Blogging Idol 2 sponsored by Daily Blog Tips has officially started.

The purpose of this contest is to see who can get the most RSS subscribers, in the most creative ways. It’s not so much in how many you get, but in how you get them. There is a panel of three judges in charge, who will determine the winner.

 

And the prizes are worth over 4,500$

• A lifetime subscription to Keyword Country (worth $2,000)
• An annual subscription to the Trackur corporate edition (worth $1,000)
• $300 courtesy of Sponsored Reviews
• $300 courtesy of BidVertiser
• $300 courtesy of TNX
• $100 from Daily Blog Tips
• $300 in text links from Text-Link-Ads
• A 3-month subscription to the SEO Book Training Program (worth $300)

In the case you are wondering who the 3 judges will be: Daniel from dailyblogtips is one of them, Ricky from Keyword Country is the second, and Jarrod from Sponsored Reviews is the third one. They will be giving points based on originality, and effectiveness of ideas. This contest will continue until the end of November, and hopefully I can greatly increase my RSS subscribers by then.

I have several ideas about how to do this, I’ve been writing a new post on SEO and technorati ranking, which I am very excited about, which I should be releasing in the next couple days. In addition, there are the results from my email test, to see which bloggers would respond to their readers, and then sharing the information they gave. And Finally and most exciting, I am hosting my first real contest. I will be offering lots of great prizes, if you’d like to sponsor this contest and offer anything then feel free to email me at don@ifbdesign.com if not then I’ll just use all my own prizes. 

If you haven’t already subscribed to my RSS feed, then I would greatly appreciate the help. I will definitely check out your site as well.

Social Marker is an incredible tool for any blog. It is a great way to save time, when your  submitting your site to social  media sites. Now, be careful with Stumbleupon, because they have a policy against submitting your own sites. But most of the sites, are ones like Digg, with a voting format. So it’s fine if you want to submit your own ones. The only time consuming part in this whole thing, is creating accounts on each of the sites. That would take Forever!

 

So what I did, is just to make accounts on the big ones, like digg, stumble, propeller, mix, reddit… That way you can just do the top 15 ones, and save alot of  time. Most of the others ones won’t get you very much traffic anyway, so your really not missing anything. Hopefully, you should have accounts on most of those sites anyway, so you can just go right in and start submitting.

 

It has little click and drag boxes, at the bottom of the browser, that are so useful, because then you don’t need to retype everything again and again.

 

Another feature it has that is very nice, is the social marker button. You can add it to the bottom of your posts like a digg button, and if a reader clicks on it, it will automatically submit the information at socialmarker.com for them to submit. However, I wouldn’t recommend adding it yet, because at this point it would just be clutter. There aren’t enough people using socialmarker yet to make it worth it, but in the coming months it’s popularity should grow so be ready to add it.

 

I’ve included a video on using it, I’ve never used a video before so let me know if this is helpful, or if I shouldn’t bother again.

 

 

 

 

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I have a special treat for all of you readers. The purpose of this blog is to talk about, “How to Get Traffic,” and to celebrate “mastersofseo” reaching the first page in google for How to Get Traffic, I’m going to be doing a series of very special blog posts.

If you want to know how I did this, read my post here on SEO.

            You may have been wondering why I’ve been posting so little the last few days and the reason is because I had a really cool idea, and I’ve been working on it. I sent an email to all the top bloggers in the niche, make money online/make money blogging. People like john chow, problogger, doshdosh… In the message I asked them, all very politely of course, if they wouldn’t mind replying with some advice on how they got traffic to their site, so that I could share them with my readers. I sent the email to 25 bloggers, who are all in different areas of success. Some Very successful, and some up and coming bloggers, and I’m going to share with you their responses.

            But the other point in doing this, is because I was curious as to who would respond. Who would take the time out of their day, to reply to their readers, (me.)  Because I want to give them each two weeks to respond, because they are all very busy, I won’t be able to share all the details of the experiment until 11/5, exactly two weeks from when I sent them it last Wednesday. Several have already responded, however most haven’t yet. I will inform you as I go which of these popular bloggers, really care about their readers, and which ones are too full of themselves to respond. I will be comparing them in several different ways, so look forward to the comparisons!

