Traffic from search engines is the blogging gift that keeps on giving. You can find yourself receiving a steady flow of new visitors to your blog each day once you have a post ranking high in search engine results. Of course, it’s not easy to get on the first page of Google for a search term so you need to think creatively. I have an idea that can help.

Every day millions of people search for solutions to their tech support problems. This is a golden opportunity for you drive new visitors to your blog. Simply write a post detailing a computer problem you are familiar with and offer up the solution. Post it and forget about it while the Google crawler works its magic on your behalf.

Here’s a real world example from my own blog. Almost a year ago I ran into a problem with an Access database. I eventually realized the problem was with an Internet Explorer setting (of all things) so I wrote a short 100 word post about it called Access Files Located on an “Untrusted Site” and moved on with my life.

Lo and behold, over the course of a few weeks my post slowly rose in the ranks of Google searches. As of today, it’s on the first page of results for a variety of searches related to Access and “untrusted site” error messages. The post receives new and unique visitors each day from search engines. I’ve since gone on to write a number of posts containing tech support solutions that now account for about 40% of my incoming traffic.

This idea doesn’t require you to write long posts or have a lot of technical knowledge. A lot of these problems and their solutions can be found online already. Just keep these two things in mind when writing your post:

• Be smart about your post title. Use keywords you think people will use in their search results. It’s a good idea to use words or phrases from any error messages the problem contains if possible.
• Keep your description of the problem and its solution clear and concise. People want a fix for their problem and not more confusion and frustration.

Helping people solve their computer problems is a simple way to generate natural traffic to your blog. In fact, you could probably start a brand new blog offering nothing but fixes and solutions for any software package on the market today and have traffic rolling in. It just takes a little patience as the search engine spiders crawl and index your posts.

There comes a time when every blog owner looks for the easy way out for their next post. You might be short on time or, even worse, running out of ideas. Regardless of your circumstances, posting an interview with an interesting subject is a really easy way to generate content and get traffic to your site.

I recently conducted a series of interviews with popular WordPress designers on my own web development blog. By choosing the right subjects and promoting the posts I was able to generate thousands of unique visitors to my site.

Here are some tips based on what I learned from my experience:

• Choose Your Subjects Wisely
  You obviously want to pick someone to interview that is involved with the topic of your site. That’s a no-brainer. But you need to do a little research before sending off your questions to just anybody. Are they willing to take the time to answer your questions at all? Are they popular enough in their field to warrant interest from readers? If someone is short on time they’ll give you equally short responses that won’t make for a good read. If your subject isn’t well-known you might get a great post but no response from the public.
• Let Others Promote Your Interview For You
  Remember that the whole point behind interviews is to generate high quality content and traffic with little effort on your part. So after the interview is done and posted let the web do the work of promotion for you. For my WordPress interviews, I posted each one to the graphic design and freelancing site Design Float and saw a flood of traffic as the interviews were voted to the front page. Find a social media site in your niche and get your interview links out there.
• Run Interviews Together In A Series
  If you interview a group of people in the same field you can get a lot of leverage out of each one by cross-promoting them. It’s also an incentive for people to come back to your site (or subscribe to your RSS feed) if you promise more interviews with similar subjects in the future. By mentioning previous interviews with each new one I posted I saw a nice waterfall effect with traffic.

Interviews are a really great way to provide high quality content to your visitors with a minimal amount of effort. Just make sure your subjects are in your field, well-known and willing to take the time to give you thorough answers to your questions.

I first started my blog My quest to make money on the internet in September 2006, I wrote posts every day, sometimes more on the various methods for making money online.

My posts included reviews of affiliate programs, weekly progress reports, sponsored posts and blog carnivals. After 5 months I was getting 60+ visitors a day and I had made a grand total of £128 (approx. $260), almost half of that came from selling 1 link. Not a great result for 5 months worth of promoting and writing, then as quite often happens in blogging other things in my life took priority and I eventually stopped blogging altogether, that was in February 2007.

Inactive Blogging

I didn’t abandon my blog completely though, I kept an eye on what was happening, how many visitors I was getting and how my affiliate programs were doing. A few times I thought about starting the blog up again, but I just couldn’t get up the motivation to do it. Then in December 2007 I was looking at how much money I’d made in total, by this time I’d received a number of payments from Google and Friend Finder, so I added it all up.

