It occurred to me that many people may not be aware that most good hosting accounts usually come with some kind of stats package. Used properly, it can give you all kinds of valuable information about how your site is doing, what you might do to improve it and what’s working well.

For anyone wanting to improve their site, or blog, that’s fantastic information.

I’ve created a very short video to show how to get to the stats package if you have CPanel. CPanel is available on so many different hosting packages that there’s a good chance you’ll have it on yours.

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This content originally appeared in Jon’s blog and I thought it was interesting enough to share – with his permission. I hope you enjoy reading the post and please feel free to comment on it!

How long has everyone been telling you that Google loves blogs? Months? Years? Well, it’s true, and I wanted to share an experience that helps reinforce that truth to you.

The Blog That Resurrected My Rankings

I had a site devoted to a particular type of exercise equipment. The site was in the top 7 results for its keywords in Google for over six months. Unfortunately I had server problems and the site went down for a few days. Google crawled the site constantly because it was well-linked, and so big G knew instantly that the site was down. Since it stayed down for a few days, Google must have decided it wasn’t coming back up, and its rankings plummetted.

After the site did come back up, it reappeared in Google, but this time on the third page (ranking 25 – 28 for its keywords, on average). Its original page one rankings just wouldn’t come back. I shrugged it off as a lesson learned and basically forgot about the site.

Early last week, though, I was testing a tool I’m creating that helps you write and post blog posts to WordPress blogs super fast. I decided to setup a blog on the site that lost its rankings, just to test it out. I made a bunch of blog posts (they were post-dated so they would show up slowly over time), and sat back to see what would happen.

To my surprise, over the weekend my site jumped back onto page one for its rankings. I hadn’t touched that site in months, and now it’s ranking better than it ever was — at #4 for 3 great sets of keywords. This, of course, has spiked my AdSense earnings for the site.

Another nice benefit of the new blog is that the blog itself is getting some additional traffic from Google, even though the blog does not have any external links directly to it. Google is applying the authority of the site itself to the blog. Since the site is well-linked, the blog is given a bit of “trust” by Google and is appearing in the search results as well.

Scraper Sites Can Help You Rank

On a related note regarding blogs and traffic, I’ve recently setup a blog that automatically creates a bunch of posts each day based on a variety of keywords. This blog is a test for a larger idea I have in mind, and the test is working great, with the blog having achieved more than 12,000 unique visitors in the last 5 days. The vast majority of the traffic has come from Google.

As part of that same test, I setup a second, similar blog that does the same kind of thing. Despite the second blog actually having more content, it has (so far) received no joy from Google at all (it’s not even indexed yet).

The difference is in the scraper sites that are referencing the content. The keywords that I’m creating content around for my successful blog is a scraper magnet — hundreds of scraper sites are auto-posting content from my own blog to theirs, and giving a reference link back to my blog posts to try and make it more legit.

How do these scraper sites know about my brand-new blog posts so fast? Because the blog is indexed by Google’s blog search, and many scraper sites scrape results from that blog search to post to their own blogs. They also scrape many other blog search engines, and since my blog pings those search engines when I make a new post, the blog’s content gets picked up and spread around fast.

Those links from these automated scraper sites have resulted in my blog quickly gaining hundreds of backlinks from all over the web, and that means great rankings for the pages of my blog.

The second test blog I setup, however, has not attracted the scraper blogs and so hasn’t even been indexed in Google yet. It might seem strange that scraper sites can help you rank, but if they link back to the source of the content, they really can.

Trackbacks Are Your Friend

On a final note, I recommend setting up your blog to automatically post trackback links to the blog posts that you link out to. If you’re not familiar with trackbacks, it’s a simple concept: any time you link to an external blog post from within your own blog post, your blog posts a “comment” to the blog post you’ve linked to, letting the readers of that post know about your own post referencing it.

Now, not all blogs will approve your trackback link, but many will, and I’ve received literally thousands of visitors from a single trackback link appearing on a popular blog. So make sure you setup your blog to automatically post trackbacks to the blogs that you link out to — it can often result in a flood of traffic.

