Here is an archive of articles related to Increasing Blog Traffic. From here you can read the articles related to Increasing Blog Traffic, visit my blogging tips archive, or visit my home page.

If you have an idea or an article that you would like to share with my readers on Garry Conn dot Com, I have great news for you. I am opening up the blog and allowing for more guest posts to be published on the blog.

I fell like there are hundreds of bloggers in this niche who do some amazing work but don’t yet have a means to spreading the word with much voice. My blog has been online for two years and it has now broke the 1K subscriber level and overall I just want to help.

If you are have creative ideas that tie into these following topics, then I am very interested in bringing you in as a guest blogger. Continue reading »

It’s not about how much traffic you get in a day, but rather what you do with the traffic that you do get. The important thing to know is that any blog that even gets as little as ten visits a day is a win situation. So many bloggers get upset, frustrated and angry that their blog has a low volume of traffic. The important thing to consider is the fact that you are indeed getting traffic.

It doesn’t really matter how much traffic you get in a day, the important thing for you to focus on is what you are doing to capture the traffic that you do get and convert them into regular readers. How can this be done? Simple. It is all in your blog’s design. It is all in how you present the information to your visitors and secondly it is all in how you shape and mold the path in which your traffic travels on.

If you have too many options for your traffic you’ll spread your traffic out too thin. If you don’t closely control what your traffic does, you’ll leave your traffic to wonder aimlessly on your blog. All in all as I had mentioned in my last post, you need to have a purpose and a goal in place for your blog before you even begin to deal with considering various strategies on how to get traffic to your blog.

Once you have a plan in place for your blog, whether that be a marketing campaign for an affiliate product or something as simple as just wanting people to drop you a comment on your blog, you have to build your blog in a way the herds your traffic into the spots that you value as being hot. It’s all about traffic control. In driving, when you see a “red light” that means, STOP. When you see construction barriers on the side of the road, you know that you’re blocked and have to keep on going.

The same is true for blogging and how your direct your traffic flow. Funneling a bunch of traffic to your blog is one thing, but what you do with the traffic while they are one your blog is a complete different ball game. In my experience, there are three hot sections on a blog. The top, the middle and the bottom. The sides are dead… the right side is more dead than the left.

Consider a movie. A movie has a title and then quickly within the first ten minutes it captures your attention. The middle of the movie “the bulk” or in your case, the chunk of your blog post, is the plot. This is pretty hot too as you have captured your readers into somewhat of a daydream. it’s lesser effective than the top or the bottom because the read really doesn’t want to click away because they want to read the next line and so forth. The bottom of a post is very hot and at times hotter than the top fold.

After a reader is done reading the post, what’s next??? What do they do now?

Do you want them to comment on your post, do you want them to subscribe to your RSS feed, do you want them to purchase the product you just pitched in the last 1000 words on your blog post?

For me… my hot spots are the top, bottom and middle. And if I had to choose one over anything else, it would be the bottom largely because of the “What Next Factor”

[Click to view full size]

Darren Rowse at www.Problogger.net asks his reader’s, “What’s Next?”

Excellent question… and you will clearly see the options he has presented to his readers. Traffic control is vital towards the growth of your blog. Creating options for your readers is very important because you don’t allow your visitors to wonder aimlessly on your blog with no purpose.

What I would recommend now, is going back to your blog and put yourself in the shoes of your visitors and consider the different things that your visitors can do while they visit your blog. If there are too many options for them to leave unexpectedly, then fill close the hole up so that you can prevent traffic leakage.

I few days ago was speaking to a fellow blogger friend and Instant message buddy, Forest Parks from The Random Forest. We were simply chatting about random things as I was working my tail off submitting an article into many of the popular social bookmarking and networking sites. Having caught wind of what I was doing, Forest sent me a message that just totally made my day and has totally saved me a ton of time with submitting my posts into all these social bookmarking and networking sites. Thanks to him, this post will show you what he showed me.

SocialMarker.com

SocialMarker.com is a site that allows you to quickly and easily submit your posts and articles into 46 of the most popular social bookmarking and social networking sites on the Internet all in one bulk shot. While it doesn’t do what I have been wanting and visioning in my mind for a long time, I’ll admit that it is very close and its a lot better than doing things manually.

