How I Quadrupled My Traffic In Less Than 3 Months

The most important metric to assess the popularity of any blog is the amount of traffic it is receiving. If you are unknown in blogosphere starting from scratch, building decent traffic on your blog can take some time. Here's how I managed to increase the traffic in recent months by applying some simple yet powerful techniques.

At present, I'm getting around 12,000 page views/month. I know it's not huge traffic when compared to some popular blogs in similar niche. However, the increase from 2,000 PV's/month to 12,000 PV's/month in about 2.5 months is certainly a good development for a relatively new blog.

If we closely look at the traffic graph shown above, we can witness a steady growth in traffic after some of my posts received good attention by social media users. You can clearly observe that before those big spikes, traffic was pretty much stagnant. The key factor was to identify this phenomenon and capitalizing on it. Following these big spikes, I introduced some major changes in my blogging routine to pull and convert more traffic.

Here are those changes that I implemented in last 2.5/3 months.

Posted Regularly

Readers and search engines both love regular feed of content. Prior to November 2008, my posting frequency was quite irregular with no definite pattern. Nothing can be better than daily posting, but if you cannot make it everyday, try to post at least 3 to 4 times a week. I have created a strict posting schedule and now I publish 3 articles per week. Try to publish at least one long in-depth post per week. Regular posting has not only given crawlers a reason to index the content quickly but it has also inflated the archives rapidly resulting in more traffic from organic sources.

Written For Audience

Daily posting alone cannot help build traffic on your blog. To make it clearer, let me ask you some simple questions. Why you visit some popular blogs? Do you like the design of the footer? Or you love to watch animated banner ads on that blog? I'm sure almost all of you go there only for one reason. To get answers of your questions and to get vital information related to your domain. So the key is to identify the needs of your audience and serve what they want. This is applicable to almost every business process - "Anticipating Customer Demands And Delivering The Goods Accordingly".

To implement this on your blog you need to do some research. Here's how I did it.

Google Analytics - is one of the best sources to identify what kind of content is receiving most traffic. Use the 'Content -> Top Content' report to identify the posts receiving most attention of the visitors. Generate 'Visitors -> Keywords' report to identity the most popular keywords that are sending traffic to your blog. After analyzing these reports, here's what I found out.

Following type of posts was receiving most traffic.

1. Problem-Solver Articles
2. How-To Tutorials
3. Lists of Resources
4. In-Depth Post About A Service/Feature

Asking fellow bloggers - in similar niche helped me in getting a clear picture about the type of content that receives most attention on their blogs. The results were almost the same as I got through analysis of Google Analytics reports.

Talking with some of my readers - gave some useful insight about their expectations and the type of content they are expecting from MintBlogger.

Updated Old Content

During this period, I updated and refreshed about 54 posts from archives. This whole exercise helped in making posts more readable, stickier and more useful for the readers. While updating these old posts I stressed on 3 important things.

Contextual Cross-Linking - I identified the possibility of cross-linking the posts with relevant anchor texts embedded right in the middle of the content.

Added Relevant Illustrations - This helped me in making the posts more attractive and sticky.

Modified/Added More Content - Some of the posts required updation of text and some of them demanded addition of extra paragraphs.

Here's a comprehensive guide to update and refresh old content on your blog.

Updated Archives Page

After analyzing the Google Analytics reports, I saw an alarming trend. Lot of visitors were heading to archives page and exiting immediately without any further navigation. The poor design of archives page was the culprit.

I completely updated the archives page by including yearly/monthly archives, highlighted categories section, list of posts in reverse chronological order and a search box. This drastically reduced the bounce rate. Recently, I've written about creating a high performing archives page.

Revamped Sidebar

It is very vital to know which parts of your web page are receiving the most attention and which parts are completely ignored by the visitors. There are some hot click-through zones and some non-performing zones. If you are able to identify them and manage to improve the latter ones, traffic is automatically going to increase.

I used Google Analytics Site Overlay feature to identify non-performing click-through zones. You can access this feature through 'Content -> Site Overlay' from GA dashboard. After analyzing site overlay report it was quite clear that my sidebar was not receiving the required attention.

Here is the composition of my old sidebar.

1. Categories
2. Four - 125x125 Ad Block
3. Recent Posts
4. One 250x250 Adsense Image Ad Block
5. Subscription Box
6. Social Media Profiles
7. Entrecard

In old sidebar, there was more stress on stuffing ads rather than providing links to some useful stuff for the visitor. After revamping the sidebar now it has the following elements and performs very well.

1. Subscription Box
2. Categories
3. Popular Posts
4. Best Lists And Resources
5. Recent Posts
6. Social Media Profiles

I completely removed all the ads from the sidebar, shifted subscription box on top and highlighted the best content on MintBlogger in different sections. In coming months, I'll divide these sections into Popular Posts, Best How-To's, Best Lists & Resources and Free Themes by MintBlogger, giving more options to the reader to scan and navigate the archives.

Commented On Tons of Blogs

You must have read several times about commenting on other blogs to get more exposure and traffic, but how many of us do it consistently over time. I have set a goal to daily comment on at least 10 different blogs similar to my niche.

Don't limit your comments on some selective blogs but evenly spread your comments across the blogosphere on as many new blogs as you can. Regular commenting will create new connections generating more traffic and exposure for your blog.

Did Aggressive Social Media Marketing

After getting the taste of success on various social media sites back in November 2008 (see traffic chart above), I became quite active on Digg, StumbleUpon and Twitter. The result was some additional traffic from social media sites.

Changed And Tweaked Blog Theme

In the beginning, I was using Minyx template for MintBlogger. I was not satisfied with the theme and decided to change it with Adspress. This new theme has much cleaner navigation, fast load time and has a non-standard look. I edited the CSS to give it a unique look to provide a pleasant browsing experience to the visitors. I don't know how much it has contributed to the cause, but some of my peers agreed that after these theme tweaks MintBlogger doesn't appears to be hosted on blogger platform and looks reasonably good.

Networked With Peers

Nobody can grow in vacuum. Socialize, connect and interact to see your blog grow faster than your expectations. I used social media, emails, IM and discussion forums to connect with fellow bloggers and readers. This created a chain of people who knows about me and definitely some of them talk about me with their contacts spreading the word about MintBlogger.

