Website Traffic Series Part 2: Blog Carnivals
On the first part of this series we covered how you can generate traffic to your website via Web Design and CSS galleries. On the this second part I want to cover one of the most basic traffic generation methods for bloggers: Blog Carnivals. (By the way, this will be a long series. The basic stuff is coming first, but soon we’ll have more salty techniques, so stay tuned!)
Concept: A Blog Carnival is basically an event where bloggers that cover a particular topic will get together and post a collection of their articles. Usually you have one hosting blog and the participants. The participants send the links to their articles and posts, and the hosting blog will then publish all the links in a single post.
There are all sorts of carnivals around the web: weekly, monthly, with fixed host, with variable host, standalone editions and so on.
Does it work?: Yes. If you manage to participate in a Blog Carnival, at the very minimum you will gain a couple of backlinks and some incoming visitors. Obviously the overall result will depend on the quality and size of the carnival in question.
When I was promoting my first blog a couple of years ago I used to participate in many blog carnivals, and some of them would bring as much as 500 visitors and dozens of backlinks.
Here is a quote from Steve Pavlina who also used them:
In my early traffic-building days, I’d do carnivals submissions once a week, and it helped a great deal in going from nothing to about 50,000 visitors per month
Over the time this practice lost some popularity, but you can still find valuable blog carnivals around the Internet, or even try to create your own.
How to get started: The easiest way to get started is to visit http://blogcarnival.com/bc/ and to browse around for carnivals that are aligned with your niche. Check the ones that have a “Next edition” coming out soon, and submit your best articles.
There are also many self-hosted carnivals around the web, where a blog owner will just publish a post asking for its readers to contribute with articles around a given topic, so keep an eye open for those as well.
Finally, depending on the size of your readership, you could also try to start your own carnival. You could host the first edition on your blog and then get other bloggers to host the subsequent editions.
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On The Importance of Adressing People By Their Names
Suppose you are inside a crowded place, say a stadium or a concert, with thousands of people talking, laughing and screaming at the same time. In similar situations we are trained to filter that external noise, so that we can focus on what our friends are saying nearby. Our brain is extremely powerful, and it does that job quite effectively.
There is one word, however, that would caught your attention even if it was uttered by someone far away, passing through your filters (well, one word except “Fire!”). It is your name.
That is right, your name is the most important word in the universe for you. Did you ever turned your head involuntarily to someone that uttered your name, only to find out that he was actually calling someone else? When that happens to me I just think “Oh, another Daniel.” It is a weird experience nonetheless.
Now, what does that has to do with websites and the Internet? Well, if you think about it, the Internet is just like a crowded stadium. Among emails, wikis, blogs and social media you have millions of people talking at the same time.
Moreover, if you have a website or blog, I am pretty sure that sooner or later you will want to catch the attention of someone. It could be to request an interview, to propose a deal to a partner, to offer an advertising opportunity to a company, to get the feedback from someone about an article that you wrote.
Regardless of the motive, if get used to addressing people by their names, you will have higher chances of success.
Here is a simple example that illustrates the case. I get dozens of email daily, most of them asking me to visit a link, to review a product or to answer a question. While I try to answer all of them anyway, the ones the start with “Dear Sir” or “Dear Daily Blog Tips Team” kind of lose my interest right away. Why? Cause it communicates to me that the person didn’t even take the time to visit my site or to read a couple of articles.
The emails that start with “Hi Daniel” or “Dear Daniel Scocco,” on the other hand, get me in a more positive mood, and my answer to them is prompt and detailed. I know that the person at least knows who I am, so I become glad to help her out.
Additionally, addressing people by their names is important not only when dealing with emails. If you are going to quote an article, for instance, do not write “The folks over the XYZ blog” or “The XYZ blog.” Try to discover who wrote the article and use his name on the credit (I must admit I also slip on this point sometimes).
It might sound exaggerated, but I am pretty sure that people would be more likely to link to you if you credit them by their names.
It is a sign of respect, after all.
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The Huge RSS Icon Experiment: Subscribe Today!
I always preach that blogging and online marketing is about experimentation, so here we go with another experiment. That big arse RSS icon (I know it hurts the eyes, sorry about that!) is to remind you visitor, you that have not subscribed to Daily Blog Tips yet, that you should! Else you risk losing the simple yet valuable tips that we publish every day.
Considering that it is 7 pm of Wednesday here, I will track the results on Friday and see how many visitors we encouraged to become RSS subscribers.
