Are you a professional writer?  If so, how many articles do you write on a weekly basis? If you are like many other professional writers, there is a good chance that your answer may be hundreds of articles.  Out of those articles, no matter how large or small your number is, how many of your articles are similar in nature?  If you are also like many other professional writers in this aspect, your answer might be not many.  Unfortunately, many writers mistakenly believe that once they create an article they need to move on to other articles or other opportunities.  In reality, this couldn’t be further from the truth.  If you play your cards right, you should be able to capitalize on one of your articles, in a number of different ways.

When it comes to making as much money as you can with one article, there are a number of important factors that must first be taken into consideration. For instance, are you writing your articles for someone else, a client?  If so, did you or are you giving them full rights to your content?  If that is the case, you entered a legal binding contract; however, there are still a number of ways that you can take that article and continue to profit from it.  You can do this by changing your content, so that it is slightly different, but enough to notice.  Simply by changing your sentences, which can involve simply rearranging or adding in new words, you can create new content, although it is still the same.  This will effectively get you around any copyright issues that you may otherwise face.

If you are not developing articles for a client, but rather developing them for your own use or if you plan on selling them later, you can still capitalize on your articles in different ways.  When selling content that you developed yourself, on your own, you will want to refrain from giving the buyer full rights.  This is often referred to as non-exclusive rights. When giving a buyer non-exclusive rights, you remain the legal owner of the content.  Essentially, this means that you can resell your article multiple times, without ever having to change a single word.  Selling your articles with non-exclusive rights is one of the easiest and fastest ways to make the most money.

In addition to keeping your articles as articles, there are other ways that you can capitalize from your content.  In today’s society, many readers are now turning to the internet or their computer, instead of printed books.  This has, essentially, increased the popularity of e-books.  Have you ever written an e-book before? If not, it is important that you know that most e-books are simply a collection of articles, just formatted differently.  If you have a collection of articles, that are all on the same topic or ones that are related in one way or another, you may be able to turn your articles into an e-book.  E-books are nice because they are sold like traditional, printed books. The same material can be sold to thousands or even millions of readers.  Turning your articles into an interesting e-book could be a very profitable business venture for you.

Although turning a collection of your articles into an e-book is a profitable business venture, it is not the only one that you could profit from.  Over the past few years, millions of internet users have used the internet to learn something new.  Whether it be how to successfully home school their children or work from home as a medical transcriber, many are turning to the internet for more information.  If you wrote a collection of articles that could be used as learning resources or how-to guides, you may want to examine online mini-courses, which are also commonly referred to as e-courses.  When using your articles to create a miniature e-course, there are a number of different ways that you can make money. You can sell your e-course material to another individuals or company, offer the materials free of charge and make money from advertising, or you can charge internet users a small fee for accessing your information; the decision is yours to make.

The above mentioned methods are just a few of the many ways that you can go about turning a simple article into much more than just one article.  With creativity and the need to succeed, you can easily make the same amount of money with one article that you would with fifty articles.

Capitalizing on your content will not only increase your chances of having your article read, but it will also increase the likelihood of your name being associated with popular authors.

Search engine spiders are by far one of the most useful things to come around in the last 10 years of the internet. They are useful not only to the web sites (Google and many others) that use them, but also to people who are searching for a particular site and those who run web sites. Spiders allow your site to be seen by the millions of people who use search engines every day. In this newsletter, we will discuss what search engine spiders do, how they work, and how to set up a robots.txt file and upload that to your site to keep spiders from visiting your site.

What are spiders and what purpose do they serve?

Spiders are essentially programs that “crawl” sites and report back to their superior (Google or whatever search engine they were created for) what their findings are. Their purpose is to make it easy for sites to get listed in search engines.

You might be wondering, what does it mean to “crawl” a site? Well it means to visit and site and copy the information.

How do spiders work?

Spiders work by finding links to web sites, visiting those web sites, going through the content of a web site and then reporting the content of the site back to the database of the site which they are working for. Google spiders, thus, crawl sites and report the information back to Google’s database. From there, the information is added to Google’s search engine, and the site then shows up in Google search results. Much the same process happens with any other search engine spider.

