A New Way to Increase your Articles' Pageviews

This morning while I was browsing the Associated Content website, I came across an article that took me by surprise as it showed me a totally new way to increase articles' pageviews.

As you may already know, Associated Content is a website that pays you for publishing your own written articles. If you live in the U.S., you can apply for upfront payment, which means that you get paid a fee for each published article that is accepted for upfront payment, but if you live in Europe (like I do), you are stuck with the performance payments, which means that you must bring traffic to your articles to get paid (at the moment the website pays $1.50 per 1000 page views). The members who can avail of upfront payment also get a bonus payment depending on their pageviews.

This is why it is very important to get as many visitors as possible to your articles and the Associated Content website is a great resource of reference articles for people looking to increase their articles' pageviews.

As many social bookmarking websites have been increasing in popularity for Associated Content producers who have been using them to increase their articles's pageviews, some are slowly closing their doors to new content from Associated Content, sometimes treating it as spam.

I have been looking into free autoresponders a while ago to try and earn a bit of money from affiliate marketing but never before had I thought of creating a newsletter and emailing my articles to subscribers!

If you are a member of a website like Associated Content where the number of pageviews matters, I suggest you read How to Promote Your Content and Increase AC Page Views in an Email Newsletter; it may seem a bit daunting at 5 pages long but believe me, it is worth reading if you are looking for a new way to increase pageviews for your web content.

Boosting Traffic: How to Make and Save Money Squidoo Lens

Here is the update on how my Squidoo lens, How to Make and Save Money, is doing: today its lensrank is 2599 (when I first published it about 2 weeks ago, it was something like 183000), it is number 74 for the "SEO and Affiliate Marketing" category, so I am pretty pleased so far, even though I have only had 21 visits.

As you may already know if you are familiar with Squidoo, your lens gets a better chance of ranking high (and making you more money) if you update it often. The ideal updating frequency would be once a day but it is not always very easy to come up with new content every day, especially if you are busy doing other things like blogging.

Unfortunately I have noticed that the mere inclusion of RSS feeds (even if they get updated every day) doesn't count as an update, so I have decided to create a Favourite lens of the day module: every day I will write a short review about a different Squidoo lens (it has to be related to making or saving money).

I am encouraging lensmasters to comment on my guestbook by leaving the url of their Squidoo lens, so I need to spend a bit of time commenting on lenses that I like, this way lensmasters and their visitors will be aware of my traffic boosting opportunity and if they are interested, they will have to visit my lens.

Et voila! Updating and traffic, I have just killed 2 cows (or it birds?) with one stone!

Participate and Host Blog Carnivals to Increase your Blog's Exposure

I have heard a lot about Blog Carnivals but until recently I didn't really know what they were and how eactly they could increase a blog's exposure, so I visited Blog Carnival, a website were you can find all kinds of Blog Carnivals on any topic.

Participating in a Blog Carnival is much easier than I thought: all I had to do after accessing the website, was find a carnival with a topic related to my blog, submit one of my blog posts accompanied from a short description and I was finished!

Being a Blog Carnival host requires a bit more work, as the host must input all the information submitted to the carnival in one blog post at a specified date, but a carnival host benefits from more traffic as well, as the carnival participants will want to check that their posts are featured, and if advertised well enough, the carnival should attract new visitors that are eager to discover new blogs.

When participating in a blog carnival, bloggers should make sure that they submit one of their best blog posts; the post must have a title that makes people want to read. A blog carnival can feature a lot of articles written by different bloggers and not many will go trough the process of reading them all so your titlemust really make you stand out from the crowd if you want to get the exposure, and not just benefit from one more link in a blog.

My first blog carnival submission is The Magic Formula to Make Money Online from Blogs and it features today on Web Dosh. I have submitted the same blog post to another carnival that will be published on March 1st, 2008 on Lead Inspectors.

Check out the new widget on the sidebar for the next Blog Carnivals, or if you would like more information on Blog Carnivals, visit Blog Carnival.

Adapt Your Articles to Your Chosen Article Submission Website

Last night, I spent over 2 hours submitting 1 single article to my list of 12 article directories; it seemed to me like a long time, but now that I think of it, it only took on average 10 minutes per directory.

When you submit an article, make sure before you start that you understand and follow the website's submission guidelines; reading them will save you time as you will avoid unnecessary editing; also, some article submission websites might not let you know if your article doesn't fit their criteria: they will simply not publish it and you will miss out on much needed exposure for your article.

Some article directories allow you to have HTML in the body of your articles as well as the author's resource box, such as Article Alley and Go Articles ; all directories allow you to just copy and paste your article from your wordprocessor but for some, your must include the HTML codes for paragraphs and line breaks. Most directories will not allow HTML in the body of your articles but some of these will let you include a few URLs in the body of your article: having the "http://www.yourwebsite.com" does not look as funky as including a HTML code but it will do the trick.

One article directory I will leave out in the future is ArticleWorld: there is no way to preview the articles before submitting them; they allow HTML links in he body of the articles and the author's resource box but you need a degree to find out how to do this; once published, you cannot edit your articles and there is no help section; I emailed the support department with a question but my email came back undelivered. Now I have 2 funny-looking articles on this website (I was not happy with the first and re-submitted it after cracking the HTML code, after copying it from Word, I had one word per line!) that will be forever waiting for approval! Oh, and I noticed my (only) other article that is still in my author section, waiting for approval (I submitted it on October 16, 2007).

In order to save time when submitting an article to an article submission website, it is a good idea to copy your own article in the same wordprocessor document under the different forms you will need, as well as a short description, a list of tags and a few sentences that will fit the author box and the resource box.

