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.

Well it’s just over a week ago now since I set my goal of getting  my Alexa rank down to 500,000 or below, and I’ve seen a big improvement in that time. Much more than I expected for the little work I’ve put into it.

If you check my last post I posted a screen shot which was taken on 17th September 2009, which was just over 1 week ago. And my Alexa rank was 908,199.

Here is my latest screen shot taken just moments ago:

It’s now 656,630 !!!.. I’m quite amazed at this, I really didn’t expect it to come down that fast. At this rate I should smash the 500,000 goal easy, unless it starts to slow now for some reason?

Funny thing is, I can honestly say that I haven’t really been doing anything much in the last week to try and get it down either! I have actually been feeling down all week, I suffer with recurrent mouth ulcers and I’ve had them pretty much the whole of September. It all started when I bit my lip, and it’s gone on from there and now I’m just getting rid of one on my tongue.

And don’t know if you’ve ever had a mouth ulcer, most people will have had one of these awful things at some point in their life, but they’ve got to be one of the most depressing and painful things I’ve ever had to endure. And I get these things several times a year!

Anyway enough about that!

The point is, all I have done this week is comment on a few peoples blogs, done a little networking on Facebook,  and added a few people on MyBlogLog. That is all I have done in the last 7 days to try and generate traffic. So just goes to show how well these methods must work.

I’ve also managed to find some good looking tips that I plan to use, and you can too, to help us with our Alexa rankings. I will go over these tips/methods in another post on Monday. I would include it in this post but it will be better for SEO if I make a separate post with a targeted keyword phrase in the title.

So try and pop back over sometime next week, and the post should be there where I’ll share these tips with you.

Thanks for reading.

Paul.

P.S.

Remember, if you want to improve your own Alexa rank, the best thing you can do is install the Alexa Toolbar. Just visiting your own site daily with it installed, will help with your Alexa ranking.

A couple of weeks ago I read a post on Rob Canyon’s blog about the Alexa Toolbar plugin for firefox, and how he had installed it and watched his rank increase. So I installed “Sparky” the Alexa Toolbar and I found my Alexa rank to be around 1,300,000. I didn’t take a screen shot of it at the time, but I wish I did now just to show as a bit of proof for this post.

So today I thought I better take a screenshot of my current  Alexa rank, which is 908,199. So in around 2-3 weeks I’ve managed to improve my Alexa rank by nearly 400,000!!

Now I’ve noticed for some reason the Alexa Toolbar doesn’t seem to give the same rank as at Alexa.com, it seems to be a day behind. I think Alexa updates you rank every 24 hours, and then the toolbar is updated with the previous days ranks? So I’m not really sure why it can’t show the same result as at Alexa.com, but there you go. If you want to know the exact rank of a site you need to visit Alexa.com to find out.

The good thing about the Alexa Toolbar is, if you click on the traffic rank shown it will take you straight to that sites page on Alexa.com. So it’s not too bad.

So how have a managed to get my Alexa rank down?

Well I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s probably something to with the amount of other students who also have the Alexa Toolbar installed. You see your Alexa rank is determined by the amount of people who visit your site, who also have the Alexa Toolbar installed. There are some other sources they use to rank you which they don’t mention, but the data received by Alexa from the people who have their toolbar installed, is the main thing that is used to give us our Alexa ranking.

It will also most likely be something to do with the fact that I have the Alexa Toolbar installed now, and I visit my blog daily.

Another reason that may have helped, is I have the Yahoo My BlogLog widget installed. I think people like to get exposure by having their face on as many blogs with this widget as possible at all times. Or at least that’s one of the things I like to do.

I have also been doing a lot more blog commenting than usual, although I still don’t think I’m doing enough, I think this has helped my rank increase because many of the people who’s blogs I’ve commented on, have visited my blog in return and some, quite a few actually, have even left me a comment in return for commenting on their blog, which is always nice.

If you would like to find out more, click on the following text to see exactly how the Alexa traffic rank is determined

So for the next 2 weeks or so, I’m going to work on getting my Alexa rank down even more. In fact I’m going to set myself a little challenge, I want to see if I can get my rank down to 500,000 within the next 3 weeks. So lets see how I go and I’ll make another post in 3 weeks from now with my results. And I will also be making a few posts in-between as updates on my progress and what I’ve been doing, and with some tips on what I’ve learnt.

