Because this blog is essentially three-four weeks old, I’ve been finding it’s really hard to compete at this point, for such competitive search terms as "make money online," and "make money blogging." Now I’m not throwing in the towel on these, I will come back in the future. But for now, I’ve decided to go for a new keyword, "How to get traffic."

I’ve been realizing that my site really has nothing to do with how to make money blogging, or make money online. In reality, it’s a blog on how to get traffic. That’s probably what was effecting my rankings as well. I mean just take a look at my most popular posts, "how to get traffic," "how to use stumbleupon," "how to get traffic to your blog, there all about how to get traffic, and have nothing to do with making money.

My personal philosophy, is that if you have alot of traffic coming to your site, making money is easy, and can be done plenty of ways. So why waste time with a make money blog, when all people really need to know is how to get traffic.

However as I looked around the blogging world, I found that there are surprisingly few sites on gaining traffic. Every blog has a little post about it, but there are very few sites that focus solely on how to gain traffic. There isn’t even a niche for it. I have yet to find on any site, neither post or blog submissions ones, that have a category on how to get traffic. And so all these blogs are forced to sheepishly slink into the make money online group, when that’s really not what they are. So today I care a new niche, How to get traffic blogs. I don’t know what I’m going to do with that new found knowledge, but there it is all the same.

The one idea I did have though, was that blogs on how to get traffic are my favorite type of blog to read, that’s why I’m in it. And so I would love to see a site, that collects all of these into one, and does reviews on them and recommends the good ones.

If I were to create a site that collected and reviewed them, do you think people would read it? Would you read it?

Using StumbleUpon

Stumble upon is an incredible tool for traffic. I’ve gotten around 5,000 hits from the site, which is a good amount for any site. However one of people’s biggest complaints, is that stumbleupon visitors don’t stay long, and that they have a very high bounce rate. I want to dismiss this myth, I have found the opposite. My stumbleupon visitors stay for an average of 1:30 minutes, to 2 minutes, which is quite good for 5,000 visits. Also the bounce rate, has been at an incredible low of 29%, that’s is unbelievable. So there, myth dismissed.

So Stumbleupon produces some good quality readers, and commenters as well. But the question is, how do I use stumbleupon? Everybody says it’s a great traffic source, but nobody has yet explained step by step how to do that. Well here is my step by step help.

1. Create an account

Obvious I know, but yeah just do it, it’s pretty important.

2. Write an Article Worth Stumbling

This is the most important step, because you can use it for more then just stumble. Sit down, and write a worthwhile article, check your grammar and spelling… and make it knowledgeable on your niche. Take as much time as you need on this, make it good, because it will determine the success of traffic.

3. Install the Stumble toolbar

This is easy and can be done here on the stumble site. You Need it so make sure you get it. It is simple to use, just the “thumbs up,” “thumbs down” buttons. The stumble button, for going to random sites. And the “send to” button, which is very important as you’ll find out later. 

4. Getting Friends

There are three ways to do this. First, earning friends over time because of like interests. This is the best way and will be the most successful for you. This will help you greatly because if they are in your niche then it’s pretty likely you’ll like your posts as well. However this can take a lot of time to generate a lot of friends like this, and for weeks to months, depending on how active you are, you’ll have only a couple friends. Which would decrease your potential for lots of traffic. The second way, is to just go on the site, and run around frantically adding random people that look cool, or seem to have a lot of friends. I wouldn’t do that if I were you. Laregly because most of the time, people won’t even add you back, and you can only have a maximum of 200 friends. So if you waste 50 with people who don’t add you back, later you’ll have to go back and delete all of them. The third way, is by going onto social sites like blogcatalog, and doing friend request exchanges. This isn’t as good as the first way, but also not as quick as the second way. It’s kind of in the middle with success rate. My suggestion is to do a mixture of the three. Add around 50-100 people from a site social marketing site, and then as you work on the site, make friends and add them. And also add popular people in your niche, their most likely popular for a reason. This is what I did, and it worked really well for me.
 Now you maybe be wondering why is friends so important? Well I shall explain later.

