3 Ways To Promottion Your Blog

Can your spare half an hour each week to promote your blog? For a smaller blog, spending that time submitting your posts to blog carnivals could be a profitable use of your time. The benefits are twofold. First is the traffic you will gain. The amount of traffic to be gained will depend upon the popularity of the carnival and the traffic levels at the blog hosting the carnival. But the other benefit is getting backlinks. For each carnival you will get one link to your post and sometimes a second link to your home page.

This strategy works on a weekly cycle. Try to submit at the same time each week. This makes it easier to track what carnivals you’ve submitted to. I’ll discuss this point more under step 2.

Here are the steps.
1. Write at least one killer post each week.

As this stratgey is based on a schedule of weekly submission to blog carnivals, we need to make sure we have a great post ready for submission each week. Put some extra effort into at least one of your posts. Maybe give it a broader appeal. Write about something that will turn new readers into regular readers. This will be the post we target the blog carnivals with.
2. Go to the Blog Carnival website and find all of the carnivals to be published in the next week.

Most carnivals don’t allow multiple submissions for the same edition. And because not all carnivals are published on a weekly basis, we need to make sure we don’t double up on our submissions. The way we do this is by selecting only those carnivals to be published during the next week. This way we will be sure of making only one submission.

You can easily do this by going to http://blogcarnival.com/bc/clist.html then clicking on the little sort button in the header of the Next Edition column. This will give you the list of carnivals in order of when they will next be published.
3. Submit to each and every relevant carnival.

Now just work down through the list and submit to all of the blog carnivals with topics relative to your niche. Depending on your niche, you should be able to find at least 8 - 10 blog carnivals to submit to. If you’re having trouble finding relevant blog carnivals, you might need to get a little creative. Think about ways you can relate one of your posts to the topic of the carnival.

When you submit to a blog carnival, make sure you fill in the Remarks text box. This will serve 2 purposes.

Firstly, this is quite often put into the resulting carnival post verbatim. Think of this as a free ad for your blog. Sell your article and get traffic for your efforts.

The other reason is that the owners of some of the larger carnivals only publish a selection of the articles submitted. Make sure your remarks convince the carnival host to include your post.

So get cracking. Gather up your best posts and get some extra traffic and backlinks by submitting blog carnivals on a regular basis. When you’re starting out, the 10 backlinks each week will come in handy, not to mention the extra traffic from the carnival itself. For more information about the importance of backlinks

TLA (Text Link Ads) Now Available for Blogger Around The World

Text Link Ads (aff) is now available for Blogger users.

I originally blogged about Text Link Ads here. In summary, Text Link Ads is a publisher program which pays you to put text links on your blog (or other website). Unlike adsense (which pays when a visitor clicks on an ad), Text Link Ads pays you to display the text link on your site regardless of the number of clicks (or so I understand).

In the past Text Link Ads were not available to bloggers hosting their blogs on blogger.com. However this has just changed. Text Link Ads have just modified their program to allow bloggers from blogger.com to use it too. Thanks to Darren over at Problogger for the heads-up.

Technorati And Blog Search

I came across a Blog Directory called Technorati the other day. It looks like quite a comprehensive site.

I noticed that Technorati have a Claim my blog service. They gave the following blurb for those of us who are new to Technorati.

Becoming a Technorati member is fast, free, and opens
the door to all kinds of good things. If you’re a blogger, claim
your blogs, make a profile and upload a photo, and readers from all
over the web can find you and read your posts. Like to read blogs, but
don’t like having to visit a zillion websites? Tell us which
blogs are your favorites and we’ll keep track of them for you.

I thought it sounded quite good so I decided to sign up. You need to
create an account in order to claim a blog on Tecnorati. Setting up the
account required the normal details (name, email address, etc).

Once I had an account, I was able to claim my blog.
To claim my blog I was given 2 options - either post a blog entry with
a special link or include a code block provided by Technorati in my
Blogger template (I chose the latter).

