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Here are some of the techniques that I am or am planning to use to build steady loyal readers to my blog.

Opt in email list. If you do not have one (work on getting one) advertise on someone else’s list or newsletter. I write a short newsletter with links to my blog.You can also use your list in the future to remind readers who may have strayed or just have not visited in a while.

Craigslist, Backpage, …. Your key word targeted ad will get picked up quickly and rank high on search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

Offline Ads. Free ads, t-shirts, car magnets, signs especially if your blog has a local presence are all great ways to promote your blog.

Google local search. List your blog as a business with your key words as the name of the business. You can get a number one listing on Google local search with a map and everything. You could do this in many major markets where you had friends or family (so you could use their addresses). This could add up to many #1 spots on Google, and other local searches you submit to.

You could easily replace “Sell House Fast of Florida” with “Make Money Online With Your Site of Any Place You Have An Address In”

If you place enough of these for your key words as the business name. It will produce a steady of quality traffic.

Put something on Ebay .Use a free outside listing template service like Auctiva with links to your site. Maybe you could auction an ad space on your site or a review.

Viral video. Make a stupid, exciting, or funny video with a link to your blog and get it on as many social video sharing sites as possible.

Local media outlets. Contact local the media with a story idea related to your niche. Get you and your blog mentioned as an expert. Start with smaller papers or TV stations first.

If you are just getting started on a budget you are forced to think outside the box and come up with creative free and low cost ideas.

What are some of your ideas and tips for marketing yourself and your blog?

Sonny Collova is an expert real estate investor, consultant, and mortgage broker who would like to earn a full time living online blogging, consulting, marketing and writing about real estate, finance, and Costa Rica. Please check out his blog www.investor-market.com .

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15 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Blogging can be hard work and having a lot of visitors to your blog is one of the best ways to feel rewarded for your hard work. Sometimes, though, getting a good number of loyal readers can feel like an up hill battle. Sometimes, just writing good articles is not enough. Here are a few things you can do to increase your readership quickly and without breaking your budget.

Have a contest
If you’re a blogger on a budget, you may think that you can’t pull off a great contest to promote your blog, but it’s easier than you may think. To offer a great contest that will get people participating you need to follow some rules of thumb:

- Work out all the details before announcing your contest.
- Only offer what you are ready to provide to your winner.
- Make entering as easy as possible.
- Offer various ways to enter.

The most important things to focus on are the prizes and the ways to enter. Prizes can be tricky if you don’t have a big budget, but if you get creative, you’ll find that you have a lot to offer. Try offering ad space on your blog, a 200 word review, or a spot in your blog roll. Offer all three to make it interesting. If you have a valuable skill other than writing, offer it up. Graphic designers can offer logo or theme creation services. Web developers can offer development services. You get the idea. What else can you offer? Better still, think about what an company might offer that you can give away for them? I suggested this very recently to a fellow blogger who managed to land some product promotions for his upcoming contest. The more creative you are, the less you will have to empty your own pockets for your contest.

Don’t make your contest impossible to enter. As amazing as your prizes may be, people are busy and don’t want to spend a long time entering your contest. Let your reader earn entries for actions as simple as posting a comment or writing a post on their own blog about your contest. The number of entries you give your reader for an action should be relative to both the time and effort involved and the value that action hold for you. One thing that will help convince people to write about your contest is to do most of the work for them. In one of my current contests, I created a text file that included the contest image code, the rules, and additional links needed. This made it very easy for people to post about the contest and a lot of people have.

Fill a need and get some links
Keep your ear to the web and look for any way you can fill a need. There’s almost always something that the growing population of bloggers will feel a need for. Develop something new or improve something that already exists to fill a need and take advantage when people notice. Recently, IZEA announced the launch of their new site ranking system called IZEA Real Rank. When it launched, it did so with a basic API and no existing widget to display the live rank of a site. As a developer, that screamed opportunity to me and I quickly created the first live IZEA Real Rank badge. I put that badge on my own blogs, announced it to my network of bloggers on MyBlogLog.com and then emailed IZEA about it. Within a day, a bunch of people were using the badge and IZEA mentioned it in their blog (while answering with their own badge). This benefits me because the badge code includes a link back to my site and a comment asking the blog owner to please include my link with the badge. The result was some very nice compliments combined with a lot of links back to my own blog, and all for only an hour of my time. If you’re not a developer, figure out what service you can offer and then figure out how to use it as a promotional tool. Alternatively, you can hire a developer to build something for you.

