My favorite is MyBlogLog although I use both of them.

You can build a network of friends and spending some time doing that can greatly increase your traffic. It will also allow you to build relationships with other bloggers in your niche which can be invaluable for the long term.

Consider adding the widgets from both sites to your blog. It allows you to see who has visited from the network on your blog and also allows others to join your community.

You can see what these widgets look like at my WordPress Made Easy blog. You can click on the bottom and join my community. This will allow you to keep in touch with me. (I know a strange thought trying to understand an Old Bald Guy).

You can also upgrade for $25 a year at MyBlogLog and get some excellent tracking information along with seeing what people click. This can be an excellent way to see what works and can be an excellent way to improve your pre-sells if you are using your blog for that purpose.

Next lesson will be a checklist and overview of all the traffic generation pieces and how they fit together.

With a blog you can submit to the normal directories but you can also use the RSS directories. You can easily submit to these using a free tool that works with the Firefox browser. It is called Sumitem Now. This will allow you to save time submitting to the directories.

The first time you do this you will need to create an account at most of the directories. The easiest way I have found is to use this with your email open next to it (I use Gmail). This way you can immediately validate your account as you go.

This will be a bit slower the first time because of the signup process but after that you should be able to do this in less than an hour.

There are 113 sites in the Submit em Now data base. It will take a few weeks for some to list you but this is an easy way to create numerous backlinks quickly.

You can also add your blog to the various podcast directories if you use audio on your blog and there are also video directories if you v-blog. All of these things are one time work that can have a big impact on your traffic and are worthwhile.

You can and should also submit articles to help create back links and draw traffic to your blog.

If you are looking for a tool to help automate all of these submissions check out Only Submitter.

First you need to understand why links are important and mistakes you don’t want to make.

The search engines look at incoming links from other sites as a vote for your site. The key is to make sure that te link is from a related site and not from what the search engines consider bad neighborhoods.

A bad neighborhood is a link farm that is just there for generating links. Most of the paid link sites fall into this category and more and more of them are being found every day as the algorithyms get better.

Now getting a link from a related site that is an authority in your niche. Getting a link from them is much better than a link from a totally unrelated site.

One of the best ways to get these types of links is by taking the time to comment on related blogs. The key though is always make sure that you are taking part in the conversation and not spamming with your comments. Always make sure that you are adding value to the post that you comment on.

The other great way of doing this is to comment about the topic on your blog and link to the original post that started the topic. This is a trackback and can be very powerful in generating traffic and links.

Next leson we will discuss using Social Bookmarking sites to build links and traffic.

1. Search engines
2. Social Bookmarking Sites
3. RSS Directories

Today we will discuss the search engines.

First understand that the majority of your traffic will come from the long tail words.

Lets define long tail. It is keyword groupings of 2 or more words. For example – black leather executive chair would be a long tail search term. Now the person searching for that term is probably very targeted and if you are selling a black leather executive chair you probably have an interested buyer whereas the person searching for just chair is probably just doing research.

The key to getting highly ranked in the search engines on the long tail keywords is your title tag. That is probably 75% of your SEO on keywords with less than 2,000,000 results. This is one of the problems with both Blogger and WordPress.com because you can’t easily change the title tag from your blog’s name to use the post title or a custom title tag.

This alone will be a huge boon in your rankings and why we recommend using a self hosted WordPress blog over the other formats. Add the plugins recommended from previous lessons and you will have much better rankings in the search engines which will lead to more traffic for your blog.

Next time we will discuss linking strategies.

Another caveat here. WordPress has gone to a version of 2.3 series that will not work with these plugins. I will be updating this list to work with this version as my testing continues. Unfortunately, some of the important features these create I have had trouble duplicating. I will post an addition and send a broadcast email once I have found a new set of plugins that will work with version 2.3 until then I recommend that you use the 2.2 series with the current best version of that being 2.2.3.

The first thing you need to be able to change is the title tag. The default for WordPress blogs uses the blog title as the title tag for all posts. This will kill you in the long tail search. Get a plugin called SEO Title Tag.

You will also need to use a plugin called Ultimate Tag Warrior. This will create tags for sites like Technorati, Flickr and others. It will also allow you to use custom title tags on each post. SEO Title Tag by itself will allow you to use your post title but there will be times when you want one title for your tag and a different title for your readers.

The third plugin that is necessary is to use Post Schedule Ping Optimizer. This will keep you from having your blog ping too much and will also allow you to prepost your blog and have it generate the posts at your schedule. With this you can add 10, 20, 30 or more posts and set them to post at specific times in the future and it will do so. Automation can be great that way.

The fourth plugin you need to add is the Google XML Sitemap Generator. This will notify Google, Yahoo and others when you update your blog and create a properly formatted sitemap for your blog.

