“> Posted on 14. Aug, 2010by Mitz

Hi my name is Mitz from WordPress Website Builder. I build websites for a living and love sharing what I know about websites. When building your first, second, or one hundredth website, laying the right foundations down in the first place should be your number one task. Certain things just have to be done and I have found that a “website foundation checklist” is a great help. As I only use WordPress for my websites, the list only applies to this content management system and the steps I use to build a WordPress Website. Many of the steps will be familiar to you, however we often forget to complete them all before launching into a website or blog.

Research a niche.Make a list of keywords that apply to your niche.Buy a domain name that includes your top keywords.Install the website. Upload WordPress.Install a basic theme. You will probably change it later so don’t waste time now.Add Categories that use your keywords. Do not make them up as you go.Change permalinks structure and settings for WordPress.Install all your plugins that you use. (I have another list for that)Create a Twitter account, a Facebook Page, and a Feedburner account. Hook these accounts into Twitterfeed.Add links to these accounts on your sidebar.Add your Mailchimp or Aweber optin code to the side bar in the top position.Setup 7 auto responder emails to to go out to your new optins.Add 5-10 great posts. Schedule 20 more.Change your privacy settings to let the world in.#1  Research a niche

There are many ways to research a niche, however the easiest one is to do a search in Google for something you are interested in. Then do the same search in the Google keyword tool and Google insights. What you are looking for is a niche that gets people searching for it but doesn’t have too much competition. Some people also go to Clickbank to find a product to sell and then create a website around that. If you are new to all of this then I have already prepared a basic step by step article and video tutorial showing how to research a niche for your new website.

#2  Make a list of keywords that apply to your niche

When you are researching your niche in Google search and Google keyword tool you will see a list of related searches and keywords that you can add to your keyword list. These words are great to use as WordPress categories, subjects for posts, and link building anchor text.

#3  Buy a domain name that includes your top keywords

Buying a domain name with your keywords in it can take you to the top of Google organic search. If you build the right foundations to your website you will most likely stay there too. For example the first website I made was a great domain name, Tips4pc.com, however I wanted to rank for “computer tips” and the guy that included this in his domain name is always number one in Google search. I have to struggle while he has the keywords in his domain name. After a few years I finally woke up to this mistake and created all my websites with keywords in the domain name. I am number one for all of these.

#4  Install the website. Upload WordPress

Again I have learnt by my mistakes and now use WordPress for every website I build. Why not use it when it does everything for you?

#5  Install a basic theme. You will probably change it later so don’t waste time now

This is where most people waste time, installing a theme, tweaking it, and then changing their minds and starting all over again. I now install a simple theme, very basic with minimal features, and add to it. By the time you add the plugins and banners, the whole website comes alive.

#6  Add Categories that use your keywords. Do not make them up as you go

People usually just slap any old category into a WordPress website, however I have found that if you plan your categories and create them beforehand thoroughly, you will benefit from more natural search traffic. If your categories are clearly defined it also helps the visitor find what they want.

#7  Change Permalinks structure and settings for WordPress

Of course everone knows you have to change the permalinks in WordPress. It takes about one minute to do and changes your urls into search engine friendly URLS.

#8  Install all your plugins that you use. (I have another list for that)

Yes I have a list of plugins that I use and choose from that the ones I need for a particular niche or style of website. Installing plugins is very important and must be done before launching your website. That way every post from the start will be pinged, added to the sitemap, and optimized, all to your advantage. Comment plugins encourage input from website visitors which is a must when building a website.

#9  Create a Twitter account, a Facebook Page, and a Feedburner account. Hook these accounts into Twitterfeed

For every website I create it’s own branded Twitter account, Facebook page and a Feedburner account. Then I go to Twitterfeed.com and enter all these details in. Twitterfeed will publish my posts automatically to my Twitter and Facebook accounts via my RSS feed. So all I have to do is post on my website and information is shot out everywhere. Of course there are other software and websites that do the same thing. It doesn’t matter which one you use as long as you are doing it.

#10  Add links to these accounts on your sidebar

Once you have created these accounts you should make them accessible on your website. This way you will get people following you. It will not happen if you do not display the icons.

#11  Add your Mailchimp or Aweber optin code to the side bar in the top position

If you do not have a Mailchimp account or an Aweber account then you are not serious about your website marketing and your foundations. Both these companies offer a free signup for new accounts so you have no excuse. I have a Mailchimp account and it is used to collect email addresses for me. I just create a new list for every website I build, then create a form for that list, and get the code and paste it into a text widget on my sidebar. Its that easy. Mailchimp does the rest.

