Just what exactly is a blog and how do people make money blogging?, you may be asking yourself, if this is all new to you, or perhaps you’ve just heard about it and wonder what it is all about. I consider myself to be pretty online business and marketing savvy, yet honestly the word blog is still a bit foggy to me, so I decided to start doing some research on this seemingly quite popular online activity. At first glance it appears to me that there are some who are making a very decent income with blogging while in contrast, others were delighted to be making a few dollars here and there with it. I thought for sure they were just being sarcastic, yet it actually seemed that they were being honest. Perhaps they had never made a penny online thus the elation?! I read a few comments that were ones like “I was so happy I made $1.83 last month!”

Sorry but I can’t stop laughing. I mean really, less than $2.00 in a month and that person wants to throw a party?! If I were to ever consider learning to make money blogging, I would first of all be sure I found out everything those couple-dollars-a-month people did wrong or just were too lazy to do, and then diligently study and learn from the ones who are making at least a grand or more per month on a consistent basis. Apologies if you were one of those couple-dollars-a-month happy earners, but come on now, unless you won the lottery and do not need to make any money, why on earth were you so happy over such a ridiculous ROI (return on investment)?  Do you want to make a decent amount of money blogging? Then read on to learn what I picked up from the experts, first of all from the infamous Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, a blog is simply a part or type of a website. These blogs are normally maintained by a person with regular entries and can be commentaries, reports of various events or even such things as graphics or perhaps some videos as well. A typical blog uses a combination of images, links, media related to the topic, text and web pages, while also allowing for the readers or visitors of the blog to leave comments and messages, thus enabling interactions to take place. The interaction is often what makes blogs unique and distinguishes them from regular websites.

One of the very first things you will want to do if you are contemplating that you just may want to seriously learn how to make money blogging is to choose both a niche subject that could potentially bring in money for you, and a domain name which is based upon the research you have put into it. Then go on to buy that domain name, host it and set up your blog. Yes indeed, there is work involved! So if by any chance you were thinking you could just hop on Facebook or Twitter and start writing about your favorite sport and an hour or two later the money would automatically start overflowing into your bank account, I have to break it to you gently…it will not happen. You definitely need to take some time to really decide if you have the proper mindset to engage in something that will require your effort, energy, money and time before you just jump in blindly, hoping to make money blogging.

Researching until you find a profitable niche is a very important part of learning how to make money blogging. To find this you will need to learn how to grasp doing an effective keyword research. One well known blogger who seems to be a guru at this suggested downloading a free copy of Market Samurai and notes that although it is indeed free to sign up and go through their video lessons, after the free trial period you would need to buy the software for a reasonable price to be able to keep using the full version. However, if your budget is a bit tight, the best alternative would definitely be the free version of Traffic Travis. According to this blogger, Market Samurai is well worth the money and can save you many hours of time if you were to just try to figure it out on your own, what I can confirm as well. Apparently he went that route and spent years of trial and error and had disasters happen that he really did not want to go into, perhaps since he did not make money blogging at that time.  Anyone else been there?! I know I certainly have, so if you have plenty of time and want to take the long route feel free, but know that you also have somewhat of a shortcut available that does include a fee.

Next you will want to buy and host your domain name which I alluded to earlier, but remember, only after you have conducted a good amount of research so that you can have one that will be profitable for you. What is so great about buying a catchy domain name if no one will either know about it and thus not find it (I have to admit I have done that and actually put together a fantastic website that honestly I think barely anyone could find!) You will also want one that people will be interested in enough to read and stay plugged in with. Three places that come to find when searching for a great domain name and hosting are of course the very popular GoDaddy for domain names and HostGator and Bluehost for hosting.