5. Gettings Stumbles on your posts.

There are three ways to get stumbles.

First, to do stumble exchanges. I would be wary of this, because you can get banned from the site. It can be very successful but it’s also risky. However that doesn’t mean you can’t join those types of groups. Just don’t stumble blindly, actually read the article and if you like it, give it a thumbs up. But don’t just thumbs up everybody. Stumble can’t track whether you really like it or not, all they can track is if you thumbs up, 100 sites in one day.

The second way, is to send it to your friends. Once you’ve written the article and installed the toolbar, you can press the send to button. And then click the friend’s name to send. This is a very laborious task, if your trying to send it to all your friends, cause you have to click each one and do a message, but it’s worth it so keep at it.

The third way, is write content worth stumbling. This is the most best way. Make sure it is a good article that your stumbling, and it Will get stumbled. I have got a lot of faith in the stumbleupon users, they can tell good content from bad content.

6. Be Active on the site.

This will vary depending on how much time you have. But you have to be, to some extent active on the site. Otherwise, you will be considered a spammer and be blocked. So find a couple niches, and check up on them occasionally, stumble the good posts, down the bad. If you enjoy doing this spend more time on it, but if nothing more, this is a way to keep your account from being banned.

Those are the basic six steps on How to use Stumbleupon. But now I want to share with you some tips that I’ve learned from experience by using the site.

1. Don’t only stumble your own posts.

I had an account that I didn’t really use very much, only on a occasion, and it got suspended. Honestly I don’t really know why, but I’m guessing because I only stumbled my posts on it. Don’t make that mistake, be an active contributor to the site, stumbleupon is to powerful to waste by being kicked out.

2. Don’t lose your friends by spamming them.

Do not send out every post, friends can be very useful but I would use them very sparingly as a trump card. Friends can get you a lot of stumbles, so don’t waste the oppourtunity by sending htem every article.

3. Make a Really good Title.

Your title is what the readers see, and it has to get their attention. Make it something relevant to everybody, and grab their attention. A good article is worth nothing with a bad title. It will just fail, and not get any traffic.

4. Be the first one to submit your own posts.

Submit your articles right after you finish posting them. There are several reason for this. First, you get can start seeing results right away, and see if it takes off.

Second, and most important, because then you get to choose the topic it goes into. About a week ago I wrote a post about how to write comments. I called it, a Psychological Analysis of Comments. It was a good title because it got attention, however I wasn’t the first one to submit it to stumble, and so somebody submitted it into the category Psychology. Which it wasn’t really about psychology, it was just a title ploy to get people interested. And thus all the psychology readers, ignored it. I sent it out to my stumble upon friends, about twenty of them stumbled it and five gave reviews. Which is enough to get hundreds of visits, but because of this simple mistake, it hardly got any traffic from stumble.  So learn from this, submit your article first so you get to choose the category.

5. Check out the category your going to submit your articles to.

Find one with 25-50 people who like that type. If your submitting to a type that has only 10 people who like those types of stories, your potential for readers is way lower.

6. Add the stumble button at the bottom of your posts, and a message asking for stumbles.

There’s nothing wrong with asking for stumbles. On my better posts I say, “If you liked this post, please stumble it.” Something like that, nice, and polite, just saying if I helped you please help me as well. If they really liked the article generally, people are happy to help. So those are the instructions for stumble, and then my personal tips. I hope it helped you understand how to best use it.

If this article helped you in anyway, I would really appreciate if you could stumble it in the category "Internet". Thanks!

Don Gilbert

Hits or Readers?

This is a question that many of us have wondered about. What is more important to us? To have pretty stats of thousands of visits, or to have lots of comments on each post, and have people who actually read the blog. We all need to ask ourselves what our goal is, and it’s different for everybody. Theres are lots of people, who just want to have a ton of visits, but don’t really care about influencing or helping people with their blogs. But plenty of others who get 1-30 visits a day on their blog, but don’t even care because it’s all people who read the posts, and then they can relate with.