My dream software is to have a program - preferably a desktop application - that allows me to fill out a Title, Description, Category and Title tag field and push the submit button. From there this program would then automatically submit my information into all the social bookmarking and networking sites. While this animal doesn’t exist (at least I don’t think it does… drop me a comment and let me know otherwise) from what I see SocialMarker.com is close… very close!

SocialMarker.com is very similar to what my dream software application would be, but there are a few minor differences. For one, its web based. Nothing wrong with that, its just a matter of personal preference. However, the real similarities in SocialMarker.com and my dream software are very close.

With Socialmarker.com, you simply fill out the form as shown above. You need to enter in a nice looking title, provide the URL of the post or article you’re submitting, include some very well researched tags for search engine marketing purposes and most importantly, include a well written description of the post or article you’re submitting.

The next step is the fun part: Choosing which social bookmarking or networking sites to submit your article or post into. As you can see in the above screen shot, it is just a matter of checking the box on the sites you’d like to submit your article or post into.

A very handy feature that SocialMarker.com provides are the pre-selection links found on the top of this section. They are highlighted in yellow on the above screen shot.

Your options are to hand pick individual networks, to select all, choose only News, choose only Bookmarking or choose only DOFOLLOW for scoring search engine friendly backlinks.

Once you have chosen the sites you’d like to have your article or post submitted into, simply click the submit button on the top right of the screen. What happens next is amazing and will literally save you tons of time!

You click the screen shots below to view full size:

The above screen shots show you live examples of how I quickly submitted a post in Digg, Propeller and made an entry into Twitter. These are only 3 of the 46 available sites that you can quickly submit your article or post into.

SocialMarker.com automatically fills out as much of the online form for each network as possible. There are many submissions that don’t require any edits or manually entries at all! Simply click the “Submit” button and then the “Next” button. Each time you click the “Next” button, SocialMarker.com automatically loads the next page and auto fills as much of the information as possible in the submission form of the next social bookmarking or social networking site.

The great thing about SocialMarker.com is the fact that it does not require a registration of any kind. You do not have to create a username/ password and you don’t have to join anything. The program works purely without the need to register for their service. If you choose to have your web browser to remember your username and passwords for all the social networking and bookmarking sites, then as you keep clicking the “Next” button you’ll be automatically logged into the site you’re submitting the article or post into. I would recommend allowing your web browser to remember your usernames and passwords so that you can quickly roll through all the submissions without having to take the extra step to log in each time.

What about Plugins?

SocialMarker.com has a WordPress plugin available. I have downloaded it and have started installing it on many of my blogs. The plugin works like a charm and it allows for your own readers to utilize their service. Most WordPress plugins I have used in the past allow readers to individually submit your content into the social bookmarking and social networking sites. By providing your readers with the SocialMarker.com plugin, you allow them the option of submitting your content in to multiple networks - up to 46 currently.

Overall, if you use the SocialMarker.com plugin, you’re giving your readers an easy way to do more for you in much less time. Long story short, this will help you increase traffic and gain even more readers to your blog. If you don’t have a WordPress blog, or don’t want to install their plugin, SocialMarker.com also provides a direct javascript code that you can install instead.

All in all, I think SocialMarker.com is awesome. It doesn’t quite fit the glove perfect in relation to my dream desktop application; however, it is very close and indeed, it does save me a ton of time and it will save you a ton of time too.

One last thing that I would like to add a comment on. When I visit SocialMarker.com, it is very clear that they are seeking donations. Their site has some Google AdSense ads on it and there are a few donation buttons on the site. While this is a totally free service, I can strongly see how the creators would like to gain some compensation for the creation of this masterpiece.

I’d like for you to help. If you can’t donate any money, that is understandable. Some people can’t afford to spend money on extra things, even more donate money. However, you do have a blog and writing a post about SocialMarker.com will have a huge impact on increasing their exposure. If you really enjoy using SocialMarker.com, do what I did and write a blog post about it. I think SocialMarker.com is a wonderful service and I believe that it will help my readers a lot. If you feel the same, then tell all your friends about SocialMarker.com too.