Finding Blogs and Commenting to Increase Your Blog's Traffic

I never really had a method for finding and commenting on other blogs, although I know that commenting on blogs is one of the tools used for increasing traffic to a blog or website.

A few days ago, I wrote a post on Morachat and last night, since I did not have much time to work on my blog, I just typed "Morachat" in my Google toolbar and I found a few blog posts about Morachat; I read 4 of them and left some comments about Morachat. Hopefully, the authors of these blogs will visit my blog and maybe also some of their readers (I am less sure about this last one because the blog posts in question are not necessarily recent ones).

This gave me an idea for a blog commenting strategy: after writing a post, you can do a search on your last post's topic and leave comments on related blogs. This will also allow you to find more blogs you like; you can keep a list of the blogs you found this way so you can visit and comment often on them.

This method will make it easier to select the blogs you really like and link to them, after linking to them don't forget to write a comment on the blog to let the author know you are linking to them and if they like your blog, they might link to you too.

I have also started to apply this method to my articles on Associated Content, since you can leave comments on other writers' articles too. There are a lot of similarities between blogging and writing articles on Associated Content, but that is an idea for another day!

Get Paid to Post on Forums While Increasing your Blog's Traffic

A few weeks ago, I made an attempt at posting a few links to my blog and articles on forums, but I did not have much success, as most forums do not accept links, as they want their websites to be as free of spam as possible.

Today, I had a dream come true: I joined MoraChat, which is a "Get Paid to Post" forum and I already made 11c (which is more than I have ever made with Adsense in a single day); I spent the afternoon on the forum (between the kids, a trip to the shop next door and watching Shrek3) but if I had had more quiet time I could have made this amount in about 1 hour.

You really need to visit the MoraChat website in order to find out all the possibilities and this is a forum you can easily get addicted to.

One great thing about MoraChat, on top of the getting paid to post thing, is that you can have as many links in your signature as you like (which will appear in all your posts if you wish), and after 7 days as a member, you are allowed to post links in your posts as well (which is very handy if you write articles).

So, rather than get booted out of Yahoo Answers (I did), sign up for free with MoraChat; you get paid via PayPal when your pay-out reaches $9 so go on, you know you want to!

Before I forget, have a very Happy New Year! (But try not to overdo it on the Champagne)

Increase Your Blog's Traffic With Blogrush

Did you notice the change? No, not a new haircut, only my new Blogrush widget.

I had noticed it on a few other blogs and thought it was just another wigdet from another blog directory, but it is actually a bit more; I won't go through all the technicality here (after all, I am just a girl!), all I will say is that it can help your blog get noticed by displaying some of your own blog posts on other blogs that support the Blogrush widget.

If you want to find out more, you can either click on my Blogrush widget or visit the Blogrush website, they have a video tutorial which explains everything much better than I do.

I hope you will excuse me for this, but I just can't help myself, so here it goes: Blogrush, because I'm worth it!

How To Survive Christmas Traffic

If you haven't already done your Christmas shopping, you will know what I am talking about; miles of cars and trucks sitting in traffic in the hope of getting a parking space outside a shopping center to buy your last Christmas items.

Option 1 - Put your car in first gear all the way to the shops and like millions of other consumers being slowly driven to slavery, suffer in silence; you will damage your car's gearbox, spend more petrol, spend all your money when you finally get to the shopping centre, slowly drive home again and when you get home complain about the whole shopping experience to your partner (especially when you realise you have forgotten something and will have to go back the next day); be careful, this could end up in a divorce (who wants to spend the whole evening listening to your complaints?).

Option 2 - Get everything online. It is easier to compare prices and everything will come to your door. Not the best option if you are a late shopper, in order to get everything in before Christmas, you should probably have ordered in November or at the latest, in the first week of December. For your food, use either delivery services or go to your local grocery store.

Option 3 - Stay home. You can act as a Christmas grinch, not buy any presents for anyone, no Christmas cards, no special lovely Christmas food and pretend that you are trying to set up a new fashion! Be ready to lose friendships and be hated by your family and neighbours (especially children).

Option 4 - Break a leg on Christmas Eve or if you are pregnant, try to plan it so you will give birth on Christmas Eve, lucky you, you don't even need to break anything else than water! You will spend Christmas day in a hospital bed, won't have to cook or buy presents, you will be visited by all your loved ones who will hopefully bring you some gifts and get well cards. You can always decide to have an after-Christmas party when you get home: traffic will be lighter and everything will be on sale!

Of course you can also walk or take public transport, I was just trying to be funny. I experienced Christmas traffic this morning for the last time (for 2007 anyway) so now I can make fun of people like you who still have Christmas shopping to do!

Getting Organized In Order To Succeed

For the last few weeks, I have been trying to find ways to increase the traffic to this blog. I keep telling myself that I must find a daily routine from the time I switch on my computer until when the kids come into my room, hollow eyes, looking very hungry!

I decided that I must do the following each day:
- Find a great new blog and write a comment on it,
- Add it to my "Favourite Websites",
- Find a new Freebies website, add it to my "freebies" and if possible, add a comment on their blog,
- Submit my blog to one new blog directory,
- Try and write one blog post.

If I don't get side-tracked (that is my main problem, I waste a lot of time everyday just reading blogs and just following links), I might have time to write one article a day on Associated Content.

I started a diary and when I get an idea for an article, I just write it down (yes, with a pen, on real paper, like they used to do before computers started to rule the world!), I also write down everything I achieved during the day, it helps a lot and it gives me a starting point every day.

Today, I achieved about half of my goals, now I must go and feed my children!


P.S. Sorry if I offended some people with the reference to my kids, I would never favour my blog over them, that was just a JOKE! It was going around in my head since yesteday, I just had to write it!