Now it is time to get your blog installed and set up properly. Both HostGator and Bluehost are recommended as they provide cpanel hosting and will actually walk you through the steps via the telephone on how to install a Word Press blog correctly if needed. With their help, you can quite easily be set up and ready to go in about just ten minutes. If you prefer a different hosting company, be sure they have one click installations for Word Press. The next step is to optimize your Word Press installation. WordPress offers lots of free templates and plugins which will help to optimize your blog for whatever niche you are in. However, if you got some money left, I would recommend visiting the Semiologic website and buying the Semiologic Pro Package. This blogging software includes, in my view, everything essential for creating a successful blog. They provide a great service and will help installing their software. If you are on a tight budget, check out Alex Goad and Bryan McConnahea’s Authority Pro 2.0. This is not just a clean, crisp WordPress Theme, but it is extremely SEO optimized as well. You can probably customize anything you want with just a few clicks of your mouse. And don’t forget to start building your list right away when your blog is alive. However, make sure you are following the right list building blueprint to avoid start up mistakes, which can have a negative effect on your business. And yes, you will need a professional autoresponder service as well. Always choose one of the well known reliable ones and don’t opt for any free versions because you are building here a valuable asset of your business. Yes, this all can cost some money, but if you are looking to make money blogging seriously, you need to see this as a business and businesses do have expenses, and the fee is not so bad in the big scope of things.

The grand total for expenses for one year with just one domain can add up a bit. Still, it is quite a small amount compared to most every other business, plus you probably want to be in the $1,000 a month or more group rather than the “oh wow I made $1.83 this month!” group…right?! I almost forgot to mention you will need good, quality informative and entertaining content. If you are a good writer that is great, but if not you can easily hire a professional to do the writing for you. One very impressive company to look into is called Need-An-Article.com (or N.A.A.). They have great writers with extremely reasonable prices. Hopefully, this has been of some value to you, best of luck, work it seriously, and you should make money blogging even if it takes longer than you would like. However, there is one important task left you have absolutely to do…Take Action! Good luck!

We are all familiar with Facebook and the more than half a billion people who actively make use of it. That site is a marketer’s dream for very several reasons. Facebook marketing is basically available for business all around the clock and each and every single day of the year. Now that advertising has been there for quite a while, customers have become accustomed to seeing them. Consequently, when you combine all of that you get nothing but excellent opportunity for your business. Still, your marketing efforts are not limited to their PPC style ad format as you most likely know. You can easily network in a number of lucrative ways that really usually are purely restricted by your power and motivation to make money online.

Once again, so many of us have heard of fan pages by now, but we believe there are still very many marketers who have not yet taken the plunge to develop their very own fan page. Needless to say that we are speaking about a fan page for your various businesses. In the interest of privacy, we also understand that a number of Internet marketers set up multiple accounts, so they can freely have loyal fan pages for every single account. That is something you need to take into consideration for obvious reasons. Precisely, what a fan page represents is networking and marketing opportunities. In a very real way, you are branding yourself with your fan page. Consequently, you should take relationship marketing seriously any time you tend to use a fan page.

We strongly suggest you keep away from all the usual hype and nonsense as soon as you market using your fan page. You need to attract and keep other Facebook users, and a growing number of people today are actually fed up with most of the hype related to online marketing. Furthermore, understand that you do not really need to involve hype. Whenever you are working toward building beneficial relationships with people, subsequently it is apparent to realize that no hype needs to take place. So simply take it real and be real with your visitors and followers. Deliver solid and valuable information on your fan page as well as actively engage the people who take the time to visit. That on its own will place you in good stead with your fans. Next, hopefully they will tell other people about you, that is when your Facebook marketing could get really pretty exciting.

When you actually think about it, keyword tools are something that can have a tremendous effect depending on the circumstance. That is why you need to think about all the present information. At no time, you truly know what can occur should you neglect certain factors, rules and other details. I think, most people do not always take the time to look deeper in the search results, and they often miss out on what they need. Still, let’s have a closer look at some tools available if you want to generate and sort out a keyword list.

I guess, before we in fact start looking at keyword tools, we shouldn’t overlook the benefits of the standard thesaurus and dictionary. These two, Thesaurus.com and Lexical FreeNet, should be part of your tool box. Thesaurus.com is the biggest and most trusted free online thesaurus. It helps you to find synonyms and antonyms quickly. Lexical FreeNet allows you to search for rhymes and relationships between words and concepts. Finally, let’s not disregard that people tend to misspell words in particular ways. To find them out, Online-utility.org/text/misspellizer.jsp will clearly be a great help for creating your keyword list.