What Do You Think?

I am very into this whole social bookmarking and social networking thing. I have totally seen a difference in traffic when I submit content into these bookmarking and networking sites. What do you think about all the hype regarding social bookmarking and social networking? Has it been working for you? Do you have friends in these networks? Do you all work together to help each other out? What do you think about SocialMarker.com? Give it a try and please be sure to provide your feedback about the program, it can only help others decide on what’s best for them. Share your thoughts using the comment form on this post.

You shouldn’t pack it up and call it a day after you write and publish a blog post. In fact, after you publish a blog post, you should look at it as being the beginning of your day rather than the end of the day. I’ll admit, this strategy is new for me; however, it works. My traffic has increased so much over the last few weeks and partly due to what I have done after I publish the post.

If getting traffic to your newly published article is important to you, then you’re going to need to reach out and pull people in to view your post. It is your blog and it is your responsibility to capture the attention of people. Again, that is assuming that you care about having people read your posts. Some bloggers just blog to pass the time and don’t care who or how many people read it.

How Attractive Is Your Post Title and First Paragraph?

First thing is that you really need to write something special. Your post really needs to reach out and grab someone within the first few seconds of reading. The blog post title is extremely important. In many cases, the post title is the deciding factor whether someone even gives your post a chance.

If your post title is hot, then you’ll get people to visit the page. However, very quickly thereafter - within the first few sentences - if your writing doesn’t continue to interest the person reading the post, they will quickly lose interest and not continue to read your post. The post title and the first paragraph of your posts have to be spot on and be an attention grabber.

Don’t Waste Your Material.

Lately, in more recent posts, I have been suggesting that people reduce their post volume down a bit. To me, it seems pointless to publish new content until your most recent post has reached its maximum exposure. How do you determine the maximum exposure rate? Well, I am sure there is more of an analytical way to determine this, but for me, I relate my maximum exposure rate to cooking popcorn in the microwave.

When you cook popcorn in the microwave, the instructions on the bag say, “stand by the microwave oven and listen for the popping sound to slow down. Do not wait for the popping sound to completely stop before turning off the microwave oven.” I use those same set of instructions with my blog. In other words, I monitor how many times my most recent post has been viewed, I monitor the number of interactions (e.g. comments) the post has had and I observe when the traffic has hit its peek and comments start to dwindle down. To me that is how I determine when it’s time to publish a new post.

Marketing and Promoting Your Blog Post

After a new post has been published on a blog, most people will wrap things up and call it a day. This is far from what you should be doing. Publishing your post is really only a fraction of the work that you need to invest in. Most of your time needs to be invested into marketing and promoting your blog and most recent blog post.

How Do You Market And Promote Your Blog?

Well, this has been a recent huge focus for me. I have been studying, testing and trying to figure out some of the most effective ways to promote my blog and my posts. What I have been doing is far from a master plan or anything like that, but I can tell you that it has really helped me to get more people to read what I write and visit my blog.

Email Newsletter Subscription VS FeedBurner

I have found that promoting a free newsletter on my blog is more effective than promoting my FeedBurner subscription options. In many ways, this really does make sense. For me -and I believe it would be safe to assume that the same goes for many others - my Google Reader is filled to the maximum. At any given time, my Google Reader tells me that I have 1000+ unread posts. However, my email inbox only has less than 100.

If the same is true for other people, then when I write a blog post and then write an email to my list subscribers in Aweber, my notification gets bumped ahead of everyone else. In the game of marketing, I have to believe that I am really not much different than other people. And in doing so, I know that email takes a huge priority over RSS feeds.

The number one way to promote your newly published content on your blog is by establishing an email list and using it to notify people when you have written something new and cool on your blog. FeedBurner provides an email notification service, which I feel is better to promote than your FeedBurner RSS feed, but even that is still far from being as powerful as sending out a personalized email to your subscribers. I use Aweber for my email newsletter needs. you can sign up or learn more.