How can I keep spiders from visiting my site?

You might be thinking, “why would I want to keep such a useful thing from visiting my site?” Well, the short answer is, sometimes site owners don’t want the spider to crawl on a particular part of their site. Some site owners don’t want spiders to crawl their site at all. The reasons for not wanting a spider to crawl a site or a particular part of a site vary, although most of the time it is because the site is either completely spam or features a page or two of spam, or perhaps there are private member-only pages the site owner does not want to appear in search listings.

If you’re one of those site owners, then you’ll want to create and upload something called a robots.txt file. We will briefly go over how to do this.

A robots.txt file

The whole purpose of a robots.txt file is to tell a search engine spider not to crawl the site or part of the site on which the robots.txt file resides.

Creating the file

Creating a robots.txt file that blocks out spiders is easy. First, open up notepad. Then, copy and paste the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Once you’ve done that, save the file as “robots” and as a .txt file.

Uploading the file

Next, you will upload the file to the part of your site which you do not want the spider to visit. So, if you don’t want them to visit yoursite.com/news/, you’ll upload robots.txt to the news folder. If you don’t want the search engine spider to visit your site as well, upload robots.txt to your index folder. That’s all there is to it.

Using the robots.txt file to make sure search engine spiders DO visit your site

Believe it or not, the robots.txt file can be used to both disallow and allow search engine spiders to crawl your site. Here’s how to create and upload such a file.

Creating the file

Open up notepad and copy and paste in the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

You’ll notice that the only difference between this and the earlier example is that Disallow: is not followed with /. If it were, that would tell spiders to go away. Once again, save the file as robots.txt.

Uploading the file

All you’ll do is upload the robots.txt file to the part of your site that you want the robot to pay a visit to. So if you want the robot to see the whole site, just put the robots.txt file right alongside the index file. And you’re done.

Creating and uploading a robots.txt file to help make sure spiders don’t miss your site is fast and easy. So what are you waiting for? Create and upload that file now!

Keywords or phrases are tools used in internet marketing to achieve better rankings in search engines.  At a certain point in time, webmasters abused this system by saturating the content of their websites with keywords to be able to achieve a high ranking. However, this resulted in search engine users getting results that had no relevance whatsoever to their query. To combat this abuse, search engine webmasters developed algorithms to decipher which websites have relevant content and which websites did not. Now, the whole focus for keyword utilization has shifted to content rich articles with a keyword ratio average of about 12% of the whole article.

The whole reason for this shift in keyword utilization stems from the fact that search engine sites track and record the abuse of keywords. If you happen to have an article of 500 words containing nothing but the word “porn”, chances are your site will be banned from the search engine.

This shift has also created a whole new industry in writing. You will definitely be able to get a few odd jobs writing search engine optimized (SEO) articles.

The key to writing good SEO articles is to be true to the subject at hand. Make sure that your SEO article contains relevant information and a substantial proportion of keyword scattered throughout the article. Include a keyword or phrase in the title of your article. Include a minimum of 2 keywords or phrases in the beginning and ending paragraphs of your article. Finally, scatter keywords in the body of your article. If you have a 500 word article, a minimum of 1 keyword or phrase per paragraph in the text body is recommended.

Write your article for your product, not for the sake of keywords. As you go on with your article, you will be using your keywords when you describe your product and when you give out instructions on how to use the product. Write about how the product came into existence and how it has developed through the years. Cite instances where the product has been particularly useful to you or to an acquaintance.

When writing the article, do not force the keyword issue. Your articles must be forthright, literate, easy and entertaining to read. Some writers sacrifice grammar for the sake of a keyword placement. Don’t do that. When searchers are directed to an article of yours and it happens to contain spelling errors, wrong grammar and a generally sloppy composition, they might decide to look for another article or website that contains more nicely written content.

If you are unable to compose your own article because of time constraints, you can use freelance websites to hire article writers who will do the job for you. Prices for an original SEO article containing 500 to 750 words max range anywhere from $1 to $15. Just be sure to communicate well with the writers so that they fully understand what you require. Ask for previous work samples so you can judge whether their skills are up to your standards. If you come across a writer offering his service rather cheaply, don’t rush in and call yourself lucky. The best way to be sure that you have found a cheap but quality conscious worker is to ask him to provide one article to you. In exchange you will pay him for that one article and use it as criteria for judging his qualifications.

