blog traffic

What’s With Daylight Savings Time?

I don’t get it, never did.

Daylight Savings Time. How much daylight are we actually saving? And who keeps track of the savings?

Its true we will roll back the clocks this weekend (remember fall backward, spring forward) and gain an extra hour of sleep. The same hour of sleep we lost in the spring. Yes I know it has everything to do with the National Institute of Standards and Time, and somewhere in the process I assume it balances out our lives. Maybe it makes us more productive, I’m not sure. I for one, always seem to forget which weekend it falls on. It never fails, I get turned around because the date that we roll the clocks back changes.

To be quite frank with you, I thought I had missed it. Maybe I slept through it this year, no such luck.

This weekend, at 2am November 1st, we will systematically roll our clocks back. If you happen to be at the club and are in a state where drinks are served until 2am, then you get an extra hour to get smashed.

Oh, by the way since I won’t be out drinking that extra hour in celebration of Daylight Savings Time, I just realized, the grammatically correct term is Daylight Saving Time (without the extra ‘s’).

How To Drive Traffic To A Blog

Nowadays it seems that everyone is having a blog, but many have no idea how to drive traffic to blog. I hope today’s discussion can shed some light to bloggers who are struggling to drive traffic to their blogs.

From time to time, I get people asking me if they should advertise their blog to get traffic. My advice is always ‘No’. If you have a new blog, remember, advertising it is not the way to get traffic. There are some exceptional cases of course. But in most cases, advertising is not a good traffic source for blogs. (Blog plays a different role in advertising. I may discuss this next time.)

Have you heard of gurus saying that blogging is a way to get traffic?

Yet bloggers are scratching their heads wondering how to drive traffic to blog.

Shouldn’t blogging generate traffic? If so, why do you need to drive traffic to your blog? Shouldn’t you just keep blogging and your blog should generate traffic on its own?

Well, you know things are not that simple.

A new blog is capable of generating traffic on its own ONLY IF it’s optimized for search engine. Else, you’ll have to think of ways to drive traffic to the blog and that can be tedious and even frustrating to some.

In my opinion, if you were to start a blog, it must be optimized for search engine. That’s the laziest way to drive traffic to your blog.

How do you build a search engine optimized blog?

There are just two things you need to do.

1) Write search engine optimized posts

Most bloggers simply blog whatever they like to say. You can do that if you are Paris Hilton. If not, you’re not likely to attract people to read what you’re writing.

A ‘purpose-driven’ blogger will do careful keyword research and optimize his article for search engines before posting it to his blog. Almost every blog post is his arrow that aims to shoot down the top position in the search results.

2) Build backlinks

The objective of a blogger should be to turn his blog into an authority site.

My definition of an authority site is one with a high PageRank. To get a high PageRank, you have to get many backlinks to your blog.

The game of search engine optimization is unfair. Authority sites receive more attention and better rankings from the search engines. You can write very good content but if your blog has no backlink, you’re not likely to get much attention.

Link building is boring and tedious. And you won’t see the return immediately. But it is necessary.

Did I say ‘necessary’?

Besides the normal ways of getting backlinks, such as submitting articles, press release, forum marketing etc, there is an innovative way that you should explore if you are serious.

It’s to create a free online application that people are interested to link to. If you don’t know how to create one, you can always get a freelancer to do it. But you need to come out with the idea.

For example, in the blog industry, many bloggers create free WordPress plugins. Useful plugins get lots of recommendations from other bloggers and thus backlinks.

Final comments

Building a blog that can drive traffic on autopilot takes time and effort. In the meantime, you should look for other ways to drive traffic to your blog. The way I recommend is to build a list. You can easily build a list through advertising and offering something for free. Then you can send this list to read your blog.

This is the beginning stage, when you have to actively drive traffic to your blog. If you keep following the two steps above, your blog will eventually get traffic from the search engine automatically. This is when your blog can become your faithful and passive traffic generator. This process can take 3 to 6 months, depending on how hard you work.

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10 Tips On Leaving Comments On Other Blogs

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Some might read this and say, ‘really, do you think I need help on how to comment?’

Yes, you do.