Social Bookmarking and Networking For Marketing and Promoting

Sites like Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, Propeller.com and Sphinn.com all have their special blend of people who are primarily interested in certain topics. Contributing in social bookmarking sites is a very effective way to market and promote your blog and content within. However, your primary topic of choice will dictate which social bookmarking site works best for you. You need to invest time into researching many social bookmarking sites and not limit yourself to the just the four sites listed above. There are many different sites that hoard a lot of people who have specific interests (e.g. ActiveRain caters to the real estate niche).

Effective Method For Social Network Marketing and Promoting

There is a right way and a wrong way to market and promote your blog in the social networking and bookmarking sites. Each community has their own set of written rules as well as community based unwritten rules (e.g. what you do to be cool within the group). Most places such as Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com, discourage and frown upon others who submit their own content into their network.

The main reason why it isn’t good to submit your own content is because history usually repeats itself and most all people who submit their own content are doing it for the wrong intentions. Many consider this as spam. Many people know that the primary purpose for an individual to submit their own content is for the purpose of getting more traffic and exposure. That breaks the unwritten social community rules of engagement.

The community also understands that most people who do submit their own content will do so regardless of the level of quality. All in all, it is not advisable to submit your own content into social networking or bookmarking sites. The goal is to have other people do it for you.

How Do You Get Listed Without Doing It Yourself?

This is a slow growth process. In order to be successful with marketing and promoting your blog and content in social networking and bookmarking sites, you need to downplay the real reason why you are there and or just forget about your original intention or marketing and promoting your blog for awhile. If community members perceive that you are engaging into their network for the purpose of promoting your blog and content then they will likely not become a social networking buddy with you.

The key to success in social networking is having friends. So anything that you do to prevent gaining friendships in social networking sites is bad. Real bad! Gaining the trust and respect of others in social networking sites shouldn’t be hard, but make no mistake, it doesn’t happen overnight either. It’s a slow growth process.

In the long run, if you successfully establish yourself into one or two social networking / bookmarking sites, then your friends will automatically and naturally submit your content into the network voluntarily. The ultimate goal is to carry yourself well and build up a level of trust and respect with your peers within the social network to the point to where they submit your content and market and promote it for you.

How Do You Get In Good With The Social Networks?

Forget about your blog. You have to play the game and be the best at it. First, you have to recognize what the majority of the community members are interested in. Then you need to be the best at delivering the things the community wants. Be a contributor. View the profiles of members within the social networking community and observe the type of content they submit into the network. Cherry pick people and find individuals who share similar interests to the content that you typically publish on your blog. Select a handful of these people and cling to them.

Participate in their campaigns, vote or rate the content they submit into the network, visit their own blogs and read and comment on their posts. Submit or vote on content they have written and slowly over time, begin to build up an establishment of trust and respect with this selected handful of cherry picked individuals. Slowly, they will see your level of commitment and level of contribution.

The way most of these networks are set up, the members of your group will really have no choice but to recognize your efforts as everything you do within the network is documented. As time goes by, your name, your avatar and your profile will begin to be noticeable within your cherry picked group. Soon the tables will turn and you’ll hit the breaking point from being a newbie to an authority within your group. When that happens, people within your group will start to plug, rate, submit and or vote for your content instead of the other way around.

During this time as you’re attempting to conquer and become the authority in one group, you need to constantly be repeating the process in another. Commonly you will start to discover that these micro groups intertwine as you’ll start to see familiar faces from one one group to another group. This is a good thing!

What About Search Engines and Directories?

The reason why I am not talking much about search engines is for the fact that SEO is really a no brainer. People tend to over complicate SEO. Making a blog or web site friendly for search engines is not rocket science. The true challenge in getting hoards of traffic to your blog or web site is not in scoring traffic from search engines. If your web site or blog is built correctly, then search traffic will naturally come as your web site, blog and content within will rank accordingly in the search results.

The true challenge that is close to rocket science is in social networking. The reason being is simple. With Google, you’re trying to butter up to a computer program. Computer programs don’t have good days or bad days. Computer programs don’t base their decision to approve you, your blog or your content off emotion, personality or personal interest.

