I’ve recently been using MyBlogLog to drive some targeted traffic.

And in this post I’m going to go over what I have been doing to get this extra traffic. And I will also go over some settings to keep your MyBlogLog profile information secure.

First I’ll go over what I have been doing to get this extra traffic I’ve been getting recently.

MyBlogLog Traffic Generation

Step 1

Add your site to MyBlogLog and add the recent visitors widget

Add your blog to your account, you can do this under the ‘My Sites and Services’ section. It is located on the left on your profile page.

Once you’ve done that, you will be able to add the MyBlogLog widget to your site. If you are adding to a WordPress blog just add a new Text widget to your sidebar, and then paste the MyBlogLog widget code in there.

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Always make sure you are permanently logged into MyBlogLog, so that you appear on the recent visitors widget when you visit blogs with it installed.

Step 2

Join other communities in your niche

I have recently found out that you are limited to the amount of communities you can join per day. I’m not sure of the exact time frame, but I’ve worked out it’s somewhere between 12 and 24 hours until you can join more.

So try and join 15 communities per day in your niche. You can do this using the search function on MyBlogLog.

You can also do this by finding someone with a blog in your niche, and look through which communities they have joined.

Step 3

Add people who have a blog in your niche to your contacts

As far as I know you can add as many contacts as you want each day, there’s probably a limit somewhere but I haven’t found it as I only add about 15-20 every couple of days.

I also add the creator of each community I join, to my my contacts.

Step 4

Introduce yourself to people in your niche

When you add someone as a contact, and join communities. Visit one of their blogs and then write them a short message introducing yourself. You can do this using the ‘messages’ tab on a members profile, and when you send the message choose private.  If you liked their blog let them know, if they have an interesting blog post you could also leave them a quick comment on their blog too.

Doing this won’t always lead to traffic, but it certainly helps. And at the same time you are also building relationships with like minded people.

Step 5

Occasionally message members of your community

This is a feature I’ve only recently found out about, and it allows you to message all your community members at once.

I haven’t actually used this feature myself yet, as this is not a feature that I want abuse. But I will be using it when I have something to tell my community members, that I think will be of value to them.

For instance I will most likely use message them when I release my first free ebook. Which coincidently I will be releasing in the next week or so.

If you want to use this feature you can find it on the community page for your blog. You will see a link ‘Message Members’

And that’s all I’ve been doing really, and I’ve noticed quite a lot of extra traffic since I started doing the above steps.

Try it out for yourself and keep an eye of your google analytics to see how well it’s working.

And don’t forget to come back and tell me how it went, I’d love to hear your results.

MyBlogLog Privacy Settings

I checked my privacy settings recently, and found out I’d been giving my contacts access to my email. I’ve changed the setting now, and I don’t really use that email address for anything other than MyBlogLog anyway. But I think it’s better to keep your email private, so I’m going to show you where to locate the setting so you can check it is set to private, unless you prefer to share it?

1. Click the My Account link at the top of the page.

2. Chose whether or not you want to hide your birthday?

3. Scroll down the page to Additional Info, and review the settings and set to ‘nobody’ for things you want to keep private.

Hope that helps? I know Jacinta Dean was wondering about this.

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Alexa Rank Challenge Update

On a side note, as I predicted I have easily made my Alexa rank goal. I wanted to get it down from 900,000 to 500,000 in 3 weeks! But it looks like I gave myself too much time to do that in, It’s been just over 2 weeks and I’m already at 405,971 !!

I’m very pleased with the result and will continue doing what I’ve been doing, and start to implement a few more of the Alexa rank tips from my Top Ten Tips To Increase Alexa Rank Post soon.

But for the moment I will be concentrating on getting my first ebook ready for releasing. And creating some gift packages for GiveAway events, as I’ve not really been working the GiveAway’s like I should have been. So I will be making sure to take advantage of them in the next few weeks, and see how well they perform for me.

So James Howard will have some time to catch me up now! 

For those who don’t know, me and James Howard are helping each other push ourselves, by making our own Alexa rank challenge between us. In a recent comment on this blog I gave myself the challenge of staying in front of him, and challenged James to catch and overtake me.

James has taken me up on the challenge and has recently made a post about it on his blog titled Alexa Rank Challenge. If you have a moment go and check James Howard’s blog out, he’s doing some good stuff over there.

This is a perfect example of how blog commenting has been used to build a relationship. So if you’ve not been doing much blog commenting recently, then you’re missing out on traffic and relationship opportunities.

I have some more case studies of this which I will include in another post soon… Watch this space

Until next time…

Paul.

Here is the video that I said I would produce in the last post. I finally go to grips with Camtasia Studio, and you know what? It’s really easy to use, after watching the great tutorial videos that camtasia provide for you that is.

So this video basically shows you how to easily search for, and install WordPress plugins from within your WordPress admin control panel. This saves you a lot of fuss and messing about with uploading it to your server with an FTP client (FTP software). I only recently discovered I could install them directly from within the control panel, I had been using FTP to upload each plugin. So as you can imagine that ws a huge waste of my time, so just in case any of you didn’t know about this, I thought I’d make this video to make you aware of this feature.