When it comes to keyword suggestions, there are quite a few sources available these days. However, I reckon you can’t bypass the Google External Keyword Tool, Market Samurai or Wordstream.com/keywords, which will all give you a lot of keyword recommendations.

Has what you have read so far added to your prior knowledge? Keyword tools are a massive area with many more sub-topics you can read about. A lot of things can have an effect, and you should probably expand your scope of knowledge regarding this topic. Take a look at the GoRank Ontology Finder. This tool will check the top 1000 Google results for your keywords by running a related word query. It will assist you analysing every possible alternative keyword.

Google Insights for Search is a great tool to find out how popular your keywords are, where people are searching from and when they entered a particular search query, compare seasonal trends, geographic distributions and category specific searches. Google Sets is a cool tool to find a list of related terms. It generates lists from a small number of examples by using the web as a big pool of data. You enter some items and Google Sets finds other items that tend to co-occur frequently with your examples.

Anyway, what’s about the editing part concerning your keywords? The SEO Tools Bad Keyword & Number Stripper will take care of removing all bad and unnecessary ones from your keyword list. It is very handy, especially if you want to quickly edit long keyword lists generated from one or more sources. Furthermore, consider using AdWords Wrapper. Just insert your list of keyword phrases into it, and this tool will generate four separate lists: a combination of broad, phrase and exact match, a combination of phrase and exact match, phrase match only and exact match only. This is very useful for your Google AdWords campaigns as well as it saves you quite a lot of time. For more precise results check out the Jumbo Keyword Tool. Once you have your keyword list, this keyword clean up tool can help you create, handle and edit thousands of keywords fast and easily, so that you won’t end up with a chaotic keyword list.

Still, the important point as it concerns keyword tools is you have to make sure you get not only the facts you need, but they have to be the right ones for your particular situation. Bearing this all in mind, there shouldn’t be any obstacles left preventing you from creating any complete and successful Internet marketing campaigns.

Resources:

Thesaurus.com

LexicalFreeNet

Online-utility.org/text/misspellizer.jsp

Google External Keyword Tool

WordStream

Market Samurai

GoRank Ontology Finder

Google Insights for Search

Google Sets

SEO Tools Bad Keyword & Number Stripper

AdWords Wrapper

Jumbo Keyword Tool

There are a lot of automated blogging software programs out there. The idea behind them is that you push start, and then they send spiders out through the web, trolling for content that matches specific keywords you put into the program. Then they take the content they find and put it on your site. You get to enjoy the advantages from having a site full of content that gets updated quickly without having to go through the work of practically creating the content yourself. It seems like a dream come true. Except…

It appears as if Google is gearing up for a significant cracking down on all those sites that are not filled with original content. They are adding measures in place that will enable them to check on your site’s content to make sure that it has not shown up somewhere else first. If the blog you are operating has mostly copied content material, you could be in for some real trouble. At the very minimum you will lose credibility in the eyes of Google. So what happens to the folks who want to create an automated business?

This primarily means that the business owners and creators around are going to have to learn how to really work hard or find the money to pay others to work hard for them. This is great, since it helps to guard the select few who have done the hard work that goes into generating original content. It also can help to be sure that a person is running a serious business. If you are not good at crafting or creating content, it is advisable to find the money to pay someone to create it for you. Trust us when we say that the expenditure will be really worth it.

The real truth of the matter is that on the Internet, there are lots of blogs that are made upon the hard work of others. The sites then generate income by employing that plagiarized content and placing lots of ads on every page. This is usually an easy method to earn some extra money, but if you get caught you can be sure that the trouble will be a lot. Stealing written content is kind of an enormous deal in the end. Students almost everywhere will get expelled from school for failing to correctly cite a reference. Think about what type of trouble you may be in if you do not credit your source correctly, or if you go so far as to steal another person’s intellectual property. Won’t it basically be simpler just to compose your own work?