#12  Setup 7 auto responder emails to to go out to your new optins

If you set up emails in your account to send out to your optins and certain times, automatically, it will save you time and stress in the end. I usually setup 7 emails to send out over a few months. The more emails you have lined up, the better. In the emails you can link back to your website, add affiliate links, and more. Always give valuable information to keep them wanting more. Setting up this foundation is very valuable. You do not want people signing up to your list and then receiving no correspondence from you. You need to keep your website fresh in their minds and give them a reason to visit.

#13  Add 5-10 great posts. Schedule 20 more

When starting a website you need to make it look like it has some content. Visitors who land there want to see something interesting. You also need to make sure your content is relavent to your niche and valubale information at the same time. If you are not very good at writing content yourself you can outsource the job. This is all the rage at the moment. Scheduling your posts in advance will give you time to concentrate on other things like getting traffic and SEO.

To schedule a post simply ==>click on the Edit link next to Publish immediately==>then move the publish date forward==>click ok==>the publish button will then change to a schedule button==>press it to schedule.

#14  Change your privacy settings to let the world in

I know this might sound like a lot of work, but who said it was easy to start a website? You can just slap up a website and hope for the best, but why not do the hard yards first and then sit back and relax, knowing that the background work is done. Once you have done all these steps you can concentrate on creating great content for your website, knowing that the wheels are already turning.

I have more details about each step on my newest website WordPress Website Builder. If you examine this website you will see that I have followed the steps above to the T. The website is ranked #1 for my main keywords ” WordPress Website Builder” and is climbing the ladder on other harder to get keywords also.

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How I Grew a Second Blog to Over 6,000 Subscribers – Twice as Fast | MaxBlogger Stories #logo img { display:none; }#logo .site-title, #logo .site-description { display:block; } MaxBlogPress WordPress Plugins for charging up your wordpress blog for MAX traffic and MAX income ProductsMaxBlogger StoriesBlogFree WordPress Plugins MaxBlogger Stories How ordinary bloggers are getting extra ordinary results… Read their success stories in their own words… How I Grew a Second Blog to Over 6,000 Subscribers – Twice as Fast Posted on 22. Aug, 2010by viperchill

I’ve had a lot of public success with blogging over the last few years in terms of both making money from my blogs and growing the size of their respective audiences. What a lot of people didn’t see before this success is the number of failed blogs I’ve started which consumed hours upon hours of my time, only to go nowhere.

I attribute some of the success I’ve found now to the lessons learned from those failures, and I still feel like I’m learning a lot today, which is one of the reasons I love blogging so much.

At the end of 2009 I sold my personal development blog, PluginID, for a mid five-figure sum (I can’t reveal the exact amount) when it had no less than 6,600 subscribers. It took me a little more than 18 months to reach what I consider quite a substantial readership.

In 9 months I’ve grown by a similar figure with my marketing blog, ViperChill, which I re-launced a few weeks before announcing the sale of PluginID, which had been sold a few months prior.

Though I don’t think blogging is a great way to make money fast, there are ways to speed up the growth of your blog. Similarly, if you’re just focused on growing quickly and making some easy money, then you’re in blogging for reasons that will probably stunt your growth.

There are a few core principles that I believe really helped me to grow my blog fast that I want to share with you today.

I Focused on the Essentials

When I first started PluginID I was literally doing as many things as I could to help grow the site. You would find me going through dozens of sites per day on StumbleUpon, leaving comments every time a blogger in the same niche posted an article and connecting with as many people as possible on Twitter.

Some things were effective, but others were pretty much a waste of time. Now, with ViperChill, I have two simple aims:

Write the best content that I canWrite the best content for others that I can

I haven’t used StumbleUpon for as long as I can remember, I leave less than 5 blog comments per month and I generally just communicate with the same people on Twitter that I did a few months ago. I found that the two most useful things for me were writing the best content I can – which others talk about – and writing great content for other people (guest blogging).

By focusing on these two things, I was able to maximise the effectiveness they had and leverage these strategies to help me grow far quicker than I had in the past.

I Worked to Build Fewer, But Stronger, Connections

Another thing I did when working on my personal development blog was try to become a ‘friend’ of 50+ bloggers in the niche. Not only did this distract me from the essential items that should have been my priority but it also led to lots of mediocre relationships, rather than a few great ones.