I would also recommend you also install the Alexa Toolbar to help improve your sites Alexa rank, and also so you can follow my progress and see if I’m on track to hit the 500,000 mark. Not to mention it’s also fun to find out the Alexa rank of each site you visit, and see if you are higher than them. Of course it would also help me with my challenge if you were to then revisit my site with the toolbar installed.

I also like to seek out blogs with higher traffic ranks than myself in an effort to try and improve my ranking. I’m not sure if it works, but the higher the Alexa rank for a site, the more traffic they are getting. Which also equals more exposure for your comment and more chance someone will click your link to find out more about you.

So in this period of time I’m going to be experimenting with lots of different methods, as well as the methods I’ve already been using and trying to figure out what works. I will update you with my findings on this when I post my results of this challenge. I will also be blogging a lot more in this time too, as more content should equal more visitors.

Challenge yourself to improve your own Alexa rank

Why not set yourself  a challenge to improve your own Alexa rank. I think it would be much more fun if a few people do it at the same time, and we all blog about it, and visit each others blogs daily to help improve our ranks. What do you think?

If you are going to be doing this too, then please leave a comment on this post letting me know, I will then help you by paying your blog a daily visit for the next 3 weeks. And I would hope you would do the same for me, but no worries if you can’t, I will still help you out.

Until next time…

Paul.

I’ve just finished watching the latest coaching call, Module #5 – Traffic Tornados. As the title suggests this module was all about the best ways of generating traffic. Most of the ways were totally free too. So I will give you a quick summary of what was covered, and then some time in the future I will make individual posts and possibly videos, going over these methods in depth.

At the start of the call Alex first reminded us about Module #1, and how we need to stay focused and have a plan of attack. Now a lot has changed since I made my plan back in Module #1, so soon I will be adding all that I’ve learnt since then into my master plan. I’ve only been doing weekly plans so far, this time I have enough knowledge to know what I want to be doing for the next 90 days. And I’ll still be learning more stuff on top of that, but that statement is always going to be true, even after the coaching has ended, because as humans we never stop learning new things.

But even when the coaching is over, it’s never really over, we have access to the private members forum for life, which the value of I think is priceless. The community we have over there is great, and creating a program or product of my own, and maybe having a forum is something I plan to do one day. Of course I won’t be able to do that just yet, but it’s one of my main goals for the future. Before I can do anything like that I need to put everything into practice, until I’m seeing all the right results. Until then I all I can do is share with you what I’m learning, so you too can put it into practice.

So on to…

Traffic Methods:

Forums

Forums = traffic + JV partners – Using this method you should not try & sell, and just be YOU and give value in your posts by helping people. If you do this people are more likely to want to find out more about you, and they will click your link that you will have in your forum signature file, which is underneath each post you make. This is also a great way to get a lot of one way backlinks to your site.

Search for forums in your niche on google, for example: internet marketing forums list, brings up some good lists/directories of forums in the Internet Marketing niche. You want to join the forums with the highest traffic, this would usually be the forum at the top of the search results. You can check the forums traffic ranking on Alexa.com against other forums if you want too.

Articles

Article marketing is a great way to drive traffic, and get backlinks to your site. If you have trouble writing articles, you can research the article directories for your subject, for ideas on what to write about. Once you find an article you like, you can totally rewrite it in your own words and add your own twist to it. But you need to make sure you add your keywords into the article. You can also use this method for ideas for your blog posts too, you’ll never have writters block again!

Search for Article Directories on google. Ezine articles is the best with the most traffic, but it’s also harder to get your acticles accepted because they are more strict. That’s the reason they’re the best though. I’ll make a post of all the best Article sites soon.

Blog Catalog

Use Blog Catalog and similar sites to search for the top listed sites in your niche, and add value comments on their blogs and build relationships with the site owners.

Google.com

Use the search term – link: (example- link: http://paul-lear.com ) to find out which sites are linking to any given site. Then go out and see if you can get your link on those sites somehow, if it’s a blog you can comment on a post and leave your link.

