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Blogger Blog Tips

How I Increased Traffic by 90,000 Hits per Month in 25 Days

Posted: 16 Jun 2011 07:06 AM PDT

This guest posy is by M.Farouk Radwan of http://www.2knowmyself.com.

The title of this article isn't marketing hype—it relates the true story of what happened to me this month. I am not claiming that I'm an expert in increasing traffic, but I'm sure you might find a point or two in this post that might be of benefit of you.

The problem

My website was growing very fast until 2009. It stopped growing when it reached 500,000 hits per month. For two years I was concerned about the growth rate, until one day when I decided to do something about it. I visited ProBlogger and I kept reading continuously for three days (I believe Daren got a traffic spike in that time because of me!).

After reading lots of articles, I discovered that even though I was getting a lot of hits still what matters the most are the recurring visitors, because they are the ones who can help my site's traffic grow exponentially.

A plan of action

After realizing this important fact, here's what I did.

1. Change the purpose of the newsletter

I had a newsletter, but its only purpose was keeping in touch with people who visited my website. At this point I decided to change the purpose of the newsletter and to use it to bring people back to my website, to increase recurring traffic.

I wrote great articles with very useful content and added them to the newsletter. One is sent each week. In each article, I add many links to related posts on my website—I even add links "between the lines." For example, if the article contained the word "depression" then I would create a link pointing to an article about depression on my website.

As a result, more than half of those who used to read the newsletter started coming back to the website (previously they used to read it in their mail without coming back!).

2. Generate more recurring traffic

If each person read three articles on my website, then I'd get three more hits. But I thought of motivating each person to read ten pages!

Here is how I did it. First, I created a forum on the website. Then on the bottom of each article I added a link saying "If you have any questions, come and ask me about it in the forums."

Recurring visitors who returned to the website started reading the articles, and some of them headed to the forum after finding the link at the bottom of the article. Success!

3. Attract recurring visits through Facebook

I had a Facebook fan page with few thousand fans, but I was completely ignoring it.

First I created a marketing campaign on Facebook until I added few more thousand people to the fan page. After I did that, I started to post each new article I write to the Facebook fan page, every day.

The reason I didn't do that before was that I was afraid that people would get bored and leave the page, but what I discovered is that the number of fans was increasing, not decreasing.

As a result of the large number of Likes some posts were getting, the friends of the people who liked the posts started reading my articles too. So the traffic I used to get from Facebook increased from 3% of my blog's total traffic to 10%.

4. Attract more newsletter subscribers

I started monitoring the traffic each page of my blog receives, and whenever I find a page that's experiencing a traffic spike, I move the newsletter subscription form to a dominant place on that page, so that I capture as many email addresses as I can.

The reason I don't put the newsletter form at the top of the page is that it harms the sales of the books I promote there, as it pushes those promotions downwards.

5. Have one brilliant idea

The forum I installed on my site had the option of sending private messages to users, so I thought of an idea that turned out to be brilliant.

Why not let people contact me using the private messaging system on the forum, instead of sending me a mail?

This way, the person who has a question will have to visit my forums to post the question, and again, to see the answer. While they're there, they may easily see other forum discussions that they're interested in contributing to. The forum is only few days old, but already I have 140 active members.

The results

Once I implemented these tactics, daily hits to my blog increased from 18,000 to 21,000—totalling more than 90,000 extra hits per month.

Here are the lessons I learned:

You can do better! If I didn't face this growth problem I would have never thought about such solutions and would have never implemented them in 25 days. When we find ourselves stuck, our true potential appears. Don't wait until you become stuck to take an action. Take it right away. You can do better than you're doing now!
Darren knows what he's talking about: read everything he writes!
Hits are not as important as recurring traffic. Even if your blog gets very large number of hits, the only way to grow it really fast is to build recurring traffic.

Have you tried any of these tactics yourself? How have they worked on your blog?

Written by M.Farouk Radwan who is the founder of http://www.2knowmyself.com and who is the author of many books including the book, "How I did it" where he explains how he managed to create a website from scratch that later started getting 500,000 hits per month and became his primary source of income.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How I Increased Traffic by 90,000 Hits per Month in 25 Days

How to Get Affiliate Code from E-Junkie to Promote our Ebooks

Posted: 16 Jun 2011 06:48 AM PDT

Over the last few years here at ProBlogger we've released four different ProBlogger ebooks. We sell most of them to our readers directly, however a growing number of our products are sold through our affiliate program.

By promoting our ebooks, you can earn a 40% commission on the sale price for each ebook sold to your own readers. So on our latest ebook—ProBlogger's Guide to Blogging for Your Business—you'll earn a $20 commission for each ebook you sell. Recommend it, and sell ten copies, and you've earned yourself $200. Sell 100, and you're $2000 better off.

Better still, when you refer someone to one of our ebooks and they then go on to buy more than one within the next six months, you'll earn 40% on those extra sales, too.