In the marketing field now I’m in contact with a lot less people on a daily basis, but the connections I have with these people actually result in things that help my blog grow. For example, some of the relationships I’ve built have led to me getting press mentions and regular links on popular blogs.

They also make it very easy for me to grow my reach whenever I have something to promote, as these connections as more than happy to help me. Similarly, I’m more than happy to help them with things that they need because I’ve built what I think to be genuine relationships with them.

I Made Subscribing the Most Prominent Thing on My Site

Over the last few weeks I offered one-on-one coaching for a short period of time. I had many bloggers sign-up to work with me and the number one critique I had for most of them was that it wasn’t clear what they wanted people to do on their website.

Some had pop-ups for newsletters which were more prominent than their RSS feed (yet they didn’t care as much about getting newsletter subscribers) while others had Adsense ads all over the place yet were making pennies with it and turning away the traffic they did get.

Though I eventually did this on PluginID; I made subscribing to my feed the number one focus of ViperChill. The site is very clutter-free, with only a few places to navigate and take action on besides the content itself. Unlike most blogs, I don’t even have links to my post categories.

Instead, I have clear links to my RSS feed in the sidebar of the blog, at the bottom of all posts, and frequently in the post text. I believe this focus reduces distractions for my site visitors and makes it clear what I want them to do – which also happens to be the thing I think will help them the most (get free content updates).

Instead of feeling like you have to be everywhere and offer everything. Try narrowing the focus of your blog and see where that takes you. I think you’ll be surprised with the results.

This article was written by Glen Allsopp who writes on the topic of viral marketing. If you found this useful, you might love his most popular post which is about WordPress SEO.

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0 to 1500 Comments in 4 Months – This is What I did | MaxBlogger Stories #logo img { display:none; }#logo .site-title, #logo .site-description { display:block; } MaxBlogPress WordPress Plugins for charging up your wordpress blog for MAX traffic and MAX income ProductsMaxBlogger StoriesBlogFree WordPress Plugins MaxBlogger Stories How ordinary bloggers are getting extra ordinary results… Read their success stories in their own words… 0 to 1500 Comments in 4 Months – This is What I did Posted on 22. May, 2010by Onibalusi Bamidele

Many people (especially the old folks) will just tell you to build it and they will come. You set up a blog competing with millions of other people, how do you expect to do it? The big guys do have tons of comments and they do have more and more of it every day. You the newbie find it difficult to have a single comment on your blog, you move out to other blogs just to see, 20, 30 and more comments on a single post while you are finding it difficult getting 1 on your whole blog.

Have you ever thought about writing a post overnight, just to wake up to find lots of comments on it.

My blog http://www.youngprepro.com is just 4 months old, I got about 700 comments in the first 3 months and I got over 800 comments in a single month (after implementing what I am about to tell you). You can also get that type of comment, it is not reserved for some set of people and in fact, you don’t need to be an A-list to get it.

You might not really know the advantages of having tons of comments, Here are some advantages of having lots of comments.

1. It is social proof: If someone who is not that conversant with blogging (or even anybody) visits two blogs, the fellow saw one with two comments on all posts and another with 30 comments on all posts, which do you think the fellow will resonate with or think is more popular? The one with more comments of course

2. It brings in more comments and readers: Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd, if somebody sees more comments on a post, he/she is more likely to comment on that post than on a post with no comments.

3. It helps you build a community: How do you feel if people come to turn your blog into a discussion spot? Having more people to comment makes it easy to have a community because there will be controversial comments, debates and the likes which will make others want to reply thereby increasing your chance of even making them loyal readers.

Listing all there is to it will make this post super long so lets go to the main deal.

Below are some great tips to get tons of comments on your blog

1. Comment on other blogs: I have personally discovered that commenting on other blogs can help you boost your blog comments. Many of the bloggers (except me) on whose blog you comment will want to visit your blog and show a return comment as a sign of appreciation.

2. Reply all comments: Had I learned this earlier, I will have two times the number of the comments I now have. Try to reply all comments made on your blog, this will give the commenter a feeling of importance and make him feel you care for him thereby making your blog a priority.

3. Guest Post: This might not increase your comments as you expect but you stand a chance of doubling and even trippling your traffic. Aside for helping you gain more comments, guest posting on other blogs helps you gain loyal readers who will eventually comment on almost all (if not all) of your posts.

