This is Jerry West again from SEO Revolution and as promised from my last guest post, I would cover one of my ways to effectively market my content. I use the power of Blogs. You see, my experience has shown that people want to be served. They would rather have content delivered to them than have to go out and search for it.

Search = Work

RSS feeds and other ways of delivering content on the web today looked like a clear answer. After all, webmasters can sit back and have the content dumped in their laps in minutes without having to think about what they want and go looking for it. Sounds good, but I have talked to the big bloggers in many industries and their biggest gripe is all the SPAM that is sent to them via RSS. One blogger mentioned that he was getting so much SPAM through RSS that he just killed the feeds. “It was to the point that I was getting ten SPAM articles for every legit one.” It’s too much work to go through.

What should you do instead?

From those I spoke with, they only rely on a few key outlets for their content. I suggest you find the main bloggers in your space (Google Blogsearch).

Read their blog. Get to know it.

Then post comments that are good and insightful. Use your real name or a pen name, but leave a full name. Don’t post your site as a way to get some free “links” Don’t “kiss up” either. If you disagree with what the blogger said, say so and back it up. Contrary to popular believe, nobody likes a “kiss a$$” so don’t do it. If the Blogger really knows their stuff, and you come up with a counter point that is well thought out and delivered, that will get their attention. Once you feel you have their attention, call them. Tell them why you like their Blog. Be direct and to the point. Then, get down to business.

What To Do:

First, don’t ask for a favor from them. You provide the favor. Tell them you would like to sponsor their Blog, or advertise on their Blog. That will open up the conversation. They may ask what site you want to advertise, and once you tell them, they will know you are in a similar space. PayPal them the money right then, don’t wait. If they are being receptive, ask for them to review one of your articles (it must be killer and reflect the same well-thought out approach of the comments you made on their Blog). But make sure they understand you aren’t asking for the article to be posted, just commentary with a link to your article.

Do you see the power of this yet?

It’s coming. Once you do this with the top 3-4 Bloggers, the secondary Bloggers, who follow the top Bloggers like puppy dogs, will pick up the article as well, and they will do the same thing … they will comment on it and link to your article. Using Digg and the other “Social Bookmarking” tools is fine … but you won’t even come close to getting the same amount of quality traffic as going direct to the top Bloggers.

Why?

Because they control the quality traffic on the web right now.

Let me repeat that: Top Bloggers Control the Quality Traffic on the Web.

Think about that statement for a moment. It isn’t the QUANTITY of traffic, it is the QUALITY of traffic. If someone you trust recommends a source, you are going to at least check it out aren’t you? You will also be more willing to spend more time on that site and really look into it, wouldn’t you? Of course. That is human nature.

Here is the kicker: If you sell a product or service, make sure the Blogger understands that you track all sales and if any sales are the result of his/her traffic, you will personally see to it that they are paid an affiliate commission for that customer for life. Yes, life. Make it worthwhile for them.

As my grandfather would always say, “Take care of the people who take care of you.”

Build and nurture these relationships and you will see great things happen for your promotions. Here are some actual stats that were achieved by getting three top bloggers to post their opinion on an article I wrote:

• Blogger One: 1,015 uniques
• Blogger Two: 345 uniques
• Blogger Three: 156 uniques
• Total Uniques to Page: 2,551

In just 30 days, 432 links were acquired. While most of those links will not be counted in Google’s new measurement, that is still an excellent achievement.

If we placed each unique visitor at a cost of 30 cents per and each link acquired at $2.50, this is our “projected benefit” from this campaign:

• Uniques: 2,551 * $0.30 = $765.30
• Links: 432 * $2.50 = $1,080.00
• Total = $1,845.30

This figure represents what it would have cost to deliver the traffic and getting the links. In other words, I can use that $1,800.00 for something else. Remember, all the links acquired are one-way links. That is a nice added bonus. And link builders, even those overseas, can charge up to $8.00 for each one-way link.

This technique gets better. Look at the referrers in your log files. Start at the top and work your way down. Those who are sending you the most traffic are those you want to contact first. Look at their site and/or their blog. Is this someone you want to do business with? To promote you? To advertise with?

