This may be a given for some people but might be new to others.  One thing that you should be doing to spread the word of your blog is to post a link to your blog/website from every online profile you have. There are plenty of places you can post a link to your website.  Websites such as: Facebook, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg, etc.  Sometimes you go to these sites to talk with friends and sometimes you may just go to them because you are curious about the service.  Whatever the reason is you should be thinking about spreading the word of your blog while you are at it.

The Idea: Basically how the concept works is if there is a field to enter in your URL for your blog you put it there.  If there is a place to put in your RSS feed then you put that in.  However if there is no field to put in your URL then you should get a bit creative and put it in a text box or somewhere else where people can see it.

Does it work? Don’t expect to see a ton of traffic right away because that isn’t going to happen.  Yes, it will bring traffic to your website but usually very slowly.  It really depends on what websites you are on and how big of a following you have on these online profiles.  Some may be bigger then others and therefore when you first post the URL you may get more traffic then you get later.  That is one thing I noticed when I first put my blog URL on Facebook is that I got a bunch of traffic right away and then after that it just died.  So what I have done now is added my RSS feed to Facebook to generate more traffc for my blog.

How should you get started? You can first get started by being signed up to many of the above profiles I mentioned.  If you get signed up to those sites you can start adding your links.  I suggest that if you can be be activate in those online communities so you build up friendships and therefore have more people checking out your website.  The more people clicking on the links the better.  If they see the website and like it they may recommend it to friends and it will get spread by word of mouth.

So remember to generate traffic to your website there are a ton of ways to do it so you just need to keep at it and constantly update the content on your website so it is fresh and new.  Also the more content you have on the website the better as long as it is quality content.  So keep at it and eventually you will get plenty of traffic to your blog / website.

Who thought that NASA spacecraft the Phoenix Mars lander would be so adept at social networking and Web 2.0?

The popular website Twitter, a Web microblogging service has been sending pithy news “tweets” to the cellphones and computers of interested “followers” from the NASA spacecraft.  As of today the users following this tweet profile is 35,411.  If you are interested in following this Twitter feed yourself you can check it out at: http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix.

Of course, the messages are not coming from Mars.  The messages are coming from Veronica McGregor, the news services manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.  What she has been doing is forwarding questions to the science team and then posting the answers.  Writing the answers in first person to save space with the tweets (since they are of limited length).

Ms. McGregor is amazed at how many people are actually on Twitter following her page.  She thinks it is great though because it is a good medium for spreading information about NASA to the younger generations.  In the past this information has been spread through podcasts, YouTube videos, blogging, and Facebook.  Now with Twitter this information can be sent up to the minute to thousands of people via their computer and cellphones.

See below for some examples of tweets just before the landing.

Atmospheric entry has started. time to get REALLY nervous. Now I’m in the “seven minutes of terror.”

Peak heating will hit in 40 seconds. The heat and energy generated during atmospheric entry would be enough to power 280,000 homes.

parachute must open next. my signal still getting to Earth which is AWESOME!

parachute opening is scariest part for the team.

parachute is open!!!!!

come on rocketssssss!!!!!

I’ve landed!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cheers! Tears!! I’m here!

For those of you who have not hear of Twitter before here is a short explanation of what it is.  Twitter is a privately funded startup company that was started as a side project in March 2006 in the neighborhood of San Francisco, CA.  Twitter is a real-time short messaging service that works on multiple networks and devices.  It is used to update people on friends day-to-day activities, world news, and even for businesses.  So now that you know what it is you may be thinking to yourself how is it really useful for business? Below are a few ways I have found it to be helpful for my blog.