A computer program has a specific set of rules and instructions and regardless of who you are as an individual, race, gender, religious beliefs, etc… Google and all automatic search engines will still subject you to the same standards as everyone else. Search engines don’t care if you’re female, black, white, gay, satanic, etc. They care about content and ranking it accordingly.

The same is not true in social networking sites. In social networking sites you’re dealing with people and you’re attempting to harness the power of people within a mass group towards using them to market and promote your blog and content within.

In the long run of things, social networkings sites can harness more power than a search engine. I believe that word of mouth marketing is much more powerful and effective than any other form of marketing. Word of mouth marketing typically results in a higher success rate for the desired action. With that being said, in my opinion, social networking / bookmarking sites is the same as word of mouth marketing but on steroids.

Ranking in Google and other search engines is easy. The results are decent, but far from being as effective as getting a solid word of mouth lead. When a trusted friend tells you about a new and cool web site, more likely you’re going to check it out. When a trusted friend in a social networking site submits your content into the network, the only difference is instead of that person telling one person about your blog post, that person is telling thousands. The result is so powerful that literally thousands of people will come crashing into your site within hours.

I hope that you found this article helpful. I would totally appreciate if you took this moment to drop me a comment and share your thoughts. I would also appreciate being rewarded with your vote, rating or submission of this post into your favorite social networking / bookmarking site. As I had just mentioned, word of mouth marketing is very powerful. You’re small contribution of helping spread the word about this article carries a magnitude of power. Help me continue to help others by telling your friends about my blog and specifically this article.

To encourage you to share this article with others, I have converted this article into a free full high quality and downloadable mini eBook. You can download a copy here and share with others.

I have been writing posts about Micro Niche Finder and providing quite a bit of information about the product for about six months now. I am pretty busy today so I don’t have a lot of time to write a long and drawn out post, but I did want to jump on the blog for a few seconds and blast out this message.

I just received an email from James Jones that informed me that the price of Micro Niche Finder will be increasing from $67 dollars to $97 dollars in less than a week.

The reason for the price increase is because James is about to release the new version to the general public. When I purchased Micro Niche Finder it was version two. I granted the ability to update to version 3 and I have to say that I am very impressed.

For those who have already purchased Micro Niche Finder, you can upgrade to version 3 at no charge. Just check your dash board panel for “Update Micro Niche Finder”.

For those who haven’t already purchased Micro Niche Finder but have been kind of on the fence about doing it, now is the time to do it. Otherwise you’re going to to be spending an additional $30 bucks.

I know quite a few of my readers who have been on the fence due to being hesitant to invest the $67 bucks. However, now if you don’t purchase the program you’re going to be spending even more money when you do decide to order.

I totally enjoy this program. I back it up 110%. I use it everyday. I believe that Micro Niche Finder is worth every penny of $97 dollars. However, why pay that much when you can order it right now for only $67 dollars?

Visit the Micro Niche Finder home page, scroll down to the bottom of the page and submit your name and email address. James will then automatically email you and send you a video demo and references on how to order Micro Niche Finder.

I would really hate to see people who are interested in Micro Niche Finder end up paying $30 more than what is needed. This is honestly a very small window of opportunity and I am very thankful that James is offering this.

Learn more about Micro Niche Finder. Feel free to drop me a comment with any questions you may have.

I got back into a StumbleUpon kick again. For the last few weeks I have been doing quite a bit with Digg.com and to be honest, I am finding that Digg really isn’t cut out for bloggers and secondly its not cut out to be a very good source of finding new friends and gaining any extra traffic to speak of.

Of course, I attribute that to the topic of my blog. Long story short, I blog about making money online, search tips, etc… and these topics really aren’t the hottest item in the Digg network.

So, now I am going to focus the same amount of time and effort into building up my StumbleUpon network. For three weeks I devoted time towards adding many stories into Digg (mostly my pages from my friends) and it really didn’t seem to pay off very well for them.

I hear all the buzz about StumbleUpon and how at times you can get a burst fire of traffic, so I want to give it a shot and try to help my readers get some more traffic to their blog posts by either discovering or offering a contributing stumble thumbs up vote.

So here’s the deal. I am looking to build up my friend/fan base. Currently I have 96 fan and I have friended a total of 129 people in the StumbleUpon network.

