If you are looking for ways to draw traffic to your website or blog, you might want to consider holding a contest or giveaway. While these can draw a lot of “freebie seekers” who are only interested in the prize, you can generate a lot of buzz that will bring long time readers to you as well. Another thing you are going to do is build links without even trying to. By nature we bloggers like to blog about what other people are doing, and if we see something cool on someone else’s blog we write about it and give them a link. That is twice as likely when that something is a contest with nice free prize to win!

If your blog is devoted to parenting issues, you could hold a contest where entrants describe their funniest parenting mishap or the most embarrassing thing their children said in public, or ask them to tell you about their favorite must have toy for their kids etc.

When it comes to finding prizes for your contests, you can offer up your own products or services, or you can solicit prizes from other website owners. The latter can be a win-win situation, as the prizes will not cost you anything and the person donating the prize will also get exposure (just be sure to mention on the contest page who donated the prize).

If you are not the creative type, or you just want to keep things as simple as possible then you can simply hold a giveaway. Your visitors can enter their information into a form or your comments section and you can randomly pick a winner. Again, you can offer one of your products or services as the prize or you can seek out prizes from other business owners.

A giveaway can also be used to increase your customer retention. If you have a service- based business, such as virtual assistance or graphic design, you could hold a monthly drawing and each time one of your customers paid for a service that month, they receive an entry form. For example, if a client paid for three graphics that month, they would be entered three times. Your customers may want to win a prize so bad, that they keep buying your services each month just to have a chance at winning.

To be successful, you’ll want to promote your contest as much as possible. You’ll want to send a notice to your mailing list as well as putting information about the contest on the main page of your website and blog. If you offer a podcast, make sure you mention it to your listeners.

There are many sites that allow you to enter your contest information, and this info can get picked up and publicized by other website owners. To find these sites, do a Google search on a keyword such as “contest submission sites.” You may also want to send out a few press releases. And never ever underestimate the power of other bloggers to build buzz.

Happy New Year! What does 2008 hold for your blog?

Many people think of the new year as a chance to have new beginnings. I’m certain many new blogs will be started as people vow to write to them on a regular basis. I’m also certain at least 70% of those blogs will end up being forgotten about at some point.

Rather than take on a new blog, let’s look at the blog you have in front of you. What direction do you want your blog to go in 2008? What worked well for you in 2007? Was there a series of articles or a topic that seemed to do well? Did people respond to one type of post over another? Did the posts with pictures gain more traffic?

When you have a clear picture of what worked for you in 2007 and what didn’t, you can weed through and tighten what you’re doing this year.

I’ve been looking at one of my blogs, and I’ve found it doesn’t have enough focus. My goal for 2008 is to give it better focus. On another blog, while it’s a niche blog, I found that by changing the particular angle, I was able to zone in on what I wanted my blog to represent. Another blog I found was too boxed in by being a targeted topic, and I’ve decided to open the topic up a little wider to include more categories.

I’m also trying to add clipart and pictures to more of my posts, as well as get better at tagging. Tagging is one of those things that just seems to slip my mind, and that’s not good! I’ve taken an inventory of my own blogs, analyzed my stats, and I’ll be making some changes.

What will you be doing to change your blog in 2008? Will you add another category, writer shorter or longer posts? Maybe you’ll work on social networking, and building traffic.

With a fresh year before you, it’s now the perfect time for you to go take inventory!

Happy Blogging! Deb

blog, blogging, social networking, blogs, build traffic

Every time you put an image into a blog post, you might not think that it is doing much, other than making your post pretty. Actually, the pictures attract people’s attention. They are more likely to see a picture before they read words.

Deb says that every time she puts a piece of clipart into her posts, traffic increases to that post. Something to think about, no? There are a number of places online you can go to get clipart, real art, photographs and such for small fees and sometimes even free.

I use more free resources than anything, myself. I usually do a search for free clipart images in my favorite search engine and go from there. Then, there is iStockPhoto where you can buy pictures or just use a sample pic. The sample pictures are free to use anywhere, but they have the iStockPhoto logo across the face of it. These are available for use as is. If you buy the pictures, then there is no logo BUT there are stipulations, depending on what you buy.

Next time you want to post something on your blog, try and find a good picture that goes with the post content. It might just give you that extra boost of traffic and a few more regular readers.