Yahoo.com

Use the search term – linkdomain: (example- linkdomain:http://paul-lear.com) to find out which sites are linking to any given site. Then go out and see if you can get your link on those sites somehow, if it’s a blog you can comment on a post and leave your link.

Alexa.com

Search for big name sites in your niche i.e:- the sites on the first page of the search results on google, yahoo, etc… Then go out and see if you can get your link on those sites somehow, if it’s a blog you can comment on a post and leave your link.

Press Releases

These can get you a lot of traffic, you can even end up getting picked up by Yahoo News. This is more advanced stuff though, press releases can cost around $200. But there are some free press release sites too, but obviously you won’t get anything near the results that you’d get by using a paid option. This is something I will go into at a later date when I know more about them. For now I’m sticking to the free options.

GiveAways

GiveAways are a great way to build your list and drive traffic, for more information on this you can download my free Listbuilding With Alex report. It gives step by step instructions on how you can use GiveAways to build your list.

Video Marketing

Use sites like YouTube to your advantage by submitting targetted videos, then do some keyword research and include these in your description, title, and tags. Also make sure to include your full website url in the description.

Social Media

Use sites like stumble upon, digg, delicious, to bookmark interesting posts including your own.

UStream

You can use ustream.tv to broadcast yourself live, it’s like having your own TV station. You can advertise to your list, on your blog, Twitter, when you will be broadcasting. I’ve not really looked into this, but it has huge potential.

I think that was about it, I’m sure you’ll agree there’s plently to keep you busy there, and great potential in all of the above methods discussed. Now all we have to do is take action and put them all to good use, and very soon I’m sure we’ll all be seeing floods of traffic.

Just remember though, you can’t do everything at once. Tackle one method at a time, and be consistant, consistancy is key when using free traffic methods. And make sure to always have a plan, and stick to it at all times!

Until next time….

Paul.

Bonus Call #1

This was a bonus that Alex arranged earlier in the year with Maria Andros. It was all about video marketing, and if you haven’t heard of Maria Andros, she is known as the Queen of Video Marketing.

Here’s a few key points that we learnt from Maria about how to market ourselves using video:

• Just be you.

• Let your audience know who you are, don’t be fake.

• It’s not who you know, it’s who knows YOU that matters.

• Video converts upto 600% higher than text alone.

• Do keyword research to maximize your visibility when people search YouTube, and more importantly, to help you rank high in the search engines.

• Be inspiring, and don’t forget to smile.

I actually managed to pluck up the courage & make my first video today, it’s a welcome video for this blog. You”l either be beable to see it now, or very soon in the sidebar to the right. It’s not brilliant, but it will do, the main thing is it’s brought me out of my comfort zone.

Module #3

Module #3 was all about blogging, and the importance of having a blog as an Internet Marketer.

Here’s some of the key points we learnt:

• “Winners never quit, quiters never win” – This was one of my favourite quotes that Alex mentioned

• Blog about all the steps you take, before and after.

• Blogging maintains your focus, as you can hold yourself accountable to the world.

• Don’t hold back, give as much information as necessary.

• The feedback from your blog will give you questions to answer in reports, and ideas for new blog posts.

• Tell your story, & give value.

• Write as you speak, don’t use vocabulary you wouldn’t normally use.

• Blog comment on other blogs in your niche, and make relationships with other blog owners.

• Show your commitment in your posts.

• Fail Forward Fast – You have to have seen some failure in order to succeed.

• Add your story in with your message.

• You can get ideas for blog posts from other blogs in your niche.

Module #4

This module was all about building a network of targeted links back to your blog from all over the internet. This is done by simply commenting & adding value to other blogs in your niche.

Here are some key points we learnt about this:

• Add this traffic method to your plan, and spend a certain amount of time doing this each day.

• Comment on blogs with high traffic

• Engage in conversation with the blog owners, get to know them, and get them to know you.

• Examine successful blogs and make notes of changes you’d like to make to your blog in the future.

• Your biggest competition are your best JV partners.

• Associate yourself with people you can learn from by commenting on their blogs and getting to know them.

• Keep track of which blogs are bringing you the most traffic, and only keep doing what works.