I would like to focus some efforts towards building up my friend/fan base. If you have an account with StumbleUpon, I’d like to ask that you do two things for me:

1. Add me as a friend and I’ll do the same for you. You can add me here.
2. Add a brief review for my home page. You can do so here. Also please give me a thumbs up rating for me home page:
   http://www.garryconn.com/

If you do those two things for me, I will do the same for you. Secondly, I am opening up my Instant Messengers to allow for people to drop me an instant message with requests for me to either Stumble or Discover pages and blog posts.

Feel free to add my screen name to your instant messenger and contact me anytime:

1. Google Talk: Simply add GarryConn@Gmail.com
2. Yahoo Messenger: Simply add GarryLConn@Yahoo.com
3. Windows Live: Simply add GarryConn@Hotmail.com

I have Google Talk open like 24 hours a day. I don’t use Yahoo too often and Windows Live I rarely use at all. Your best bet is to add me as a friend to Google Talk.

By adding me to your instant messenger, you open up a direct line of communication with me. This is a two way street. I’ll accept requests to discover, review and stumble pages, but I do ask that you do the same for me.

If we all work together, I am going to help you drive some traffic to your blog posts and pages that you think are cool.

Sound good? Do you want to join my StumbleUpon empire? Let’s have some fun and share some really great content with the StumbleUpon community. Drop me a comment with your thoughts or if you have any questions.

Listen to this:

And now read this:

A few days ago, I sent out an email to all my email subscribers and also wrote a very kind heart to heart message regarding my advertisement policy.

Long story short, my policy is that I do not accept ads that point to affiliate based products commonly found in ClickBank or other related items such as that.

The most popular rejected advertisement request is this:

Ty Coughlin’s Reverse Funnel System. Current to date, I have rejected and refunded over 100 requests to advertise this product.

I don’t know anything about this product, I’ll admit that. But I don’t care. I am not advertising it. The simple fact alone of having over 100 people bombard me requesting to advertise their affiliation with Ty Coughlin Reverse Funnel System is enough reason for me to say, “I am not interested in this product!” and, “I am sure as hell not going to contribute towards promoting it!”

Is it a scam? I don’t know… and to be honest, I don’t really care. Products like this do not interest me, and I don’t blog about products like this. In fact, it more closely resembles the type of products I don’t like.

Need Examples of What Is Acceptable?

Just in case people are still not clear on what I am looking for in an advertiser for $5.95 here are a few examples:

Example A:

Example B:

Example C:

Note: Joel Comm is actually paying me for this ad. He owns this product!

Example D:

If you’re still not sure about the kind of advertisers I am looking for, I have taken it upon myself to create really cool game called, Garry’s Advertiser Concentration. Playing this game will help people better understand the kind of advertisers I am looking for.

I am provide, what I would seriously consider, some of the best advertising solutions within my niche. You can advertise a graphic on my blog for as little as $5.95 / month, which literally saves you hundreds of dollars.

If you haven’t noticed yet, I am extremely picky with who I accept into my ad system.

I want fresh blood. I want newbie bloggers. I want product developers. I want people who have written their own ebooks. I want people who want to promote legitimate things (that they own!). I want any advertisers who wants to take advantage of my offer while not exploiting my cheap prices by requesting to advertise trashy products, Internet scams or bogus products.

Time and time again, I watch and read the income reports from many other established blogs and I have mixed emotions about it. Part of me feels like posting your income report (if it’s good) can come across like its rubbing it in people’s faces.

I have talked to close to 50 people about this in email and instant message. People who were requesting that I post my reports. I explained to them how I felt about it and everyone I spoke to assured me that by posting my monthly income report it would be more of a motivational thing rather than an envy and jealousy thing.

So here goes, here is my March 2008 Income Report for Garry Conn dot Com. I am NOT including numbers derived from other sites or other ventures, just money generated from Garry Conn dot Com. This is my personal blog and I think it would be best to keep all the apples in one basket and the rest of the fruit in another.