4. Contests: Even though I have never had one on my blog, Comments contests and other types of contests can help you increase comments on your blog, you can also make it a requirement that the contestants comment on that particular post.

In case you think, there is nothing special in 1500 comments on a blog, this happened on a “4-months-old” blog with only 99 posts.

What do you think, does this post help? is it the general hype? Your feelings and opinions are welcome in the comments section!

—
Onibalusi Bamidele is a young entrepreneur, Get his free ebook on how to build a better website at http://www.youngprepro.com/successebook or visit his young entrepreneur blog to get the “special stuff” he regularly gives his readers
—

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“> Posted on 29. May, 2010by Dee

One of the common suggestions for bloggers is to post as much as possible. A higher post frequency usually translates into higher traffic numbers. I have found that to be true but what if you don’t have time to publish many posts? That has been the situation for my gaming blog. I started it two years and two months ago. My initial plan was to post 2-3 times a week. However, life got busy and I didn’t have a lot of time to devote to the blog. Also, it took me longer than I expected to write the posts. I underestimated the research time to produce quality content.

As a result, I’ve posted less than two posts per week over the life of my blog. The screenshot below shows that I have 176 posts total.

I published my first post about 112 weeks ago. When you do the calculation (176 divided by 112), on average I’ve only published 1.57 posts each week.

Fortunately, the low post frequency has not kept me from increasing my traffic. I recently reached the 30,000 monthly visits milestone in March. As I write this post on April 30, the last 31 days have also seen 30,000 visits. The traffic has been mostly steady so I expect similar numbers in future months. Here are the relevant screenshots.

How did I achieve these traffic numbers with a low post frequency? My main method has been SEO.

SEO

The majority of my traffic comes from search engines. Here’s a graph of the traffic sources for the lifetime of my blog. Over 83% of the visits have come from search engines.

My SEO strategy consists of two things, keyword research and link building.

Keyword Research

At first, I used Google’s Keyword Tool to generate a list of keywords to target. This was somewhat effective but many of the keywords were too competitive or unrelated to my blog. I soon ran out of viable keywords.

Looking for inspiration, I visited a popular forum to see which words they were using to describe the niche. This technique gave me a lot of keywords to work with. I wasn’t sure if they would drive a lot of traffic but it didn’t hurt to try.

I inserted the keywords in my posts and my traffic grew slightly. Not every keyword was a winner though. I analyzed my keywords logs to determine which ones were sending the most traffic. In my analysis, I saw a curious pattern. Most of the top keywords were related to one broad topic.

I hadn’t planned to write much about this topic but I quickly changed my plans. The demand for content in that subject area was high and I was ranking well for the related keywords. Gradually, I shifted the focus of my blog to cover the popular topic. That’s when my traffic really grew. Today, 90% of my posts cover that topic.

My keyword placement has been pretty simple. I followed basic SEO fundamentals by including the keywords in the title tag of my posts. Also, I made it a habit to link back to my older content with keyword rich anchor text.

I’m able to get a lot of traffic without a high post frequency because I target a popular keyword with each post. In 2010, I already have 25 posts that have received over 1,000 visits. 12 of them have eclipsed 2,000 visits. My top five blog posts have combined for over 36,000 visits.

Link Building

Link building is important because some of your competitors will be targeting the same keywords. To determine the rankings for popular keywords, Google’s algorithm is heavily weighted to take into account the quality and quantity of incoming links of a site.

I haven’t spent too much time building links. Link building hasn’t had to be a big focus because most of my competitors do not have strong link profiles. Since my competition is weak in this area, I didn’t have to build many links to outrank them. If you’re in a saturated, more competitive niche, you will need to spend much time on link building to rank for the popular keywords.

I built my links using a variety of methods.

In the early days of the blog, I followed many of the smaller blogs and linked out to them. A couple of the bloggers appreciated the traffic I sent them, so they added my blog to their blogroll.

One blogger was impressed with my writing and asked me to write for his blog. I wrote two guest posts for him.

I interviewed a popular blogger after he did well at a big tournament and he linked back to my interview.

I wrote a few articles for EzineArticles.

I used to be a staff writer for a few internet marketing blogs. Since I would use my gaming blog as an example and case study, I was able to place links on those blogs.

I found a forum that allowed members to link back to their blog posts. I created an account, wrote about some of my best posts, and linked back to them.

