Just in case you haven’t noticed yet there are a lot of blogs out there and they are all looking for traffic.

Now the question is what should you be doing to get traffic to your blog or more precisely what should you be doing to keep traffic coming to your site consistently?

It is common sense that the more traffic you get to you blog the more known you become, the more known you become the more you can profit from your blog.

1) Pay Attention To Your Content

Like I pointed out in the post on Rock Star Blogging, your readers are your audience and your fans. They come to see your blog for a reason. The reason they come will vary because no two people write the same way but there are three basic reasons:

• Entertainment
• Information
• Education

Entertainment is pretty much self explanatory but some people get confused when it comes to information and education. What is the difference?

Information is just that information, it can be about your organization or it can be on a topic that you know, for example a blog on Internet Marketing Seminars providing you with the information of when the events are and who will be there would be information. It doesn’t teach you how to put together a seminar yourself but it does provide information about them.

Education, on the other hand, will still provide information but it will provide information on how to do something. For example, this blog provides information and education on how to blog.

Most blogs won’t provide step by step complete education mainly because there are too many variables in what they are trying to teach but they will usually give you enough information to get you started and will usually direct you to a course that will teach you more (usually an affiliate link).

These are key things to remember when you create your content or publish content you got somewhere else.

Try to get your punctuation, grammar and spelling correct.

This doesn’t mean you need to be an expert (you already know I’m not) but you do need to be able to get the message across.

If don’t have a spell checker in your browser then install the TinyMCE Advance plugin which includes a spell checker for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Flock both have addons for spell checking.

For grammar I use Microsoft Word and type my post in and look for green underlines that suggest there is a problem with the grammar. It is no where near perfect but it is better than nothing.

After I have written my post I will copy and paste it into notepad to get rid of all the unwanted coding that Word puts in. Then I will copy and paste from notepad to my blog.

Pay attention to whitespace. Whitespace is the area that doesn’t have any text written. You can increase whitespace and make your post easier to read by keeping your paragraphs short and making sure there blank line between paragraphs.

2) Tell The World About Your Blog

I know, I know, if you could tell the whole world about your blog it would already have more traffic than you can handle.

What I mean by this is get your blog listed in places everyone in the world can find it.

Such as search engines, ping services, social bookmarking sites, other blogs, blog directories and any where else you can think of to list it.

With a WordPress Blog search engines and ping services can be notified as soon as you post it is just a matter of having the right plugins.

Social bookmarking and blog directories can be handled with services like OnlyWire and software like Bookmarking Demon.

I have covered listing with other blogs in a previous post Blog SEO Using Comments for Back Links

For all of these methods you should do some keyword research and use those keywords when you list your blog.

3) Create Posts Often

The more you post the more people will have to read and the more the search engines will find you.

The more you give people to read and choose from the more likely it will be that you have answered one or more of their questions and that makes it more likely they will come back again.

Once your blog is established you can cut down the frequency of your posts but you should still average at least once per week. Until your site is indexed by the search engines you should post once per day or more.

4) Use your blog to tell other people about blogs you like.

You can use the blogroll to list blogs that you visit often. If the blog master is paying attention they will see a link from your blog to theirs and quite often they will provide a link back to your blog.

You can also mention specific post in other blogs in your blog posts to create pingbacks for example Wizzer cover a new blog tool on his blog an this is a link to it. When I submit this post it will automatically ping Wizzersays and if he accepts the ping it will create a link back to my site automatically.

5) Use Your Blog’s RSS Feed

More and more people are staying updated by RSS feed.

Put a prominent link to your RSS feed on your blog. This makes it easy for them to subscribe to your feed.

If you use FeedBurner (now run by Google) you can also let them subscribe to your RSS feed by email for those people that don’t check their feed reader everyday.

It isn’t hard to add the RSS feed buttons to your site and if you pick up regular readers you will find that your traffic increases as they come back to the site to read your latest posts.

I am going to talk about monetizing your blog. That’s right we are going to talk about money in this post.

There are a number of ways to create an income with your blog. You can show paid adverting, you can sell affiliate products or you can sell your own product.

By far the one with the highest profit margin is selling your own product, followed closely by selling affiliate products.

To make a decent income with paid advertising you need to have a lot of traffic to your site and/or you need to sell the advertising directly instead of using pay per click advertising networks like Google Adsense and Yahoo! Publisher Network.

Yes, you can make money with these, if you have a ton of traffic, but nowhere as much as you can make selling your own product or an affiliate product.

Now let’s cover how you show your advertisements.

If you have been looking over other blogs, which you should do to see how they work, you have probably noticed that some blogs have what I would call “In Your Face” advertising. This is a blog that no matter where you look you get hit by an ad. All over the sidebars, the beginning of an article, the end of an article and even right in the middle of an article.

There are also blog with what I call “Soft Spoken” advertising. These are blogs where the advertising blends in so well that you hardly notice it. It comes from text links in articles, small unobtrusive ads in the sidebar and text ads in the sidebar.

This is an example of a “Soft Spoken” link, I found a great site for blogging beginner instructions that actually shows you everything you need to know to get your blog up and running.

Then of course there are the vast majority of blogs that are somewhere between these two methods.

Which of these will make you more money?

That really depends on your content.

If you are going to have “In Your Face” advertising you MUST have good content to keep the reader on the page to see your advertisements. But on the other side of the coin if all you have is scraped content (nothing original) you MUST have “In Your Face” advertising to have any hopes of earning an income.

Put yourself in the shoes of your reader. If you go to a page and you have to dig through the advertisements to see the content, how do you feel if the content is lousy?