The simple fact is that if you really want to earn money, you have to put in some work. Google is trying to reward the people who are doing that hard work while punishing the people who are stepping on the backs of the hard workers. This is a good thing. It helps to even out the playing field between the people who are genuinely trying to help others and earn a place for themselves online and those who only want to make a quick buck.

Therefore, when considering any automated blogging software program, think carefully about it, given that web people should actually be ready now to do some serious and hard work. Google is certainly trying to find a reason to take down individuals who are not willing to do real work!

The term website usability has been around for quite a few years, and yet it is something that seems to be barely discussed in the more heavily trafficked marketing forums. Even so, it is interesting since it is an area of vital importance to the success of any business website. If your site is not very “usable,” then basically people will not want to use it – meaning stay there, or return – meaning not very sticky. As you know, you certainly want both in your corner if you wish to succeed on the net. Furthermore, there are many factors involved with usability, and the only way to optimize your site is to know what is going on with your visitors. That is the reason you have to consider all the accessible information. You never actually understand what can happen should you ignore particular details, criteria and other factors.

There is usually one method to monitoring your visitors, and that is through a good tracking program. What you can do is identify problem spots on your site, and next begin testing that spot to take care of the issue. We know that is not extremely high tech, but it is the state of where things are at today. Many tracking scripts are extremely simple, and of course you can use something highly effective like Google Analytics. They mostly do the same things, and then it boils down to features and benefits. Just several important areas include how long people remain on your pages as well as precisely where they enter and leave from. The best scripts will not leave you wondering about visitor behaviour on your site.

Hopefully, just as with so many other areas regarding your website, you will have to to pay more attention to some things than others. Still, the bottom line is how you wish to use it, and how much of it will impact your situation. When you engage in the overall process of increasing site usability, you are optimizing. You can optimize your site for any number of desired actions, including conversion rates; either an opt-in or a sale. The proven method or approach for optimizing anything on your website is accomplished through testing. As you may know, there is simple A/B split testing as well as Taguchi multivariate testing. Multivariate testing is much more powerful and different than split testing. You can take the somewhat blind approach and select random aspects of your pages to test. Still, if you are tracking and notice visitors are always exiting on the same page, then that is a huge clue that something on that page is causing them to leave. When you have that kind of information, now is the right time to take a more intelligent approach to your testing.

This process of enhancing does require time, but if you are serious about developing a business it is worth doing. Once you have been through the process, you will have discovered a lot plus make a lot more money. You will get your conversion rates to a rewarding level, and this really is what it is all about. Finally, your achieved result is increased success and constant business growth. However, the important point as it concerns website usability is you have to make sure you get not purely the information you need, but it has to be the right information.

Writing a converting sales page or landing page may seem like an easy task. While it is not difficult, there are certain steps you need to take, and rules you have to follow so that you can promote your e-book or products the correct way. Quite a lot of people rush through this step, and as a result their product does not sell that well or not at all. Let’s assume, you were planning to write an e-book. You may think probably that writing an e-book is the same like writing a regular book, and you won’t need a sales or landing page. However, inadequate planning will result in all of your hard work going down the tubes. If this is your first time writing an e-book, here is a guide to help you create a proper sales page to compliment it.

Before you start with your actual e-book, first you need to write your sales letter. This will be the promotional page for your actual book. The reason you write your copy prior to the e-book is because the e-book has yet to be created. This leaves you open to make a powerful sales page since you are not limited to what is already in the e-book.

By doing this, you can describe to your potential customers what it will be about and what benefits they will gain from buying it. Once your sales pager is finished, you now have an outline for your e-book. I do hope, this will make any sense to you.

Purpose of a Sales Page

The sales or landing page has three main goals:

1. Grab the attention of the potential customer.

2. A detailed explanation of the benefits of the product.

3. Create a call to action – turn the visitor into a buyer.

The content of your sales page is the most important part on the page, so you do not have to add lots of graphics, which might confuse the visitors. You want them to focus on the content and not the graphics.

Sales Page Structure

A sales page is designed a particular way, and with good reason. You want to keep the customer interested and the content flowing smoothly.