Based on your needs and goals, you can decide if you want to continue and contact them. Remember that just because the page is a PageRank0 doesn’t mean you shouldn’t contact them. There could be an issue with the site, the Blog being new, or the owner not understanding how to get their site indexed. You would be surprised how many Bloggers don’t understand fundamental Internet Marketing. If they don’t, offer to help them in that area in return for their help to promote your business with their readers. It’s a win-win.

As you go through the list of referrers, your goal is to expand your own “PR Distribution List”. You have the top three Bloggers on your list, now you want to expand into the secondary level. While the secondary Bloggers tend to have a very small fraction of the readership the big Bloggers do, they are worth contacting. If you expand your circle to include 40-50 Bloggers, when you have your next great article, you have a distribution list that will give you immediate quality traffic … plus, you’ll get some great incoming links to boot.

If you are struggling with qualified traffic and getting solid links, this approach can breathe life back into your site.

Follow these simple rules for search engine optimization and your blog will rank much higher in Search Engines.

1. Use your primary keyword in your blog domain

   The first thing to do is to ensure that your blogs URL contains the primary keyword you want to optimize for. Using the targeted keyword in subdomains also helps. (unfortunately not something I’ve done with my blog)For example, if you want to start a HTML tutorial site then the primary keyword you want your URL to contain is html. So choose a URL like www.htmlhelp.com.

   You can also use the keyword in subdomains like www.web-design.com/htmlhelp

2. Use your primary keyphrase in the title of your posts

   If your primary key phrase is html help make sure that the word html and help appear in your blog headers such as H1 and H2 tags as well as the title of each of your posts.

3. Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post

   If you want to get listed for secondary keywords use them infrequently in the body of your post. The theory is that the more times a keyword appears within a Webpage, the more relevant the page is likely to be for someone searching those keywords.But do not overdo this by repeating the same keywords over and over again. Google bots can find out if a keyword is too frequent on a page and might just remove your site from their index.

4. Use your keywords in the anchor text of links

   Use your primary and secondary keywords in the anchor text of links when linking to other blog posts or to other pages of your blog. Keyword in links have more importance than simple text.

5. Make sure search engines can spider your blog easily

   Make sure your navigation bar is present on all pages of your blog. Your previous posts or atleast the popular ones should be linked to all pages so they get spidered easily.

6. Get backlinks from other blogs

   You need as many links as possible to link back to your posts or blog because it will help you build pagerank and get your blog to rank higher in search engines. The more links you have the higher your blog is ranked in Technorati helping your blog to be found easily.So how do you get backlinks?

   • The first thing to do to get high-quality links is to submit your blog and RSS feed to blog search engines and directories.Start by submitting your blog to all the directories listed on this page:
     http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
   • Link exchanging with other similarly-themed blogs will help you to form richly interlinked networks or communities.
   • If you find an interesting article on another blog, link to it generously. The trackback will become a link back to your blog.
   • Lastly posting legitimate comments in response to posts on other blogs will help you get backlinks. Regularly post legitimate comments in similarly-themed blogs with high traffic to get many backlinks.
7. Update your blog frequently

   Update your blog frequently using all the rules mentioned above and your blog will surely get top rankings in a short time.

8. Stick with your blog

   Once you start posting on your blog, stick with the same domain or you could end up losing a lot of your traffic and regular readers.Also stick with the topic you selected for your blog. If it’s about pets don’t suddenly switch to another topic such as Gadget’s because you will loose traffic.

Source: JohnTP.com

Have you ever wondered how you can generate more traffic to your blog/websites using forum signature area? I have wondered that myself for awhile now and finally found a few ways to optimize it.  It took a bunch of trial and error but here are a few points I came up with that have help me generate traffic to my blogs:

1. Install Google Analytics
You have to have Google Analytics installed on your websites to be able to optimize your signature.  Without having it installed you cannot tell where the traffic is going. So once you have Analytics installed on your websites what you do is login and go to Traffic Source > forum_name (referral) > looks for Dimension: and select Landing Page instead of Referral Path.  In here you can tell exactly where all your traffic is coming from in your forum signature.  So if you have say have 3 keywords in your signature and they all link to different pages on your blog you can tell which keywords get clicked on more than others. This is very important in choosing which keywords to put in your signature.  In addition to putting keywords in your signature you need to make sure these keywords relate to the topic of the forums.  If the keywords do not relate then the likelyhood of someone clicking on the links will decrease significantly.