1. Create an account.  Use the search feature of Twitter to see what your competitors are doing and read and learn from them.
2. Add a picture of your company/logo or yourself.  People like to see who you are and that way they can relate to you a bit more easily.
3. Talk to other people on Twitter. Even if it doesn’t help your business it shows you are human and are interested.
4. Point out interesting topics on your space and don’t just put things about yourself.
5. Share links to interesting places / websites / blogs.
6. Be careful about always promoting your own stuff.  Your fans will like it but not everyone else will.
7. Talk about things that are not business related as well.
8. Try to answer questions like “What has your attention?” instead of “What are you doing?”
9. When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link. (this point is in bold because its very important for marketing your blog on Twitter)
10. Ask questions.  Twitter is great for getting opinions.
11. Tweet about other people’s stuff.  This doesn’t directly help your business but show you care about others.
12. When you DO talk about your stuff make sure it is useful.
13. Don’t toot your own horn too much. (I know sometimes I do this but try to stay away from it some of the time if you can)
14. You don’t have to read every tweet.
15. Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.
16. Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (like my blog readers)
17. Remember that Twitter doesnt’ replace direct email marketing.
18. Twitter works well as an opinion poll.
19. Have favorites.  When you are new to Twitter you may not have noticed but there are little star icon next to each tweet.  Watch what new followers favor and build off of that.
20. Avoid spammer stats.  Its not good to see that you have 3 followers and follow 150 people.  If you do this it shows that you haven’t revealed anything about yourself and in turn makes it so that people are unlikely to follow you in return.

Creating a blog takes a lot of work.  One thing you need to do when creating a blog is to drive traffic to that blog.  If you do not drive traffic to your blog then you will not make any money!  It is very important to have ways of driving traffic to your blog so you have a steady stream of traffic or you will never be successful with your blog.

Below is a list of a 9 great ways to get a steady stream of traffic to your blog (a bunch I have already mentioned in previous posts on my blog):

1. Article Submission

Submitting articles to article directories is a great way to get traffic to your website.  Check out my technique of submitting articles HERE.  By submitting your articles to article directories you are creating most visitors through links on the articles and also creating backlinks.  These backlinks are important because they increase the rank of your blog.  So when trying to generate traffic to your blog this is one of the main steps to keep in mind.

2. Social Networking

I have mentioned this as well in a previous blog post.  In that previous blog post I mentioned a list of 77 social networking sites you can submit content to.  By doing this you can drive lots of traffic to your website through links and backlinks. If you can get to the front page of some of these websites such as Digg you can expect to see so much traffic that the server your website is hosted on might melt.  This is something every blogger hopes to do is to get to the front page and just watch the traffic role in.

Another type of website that is very similiar to social networking is social bookmarketing websites.  The difference with these sites is that people can browse the sites and bookmark them and come back to them later very easily if they are interested in the site.

3. Submission to Directories

This is a pretty easy one.  All you need to do is find a list of free directories to submit to and submit your website or blog to them.  There are also paid ones that might send more quality traffic to your blog so its your choice.  Another option is adding a recipocial link which means that the directory links to your site and you link to the directories site.  By doing this you also get better quality visitors and more traffic.

4. Reviews

You can ask for people to review your blog in forums and blogs.  Some blogs such as DigitalPoint’s forum allow you to ask for reviews of your site in a particular thread.  It is a good way to improve you website by having other people take a look at your website and constructively criticize your blog so you can improve it and also you get traffic from the people visiting your website.

5. RSS Feed

This is something I have mentioned in the past that is important to do.  You should have a link on your blog somewhere so people can signup for your RSS feed easily.  By doing this you encourage people to keep up with your blog and also come back to visit it from time to time.  The more RSS readers you get the better.  One of the best things you can do is signup for FeedBurner and you will be able to track the amount of RSS readers you have and give visitors an easy way to signup for your RSS feed.

6. Forums

Another great way to get traffic is through forums.  There are many forums out there that are Do Follow forums.  These forums are great because you can add links to your signature and when you post it will add links back to your website.  Therefore the people visiting the forums can click on your links and also search engine spiders will crawl those links and increase your page rank.