Try writing an article yourself before hiring it out to someone else. You of all people should know how the article must
read.

Getting listed quickly in search engines is something every web site owner wants to do. Lots of site owners don’t really know how to do this, though. Fortunately for them, there are several ways to getting listed quickly, all of which we will go over in this article. These ways include submitting the URL, using keywords, using links, and using blogs to get listed quick.

Tip #1: Submit your URL manually to search engines

Search engines like Google, Altavista and Yahoo all have options for you to manually submit your site. Before submitting, however, it is important to make sure of the following:

1.    All pages on your site are complete. Search engine spiders won’t touch incomplete sites.
2.    Your site is not full of spam and/or excessive use of keywords. Yet again, spiders won’t touch spam sites, which means your site will be skipped over if it contains lots of spam.

When you submit the site, make sure to submit it only once to each search engine. Submitting multiple times to the same search engine will get you no where. In fact, they might keep your site from ever having a chance at being listed on the search engine.

Tip #2: Use keywords to get spiders to come to your site

Search engine spiders absolutely love sites with good, well-placed and well-used keywords and key phrases. In other newsletters, we have covered the correct use of  keywords and key phrases, so you might already be familiar with it. If not, we’ll briefly touch on it right now.

Keywords are words that are used frequently on a site that search engines look for. The key to correct usage of keywords is to make them fit naturally throughout a piece of content and not look like spam. Before writing your content for your site, take a second to decide what the content is about. Then make a list of keywords or key phrases that seem to fit with the topic at hand. Next, write the content and try to sprinkle in the keywords or key phrases throughout the content in a natural, non-distracting way. When you are done writing the content, you should count the number of keywords or key phrases. Then divide that by the total number of words in content. If the number you get is between 1-3%, you’re good to go. If it’s below 1%, try to naturally add in keywords or key phrases. If it’s above 5%, try to take out keywords or key phrases. Aim for the perfect balance of between 1 and 3%.

Tip #3: Use links

Having another site link to you will make spiders that visit the first site come to your site as a result of the link. Many owners of sites related to yours are happy to post a link to your site on their links page. Some might require what is called “reciprocal linking”. This basically means that if they place a link to your site on their page, they want you to return the favor by posting a link to their page on your site. Doing so helps both sites better gain the attention of search engine spiders and helps them both to get listed quickly.

Tip #4: Install a blog on your site

Blogs are extremely popular and quickly listed by search engines. Places like Google are known to index (or list a site/blog) far faster than they list regular web sites. Blogs are listed by search engines like Google within days of being created, whereas it can take weeks and months for search engines to notice a site.

Installing a blog on your site is really easy. All you have to do is install a program such as WordPress on your web site and then use that to make blog postings. If you run a sports site, for instance, you could try making twice a week posts on the blog about sports news. Doing so will help your site as a whole get noticed quicker by search engines.

If you apply just one of the tips above to your web site, you will get listed more quickly than expected.

Creating a blog on your web site is quicker than ever before. Do it today and watch how quickly and effortlessly your site gets listed on search engines!

In today’s society, everyone is searching for easy ways to make money.  In a way, affiliate programs can be considered one of those opportunities.  If you have a website that receives a high amount of traffic, you may be able to make money with affiliate programs, with little or no work.  Despite the possibility of making money with little effort, you may want to think about putting forth some effort.  There are a number of relatively easy ways that you can go about increasing your commissions.

If you are already in an affiliate program, you likely know exactly what affiliate program commissions are.  If this is your first time joining an affiliate program, you may want to learn a little bit more.  Affiliate program commissions are just like the commissions that many retail stores offer their employees for making large sales.  If and when you join an affiliate program, you will be notified of your commission rate ahead of time.  Say, that rate is five percent.  Every sale that you help to generate, you will receive five percent of that sale in commissions.  Many times, all you need to do is place a link or a banner on your website.  That is why affiliate programs are often considered on the easiest ways to make legitimate money online.