2. Create Threads with useful information
You need to create threads with useful information for people to notice your forum signature.  If all you do is respond to other peoples threads with your 2 cents which isn’t that exciting and useful like “thanks” you aren’t going to have people noticing your forum signature.  You need to start threads that people like and are intrigued by and lots of people will view and respond to it.  Those people are than more likely to view your forum signature and click on your links.

3. Make the keywords in you signature catchy / interesting
People have a very short attention span so you need to grab their attention quickly.  So if you have a very interesting keyword in your forum signature they are more likely to click on it than pass it by.  If they can live without clicking on it than you haven’t chosen the right keywords.

4. Make the keywords in your signature colorful and attractive
People like colors! They will notice it a lot more if it has colors and is bold. If it just blends in with the rest of the posts in the thread it doesn’t stick out and therefore will not get clicked. Play with the appearance of the forum signature and make sure it stands out so people will see it right off the bat!

5. Formatting is important
In addition to above you need to make sure the formatting is good. You can play with alignment (centered / right aligned / left aligned).  You can play with adding in smiley faces or other emoticons to see if that helps. You can play with underlines, *, !, etc to help grab the readers attentions.

So hopefully this list will help you optimize your forum signatures so you get the traffic you are looking for to your blog/website!

Creating traffic to your blog can be a difficult task. While doing some research and looking at my Google Analytics stats I realized there is another way to generate traffic to your blog. This is something most of you probably have never thought about and I didn’t think about it myself until I started getting traffic to my website through this method. Everyone knows that getting traffic through search engines is great because it usefully converts better and you don’t need to advertise your blog all the time to get this type of traffic. Have you ever thought of the possibly of getting traffic through the Google image search feature? If you haven’t this might be something to look into. Let me explain a bit further.

When you add a image to your blog you think you are doing this mainly to create an attractive website that people will be interested in; however there are other beneficial reasons why you may want to add pictures to your website.  This other main reason is because people can find your blog through the Google image search feature.  Have you ever seen the Google Image search feature?  There is a button at the top left of Google to search images when you search for topics and in the search feature you sometimes get Image results showing at the top of the search results.  See example below:

So how can you optimize your images so they show up in the Google search feature?  If you can get in one of these top spots when people do regular Google searches you could potentially generate a lot of traffic to your blog.  So how is it done?  Here are a few steps you can take to optimize your images so you can get some better traffic to your blog through Google Image search feature.

1. Insert keywords into your Alt tags – this should be pretty self-explanatory.  If you put descriptive alt tags on your images you are more likely to come up in the search results
2. Name your Images with Descriptive titles - this as well should be pretty obvious.  If you have unique titles for your images then you are more likely to come up in the results.  If you have a very generic title for your images then the likelihood of it being the same as other images is very good and therefore giving you bad image search results
3. Use relevant text around the images – It is helpful to have relevant keywords around the images because those keywords will likely show up in bold as well and the user who searches will more likely click on the images
4. Optimize the title and meta tags of your pages – this is something you should already be doing for all of your pages.  You should especially be doing this for the pages that have the images so that they come up in the results a bit more easily
5. User anchor text keywords in links to images – what this means is if you have a hyperlink to an image and its text make sure the text is descriptive and not something generic like “Click for full size image”.  That type of thing is generic and will not help.  If you put something like “Jessica Alba Hot Picture” you are more likely to get the right results
6. Make Your image folder accessible to search engines – you need to make sure that your images folder is accessible by search engines.  If it is not then the images will not get indexed by Google and you will not get in the search image results
7. Enable Google Image Search in Webmaster Tools – this is one that I just recently found.  If you are signed up with Google Webmaster tools what you can do is login to your account and go to the Tools tab on the menu bar and find the option to enable enhanced image search on the left sidebar.  Once you do this your images will hopefully be indexed a bit more easily
8. Monitor the Number of Google Images Indexed – this is an important step because if none of your images are indexed then you are not going to get any traffic from Google image search.  You can do this by going to Images button at the top left of Google and then typing – site:www.yoursite.com or site:yoursite.com.  It really depends on how your site is indexed for if you should have the www or not.  If it brings up results then those are the images indexed by Google.  If you get no results then you have no images indexed by Google and you need to work harder on the steps above to get your images indexed.

