11/25/07

Share the Blog Love with RSSHugger

RSSHugger Blog love RSSHugger is yet another good free way to bring your blog site some much needed traffic. It's created by Collin LaHay an experienced entrepreneur, search engine optimizer, and internet marketer. Colin set this site up in the interest of getting many bloggers to submit their RSS Feeds to the site and in the interest of readers discovering new blogs that interest them. It's free to join and have your blog listed on, as long as you write up a blog entry discussing RSSHugger in order to spread the word.

There's also a paid version for $20 in which you don't have to do a post like this (but why not save yourself the money?). Once your post is approved and your blog has been reviewed by RSSHugger, it is accepted into the listings. There's a Top 100 Blogs list on the site and your blog should be included on that list within a month of submission to the site. Similar to StumbleUpon there's also a "Random Blog" choice on the menu, which gives a random blog that just might pique your interest. My first click came up with The Modern Lawyer which discusses clothing and technology for young attorneys and law students.

Here's what you get from the site as a blogger:

- Raise awareness of your blog
- Send tons of visitors to your blog
- Share traffic with the community
- Be part of a viral/buzz marketing campaign
- Build deep-links for your blog posts to help with search engine optimization
- Get new interested RSS subscribers who view your content on a regular basis.

Here's what RSSHugger offers you as a visitor:

- Find blogs that interest you
- Easily subscribe to many blogs
- Skim over hundreds of blogs to find what suits you

The more places you have your blog listed and linked, the better. For the above reasons and the fact you can be permanent on this site in exchange for giving them a free write up, why not sign up with RSSHugger and spread the love?

Traffic Analytics: 5 Ways to Get Visits


Previously The Monetizer gave you "10 Free Ways to Increase Blog Traffic". I decided to check out the Google Analytic's traffic sources to see which recent initiatives are working best for The Monetizer blog. I believe most bloggers and especially rookies in the blog field can start implementing the following things to start getting visitors.

Here's what I'd recommend to get easy blog traffic (in this order):

BloggingZoom - I gotta hand it to Courtney Tuttle and his group for building this for the blogging community. It's the Digg for Bloggers and if you put a catchy and good blog article on there for "zooming" by others it can bring you some decent traffic. It's free to join and submit your content to. Be active on the site and Zoom others while submitting your own blog posts. One thing to realize is that while you can submit articles from all blog niches, it seems certain niches perform better than others for moving up the rankings (especially SEO, blogging and make money online themes).

MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog - I'd recommend you join both and start networking. It's free to join and it can bring traffic of interested viewers to your blog. You can also join groups or create your own, as well as give broadcast shouts that will show up on your friends Comment section for everyone to see (Don't spam!)

EntreCard - I have a recent post about EntreCard, the online business card for bloggers. I've become a bit addicted to this one in terms of dropping the card off with other bloggers and choosing the best blogs to spend my credits on for advertising. I've only been a part of the program a few days and it's already brought me a good bit of traffic. It's free to get your card, just make sure you have a snazzy 125x125 logo created in JPG or PNG format. Once you're set up, I'd recommend going into your campaign section and finding blogs to drop your EntreCard off at. You'll build 1 credit each time you drop it off and can build up enough to advertise on a bigger blog where you can get noticed.

Squidoo - This may not work for everyone because I used other means to promote the Squidoo lens. The Lens includes my blog RSS feed and links to various articles on the blog. But nonetheless its a free piece of internet real estate where you can set up shop and promote your blog and other affiliate/referral programs. You can also add backlinks to your site which is helpful for SEO.

Those are 5 things above that you can do to start getting more visits and traffic for your blog. They've proven succesful for me early on in the life of this blog. BLoggigZoom, EntreCard, BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog are all very simple to join and start networking with or using. They are all free so there's no sense in debating them, give them a try if you want readers! On the other hand, Squidoo is like building a new site or webpage so that will take you some time, but it can also provide additional income.




I also want to give a shout to 45n5.com for allowing the Monetizer onto its Top 100 Make Money Online blogs list. This has brought me a bit of traffic as well. According to stats the Google PR is 3, Alexa rank is 573,491 and Technorati of 331,293. I'm ranked amongst the up and coming 150 or so at #206. Only way to go is up from here!

I'll discuss Analytics a bit more in a future post as it's something I'm constantly exploring. If you don't have it installed yet for your blog or site, head over to Google Analytics and get the code for your site. It's a very valuable tool to have from the inception of your blog as it will tell you just about everything except what your visitors ate for breakfast. I recently discovered you can check stats on what visitors use most for web browsing and what sorts of connection types your visitors have (Cable, DSL, etc). It's scary how much you can know these days, but every bit of info will help you in building your blog and expanding your audience.

On a side note I'm not seeing much at all coming from BlogRush. This is perplexing, seeing as I had a good number of referrals for it. I believe that the bigger blogs with more traffic are gaining the most from the widget so far. It's just a theory but it makes sense as they would get a lot of referrals which allows their headlines to show more often. So at this point, it may not favor newer blogs as much. I may give it a bit longer, but if I don't see much improvement, that space is much needed on the left sidebar.

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