Develop a marketing tool that markets you
Would you waste time playing slots? What if I said it was free? What if I said prizes included text links to wherever you want? After Jason Boom handed me the great idea for Entrecard Slots, in which you visit a virtual slot machine for a chance to win credits to use in Entrecard, I decided to expand on it to create what I’m calling Free Ad Slots. The variation simply allows visitors to win text advertising links. For both versions, I created a simple widget and then found that I needed some kind of incentive for bloggers to add this widget to their own blogs. The incentive I decided upon was to match any jackpot a visitor hit to the site that sent them. This addition to my blog took about three hours to create both versions and after only a couple days, both have been used significantly, and many people have included the widget in their own blogs. Think of something you can offer your readers that is fun or entertaining, gives back to them, and offers some form of incentive for them to help you promote it.

Thinking outside the box has doubled my traffic and readership, gained me about 60 inbound links, and increased my brand recognition all in the space of a month. Creative promotions have far outweighed paid campaigns that I have tried in the past and have kept my wallet just a little fatter at the same time. Get creative and get more readers.

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32 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Just how important is your blog’s robots.txt file if you want the world to find you and your blog in the search engines?

The robots.txt file is a file on your site that is meant to give instructions as to where search engine spiders may and may not go. This is not a wall but a permission system, which means that you can not force “bad” bots to listen to it. Bad bots are the bots that go all over your site but do not offer you any value at all.

The powerful reason for the robots.txt file is that it is listened to by the majority of all search engines and it helps to ensure that your site gets spidered and indexed properly. That means the pages you want to be found, can be found and the pages you want hidden will remain hidden.

We do not want to go into a long lesson on this, as there are loads of resources available on the topic that can be explained much better then we can explain them. What we will share with you however is that you want to use one and you want to upload it to the root directory on your server, located in the same place as your index page.

You can see the robot.txt we use at http://www.johncow.com/robots.txt

Out of curiosity weve been snooping around a little to see how others do it. Surprisingly enough, we found that there seem to be two different approaches to the system that are total opposites. We’re comparing 4 well known blogs here.

Shoemoney.com / PR6 / Alexa 2,988 - We know Jeremy is pretty tech savvy and he probably is the one with the most knowhow about how this would work. Then again, he might not give a poop about it and just let it be.

Here’s his robots.txt:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /wp-content/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /sitemap.xml
Disallow: /index.php
Disallow: /*?
Disallow: /*.php$
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /category/

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /wp-includes/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /link.php
Disallow: /gallery2
Disallow: /gallery2/
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /pages/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /feed

JohnChow.com / PR4 / Alexa 3,071 - Mr Chow has been around the block and we’re assuming he’s quite tech savvy too. Why else would he run a site called TheTechZone for over 8 years? His robots.txt is quite similar to Jeremy’s:

sitemap: http://www.johnchow.com/sitemap.xml

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /go/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /author/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /wp-images/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /backup/
Disallow: /banners/
Disallow: /archives/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /

User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

Problogger.net / PR6 / Alexa 2,600 - The Problogger seems to take a totally different approach to things. Being part of B5 Media, an organization that makes money by running blogs, we’re pretty sure that the technical knowhow of SEO is widely available in a team of professionals. A copy of Darren’s robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

That’s right. The Problogger doesn’t hold back any secrets for the search engines of this world. Anyone is allowed to crawl through all of Darren’s content.

MattCutts.com / PR7 / Alexa 5,059 - Matt has been working for Google nearly eight years now and is currently head of Google’s webspam team. Surely its safe to assume that Matt knows what he’s doing. Like Problogger, Matt withholds almost nothing for the crawlers, just a files/ folder:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /files/

Eventhough files/ won’t be indexed, Matt has put an index.html saying ‘Sorry’ in place to keep nosy cows like us out of there. Afterall, a robots.txt file is available for anyone to see. put one and one together and you can try to have a peak at the contents of a directory that’s specified in there.

As you can see, there seem to be two trains of thought on the subject.