You see, when you leave a comment on a blog, particularly if it is a dofollow blog, then you need to leave a comment that is relevant. It’s like my online instructor once told the class, leave substantive comments only.

Let’s take a look at what a relevant, comment on a blog is.

1. A relevant comment is one that has something to do with the post topic. If I write a post about walking as a form of exercise, then don’t leave a comment about World War 1. That isn’t relevant.
2. When you leave relevant comments, remain tactful. Don’t attack other commenters or the blog owner, this could get you banned if the comments are moderated.
3. Make sure you are contributing to the conversation at hand. Think of commenting as a conversation in a classroom or in a coffee house. You wouldn’t say stupid things to embarrass yourself now would you?
4. Think about your online reputation when you comment. You never know who is reading a particular blog post. It only takes one or two times to get a bad name, and others will spread the news about you, and bad news spreads quicker than a California wildfire.
5. Don’t leave comments that have your link and your link only. That’s just out and out spam. Nobody likes spam casserole.
6. DoFolllow blogs will link back to you anyway. So tip number 5 is a no-brainer.
7. Look for DoFollow blogs and websites. You don’t always have to look for blogs to leave comments on. There are plenty of media sites, like The Huffington Post, and local newspapers that may have hotbed topics that allow you to leave comments on. Most of them are dofollow.
8. Leave comments or contribute to conversations in forums. Bloggeries, Digital Point Forums are great examples of highly participatory groups that have engaging members. Once you meet the minimum posting requirements, you can have a signature link below your name. A great way to build backlinks, and drive traffic to your blog.
9. If you’re an Entrecard dropper, don’t just drop and run. Believe me, you won’t get traffic this way, at least not sticky traffic–and you’ll complain that Entrecard doesn’t work. It does work if you leave a comment or two on other blogs. You know what it feels like to write something only to have no one comment on it.
10. Don’t just comment to get linkbacks. Again, this goes back to leaving substantive comments. Comment because the post is interesting to you, or that the writer has written something significant.

I know there are probably a lot more tips on leaving comments on other blogs that I might have missed. That’s what you’re here for…let me know, leave a comment.

Here is how I get free traffic for my new blog

“Home Business Success” is a success!

I want to thank everyone who has stopped by here and commented, linked, or just peeped at my new blog. If it were not for you, I could not give you this positive reporting.

Here are some stats I kept from August 26, 2008 through September 7, 2008. August 26th was the date Home Business Success blog was born…:)

On August 26th my Alexa Ranking was 14,000,000, and my Page Rank was zero.

By August 29th, I gained 16 RSS readers, and 3 new leads.

However in just four days my Alexa jumped to 11,198,562–this was August 30th. And I received 3 more RSS subscribers, 1 SFI affiliate and 2 more leads.

On Labor Day, Sept. 1st, I gained 1 more lead. This is invaluable racking up leads, because they have expressed an interest in what I am promoting.

By Sept. 2nd, my Alexa was 2,392,358, PR was still zero, no problem though, that takes a little more time. But, I like how quickly my Alexa ranking is climbing. I started using 10KHits4You on this day, a manual traffic exchange.

When I woke up on Sept. 3rd, I had gained 3 more RSS subscribers and 5 more Twitter followers. Talk about excitement. But, I was in for a great surprise from Feedburner, I gained 615 new RSS subscribers overnight. I hope this isn’t one of those times when Feedburner giveth then taketh away. LOL.

(***NOTE***Feedburner had a false pregnancy reading; My subs are 150 readers. Still Awesome though!!***)

I’ll keep you posted on things as they happen with my new blog. Using traffic exchanges is not a bad idea to promote your blog or home based business. Best of all they are free.

Here is what I use to get traffic…(it’s easier for me to post the banners just in case some of you are interested in using them for yourself.)

TRAFFIC EXCHANGE PROGRAM–TRAFFIC ERA

10KHITS4UNOW

LINK: http://www.10khits4unow.com/index.php?affid=31718

ENTRECARD

http://www.entrecard.com

I spend 5 hours a day surfing/dropping EC cards and commenting on 3 dofollow blogs per day. I must admit not all the blogs are dofollow, because sometimes I’ll read a post that is just too good not to comment on. However, it just makes more sense to get link juice if I can on a dofollow blog.