One of the easiest ways to increase the amount of commission you make with affiliate programs to choose your programs wisely. When it comes to affiliate commissions, different programs offer affiliates different commission rates.  Typically, a common commission percentage is three to five percent.  There are a select number of affiliate programs that have a ten or even a fifteen percent commission rate for affiliates.  Joining an affiliate program that has a relatively high commission percentage is one of the easiest ways that you can increase the amount of money you make.

Another one of the many ways that you can go about increasing your commission is to be successful.  Although this is often easier said than done, it can help you immensely.  Most affiliate programs reward their highest performing affiliates.  For instance, once you reach a high level of earning, like one thousand dollars in sales, you may be promoted to a higher commission level.  Many affiliate programs do this as a way to motivate their affiliates.  If you can successfully make sales, you can see an increase in the amount of commission you make.

In addition to choosing your affiliate programs wisely and performing better, you can also increase your commissions through experimentation.  There are a large number of different ways that you can go about increasing your affiliate program commissions. The only thing is that not all of these ways work for everyone.  The best thing that you can do is experiment.  You will need to take the time to see what works for you and what doesn’t.  When experimenting, you may want to try writing affiliate product reviews or recommendations, sending out monthly newsletters, optimizing your website for search engines, or submitting articles to article directories.

It is also important that you give it time.  Increasing your affiliate commissions is not something that will happen overnight. The only way that you can increase your commissions right off the bat is by signing up with a high paying affiliate program.  However, even with those programs, you are not guaranteed to make any sales right away.  If you are interested in using search engine optimization on your site, sending out newsletters, or submitting to article directories, you need to give these methods time to work. Although you may want to see results right away, it doesn’t matter if it helps one week from now or two months from now, at least you will be able to see an increase in your commissions.

By keeping the above mentioned points in mind, you should be able to see an increase in the amount of money you make with affiliate programs. After time, you may very well end up making a full-time income just with affiliate programs.

If you put your mind to it, you could very well support yourself and maybe even your family, just by actively participating in affiliate programs.

Are you looking to increase the amount of traffic that your website sees? If you rely on your website for income, there is a good chance that you are. If you are unfamiliar with internet marketing, you may have done a little bit of online research.  While researching internet marketing, there is a good chance that you came across article directories. Article directories are essentially online websites that display content, often with links. These links should link readers directly to your website, whether it be an online store or a content site.  When it comes to article directories, one of the most common questions asked is “is it worth the time?”  In all honesty, it depends.

Submitting articles to article directories is a great way to increase traffic to your website, but it all depends on the approach that you take.  If you are looking to benefit from submitting articles to article directories, there are a number of important factors that you will want to take into consideration. These factors, which are outlined below, may have a significant impact on the amount of traffic that your website sees from article distribution.

As it was mentioned above, article directories are essentially websites that display a collection of content. That content, which is accompanied by links, is often placed into specific categories, such as parenting, money, business, and so on.  As article distribution has increased in popularity, so have article directories. This means that it is possible to find hundred of article directories that are willing to accept your articles and have them displayed on their site.  While your first impulse may be to submit your articles to every article directory that you can find, you may want to reexamine your decision to do so, as it can be time consuming.  In fact, it may be a good idea to research article directories, find, and submit articles to the directories that are considered the most popular or those that come highly rated and recommended.

It is also important that you examine how often you submit content.  As with your website, you are urged to update it often or at least add new content to it.  After all, it is a known fact that internet users like to see new, refreshed content.  The same can be said for the articles that you submit to article directories.  You will want to develop a schedule.  Submitting new articles to article directories a couple of times a week is a good goal to have.  In fact, the more you can submit, the better the results are likely to be.  The more articles that you have distributed across the internet, the more links you will have.  This, in turn, will increase your chances of seeing your website’s traffic increase.

Although producing and disturbing a large number of articles is your best chance of success with article  directories, you also want to examine the content that you are submitting.  It is extremely important that your content is interesting, readable, and presentable. That is why it is important that you do not rush when creating articles. In fact, it may be a good idea to proofread your articles multiple times, before distributing them online. It is also advised that you view your articles, once they have been published online.  Most article directories will allow you to post links to your websites at the end of your article page.  For article directories to work to your benefit, you need to make sure that readers make it to the end of your article.  This is why interesting and readable articles are vital to your success.