Well today I was realizing, one, if your trying to make money with your site, then unfortunately you need to have both. And two, my blog is unbalanced. I’ll let you decide which way.

So I was reading my google analytics, looking at where my traffic had come. I saw the depressing stats of entrecard, a good amount of traffic with 3,000 but the 38 second, and 43 second average stay.

Then I wasn’t surprised to see Blog catalog, with an average of over 2 minutes. I was quite happy with that, but then I saw the one underneath it and couldn’t believe it.

Blogger Choice Awards, had an average of over 4 and a half minutes. That’s really quite amazing, and considering there were over 500 visits from that site, the visitors were consistently staying that long to. I hadn’t checked out Blogger Choice Awards and went over to it.

For those of you who don’t know, Blogger Choice Awards is a blog competition site, where you vote for the winners. Here’s what they say on the front page. “Welcome to the Blogger’s Choice Awards, the most popular user-generated blog voting site on the planet!”

So I looked at my categories and saw that this blog was on the first page, both for Best Business Blog, and Best Blog about Blogging. The last blog on the first page admitted, but on the first page nonetheless. I was surprised, and impressed with both the volume of the reader’s it’s sent over, and how much they read. If you look at this graph you can see that they came in a consistent manner.

Well ok… consistent arguably, but that’s about as consistent as you get in the blogging world. 

But the point of this blog post was not to talk about my site but to tell you to check out Bloggers Choice Awards. Whether the purpose of your blog is Hits or Readers, you will profit from it.

How about you? What sites send you your most traffic? And which site sends the visitors that stay the longest?

*Note*

I was told what I said didn’t make complete sense when I wrote this, so I’m going to explain again. Basically there’s a list of links. Right now, it’s just my blog, mastersofseo.com What you do, is pretty much copy this entire post, and make it a post on your blog, and copy my list, and include your blog  with mine.  And then comment with the link to your site. Then I’ll add your blog to my list thus giving you a link. The possibilities with this are incredible, because then my readers will keep commenting adding link mine and your links to their sites. And your readers will do the same. And Everytime a new person does the post, we all get a new link, and all there readers join and add our links as well. It can fly around the blogging world in hours. So that’s the point, I hope that made a little bit more sense.

I want to combine with you, to help all of our blogs get better technorati rankings. So here’s what you need to do. There are four simple rules.

1. Copy The List Below into a blog post of yours.
2. Add Your Link To The List
3. Comment On This Post So That We Can Update The List With Your Link
4. Watch Your Authority Sky-Rocket..

The key is just to get alot of people to do it. I got the idea from another blogger, and his technorati ranking is 17,000 largely because of this post. So let’s see how successful we can do with it. Just comment with your blog, and write a post about it on your blog.

The first blog, mastersofseo.com

And I will Update The List Daily, to add your blogs.

Please Ping Technorati Once You Post The List To See Faster Results. 

You may be afraid of Google thinking that this list is a “Link Train” and might be labeled spam. In order to combat that, please add a Rel=”Nofollow” to each link in the list.

Don’t forget to promote this article via social networking and word of mouth.. It only means better results for yourself and everyone on the list.

Also please digg and stumble the article, so that we can get better results from it.

What is the point of a comment? They can have many different purposes, and depending on what the goal of your blog is, you will write your comments differently. I believe the purpose of writing comments is to:

1) To connect with bloggers, not necessarily in your same niche, but just social marketing.

2) To thank the writer for a good post.

3) To get interested readers back to your site.

4) And now with CommentLuv, and do-follow blogs, free back links.

To help you understand the psychology behind a comment, I am going to show you how to write a post that accomplishes all 4 of those goals. In order to help you accomplish these goals, I am going to show you 5 things that should be in every comment. Sometimes it’s okay to omit one or two things, but generally this should be your model. I will post an example comment after a general summation of each point, so just try and grasp the concepts in a general sense, and then I will explain in more detail.