I hope you enjoyed the video, please let me know what you think as it was my first attempt at this sort of thing.

Until next time…

Paul.

(Please note, if you purchase by going through the links in this post I will receive a commission)

As promised, I’m going to walk you through setting up your first list in Aweber. This guide is assuming you have already created your account, so if you haven’t already done so Click Here to sign up. The sign up process is pretty straight forward, & you get a 30 day money back guarantee. I will also add that the if the small monthly fee bothers you, once you’ve got a couple of hundred people on your list, it has the potential to pay for its self. I will go into some of the things you can do to get people on your list in future posts, but for now let’s just concentrate on setting your opt-in form up.

1) Login to your Aweber account, then from the menu at the top of the screen, left click on ‘My Lists‘

2) Left click on ‘+ Create a New List‘

3,a) List Settings: Fill in the following details: Choose a unique name for your new list, this need to be 15 characters or less, Aweber will indicate if the name you choose is available or not. You will also need to give a short description to tell your subscribers what the list/campaign is about. And then in the ‘From Address’ field, enter your full name & email address which you want your emails to appear sent from. This should be an email address you check regularly. Unless you want to recieve an email each time someone subcribes, leave the ‘Subcriber Alerts’ field blank.

3,b) Company Branding: This isn’t essential, but I usually fill it in, see the screenshot below & fill the section in if you want to. If you haven’t got a company logo, then leave that section empty, then click save settings:

4) Back to the top menu now, Left click on ‘Web Forms‘

5) Left click on the ‘+ Create Web Form‘ tab. Then fill in the form name (this name only appears to you). Now look at the screenshot below, these are the settings I use. When you’re done here click ‘Next’ at the bottom right of the screen.

6) Web Form Edit: The form that you see on this page should be fine as it is for your first web form. But if you would like to add a header or footer, or change the text on the submit button, simply hover over them & click to edit. After you’re done here click ‘Save’

7) Now we need to go back to the ‘My Lists’ tab on the top menu, & click on ‘Confirmed Opt-In’

8.) Go to the bottom of the page, Now this is optional, but creating a success page with a download link, using a HTML editor, is something I would suggest doing. You’ll need to find a good ebook or report that has giveaway rights, you then use this as a incentive for people to sign up to your list. So when you’ve chosen your gift, upload it to your webspace using the file manger option in your cPanel.  Then all you need to do is add the URL to to the .html page that you’ created with the download link on. Once you’ve done that click on the ‘Save Confirmation Success Page’ tab.

9) Now go back & click on the ‘Web Forms‘ Tab, Now click on ‘Get HTML’

10) Now select all the text, as shown in the screenshot below, & copy it (Crtl+C)

11) Now for this example I’m going to show you how to add the Opt-In form to your blogs sidebar. So login to your WordPress Dashboard, now goto Appearance > Widgets:

12) Locate the Text widget, then drag & drop it into one of your sidebars, which you’ll find to the right of the screen you are on.

13) Paste in the script code you copied from the Get HTML section on Aweber, give it a title, click ‘Save‘ & that’s it. Now visit your site & you should see the Opt-In form in your blogs sidebar, this will be viewable no matter what page someone is browsing on your blog.

Congratulations, you’ve set up your first Opt-In form, you will now want to start adding some follow up emails to the list you’ve just created. Be sure to give value to your subcribers, & don’t send any promotional emails to them right away. Instead give them more free stuff, & start to build a good relationship with them, tell them about yourself, let them know who you are & encourage interaction from them, do this & you won’t go far wrong.

Stay tuned, I’ll be making another ‘how to’ type post soon.

Thanks for reading,

Paul.

(Please note, if you purchase by going through the links in this post I will receive a commission)

I’ve not updated my progress for a while, so here’s an update of what I have achieved since my last post:

I’ve updated the blog theme, signed up with Aweber, added an opt-in form & gift to my blog, set up Google Analytics to track my traffic, submitted my site to some RSS feed directories, and set up a profit pulling platform. So as you can see although I’ve not updated my progress here for a while, I have been quite busy behind the scenes, most of the time sticking to my plan. Although my current earnings online to date are zero $0. Doe’s this bother me? No, I’ve only just got going & I’ve not even started to drive traffic to my site yet, I would also rather concentrate on building my list right now than make money anyway. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “The money is in the list” right? Well I believe that to be very true, & I can understand why having a mailing list is so important, so that is what I’m putting all my effort into. And I would strongly advise you to do the very same.

Now I’m guessing that if you are following my progress you are either one of the students on Alex Jeffreys Coaching Program. Or you are not on the Coaching Program, but you are more than likely interested in making money online? Now some of you may have already taken some action & got a blog, hosting, domain name, & auto responder set up? If you have well done, you’ve taken the first steps to success online. But if you have yet to get started that’s not a problem, because I’m going to take you through the steps you need to take to get yourself up & running, or at least up & crawling. Because we don’t want to run before we have learnt to walk, always remember that.

