QUALITY & UNIQUENESS

There are many things you can do to produce content that really have no direct relationship to the quality of your blog, and you should consider pursuing them. However, nothing will turn a blog into a success like high quality content.
Good content creates a readership. Those repeat visitors can be the lifeblood of a successful blog. Additionally, other people who operate blogs notice good content and web sites and they will often link back to your quality posts. This creates a direct traffic stream from those links, as well as adding to your total cache of backlinks, which can help in search engine results.

People will come back to a site they know provides grade-A information or that touches them in some way. Humor sites that are not funny do not get repeat visitors. Sites about technological advances that contain inaccuracies do not develop a readership. Blogs that are littered with grammatical and spelling errors seldom generate massive traffic.
Effective writing is key to a successful blog. It is beyond the scope of this ebook to outline what makes a writer entertaining or informative. Most of us, fortunately, have an idea of what separates the good from the bad. Writing effectively may take more time and effort than simply spewing forth a few posts to your blog, but the end result is worth the extra energy.
In addition to writing well, you should strive to produce unique content that will distinguish your blog from others. This includes choosing topics that are interesting, opinions that are compelling, and doing whatever else is necessary to capture and hold a reader’s interest. You need to give people a reason to choose your blog over others in the same field. You must provide them with something they cannot get elsewhere.
This raises the subject of re-blogging. Re-blogging occurs when a blogger provides a synopsis of what someone else has written (perhaps even with an excerpt) and then adds a small amount of personal commentary. Re-blogging can be effective in two circumstances. If your blog is operating primarily as a news aggregator and a means of providing readers with an edited compendium of potential items of interest, it is a natural fit. Second, if your commentary somehow illuminates or provides an interesting twist to the original content it can also be effective. Too often, however, reblogging is nothing more than repetition of what could be found elsewhere and fails to impress readers.
Instead of relying upon re-blogging, a successful blogger will generally try to stay on top of his or her chosen field and will become the initial source of exciting information and opinion. It is fine to share the remarkable work of others--making sure that information gets out to everyone is one of the great things you can do with a blog--but it is even better if you can make yourself into a primary source of quality, unique content.

SUBJECT MATTER

Blogs that tackle a specific and limited range of concerns generally tend to outdraw those with a more scattered approach. Blogging within a particular niche is usually the best way to experience success. However, there are limits to specificity. If one chooses a subject area that is too limited, the potentiality for high-volume traffic is reduced. Alternatively, if one opts to blog in a well-covered subject matter they risk getting lost in the shuffle and not finding a regular readership.
There is no secret formula that will yield the perfect niche for your blog. There are, however, some guidelines you can follow when selecting a blog topic that will help lead you to a choice that has good traffic potential.

First, remember that you will be revisiting, updating, tweaking and researching the topic of your blog for as long as you decide to maintain it. Thus, it makes a great deal of sense to choose a subject matter in which you have a keen interest and a developed knowledge base. You may discover that there are a lot of people looking for information on widgets and that there are few great sources for that information online. However, if you don’t know a lot about widgets and find them a complete bore, you will probably have a hard time maintaining the site over the long run.
Second, remember that there are two different factors you must consider when trying to choose a topic with real traffic potential. You will want to write about something in which others are interested. There must be a group of people out there who are regularly looking for information on your topic. That is a necessary factor. However, you must also consider how many other sources of information are out there already. It can be very tough to break out in a competitive field.
You can get an idea of the competition and interest levels by using any of a number of freely available online tools. One tool I have found to be invaluable and easy to use is Nichebot at http://www.nichebot.com. It operates almost like a search engine: you type in the word or string in which you are interested and it then supplies you with a breakdown of how many people are searching for that phrase (and related phrases) every month. It then provides you with an indication of how many sites online contain the words in your search phrase. It even goes so far as to express the ratio of sites to searchers, making determinations of a niche’s viability relatively simple. Nichebot offers some additional tools that can make subject selection easier.
Ideally, you will find a hot topic with little competition. However, that is far easier said than done! One could spend days plugging possible subjects into Nichebot without finding a wildly underserved group of searchers for a topic in which the blogger has an interest. However, it does a great job of letting one know what they might be up against in terms of competition and occasionally you can discover some very interesting gaps in the information market.
Third, remember that although finding an underserved niche will make your life easier, it is not necessarily a requirement for success. There are some people who will tell you that operating in a competitive sector is great. After all, you know in advance that there are hordes of potential visitors on a hot topic. All you have to do is give them a reason to come to you instead of others. That is, of course, easier said than done. However, if you are up for a challenge and believe you can offer something that will truly separate you from the rest; you may consider blogging in a competitive field.

CONTENT

OVERVIEW

A blog is nothing more than a vessel into which we place content. Content refers to the materials presented in the blog. Content is so critical to the success of a blog, that we are going to address it first and look at it in isolation from all of the other traffic-producing strategies you can implement. Although there are blogs dedicated to podcasting, video casting and photography, this ebook will operate from the assumption that the bulk of your blog’s content will consist of text.
The subject matter of your writing can be critical to your blog’s traffic potential. The quality of your writing, the uniqueness of your perspective, the frequency with which you add content to the blog and the way the content is presented will also make a difference.