It had been 10 months since my last post but I had made another £600 (approx. $1200), that’s almost 5 times as much as I’d made in the first 5 months. I was amazed by this, I looked at my visitor stats as well and I found that I was getting 120+ visitors a day. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that my blog is in anyway successful, 120 visitors a day is still a very small number, but considering I wasn’t even posting my number of visitors has doubled. If I had just kept the blogging up I could have been getting 200+ a day and made even more money. Looking at these results gave me the motivation to start posting again, not at the same rate as before, I just don’t have the time, but I will write the odd post now and then to keep it going. I’ve been looking for new money making opportunities for my blog, some of which I have already implemented and will write some posts about in the future.

It just goes to show how blogs can be a good source of passive income and that if you have an old inactive blog hanging around the internet, it might just be worth resurrecting it. The good thing about all this is that my interest in blogging has been renewed, enough to start a new blog as well. My latest project is Martin’s Personal Development Blog, this will be a monetized blog, but in a more subtle way than Quest, it will be all about personal development and productivity.

Resurrect those old blogs now they might make you some money.

This post was by Martin of My Quest to Make Money Online

Bloggers have felt the greatness entrecard is, can be, and will continue to be. Entrecard has been able to increase traffic for all bloggers as well as allow them to expand.

We all know about entrecard and we all know about John Chow’s advertising. Just by being mentioned on his site will drive you traffic. He even has posts about advertising their advertisements. Lately thats what his entire blog has been about. So how about the advertising you don’t have to pay for?

John Chows Entrecard Widget

Late one night I was lucky enough to find that John Chows entrecard had room to advertise on. I wiped out my entrecard account and dropped 250 credits (it’s about 300 credits to advertise now) hoping to be approved. Within a few days it was approved and set to run Jan 2nd. Perfect.

According to the entrecard stats, John Chow sent us 83 visitors. That works out to be 3 credits per visitor. Since the credits are essentially free, I thought it was a pretty good “investment“.

What it also did was increase our entrecard price. Remember that your price is determined on how many people on average, drop their card on your widget. Basically I will be able to recover the cost of the widget, so it really is ‘free’.

John Chow has sent us the most entrecard traffic by far. Who’s sent you the most?

Many new bloggers just don’t know how to increase their rss subscribers. It’s not that the content isn’t good, there just isn’t an audience yet. Blogs take a little bit of marketing regardless of who you are. We took a while to get rolling, but that was just due to inexperience. One tool that was vital to our success thus far, has been the power of giveaways.

Free Stuff Draws RSS Subscribers

When you subscribe to a blogs RSS feed, you do so because you don’t want to miss anything from the blog. Whether it be for the content or some sort of giveaway. Once you get a RSS subscriber chances are you should be able to keep them for a while. Sometimes I stay subscribed to a blog just because I’m too lazy to unsubscribe.

Our latest RSS boost came from just offering a few prizes for subscribing to our feed via email. The number went from 14 to 74 within about 2 weeks. Even with the contest over, our email subscribers remain at 74. I plan to have other smaller giveaways like our TNX points giveaway as well. Make sure you don’t miss them.

CyberStreet Proof

I have been subscribed to Cyber Street Report for a long time, when they had a completely different theme. When I subscribed their RSS feed numbers stayed at about 10-15. I hadn’t visited them in months, until the posts surrounded blogging reviews and entrecard.

With the entrecard craze surrounding the blogosphere, Cyberstreet jumped on board and promoted the hell out of it. They have even decided to giveaway entrecard points. Give the people what they want right?

In a few short days of offering free entrecard points, it has seemed that their rss feed count has doubled or tripled to 36 readers. While this isn’t that much yet, the growth is great. I’d imagine as the prizes continue so will the feed subscribers increase.

The great thing with this is that it didn’t cost them anything to give these points away. There isn’t any excuse not to reward and attract readers with the tons of opportunities out there. Pick a service and promote it!

There is Always Help

If you still haven’t been inspired as to what you can do, make sure to contact us with any idea you might have. We might be able to throw in a prize to make your giveaway that much better. To follow with Cyberstreet, I also plan on giving away some entrecard points. Give the people what they want… right?

Entrecard is the latest blogging and traffic tool to go viral. Everyone from John Chow to John Cow is using it. I don’t know how I missed out on this interesting new blogging toy to play with. Blog about your Blog is late to the party, but we are jumping in both feet first.

What is Entrecard?

Entrecard offers a basic point system where you can buy and sell 125×125 banner cards on other blogs. These cards can be placed anywhere on your blog. The idea is to exchange traffic. With button banner advertising being so common now, it’s really an excellent idea.