I run and maintain quite a few very profitable web sites and also run a web site development and design business. The figures shown below were ONLY generated directly on Garry Conn dot Com. The total monthly income generated from Garry Conn dot Com equates to around 39% of my total income for the month. The remaining 61% was achieved on multiple sites and professional service contracts via Google Adsense, Web Design Service and Yahoo Publisher, Amazon Associates, Commission Junction and a few other programs.

190.45 Private Ads

146.03 AdSense

151.48 ClickBank

216.00 PepperJam

$2,750 Web Design

$3453.96 Monthly Total

Quite a large % of the total monthly income has been received with the newly added web design business. There is a lot of money to be made in this business.

I am currently looking to hire a few web designers on a per job basis. The deal is simple. You will complete the jobs I sell based off an agreed bid amount. Keep in mind, I focus on very HIGH QUALITY at LOW PRICES. I am not looking for someone who produces garbage. This job caters to the under the radar web designer who is looking to make some money with the skills acquired over the years.

- Interested? Email me at GarryConn@Gmail.com Subject = Web Design Ops.

I want to give out a special thanks to my Garry Conn dot Com Private Advertisers. Please be sure to visit the sites of my advertisers so that they will remain happy campers and keep spending money on me!

Are you Interested In Advertising?

I have an amazing program for everyone. The cost is super low and the BANG for your BUCK will make you deaf!!! Here are some of the sick and crazy programs I got going for the blogger who doesn’t quite have the biggest wallet.

1. If you would like to sport your 125×125 graphic on my site like the rest of the cool cats listed above, the cost is only $5.95/ month! And as you can tell, you’re not cool unless you buy my 125×125 for $5.95!
2. Buy a word or phrase and have it auto link to your blog. Many people know that I just run my mouth and type a million and one words on my blog. Is there a word or phrase that you’d like to hyperlink to your blog? Imagine having this word or phrase link to your blog from every page on my blog if I previously typed it! You’re going to flip out… the cost is only $5 bucks!!! Buy it now before I come to my senses!

I appreciate everyone who has joined me as an advertiser. I hope to continue doing business with you. To everyone else who has been looking for a very cheap yet effective way to advertise your blog, business, products or services, I have a some killer solutions for you. Be sure to check them out! Prices will be increasing soon.

Here is my first top quality article that is being mailed out to my mailing list. Because this is my first mailing, I am offering a link to this article to everyone who reads my blog. This serves as a sample of the level of quality content you’ll receive if you join my mailing list.

To join my mailing list, simply look at the top right corner of any page on my blog and register your name and email address with me. You will then receive an automatic email from me asking to validate your account. From there, you will instantly be included when I send out my next letter.

This is the ONLY time I will be including a direct link to my premium grade content from my blog. From this point on, if you want to be included, you have to join! Don’t worry folks, joining my mailing list is free. All my premium grade content is published to PDF. This allows readers the ability to download and read anywhere they want.

Here is the reference to my article titled, Blog Tips During Softball Practice. I would really love to have your help promoting this first premium grade article, if you don’t mind, please visit this page and offer me a Digg vote if you enjoy what you see. Your one vote will mean so much to me.

CLICK HERE to vote in Digg. Drop me a comment and share your thoughts with me. Let me know that you decided to offer me your Digg vote too!

How many times in a week do you search for images in Google Image Search? For bloggers, those numbers may be very high. I know that I use Google Image Search quite a bit when I need to find a picture to use for a blog post. And the reason why I know that Google Image Search can increase your blog traffic is because I can see the stats myself.

I use a lot of images on my blog and people are finding these images in Google Image Search. What they do from there, it’s hard to tell. By for people concerned about increasing numbers, then getting traffic from Google Image Search is a snap. A lot of blog authors are interested in increasing their traffic, I am too!

One thing I want to mention about getting traffic from Google Image Search is this - consider what your own behaviors are when searching for images. What happens when you find what you want? Do you drop a comment and tell the person, thanks for the image? Do you ever return for another visit? Majority of people will say no.

Having that said, some people still think traffic is traffic and that it may just look good in your traffic reporting stats, such as if you’re trying to resell or flip a domain. If you want to take advantage of Google Image Search and get your images and pictures to pull up first over everyone else, the remainder of this article will show you a few tricks in order to do so.