So hopefully these tips above will help you generate some extra traffic to your blog.  I know it has worked in the past for many other people and can work for you if you just give it a try and try to follow these guidelines.  Good luck and let me know how successful you are at this technique!

There are many ways to generate traffic to your blog and I have mentioned plenty of them on my blog already, but what I plan on doing today is giving you a list of the methods I found work best.  I have tried many different ways and some of them give short term results while others have given long term results.  I think it is good to have a little bit of both so you get the maximum amount of traffic to your blog.  So below I will split my traffic generation into two categories: short term and long term traffic generation results.

Short Term Traffic Generation:

Yahoo Answers - If you are interested in driving traffic quickly and easily this is a good one for you to try.  What you do is you post answers or questions with links back to your website and write them in a way that interests readers to come visit your website.  You will get hits right away but they usually don’t visit again after the question is gone.

Facebook - I would say that the links you put in your profile are short term.  The reason that is is because all your friends will check out the new link to your blog / website when you first post it up because of the news feeds but then after that it will die down and you usually won’t get anymore new traffic.

Forums - Posting on forums can be a good way to get short term traffic to your blog.  As long as you are posting useful information on the forums and have a good signature with links to your website you will usually get some decent traffic back to your blog.  Usually a lot more traffic then some of ideas mentioned above but then again it is still only be short term traffic.  However one of the other benefits of this type of traffic is the linkbacks to your website which can help raise your PageRank.

Blog Comments – This is pretty similar to forum posts.  Basically you can get a bit of traffic to your blog / website but you are better off doing this to increase your linkbacks which in turn will hopefully increase your PageRank.

Link Exchange sites – Link exchange sites such as linkreferral will generate traffic to your blog as long as you are using them but once you stop so will the traffic.  Most of the traffic generated with this method however is not very good traffic because people are just interested in getting more traffic to their own website.  Since everyone has the same idea in mind no one really sticks around a website to see what it is about.

Twitter – As far as I can see so far this is a short term way of generating traffic to your blog.  May be after getting a very large follower base you can get long term traffic from this but in the mean time you get hits every once and awhile from this.

EntreCard - This is like linkrefferal in that it is basically a link exchange type program.  You can advertise on other peoples blogs and they can advertise on your blog.  It does generate traffic but majority of it is just traffic where people are interested in getting points so they can make more traffic.  It is worth a shot to try but it might not be the best solution in the long run.

Social Networking - This is a awesome way to get a ton of traffic to your blog.  If you can get to the front page of some networking websites you can see up to 50K unique visitors in a day!  This traffic is awesome but it will not last forever and its not easy to get to the front page.  I definitely recommend doing this step but don’t expect to see traffic for months and months after you post something on the website.

PPC Advertising - This is not something I have tried on this website but is something I have done with my full time job.  PPC stands for Pay Per Click advertising and what that is is when you pay for each click you get on your advertising to go to your website.  An example of this is Google Adwords where you see advertisements on the right of the search results.  If you click on them the advertiser has to pay for each click on their advertisement.  This is a very good way to get traffic fast to your website but it will cost you and you will only get it when you pay for it.

Long Term Traffic Generation (The Good Stuff!):

Search Engine traffic – This is really good traffic.  If you can do a bunch of SEO on your blog/website and get a bunch of your pages ranked highly in search engines for key terms then you will get a lot of traffic to your website without a lot of work.  This will always be constant traffic as long as you do not get banned from search engines.  So just be careful not to employ black hat SEO techniques and you should be fine.

Article Directories - This is another way to get long term traffic to your blog.  Once you have submitted enough quality articles to article directories you will constantly get traffic from them to your blog and it is good traffic because people are interested in what you have to say.  So if possible try to always add more articles to article directories.

Link Exchanges - As long as the sites you are exchanging links with do not go under you can usually always get traffic from the links you have exchanged with other websites.  There are rumors that Google doesn’t like this type of traffic generation but I think if you do a little bit of it it cannot hurt your website rank and will bring in some more traffic.