The idea gets a little ‘complex’ but if you break it down, it’s pretty easy.

Dropping Your Card

When you drop your card (the 125×125 banner) on someone else’s blog you get one point and so do they. What you are doing is basically saying that you viewed their entrecard widget. By calling attention to their widget, they can sell their actual advertising for more.

Advertising

To determine how many credits you can sell your space for, it is the number of credits to twice the number of cards dropped on that widget each day. To place an ad on our spot, it currently costs 16 credits. Therefore 8 members have dropped their card.

Each ad runs for 24 hours. We are currently displaying A Frog To Kiss. In another 4 hours or so, we will be displaying our next ad, which happens to be Internet Dreams.

The Most Popular

Of course the most expensive entrecard belongs to none other than John Chow. It currently costs 122 credits per day and I’m sure that number will go up. I expect BAYB to be rivaling some of the other popular entrecards in the days to come.

Be Careful It’s Addicting

Each day you can visit other blogs and “drop your card”. This gives you 1 point. With each point you get, you then can advertise your card on other blogs. Do this everyday and you can be set to advertise on popular blogs. The more popular, the more traffic. We all know, traffic can be addicting!

How Does It Perform?

The most important thing is the traffic. As I mentioned I have only been on it for a day now. What is good about it is that they give you stats on how much traffic you’ve received. What’s bad is, I don’t know where it came from. I would definitely be more interested in finding out which blogs are sending me the traffic. Therefore I could obviously advertise on them again.
So far we’ve received 34 clicks from entrecard.com and 17 clicks from the ads we’ve purchased. Another problem is the quality of traffic. Yes, they are visiting our blog, but they are also just looking for the entrecard widget.

Have you registered to entrecard? If you have make sure to drop your card on ours!

When blogs sell banner advertising, many of them offer space for banners with the dimensions 125×125. I am terrible with graphics so I set out to look for the graphic designer bloggers. After outrageous price quotes just for a simple banner (someone told me 200$) I gave up.

A Graphic Artist in our Own Backyard

I was on Garry Conn’s blog and noticed his right sidebar. There is a huge banner for Me and My Drum that looks pretty awesome. Definitely check it out. I quickly contacted Mark to see if he would make a banner for me. Within a few days he had three different ones to chose from. I’m going with number two.

I’m not sure what Mark is charging, but if your looking for some graphic work, you should definitely contact him.

Where to Advertise

As I mentioned there are a lot of sites that are offering banner space. My first test for our new banner is going to be Blogging Truths. For only 6$ per month, might as well give them a shot to impress me.

We also offer a 125×125 spot on the right sidebar. For the first person interested I will let the spot go for only 20$ for the first month.

Does your blog offer banner advertising? Plug yourself in our comments section along with the price, maybe you’ll find yourself with a few sales.

When I started blogging I joined a lot of directories and toplists hoping for traffic. That doesn’t work, however they do provide other services, one isn’t traffic. Why?

Because They Don’t Have Traffic

You can’t expect to get traffic from websites that don’t have much traffic themselves. I’ve never had much luck with top lists, if I did, it was short lived.

That has changed, since Blog about your Blog was named to the top 20 of 45n5’s Top 100 Make Money Online Blogs. I helped hype the list when it was first launched around September 9th.

The Results

Time to throw some stats at you. From being on the top list, we’ve received 390 visitors and counting. In September alone we received 291 visitors, which leave 99 for October so far.

If Blog about your Blog was listed on the top list on September 9th, that works out to be 9 (almost 10) visitors per day.

Guess what? We didn’t have to do anything either! Well, besides be a top blog, all we had to do was ask for inclusion. We didn’t have to install some code or script, provide our stats, or anything. It was all done for us.

Benefits

Mark has done a great job to market his top list. By sending traffic to the top list on 45n5, it is sending traffic to the other blogs. Traffic is a huge benefit, but it’s not everything.

To be named one of the top 20 “make money online” blogs, is an honor. The system isn’t perfect, but nothing is. If anything it is accurate, although it is missing some great blogs on the list. Since they are new, they don’t have the page rank to compete, but shouldn’t they have to pay their dues, like we have?

Not only is the list “honorable” to be mentioned with John Chow and Darren Rowse, but it also provides credibility. We’ve been around long enough, and worked hard enough to be recognized.

If you blog about making money online and somehow missed out on this list, you should definitely get listed.