In your first sentence, you should write something relevant to the blog post; your ‘two cents’ or commentary of it. This is to show the blog owner that you read in fact read the post thoroughly and actually thought about it (which means that you actually do have to read it and think about it).

Second, compliment the blog post. If you said in your first sentence, “I’ve never heard a blog post about cottage cheese before,” Then say in your next, “But this one must be one of the best, it was very informative and covered all aspects of cottage cheese.”

Third, you’re going to want to ask an honest question about the post. Ask the author to elaborate on something mentioned or to explain a term that you didn’t recognize.      

Fourth, compliment the blog as a whole.

Fifth, Your name and a link to your blog, with little seller’s pitch below as to why they should visit it. Whenever possible this should be done using a hyperlink:   <a href="http://www.YourUrl.com">Your Link Text</a> (For those of you who don’t know how to do a hyperlink, you just post the former code into the comment box at the end of your comment. Put your url in where it says http://www.YourUrl.com" and replace the ‘Your Link Text’ with the text you want to link with.)

* * *

Now that I have showed you my model, let me explain each one, and then give you an example of a good comment, and bad ones.

1) About the first one, you need to say something about the blog post, because you need to assure them that you read it. There are many human spam commenters. They come onto your site and just leave a little message saying, “Great Post!” Visit my site here. These type of comments do not help the author or his blog, and they actually cause more harm then good. The writer of that blog probably won’t ever visit your blog, and might even delete your comment (making the effort of commenting of none effect). You need to make a good impression starting out of the gate with a useful and thoughtful comment on what the person wrote. Respect the time it took him to write the post, and give him a decent response.

2) Now the second one is very important, and a little tricky. Steps 2 and 4 are done for one reason: every blogger loves flattery. They love you puffing them up about how great their blog post was. This is good especially with bloggers who have bigger and better blogs than you because they know that they’re above you, and they like it when you give them recognition. There is, however, a thin line between flattery and excessive, obviously fake praise. Flattery is good, but don’t go overboard. A comment like this is fine:

“This is the best post I’ve seen on this X subject. You really have a good feel on this topic, and the way you wrote about it made it both entertaining to read, and informative at the same time. I will definitely check back in the future to read such a profitable blog.”

That would be a good paragraph, on part 3. But like I said don’t go overboard:

“Your Blog is the best EVERRRRR!!!! Like seriously I love your blog, it’s incredible, and awesome, and every other cool thing out there. I could read your posts all day, and record them so that I can fall asleep listening to them at night. Keep writing, because you’re the best blogger on the internet.”

That spells F-A-K-E. And thought it may feel a little good to see a comment like that, you know–as does everyone else who reads the comment–that somebody’s trying to suck up to you. Having a reputation for “Sucking up” is really bad. Avoid it at all costs. So for step 2, compliment the blog, it’s essential to puff up the writer of the blog. Just don’t go overboard, because you don’t want them to explode or think you’re lying.

3) Ask a question you had about the post. This step has two reasons behind it. 1) You want to show him that you really read the post and were listening whether you agreed with it or not, and 2) You want to prove after your somewhat suspicious compliments that you aren’t a suck-up. You’re proving to the admin of the blog and all the other readers that you aren’t just going to sing his praises. This could mean questioning the conclusions that the writer made, perhaps his facts, or even his sources. Again you can’t go too far, otherwise you will look fake. It will be confusing if you praise the post and then tear it to shreds. Balance is really important, and you have to balance your criticism with your praise. But you can balance the scale however you want as long as it is in fact balanced. If you want to praise less and explain why in your critique that’s fine. Only make sure you don’t have praise them and then say "…but I didn’t really agree with anything you said…"

4) Compliment the blog as a whole. Feel free to make this short, but if it is short, make it sweet. This is just to kind of smooth over whatever questions, or critiques you had in the previous statement, just to show there are no hard feelings. This should be something like,

            “I found your blog to be very informative to your niche, and if I ever need more information on cottage cheese, I will check back to your site.”