In The End: Change of Traffic Pattern

I would like to finish this post by comparing 2 traffic pie charts generated through Google Analytics. You are going to see a classic example of how traffic pattern changes drastically when you change your approach and blogging routine.

Traffic Pattern Before November, 2008

Traffic Pattern From 1st Nov, 2008 To 20th Feb, 2009

From both pie charts, you can clearly deduce how percentage of traffic from organic sources and social media sites has completely reversed in last 3 months. Before November 2008 just 20% of traffic was coming from search engines, now it has swelled to 57% (indication of inflating archive with posts getting good rankings in SERP's). In the long run, this organic traffic is going to matter the most.

So these were some changes, tweaks and various methods implemented by me to pull more traffic towards MintBlogger.

Over To You

I would like to know various methods you may have implemented to build traffic on your blog?

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20 Useful And Essential Wordpress Plugins

Wordpress is one of the most popular blog hosting content management system. Despite its feature packed options, every Wordpress powered blog needs an array of plugins to include additional features and functionality. Here is a collection of most essential plugins that makes blog management easy and creates pleasant browsing experience for the visitors.

1. Akismet: Undoubtedly the most essential plugin for any Wordpress install. Akismet is the best anti-spam plugin used by millions of bloggers across the globe. Akismet gives protection both from comment spam and trackback spam.

After activating this plugin, you simply have to provide Wordpress.com API key to kick start it. You can optionally choose to automatically discard spam on posts more than 1 month old.

2. WP Super Cache: A must for every professional blog. This plugin caches frequently accessed pages and eliminates repeated access of database. This significantly speeds up the response giving smooth browsing experience for the visitors. If your blog receives big spikes of traffic, this plugin can help your blog cope with the load of heavy traffic very easily.

3. Google XML Sitemaps: Very useful plugin from SEO perspective. This excellent plugin creates Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap that helps in proper indexing of your blog. Just install and forget it. Whenever you will create/edit/modify any blog post, this plugin will automatically update the sitemap.

4. Google Analytics for WordPress: Undoubtedly the best tracking plugin. One click install and simple configuration. This plugin helps you track the following:

1. Outbound links
2. Adsense clicks
3. Image search queries
4. Downloads

5. Feedburner FeedSmith: If you are using Feedburner to promote your blog feed, make sure you have this plugin. It redirects all your feed subscribers to a single Feedburner feed and keeps track of all of them.

6. All in One SEO Pack: The name says it all. This plugin takes care of on-page search engine optimization functions with ease. It automatically generates optimized title and meta tags for every new post. After configuring, this plugin also prevents creation of duplicate content.

7. WordPress.com Stats: Like Akismet, this plugin also requires Wordrpess.com API key for its functioning. Although much of your traffic analysis needs are fulfilled by Google Analytics, still this plugin installation is highly recommended as it gives detailed statistics about your traffic right in your Wordpress dashboard.

8. Exec-PHP: Very handy plugin that lets you execute arbitrary piece of PHP code in your posts, pages or sidebar text widgets. A must-have plugin for coding ninjas who extensively customize their default theme.

9. Contact Form 7: An excellent contact form manager plugin supporting Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering, multi-language support and much more.

10. WP Ajax Edit Comments: Another must-have plugin facilitating editing and moderating at a click of a button. Once configured, visitors can edit their own comments for a pre-defined time interval. Administrator can modify, delete and moderate the comments directly from the post page.

11. Sociable: One of my favorite and highly recommended. Sociable easily integrates social bookmarking buttons on your post pages at specified location with ease. It supports up to 99 various social bookmarking services. You can also embed these bookmarking links in your feed as well.

12. Subscribe to Comments: Sometimes readers want to take part in ongoing debate in the form of comments on selective posts. This handy plugin provides a comment subscription to the commentators to get alerts for every subsequent comment posted. At any time readers can unsubscribe

13. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: A highly customizable plugin to display related entries beneath your posts or in feeds. This improvised plugin uses MySQL advanced search queries to correctly match the related entries displaying the highly relevant posts. Use you can display posts on the basis of tags or categories.

14. WP-DB-Backup: A must-have plugin for every Wordpress install. This simple yet powerful plugin backs up your blog's core database. You can optionally backup additional tables in the same database.

15. WP-Syntax: An ideal plugin for those bloggers who frequently use sample-programming codes in their tutorial/how-to posts. This excellent plugin provides syntax highlighting for several popular languages to give a clean and neat look to the embedded code for better readability and understanding.

16. AdSense Manager: A robust and highly customizable plugin ideal for serving different kind of ads from major PPC advertising networks. Configuration is very simple with custom placement widgets that automatically generate code for ad impressions at targeted places on the post.

17. Login LockDown: If you want to add an extra layer of security for your Wordpress install, then this plugin is a perfect addition in your arsenal. It logs IP and timestamp of every unsuccessful login attempt and optionally disable login page for some period (configured during installation).

18. RSS Footer: This plugin has dual use. It not only allows you to append arbitrary test/HTML at the end of feed but also lets you automatically embed permalink to original post with title as the anchor text. An excellent plugin to curb scrapping of your blog feed.

19. WP-Polls: Looking to host polls on your blog? Here comes WP-Polls to your rescue giving you highly customizable poll plugin. Latest version supports multiple answer options and custom CSS styles support.

20. pageMash: Ultimate static page management plugin. This plugin makes arranging order of static pages a cakewalk. Simply use the ajax powered drag-n-drop interface to shift page positions in a hierarchy. This plugin also lets you hide selective pages with a click of a button.

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How To Write Blog Posts Fast

Time is money, especially if you own several flourishing businesses (including your weblog). The more you multi-task, lesser the time you get for each one of them. Every blog demands constant supply of quality content to keep both readers and search engines happy. Developing fast writing skills can remove much of the burden of keeping your blog alive. Here are some basic techniques to develop fast writing skills.

Skim An Idea

Ideas can pop up any time. Whether you are watching a movie, taking bath, cooking or strolling in a nearby park. As soon as you pick up any idea, note it in your organizer, PDA or pocket book. Later on, you can transfer this idea to your blog post editor in the form of a draft.