I submitted my blog to automated news sites in my niche and they added my RSS feed.

In the last six months, I have regularly earned links from different blogs and forums without doing any work. I think this is a result of blogging consistently over time and getting enough traffic to develop a good reputation within the niche.

Don’t Underestimate SEO

SEO doesn’t get as much airplay as it used to in the blogging community, but it is still a very effective strategy especially in non-internet marketing niches where most of webmasters don’t optimize their sites for search engines.

If SEO is not a part of your overall marketing plan, you should consider it. Google is one of the most visited sites in the world. If you can get on the front page of Google for many popular keywords, you will receive a big boost in traffic.

Be patient though. SEO usually takes time and you may not see major results quickly. But if you work hard, in a couple of months your blog will reach new traffic heights.

I recommend reading the following articles to get started with SEO:

SEO BasicsThe Blogger’s Guide to SEOBeginner’s Guide to Search Engine OptimizationSearch Engine Ranking Factors

This is a guest post by Dee Barizo. Along with operating a gaming blog, he recently started an online degree site called The Best Degrees with a friend. He hopes to apply what he learned from the gaming blog to this new site and reach 30,000 monthly visits within six months.

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“> Posted on 05. Jun, 2010by ChrisGuthrie

I’m Chris Guthrie and I’ve been a full time internet entrepreneur since October 2009. Before that I was building websites in my spare time while going to a full time job and now I run a blog called make money on the internet where I teach others how to earn money online based on my real life entrepreneurial experiences. In the course of running this blog I’ve received comments and emails from readers asking for advice on a variety of topics but one of the things I find most people lack is a clear plan for their blog or website.

If you are just blogging for fun – great! I hope you enjoy the hobby and meet a lot of people from doing it, if on the other hand you’re blogging because you want to earn enough money to quit your day job then you need to develop an actionable plan. Here are a couple questions you need to ask yourself and truthfully answer about your blog:

1. How much is my traffic worth?
2. How much work will it take to be the best or among the best in my niche?
3. How do I get more traffic?
4. Do I have enough traffic to even bother monetizing my blog yet?
5. Can I make enough money to quit my job by blogging about this topic?

You can apply these questions to any type of website – not just a blog. I never stopped to ask myself these questions while running a very popular video game website back in 2006 and despite the fact that I was getting over 500,000 page views per month the website never earned more than $1,000 a month. Contrast that to today and I have blogs that have less than 100,000 page views per month that earn more than $1,000 a month. The problem is that I wasted that time on a website where the earnings potential was very low based on the visitor demographics. Had I truly sat down and figured out how this website would make money I could have recognized it would be very difficult to monetize and moved onto something else.

The point I’m trying to get across is that you really need to first determine if the blog your building has the potential to earn a lot of money or if it doesn’t. If you’ve determined that the blog your building does have the potential to earn you a lot of money then you need to come up with answers to the rest of the questions and plan out what types of traffic levels you’ll need to produce your desired income level.

Here is a rough example of a blogging business plan I have for my blog:

I know my traffic is worth enough money because teaching people how to make money is a high value niche (if you actually know what you’re talking about) and people will pay for good information. I won’t offer advertising or create / sell any product on my blog until I have over 10,000 daily RSS / newsletter subscribers. I plan to hit this number of readers in just 12 more months. To do this I will need to post incredible content like this on a continuous basis. After I get 10,000 readers I should be able to sell a product $100 product to at least 10% of my readers which in turn will make $100,000. (Think 1,000 True Fans). Or at the very least I can open my blog up to advertising and earn mid four figures a month via banner advertising and promoting other companies products within my blog posts.

I don’t care about earning any money on the blog now as I already earn money from my other web properties so there is no rush to sell advertising or create and sell a product. Besides, I think the type of people that read my blog appreciate this style of content and it only helps to further differentiate myself from the other bloggers in this space.

I could list off all the ways I’ll drive the traffic and get the readers to my blog, but as you can see from the above I have thought through the possibilities of how to earn money with this blog and have a plan of how I will go about doing it. If you haven’t even loosely planned out how you intend to make money from your blog or if it’s possible to make enough than I urge you to take some time to think it over.

What do you think? Have you put together a blogging business plan? If not, how do you plan to earn money from your blog?

This has been a guest post by @ChrisGuthrie who is a full time internet entrepreneur. If you’re interested in learning how to make money on the internet or ways to make more money you should subscribe to his blog.

