Jamdo Marketing Blog

I want to share a little technique (I shamelesslessly stole from Adrian W Kingsley-Hughes at problogger) that you can use to get a bit of targeted traffic to your blog.

You might notice that at the bottom of this blog is a line starting with “Technorati Tags”

If you are not sure what they are then it might to time to do a little investigating, because they can really help the popularity of your blog.

A “tag” identifies your blog post by its theme. The use of technorati tags allows readers of that (extrememly popular) website to find blogs about themes that they are interested according to how bloggers have tagged their blogs.

It is therefore a very good way to get HIGH QUALITY traffic -that is people who are already searching about what you are blogging about. They will go to technorati.com and see what the lastest posts are regarding a certain tag. They will then see your blog and hopefully visit!

So how do you tag a blog post?

Well, I find that the easiest way is to install the SimpleTags Plugin for Wordpress.

It’s very straight forward - just download it from that site and then upload it to the plugins folder of your blog. The login to your blog and go to “Plugins” and click on the “Activate” link next to its name.

Now every time you write a post, you will be able to put little < tag> and < /tag> (without the spaces) tags around each keyword that you want to tag. It will make that funky little “Technorati Tags” line at the bottom autonatically.

If you want to get REALLY technical you can even insert some code to make yourself a button to automatically tag certain words when you are writing a blog (the instructions for doing so are also on the link above).

Really, this is something that every new blogger should be doing to get as much qualified traffic to their blog as possible!

So go forth and tag!

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One of the most important things about promoting a blog is posting to it with some regularity.

There are a few reasons for this, but by far the most important is your readers. People like to continually have something new to read on the topics that interest them. If that happens to be your blog’s topic then you have a good chance to convert them into a regular reader.

If you stop giving them new content, however, then you seriously risk losing them. Every regular reader you lose makes it that much harder to regain them.

The other main reason to blog regularly, is that it keeps the search engines coming back to your site and indexing it. If every time the search engine spider comes to your site there is new content, then it will be scheduled to come more and more often.

The trick is to get into a blogging pattern. My pattern is to read my Bloglines feeds in the late afternoon to see if there is anything worth commenting on in my own blogs. I then spend the evening listening to tunes and posting new blogs. This will be different for eveyone obviously.

There is a good post over at ProBlogger about Preventing Blog Burnout which is worth a read if you plan on doing this blogging thing for the long term.

Get into your blogging groove and stick to it. It is the key to retaining an audience and it will pay off.

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The unfortunate fact is that getting lots of visitors to your blog can be quite a lot of work.

You should be thinking in terms of a yearly plan rather than hoping that your blog will be inundated with readers within a few weeks.

Sure that happens sometimes, but to get a lot of readers in a short period of time requires stellar content and more than a little bit of luck.

If you are still keen on joining the world of blogging and are prepared to stay with it for more than a few weeks or months, then you will probably do ok.

Of course, you still need a little luck, but time and effort will be on your side. Work to a plan and you WILL be successful.

Now what should you be doing?

Well, I found this great little post called 26 Steps to 15,000 visitors a day.

It was written a year ago, but it still holds pretty true.

The one thing I would add to the article is that you NEED to get lots of backlinks pointing at your site. And I mean quality backlinks from authoritative sites (avoid spammy backlinks).

Anyway, take a read of that plan and follow it. It is very good and will lead you to blogging success.

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The Google Adsense Heat Map is something you should become familiar with as quickly as possible if you are planning on displaying contextual advertising on your website. (There is also a Heat Map for forums.) The darker the shade of orange, the higher the click-through rate.

The Heat Map will show you where your Adsense is likely to get the highest click-through rate.

Hopefully I don’t have to explain why that is important!

The other thing you may wish to think about when putting contextual advestising on your site is integrating it with the “look” of your site. This means getting the colours matching and using the right format of ad to match its positioning.

Look at this website for example - I have used the 780×90 leaderboard at the top of the page, but below the navigation bar. The colours all match the header and other colours on the page. I have also placed a “4 link unit” at the top of the left column which is a good hotspot according to the heat map. Because I still had some spare space I placed a 160×600 wide sidescraper at the bottom of the left column - once again integrated to the look of the page. (The 160×600 seems to get a better click-through rate than the 120×600 on most of my sites).

Now, the Heat Map says that the highest click-through rate will come by putting an ad right at the top of your content. Think carefully about that one, because you will get a good click-through rate, but you might also upset your readers who find it inconvenient to scroll past the ads.

So there you have it - integrate your adsense in accordance with the Heat Map and you will ensure the highest possible click-through rate. Now all that’s left is getting people to your site!

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Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger has mentioned a rumour that large ecommerce sites like Amazon will be investigating ways for their Affiliates to start integrating eCommerce with their blogs.

This is great news for bloggers everywhere who want to make a little bit of money with their blog.

The thing is that they are a little late to the party. I have been using blogs as a platform for ecommerce relatively successfully for a little while now, and I know several people who are a lot more successful at it than I am and have been using it longer.

In the next few weeks I’ll be talking a lot more about the Affiliate opportunities available to bloggers and how to more or less put it on auto-pilot, which in my opinion is the most powerful way in which blogs can be used.

But before that I am going to go and enjoy Christmas!

Happy holiday season to the readers of Jamdo - let’s hope for even more succes in the new year.

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If you are starting to get into blogging and want to minimize the time you spend logging into and out of your various blogs to post to them, then I have found a pretty cool Firefox pluggin for you. (If you aren’t already using Firefox then you should be).

This free pluggin is made specifically for busy bloggers by the guys over at Performancing and it ROCKS!

Basically, the bottom half of you browser will turn into a little blogging station from which you can post to your blogs while surfing the internet in the top half of your browser. You can have as many blogs as you like all set up in this pluggin and just highlight the one you wish to post to plus the relevant category. This is a real time saver (I personally think it is even more efficiant than having the Wordpress “Press It” shortcuts on your toolbar that give you a popup window to blog).

It also gives you the option to automatically add Technorati tags to your posts - I haven’t written about the benefits of Technorati tags yet, but I plan to in the near future.

The only criticism I would have is that I can’t find an obvious way of doing a trackback to another blog that you have talked about - Wordpress users are able to do that in a handy little text box on the page they blog from. I am sure the performancing guys will get around to adding that soon.

Anyway, this pluggin is a very easy install and it could really save you some time. You can get it from perfomancing.

Technorati Tags: technorati, tags, performancing, firefox

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