Remember, that this is your conclusion, so make wrap up what you said in the previous three parts. This is the last thing that people are reading, so if you haven’t convinced them of your genuineness, this part needs to confirm in their minds that they need to visit your blog and link to you. In my example part, I wasn’t very strong. That’s a very safe answer but it isn’t very convincing. How critical or how complementing you were earlier will determine how much you can praise them in the last part. Remember: keep it consistent.

5) This is important but it doesn’t require as much work as the other four. This is after your conclusion in step 4; your “Epilogue” so-to-speak. First you write you name and then your hyperlinked URL. After that, put your blog slogan or catchphrase. This is to get them to come to your blog without actually telling them straight out to do so. For example this is the way I have commented on some blogs:

 
Don Gilbert
http://mastersofseo.com
How to Get Traffic to your Site

Notice I did not say "please visit my blog" Everybody hates being told what to do, but people love to reward you if you didn’t ask to be rewarded. It appeals to their inner sense of self-righteousness; they feel good when they reward someone who hasn’t asked to be rewarded and yet deserves it. With a little tagline like ITALIC’How to get traffic to your site’ITALIC you’ll get lots of hits. Because I’ve written such a long and thoughtful comment, everybody will be really impressed and they’ll wonder if my blog is the same way. Everybody wants to know how to get traffic to their site, but that’s such a difficult topic and there are so many sites that claim to be able to but can’t. They would probably just assume it’s a seller’s pitch. After writing a comment that’s a page long and completely analyzing their blog, however, they will think you’re really smart and visit your blog just because they want to see the blog of somebody who writes such long comments. The great thing is that all the other readers will be thinking the same thing, and you’ll get not only the author, but anyone who reads the post.

Why Do This?

Now your probably thinking 1) none of my comments are like this, and 2) This will take BOLDforeverBOLD. Well I agree that it can take 5-10 minutes. But look back on the purposes of commenting that I mentioned to begin with. These types of comment will accomplish all of those. You will get a significantly larger amount of traffic then if you just left a little comment saying “great blog here’s mine ___.” With my kind of commenting  you will only be able to write, around 5 comments a day, instead of 30. But one good comment is worth 10 bad ones. Comments don’t get traffic unless there insightful. This type of commenting is a way of advertising your blog, especially on big blogs that get a lot of traffic. Your big comments will get the most traffic mostly just because they’re big and well-written. If you write a comment with good content, you will also boost the Search Engines rankings of a post. You will benefit the blogger greatly. But this gives you two very great advantages. 1) When you boost the traffic of a post, you will increase the number of people who see your comment, thus increasing the number of click-throughs you get, and 2) when you boost Google’s opinion of the post and comment, the link you put back to your site rises in value. The more google likes that post, the more it will transfer that back to your site.

Also you need to make sure that you subscribe to the comments at the end. Though it may get annoying to keep getting emails about it. If the owner of the blog or any other people comment on your comment, you need to be there to reply. You just asked the writer a question remember, so make sure that when he answers your questions, your there to respond. Generally I comment, they reply, then I agree with their reply, they don’t get past three messages. Remember this isn’t a debate, your not trying to convince to your side, if you did critique his blog. Your just trying to show you read his post and thought about it. So feel free to even if you disagree just swallow your pride, and say their right, it’s not worth arguing.

            Now to show you exactly what I’m talking about, I’m going to write a sample comment, for my post “My Journey back to Success.” If you haven’t read this post yet, do it now here, so that you can understand what I’m talking about.

I wish you the best of luck in your Journey. I’m going to be watching to see how you do. This will be a great test to see if your posts are worth my time. If you fail, then we shouldn’t even bother reading your posts anymore. I’m very curious to see if you’ll be able to get the same readers that you had before and come back again. Because of the niche your in, your readers will probably be a lot of the same old, and I wonder if they’ll continue to read your posts again even after you stranded them.

