Increasing Your Traffic through MyBlogLog

Are you trying the increase the popularity of your blog, but you have already tried all of the conventional methods? MyBlogLog is a great service that you can use to increase your traffic.


Here’s how in 3 simple steps:


Create a profile that contains your information as well as your blog’s information. You want to be as detailed as possible and make sure you fill in your contact information because you want to welcome an open channel for communication.
Next, you want to search MyBlogLog for competitor blogs or other blogs that may have your ideal reader base. Once you find a good amount of them create a list for your own record.
Once you have a list of blogs that may contain your ideal readers then you want friend MyBlogLog users that are subscribed to those blogs and could also potentially benefit from your blog. The key to this is not the spam those users, but instead just friend them because a good portion of them will friend you back and visit your blog which should increase your traffic and readership.

Leveraging social communities can be an easy and effective way to increase your traffic and readership. Just be careful when leveraging them because the last thing you want is for people to accuse you of spamming.

Interview with Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal

Loren Baker from Search Engine Journal has been doing a SEO site clinic which has been helping website owners increase their traffic, rankings and links. Because of this I decided to do a short interview with him:

What is Search Engine Journal's benefit from doing a SEO site clinic?

Search Engine Journal benefits by helping the SEO community and companies which are starting their initial SEO by total transparency. We are working together, with our co-authors and guest contributors as a team to offer SEO advice to not only the sites which we have accepted into the SEO Clinic project but also the readers of our column who are working on their SEO. For example, when doing an SEO Clinic for a WordPress powered blog, our goal is that numerous WordPress bloggers will benefit from our SEO recommendations.

Our Resident SEO Pimps benefit via expanded recognition of their expertise and services to the SEO community. I think that it would be easy to charge anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 in consulting fees for such SEO oriented information and recommendation, but our ultimate mission is to help smaller sites and charities which cannot afford such SEO consultancy fees. In essence, such transparency should benefit the SEO and search marketing community as a whole.

How popular are your SEO clinics? Are they heavily linked to?

These posts have become quite popular throughout the SEO industry and the searchosphere. Many blogs and informational sites have linked to our SEO Clinic pieces, and our hope is that for each Clinic we provide, more sites which fall into the categories of our Clinic "patients" and link to the recommendations.

Do you have any recommendations for bloggers or website owners who looking to increase their links?

In each SEO Clinic, to date, we have discussed ideas for sites, such as TechSmith.com and BigOceans.com to attract links. In essence, the SEO Clinic will attract links to our patients from SEO blogs which cover the free SEO Clinic advice, but in each clinic we provide recommendations to improve links via building relationships with blogs in the niche categories our patients appeal to, and via social media marketing via Digg.com, StumbleUpon and other major traffic and inherent link building avenues.

Elite Retreat San Francisco

I am currently attending the Elite Retreat San Fransisco conference where Shoemoney, Aaron Wall, Lee Dodd, Darren Rowse, Kris Jones and I spoke about online marketing. I know many of you wanted to attend and could not make it, so Kris Jones blogged about the whole event. Make sure you check it out!

New Window Targeting Option

After much demand, we've added the option of opening a new window when a visitor clicks an AuctionAd. This is optional, as some ad blocking software will block any kind of popup. To use it, go into your Get Code page, and check the "Open in New Window" checkbox. To add to existing code, add this to your code:
auctionads_options = "n";
We hope this makes AuctionAds an even better fit for those who choose to use the option!

SEO Poker Tournament This Saturday!

Readers, SEO BlackHat is putting on a SEO Poker Tournament Saturday, March 24, at 9pm GMT.  Instead of a $100 entry fee you instead get in by antying up quality links!  Real cool concept, more sign up info here.

adNet's Jeff Kuntz on Ad Network Strategies

Jeff Kuntz, adNet's SVP of business development, was featured in an article in iMedia Connection. The article was focused on how ad networks can maximize strategies with brand advertisers. Read the full interview here.

Jason Cohen Interviewed on Email Acquisition

Media Whiz co-President, Jason Cohen, was recently interviewed on MediaPost's EmailInsider. The article focuses on email acquisition. Here is the full article.

Optimizing Before You Purchase Links

There are many ways to increase a sites ranking such as purchasing text links, but it seems that people are forgetting the basics. Before you purchase text links I would make sure you have optimized your website for the search engines. Here are the most common mistakes that I see:

Meta Description - Although meta tags don't seem important you would be surprised at how much a unique meta description tag on each page of a website can do to your rankings. You can try stuffing them with keywords to see if it helps, but I recommend tailoring each description to accurately represent the content on each page.

Sitemap - You want to make sure that your web pages are getting indexed by the search engines. If your content does not get indexed how do you expect the search engines to rank it? Using a simple sitemap structure can work well for you if you have a small to medium sized website.

Robots.txt - Most people think that the more pages you have indexed, the more traffic you will receive. In many cases this is not true; by removing duplicate content from the search engines you can actually increase your traffic.

URL strings - A lot of people use content management systems which make their URLs look all funny with extraneous characters. Clean up your URLs, the difference is like night and day.

Code - By using clean and compliant code you can keep your website search engine friendly. You can use basic code elements such as headings or alt tags to help improve your rankings.

There is nothing wrong with purchasing text links, but before you do, I recommend you cover the basics. If you do not do the basics then you will not be getting the most from the text links you purchase.