Collect Data

Work on this idea by collecting facts and figures from various sources. Scan relevant sites, discuss with peers and use social media to gather more facts (create a mini poll). You can also use various Wiki's for collecting additional details about the topic.

Create Post Skeleton

Once you have the required data, divide them into main points/sub-headings. This will ensure a smooth flow while writing the blog entry. I have written an article about basic anatomy of a blog post that may help you in creating a post skeleton. Hold on, this is not the time to start a writing session.

Remove Distractions

Just before you start to write, switch off your mobile, logout from email, IM's or any social media account. Preferably, switch to an editor like Dark Room. I regularly use this editor to write fast without any distraction. If you prefer to write directly in your blog's CMS post editor and your web browser is Firefox, install thesaurus and dictionary plugin to aid in filling gaps and enriching the post with more professional language.

Write Like A Rabbit

Finally, you have all the building blocks in your hands. Start writing and do not stop until you are finished. Forget about spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, links, illustrations or the credits. Just keep writing till you have nothing more to say about it. If the article is not very long, this whole session will not last more than 15 to 20 minutes.

Polish It

Now it's time to correct and improve the post. Go through your article once again and correct all the spelling mistakes. Nowadays, almost every web browser supports spell-check plugins or native support to identify such mistakes and to provide alternative suggestions. Fill in all the gaps and if you feel the need, stuff additional text at selective places. Now quickly dump your article in a standard word processor and once again run a spell check.

Press The Publish Button

Just before publishing the post, apply this useful technique that has helped me in picking those mistakes that I may have missed in earlier stages. I always first publish the polished article on my test blog and read it aloud. This helps me in identifying several mistakes that I am not able to catch earlier. This is the right time to add illustrations, contextual links and credits, if any. Once satisfied, transfer the post to your main blog editor and hit the publish button.

Done. Total time 25-30 minutes.

Have Your Say

What's your approach to write quick blog entries? Do you use any external text editor or prefer your blog CMS post editor?

Image Credit: Zahra

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How To Write A Killer "How-To" Post That Brings Tons of Traffic

A 'How-To' tutorial is probably one of the most common post type used by almost every blogger. Inherently, 'How-To' posts have immense opportunities to bring tons of readers to your blog. A typical 'How-To' tutorial almost always promises to deliver a solution for the reader. Let's see how to create an attractive and sticky 'How-To' post that has the potential to go viral in no time.

Create Problem-Solver Article

Ideally, every 'How-To' tutorial should be a problem-solver article, providing unique solution to some of the most common questions of your readers. Anticipating readers' expectations and capitalizing on it will make you an ideal solution provider. People want quick and easy solutions to their problems. Identifying your readers' grievances and providing the right answer to their questions in the form of 'How-To' posts can make your blog a big hit in no time.

Craft Eye-Catching Headline

The title of a 'How-To' post carries the weight of the whole article. You claim a solution, a promise in your post headline that tempts a visitor to read it. Headlines of such posts are like honey pots crafted to perfection to attract the audience. Having said that, one must keep in mind the negative implications of not fulfilling the promise done in the headline. The more eye-catching is your headline, the more responsibility is on your shoulders to match that headline with equally good content.

Take Step-by-Step Approach

Divide the path towards the solution into clear steps and move ahead by taking one step (no overlapping) at a time. Sometimes, newbies are not able to pick up the right progress thread and mix different stages of solution at one place leading to confusion and frustration for the reader.

Use the power of bullet lists, sub-headlines and short paragraphs to make the tutorial clear enough to be grasped easily by anyone.

Use The 'KISS' Principle

Remember, the solution provided by you is going to be read by intellects as well as by those who are completely ignorant of the subject discussed in the tutorial. Use the KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) principle to make it readable for every class of readers. The more simple and plain is your 'How-To' tutorial language, the more it will be popular. Avoid use of rich complex terms that may confuse some of the readers.

Spice Up With Illustrations

Illustrations are an essential part of any 'How-To' post. They add visual appeal and make the tutorial more readable and easier to understand. If there is scope, use them liberally to make your readers better understand the solution. Recently, I have written about using photos to make blog posts irresistible.

Provide Supporting Resources

If your 'How-To' post has the scope of providing demos or downloads, nothing can be better than that. For example, let's assume you are writing a 'How-To' tutorial about creating a CSS navigation menu.

Create a couple a demo pages and provide links to these pages. Package the code in a zip file and provide this download to your readers. They will simply love it and may spread the word about it among their contacts giving you more and more traffic.

Be Ready To Answer

No matter how well you package your solution, you are bound to be bombarded by readers questions in the form of comments and emails. Be mentally prepared and create some common FAQ's drafts to speed up your response. Sometimes, an average 'How-To' tutorial goes viral simply because you are answering every question of the readers. It may also happen that one of your readers provides a better solution then yours. Acknowledge the solution provided by your reader thanking him for adding his valuable input.

Promise To Deliver Again

In the end of your post, do not forget to indicate your readers about delivering similar kind of stuff in the future. If you have any relevant semi-prepared drafts in your dashboard, do not hesitate to tell about them to your readers. This will help in capturing more traffic.

Over To You

What's your approach of creating such type of 'How-To' articles? Do you think 'How-To's' perform better than other type of posts?

Image Credits: richardmasoner, .damien, Zahra

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How To Make Your Blog Photos Stand Apart From The Rest

Adding illustrations to a blog post is a very effective method to make them more attractive and readable for the visitors. Human eye is more sensitive to colors and pictures. No one likes to read long plain text articles. If you spice up your posts with relevant photos, you will observe dramatic increase in your readership. Let's see how to integrate well-decorated photographs in our blog posts.

There are two methods of embedding a picture in a blog post. In first method, we embed a picture in its original form without any modification. The second method involves trimming, decorating and adding various special effects to the illustration to make it more attractive for the reader. Here are some methods to modify and enhance your pictures to make your blog posts irresistible.

Surround With Frames And Borders

Normally, a frame or a border surrounds portraits or primary image of any blog post. You can use this option to give a unique look to all the portraits embedded in your blog posts.

