A good way to build authority and search engine rankings for your site is through article directories. They usually don’t generate a lot of traffic, but they do provide quality one-way links back to your site, and there’s always the possibility of the articles becoming popular and generating direct traffic. The two biggest directories are www.goarticles.com and www.ezinearticles.com. These are the best in terms of quality and what they allow, but there are hundreds of others to choos from. If you’re interested, you can check out this list of about 2200.

So what are the benefits, and what do you have to do? First of all, Don’t submit any article that aren’t quality. You don’t want your name on something that isn’t good work.  Another thing you DON’T want to do is submit duplicate content, especially stuff you haven’t written. This is bad for your article, and just bad all-around. So don’t just copy other’s material. One useful technique that I’ve found and utilized when I don’t have the time or I don’t want to take the effort to write an article from scratch is this: Find an article that looks good, read it over and make sure it has some good content. Then you cut and paste the article into Google Translator, and translate it into German (you don’t have to do German, I’ve just made a habit of using it because I’ve found it goes back into English smoothest). Once you’ve got it in German, copy it again, and translate it back to English. Go through the article and clean it up, because translator doesn’t always do a great job of going into smooth English. 

Make sure that in all your articles you link back to your site, preferably with a hypertext link. If the article site doesn’t accept HTML, then just paste in your URL. This will ensure you get at the least a quality one-way link back to your site. And as any competent Internet Marketer knows, quality one way links are what paves the road to number one Google listings.

Facebook is a social utility that can easily be utilized to gather traffic to your site. Even if you don’t get much traffic, it’s good for link-building to, a key (as any competent internet marketer will tell you) to SEO.

As always, the first step is to create an account. Chances are good that you have an account already.Even if you don’t use it, I would suggest creating a new one, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, you may want to use an account under your name in the near future. And if you’re site is on, say, camping tents or nursing homes, then your friends will probably wonder why the heck you’re joining weird groups. It’s not hard to create an account at all either.

When you create your account, Edit your profile a little. Add some details about your life (or just make up some believeable facts about an imaginary person). This helps your account to look legitimate to other people, and to Facebook. It isn’t wholly necessary, but it does give somewhat of a boost.

Next, you’ll want to join some groups. If you look at the navigation bar on the left side of the browser window, you’ll see an option titled ‘groups’. Click on this, and it will pull up a page of your groups. You’ll want to look around for groups related to your website. Join somewhere around 10, if you can find that many. You can do later more, but 10 is good for starters. You now have a couple of different options. You could post on the wall. This won’t work so well (if you’re aiming to get direct traffic) in larger groups, because their walls tend to move very quickly, and posts get pushed off the first page. Of course, there are those gems with tons of people that don’t use their walls so much, so be on the lookout for those.

As for the number of members in a group, it wholly depends on the group. Some groups with 100 or less will have tons of activity, while some with over 1,000 members will have little or no activity. There isn’t much of a limit or a minimum; it depends on how involved a group is. So try to find groups with high involvement level.

Another thing you should do is start your own group about your topic. This ensures there’s a group on exactly your niche, and you might actually get people to join it (don’t expect it, unless you go around and ask a bunch of people to be your friends). On your group, put a paragraph or two about your topic, and commend discussion on the topic.

One last thing that you can do is look around in groups  and ask a bunch of people–preferably those who seem to be interested in the same things as you site-wise–to be your friends. This gets some internal linking going around your profile page.

Any popular blogger or website writer knows, that a high search engine ranking is key to blogging success. Without it you lose an immense amount of traffic that could be obtained through it. It’s probably the most successful, and possibly the easiest way to gain traffic.

So you are wondering, how do I submit to search engines… Now our goal is to only give information to you that is free. So here are several free sites  that you can submit your link to, to get into search engines. People often think that you need to pay for these. There are many sites that do require you do this, but Don’t! They are practically a scam because 99 percent of traffic from search engines will be from yahoo, google, or aol. Don’t pay any money for people to add you, there are plenty of free sites that will accomplish what you want.

I recommend these sites, Submit Express and FreeWebSubmission. They are both free and easy to use. But they only add you to about 20 sites, which is good but it excludes a few. This is another site I recommend that adds you to about 300 search engines. Meta Net Promotions.  Also free but for this one you need to add their link on your page. You will have to decide how important some of your sidebar is to you. I would do it because you can always take it down in a few weeks. These sites will require you to add it, then they will check once to make sure you put it up. But they don’t do repeated checks so you can just take it down a couple weeks later, wait a little to be safe.

Now let me verify something. Your traffic from search engines will vary depending on what you choose as your keywords. If you write an article about google, you will never get a visit from it. It is to big a site for you to ever possibly rank. So you need to find keywords that are related to your site, but that are still possible to rank for. You can get a good idea of how hard it’ll be to rank by typing in the phrase or word on google.com. To the right of the search blank is a number with how many urls it came up with. If it is under one million you have a chance, but to pass the other sites you need to make your site more powerful then theirs, "more coming on this in later posts."