Have any more great blog-related traffic building ideas? Care to share your opinion about this post? Please post your thoughts in a comment below.

Source: Jon Leger’s blog

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While the use of a description meta tag is optional and will have no effect on your rankings, a good description can result in a better snippet, which in turn can help to improve the quality and quantity of visitors from our search results.

A lot of people find Meta tags confusing (I won’t pretend to be an expert myself) and from what I see a lot of webmasters don’t even use them at all. Google’s post is a good beginner’s lesson on the different meta tags and what they do. It also shows which ones actually make any kind of difference in search engine results – and why which is useful to know. If you haven’t already realized it there’s a link at the top of this post to the full article.

From what Google say it’s clear that the description meta tag is still one that should certainly be present on your pages and given some time and effort when you’re creating your page. If you do manage to get a 1^st page placement in Google and your description is pretty poor, how many visitors might you end up turning away?

If you think about the times you’ve read a poor description and not even bothered looking at the site you’ll know how important this is. On the other hand if you remember the times you’ve seen a great description snippet you’ll probably remember you clicked on the link before you even finished reading it!

The description snippet you put in the meta tag is like getting a free advert in Google – don’t waste it – interest and intrigue your prospective visitors and you’re likely to see more visitors.

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It’s an easy and effective way to promote your blog and get some traffic. You just drop a small piece of code into your sidebar and a widget appears that has links to other, related blogs. In turn, your blog will appear on a similar widget somewhere, once for every time you show a widget on your blog page.

Inevitably there have been some problems. Most services with such rapid takeup have a few teething troubles and this is no different. My take on this is that in a few weeks time it will be a fairly solid little service. I’ve signed up already – no sense hanging about when it’s a free account anyway.

Created by the renowned John Reese, Blog Rush is set to re-circulate a lot of the traffic that is currently wasted on blogs. When a visitor moves away from your blog, why not encourage them to move to another site that gives you some credit for the traffic?

You can check out a little more about Blog Rush by clicking here

Blogged with Flock

Tags: blog, JohnReese, Blog Rush, widget, web traffic

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So what lessons can she teach us on how to make more money on the internet? Well, before I get into that let me tell you a story that will help you to understand.

I watched a family comedy this evening. The opening scenes were of a young woman – not an actress I know – but there was something about her that was eerily familiar. Then I realized that she was virtually the twin of Julia Roberts, but a blonde version.

Now I happen to love Julia Roberts – she’s a great actress and I always enjoy her films. And let’s be honest, she’s very pretty. So when I saw what looked like her blonde twin I immediately felt that I would enjoy the film.

That’s not actually logical, because I’ve never seen this actress before, but my emotional response was exactly the same as if it had been Julia Roberts. I guess, if you want an explanation, that the part of my brain that recognizes faces kicked in and sent a message to my anticipation center that Julia Roberts was in the house – so to speak.

When the actress spoke she also sounded like Julia Roberts so that made the connection even more. In the end I had a very good time watching the film, it was thoroughly enjoyable and a good time was had by all the family.

At the end of the film I got to thinking how really good marketers use the same phenomenon to make more sales. Let me explain…

If John Doe comes to you with a sales pitch, you will view him with some degree of neutrality, or possibly even negativity, because you don’t know him. But if a member of your family recommends something enthusiastically, you tend to listen with an open and receptive mind. The issue of trust has already been established.

The very best marketers know that it’s cheaper to sell to your existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Why is that? Well, you already have a relationship with them, based on some degree of trust. They parted with their money and you provided them with a product, or service. If you did a good job of that – and you should – then they’ll be more inclined to listen to you the next time you have something to say.

That’s also one of the reasons you see so many marketers all pushing the latest product launch for someone else. I may not have a relationship with Mike Filsaime, for example, but I probably do with one of the many affiliates he has. If someone known to me promotes the offer, I’m far more likely to pay some attention even if I’m not really interested.

So by using the existing connections of their affiliates – ‘friend of a friend’ – the big marketers can maximize their sales dramatically.