Use Different Types of Edges

Bloggers often use different edge effects to make an illustration more attractive. I have shown some basic edge styles that I often use in my post illustrations. You can invent your own styles to spice up your pictures.

Use Speech Bubbles

Speech bubbles have the power to put life in a picture. Use them liberally wherever you find any scope of using them.

Use Arrows

Do not hesitate to use arrows in specific kind of illustrations. Normally, they are heavily used in data charts, stat sheets and similar kind of pictures.

Use Captions/Headlines

Adding captions and headlines gives a strong statement not only about the picture but also about the topic of your blog post. Normally, captions are added in the primary illustration of a blog post supported by secondary pictures, if any.

Use Miscellaneous Effects

As shown above, there are hundreds of special effects that can be added to the illustrations. Remember, the time you will devote working on your blog post illustrations will never get wasted. A blog post supported by relevant illustrations brings more traffic and more engagement from the readers.

You can use Photoshop or GIMP to add these special effects to your blog post illustrations. If you have limited photo-editing skills, you can read some good free tutorials available on Internet that will equip you with enough skills to perform these basic photo-editing tasks.

Here is an excellent Adobe Photoshop Basics tutorial by Sue Chastain. This course is divided into several modules and is completely free. I have done this course and it really helped me in refining my Photoshop skills.

GIMP users can select some of the best free tutorials from Kristarella Top GIMP Tutorial Sites.

Image Credits: Swami Stream, midorisyu, bensonkua, Peter Hosey, Pink Sherbet

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Ad Inventory Management For Bloggers: A Comprehensive Guide

Unless you are running a non-profit blog, you must have tried your hands on various monetization options for your blog. With the advent of new advertising technologies, bloggers have tons of options to experiment and improvise. Though PPC ads served by 3rd party networks are the most popular option among bloggers, direct advertisements are not far behind.

If your blog is receiving massive traffic, selling direct ads is a more profitable option. However, the management of direct ads inventory is no mean task, especially if your getting orders in bulk one after another. Keeping track of available slots, tracking of dates/ad impressions, tracking of generated revenue, tracking of payments - all require a solid and effective inventory management policy. Let's see how to manage our direct ads effectively to reduce errors with significant time savings. Let's quickly brush up some basic terminologies before going ahead.

Ad Slot - A pre-defined space on a web page where actual ad will appear.

Placement/Section - A logical unit in which one or more ad slots are grouped together to better manage the ads on that location. For example, you have 4 125x125 ad spaces available in your blog's sidebar. It means you have 4 ad slots. To manage this group of 4 ad slots in a better way, you can bind/associate them together into one logical unit - Placement/Section. Let's say you call this section - 'Blog Sidebar 125 Ads'. You can compare Adsense channels with Placement/Section.

Ad Product - An advertising option available to potential direct advertisers.

Targeting Criteria - Different demographic attributes (Geo-location, browser, language, age-group and much more) applicable on any ad slot.

Rate Card Cost - A standard rate of any ad slot given in your media kit/rate card.

Minimum Cost - Minimum possible cost for negotiation with potential advertiser.

Overbooking - Processing/Queuing an order for already occupied ad slot.

CPC/CPM/CPD - Various pricing models. CPC (Cost-per-click): A fixed amount payable by advertiser for every click generated during ad delivery period. CPM (Cost-per-thousand impressions): A fixed amount payable by advertiser for every ~1000 impressions. CPD (Cost-per-day): A fixed amount payable by advertiser for a single day regardless of number of clicks or impressions generated.

There are many more terms, but I have taken the most common to avoid unnecessary complexity.

There are several ad management software that can be used to manage your ad inventory. Some of them are free while others are commercial solutions. The 3 most popular are OIOpublisher, OpenX and Google Ad Manager. I use Google Ad Manager for 4 primary reasons. It is free. It uses the same ad delivery technology used by Adsense. It easily integrates Adsense system into your current inventory. It gives access to highly customizable ad serving API that can be fine tuned to provide custom solutions to advertisers.

Defining Ad Products (Creating Inventory)

Before you start selling your hot dogs, you must create them, right? Identify the premium space on your blog and divide them into appropriate ad slots. If more then 1 ad slot is present on a single location, group them into a logical unit (Placement/Section). All this exercise is for internal use. Now, name each product and assign all the applicable attributes to this product. For example, "125x125 - Sidebar Ad". Calculate the rate card cost, minimum cost (for internal use), ad size, type of ads available (image banner/animated banner/flash component/text link group) and number of ads available for a given slot. Once you have fed all the available ad products in your ad management software, update your media kit/rate card by including the details of each ad product.

This whole exercise ensures that while accepting new orders you do not overbook or book conflicting dates for already occupied ad slots. When any new order will be received, you can check your inventory for slots availability with a click of a button. This will only work if you have already defined each ad product in your inventory beforehand.

Processing The Order

Let's assume you have clinched an advertising deal and now you it's time to deliver the goods. If your order is confirmed, it means you have crosschecked your inventory for the availability of an ad slot as described in previous section. Configuring an ad and integrating the relevant code in your blog is not difficult at all once you are accustomed with your ad management software. The most important things that must be taken care of while configuring the ad are:

1. Binding it with relevant ad slot, placement and ad product.
2. Properly defining the start date and end date.
3. Defining the ad size and type.
4. Choosing the pricing mechanism (CPC/CPD/CPM) and filling the price detail.
5. Configuring the demographic attributes (if applicable).
6. Specifying/Uploading the image URL, script code, target URL etc.
7. Approving the order.

After processing the order, the change will immediately reflect in your inventory (ad products). For example: If you have just processed an order of 1 125x25 ad slot in your blog sidebar from the available 4 such ad slots, your inventory will reflect 1 ad slot booked (the slot which you bind with this order) with associated order details. Rest 3 slots will be available for more orders.

Integrating Ad Code

Once the order is processed and approved, you can create the corresponding ad code with a click of a button. Normally, your ad code will be divided into 2 parts. The first part will consist of a driving script to be placed in the header of your template. The second part will be the actual ad delivering code to be placed at the actual position in the body of your template. If you are not an experienced customer, you must try few impressions on a test blog before integrating it into your main blog template.