There are others but we will discuss them later in this series. These are the primary plugins needed to keep your blog search engine firendly. The others will help you generate traffic and will be addressed in those lessons.

Now if you already have a product a blog can be an excellent pre-sell tool for that product and or products. The first thinmg you can use it for is to build your credibility in the marketplace. I do this with a particular blog (www.wptutorial.com/blog) that only answers questions people have on blogging and WordPress in particular. It doesn’t sell specific products (although there are side bar links to them). It is done purely to establish expertise in that area. This can be extremely powerful.

Now if you are an affiliate you can use a blog in a few different ways.

1. Pre-sell through writing reviews.
If you decide to do this there are a couple caveats to observe. Give an honest opinion and quite often if you list the pluses and MINUSES you will have much more credibility. (More on this in a future lesson on headlines).

2. Use a blog in place of email delivery.
This can be quite effective and is even more powerful if you ad content articles amongst your presell pitches. Use your email list to just send people to your blog with a short teaser. This will improve your email deliverability and others can actually choose to receive your pitches through your feed.

3. Use content articles to pre-sell.
This works great for niches. For an example you write about fishing. It is something you like and easy for you to add content. When you are talking about your latest trip link to the lure that was working for you, the rod you use, the reel, etc. Whatever fits in with the content. You can find almost any product you use regularly available trhough an affiliate program online.

This gives you an idea of how you can structure your blog. Our next lesson will discuss finding affiliate products.

Remember, if you have done your keyword research to find topics that people are interested in and give those people quality information on that topic they will be very happy to check out your recommendations if they are part of your content.

Whether you are selling your own product, working as an affiliate, or using contextual ads such as Adsense to generate your income a bit of research is necessary.

There are various tools available. For a free option you can try the Adwords Keyword Tool. This will show you similar keywords for your topic and how competitive they are.

This can give you some food for similar topics to create your posts around.

Now this gives you an idea but if you really want to find out where the profitable keywords are there are two paid services that will give you a lot more detail and a better idea of the best sub topics to monetize your blog.

Word Tracker

Keyword Country

There are two good videos on using Keyword Country on my Videos For Beginners site.

Key word research will help you make sure that you target the most profitable parts of whatever niche you are in.

Last time we talked about making your blog search engine friendly so if you are going to use it for this create topic specific title tags for your blog. (Not Issue 32 volume 13).

You can also use a blog for writing reviews. This can be an excellent way to generate affiliate sales. Give an honest review of a product or service that you use. You will find it to be more effective if you make it fair and don’t just create a pitch for the product.

Quite often if you are listing both the pluses and the minuses you will find you will get a much greater click through rate. Title tags are extremely important for getting rankings for the specific product name that you are promoting.

If you can create controversy in the title you will get more people to click through from the search engines. (ex. Does product a really suck?, IS product A a scam?) These won’t help if your title tag is “My Blog Name”. This type of blog should always be one you host and should be optimized for title tags.

You can use a blog to help pre-sell your expertise for your products. This is something I use at WordPress Made Easy Blog. The blog is there to answer readers questions about using WordPress or blogging in general.

It helps to establish my expertise as someone who knows about the topic and helps pre-sell a variety of products I have on that topic. This can be extremely effective in helping to create expert status in your specific niche.

You can also combine one or more of these formats into the same blog as long as the topics are related and focused on the same topic/s.

First we need to define a few terms. When talking about search engine optimization one of the terms you will hear is the long tail.

The long tail is where someone searches for a more specific item. For this example lets talk about chairs. Type chair into Google and you will see over 161,000,000 results. A very competitive term.

The long tail phrase would be black leather chair and you would find about 3,400,000 results. A big drop off in competition. Take it a step further and type in black leather executive chair and it drops to about 1,500,000 results.

Targeting specific phrases and getting ranked highly is obviously much easier than targeting the generic keyword.

The other side of the coin is that if you are selling chairs the person looking for a black leather executive chair is much more likely to be a buyer than someone searching for the word chair.

When you get to the less competitive words in the search engines having the term in your title tag is 75% or more of the SEO you need to do.

The problem with using Blogger or WordPress.com versus hosting your own blog is that if your blog title is Chairs and Things that will carry forward as your title tag for each post you make. If you have your own self hosted WordPress blog you can get a plugin that will allow you to use your post title as your title tag.

Instead of having your blog title as the title tag for all of your posts you can have the post about black executive chairs use that as a title. The post about blue rocker recliners will have that in the title for that post. All of these will rank higher in the search engine for the long tail words (all other factors such as backlinks, etc being equal) than the comparable blog using the blog title as the title tag.

You can find out more about getting your WordPress blog indexed quickly and ranked higher in “7 Tips To Get Your WordPress Blog Search Engine Friendly”.