You start with the header or title; next, the promises (what you will give them), testimonials (happy customers), product information, benefits to them, bonuses you are offering (everyone loves bonuses), guarantee (if they don’t like it, they can get their money back) and lastly the closing or summary.

Header

The goal of the header is to get the reader’s attention. This should be in a large font, bolded. It sort of sucks them onto the page. If you have a logo, you may include that as well, but DO NOT add too many things to distract them from your content.

The Promise

Here you basically offer the benefit – Learn How You Can Cure Your Acne in Two Days!!!

Testimonials

This should include feedback from customers who have received your product. You can usually exchange an e-book or a free CD for a testimonial. Include pictures where possible, those work best. Since video marketing has become so popular, marketers are even turning to video testimonials. What better way than to hear praises about your products in living color.

The testimonials are placed right after the promises, just in case someone is thinking your product is no good, or they have some negative feelings about it. If you wait and place it at the bottom of the page, they will have probably already moved on.

One important point I like to mention here: Please don’t fake any testimonials. They have to be real, written by real people. If you make it up, it could get you into some serious trouble.

Product Information

Here is where you can get creative. Since people tend to buy on emotion, here is where you show them your compassionate side and let them know that you understand, and explain your experience with that very problem:

“Acne can be tough to deal with; I know I had it too. You need to know that it is not your fault, and you are not alone. Many people are affected by acne everyday, but you can do like them and try xyz product. In just days, you will see the difference.”

I don’t know about you, but if I had acne, I’d be ready to place my order. The key is to identify the problem, relate to it, and offer a resolution. That almost always equals a sale.

The other thing I would stress is since e-books are different than regular books; you need to let your customer know exactly what they will be getting.

This will tell the potential customer the benefits they will receive when they purchase your product. Use bullet points to stress these points and add a testimonial, just in case they are having second thoughts. Give them as much information as possible here.

Bonuses

This is a tactic that has been shown to increase sales dramatically. Letting the customer think that they are getting a little something extra works really well. Adding a deadline on the bonuses tends to speed up the purchasing process because they don’t want to miss out on this golden opportunity. It has also been shown that bonuses reduce the risk returns.

Guarantee

With the number of scams being run both online and offline, potential buyers may be a bit skeptical about making a purchase. A solid guarantee puts their fears to rest because they know that they have the option of a refund. You can guarantee your product for 30, 60, 90 days or even lifetime if you choose. This lets the potential customer know that you stand behind your product 100%, otherwise you wouldn’t offer this guarantee. Make sure that your guarantee is clearly written with no fine print. Clearly state the terms of the return, i.e. re-sellable condition, everything must be intact, etc.

The Closing

The most important part of the sales letter is how you close it. Here is your last chance to sell them before they click away forever. If they have followed the sales page this long, they are definitely interested so reel them in and get that catch.

Here you include the greatest benefits, why they should act now, and emphasize again how you want to help them with their problem. Include a Pay Now button to make is easy for them.
Include a P.S., P.S.S, P.S.S.S., letting them now that this offer may not be available again, or it is selling out fast, and they need to act now.

Now that your sales letter is complete. You have to provide a way for your customer to pay for their product. PayPal works well for most, but there are other checkout services available as well.

Don’t forget to add a SSL certificate. This lets your customer know that their information is safe and secure. You must also include product delivery information: Buy now link; a detailed description of the product and what they will receive; delivery options or how the product will be delivered and the estimated delivery time.

Now that you have your sales page completed, it is the right time to write your e-book, and then to start marketing it successfully with that well crafted sales or landing page.

There are many ways to increase web  traffic, both free and paid strategies and some are more effective than others according to how much work you put into it. Some marketers spend thousands of dollars on SEO and PPC tactics, video and joint venture attempts and still have mediocre results. This doesn’t include the money wasted on DVD’s, E-Books and Training Programs all claiming to teach you how to do this effectively. The answer is simple. Using free software to increase web traffic is a highly effective, yet fairly inexpensive way to generate tons of traffic your website.