Tracking And Maintanenece

Generally, most ad management software comes with healthy reporting modules. With manual ad management, its very difficult to track impressions and clicks accurately. These ad performance/sales reports make your life easy by giving detailed statistics of running ads. The snapshot shown above has been taken from a report generated for an ad slot running on MintBlogger. You can generate various types of reports to better manage your advertising resources. Generally, these reports can be divided into 3 main categories.

1. Delivery Reports
1. Sales Reports
1. Inventory Reports

Each category consists of several granular reports giving in-depth statistics about specific entities. These reports not only generate general tracking and inventory management reports, but also give you vital data about ads performance. This may help you in identifying heat zones on your blog to further fine-tune ad placements for better results.

In the end, I must stress on the use of specialized ad management software to avoid any conflicts with huge time savings and better results.

Related Reading:

1. How To Get Direct Advertisements For Your Blog
2. Google Ad Manager: Complete Ad Management Solution For Bloggers

First Image Credit: Sarah G...

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How To Create High-Performing Blog Archives Page

Archives page is present in almost every single blog and is one of the most prominent links in the navigation bar. This page has the power to influence, create trust and convert the traffic. A well-designed archive page can do wonders in gaining the trust of a reader and bringing him/her back to your blog on regular basis.

About 50%-70% visitors who spend more than a minute on your blog are more likely to click the archives page link. If a visitor finds your article interesting, he will eventually head over to archives page to look - "What else is on offer?". A perfect archives page can easily quench his thirst and can further go beyond that by presenting him the hidden gems in your archive, which eventually will lead to trust in you and your blog's content. Let's see, what it takes to make a good archive page.

There are some common and essential ingredients of a good archives page. I'm going to list the general pattern, though you may create a completely different design, but the core components/content will be more or less similar.

Yearly Archives

Every archives page can be divided into some very important sub-sections. One of them is the Yearly/Monthly archives section. This section gives the convenience to jump to posts of specific month or year.

An example is shown above consisting of monthly archives segregated on yearly basis. I prefer to use this approach because of some inherent advantages in it.

Clean and unobtrusive navigation structure - The link structure in this format is fairly simple and creates no confusion in the mind of the visitor. At a single glance, a visitor can easily jump to archives of desired month/year.

Saves lot of space - The horizontal alignment of monthly archives saves lots of space. Even if your blog is 10 years old, still a visitor can see all the monthly archive links without the need to scroll the page. This increases the probability of clicking on the links and helps in keeping the reader glued to your blog.

Categories Highlights

Yet another very important section to keep the readers engaged. In this section, you get the opportunity to highlight the BEST content of your blog.

Choose the top 4-5 popular posts from each category and provide links to these posts in respective sub-section. Make sure to add the 'More...' button at the end of each sub-section to encourage the visitors to further navigate the respective category. Arranging the categories in 2 or 3 columns saves the space giving more room for other sections.

Keep updating this section - Once in a month, review this section and update the highlighted posts with new updated popular posts in each sub-section.

Posts Listing (Reverse Chronological Order)

Some visitors prefer to browse all the posts in reverse chronological order. Why leave them disappointing, when you have all the cards at your disposal.

As shown above, creating this list is very easy. All it takes is dividing the sections on the basis of month and providing links to posts in reverse order (kind of a LIFO stack). However, if your blog is very old with massive archive, this list can become very long.

Search Box

And last but not the least is the search box for a hungry customer. If all of the above sections fail to provide the content a visitor is looking for, you can give him a chance to manually type a keyword or phrase to display relevant posts containing those keywords and phrases.

Even though a large number of visitors will use it sparingly, still it's a must have section of any blog archive page.

What Else I Have Missed?

What else you would like to add in your archives page? Do you prefer to have a dedicated archives page or prefer to give monthly archives links in sidebar?

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How To Be A More Productive Blogger

With the increase of your blog's reach and popularity, the pressure to deliver more is inevitable. Sometimes, novice bloggers struggle to cope up with this pressure wasting much of their time in other less useful tasks. This can lead to distrust and annoyance among your readers. How to avoid such situation and be more productive? How to live up to the expectations of your growing audience? Let's see, how we can be a more productive blogger by introducing some esssential changes in our daily blogging schedule and in our lifestyle.

Remove All Distractions

As a blogger, your first priority should be to churn out regular quality content for your readers. And for that, you need focus and attention. While writing your posts, close all IM clients, your email inbox and other social media desktop clients like twhirl or tweetdeck. An ideal situation would be to take your laptop in your garden (disconnect from Internet) and write continuously till you are exhausted. This way, you will be able to generate more content in less time with almost no distractions.

Create A Strict Schedule

Creating a timetable and following it are two different things. Almost all of us have created timetables in the past, but how much we stick to it? The key to increase the productivity is following the schedule religiously. Divide the time slices for each of the daily task related to your blogging schedule according to their priority/importance. Allocate time for writing posts, social media marketing, checking/answering mails, reading feeds, interaction with peers, blog maintenance, comment moderation and similar stuff.

Keep Ideas Pocket Book Handy

This is one of the best methods used by large number of bloggers to keep their dashboard full of drafts. Keep a small pocket book and whenever something strikes your mind that can be used for your next blog post, immediately scribble it on your pocket book. And later on, whenever you open your dashboard, create drafts one-by-one and copy those ideas in each one of them and save all the drafts. Try this method and soon you will see your dashboard having dozens or even hundreds or empty (idea ~ heading/title), semi-prepared and complete drafts. I'm using this method and at the time of this writing I have 41 semi-prepared drafts in my dashboard. Have you ever tried this methodology to generate ideas for new blog posts?

Read, Read And Read

Piling up drafts alone will not help in producing more content. Again, picking up an idea and building your post upon that idea are two different things. You can only turn those drafts into good posts when you will have the required knowledge and information related to your niche. Read as much material as you can and keep yourself updated with current happenings in your domain. This will fill your cranium with the required raw material needed to craft countless quality posts.