Here I commented about the blog, and critiqued it a little bit. But I made genuine comments about the post, showing I read it and thought about it. And I said truthful things, that weren’t quite obvious. You never want to leave a comment that’s completely negative, so now in this second part I’m going to need to make it a little bit less harsh.

 However I must admit, your previous rankings, google, alexa, and technorati are very impressive. If you could achieve those high rankings in such a short period of time, I would be surprised if you couldn’t achieve at least some level of success again. Three months is nothing for a blog, and even your total time of around 9 months, is still a baby for a successful blog.

Now I smoothed things over a bit. I complimented his past success, and told him what he wants to hear, that his blog will succeed and thus appealed to his pride. And also, most likely the fact that he had to leave blogging after those three months of incredible success, is a real annoyance to him. And so I comforted him in his lowest spot by telling him that he still has plenty of time, and I don’t doubt he’ll be able to achieve that success again.

I had one question about your post. I noticed your page rank dropped two whole points from four to two. I don’t know too much about page rank, so I was wondering why that happened? I thought page rank had to do with the amount of links you have, and your links most likely wouldn’t have changed over that period. So any ideas why the page rank dropped?

Now I posed my question. If you noticed it wasn’t a very difficult question. Or at least it shouldn’t be. If this guy is any good at what he claims to be, that should be a very easy question for him to answer, and giving easy questions is good. By asking a question that you know he can answer, even if it’s something you could look up lets him feel superior. Remember, you’re not trying to look like an arrogant blogger telling him what’s what. You’re trying to appear an honest, geniuine commentator, who just happens to be very intelligent and has a better blog with better stats than the person your commenting on. Again, appeal to his pride. Let him think he’s smart. When he visits your blog, even if he was thinking you’re not very smart, he’ll have no choice but to admit your intelligence. This is also important for bloggers that are way more successful then you. By letting them feel superior, they are more willing to help somebody they don’t consider any competition, as opposed to an equal who’s telling them what to do.

Your blog is very interesting, and I really appreciate the readability that I’m sure you labor to put into your posts. It’s a great blog, because bloggers from all stages of experience, can understand what you’re saying, and put the things into practice. Your layout compliments your blog very well, it has a clean, uncluttered look. And your posts are easy to learn, but very productive. I will definitely be checking back in the future, whenever I need new ideas on getting traffic.

Now I wrote my compliment about the blog as a whole. I didn’t over do it, but I was very praiseworthy. I was flattering but not to much so. It was enough to leave a smile on the administrators face, but not too much and make him laugh and think I’m a joke. The part at the beginning that where I said, “I’m sure you labor” was a nice sentence, because there’s really no way for me to know if he’s truly laboring or not. He probably just isn’t a very good writer, and so he can’t write very complicated things. But I said, “I’m sure,” and he’s like o really? O yeah, of course I do that. Yeah that’s a conscious effort, and then his thoughts are well, it’s hard but I do it for you. And I wraped up the whole comment with a sentence that sounds really good, but when analyzed is proven to not really say anything. It sounds like I’m promsing to check back often, but in reality I just promised to check back, “whenever I need new ideas,” if that ever happens. But still it makes him feel great because he thinks he’s helped me out. When in reality, I may never come back again. Now if you really did like the blog, then take out the save guard, and just say, “I will definitely be checking back in the future,” or however you want to phrase it.

 
Don Gilbert

<a href="http://www.mastersofseo.com">Make Money Blogging</a>

Now I finished up my comment with my name, and a link to my blog, and then my little seller’s pitch about why they should visit my blog

And that’s it, a step by step guide, with an outline and sample comment, on How to Write Comments that will get read. The purpose of commenting, is for link building, connections, and traffic. All these things get accomplished with this style of commenting.

If you liked this post, please stumble it using the link below.