Link Baited Websites – There might be another term for this but this is what I want to call it.  Basically what this is is websites that have linked to your website because they found it interesting and wanted to link to it.  If you can write blog entries that are very interesting to users they will most likely link to it and refer to it in their website.  This is great traffic because it is free and you don’t really need to work for it.

Banner Exchange - This is similar to link exchanges in that you exchange a banner with another website and there is a link on the banner.  It is good for long term traffic as long as both websites stay up and active you can always send traffic to each others websites.

So that is it

For now this is the list of things I have tried so far to generate traffic to my blog.  As mentioned in a lot of the paragraphs some of the traffic generated to the website is a lot better then other traffic but all of them are worth a shot.  I would try some of them yourself and see what works best for you.  And remember as long as you write quality content, lots of content, and do some SEO on your website you should get decent traffic from search engines.

Also if you guys have any other traffic methods you would like to suggest feel free to comment below and I can add your recommendation to my list and link back to your website since you are the contributor of the idea.

Generating traffic to your blog can be a difficult task but with the help of EntreCard it is a little less difficult.  The way EntreCard works it a little bit tricky at first so let me explain how it works.  It is basically a traffic exchange type system where you advertise with your widget on your blog other peoples blog ads.

EntreCard Virtual Currency

Before I go into any detail on how EntreCard works you first need to understand how the virtual currency called EntreCard Credits, or “EC” for short works.  You earn these EC in a variety of ways that do not cost you any money.  With the EC that you earn, you can purchase advertisements on thousands of blogs, or shop for hundreds of products and services in EntreCard’s virtual marketplace.

How To Get Started

You can get started with the system by going to EntreCard.com. When you are signing up you are prompted to create a 125×125px ad or create a text ad for your blog.  Note: Keep in mind that you can only apply for this system if you have a blog. So once you have signed up you will be advised to put a widget on your blog (this is a requirement to participate with this program).  This is simply done by choosing one of the variations of the widget sizes and putting the html code on your blog (usually on the sidebar).

Earning Entrecard Credits

Now to earn EC you can click on the Campaign button at the top of the page in the EntreCard control panel.  Browse through the cards you like and click on the ones that catch your eye.  Then to view their blog you click on the link to their blog and view the blog.  Once you have spent some time at the blog and commented or whatever you wanted to do you can find the EntreCard box and click the Drop button to drop your card.  This card will go into that users inbox and they will know you visited their blog.  You can do this process a few times to earn more EC.  You can also earn EC when you first signup depending on the number of blog posts you have.

Purchasing Advertisement

Once you have earned enough EC you can click on Campaign at the top and click on the Browser option at the top of the page.  Find the blog you want to advertise with and click the Advertise button.  What this will do is send that user a request that you want to advertise with your 125×125 ad on their blog.  If they approve then for one whole day your ad will show on their blog and when people click on it you will get traffic to your blog.

Summary

So this whole EntreCard system can be summarized as:

• Sign up for EntreCard & add the widget to your blog
• Earn some EC by dropping cards and blog posts
• Purchase some ads
• When you earn more credits you can purchase ads on more expensive blogs
• You get credits from dropping cards, others people dropping cards on your blog, when others buy your ad space, or if you sell products or services in EntreCard’s virtual marketplace

Couple Extra Notes

• The ads your purchase run for a full 24 hours and will not be in rotation with any other ads
• Every time someone purchases an advertisement on your blog the cost of your ad goes up and for every day that goes by without someone purchasing an ad on your site the price goes down
• Expect to see higher prices on ads with higher Alexa Page Rank, Google PageRank, Technorati Authority, etc

So after doing a lot of research and testing one technique for generating traffic that I found to work best for me is to generate traffic through forums. It is important however that the forums that you do participate in are do follow forums.  You can find a list of them here in one of my previous posts.

So how do you generate traffic with forums?

There are a couple ways you can generate traffic with forums.  The main ways you can generate traffic are through links in signatures, review links (in particular threads), and through increased rank from search engines because of the do follow links in the forum.   When trying to generate traffic with forums you need to be careful though not to get banned.  This is something that can happen easily if you do not follow the rules of the board.  This actually happened to me recently because I posted a link in the body of a forum post and they deemed it as self promotion and didn’t take to kindly to it.  So I was given a temporarily ban on that forum.  So be warned that you do need to follow the rules if you don’t want to be banned.

