Getting Traffic 104 - Stumble Upon

Like using the Ping-O-Matic, adding your site to Stumble Upon is one of the easiest ways to start getting traffic, and should be one of the first things you do after setting up your blog.

What is Stumble Upon?  It's a website that allows users to install a toolbar into their browser with a 'Stumble' button.  Users make an account with Stumble Upon and then choose their interests.  After that, whenever they click the 'Stumble' button, their web browser jumps to a new page matching one of their interests!  It's a fun thing to do when you have some time to kill, and it has helped thousands of people discover new favorite sites.

How does this help you?  Simple:

1) Go to Stumble Upon and sign up for an account (free).

2) Install the Stumble button into your web browser (you can uninstall it easily as soon as you're done with this tutorial).

3) Go to your website.  Once you're at the homepage of your blog or website, use the stumble tool bar to add your site to the stumble search engine.  Be sure to set it to the appropriate category, and put an interesting and accurate description into the description box.  Add it to the Stumble site, and you're done!

4) At this point you can uninstall the stumble toolbar from your web browser if you want to.

Congratulations, now people from all over the world will be 'stumbling' onto your website.  The whole process takes just a few minutes.

Keep in mind that some of these 'stumblers' you get may not stick around on your site, and may keep on stumbling along, which is really useless traffic to you as guestblogging.com points out.  I still maintain however that some of my favorite sites have been found by using stumble, and there is the possibility that you may get some loyal traffic from it, but perhaps not as much as you would hope for.  It is worth a try anyway.

To discover more great tutorials and articles about building or monetizing your blog, click on the category tabs at the top of the page!

Read More

Getting Traffic 101 - Ping-o-matic

That's right, you heard me.  The Ping-o-matic.  This website 'pings' the big search engines for you so that you don't have to go around to them all and tell them you have new content on your website.  It's as easy as putting in your website name, url, and then checking all of the boxes (yes, check them ALL), and then clicking 'Send Pings.'

Warning: Do not spam the ping-o-matic.  It won't help you climb the search engine ranks, but it will possibly get your site banned from the search engines.

Only use the ping-o-matic when you have added a new post, and even then you don't want to use it too many times in one day or the search engines will think you're spamming them.

1) Post your new post on your site.

2) Go to the Ping-o-matic (I keep it bookmarked so it's easy to get to).

3) Put in your info, check all the boxes, and click 'Send Pings.'

Done.  Easy way to get some traffic moving to your site.  The more content you write, the more times you get to go ping the search engines and the more traffic you'll get.

You might ask why they give you this free service.  It's so that they can play with all the data they get from doing it.  Good for us, and good for them!

To learn more about blogging, getting traffic, or writing great content, check out our other articles!

Read More

Starting A Blog For Profit

So you've decided to start a blog for profit.  Maybe you're new to blogging, and this will be your first blog, or maybe you're a seasoned veteran and have just decided to see if you can make some money off of your hobby.  Either way, you've come to the right place.

Blogging for profit breaks down into these main components, each of which we will be going more in depth into in other blog posts.

Read More