Archive for September, 2009
Is there value in a blog traffic exchange?
There are many tools out there to help increase blog traffic such as blog explosion or blog soldiers. These tools work by creating a blog traffic exchange where you view a blog and in return you earn a credit. These credits are cashed in when someone else joins and views blogs. Each credit counts toward one blog traffic exchange.
In theory this is a great idea to get traffic to your blog but in reality I have found them of little value in my own experience. The reason I say this is that as a blogger I joined a few of them early on to get traffic and people reading my blog but I never really read other blogs I simply waited for the time to go by to earn credits. I am sure the other participants of the blog traffic exchange program was doing the same thing. So what in the end did this get me. It got me a one time increase in my blog traffic but since the reader didn’t really read anything on the blog in the long run it was useless.
Every now and again maybe a reader would come along and actually read the articles, maybe even leave a comment but on a whole I think blog traffic exchange programs add little value to long term success as a blogger. Perhaps when you are a new blogger it is good to get the exposure but don’t spend too much time on it. Spend your time getting backlinks to your blog or writing articles for article directories. These are much more valuable in the long run.
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![[Squidoo]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/squidoo.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Technorati]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
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![[Windows Live]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/windowslive.png)
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![[Email]](http://thebloggingcenter.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
How to start your own SEO business
After blogging for a few years and learning the ropes of how to get a blog ranked high in search engine results you might want to consider spawning off on your own and make money online with your own SEO business. There are just a lot of people out there who want to rank high in search engines but do not have the time to commit or the technical background to be active in their blog marketing. Therefore they turn to SEO experts to help build a blog or website that will do well with search results.
If you have the background to do your own SEO business and feel you have what it takes to earn money online as an SEO expert, here is what you should do to get started.
Tips To Start Your Own SEO Business
1. You need to have a front. Create a blog as the center piece to your SEO business. This should be updated on a regular basis and you should post on a regular basis about tips, techniques and your own experience as an SEO expert. Give potential customers confidence you know what you are talking about. You should also build a services page on your business blog where you can describe your SEO services and the pricing available.
2. Start Local: Contact your local companies of any size, shape and business and offer to help build them a website if they don’t have one. Get in the door and from there market your SEO services.
3. Build a portfolio: Sometimes you need to earn a reputation before you can earn money online with your own SEO business. This means taking on good customers and working on their SEO for free in return you can use them as a reference on your SEO business blog. They might even give you a nice quote you can post on your site when you show the results.
4. Market yourself: Write articles on the topic of SEO and send them out everywhere. This includes guest blogging on SEO blogs, article directories and within specific business publications. Get your name out there and get links back to your SEO business blog so that potential customers can find you.
Three steps to earning a search engine promotion
So you just joined the blogging ranks and now want to earn a search engine promotion. The first rank is easy so no worries but you need to get started. For new bloggers the first rank in search engine optimization is really to get listed and see where the chips fall as far as page rank for their keywords.
Step one is to use the SEO all in one plugin for wordpress and ensure each post has been maximized for SEO. This includes meta keywords and descriptions as well as making sure your article contains your keyword a few times.
Step two to earning a search engine promotion is create a sitemap and robot file. Search engine spiders will use the sitemap and robot file to crawl your blog and index the pages you have. These two files can really make a difference in the speed in which you can have your pages indexed. I would suggest using a sitemap plugin as well which will update the search engines when you post a new blog article so that they can index it.
Step three is to submit your URL to the search engines themselves. I would wait until you have a few articles written on each category you plan to write on so that your site is more filled out and has value to any reader that finds it before submitting your URL. There are many free search engine submission tools out there that will submit your blog to various search engines to save you time in doing it manually.
Good luck soldier on your new journey in blogging. Hope you earn your search engine promotion quickly!
Filed under Blogging, Blogging Tips
Get active in your marketing to get backlinks to your blog
Usually in my marketing for my blogs I go down the usual routes of commenting on dofollow blogs, submitting the URL to all search engines and RSS feeds, post on similar topical forums as well as submitting some articles to directories get backlinks when I create a new blog. I tried something different with my last blog and I think it might be working.
I created a squidoo and hubpages site for my blog topic and linked to it from there and in addition I added my RSS feed to the pages to help encourage readership. So far in looking at my statistics for that blog it looks like it might be working in that I see an increase in blog traffic all coming from those two places.
Give it a try for your own blog. At the very least you get backlinks to your blog but you also can earn passive income from your squidoo lens or hubpage. I have also noticed that those sites get really heavy weighted by search engines and my hubpage is now on page 1 for my keyword so hopefully that will be a good quality backlink for my blog.
I personally don’t get a lot of value out of reading sites like squidoo and hubpages, they seem like great avenues to get backlinks or make money but as I read through existing pages from other people I didn’t really get value from them. But hey, a backlink is a backlink and this one was free so no complaints from me.