So what forums work for me?

After trying a few ones the two I find that I like the best are DigitalPoint and SitePoint.  The reason why I like these two in particular are because they are do follow forums and they have a lot of traffic.  The type of forums that have very little visitors are very unlikely to send you a lot of traffic to your website.  So what I do is try to be as active as possible in these blogs and as a result get traffic from the members of the forums.  Also a neat feature of DP (DigitalPoint forums) is that if you have an Google Adsense account you can also get a share of the ads shown on an thread you participate in.  Therefore if you are a very active member of the boards you have a chance to make money with your Google Adsense account on the forum as well.  Usually you don’t get a ton of earnings but it is still worth setting up.

So test this out for yourself.  Market your blog with forums.  If done right it can generate plenty of traffic to your blog and you will be on your way to a successful career as a blogger.

Alexa.com is a website that is used to give you information on traffic levels for your websites.  The Alexa rank is measured by the amount of users who have visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.  Alexa rank may be a bit inaccurate because the method of measuring a websites reach is by people who have the Alexa toolbar installed and visit your site and majority of people who have that installed are more tech savvy.  Therefore more tech savvy websites usually have a higher rank than other websites so the Alexa rank to an certain extent can be a bit inaccurate measure of traffic.

Now you may be asking why is it important to have a good Alexa rank?  Well there are many reasons why you would want to increase your Alexa rank however, the main reason why you want to increase your Alexa Rank is because advertisers and advertising services like ReviewMe and Text Link Ads use your site’s Alexa rank as a way to determine the worth of a link on your website.

So the question now is how can I increase my Alexa rank? There are a lot of ways to do this but the two main ways I have done this are:

• place a Alexa Traffic Rank button on your site
• install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension

By adding these two things to your website you will certainly see an increase in your Alexa rank.  And as mentioned before this is important because many advertisers still use this number to determine the worth of advertising and links on your website.   So try and constantly increase this Alexa rank and if possible get into the top 100k would be a good goal.  This is a goal of mine and I am slowly working my way towards it and will hopefully reach it in the next few months.

So consider these two ways of increasing your Alexa rank.  You won’t regret it!

Note that the title of this post itself is “linkbait”.  Linkbaiting – the idea of writing content that people will be interested in and link to is nothing new to anyone.  However the ART of linkbaiting is something that needs to be done right to draw attention to your blog or website.  The art of linkbaiting is worth mastering for a few reasons:

• It can draw in lots of traffic and have a viral effect on your website where people just spread the word and before you know it everyone links to your website or knows about it
• Incoming links are one of the best ways to get to the top of search engines
• This is also a strategy that Google approves (which is very important because most of your SE traffic will usually come from Google)

What is linkbaiting and why does it work?

As mentioned about linkbaiting is writing content that people are interested in and want to tell others about.  The content is compelling, useful and people feel the need to share the information with others or believe it will improve the quality of their website.  It works because it is relatively simple to produce and doesn’t cost you anything.  As long as you have some guidelines of what type of things attract people to link to your content you are on the right track.  A great example of linkbaiting is WillItBlend.  The reason why this works is because it is out of the ordinary and it is interesting to the “younger” generation.  You can see how people would find throwing an iPhone into a blender could be funny and interesting to watch.

So you may think that if you are good at promoting your content and having it somewhat interesting to people that this ART of linkbaiting will work for you.  For the most part that isn’t the case.   The people who are best at linkbaiting know how to write content that will constantly be interesting to the reader and they try to have at least one a week in their website or blog.  Below are a list of a few characteristics that make a website or a blog good linkbait.

1. A list of useful information in a short concise post

These type of posts in blogs are very interesting to readers because they give the reader very useful information with not a lot of reading.  People like access to their information quickly and they do not want to have to wait for it.  So if you can provide them with a list of the “Top 10″ or the “25 Best” type posts people are usually interested in this type of thing.  Below are a few example title tags:

• 100 Plugins For…
• 15 Tips to…
• 100+ Resources to Help You…
• 30+ Simple Things You Can Do to…
• 25 Ways to…

I think you get the idea.  I have done this technique many times on my website and as you can see majority of them are in the top read posts (right navigation bar).