Once my blog had been claimed, I was able to add some additional
information (a description and some tags, among other things) about my
blog. There was even an option to upload a photo.

Tecnorati offers members some basic statistics. It displays a rank
(mine is 1,480,713) and the number of blogs which link to yours (mine
only has 1). The rank is calculated according to the number of inbound
links to your blog.

What You Should Know About Monetize Blogger

How Can You Monetize Your Blogspot Blog?

What options do you have if you want to monetize Blogger blogs? I know Blogger is not considered a serious money making blog platform by some Wordpress users, but it does have its advantages. It’s free and it’s easy to use. But the downside is that you are at the mercy of Google. They can change the terms and conditions and even the platform itself whenever they like. Also, if you manage to build a successful blogger blog, you can’t really sell it.

There are plenty of monetization strategies available for Blogger. It’s really just a matter of finding out what will work for you. If you receive a lot of search engine traffic then contextual ad programs like Google’s Adsense can be a good option. However if you have a lot of repeat visitors and regular readers, you may need to explore other options. Here some of the more common ways to monetize Blogger blogs.
Adsense.

Adsense is probably one of the easiest ways to monetize a blogspot blog, at least in terms of setup and maintenance. Blogger provides a widget where you can enter your Adsense account details and choose the ad format. You can then position the Adsense widget wherever you like using “Add and Arrange Page Elements” on the Blogger user interface. There is even an option to display Adsense ads between posts.

There is still limited flexibility when using the Adsense widget though. You can’t position the ads inside of your posts. However, if you are comfortable with HTML and CSS you can position your ads by editing the Blogger template. You can also show different sets of ads on post pages to what is on the home page. For example, you might want to position ads between posts on the main page, but inside the post on post pages.

I wont go into the details of how to do that here. I’ve managed to display Adsense ads most place I’ve needed to using a blogspot blog so let me know if you need some pointers.
Other Ad Networks.

Most of the other ad networks I’ve tried or looked at will support blogspot blogs. As long as they provide javascript or HTML code to display the ads, you can use Javascript/HTML widget to position them on your Blogger blog. You will face the same limitations as with the Adsense widget, but you can still work around these by editing your template directly.

Something I should have mentioned earlier about positioning of javascript code in a blogspot template, is blogger’s treatment of comments.

Anywhere in the ad network’s javascript code you see:

<!– some code –>

you will need to replace it with

<!– some code –>

This will allow you to insert the javascript directly into the template. Once again, let me know if you have issues with this and I’ll see if I can help you out.

One other thing to be aware of with ad networks is that some have minimum requirements. This could be the content of your blog or the traffic it receives. I know TTZ Media for example doesn’t allow free sites - you need to have your own domain name. But there are plenty of other programs out there. You just need to find one which suits your niche.
Affiliate Programs.

There are literally thousands of affiliate products you can sell on your blogger blog. The technical aspects of displaying your affiliate ads are the same as for what I described in the Other Ad Networks section above.

As to what affiliate programs to use, Amazon Associates, Commission Junction and Click Bank are a few that come to mind. You should be able to find a product that will appeal to your audience in those programs.
Sell Advertising Directly.

Once you get a larger readership, as measured by page views, subscriber count or whatever, you should be able to sell ads directly on your blog. You can start by approaching advertisers who sell products in your niche - particularly those who advertise on other blogs in your niche. This may end up being a little more work particularly if you continually need to look for new advertisers frequently.
Other Ideas.

Getting paid to write reviews is another option you may want to look at. You just need to be aware of the penalty Google has been applying to blogs who have been writing these types of posts without including a nofollow on the link. If you rely on traffic from Google, sponsored reviews are probably not your best option.

So there are plenty of options available for you to monetize blogger blogs. While the technical aspects of displaying ads and affiliate links may be different, the challenge of monetizing your blog remains the same. Try different things. See what works for you. A lot will depend on your niche and the type of traffic you receive as to what the best way to monetize blogspot blogs will be.