            However, I did not only send this to people like johnchow, there were also a lot of smaller bloggers, who should definitely respond as they are not making enough money to start ignoring their readers. This will be very interesting to see, which bloggers care about you, and which ones don’t. And even if I don’t get any responses, from all 25 of them, then at least you’ll be able to see which of the blogs you read really are trying to help you, and which are using you.

 

 

If you haven’t already subscribed to my RSS feed, do it Today! Don’t miss these articles on How to Get Traffic, from the greatest bloggers on the internet.

I don’t know why I’m still obsessed with these lists, but once again, you get to receive the reward of my labor. I present to you, the largest list of blogs with the Top Commentator Plugin Installed, on the internet. This list is invaluable, for improving both your Technorati and page rank. Unlike blog directories, which only get seen by search engines, these links you will see on your Technorati as well. You can pretty much go down this list, collecting links to your site. Within a week I guarantee you can decrease your Technorati ranking by at least half. Now, unlike with my blog directories list, I would recommend you work from the bottom up. Chances are, with smaller blogs, they’ll have less comments. Every now and then, you’ll even be able to find a blog with only one comment, as the leading commenter, can you say Free Link! That’s the reason I included a lot more low page rank sites, as opposed to higher ones, which are much harder to get on.

Now don’t forget to get on my top commentator list as well, being new, it is also relatively empty.