As long as you keep the above mentioned points in mind, you should be able to benefit from submitting to article directories.  To get you started, you may want to examine Ezine Articles – http://www.ezinearticles.com/, Isnare Articles – http://www.isnare.com/, and Article Alley – http://www.articlealley.com; they are considered three of the most highly rated and recommended article directories online.

Article directories are a great way to increase your website’s traffic, but they are also a great way to get your name, as an author, out into the internet community.

These days, our needs for knowledge, information, everyday necessities and novelty materials can be found just with one single click on an internet website. It’s no surprise that people prefer to surf the WWW rather than go to a library or shopping center to look for or buy what they want. More and more people use search engines like google to help them go directly to the website that contains what they need.

This trend sparked a revolution in internet marketing strategies. Web masters of vendor sites compete with each other to place their websites in the top 10 search results of a user’s searches. Various software utilities were created to boost the chances of high SE rankings. Some of these utilities even manage to cheat a high ranking out of a search engine even when the website itself contains nothing of interest to the user.

As more and more web masters arm themselves with rank boosting software, the effectiveness of their efforts begins to plummet so much so that they find themselves back to where they started. A new avenue for increasing their rankings became necessary. One of these ideas is the saturation of keywords on a single article. The entire philosophy of keywords hinged on their relevance. In searching for a Ford truck, what search strings would the customer use? How many of those search strings will match the keywords? The more a search string matches your site or article’s keywords, the higher you place on a search engine result page. Keywords have gotten to be such a major concern that private enterprises which offer search engine optimization (SEO) services are now making a killing in the internet economy.

The first result that comes out of a search engine is usually the website that contains the most similar number of keywords in the exact same order as the search. For instance, if I used “DIY Wi-Fi antenna” for my search string, the search engine will look for the exact same words and word placement. Now, if I type the word “ask” and perform my search using google, the common result would be ask.com. Notice how the search engine immediately went for the website with the domain name (ask.com) that matched my query. On the other hand, if I type “asked”, google still comes out with the ask.com webpage as its top search result. It’s all about relevance.

To be able to fully utilize your website’s potential as a top search result item, you need to orient your website towards the product or idea you want to promote. If you cannot have the .com name, you can rely on keyword optimization to help you with your search engine rankings.

You do not need to consult a private enterprise to tell you which keywords to use. All you have to do is think about your product or idea and think of how you would look for it in the internet using a search engine.

Keywords will not work for you if you keep them generic. Most customers log onto the internet already knowing what they need or want. Remember, these shoppers can’t hold or examine the merchandise so they want to find out about them fist hand before they actually buy. When they do decide to buy, they have a specific idea in mind. They will use this idea as their search string in search engines. Ergo, if you have multiple products, you need to be able to generate a fair amount of literature containing relevant keywords for each of your merchandise. If you choose to limit your business to a certain area, be sure to include the name of your chosen location into your keyword base.

You also need to take care of the literature or articles you produce for your business. Make sure that they contain the necessary keyword count. Do not sacrifice the quality of your articles for the sake of keywords. Always present a detailed, literate and informative article.

In today’s society, the internet is no longer just used for shopping or entertainment; it is also used for learning.  Over the past few years, online eCourses have rapidly increased in popularity. What does this mean for you? This means that if are an article writer, you can easily build off of this popularity.  You can do this by making eCourses with your articles.

Before examining how you can go about making eCourses with articles, it is best to quickly familiarize yourself with eCourses, namely what they are.  Just as they sound, eCourses are courses that are offered online. These courses, which are often hosted over the internet, enable internet users to get an education or familiarize themselves with something new, often right from the comfort of their own homes. Although eCourses have similar goals, to educate internet users, those goals are accomplished in different ways.  There are some individuals who are considered experts in their field, such as the field from working from home.  Many experts create eCourses and distribute them online for other internet users to benefit from.  eCourses are also offered by many colleges and universities as a way to get an education from home.