Name the images exactly what it is. If the image is of an opened laptop, then name it opened-laptop.jpg rather than just naming it laptop.jpg. If it is a black laptop you could name it, black-laptop-opened.jpg and so forth. The key to remember is giving your image an accurate name that describes it in about 2 to 4 words, three words seems to be the sweet spot.

There are quite a few other tricks of the trade with scoring more traffic from Google Image search. I’ll be happy to cover a follow up post if the interest level demands it. Drop me a comment and share your thoughts. I’d like to get more of the hermit readers jumping in here from time to time with some comments. You know who you are.

As more and more time goes by, Feedburner subscription numbers are becoming more and more important. Keeping things really primitive and very simple: The more subscribers you have, the more of a powerhouse or authoritative figure you are within your niche group. I am not going to sugar coat this, if you don’t have a lot of RSS subscribers and don’t show the numbers off in your FeedBurner Chicket, then you may be a cool guy or gal, but not really looked upon as a leading authority by initial first impression.

Here are my thoughts. I believe that everyone picks nose. But, no one will admit to it. I believe that people who are aware of PageRank and have the Google Toolbar installed and have activated the PageRank display, check to see what the PageRank is one the pages they visit. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that checking the PageRank of pages viewed is one of the first things that people do. Second had to that is FeedBurner.

The first thing I do when I visit is blog is check the PageRank, then I check to see if the author is displaying their FeedBurner Chicklet. If you have a blog within the same niche of my blog and you’re not displaying your FeedBurner numbers then I believe that you are aware that your numbers are low and that you don’t want to publicly display them. This opinion is also coming from a guy that openly admits that he picks his nose. I have no shame.

So, if you’re open minded and have come to terms with the fact that FeedBurner is a vital and important metric that gives people a surface scan representation of your individual authority, popularity and rank within your niche, then the remainder of this article will provide some off the cuff tips that will help you increase your FeedBurner subscription numbers.

For me, it’s all about “Self promotion and marketing” When starting a blog or pursuing through the stages of developing one where building up readership and increasing the level of hierarchical authority within the chosen group or niche are important, one of the best ways to work towards increasing subscriber numbers is in carefully and heavily self promoting and marketing the FeedBurner RSS subscription sign up forms and links.

Understanding the common behaviors of people coupled with the common behaviors of how people surf the Internet is very important. People want to stay on track, they don’t like to deviate way from the course and they like to feel that work is being made towards getting to an ending.

When promoting my RSS feed I strategically create advertisements and place them on the hottest places on my blog. Here is a screen shot illustrating the top fold hot spots on my post pages.

The hottest spot is the long horizontal rectangular advertisement that tells people about my RSS feed and offers a reason why people should subscribe to it. I have another that matches its effort at the bottom of the page as show in the next screen shot:

In this screen shot you will see that I once again promote my subscription services and directly below that, more private advertisers.

Now, having shown this to you I will now explain my thought process behind why I have my blog and many others set up this way. It is all about “cause and effect” or for programmers, “If and Then”, which I like better.

When I design a blog I consider, “If and Then”

If the visitor finds my page then what will they do next?

In my case I design my blog with this priority in mind.

If a visitor finds my page then they will subscribe. If the visitor doesn’t subscribe then they will read my content. If they read my content then they will subscribe. If they subscribe they will then come back and visit my site again.

Throwing private ads into the mix follows the same suite of “If and Then” tactics.

The final thought that I want to express to you is this, it doesn’t matter if you blog as 10 visits per day or 100 visits per day, if you focus on capturing a high percentage of daily traffic and convert them into subscribers, your daily incoming traffic will eventually start to compound on you.

It is not about having a ton of traffic. These measures help you create the traffic. The more people that you can retain and convert into daily visitors, the better.

It is all about the “If and Then’s” and understanding the pattens of how people surf the Internet and how the human brain processes information. If you introduce something to a visitor before anything else, you plant the seed. If you follow up with the message at the end of the page and control what the visitors sees directly after the climax of reading the content, you take that same planted seed and germinate it.

I hope that you found this tip helpful. If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe to GarryConn.com. The subscription options are directly below.