PageRank 7

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com

http://onemansblog.com

PageRank 6

http://www.shoemoney.com/

PageRank 5

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/

http://www.bluehatseo.com

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/

http://www.blueverse.com/

http://elitebydesign.com/

http://themelib.com/ Inner Pages Only

http://techie-buzz.com/

http://www.quicksprout.com/

PageRank 4

http://vocino.com

http://pixelheadonline.com/blog/

http://www.m3nghua.com

http://www.jonlee.ca

http://chenpn.com

http://www.bontb.com

http://www.jdavidmacor.com

http://ahkong.net/

http://www.balkhis.com/

http://theuniversitykid.com/

http://www.sueblimely.com/

http://zacjohnson.com/

http://www.pureblogging.com/

http://optempo.com/

http://www.imbloggingthat.com/

http://uberaffiliate.com/

http://imiseasy.com

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/

http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/

http://www.bloganything.net/

http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/

PageRank 3

http://www.riceblogger.com

http://merapuland.com/

http://www.johnchow.com

http://www.jennyhow.com

http://www.adesblog.com

http://www.ededition.com

http://blog.butterflymedia.ro

http://www.bloganything.net/

http://webgrrrl.net

http://www.sabahan.com

http://the-reflector.com

http://www.blogtrepreneur.com

http://baklaako.com

http://www.andrewooi.com/

http://bloggingawaydebt.com

http://founderscafe.com

http://www.bloganything.net

http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk

http://jakeldaily.com

http://uniongraphite.com

http://tallfreak.com

http://www.lifeiscolourful.com/

http://www.dailyseoblog.com/

http://otooo.com/

http://www.jonathanvolk.com/

http://entrecard.com/blog/

http://thoushallblog.com/

http://www.standoutblogger.com/

http://norhafidz.com/

http://linkersblog.com/

http://www.jonlee.ca/

http://pixelheadonline.com/blog/

http://www.wpthemedesigner.com/

http://theblogentrepreneur.com/

http://www.lighteningsblogworld.com/

http://www.peterleehc.com/blog/

http://www.derek-ang.com/

http://www.niharsworld.com/

http://www.datmoney.com/

http://www.oneyearmillionaire.net/

http://www.datmoney.com/

http://www.domainstructure.com/

http://www.benbarden.com/

http://www.michaelaulia.com/blogs/

http://www.bookmarkbliss.com/

http://www.creadiv.com/

http://www.jennyhow.com/

PageRank 2

http://www.terencechang.com

http://bloggervenue.com/

http://www.benjaminpatton.com/

http://dablogger.com/

http://www.enkayblog.com/

http://www.netstrife.com/

http://slyvisions.com/

http://www.adesblog.com/

http://bloggingexperiment.com/

http://www.ryanjparker.net/

http://pimpmypagerank.com/

http://www.netbusinessblog.com/

http://linkmoney.org/

http://desmondblog.com/

http://www.romandock.com/

http://honestknowledge.com/warriorblog/

http://www.mastersofseo.com

http://www.dotcomdud.com/

None

http://www.azikuri.com/

http://www.niggybuzz.com

http://azwanhadzree.com

http://mrbadak.com

http://www.everydayweekender.com

http://www.papajoneh.com

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The first step after you set up your blog, should be to put up your stat tracker. Because without one, you will be essentially blogging in the dark. You will never know what people liked, and what you should write more on. However, the question is, which stat tracker do I use? There are lots of different popular ones, and everybody swears that there’s is the best. Also, pretty much all of them are free, which makes it an enjoyable decision, but still, which is the best for your site? Now you may be wondering, what difference can a tracker make? Well the answer is that, some trackers are Much better then others, like significantly better. And by better I mean, “that they find and record more visitors then the others.” You may be asking, well what’s the difference between five to ten more visits, well the answer is that it isn’t just 5-10 visits, it’s more like 20-50%. Yes you read that right, if you get the wrong tracker, it can miss up to 50% of your traffic for that day.

 

Now you understand the importance of the right one. I’m going to show you the several ones that I have used, and organize them by how much I like them. And then show you several others that I haven’t used, but that have been recommended to me by others.

 

            *Note*  All of these are free services. My goal is to only write about free things on this blog, and so you don’t need to worry about having to use your creditcards, for information from my site. I distrust many online services, and so I am as hesitant as you are for buying stuff, especially when there’s another option that’s just as good, but free!

 

1. Google Analytics

This is probably the most famous tracker. It’s very easy to install and use, and is considered one of the best. It is highly regarded in the blogging world, simply because it’s from Google. However, Analytics records the least amount of traffic, of any trackers that I’ve tried, by a significant amount. Analytics gets at least 30-40% less traffic, then other ones I’ve tried, and that’s every day. However, I would still recommend you use Analytics, if nothing else but the fact that it’s so respected. Also it’s free, easy to set up, and it will keep track forever, which some sites don’t do as you will learn. So my  advice would be to set up Analytics, and check back with it every now and then, but don’t use that as your only one, and Don’t use it as your source when you advertise how many hits your sties gets, because you will be way undercutting yourself.

 

 

 

 

2. Statcounter

 

This is another very popular tracker. This has two options, a paid version, and a free version. I use the free version as my main traffic analyzer, and have found it to be much more accurate then Analytics. It also gives you much more detailed information, on figuring out where the visits came from. There is really no need to get the paid version, because the only difference is that it will log more then the last 500 hits. If you are getting over 500 hits a day on a consistent basis, then you may need to upgrade, but for most people a log of 500 hits is plenty for a daily basis. Also, if you use both statcounter and analytics, you will be able to see a general idea of past traffic, as well as the recent traffic. I would highly recommend this, and until a week ago would have proclaimed it as the best, however that has somewhat changed, although I would still definitely use it. 

 

 

 

3. Woopra Beta 

This is one that I just found this past week, and I really like it. It is slightly different in that it is a program on your computer, instead of a computer script like the others. However, I find this almost better, because I can keep it up in the background while I’m working and not have it in the browser.  However, it is in it’s free beta form, but will soon be for pay. It’s possible that the beta term has already ended, because I haven’t been able to log in for the last couple days. But Woopra really shook me up because it showed a significantly higher amount of traffic then even statcounter, and much higher then analytics. So now I’m trying every free tracker I can find, just out of curiosity to see which one tracks the most, I’ll keep you updated on my progress, but back to woopra. One feature that I really like about it, is you can set it to a live option, and then you can see if there are any visitors on your site at that exact moment. And if there are, you can send them a message that will show up on their browser saying, “message from webmaster.” It’s pretty useful for getting feedback from your readers, and also staying connected with them. So I would suggest adding this one as well.

 

 

Those three are the only ones I’ve tried, but I’ve created a small list of other free ones that I found off of google. I haven’t checked any of them, so it’s possible they’re junk, but feel free to check them out anyways.

 

 

Other trackers

http://www.mvtracker.com/

http://www.addfreestats.com/

http://www.accesscounter.com/

http://www.truecounter.net/

http://www.ritecounter.com/

http://gostats.com/

http://www.statssheet.com/

http://www.onestatfree.com/

http://www.stat08.com/

 

 

There’s one more that I wanted to mention called Awstats. Collin from Feedflare, suggested it to me, and though I have yet to try it, you can check it out as well by clicking this link.

 

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