KEYS TO TRAFFIC

What produces traffic? What is it about some websites that makes them popular destinations for a huge number of visitors? Why are some blogs checked out by tens of thousands of people every day while others struggle to find a single visitor? The issue of traffic can be complicated. There are a variety of factors at play, and every strategy can be dissected and the details debated ad infinitum.
However, there are two keys to traffic upon which everyone can agree: Content and Links.
Before briefly looking at each of these, we should establish some context for our evaluation. Traffic can come from a few different places. Direct links to your site may produce a stream of visitors if those links are in the right places. Search engines, however, offer the real key to high volume traffic numbers. Surfers rely on Google, Yahoo and MSN to help them find the sites that will provide them with the kind of information they are seeking. If your blog comes up early in those search engine results, you can expect a significant stream of traffic.
Content is essential to traffic flow.
You have to offer something that makes your site worth visiting. Content creates repeat visitors, increases their stay, encourages word-of-mouth type promotion and assists in improving a blog’s standing with the search engines.
Every link can conceivably serve a traffic producer. If someone finds a link to your blog on another site, they are only one mouse-click away from being part of your traffic. Search engines also assess the number and quality of links to your blog. They regard sites that are linked to frequently as authoritative and reward them with higher placement in search engine results.
So, if you want traffic to your blog, you need to do two things: Provide content and acquire links. This ebook is designed to show you some great ways of doing both. The end result should be higher traffic numbers for your blog.

Monitor Your Search Engine Rankings

Once you have been indexed by search engines periodically check up on your blog’s rankings within its niche. You do this of course by searching on the key phrase you used for optimization.

If you picked a penetrable niche, you should be able to get onto the first page (at least on Yahoo) within a month, but if not, you will need to:

Search out link partners in your niche and setup reciprocal links. Simply find high-ranking websites in your niche on Google and Yahoo and offer to exchange links with them.

That’s all. (I know, that was a lot of work.)
Now, do it again with a different Blog and a different subject.

If you don't have any private label content to use for your first blog, you can purchase some from the Warrior Forum at an excellent rate. Most Warrior Forum authors charge less than $2 per document.

Get Your Blog Listed On Search Engines and In Top Blog Directories

Once you have posted your first piece of private label content, inserted Adsense ads, etc, it is time to promote your blog.

Go to http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/ and submit your blog to as many of these blog and rss feed directories as possible. Some of them may not accept your Blog. Use your key phrase in the title and at least once in the
Description if you are able to enter one. This is going to take many hours, but the effort is well worth it.

Go to http://yahoo.com and set up an account if you don’t already have one. Add your RSS feed to your "My Yahoo" account as a news feed you want to monitor.
You will need to add RSS Beta to your My Yahoo content if you don't have it. For more info on how to do that, go here:
http://my.yahoo.com/s/rss-faq.html and add it.

You will now add your blog into the RSS feed in my yahoo. To do that, click on edit in the RSS feed section.
Enter the url of your blog.

Go to MSN.com, create an account, and do the same.
To do that, enter your blog URL with “atom.xml” appended to the end of it where it says “Search for content to add”. I am using one of my blogs to demonstrate. The URL I will enter is:
http://your-home-equity-loans.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Creating The Blog

We will be using the free service Blogger. Go to http://blogger.com and open an account. I will not go into a lengthy explanation on how to use Blogger. They have an excellent tutorial at http://help.blogger.com/. You can play around with it yourself until you are comfortable with it.
Once your account is open, create a new blog using your chosen key phrase as you Blogger sub-domain, so if we used car insurance as an example, and “new your car insurance was our best ratio it would be:
http://new-york-car-insurance.blogspot.com or http://newyorkcarinsurance.blogspot.com
Select a template to use. I like to use the “Minima” layout. If you want to use my pre-made template, you can download it HERE. Only use this if you already have an Adsense account. Just change the publisher ID to your own, and change the links to be for the ones you want to use for your Clickbank affiliates. If you don’t have an Adsense account yet, just use a standard template for now. Set the Blog title to be exactly the same as your key phrase. In our example case, that would be “New York Car Insurance”.
Create a description that contains your key phrase in it at least once.

Make your first post to your blog using the content you modified above.
If you don’t have an Adsense account, apply for one now at http://google.com/adsense . Apply using the url to your new Blog.
Once approved, you can download the template above and modify it as indicated. If you want to use your own method, make sure you paste your Adsense into places where viewers are likely to click, and make sure you blend them in by setting the background color to be the same as the background color of your blog template.
Go to http://clickbank.com http://cj.com, and http://paydotcom.com and create accounts. Find affiliate programs for high-quality products in your niche. Create affiliate links for these products and insert them into your sidebar on the template where it says “Links”. Periodically, post a full update with an advertisement that explains the benefits of a particular product.

Post another piece of private label content every two days. Search forums with related content - quote and link to pertinent information about your niche.

Insert links to other blogs, related news, etc. at the bottom of each post using your key phrase somewhere in the anchor text of the link.