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Website Traffic Series Part 1: Web Design and CSS Galleries
Like it or not, if you want to be successful on the Internet, you will need to generate traffic to your websites or blogs. It does not matter if your goal is to make money with advertising, to sell ebooks, to generate leads to your business or simply to share your ideas; if people are not visiting your site your efforts will be worthless.
That is why I decided to start this “Website Traffic Series,” where on each post I will cover one different traffic generation strategy. Now I am not trying to reinvent the wheel, since I know that there are plenty of advice out there on this topic. What I will do is to summarize what is known about each strategy, and break it down into “Concept,” “Doest it work?” and “How to get started.” That is, I want to provide some practical advice and a reality check with my own experiences at the same time.
If things go all right this so be a long series, so stay tuned!
Part 1: Web Design and CSS Galleries
Concept: There are literally hundreds of web design and CSS galleries around the Internet. Basically these galleries gather and filter creative and good looking websites from around the world (mostly CSS based, but some also feature Flash and XHTML) and showcase them for the visitors.
Some of these galleries are extremely popular, and they can send thousands of visitors your way if you get featured there. There is also a bowling effect from smaller galleries that end up picking the designs featured on the top sites, so the overall traffic boost could last several days.
Does it work?: Yes, provided you can get featured on one of the top rated galleries. Achieving that is the hard part, though. A unique design will not suffice, it must be appealing and creative.
Daily Blog Tips has a unique design, for instance, but I doubt that it would get featured on one of these galleries because the design is too simple and minimalistic.
Another point to consider is the quality of the traffic. Most of the incoming visitors from the galleries will be interested in your design, and not necessarily in your content. Should you have a good strategy to convert them (i.e. highlights of your best content, clear subscription options and so on), however, there is good chance that some of these visitors will like your site and return later for the content and not for the design alone.
How to get started: First of all you need to have a creative and appealing design. If you are good with CSS you could do it yourself, otherwise hire a professional designer. You can improve your chances by using a clever color scheme, innovative navigation menus and so on.
Once the design is in place you will just need submit it to the galleries and cross your fingers. Check The Great Website Design Gallery Roundup for a complete list of the galleries and a detailed description of the features included on each one.
Over to the readers: Have you had any experience with web design or CSS galleries in the past? How did it work out?
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From Building Your Website To Building Your Brand
This is a guest post by Alan Johnson, find out how to build a long-term income generating website in 10 days by visiting TheRatingBlog.com.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that all there is to being an online entrepreneur is building websites and that monetizing them is the only way to make money. Is that really all there is to it, or does being an online entrepreneur have far more potential than meets the eye?
You may not realize it but, with every project of yours, you are actually building a brand around yourself as well. Sure, you may have only been interested in branding as far as your websites are concerned but, like it or not, you are the person behind them and, as such, a lot of people, especially other webmasters will judge you based on how successful your projects are.
Why would you want to ignore this aspect and not use it to your advantage? Let’s say that your first project has been a huge success and that the community has given you credit for your achievements. As such, every new project you choose to launch will have an important advantage as far as exposure is concerned, as a result of the brand you’ve created around yourself with your first project and as a result of the contacts you have made.
Bloggers who you have been in good contact with will gladly write about your new projects and the effects will be more than worthwhile. Let’s face it, a project launched by a person who is both well-known and respected stands far more chances at being successful compared to a similar project launched by an online entrepreneur who does not yet have a strong brand associated with his or her name.
But with such important advantages also comes a great deal of responsibility because, in the end, you have a reputation to protect and it is inevitable that people will judge you based on your achievements as well as based on your flops. While they will give you credit for the things you do right, they will also show no mercy once you make mistakes and, as such, your brand might have to suffer.
Being well-known will never guarantee the fact that a certain project of yours turns out to be a huge success. Yes, you will receive more exposure and yes, that will increase your chances of maximizing results but no matter how popular you are, you will never be above failure.
In the scenario I have previously mentioned, if you are popular for being behind a successful project, there will indeed be some great advantages you can take advantage of but on the other hand, rest assured that, if you continue by launching one flop after another, your reputation won’t be what one would call stainless and, as such,
others will not be as thrilled to cover every new project of yours as they initially were.
You have to understand that there is more to being a webmaster than simply making money as a result of monetizing your websites and you have to understand how important the brand you are building around yourself can be and why taking this aspect into consideration is a must.
Note from Daniel: I agree with Alan’s points, but I think there is an even more important issue around it: integrity and ethics. If you keep your integrity and work under ethical values on all your online projects people will respect you for that. If, on the other hand, you fall short to using shady and unethical techniques, even if just once, your reputation and credibility might get damaged for good. So think twice before trying to find shortcuts to hard work. There are none.
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