Automate Tasks

Automating common tasks of your daily blogging routine can save huge amount of time that can be spent on more high priority tasks. Use GMail's canned response feature to give quick answers to some common types of mails received by readers, peers, advertisers or any general/common type of query. Use the combination of filters and multiple-inboxes feature of GMail to delete unwanted mails and to divide incoming mails according to their type and priority. You can also disable comment moderation if you are experiencing fairly good commenting audience.

Be Innovative

Try something new and unique to get more out of your blogging efforts. Do not hesitate to experiment new things. For example, you can try publishing quick short entries at fixed time intervals instead of posting one long, comprehensive, in-depth article on a given day. Analyze the response of your readers and take it further if you receive favorable response from them. You can mix this pattern every alternate day to give a new reading experience to your readers.

Take A Break

Sometimes, working continuously day after day without taking any break may exhaust you completely. This may lead to low output with more stress on your mind. Once a week preferably on Sunday, take a complete break from your blogging schedule and spend time with your family and pals. Next day you will return with a completely rejuvenated mind filled with fresh ideas with same fire in your belly to deliver more and more for your readers.

Over To You

If you think you are delivering short of your capabilities, what other efforts you will do to get maximum output with minimum efforts and be a more productive blogger.

Image Credit: FotoosVanRobin

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10 Signs That You And Your Blog Are Doing Well

We often assess our blog's reach and popularity to better understand where we stand today and how much more is needed to reach our immediate goals. Sometimes, we may struggle in properly quantifying our blog's worth and it's popularity. However, there are some general indicators to get fair idea about these attributes. Here are some general signs that can help you in correctly assessing your blog's increasing worth and your own online reputation.

Inflating page views - is one of the best indicator that things are going pretty smooth. Consistent increase in page views/day month after month is a sure sign of success for your blog.

Reduced bounce rate - indicates that your blog design, contextual inter-linking of posts and your content is good enough to engage the readers and refrain them from leaving your blog immediately.

More traffic towards archives - clearly states the fact that Google and other major search engines now give your content more respect than ever before. If large part of this traffic is coming organically, then be assured your blog is on the path of success.

Steady increase in subscribers count - indicates your increasing authority in your niche. A visitor scans your blog content and comes to conclusion that it will be a loss for him if he misses your blog content, resulting in his subscription. This is a clear indication that your blog content is good enough to grow its core readership.

Your tweets are now retweeted more often - than before. A sign that your followers value your tweet and this value is created primarily by your blog's popularity, because that's your identity as a blogger and your platform to show your authority.

Increasing mails from readers - clearly suggests that your blog readership is growing and people see you as a problem solver. The solutions provided on your blog and your approach in answering the readers comments encourage readers to contact you and ask their questions.

Offers of guest blogging - states the fact that the peers in your niche wants to leverage the reach and popularity of your blog. They may send you guest post offers to get some recognition and traffic through their guest post. If you start getting these guest blogging offers more than frequently, then it's a clear sign of your blogging success.

Direct advertising offers - are one of the best indicators of increasing popularity of your blog. When an advertiser is approaching you directly, he/she is affirming your blog's reach, it's popularity and last but not the least - your authority.

Growing network on social media sites - is a good indicator that your blog is working for you and giving you the recognition and fame you deserve. If the followers count on twitter in swelling at good pace, people are adding you as a friend on facebook and linkdin, it indicates your growing authority and your blog's popularity.

Invitations to co-author a blog - is another indication that people are desperate to include your name in their writing team and wants you to be associated with their blogs. These invitations may include luring monetary compensation offers, acknowledging your knowledge and skills.

Over To You

This list can be stretched further and I would love to get more additions to this list in the form of your comments. Over to you guys...

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Mint-Classic: New Free Blogger Template By MintBlogger

This is the second blogger template released by MintBlogger. Mint-Classic is a two-column, fixed width template. A large header graphic gives it a unique look with attached navigation bar at the bottom.

This template has been thoroughly tested in Firefox 2.0+, IE 6.0+ and Opera 9.0+. Light and fast optimized CSS code with minimum warnings.

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How To Create An eBook For Your Subscribers

Who doesn't love freebies? Bloggers often use various techniques to increase the subscriber count and to get more eyeballs for their content. Giving a free eBook along with subscription is by far one of the most popular methods to attract more readers to your blog. However, nothing can beat quality content to retain those subscriptions. Let's see how to create a free eBook for your readers to inflate your subscriber count.

Creating an eBook solely for the purpose of selling is a different thing and we will not touch that topic. Instead, we will learn how to create an eBook to be given for free to potential subscribers.

Identify Your Audience

Once you have decided to create an eBook for your subscribers, its time to do some research about your audience. This way, you will be in a better position to identify their demands and expectations. Create a table on paper and ask the following questions to yourself.

1. Who are my readers?
2. Where do they come from?
3. What are their common traits?
4. What do they look for on my blog (Use Web Analytics)?
5. In general, what are the demands of my readers?

Take your time and answer each question on paper. Once your have answered your questionnaire, you will have the building blocks for your eBook in your hand. This whole exercise will help you in identifying the right kind of material that is needed to lure your subscribers.

eBook Creation Life Cycle

Take a problem solving approach - eBooks that provide solutions to common questions of readers are the most popular ones and have the potential to go viral. Keeping this in mind, tabulate are the major points and make a list of problem solver topics.

Rough draft - Prepare a rough draft dividing it into major sections and sub-sections. While doing that, scan your blog archive and take the most relevant articles to further expand them in your eBook with new perspective. There are many free eBook Templates that can help you get started in no time. Here are some templates from EBook Template Source. You can also use this excellent newsletter template in Word format. Change it according to your needs and convert it into your eBook.

Size & pages - An ideal length for a free eBook for subscribers can be anywhere between 30 pages to 100 pages. The more pages it will have the better it will be. Try to keep your eBook less than a MB, so that even dial-up users can download it easily. Do not use too many large high-resolution images to keep the size under control. Packaging your eBook in an attractive eBook cover helps in getting more subscribers. Here are some free eBook covers that you can modify using any image-editing program to suit your needs.

