog awareness while paying next to nothing.

For starters, with retargeting on AdWords, you only pay per click, so even if you’re paying for one or two clicks per day, you can still generate thousands of free banner impressions in the process.

While building blog awareness, consider highlighting your Twitter account, Facebook fan page, or newsletter. Often, people won’t click on your ad, but instead, navigate directly to your presence on another site.

You can also do cool stuff like promote your advertising opportunities only to people who have visited your advertising information page. Similarly, you can promote eBooks or other paid product to your past visitors.

When retargeting your own traffic, clickthrough rates tend to be abnormally high, keeping your cost per click down, making these campaigns highly likely to generate a positive ROI.

About the Author: Alex Holmes is the co-author of The Hidden Audience, a practical guide to retargeting. He also runs a retargeting ad network called Y Audience.

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