7. E-Books

One thing many bloggers do is produce a free e-book that users can download from their site.  Usually the e-book is a list of most of the things on their blog that have made them money in the past.  It is a great way to interest people to come to your website because everyone likes FREE things.  So consider creating an e-book and posting it on your blog as a free download and people will be sure to download it.  Also the more reputation you have in the blogging world the more like people will want to download that free e-book.

8. Yahoo Groups

You can find Yahoo Groups which are relevant to your niche and join and participate actively.  This works similarly to forums where you put a link in your signature and get traffic the same way as you do from forums.  You can also post and answer questions with Yahoo Answers and put a link to your website in there which will generate traffic to your website.

9. Audio (Podcasting)

This may be something that isn’t for everyone but it can work if you are willing to broadcast yourself on the web.  Basically what you do is create audio on Audio Acrobat and submit it to podcast directories and you will usually get some good traffic.

So there you have it.  9 great ways to generate traffic to your website.  If you have any other good ideas of how to generate traffic for your blog and would like to share please reply to this post.

One good way to increase traffic to your blog (that I mentioned before in a earlier blog post) is to submit your articles to article directories.   There are many different techniques on how you should submit your blog posts to article directories.  Back in the day when people were just learning about SEO (search engine optimization) it was well known that mass submitting your articles was the best way to go.  However nowadays mass submission of your articles is not as effective and you need other techniques to get the traffic you want for your blog.

Some people say to submit some articles to high quality article directories and then submit others to low quality article directories.  Other people say to submit the same article to multiple articles directories.  These are all theories that may work but below is what I believe is the best way to increase traffic to your blog and not get PENALIZED by Google for using this technique.

First of all I don’t believe you need to submit the same article to multiple article directories.  Your article will eventually indexed as long as you submit it to a quality article directory such as:

• EzineArticles.com
• Buzzle.com
• ArticleDashboard.com
• Amazines.com
• IdeaMarketers.com

Most of these article directories require that you signup but that is usually quite easy and you get accepted in a couple of days normally.  Once you have your article submitted to one of these top article directories you shouldn’t submit it to the other 4 or so top article directories.  What you should be doing is take your best articles and submit them evenly between all of these article directories.  Then what I would do with the other lower quality or shorter articles is to submit them to the top 25 QUALITY article directories (not including the ones above). By doing this you get the most effective technique that seems to work nowadays with search engines and you increase the amount of traffic you receive.

So test this technique out for yourself and see how much traffic you receive from these article directories.  I think you will be surprised that if you keep this up you will have plenty of quality traffic coming to your blog on a consistent basis.

One thing a lot of people struggle with when creating a blog is getting enough traffic to the blog.  There are a number of ways you can generate traffic for your blog.  One way I have found to get great traffic to your blog is with LinkReferral.  This is a great site because what you do is your post your website up and then you review and visit other people’s site to get your rank up on the site so people visit your website as well.  It is a great way to generate a lot of traffic to your website.

You can increase the your rank by viewing other sites, submitting site reviews, doing forum posts, and selecting favorites.  If you are interested in getting more traffic to your blog check out LinkReferral.

Link building is a very important process of online marketing.  It is something that every blog needs to do to get more traffic to the site.  When doing link building you need to realize that a bunch of the website you go to are nofollow.  This means that you aren’t going to increase the rank of your page by having links on these highly ranked page.  Basically what happens is the search engine crawlers cannot go from their site to yours so you do not benefit.  However there are still a lot of forums out there that have a DO-follow type setup.  If you are interested in knowing which sites actually have this do follow check out a list of 100 Do Follow Forums here.

One of the key ways you can get indexed by Google is by being linked to other sites that are ranked highly with Google.  This is no secret and it is one of the important things to keep in mind when trying to increase the rank of your website.  So the question now is how do you get others to link to your blog?  There are many ways to do this such as simple link exchanges and comment spamming.  However there are a few other ways to do this that might be a bit more effective.

You can also bait people to link to your blog with a few simple techniques.  You need to give them some kind of content that would make them interested in linking to your blog.  Here are a few link baiting techniques that can work for you.