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26 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Tons of bloggers used this form of building pagerank when they started out. Heck, we still do it because we know it’ll be worth it in the end. We’re not going to discuss how pagerank can affect your advertising sales. We won’t go into details of how pagerank gets passed on from a high pagerank page that holds a link to your page. We’re not telling you how loads of blogs are using the Nofollow tags for comments, and we’re not telling you how much time it takes to find a high pagerank post where you can leave a (useful) comment, that doesn’t get terminated by the nofollow tag. We all know this is a pain in the behind process and that’s one of the reasons many bloggers stopped doing this.

But then there was Comment Kahuna!

Some clever buggers developed a FREE (we know how much you love free stuff!) application that does exactly what you think it does! Find high pagerank blog posts that allow you to comment freely, without having to fear the nofollow tag

All you do is fill out your profile including your name, email address and your blog URL (This is so that you can later on have the application automatically fill out the comment filds on the blog posts you wish to comment.) Then you save that profile, enter a keyword to narrow down the field to niche related posts, select the minimum pagerank a blog needs to have and hit search! seconds later Comment Kahuna will tell you where to go. It comes with a build-in browser and you can then sort out exactly which of the high PR posts you can abuse where you’d like to get your pr juice from leave behind your meaningful comment.

We’ve discovered this gem a bit late - the guys who’ve created Comment Kahuna are actually closing their doors in less than 20 hours! If you want to take advantage of this devilishly handy piece of freeware, you better get that behind of yours over to their site and grab it before its gone. While you’re there, check out their video to see how easy it really is.

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62 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

So we’ve had a good night sleep and the first thing we did when we woke up was obviously jump out of bed to check yesterday’s statistics and see the damage Digg.com had done to our little blog. Just before we fell asleep, we had counted 1300 diggs, at this moment the number of diggs is a massive 2256! That’s a new record for us seeing the last time we managed to get ‘just’ 1547 diggs for some poor bastard falling off his bike.

So why do we use other pages to get dugg and not just post Digg-bait on our own blog?

Well there’s two main reasons why we prefer to use this method:

1) A lot of the times, popular articles on Digg are silly pictures or video clips. Now even though it doesn’t look like it, we really do try to maintain a certain level of quality on this blog. Wordless image posts is not our idea of a quality post, and thus we choose not to post these here. We have bought JohnCow.* other than dotcom domains for this purpose. Besides having an outlet for Diggbait, it also significantly reduces the risk of getting our dotcom banned from Digg. We all know what happened to John Chow right?

2) Once the picture post hits the frontpage and doesn’t get buried, changes are you’ve just created a nice PR5 domain. Not just because of the linkjuice Digg passes on, but there are tons of sites out there that publish the popular stories from the Digg front page. Popurls.com is one of many for example. Also a lot of .edu sites have mirrors up in case the Dugg site crashes. (We did once yesterday, but a few Apache tweaks sorted that out.) All you do is wait for the next Google update to come around and you’re more than likely going to receive a nice PR. Wrongbob.com is one of our sites that managed to get a PR5 this way. (And now it’s just dead in the water because we don’t know what to do with it )

As far as statistics go, even though it was the weekend, Digg has sent over 50,000 visitors to the submitted article and because we linked everything on that post straight to this blog, we’ve captured over 10,000 unique visits from there. And that’s just day one. If this is going to be anything like the previous Digg, loads of traffic will keep flowing in for days to come. Here’s a screen shot of our .US site that hosts the Digg article, it’s just been online since last week.

Obviously Digg traffic has a high bounce rate and it’s not considered good quality, but we’ve yet to hear the first webmaster or blogger complain about being on the front page! It might not convert in good money, but if you use the method we use,make sure that your landing page has your blog’s brand on it. When people come across your blog months later, they’ll vaguely remember your logo. color scheme and think to themselves;”Hey! I’ve been here before, must be worth checking out”.

And forget about slapping ads on, the few bucks you’ll make of that aren’t worth it in the long run. The price you’ll pay is getting hundreds of diggs less because you will get buried as a spammer.

Right, the digg is over, nothing here to see folks - lets moove along please!

(PS Just wanted to thank Sergio from SOSFACTORY.com for yet another fabulous custom cartoon header and mascot! )

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27 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post