If you have spent any amount of time seeking ways to get people to your website, you have undoubtedly come across article marketing, which requires submitting a number of articles to hundreds of websites. There is video marketing, pay per click campaigns and Tweeting on Twitter as well. Many of these strategies take either a significant amount of time and/or money. If you do it yourself, you have to spend time and if you outsource the tasks you have to spend money.

Why Should I Consider Free Software

Software creation and distribution could be the answer to your traffic problem. Don’t worry if you have no experience, there are several programs that show you how to create your own software, or you can hire someone to create it for a decent rate, or join one of the software membership sites.

Now you are probably wondering, what is so great about software? Well, it is not the creation of the software, it is the distribution. By distributing your software for free to the shareware websites, you have a chance to link to your website. Visitors will be redirected to your website for the download, you offer them a free newsletter in exchange for your free product and then give them the product as well as an introduction to all of your other offers.

Let’s face it; everyone appreciates something for nothing, although the opportunities are few and far between. Not only will you increase your web traffic, you are also building a valuable mailing list to market your products in the future.

While other marketers are submitting articles and conversing with potential venture partners, you are working on your next product while your one free piece of software is making money for you. It is a simple one shot deal and a golden opportunity.

There are a few important things to remember. You must provide something of value to your potential customers. In other words, it has to be software that in fact does something or people will just uninstall your product and opt out of your list. Your free software should have some relevance to your niche. People don’t just download anything anymore due to viruses and spy ware, so it has to be worthwhile and something they can use.

Finally, to give an answer to my question posed at the beginning of this article: Yes, free software distribution will surely help you to increase  web traffic and on the other hand, will improve your income as well. However, this does only work, if you deliver what you promise and provide compelling content when people reach your website.

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be a priceless tool for your online business, but before you can get the most benefit of this tool, you must understand how to interpret the web traffic analysis data.

Many web hosting companies only provide you with the basics when it comes to web traffic analysis data. It is then up to you to utilize this information to the best of your ability. This web traffic analysis that you do receive from your web hosting company can be a bit overwhelming if you do not understand how to apply it to your online business, so let’s go over some of the information you may receive, so that you will understand how to use it. The basic data that you will receive will be visits to your site. These visits can be tracked daily, weekly and/or monthly.

The purpose of these figures is to measure your website’s activity accurately. At first glance, it may appear that the more traffic you see the better. In fact, most people assume that their website is doing well from viewing these figures, however, this perception is inaccurate. By seeing what your visitors are searching for, you can accurately measure your website’s activity, but disregard the first glance since it is not accurate if we speak about analising your web traffic.

“Hits” Don’t Matter

There is a myth or a misconception about what is known as “hits” and what is quality web traffic to your site. Hits are simply the number of information received by your server. If you think about it, a hit is simply a number of graphics per page. This is to give you an idea of how inaccurate the “hits” concept can be. One good example is if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server notes this as 15 hits when in fact it is really only one visitor checking out one page. It is for this reason that “hits” are not very useful when you do a web traffic analysis of your website.

The goal is using a web traffic analysis to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working. One way to figure this out is to see how long visitors are spending on your site. If the time spent is relatively short, there is a problem. It could be your website appearance or your content. It is up to you to figure out and fix those problems.

Importance of Keywords

In addition, web traffic analysis stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, now take a look at your keywords and keyword phrases. If certain keywords are sending visitors to your site; the more targeted the visitor, i.e. they find what they are looking for on your site, or even better, if they  fill out your contact form or make a purchase, then you know that the particular keyword(s) is valuable.

Keywords are crucial to attracting quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Careful analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you an understanding of your visitor’s needs and motivations.

If you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, that is great news, and it means you have achieved an important level of brand recognition, which is a promising sign. As a result, always look at your web traffic analysis stats the right way and your site will be on track for success.

Internet marketing is not like it used to be. Today, everybody is trying to get in on the act. Even small niches often have plenty of sites vying for Google’s attention. However, what can you do to stand out and get consistent traffic?

Update Your Site

This is probably the single most important element to getting consistent traffic. After all, if you don’t show your site some love, then why should Google?