Joomla AuctionAds Plugin

Justin Cook has created a plugin for Joomla websites here.

Nice job Justin!

New URL Converter and Referral Counter

We're hard at work adding new features and improving AuctionAds. First up is a handy URL converter. This lets you convert any eBay URL into an AuctionAds link. You can use it to link to a your auctions or link to that funny auction you found. Any time you'd use an eBay link, run it through the URL converter and make some money.

Another small feature that many people asked for is a referral count on your Account page. You ask, we deliver.

Blog Consistently

Ever since blogging has gained in popularity people have debated about the optimal number of posts you should be posting. There are those that say if you post too little you will lose your readers and those that say if you post too much you will overwhelm them and also lose your readers. Is there a magic number of posts you should be writing everyday?

I have a completely different take on it, and I'm not necessarily saying I'm right because there are so many factors for a blogger to consider. But the way I see it is that the most important thing is that you're consistent. I believe that once you set the expectations for your readers, you need to be consistent.

If your blog readers are used to you only posting once a week then I don't think you will lose any subscribers by not blogging enough. On the other hand if you write five blog posts per day and then all of the sudden cut back to a couple posts per week it is more likely that you will start to lose your audience.

So instead of worrying about finding the magic number of posts to write just be consistent and give your readers what they have grown to expect.

Contextual AuctionAds

aJay has made a great guide on how to make contextual AuctionAds using Ultimate Tag Warrior. Check it out.

When Do You Post to Your Blog?

Michael Gray from Wolf Howl had an interesting post about what time of day do you post to your blog. One thing that I like to keep in mind when posting is that readers probably have hundreds of options in their feed reader, but the amount of blog posts in their reader decreases over weekends drastically. So if you start posting on the weekends, there is a good chance that you will start gaining new readers because when they can't find anything else that's interesting to read they will at least be able to read your blog post.

Keep your posting schedule the same for a few weeks but also start posting on the weekends. Do this for a month and you should see good growth from it.

AuctionAds Launches!

Readers, we are excited to announce the launch of AuctionAds!  This is a joint venture between ShoeMoney Media and MediaWhiz (TLA's parent company).  AuctionAds is a simple to use, creative implementation of Ebay's affiliate program.  You can see a live example of these ads on the left margin of this blog.

AuctionAds also allows website owners to make more money than going direct to Ebay's program because we will be leveraging our scale against Ebay's tiered payout system.  We also have baked an affiliate program right into the ads so if anyone clicks on your "Ads By AuctionAds" link on your ads and signs up, you stand to make a percentage of their revenues.  Try AuctionAds out and let me know below what you think, thx!

AuctionAds Launch

ShoeMoneyMedia Group Inc. and MediaWhiz Holdings are proud to announce the launch of AuctionAds. AuctionAds provides publishers a new way to monetize their traffic by using the eBay affilaite program.

Why use AuctionAds? - AuctionAds is a one stop shop for international and domestic website owners. AuctionAds provides a very simple way to let webmasters tap into the extremely lucrative eBay affiliate program without needing any programing skills. Its really as simple as copy and paste.

What is the revenue split with publishers? - AuctionAds is purely focused on growth and because of that we are paying out 100% of revenue to our publishers. We are well funded and are not concerned with making a profit in initial stages. In the future we will evaluate and possibly make some changes. The goal of course is to provide the user with the most profitable solution and have a profitable company at the same time. Fortunately, that is possible. As AuctionAds grows so does our volume and ability to leverage higher payouts.

How do I get an AuctionAds account? - Sign Up Here!

TLA on YouTube!

Readers, Loren Feldman from 1938media.com put together this new TLA Advertiser video for us:





Special thanks to Kris Jones of PepperJam Search and Michael Gray, aka GrayWolf for taking time to get filmed!

Idea: If you are a TLA Affiliate you are more than welcome to embed this video in a post and link below it to our $100 in Free Text Link Ads starter kit page like this:

text-link-ads.com/starter_kit.php?referrer=XXXX

(XXXX being your affiliate id)

Just an idea ;)

"SeoClass" launches hands on SEO seminars in NYC

LBB Readers, a very talented group of search marketers has just announced SeoClass which will be a series of hands on seo workshops to be held in NYC.  Michael Gray just announced details of the workshops on his blog here.  The class is put on by a great group of folks including: Jeremy Schoemaker, Rae Hoffman, Todd Malicoat, Greg Niland, and Michael Gray.

I think these smaller workshops are the best settings for site owners to get great instruction and the rare opportunity to ask specific questions about their unique site situation which is key.  I am also looking forward to catching up with these guys now that TLA is out in NYC!  Get more information on SeoClass here.

Don't Lose Your Blog Readers

Darren Rowse from ProBlogger posted a great list of 34 reasons why people unsubscribe from your blog. Darren asked his readers their thoughts on why they unsubscribe from blogs, over 109 people commented and Darren classified all the responses and posted the data.

There are definitely some really interesting reasons why people will unsubscribe from a blog. If you're a blogger, I would consider reading this post and then reading it again to make sure that you're not losing your audience for any of these reasons.

We all spend so much effort building an audience that it's critical we lose as few readers as possible. Similar to the business saying where it's cheaper to keep existing customers rather than finding new ones.