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“> Posted on 12. Jun, 2010by dev

Hey everyone,

I am Devesh from Technshare.com. Today I am going to share how I got 12,924 unqiue visitors in 4months. Is it really took me 4months? The answer is no, because the month was march when i actually started promoting my blog.

My blog Technshare.com is just 4 months old, I got more than 12,228 unique visitors with 2000+ comments in 4 months.

To be honest I started blogging for making money online, but now i found my passion in this field. When i first started blogging, that time i don’t know even how to get traffic, promoting.. etc. , I’m just happy that I learned this quickly, since my blog is only 4 months old.

The month was march, when my blog actually started getting some great traffic.

Here are the techniques I used to get 12,228 unqiue visistos in 4 months:

1. Use a fresh design – First of all using fresh design, is very important part. Use a clean layout that is easy for your visitors to navigate (like MaxBlogPress).

2. Blog commenting. One of the most easiest and effective thing I have ever done to increase my traffic was to comment on other blogs. Sometimes i got more than 20% of my blog traffic from commenting alone. The more you interact with the blogger, the more they’ll notice you. A good way to build that relationship and network.

3. Guest Posting. Another easiest way to get targeted traffic is Guest Posting. You don’t need to do a lot of Guest post. I do maximum 4 Guest posts in a month. Here are the reasons, why you should do Guest posting:

Drive targeted traffic.Build contact with other bloggers.Increase your brand awareness.Build Backlinks to your blog.Get new subscribers.

4. Social media. It’s simply an incredible viral means to drive a large amount of sustained traffic to any website over a period of time. I try to submit every article to social media websites like Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Delicious…etc.

5. Networking. Networking is essential, especially when you are just getting started. Creating a good network of contacts within your blogging niche is essential if you want to grow your sites audience. Remember that your goal is to build genuine relationships, so don’t approach people just because you think they can help to promote your blog. Approach them because you respect their work and because you think the two of you could grow together. It is essential, especially when you are just getting started.

6. Discussion Forums. If you’ve got a post that you think relates strongly to something that another blogger has written about or that is the topic of discussion on a forum – leave a link to your own post. I’m usually promote my blog on Digital Point, Webmaster-Talk and Site Point.

Where I Am Today…

4500+ Monthly VisitorsAlexa Rank: 40k

PS. Please be assured that none of them are to show off .

Devesh is a Young Entrepreneur & author of a Make Money Blogging. Visit his blog for regular articles on Blogging Tips, How to  Make Money online , Link Building and much more. You can Follow him on Twitter @tnsblog and make sure you download ~Atomic Backlinking ebook Plus 8 Squeeze Page.

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“> Posted on 19. Jun, 2010by kevsworld

Hello everyone, my name is Kevin and I’d like to share my story of how I made over one thousand dollars in one month by blogging.  I think the best way to do it will be to divide it into four chapters:

Chapter 1: A Novice in a Crowded Niche

I’ve been a student of fitness, weight training, and bodybuilding for over twenty years.  I’m not a professional—just a passionate practitioner.  I’ve trained a few of my friends and helped them get in better shape.  I’ve also answered the questions of younger guys in the gym.

One night I had a conversation with a young man who was interested in putting on muscle.  I told him some of the basics and cleared some of his misconceptions.  Then it hit me:  why haven’t I ever blogged about this?

I already had a personal blog with a loyal following (my personal blog is more about my spiritual journey and reflections).  I had even authored a book.  But I had never thought much about writing fitness articles.  I decided to go ahead with it–I started strongandfit.net. I never thought about the fact that that the fitness niche was super crowded.  I just knew I was passionate about this topic and I enjoyed writing.

Chapter 2: Adsense/Monetization

At some point I added adsense to the blog.  I experimented with different arrangements and made some important discoveries:

1. A square ad directly above the content is the best placement.

2. The ad should be blended in with the colors of your blog.

Adsense was doing pretty well—I was earning about 200 dollars a month as traffic was growing.  But there were two problems:

1. I had limited control over what appeared in the adsense ad.  My blog exposes a lot of fitness scams, and sometimes the very product I was criticizing was appearing in adsense ads.

2. I felt like there were other ways to make the blog more profitable (turns out there were).

Chapter 3: Affiliate Marketing

The next big breakthrough came when I discovered clickbank products.  They had some great workout programs I could sell.  I eventually decided to switch entirely to affiliate advertising.  There were two distinct advantages:

1. Affiliate marketing was much more profitable than adsense.  Sometimes I make more in one day than I did in a whole month with adsense.