What about the small marketer? He may not have huge numbers of customers. Then keep building your list. And make sure you contact your customers regularly, preferably with some information of value. That way, when you promote a product, they’ll be more likely to consider the offer because they will have a feeling for what you’re all about.

Pretty much the same way I felt about an unknown actress who made me think of Julia Roberts.

It’s one of the oldest pieces of advice in the book, but my experience is that businesses generally do not put enough time into exploring the value of their current customer base. And if you only have a few people on your list you can still market to them. You’re likely to get more sales than you would by approaching the same number of strangers

And that’s what visitors to your website are the first time they visit – strangers.

So it really does pay to maintain your relationship with your customers because they are, without exception, your best business asset. Protect them as you would money in the bank.

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That’s why I’ve decided to use Wednesday to do all my planning. Since it’s a quiet time of the week with fewer sales, fewer customer service issues, fewer distractions, it makes sense to use that quiet time to plan what’s happening for the following week.

After all, as they say in the cliche, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. So good planning is important and so is finding the time to do it right.

It does seem strange to me that Wednesday is so universally quiet (perhaps not universally, but certainly everywhere I have contact with). It’s almost like a day that’s been designed for a bit of catch-up and forward planning.

Do you plan your week ahead? I’m thinking now especially of people who may be part time in internet marketing and have a day job. It’s hard to find time sometimes, but I’ll bet you could slot in a couple of hours more easily on a Wednesday than most of the rest of the week.

What should you plan? Well, something I would strongly recommend is article submissions. Writing quality articles and submitting them regularly is an activity that will continue to bring you traffic long after you’ve written the article. Why not plan a sequence of articles for the following month?

You could write one or two articles every Wednesday. Over time you’ll see traffic coming from the articles. You should see which one does best and then examine it carefully to see what makes it better than the others. Learn from what you do by taking the time to analyze the results.

When is a good time to analyze results? When you have some quiet time – Wednesday sounds like a good day.

It’s a good time, too, to see what emails you’ve been sent with new offers. You’re bound to get a batch of them early in the week as people look to make a sale to you. There’s a lot of good instruction in those emails.

Pull out the ones that having wanting to click on the links to look for more information. Those are the ones that have obviously worked. If you study their style, you’ll start to see a pattern after a while and if you adopt some of the techniques you notice you might find your own sales pitches picking up more customers. If you haven’t yet got a list to pitch to you’ll still learn valuable techniques for motivating people to click on a link.

And that is worth its weight in gold.

Wednesday is a quiet day, but you can get so much out of it I think you’ll find it becomes your favorite day.

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There are several things you need to have in place to make money online.  A website helps, although it’s not essential. A product, or affiliate link is a good thing too. And you must have web site traffic. That’s the magic ingredient that can give you the sales you so desire.

So, how can you make money online and increase web site traffic for free? Well, there are tons of ways, but I’d like to talk about one way to increase web site traffic with a link to a web site traffic promotion offer that is, well, free.

How many places do you know that will give you free web site traffic? I mean really free web site traffic?

And quality web traffic that is worth having?

I found one such site today, while doing some general research on keywords – another of the important things to get right for good web site traffic.

There’s a website called Make Money Online with John Chow Dot Com. Wow, that’s a mouthful of a name. But the site itself is full of good content. I won’t say I agree with every item and I definitely don’t agree with every comment, but there’s enough in there to get your imagination going.

And what John Chow does with his advertising revenues of that one blog is just insane. If you read about it you’ll understand what I mean.

So, here’s the deal:

John Chow dot Com is a blog that can help you to learn how to make money online.  Since John is making pretty good money online with his blog, you’d better believe he knows what he’s talking about. And if you’re willing to carry out a review of his blog, he’s offered to make a link to your review and send you some traffic.

So that’s a free link that you can use as a web site traffic promotion strategy to drive more web site traffic to your own digital real estate.

Personally, I’m going to implement some of John’s ideas for advertising on a couple of my other blog sites. He’s done a lot of hard work testing and it seems like a smart move to learn from others who’ve already done what you want to do.

Why re-invent the wheel?

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