With me most of the time I will simply click the back arrow and go away but if there is an ad on the page for something that might provide the answers I am looking for I will, occasionally, click on that ad to see what comes up. This is where you would want to use a pay per click advertising service because the people aren’t going to stay on your site so you don’t care if they get away.

Now let’s take the same scenario but the content is outstanding. In this case I will go through the ads to get to the content so you keep me on the page and I might even subscribe to your RSS feed and come back to your site again for more good content or I might check out your other articles and if they are good you end up with a reader that comes back over and over again.

They might not buy anything the first time they are there, most people don’t, but the more they come back and trust you for good information the more likely they are to buy on your recommendation. But if you are really pushing the ads everywhere you can get them, you will have to work much harder on your content to keep them as regular readers.

Now on to the “Soft Spoken” advertising, again the success of this relies on good content and keeping your readers, informed, entertained and coming back. You might not think that a text link in the middle of a post could make you any money but if you have been providing good information in your content and you have repeat readers, you have developed a relationship with them. This means that they will trust you much more than they will trust a flashy banner or a blatant ad, therefore they are more likely to click on something that you recommend.

With that said you as the author have the responsibility to make sure the product you are recommending is of good quality and actually fits in with the topic of your post. If you just start recommending any piece of garbage product just to earn a buck you will find your readership and your traffic dropping, when this happens your income drops.

So which is better, “In Your Face” or “Soft Spoken”?

If you plan on using a pay per click system then “In Your Face” is your only choice. This is because by definition with pay per click advertising you are looking to send people to some one else’s site, so you want as many chances as you can get for them to click.

If you have good content then either will work but I actually recommend you land somewhere in the middle.

If it is a product related to your niche that you know and you really like go ahead and put an advertisement in your sidebar or in an article and make it more noticeable. But remember, there are a lot of people out there like me that don’t want to have to look through an ad to see the content.

On a side note and a tip for you, if you are using pay per click ads on your site check out the ads that are showing on your site DO NOT CLICK ON THE ADS (this can get you shut down by the ad server) but write down the URL for the ad and type it into your browser. Quite often you will see that what is being advertised has an affiliate program.

Why do you want to know this?

Most pay per click ads only pay you pennies for the click whereas if the product you found is a good one and you join the affiliate program you could get paid quite a bit more! Which would you rather make 2 cents or $20?

The choice is yours and as always I recommend that you test your ads. Run one ad for a week or a 1000 viewers (which ever you prefer) see how much you made then change it for the next 1000 viewers. You can use this to test pay per click against affiliate product or affiliate product against another affiliate product. But if you don’t know which makes you more money how do you know which to use?

As you probably know every blogger out there (or at least a vast majority of bloggers) are looking to make some type of income with their blogs.

There is nothing wrong with this but the typical technique used is to put up a blog throw some advertising on it and expect instant income.  Isn’t that what all the over-hyped products tell you?

The average results for this type of attempt is usually the blogger makes nothing, nada, zip and quite often it ends up costing money.

Now, don’t get me wrong I do believe you need to spend some money to make money.  If you aren’t spending money then you are spending your time doing the work, either way it costs you.

But that is getting off the point.  There are basically two different types of blog formats that can create a good income for you:

1. Authority type blog – this is a blog that usually ends up being a very large blog with lots of content on one subject.  Make that good content on one subject.  The goal here is to dominate the subject, build a loyal following and monetize buy either selling directly to your followers or through affiliate programs.
   • This type of blog brands you as an expert of that subject.  With the authority type of blog you need to pay close attention to your content.  It can’t be a PLR article that provides bad information (yes, a lot of them do).  It needs to be content that provides reliable information or you will find that you end up with a bad reputation in the subject which makes it hard for you to sell or even refer people to products.
   • This leaves you with advertising to monetize your blog.  If you have a bad reputation your traffic will drop and your advertisers will go away which leaves you with only the advertising systems that pay you pennies per click and since your traffic is dropping they won’t pay that well.
   • Good content in the key to keeping people coming back to your blog.  People reading and liking your content is the key to getting traffic from social bookmarking services.  If they don’t like your content they are not going to bookmark it, are they?
   • To summarize the authority type blog needs good content to succeed (preferably a lot of it) so make sure you KNOW the content is good before it is published on your blog.
2. Mass production blogs – This is where you put up a lot of blogs usually targeted at a few long tail keywords.  The goal here is to rank for the keywords you selected and drive traffic to these blogs to create an income from them. 
   • This income from mass products blogs usually isn’t very good on a per blog basis but once you get enough of them going you can make a decent income.  For example:  if you are making $20 per month from a blog that isn’t much money but what if you have 100 of them? Or 200 of them? Or 1000 of them?  You can see the income quickly increases.
   • The main problem with this type blog is that there are a lot of people trying to do this with private label content they purchase.  Which is actually a good way to do it BUT most of them don’t change the content, they just publish it the way it is and a lot of them buy content that is pure garbage and don’t check it or change it.
   • Eventually what happens is the search engines get wise to this technique and the blogs stop turning up in the top results of the search engines.  No search engine results means no traffic. No traffic means no income.
   • So again, you can see we are brought back to your content.  Private label content is fine to use but you MUST edit it or hire some one to edit it for you.  Yes, you can get software programs that will change your article but most of the time the results are a terrible article.

Your articles should be edited by some one that has at least a little knowledge of the subject you are working in.  This will ensure that you don’t publish garbage on your site and this can make the difference between success and failure for your blog.

If you actually read this article you will know that the success of your blog doesn’t rely on content but on quality content.  If you are using private label content change it, make sure it is good information.  If you are allowing other people to post on your blog read their posts before you approve them.  Content may be king but that king could have a very poor or debt ridden kingdom. With quality content you can be the king of a thriving kingdom.