And it is not just search engine traffic that you will help out by updating. The more you update your site, the better your chances of being blogged about, socially bookmarked or being linked to on a related site.

Update on a Regular Basis

But as for Google, consistent updates – and the links that come with it – show that your site is relevant. It shows that its part of the conversation, and today’s Web 2.0 is all about conversation.

Google loves fresh, user-generated content. Authority is still important, but recency is important nowadays too. If you post new content – web pages, blog posts or both – on a regular basis, then you look a whole lot better to Google. (Not to mention the above mentioned links that come with content will also show Google and other search engines that your site is in fact relevant.)

Whether you update every day, 2-3 times a week or once a week, it is important to stay consistent about it. Stick to a schedule. This will help Google and other search engines know how often to send spiders your way.

Use Good Tools to Make it Easy

If you’re not hot on making HTML pages and don’t have the money to hire someone else to do this for you, don’t worry.

If you’re doing a content site, content management systems like Joomla can be a good way to go. WordPress, while originally a blogging platform, is also an excellent content management system.

Alternatively, if you are using an off-site blog, use WordPress and drip-feed it. You can date your articles by when you want them to appear, and they won’t post until the date you have set for them. This kind of “working in chunks” makes it easier for you to update. Just write or buy your content, plug it into WordPress and “set and forget”. Just make sure you note when the last content is set to post, and have some new content ready by then!

Use Web 2.0 Sites

Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and Hubpages tend to index quickly in Google and often rank really well for their keywords. These pages can help you get consistent traffic to your site.

And if you are using a site like Squidoo, that uses dofollow tags, Web 2.0 sites can also help your site’s general overall ranking, which will help you get more consistent traffic as well. Just be sure and regularly add new pages as time goes on.

Getting consistent traffic to your site is doable and really not that hard, but only if you put in a consistent effort!

So you finally got your niche site up. You put up ten, maybe fifteen or twenty pages of content about your niche and put some damn good affiliate links on those pages. You have sent out some articles to get good organic backlinks, traded a few links here and there.

Maybe you discreetly bought some links to your site to give it that extra push to get that consistent website traffic. Then you made a couple of blog posts on a good site like Blogger, linked back to your site, and pinged it. You moved on to another site and waited for a while so that your first site could get out of the sandbox.

Finally, after a while, it made it! Your site has a little bit of age on it, and Google shows a bit of love. A few people see your site and maybe decide to link to it — you have probably even been socially bookmarked. The site is starting to rank well with Google, and you are making a few affiliate sales, maybe even a lot. You couldn’t be happier!

But soon, your consistent website traffic, and your sales start to drop off. What happened?

You didn’t update. You stopped adding content. You stopped blogging and bookmarking. If you were buying links, maybe you didn’t keep on with it, or maybe you didn’t keep adding them. And Google noticed.

You see, Google has a certain kind of attitude towards your website. If you’re not giving the site any attention, then why should everybody’s favorite (or at least most used…) search engine treats it any different?

You’ve got to be consistent to maintain consistent website traffic. You have got to show your site some love!

When you don’t, Google assumes that nobody cares about your site. It assumes your site maybe is not so relevant. And so it doesn’t want to rank that site anymore.

Google these days is all about recency. It is hard to establish any kind of authority anymore if you don’t have lots of activity. Even just getting links is not enough — you have got to maintain your site. You have got to update your pages, you have got to add new pages, and you have got to have links coming in on a fairly frequent basis.

How often you update your content will determine how often Google sends spiders to your site. Take a lesson from Web 2.0 social media sites. Many of those sites pretty much have Google camping out on their front doorsteps, just waiting for the chance to index them. In fact, many of these sites get indexed several times every day!

Why?

Updated content. Pure and simple. Google loves recency almost as much as it loves authority these days. It goes to sites that are active, because that indicates that users love those sites! And it is Google’s job to give people what they want.

So update your site. Give it new content regularly. If you are buying links, do that on a consistent basis — albeit discretely. Give your website some consistent attention, and Google will too, resulting in consistent website traffic for you.