2. Monitoring the News to bring the lastest news to your blog

Another way to get a lot of good links to your website is by writing on new topics in a timely manner.  If there is something new that is happening in news and it relates to your blog you should see if you can write about it first.  People will be searching for information on it and when they find your site since there are less resources out there they will be more likely to link to your blog.

3. Write on a controversial topic

People like controversy.  Plan and simple.  If there is something to argue about or is politically incorrect then people want to read about it.  Controversy draws attention so if you can write an opposite opinion to something in the news you can probably cause a lot of controversy yourself on your blog and people will link to that because they find it fascinating.

4. The use of fear

This is another technique that people use to draw links into their blog.  You can scare people into reading more and then wanting to link to your post because it is informational.  Something like what has happened recently with the economy in the United States – “The Dow Jones stocks has went down 777 points yesterday costing stockholders $1.2 trillion dollars!”  This type of title would cause fear to stockholders and encourage them to read it out of seer curiosity.

5. Using humor

The use of humor is very effect when it comes to the ART of linkbaiting.  People can find WillItBlend humorous and therefore link to the site.  You can also write funny witty titles that catch the readers attention and make them want to read more.  Once the reader reads more they will realize that it is a great post and want to link to it.

So there you have it.  This is linkbaiting in a nutshell.  You should try yourself to use some of these technique to encourage others to link to your website.  Try to make a habit of doing this once a week and you will be surprized at the type of traffic you can generate from your blog.

To increase the rank of your website/blog and therefore get more traffic you should build links.  I have said this a few times already on my blog but it is important to keep stressing this fact because it will increase the rank of your website and ultimately get you more traffic.  If you rank high on search engines such as Google then people will click on the link to your website first and if they like it they will hopefully stick around and read some of your website.  Below is a list of a few things you can try to get more links to your website.

• Build a “X list”.  Meaning a list of however many things you want on your topic.  Example: 10 Ways To Make Money Online. People like to link to these type of posts/articles
• Create a 10 easy tips on your topic type article
• Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category
• Create a list of gurus/experts.  Like how I have done with this post
• Make your content easy to understand and follow so that people are more likely to link to it
• Put in some effort to minimize grammatical or spelling errors.  I have said this before and it is helpful so people can follow you posts more easily
• Add a privacy policy and a picture of yourself to build authority on your website/blog
• Submit your website to article directories
• Submit your website to directories
• Trade articles with webmasters
• Trade links with other blogs
• Post comments on other peoples blogs
• Email friends and others about important relevant news and ask them for feedback
• Post a review thread in a forum and ask for feedback
• Submit your website to DMOZ
• Add your posts to social marketing websites such as Digg and get your friends to tag it so hopefully it gets to the front page of the website and gets lots of hits / links
• Join the Better Business Bureau (people will trust your authority more)
• List your site at the local library’s website
• Launch an affiliate program
• Produce a free e-book and put a link for it on your homepage
• Add your website to Craigslist
• Ask and answer questions on Yahoo Answers and provide links to sources (this is a good one I use to get some quick traffic to my website.  It won’t bring continuous traffic but it brings some quick traffic)
• Setup a page with Squidoo
• If you publish a RSS feed with useful content some people will link to that
• Participate in forums and add a link to your website in your signature
• Review other peoples products and have a link back to your website
• Review related sites on Alexa to draw related traffic streams
• Link to other blogs. By doing this most bloggers can track where links are coming from and they may in turn link back to your blog
• Add your blog to Technorati
• Design your website so it is very easy to navigate and you may find that more people will link to certain content on the site
• Sue Google (I do not recommend this one but it will draw a ton of traffic to your website)
• Get sued by a company people hate (hopefully you don’t have to deal with this but you would get a lot of links to your website from people who hated this company)
• Hold a contest. People love contests where they get things for free so they will most likely link to it
• Build a tool collection.  Tools are always useful and people like to link to lists of useful tools
• Offer free samples in exchange for feedback
• Interview someone of authority. People are interested in that type of thing and will tend to link to it
• Create and release an open source site design template.