Now that you know exactly what eCourses are, you can better understand how you make an eCourse.  If you have never taken or viewed and eCourse before, you may not realize that they are just collections of information, just like articles. In fact, that is why making your own eCourse may be a lot easier that you had originally anticipated.  The way that you can create your own eCourse can vary, but many article writers just take a collection of articles and combine them together.  Of course, will want to combine them in a way in which they are easy to read, helpful, and connected.  For instance, if you are interested in making an eCourse that focuses on working from home, you will first want to explain what working from home is before outlining various work at home opportunities, and so
forth.

Once you have successfully created an eCourse, your next step will all depend on your goals. For instance, is your goal to make money with your eCourse or is your goal to generate traffic for your website?  If your goal is to generate traffic for your website, you may want to think about offering your eCourse materials free of charge.  Many webmaster paste their eCourse materials on their website, for easy viewing, but others use it as email content.  If you use your eCourse material as email content, you are essentially creating and distributing a newsletter.  Newsletters are another one of the many highly rated and recommend internet marketing tactics that webmasters
use.

If you are not a webmaster, just a professional article writer, you may be interested in using your eCourse to generate sales.  If so, there are a couple of different approaches that you can take.  For the fastest results, you may want to consider selling your eCourse to an individual or company who can effectively promote it.  This will, in turn, generate income for both parties involved.  If do have the time to market and promote your own eCourse, you may want to examine selling it on your own.  As it was previously mentioned, a large number of webmasters offer similar eCourses free of charge.  Despite this free competition, you may still be able to make a substantial profit from selling your eCourse material, even if you make it available for a low price.

Whichever way you decide to use your material, you are still advised to make an eCourse with your articles.  After all, what else would you do with your articles?  Making an eCourse is a great way to put your old, unused articles to good use.

When transforming your articles into an eCourse, you can distribute your articles if you want for free or you can sell them and make yourself a little bit of extra cash.

You’re a blogger and are constantly hearing about pinging. The thing is, you don’t know what it is and what it can do for your blog. Well that’s fine because a lot of bloggers don’t quite understand pinging. In this newsletter, we will explain what pinging is, how it helps your blog, and what the best pinging services are. After you’ve read this newsletter, you’ll know exactly how to use pinging to make your blog popular.

What is pinging?

When a blog is pinged, it essentially tells a web blog tracking system that the blog has been updated. Thus, pinging is the process of telling tracking services that a site has been updated.

So how does pinging work? Well, a ping service scans regularly blogs for updates. Whenever there is a new update for a particular blog, that is reported back to the pinging service’s site. You can almost think of ping services being just like search engine spiders—both scan sites looking for information, and both report that information back to their specific site. The difference is, a ping service only reports back new blog posts.

Why is pinging useful for my blog?

Pinging, in effect, tells people that there is a new blog posting available. Those who are loyal followers of your blog will see the ping and want to visit your blog. Those who haven’t read your blog before will see the ping and perhaps think “hey, there’s a new blog I haven’t been to before, I think I’ll check it out”. Pinging helps to increase your traffic because it tells people when your blog is updated. Those who visit sites with pinging services will see this information in the form of a scroll on the left or right side, or top of the page. The scroll is usually in XML format and typically includes the title and URL of your blog, as well as the date and time of the update.

OK, so now I know what pinging is. Who offers pinging?

The answer is, there are several pinging services available which you can use to have your blog pinged. We’ll go over some of them right now.

Weblogs.com

Weblogs.com is probably the most well-known pinging service. Weblogs.com monitors sites for updates and then pings whenever there is an update to report. Virtually every blog software is available to use Weblogs.

Yahoo’s Blo.gs

Another popular pinging service, this one is offered by Yahoo  and has a built-in integration with movable type and other tools. One cool thing about this service is that it offers the ability to give out updates via Instant Messenging services like AOL and ICQ. It is a direct pinging service, so those who sign up for subscriptions to your blog will be sent an email anytime your blog is updated.