2.  I had complete control over what kind of products showed up on my blog.  I felt good about what I was selling (still do).

Chapter 4: New Year’s Resolutions

All these factors came together back in January.  You guessed it—New Year’s resolutions.  It was the time of year when everyone was thinking about making positive changes, such as losing weight or putting on muscle.  Those who visited my blog were referred to high quality products and honest reviews.  Many of them decided to invest in some of the programs I promote.

The end result was over a thousand dollars in one month.

Epilogue:

I’m still training at the gym and writing posts on over at strongandfit.net.  Profits go up and down, but that is to be expected.   But blogging has been an exciting journey, and I’ll keep writing with passion and integrity.

Kevin is the author of Strongandfit.net: Lose Fat, Build Muscle

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How I Learned from Another Blogger’s Mistake to achieve success for my blog | MaxBlogger Stories #logo img { display:none; }#logo .site-title, #logo .site-description { display:block; } MaxBlogPress WordPress Plugins for charging up your wordpress blog for MAX traffic and MAX income ProductsMaxBlogger StoriesBlogFree WordPress Plugins MaxBlogger Stories How ordinary bloggers are getting extra ordinary results… Read their success stories in their own words… How I Learned from Another Blogger’s Mistake to achieve success for my blog Posted on 26. Jun, 2010by Onibalusi Bamidele

One day, I stumbled across a blog post on Tycoon Blogger which was talking about how he (Dan) wrote a guest post for maxblogpress which resulted in thousands of visitors who just came to his blog, there was no way to capture any of their details for future purposes. Here is an excerpt from the post below:

“I have learned this lesson the hard way, I did my first guest post about a month after starting this blog.  My theme was a crappy free theme, I did not have any logo, my posts were weak and I do not even think I take my feedburner account up and running.  About a month ago, I published another guest post on MaxBlogPress.com and it drove thousands of visitors to my site.  My blog was in much better shape to project a better image and capture some regular readers but I still could have done more to get my blog ready for the influx in traffic.”

After reading the above statement, I was happy I hadn’t submitted a guest post earlier until everything was in place.

I submitted my post to maxblogpress (on how to get more blog comments) with a link to my blog and my mailing list. I woke up to find my squeeze page got over 200 visitors in one day as a result of my guest post (it used to get an average of 10 a day).

I also added close to 100 subscribers to my list and I got almost 1000 visitors to my blog  in one day (according to Google analytics), over 500 of those visitors came from my guest post on maxblogpress

I was so happy with the result of the guest post and because I was proactive.

Below are some great things I did to get more advantage of the traffic.

1. A Great Guest Post: I have submitted a guest post to maxblogpress before when I was very new to blogging, I didn’t read the guidelines and the post was rejected, I tried it some months later when I now have some blogging experience and results and it was accepted.

Your guest post does not have to be rocket science, it just has to be great. 99% of the stories here on maxblogpress are success stories. Mine was about how I got 1500 comments for my 4 months old blog.

I also discovered blogs hardly reject success stories.

2. Be Wise: I know this might hit a lot of bloggers but it is simple wisdom that will make a blogger know how important a mailing list is. If you are determined never to build a list then focus on your RSS subscribers because they will be notified when you have  a new blog post which means repeat traffic to your blog.

I focused my effort on my list and It got 220 visits in just one day (as a result of my guest post here) but due to my poor squeeze page, I was only able to capture 50 emails on that day, I still did something because half a loaf is better than none.

Build your list and focus your guest posts on your list and not only on your blog. Many people will not visit your blog again, by having them on your list you can make them return often (just as Pawan does here).

3. Great Content: Since the day I submitted my post to maxblogpress, I have been writing great posts on my blog.

Having great content on your blog when there is a traffic surge will determine whether the people who came will come back again.

4. About Page: I discovered the most viewed page on my blog on this particular day was my about page, everybody want to know who you are so make sure you have  a detailed about page before you give guest posting a trial.

The traffic almost made me faint, it was like social media traffic but it is more quality and important because you have people who want more from you. I was able to make effective use of my traffic and I hope you can also learn from this post.

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Onibalusi Bamidele is a young entrepreneur, Get his free ebook on how to build a better website at http://www.youngprepro.com/successebook or visit his young entrepreneur blog to get the “special stuff” he regularly gives his readers

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