If you're interested in promoting ProBlogger ebooks, we have a page set up with information on how to sign up and where you can get resources for your promotions here.

How to get the affiliate code to promote our ebooks

We use E-Junkie to serve our products, but a number of readers have found navigating their affiliate system a little tricky. So today I want to walk you through the process for getting the affiliate code you need to use to make sure you get the commissions you deserve.

1. Go to http://www.problogger.net/affiliates/
.

2. Click on the link to sign up at E-Junkie.

3. Once you're signed up and logged into E-Junkie, look for the "Affiliates" tab at the top of the page and click it.

4. Then click the "Affiliate admin" link in the navigation menu.

5. Next, click the "Get affiliate code" link.

6. Select "ProBlogger" from the drop-down menu, and click the "Get affiliate link" button.

7. On the next page, you can get your link in one of two ways:

a. The common affiliate hop link: Use the code provided there, and you'll send all the people who click it to a general page on ProBlogger which lists all of our products. This is a good option if you want to highlight the full range of our ebooks so they can decide which is right for them. However I don't find it converts as well as the second option—promoting ebooks specifically.

b. Get product-specific affiliate links: This drop-down menu will let you choose which ebook you want to promote. Choose the one you want, then click "Get affiliate code," and it'll take you to a page that displays that code.

This second option generally converts best, because you're able to promote a specific ebook that's relevant to your audience's particular needs.

Whichever option you choose, E-Junkie gives you some HTML code that you can copy and paste into the blog post in which you're promoting a product. The code isn't perfect for every situation, as the call to action is "Click here for further details," but you could change that to something else to suit your post.

The URL part of the code that is given can also be used to link our banner images (or it can be tweeted, shared on Facebook, or emailed).

If you want to use one of our banners to promote an ebook in a sidebar, go our affiliates page and select the one you want.

Do keep in mind that our best-converting affiliates don't just use banner ads in their sidebars—the best conversions come from a more specific promotion, either through writing a blog post about the product (a review), through tweets, or through emailing a list with a recommendation or review. These more personal recommendations of specific products convert a lot better.

Further reading on affiliate marketing

For some more general tips on how to convert most successfully with affiliate promotions check out:

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Get Affiliate Code from E-Junkie to Promote our Ebooks

Thinking of Creating an eBook? Here's a System to Guide You Through it – 33% off Today

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 09:42 PM PDT

If there's one question that I get asked more than any other at the moment it is about eBooks. In fact there are three main questions that I'm asked on the topic of eBooks more than any other:

How do I create content for eBooks?
How do I design beautiful eBooks (covers and internal design)?
How do I market and launch eBooks to maximise their potential?

Over the last few years selling eBooks has become a larger and larger part of my business (in fact its now the #1 way I earn a living) and these three questions have been the same three big issues that I've had to grapple with time and time again.

To be honest I'm still refining my systems even now after years at it but in the early days the process was very very messy and quite hit and miss.

The learning was slow – nobody had written a comprehensive guide to walk me through the process, so I had to really develop my own way forward.

This week Kelly Kingman and Pamela Wilson have released a fantastic guide to walk eBook publishers through a great system of creating, designing and launching eBooks.

It's called the eBook Evolution and for the next day it's 33% off.

Having just reviewed it today I can safely say it is what I needed a few years back when I was starting out – it would have paid for itself many times over by now.

Pamela and Kelly bring some great skills and experiences to this eBook. Pamela is a graphic designer with many years of experience and Kelly is a published author and experienced eBook creator. I've been so impressed by Kelly's previous eBooks that we're actually working together on a photography eBook to be released in the next weeks – she knows what she is doing!

Together they've created eBook Evolution which is divided into 3 areas corresponding with those 3 common questions about eBooks:

Write it – from choosing your topic through to writing your manuscript
Create it – eBook Evolution gives you some great templates to use to help you create a beautiful eBook. You also get a Cover Recipe book to make attractive covers. This section has some great screencasts as well as templates you can use to do your own eBook design.
Launch it – some fantastic tips on how to get word about your eBook out there to the right people to help you promote it.

On top of that you get some great bonuses including a Quick Start Guide, a brainstorming guide to help you come up with ideas and some useful interviews.

The eBook Evolution is available for $97 until tomorrow (Thursday night at midnight Eastern US time) when it'll go up to $147. It comes with a 30 day money back guarantee.

If eBooks are on the horizon for you (or even if you're already publishing them) but you're unsure how to develop a system to write, create and launch the – this is a guide that you'll seriously want to consider.

As I said above – if this had been around 2-3 years ago I could see that it would have returned the $97 investment many times over (all I'd have had to do is sell an extra five $19.99 ebooks from what I learned to make the money back).