Blogrolling.com

Blogrolling allows its bloggers to manage their blogrolls(updates) through a web-based interface. Recently updated blogs are also highlighted on Blogrolling’s web site. Data is automatically retrieved from other sites like blogger.com and weblogs.com every 5 minutes. Often times your blog is already being pinged by Blogrolling, so you might not have to sign up for it. Search on the site first for your URL before signing it up.

Technorati

Available at http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping, Technorati is another service that pings blogs. It gets its data from a variety of places and is definitely a site you should go to for blog pinging.

These are just 4 of the many different blog pinging services available. A quick search on Yahoo or Google will reveal many other possible blog pinging services to use for your blog. It is best to sign up for as many as you possibly can to ensure that your blog is well-pinged. A well-pinged blog will definitely help your blog attract more visitors. So sign up for as many as possible and watch your blog traffic increase.

Pinging tells people when your blog is updated. It is an incredibly useful, and easy to sign up for service, so be sure
to sign your blog up for pinging!

Is your blog collecting dust and not getting enough traffic? It’s a common problem for bloggers. Their blogs are good, but no one is coming to visit. They want to know how to increase traffic. Increasing traffic is actually easier than it seems–provided you know how. In this newsletter, we will go over 7 specific methods of increasing traffic. These are guaranteed methods to draw more visitors to your blog.

Tip #1: Sign up for pinging services

It seems pretty obvious, but most bloggers, even those who are more experienced, don’t sign up for pinging services. If you’re new to blogging and don’t know what pinging means, pinging basically means that when your blog is updated, a “ping” is sent out by the service to let pinging sites know that your blog has been updated. People who are visiting sites with pinging services will then see your blog flash across the side of the screen as “newly updated”. Pinging services include Yahoo’s blo.gs, weblogs.com, Google Blog search, and ZingFast.

Tip #2: Sign up for Technorati

If you go to technorati.com, you’ll see an option on the left side of the screen to “Claim Your Blog”. Doing so allows you to get updated link counts, add your photo or branding to Technorati, and see your Technorati link. Having your blog claimed on Technorati helps to increase traffic because the millions of people who go to that site will have a chance to see your blog on there.

Tip #3: Sign up for FeedBurner, a RSS service

What FeedBurner basically does for your blog is it helps you to promote your blog’s content, build your audience and measure your audience. In other words, it helps you increase your blog’s traffic.

Tip #4: Bookmark your blogs at places like del.icio.us

You can set up an account and profile at del.icio.us. Then, using that, you can add links to your blog along with excerpts from your blog. Anytime someone visits your profile on del.icio.us, they will see a link to your blog and excerpts. There are other social bookmarking sites that you can use in much the same way. The bottom line is, using these social bookmarking sites can help you increase traffic.

Tip #5: Post comments at other blogs

No, this doesn’t mean you should go and spam other blogs with comments that are only there to promote a site. It means that you should visit similar blogs to your own, post legitimate comments and then sign your name(along with a link to your blog). This way, people know you aren’t there just to promote your site—you’re there to post a good piece of feedback and also say where you’re from.

Tip #6: Ask owners of other blogs to post a link to yours

Find other blogs that are similar to yours. If they seem to be decently popular(that is, they have a good amount of comments for each post), you can try to contact the owner of the blog to add a link to your blog if they have a links section. To make them really want to do this, you can offer to link back to their blog on your blog. People do this reciprocal blog linking all the time and it does help to increase traffic.

Tip #7: Use keywords in your blog

Like regular web pages, having a good keyword density on a blog is a terrific way of getting search engine spiders to notice your page. (FYI: Search engine spiders are programs from search engines that browse sites and report back their findings to the search engine database, which then lists that site. The more keywords on your site, the more likely it is for a search engine spider to pay a visit)

If your average blog posting is around 200 words, try to use 2-6 keywords per blog post. 2-6 keywords in a blog posting of 200 words is a keyword density of between 1 and 3 percent, a respectable number. Remember that you don’t want to use too many keywords, as that will make your blog look bad. Also be sure that the keywords used are relevant to your blog. Before even making a blog posting, decide what the post will be about and then select a keyword or two to use in your post. Then do it. It’s a surefire way of getting more traffic to your site!

Signing up with a service like Technorati is a quick, painless way of increasing traffic to your blog. So sign up
today!