Ask For A Review

This is a popular technique usually used in webmaster forums.  Basically what you do is ask in a forum for people to review your website.  Sometimes these people make their website look horrible on purpose so people will visit their website and comment on how to improve it.  The main idea of this is to get the person to view your website in the first place.  Then once you get all the comments in you do the recommendations to fix up the website and then you can ask “How does my site look now?”  By doing this type of thing you scored double link bait and hopefully you can get a lot of people to link to your website / blog by doing this.

Write About A Website You Wish To Bait

Another very good way to get people to link to your website is to write about the website you want to link to yours.  By doing this you are stroking the ego of the owner of the website and they may be inclined to link back to your great review about their website.  An interesting fact is that some of the biggest Diggs done were articles about Digg.  People that visit Digg love to read about themselves.

Interview A Site Owner

By doing this the site owner is likely to link to the interview that resides on your website.  This is a fantastic way to get links back to your blog/website.  Same as the previous point this can stroke the ego of the website owner so they are inclined to link back to your website.

The Trade Show Photo Trick

This trick is assuming that you go to trade shows.  What you can do is get pictures taken of hot babes and other webmasters that are at the trade show.  Then what you do is post the pictures on your website and email a link to the other webmasters.  They will most likely post this on their website with a link back to your website so they can show their readers how much of a stud they are.

So here are a few techniques on how to get other websites to link to your website.  Hopefully these tips will be helpful for you and you can use some of these techniques to your advantage.

Here are a list of 77 social networking sites you can use to market your blog. I would suggest first having at least 10 quality posts on your blog before you start to drive traffic to your blog though. The reason why you want to do this is because if there is no content on your blog then the people visiting your blog are unlikely to come back a 2nd or 3rd time. The same goes for quality. If you do not have quality content the readers will usually not give you a second chance if you have a new blog and have not already established your credibility. Check out my list below of some good social networking sites.

Technology:

Slashdot
Dzone
CSS Globe
Pixel Groovy
Design Float
Leet Daily

Internet Marketing:

PlugIM

News:

Digg
Netscape
Reddit
Newsvine
Shoutwire
Wobblog
Content Pop

Bookmarking:

del.icio.us
Ma.gnolia
Furl
AllMyFavorites
Blinklist
Blogmarks
Blummy
BuddyMarks
BookmarkTracker
Chipmark
Connectedy
De.lirio.us
Dogear
Favoritoo
FeedMeLinks
Foxmarks
Fungow
Linkatopia
Livemarks
Mobilicio.us
Mylinkvault
Socializer

Video Sharing:

YouTube
Broadcaster
Panjea
Revver
Viddler
Video Bomb
Video Sift

Photo Sharing:

Flickr
Photbucket
Fotolog
Fotki
My Opera
Zoomr
Text America
Picli

Link/Website Sharing:

StumbleUpon
Blue Dot
Trailfire
Ensiting

General:

MySpace
Facebook
Trig
Friendster
Orkut
Bebo
CyWorld
LiveJournal
Grono
Tribe
Hi5
Jaiku
Multiply
Netlog
Passado
Skyrock
Tagged
AIM Pages
Yahoo! 360
Everyone’s Connected
Windows Live Spaces
Zaadz

I hope you like the list and it helps you market your blog a bit more successfully.

Technorati Media was founded to help bloggers spread information about their blog.  In other terms if you think of Google as a reference library for all the Internet then Technorati Media is kind of like the coffee house (paraphrase from Time Magazine).  Technorati is the leading blog search engine that indexes more than 1.5 million new blog posts daily in real time.

If you want to market your blog then you should join Technorati Media.  They also provide advertising for your blog if you are interested.  They can target ads for your blog based on content and audience.

When getting the rank of your blog one of the most popular measurements are from Technorati and from Alexa.  So when marketing your blog it would be a good idea to signup for Technorati yourself.