Writing schedule - Professional bloggers have very busy schedules, especially if their blog has picked up speed and traffic is increasing at consistent rate. Create a strict timetable and allocate at least 1/2 an hour daily for your eBook. This way, in less then a month you will be able to write an entire eBook. The best time to write is in the morning with fresh mind. In the footer of each page, write a copyright statement with your name and a permalink to your blog. In the end, do not forget to give credit to all the trademarks you have used. End with a brief biography of yourself and about your blog. And last but not the least is the licensing information in the very last page.

Software to be used - Now comes the technical part of creating an eBook. Conventionally, eBook are distributed in PDF format. Start your eBook in a Word Processor, preferably Microsoft Word. Later on, you can change the Word file into PDF format through conversion software. The most popular is PrimoPDF, which has very large user base and provides excellent Word-To-PDF conversion options. While creating the PDF make it non-editable (read-only).

Licensing issues - Always keep the habit of licensing just about anything you create for your readers. Use the Creative Commons license for your PDF and let your readers share and distribute it further, provided they do not alter it's content. If this distribution goes viral, your blog will get good exposure very quickly.

Distribution mechanism - At this stage, your eBook is ready to be distributed. For that, you need a reliable hosting service. If you have a self-hosted blog, then there is no problem in hosting your eBook. In case you are using any free service like Blogger, you must choose a reliable host for eBook distribution. There are many free services that give you basic PDF hosting services like FreePDFHosting and KeepAndShare. Once your PDF is successfully hosted, spice up your subscription box on your blog and aggressively pitch about your eBook. Never provide a direct link on your blog. The best way is to provide a link in your blog feed. Use a feed footer plugin to embed your eBook link at the bottom of every post in your feed. Blogger users can add the link through their Dashboard by going to 'Settings -> Site Feed -> Post Feed Footer' and pasting the HTML code for the link.

Spread The Word

Now is the time to aggressively spread the word about your Giveaway. Use the following methods to achieve it.

Send Copies to friends and fellow bloggers - Give some copies to well known bloggers in your niche who are your good friends. They may distribute it further or may tweet about it.

Announce in major discussion forums - Go to all major discussion forums and announce about your giveaway. Make sure you post it in the right sub-forum and do not spam with links.

Use social media - Use the power of social media to spread the word about it. Tweet about it and send DM's to some of your trusted partners to retweet it. Aggressively talk about it on Facebook and create a separate section in your Facebook profile displaying your Giveaway

Embed in your email signature - And last but not the least is your good old email signature. Add it in your signature in more compact form and let your business contacts, friends and people know about your giveaway.

Over To You

Have you ever given an eBook for free to your readers to increase your subscriptions? If yes, how was your experience and how much you succeeded in pulling more subscriptions through this method?

First Image Credit: LuMaxArt

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How To Get Direct Advertisements For Your Blog

About a decade back, nobody thought that blogs would transform from a personal diary to full-fledged money making websites. Blog monetization strategies have undergone several transitions during these years, and bloggers have tons of monetization options at their disposal. One of the options is 'Direct Advertisements'. Interestingly, large number of bloggers does not use this option for many reasons. Let's try to understand the dynamics of direct advertising and the methods to grab direct advertisement deals.

If you own a blog with decent traffic (at least 500-1000 unique visits/day) and are planning to monetize it, direct advertising is an excellent option for you. Quality content and good traffic are two most important prerequisites before pitching for direct advertising.

Advantages of Direct Advertising

Cuts out the middleman - Almost every blogger who has monetized his/her blog is familiar with PPC (pay-per-click) ads served by popular 3rd party advertising networks. Since they act as a middleman between the advertiser and the publisher, they take a good share of revenue. On the other hand, getting direct ads from advertisers removes the middleman and you as a publisher get full incentive for your service.

More choice on type of ads - You can offer almost any type of ad format for the advertisers. With 3rd party advertisements, you have limited choices with some predefined standard ad formats. Through direct advertising you can offer a wide array of ad formats with much more flexible ad placements. Following are some popular ad types used by bloggers.

1. Banners (Animated/Static)
2. Text Links
3. RSS Ads
4. Newsletter Ads
5. Site Reviews
6. Audio/Video Ads

When you are in complete control of your ads, advertisers gets more variety to choose from that suits his business demands.

Flexible payment options - Another advantage is acceptance of payment in multiple ways. If an advertiser is not willing to pay by one method you can opt for the second. Normally, bloggers prefer wire transfer or Paypal as the best method to get payments from advertisers. Still, if an advertiser chooses any other payment medium you can be flexible and can go ahead with that option without any chance of losing the deal.

Long-term relationships - More than often, bloggers develop long term relationships with advertisers who are satisfied with their service. This not only opens the door for consistent stream of income from these advertisers, but also increases the probability of grabbing more advertising deals through referrals of these satisfied advertisers.

Flexible pricing - Since you are in complete control of your ad inventory, you can exercise extreme flexibility while quoting price of different types of ads to grab virtually every advertising deal that comes in your way.

Builds Credibility - A blog that gets consistent direct advertisement deals automatically builds it's credibility and is seen as an authority in it's niche.

Disadvantages of Direct Advertising

Difficulty in finding advertisers - Initially, a lot of effort goes in finding advertisers for your blog. Sometimes, it may take considerable time before any such deal is finalized. Once you start getting the deals, things become easier though you still have to move your legs aggressively to clinch new deals.

Time consumption - Keeping track of ad inventory, negotiating deals with advertisers, keeping track of payments and time deadlines consumes lot of precious time. If you have multiple blogs that are updated daily, things can become more difficult as considerable part of your blogging schedule is spent in maintaining your ad inventory and in finding new advertising deals.

Disputes - Sometimes, an advertiser is not satisfied with the results and may nullify the agreement from his end demanding refund of his payment. This can also lead to negative feedback to other advertisers in the pool.

Preparations For Getting Direct Advertising

Before you decide to approach advertisers, you must do some very important preparations to increase the probability of clinching your first direct advertising deal.

Create a dedicated advertising page - An advertising page concentrates all the necessary information needed to convince potential advertisers (kind of a portfolio of your blog). This page tabulates the most important statistics about your blog. In simple words, this page gives all the reasons why advertisers should choose your blog for advertising.

Following are some of the essential ingredients of a typical advertising page.

About your blog section - This section gives a brief introduction about your blog. What it's all about, it's niche, target audience and the purpose of its existence (reader's perspective).