Now if you are a beginner you are probably wondering what keywords are, and how to rank for them. Keywords are the words or phrases that appear on your blog. You are most likely to rank higher if you say one phrase multiple times, or if that is the title of your blog, or the url. Say for example that you wanted to rank for poetry. That would be incredibly difficult. So you’d have to be more specific, like dramatic poetry, or emotional poetry. The more words in the phrase the more chance you have of ranking for it; if you use that phrase. If you were trying to rank for dramatic poetry then I’d make that the title of your post, and then mention it at least once in your post, that will help. But like I said traffic with search engines can be easy or hard depending on your choice of keywords. You may work really hard on something and get traffic for something you only mentioned once. But remeber you can never really know how successful a post will be until you post it. Google does strange things sometimes, and can move you up and down randomly so that you could rank for a hard keyword.

Now that shows you which sites to submit your url to, and helpful tips on keywords. If you follow the advice you will be another step closer to blogging success.

There are many different ways of tracking your visitors. Far and away the best would be Google Analytics. When in doubt, go with google. The only partial drawback to using solely analytics is time–it updates around every couple of hours. If you are totally obsessed with instantly seeing when a visitor comes onto your site, there are two remedies. The first would be to generate a lot of traffic, because the more traffic you have, the more often Google Analytics updates. If you haven’t much traffic, and you absolutely must see those visitors, then you can sign up for Statcounter. This program will show visitors within a minute of their coming onto your site. I would advise, though, against using only Statcounter, as it has some major drawbacks. It only stores up to 500 visitors before it starts deleting old records, and it’s data displays aren’t half as clean as Googles.

A jumpstart introduction to Google Analytics if you’re new to it. Once you’ve created an account, all you have to do is paste a little code into your template. If you’re using blogger, simply go to your template, click ‘Edit HTML’ and paste the code into the bottom, just above the lowest <body> tag. Now you’re ready to check out the interface.

Go to the reports for your site. You should automaticly be taken to your dashboard. There are a couple of different data displays on your dashboard. The first is a graph of the number of visitors you have. Naturally, if you just created the account, it will be at zero. Just above this display is a date window that can be dropped down. From here you can view traffic for a single day, or multiple days.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, there are four different boxes, each representing a different aggregation of data. The “Map Overlay” and the “Traffic Sources Overview” are my personal favorites.

If you want to see where your visitors are from, click the “view report” button in the “Map Overlay” box. This will take you to a new page with a wold map on it. The default display is the countries that the visitors are from, but I don’t find this very useful. to change the view, scroll down a little bit until you see ‘detail level’ options. There should be a ‘Continent’, ‘Sub Continent Region’, ‘Country/Territory’, and my personal favorite, ‘City’. Click on the City option, and the map should load a bunch of orange dots. These represent visitors, and the bigger they are, the more times that person has visited. If you roll your mouse over any of the dots, the name of the city will pop up on screen.

If you direct your attention to the navigation bar, you will see an option called ‘Traffic Sources’. This is a handy view, and probably the most useful data collection. Click on it, and scroll to the bottom. Here you will see something that says ‘Top Traffic Sources’. Underneath there will be a ‘Sources’ and a ‘Keywords’ header. Under the ‘Sources’ is a list of how many people have come through what sites or search engines. Under the ‘Keywords’ header you will see a list of the search terms that people have found you under (what they typed into the search engines and found you under).

And viola, there you have a simple introduction to the major features of Analytics. There are many more, so explore and experiment. But it’s always nice to know how to find the basics.

Entrecard is a new advertising technique that can be very profitable if used correctly. It’s best perks are, it’s Free, easy to use, and doesn’t take alot of time. It gives you the ability to advertise on more popular sites such as the John Chow site. Now let me show exactly how to use Entre Card, Step by Step.

First go to the homepage Entrecard, and sign up for an account (the signup process is very straightforward).

Then click in the top corner for Dashboard. This is the page where you can see who is advertising on your site. It will show your credits and how much it costs to put an ad on your site. The website is based off of credits. You are awarded them for various things such as people advertising on your site. An important note; save up your credits! Don’t waste them on smaller sites. That was a mistake I made when I first started using Entrecard, and I learned that those sites don’t get any traffic, so it’s not worth the time or credits. Save up credits, and advertise on bigger and better sites, ones with lots of traffic to give.

After you have seen your dashboard, click on Campaign. There you can see all the blogs you can post on. Like I said, I wouldn’t advertise on the smaller sites… anything 30 credits or under. When you first make the account you will receive a flood of ads; you must approve all of them so you can receive the credits, and this way the cost to advertise on your site will go up.

Wait until you have over 30 credits before you start looking for a site to advertise on. Just because a site costs a lot of credits doesn’t mean it gets a lot of traffic, so make sure that the site is well-to-do as well. If it’s a blogger, then you can click "see my complete profile" to get an estimate about how popular the site is. If it is it’s own Url then check the site for any type of hint at the amount of traffic. If you can’t find one don’t worry, if it costs alot, generally it’s a powerful site.

Make sure you look back every couple days to approve ads on your site, (this gives you credits), and to see what your balance is up to. You should receive an email every time you get an ad, so that should save time.

And there’s Entre Card for you. I’ve stressed this already, but be patient, and advertise on a big site. Maybe this will be the traffic that pulls your blog out of the common pack, and starts generating consistent traffic.