Steve Pavlina: How to Make Money From Your Blog

I have just spent the past half an hour reading the most amazing blog post.
Even though it was written seven years ago, this monster sized post had me glued right up until the end as if it was the latest bestseller from the New York Times list.

The title? How to Make Money From Your Blog.

Steve Pavlina calls his site Personal Development For Smart People and I really feel like this post has opened my eyes to the amazing possibilities which are out there. I'm sure I'll be going back to check out his other posts.

Why?

I don't know, I can't put my finger on it for the moment, but Steve has a particular style of no-nonsense straight-talking which seems to cut through the rest of the rubbish which is out there and bring you the information exactly as it is.

His underlying message seems to be, 'know what you want and be true to yourself'. He starts by asking, 'are you 100% satisfied with making money from your blog at all?' This makes sense because in case anyone has any sort of qualms about it, then they will subconsciously self-sabotage at every stage to set themselves up for a fall.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to have noticed this, and I feel a little like the cheerleader who arrives when the game is over but still insists on doing the whole routine, but I wanted to bring this new information to my readers.

It is very refreshing to find something like this.

I like that. Thanks Steve.

A Quick Way to Get More Visitors Without Doing Anything!

From having this blog, I have noticed one thing about the way that visitors arrive here.

Now I will let you into the little secret that I have discovered:

Having interesting photos brings visitors to your blog too. A lot of people come to my blog after having looked for an alien picture. And that alien post is my most popular post and has had thousands of page views by itself.

• Relevant

Obviously, it would greatly help if the photo or image was completely relevant to the subject of the post. There is no use having a highly popular picture of a singer or something in a post about different styles of period lamp post. The visitor would come, find nothing to interest them and leave. Also, do not forget to name the photo with a good, relevant name so that it shows up in search results. If it is just called a number or something completely different, then it will not work.

• Positioning

It helps to place it in a good place where it is high enough up in your post

• Size

Not too big and not too small

And that is the whole tip. To get more visitors, choose an interesting, relevant, popular picture and that will lead people to your website as well, after that it is up to you to grab their attention and keep them there.

Cute kittens always help too!

How To Get More Traffic for Your Blog Through Linkreferral

Linkreferral is a great website for generating traffic to your blog, e-commerce website, or any other website that you may have.

 It is basically a links directory where you can add the link for your own website into one of the many categories that they have after registering for their service.

After that they require you to do your share of visiting people's websites which in turn makes people visit yours.

If you go to 30 websites from their directory, from any category, and review 5 sites, choosing one of them to be your favourite, and make one comment on the forum, then you have done your maximum daily amount.

Bad Points

• It takes ages to visit 30 websites. It is not possible to just click through quickly, linkreferral only registers your visit once the whole website home page has loaded.

• It also takes ages to leave 5 reviews on other people's sites which are helpful and meaningful.

• Because the forum comments are perfunctory, the forum is full of thousands of comments, but does not have the feeling of a proper community. A bit like a dance for shop dummies. They are dancing, but they don't know why they are there or whether they are having fun or not.

• From time to time, someone visits your site who just 'doesn't get' what you do and what you are all about. This person just leaves a low score or a poor review and this can knock your ego a bit.

• Another bad point is that sometimes you come across a website which is so interesting that you find yourself so absorbed with reading it and forget to visit the other 29 and one link leads to another and...

Good Points

Linkreferral leads you to discover hundreds of other websites. These are often other blogs, or money-making websites, or anything you can imagine. You can leave comments on their sites and so build up your backlinks and they in turn visit yours.

• You do not have to do every part of the requirements, just surfing a few of the sites lets you work your way up the list of sites in your category. The secret is little and often. Since people have to visit 30 sites, if you are on the first page, then the chance are higher that you will get a visit.

• You start getting visitors almost immediately you join. 

• People come to your site and leave a review. This means that they can spot something obvious that you may have missed, and it also gets tested out by lots of different browsers and computers who can comment on how fast your images load etc.

Link Building
A directory website like this is very useful for making contacts and link building because you are able to send direct emails to the website owners.

Referral Programme
Unfortunately, the actual referral programme is not that great. They ask $50 to join and pay $0.15 cents per referral, so you need to refer at least 334 people before you even get your $50 back.

But on the whole, it is a great way to generate a steady stream of traffic to your site, who are interested to see what your site is like and can review it for you.

How to Get More Traffic for Your Blog Through Twitter

Using Twitter is a great way to increase the traffic that you receive to your blog. Of course, you must already be a member of Twitter, and it is very easy to sign up here:

http://www.twitter.com

You do not have to have a large number of followers to get people to visit. But follow these easy steps and you will soon see an increase in the numbers of people who visit you and want to read what you say and if you do it properly, maybe an increase in twitter followers as well!

1. The very first step is to make sure that your blog looks at its absolute best. Build up a nice number of interesting and informative articles on your subject. This way when you get visitors, they will have something to read to stick around for, and hopefully join.

2. Test your blog by loading it using different browsers and get friends and family to test it on their computers. It must load quickly and be easy to read. The average visitor who comes along from twitter will not stick around if a lot of large graphics and fancy widgets slow the loading speed down. 

3. Sign in to Twitter.

4. On the twitter home page, you will see your timeline on the left hand side and on the right in the blue column, it list a varied amount of information, including a list of the top trends (TT) occuring on twitter at the moment. These sometimes have the hashtag symbol (#) and sometimes are just some words or a sentence.

5. If you notice one of the TT is relevant to anything in your blog, then it is really easy to tweet about it to that group of people who are currently discussing that subject. This could be thousands of people! The more relevant it is the better, because that means that your visitors will actually be interested in it and might stick around to read the rest of your blog and tell other people about it.

6. Because twitter limits the characters to 140, your blog url can take up a lot of this the first thing to do is to shorten your url so that it leaves space for the rest of your tweet. Visit a website like tinyurl and paste your url into the box so that you end up with a shortened version like this: http://tinyurl.com/74lmnqt

7. Now you are ready to tweet your information into twitter. 

8. Make it short and meaningful. I get some visitors to my How to Survive Spreadbetting page whenever there are relevant tweets on twitter by tweeting things like: Read How to Survive Spreadbetting (tinyurl link to page) and the hashtag, whatever it is. I do this when people are discussing the economy or the credit crunch, or banks, finances or anything relevant. 

9. Do not try to be obscure or witty or interesting, you can do that in your own timeline with your friends etc, Keep it short and simple enough and to the topic to make people want to click it and know what they will find. A lot of people will not click on a strange link in case there are viruses, but if it is interesting to them and about a topic which they have already been discussing, then they might click on your link.

10. Have a call to action like 'Click here' or 'Click now!' will incentivise more people to click.

11. When they get to your page, keep them there by having a few links of your other topics, this is easy in blogger by putting the 'Labels' widget somewhere on your page, like I have the 'Categories.' Click Now, if you see something interesting!

12. Don't spam. You will not get any visitors who are interested and they may never click on one of your links again.

13. Don't overdo it. About one or two of these types of tweets along with 30-40 of your tweets is OK but any more will really put people off!

14. A good thing to do might be to have two accounts where one of them is your personal one about your life and another one where you only tweet links. This way, anyone who signs up to join you will know what they can expect.