So let’s start with what you need first:

Domain Name & Hosting

Before you can get your blog set up you are going to need your own domain name & hosting account. Now some people try & save money when they are starting out & go with a free wordpress blog from WordPress Direct or a free hosting account. But for what we are doing you are going to need to pay for your own hosting & a domain name, the reason for this is you are going to want to have full control over your site. With a free wordpress blog or free hosting account you are always at the mercy of the company who is providing your free access, there’s also a chance you won’t own the content that you write, on a free hosted blog. Also with blogs on WordPress Direct, you won’t be able to use a lot of plugins that you will need, & you most likely won’t be able to have an opt-in box to build your list either. So just trust me on this one & go with the paid hosting from the start, it will save you a lot of headaches.

So for your paid hosting account I would recommend using Hostgator.com, this is the hosting company I use, as do many other successful Internet Marketers. I haven’t noticed any downtime in the 5 months I have been with them, & they have plenty of tutorial videos in the members area, to walk you through everything you need to set yourself up.You also get a 45 day money back guarantee, though I’m sure very few people need to use it, it’s nice to know the option is there.

I’ve also found a 20% discount code that you can use, it’s only valid for July 2009, but I’ll try & replace this code with a new one when it expires, I will try & keep these discount codes up to date. If you are reading this post & I’ve not updated the codes lately, just leave me a comment & I’ll get right on to it.

The latest code is: BEACH

The process for purchasing your hosting from Hostgator is fairly simple:

1) Go to HostGator.com. Select ‘order now’ under the plan that you want. If you are just starting out, I would suggest choosing the Baby plan, which is the plan I am subscribed to. This allows you to host unlimited domains which is important, also unlimited bandwidth, & unlimited disk space.

2) Register your new domain, now you can do this with Hostgator for ease, but I would recommend registering your domain name with namecheap.com. It’s a very simple process but I can go into the details of it more if you have trouble, simply drop me a comment. However if you’d rather keep things more simple, you can register your domain name with Hostgator like I said. So if you went with Namecheap.com you already have a domain, so click “I will use My Existing Domain” and type it in the field, click “next” to continue. If you prefer to get your domain name with Hostgator, proceed to register it with them.

TIP (If you decide to use Namecheap.com you can find discount coupon codes by searching on Google for “namecheap July 2009 coupon” Replacing July 2009 with the date you are currently looking for. Namecheap also offer free WhoisGuard subscription for the first year, which I highly recommend to you. This will stop your name, home address & email & phone number being made publicly available to all kind of spammers.)
3) Back now on hostgator.com, Select the desired “billing cycle”, and type in the coupon code. Now click ‘calculate totals’.

4) You should see the discounted price.

5) Complete checkout.

Once you’ve done all that you will get an email from Hostgator with all the details of your account, you will want to keep this email for future reference, & you will need this for updating your DNS (Domain Name Servers) info in the steps below. If you purchased your domain name with Namecheap, then you will need to update the DNS (Domain Name Servers) with your hosts name servers info. So go to namecheap.com & login to your account, then:

1) Go to the section on the your account homepage where it says “QUICKLY MODIFY ONE OF YOUR DOMAIN” & enter the domain name you just purchased. Then click “Modify >>”

2) Then on the menu to the left, you will then need to click “Transfer DNS To Webhost”

3) Now go to the email that you received from Hostgator, which contained your account info. Now you need to find the part where it says-

EXAMPLE:

Nameserver 1: ns1.mydomain.com

Nameserver 2: ns2.mydomain.com

Then copy & paste the nameserver info into box 1 & 2 on Namecheap.com

4) Click save changes… (The changes are sometimes instant, but you may have to wait up to 24hrs for the changes to take effect. For instance don’t be alarmed if you can’t view your website straight away, just wait upto 24hrs & everything should be fine after that. If not just contact Hostgator & they will be happy to help you. I’ve emailed & phoned them a few times, they’ve always been very helpful, & replied in a timely manner.)

That’s basically all there is to it, but if you have any problems just leave a comment & I’ll do my very best to try & help you get it sorted.

The next thing you’ll want to do is set your wordpress blog up in Hostgator, you can very easily do this using the Fantasico script setup in your cPanel, you will find videos explaining everything in your Hostgator account, but again if you need help drop me a comment. I will reply to any question asked

Now at the beginning of this post I mentioned all those other things I’ve done in the last 2 weeks. I will talk about setting those up in the next few posts. I hope this post has been of some use to you?

I’m currently in the process of learning how to use Camtasia Studio, if I can master this I will be bringing out some tutorial videos to go with this post & future posts. For now I will try & at very least add some screen shots. Now I must admit I’m finding Camtasia a bit difficult at times, & I’m also having trouble projecting my voice to make the recordings sound lively & loud enough. Hopefully I will get the hang of this soon, so if anyone has any tips for me, I would be very grateful. I guess I’ll just keep practising for now, as they do say practice makes perfect.

Thank you for reading,

Paul.

(Please note, if you purchase by going through the links in this post I will receive a commission)