Traffic statistics - The most important part of advertising page. Give all the important data related to your blog traffic to convince the potential advertisers. Following are some major blog statistics that are commonly used by bloggers in their advertising page.

1. Page Views (per day/ per month)
2. Unique Visits (per day/ per month)
3. Alexa/Compete and Similar Services Ranks
4. Number of Feed Subscribers
5. Demographic Data (V. Imp)

Some advertisers don't give much importance to Alexa and similar ranks but others do take them into consideration, so its better to include them in your traffic statistics section. Similarly, providing concentrated demographic data increase the chances of getting advertising deals.

Available Ad Slots - In this section the available ad inventory is showcased. This includes each ad type, their format, their exact placement and the number of such slots available for any location. To give a clearer picture you must supplement this section with appropriate snapshots of ads placed in a particular location.

Now here comes the tricky part. What about pricing of ads? Should we straightaway quote the price of each available ad slot? Well, I would strongly suggest you to keep your cards closed. Let the advertiser contact you with relevant details and then you can play your cards according to the situation. Ask for advertiser's website address when he first contacts you. This way you can visit their web site and can get fair idea about their budget and purchasing power. Through this approach, you create an opportunity for yourself to assess the situation and then create a flexible pricing plan. If you publicly display your ad prices, websites with considerably low budget may not approach you and big websites may grab it in much lesser rate then they were willing to pay earlier.

Testimonials - Great marketers use their customers feedback to promote their products. Same rule applies here. Get some testimonials from your satisfied advertisers and prominently display them on your advertising page. This builds your credibility and shows your track record of giving excellent advertising services. Apart from publishing the plain testimonial statement, you can further replenish it by including thumbnail image of the person with his/her designation.

Calculating Advertising Prices

Often newbies are in dilemma about setting the correct price for their advertisements. Sometimes, they fear that quoting a high price can result in loss of advertising deal, while quoting less will be like giving their real estate in pennies. How to overcome this situation and how to correctly calculate the prices for your ad inventory? Here are some basic guidelines to calculate ad prices.

Image Vs Text Ads - Normally image ads are always priced high than text ads. The CTR (click-through ratio) of image ads is much higher than text ads and hence this pricing difference.

Size Does Matter - Larger the size of the banner, higher the price is. If your 125x125 image banner is priced at $30/month, a 250x250 banner should be priced at 4 x 30 = $120/month.

Placement - If the advertisement appears above the fold (area visible without the need of scrolling), it is priced much higher than those ads that appear below the fold. If an ad is going to appear in the footer, it's price will be considerably low than that placed in the header of your blog.

Pricing Model - There are two popular pricing models for advertisements. The CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model and CPA (cost per action) model. The CPM model is the preferred way to calculate ad prices and is widely accepted model throughout blogosphere. In this model, a fixed amount is paid for every 1000 page views, simple. But how would you calculate the right price for a particular ad in this model? Here are some ways to do it.

The best way to get the correct value of an ad is to check public ad inventories and see their CPM rate. Login to your Adsense account and go to advanced reports to view the CPM rate for a particular ad. Take at least month long data to get the clear picture, though a long-range data will give much more accurate rate. Let's suppose you get a CPM rate of $1.20 from the report. Now according to your assessment of the purchasing power of the advertiser you can increase or decrease this rate. A low budget advertiser can be offered a rate of $1.00 or $0.80, while a big web site can be asked for a CPM rate of $1.50.

Let's assume that the deal is finalized with a rate of $1.50 CPM. How the monthly rate will be calculated? Suppose your blog generates 5000 page views per day. This amounts to 30 x 5000 = 150000 page views per month. So, at this rate the price of the ad will be (150000 / 1000) * 1.50 = $225/month.

Daniel Scocco has written an excellent article about calculating ad prices for your advertising space. If you are still in dilemma, you can also ask an expert to assess your blog's worth.

Finding the Advertisers

Now comes the real tough part (at least for newbies) of finding advertisers for your blog. There are many ways to do it.

Visit Marketplaces - There are several popular forums and discussion boards where advertisers and publishers meet solely for the purpose of finding and negotiating advertising deals. You can visit Digital Point - Buy, Sell or Trade Forum, SitePoint Marketplace and Webmaster World Commercial Exchange Forum to find advertisers for your blog.

Check Competitor's blogs - Visit popular blogs related to your blog's niche and see who is advertising on these blogs. This is a good source of creating a list of potential advertisers. Since they are already advertising on a blog related to your blog's niche, a chance of clinching a deal from these advertisers is more likely to happen.

Check public ad inventories - Some 3rd party advertising networks give public access to their inventory to account holders. Sign-up for these ad networks and browse their ad inventory. Again, filter out advertisers related to your blog's niche. Here not only you can get a list of potential advertisers but can also get a fair idea about how much they are willing to pay.

Write a blog post about it - This is one more way to attract advertisers. Write a blog post explicitly stating that your blog is now open for direct advertising.

Search engines - And last but not the least is search engines. Type in relevant keywords and visit the web sites. Check their contact page and create a list of potential advertisers.

How To Approach Potential Advertisers

Once you have the list of potential advertisers in your hand, its time to contact them inviting to advertise on your blog.

Write a mail giving your brief introduction. State your purpose of writing in brief. To speed up the process give your phone number and messenger id. Attach the media kit/rate card showcasing various advertising options available on your blog. It's somewhat similar to mobile version of your 'Advertise' page. However, this document must contain detailed pricing of every ad type. You must also quote discounted prices for long-term deals. One more convincing methodology is to give limited period read-only access to Google Analytics dashboard to verify your traffic claims for long-term deals (6 months or more). This offer increases the confidence of advertiser and the probability of negotiating a deal also increases.

If this is your first advertising deal, be ready to be flexible enough while negotiating pricing of your ads. Remember, your first deal will open the door for more such deals.

What Else I Have Missed?

I would like to know your experiences in maintaining independent ad inventories and your approach towards grabbing such advertising deals.

Related Reading:

1. Ad Inventory Management For Bloggers: A Comprehensive Guide
2. Google Ad Manager: Complete Ad Management Solution For Bloggers

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