Learn more about what the eBook Evolution includes and secure your own copy here

Disclaimer: While I am an affiliate for this product I am also a big fan of Kelly, Pamela and the wonderful resource that they've created.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Thinking of Creating an eBook? Here's a System to Guide You Through it – 33% off Today

Trent Hamm's 5 Strategies for Building The Simple Dollar

Posted: 15 Jun 2011 01:06 PM PDT

This guest post is by Michael Alexis, producer of WriterViews.com.

Trent Hamm's personal finance blog, The Simple Dollar attracts over 1.2 million page views every month. When I interviewed Trent earlier this year, he shared the top strategies he used to build his audience. This post includes five of the strategies Trent used to take his blog from zero to one million, and his best practices now that he is achieving his dreams. How does that feel? Trent describes when it first started happening: "it was a little scary, to know that I was reaching so many people," he says, but adds that now it feels good since he has become comfortable with it.

1. Get lucky by thinking strategically

Trent

Within a month or two of launch, The Simple Dollar had a few hundred thousand views every month. Trent says, "I was very lucky to get a few popular sites to link to me early on, and I didn't expect that." However, when pressed, Trent admits there was strategy involved. Trent started by looking "at a few very popular blogs at the time— Lifehacker and a few others" and then "tried to think a little bit about what kind of posts would be useful to their readers." Trent then intentionally wrote a few early posts with that in mind.

Action Points: 1) Find a popular blog in your niche, 2) Study their style, 3) Write for their audience.

2. Quit your job and commit to your dreams

Trent's impetus for starting his blog was a major financial meltdown. Married and with a newborn, Trent realized, "I was digging a debt hole and following a career path that would get me nowhere near writing." So, he committed to change. Trent started by sitting down for two to three hours a day to focus on writing. A few years later The Simple Dollar generated enough income that he could quit his job.

Trent remembers "it was very scary" to quit, but needed to be done because it was a "gigantic time sink."

How can you do what Trent did? He says it will not be instant, but it isn't impossible either – the reality is somewhere in between. First, he says, "I didn't leave my job until I knew that the day I walked out the door my income would be enough to cover expenses." Once that is the case, Trent says you gain time freedom, and you can work on projects of your liking. In order to reach that point, Trent says, "I devoted a lot of my free time to getting a platform ready, so that I could jump." He spent over two years writing every day, and putting his goals before doing things like watching TV.

Action Points: 1) Build your platform, 2) Earn enough to cover expenses, 3) Take the leap.

3. Set the rules

Some bloggers use a "start here" widget to welcome new readers to their blog. With The Simple Dollar, Trent gives an overview of content with his 14 Money Rules. "These," says Trent, "are an essential set of things that people visiting the site can read and get the basics of." Trent thinks hard about his rules, and says, "they've evolved over time." Even though some of these rules had been highlighted in earlier posts, Trent says, "I kind of sat down and solidified the things I had written about over the years."

You need to believe in your rules, and it is okay to rank them. Trent's favorite is rule #6—Stop Trying to Impress Other People, which developed after he realized that his after work "social events" weren't really important to him, and were a major expense as well. By making sure your rules reflect your values, you give people an honest introduction to your writing.

Action Points: 1. Think about what matters to you, 2. Write about it, 3. Solidify your rules in a list.

4. Be your own ethical filter

Trent believes "when I read other peoples sites, it's a relationship of trust; I'm letting their advice come in the door of my life." So, if that writer is advertising something Trent doesn't feel right about, he doesn't trust that person as much anymore. When writing for The Simple Dollar, Trent will "look at decisions" by viewing them "from the perspective of the reader." That means Trent doesn't sell information to his readers, and isn't serving up posts that are paid for by someone else. "Basically," says Trent, "if it's something I don't want to see from someone I read, I'm not going to do it to my readers."

By applying a strict ethical filter you will build a stronger relationship with your readers, and keep them coming back. "People may not agree with everything I say," says Trent, "but at least they know I'm coming from a genuine background."

Action Points: 1. Consider your writing from a reader's perspective, 2. Be true to yourself, 3. Build trust with your readers.

5. Collect ideas

Trent's blogging started off by chronicling tips from the changes he was making in his financial life. Trent remembers that these were just "two, three, four paragraphs" and that he would "write several a day, jotting those out in 15 minutes, then boom—they were ready to go." Now, Trent posts twice a day with longer, more thoughtful posts, and he attributes this, in part, to his philosophy background.

Throughout his journey, Trent has kept track of his thoughts in an Idea Book. He says that by doing this, once you have all your ideas in once place, you can go ahead and start acting on them.

Action Points: 1. Generate ideas, 2. Track them in your own version of an Idea Book, 3. Use them.

Those are just five of the many strategies Trent used to launch his writing career. Do you use any of these strategies in your writing?

Michael Alexis is the co-founder and producer of WriterViews, a daily video series where accomplished writers share their tips, strategies and stories. Learn more about him here and follow him on Twitter at @writerviews.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Trent Hamm's 5 Strategies for Building The Simple Dollar