Also, don’t forget about those little tags inside the image code that tell people what the picture is. Those tags are picked up by search engines. Whenever someone looks up a photo of something with those image searches, your photo would then be available to come up under the tag you gave it. For example, I am going to post this photo:

The code would look something like this:

<img src=”http://whereiputthe.com/picture.gif” alt=”Digital Camera”>

See where I added the alt=”Digital Camera” ? That is crawled by search engines so when people look for pictures of digital cameras, this picture will be seen by the searches.

You can do the same thing with the title tag in the link for the picture. For instance you can do this:

<a title=”Digital Camera” href=”http://thissite.com”><img src=”http://whereiputthe.com/picture.gif” alt=”Digital Camera”></a>

Yet another way for your pictures (and links) to pick up traffic. Let me know if you find that this works for your site.

Tags: pictures+in+posts

If you have ever been a salesperson or know a successful salesperson that lives on a commission based selling job they will likely be able to tell you that there are some commonly met barriers in making a sale.

* getting someone to know you
* getting someone to like you
* getting someone to trust you
* getting them to understand your product
* getting them to believe in your product
* plain ole fashioned timing, which you have no control over really

How does this apply to blogging? Getting readers to subscribe to your blog is basically like selling yourself. You are a salesperson, but in a good way because you are you and that’s all people really want. Someone fun to chat with, interesting to talk to, someone to learn from, someone different from themselves …. you get the idea.

Getting people to know you. This is hard for some bloggers. Your level of openness lets your readers know you and see you as a real regular every day person that they can relate to. You want your readers to know that you’re just like them, you have a family, friends, a computer and you’re not some bot pumping out static blog posts once a week.

Getting people to like you. People are either going to like you or not like you. Really the only advice to give there is to not be a jerk ~lol~ or if you want to stir the pot in the other direction go ahead and be a jerk too! But, if you let your readers know you then I think eventually that leads to them liking you too.

Getting people to trust you. Trust is completely different than knowing and liking someone. Sure, I may know a person and like a person but that doesn’t mean I’m going to trust them with my money or my children … heck I know some people that I wouldn’t even trust to let dog sit while I was shopping or something, you know? How do you get your readers to trust you? Easy. Be honest. That’s all there is to it. Be sincere in your blog posts and your readers will know you, like you and trust you.

Those three things apply not only to sales and blogging, but to life in general. Interaction with people happens in so many ways and in so many places that it’s always something we do, often without even thinking about it. Now, we get into the other three which in sales have to do with the making of the sale.

Get them to understand your product. This can apply in two ways. Sometimes a blog, particular in a niche area is actually selling a product or service in addition to sharing information and opinions. So you may not only be getting them to understand YOU as yourself the blogger, but also introducing them to a product or service that will help them in some way. Make sure they understand everything about it, what it does, how it works, how you provide the product or service etc.

Get them to believe in your product, yourself, your blog. What do you offer? What benefits are there to reading your blog? If you’re selling a product or service what are the benefits of that service? What kind of results are there to show for what your service or product is? Seeing is believing for a lot of folks, so share results and case studies if they apply.

Lastly is that pesky thing called timing. We can’t control timing. People are busy, things happen, the world goes round. There is nothing we can do about that. Your blog, product, and/or services may or may not be what the reader is looking for right now. They may get pulled away from the computer, or the power may go out, they may have just spent all their money paying the electric bill, or maybe their kids needs braces right now. There’s nothing we can do about it except hope that they’ve bookmarked you or grabbed your blog’s feed and will return when the timing is better.

Twitter and applications just like it are changing the way we communicate. It is a great tool to help you keep in touch with your friends. It also allows you to promote your blogs in a quick, straight to the point, fashion.

Here is an excellent example of just how to do it, and do it right. My friend Fave runs a podcast. Every time he makes a podcast, he allows his Twitter subscribers to “watch” the process of him making the podcast and be notified the minute it has been completed. He even gives a little count down to when the post will show up on his Friday Favecast blog. He uses Twitter to ensure that he has repeat visitors/listeners for his podcast. No wonder he just won the prestigious Black Weblog Award for best podcast of 2007.

I have just begun to use Twitter, myself. I can already see the enormous possibilities. It’s not just about keeping in touch. It is one of the fastest ways to garner free advertising for whatever project you are working on. Those of us who use the web as a means to support ourselves know all too well that promotion can make or break your online business.

There are plenty of ways to make Twitter more user friendly. I have downloaded Twitterfox to use as an add on for my Firefox web browser. I also have also downloaded Twitterbox to my computer, so I don’t have to even have my browser open to get updates and send them. You can find Twitterbox and many other applications like it through the Twitter website.

In response to Jenn’s question as to what Twitter is, I have added some pictures so click for more: Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter