The Open Source Marketer

More blog readers means more opportunities. I know you agree with that statement because that’s why you are reading this post. So here are two easy things that you can do to increase your blog reader traffic. What opportunities you can create from there will be the topic for a future article.

1. Listen to the blogcatalog interview I did with one of the experts from BlogCatalog.com. We talk about how to get blog readers and how to find joint venture partners for your online business. Every month I see a steady flow of new traffic from BlogCatalog.com and other social blog catalog sites. If you are looking for a solid way to build real relationships with your readers and other bloggers, then listen to this talkshoe interview and find out how.




2. Signup for a free BlogRush account and syndicate your blog posts on keyword targeted blogs. Remember, this is just one of the many ways that you should consider for getting reader traffic to your blog. This will not be a silver bullet for traffic generation but it promises to be a good method of sharing traffic between blogs. Your posts will appear on related blogs based on targeted context matching and blog categorization. This will put your blog posts on relevant blogs so you will get in front of the right reader audience.

Oh, and be sure to look for an upcoming blog post on what not to do when hosting a conference call using TalkShoe.com. I’ll share with you what I learned on the BlogCatalog call. It will save you some grief if and when you ever decide to conduct your own phone interviews.

Enjoying life,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Are you social. Sure you are! Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, there is a lot going on in the social media space these days. And, whether you think it is all fluff or not, you have to admit that there is evidence of some real website traffic mixed in with all those widgets and toolbar buttons.

Yet, everyone I talk to about using social media sites to get visitor traffic has been very interested and very confused all at the same time. So, to help cut through some of the confusion I have decided to host a TalkShoe conference call this coming Friday, September 14th at 7:00pm CST. and you are invited to participate. The call will cover social blog catalog sites and how they can be used to get move website traffic. If you want more website traffic that doesn’t cost you on a pay per click, then get in on this call.

Time magazine voted You as person of the year in their 2007 edition, but that doesn’t mean everyone understands the culture of the technology. Don’t worry, your not behind. These things are new and there are lot of them. That’s why you and I will discuss their benefits and their draw backs together. You will get all the information you need to successfully leverage these sites and build value for you and your site visitors.

Here are some of the things we will cover on the call:

1. 30 Second Caller Introductions (10 min)
2. Introduction to blog catalog sites (3 min)
3. Why a blog is better than a website (5 min)
4. How to create a compelling profile (5 min)
5. How to get people to add you as a friend (3 min)
6. How to pick the right neighborhoods (3 min)
7. How to use shout outs effectively (3 min)
8. How to leave useful comments that draw attention (5 min)
9. How to save time using any social media site (5 min)
10. What NOT to do on social media sites (5 min)
11. Open Discussion (15 min)

EVENT DETAILS:

Scheduled Time:
Date: Fri, September 14, 2007
Time: 7:00 CST / 8:00 PM EDT

How to participate:

Call in:

1. Dial: (724) 444-7444
2. Enter: 51402 # (Talkcast ID)
3. Enter: 1 # or your PIN

A pin is NOT required to call into this TalkCast. However, you will need a PIN and the TalkShoe client to chat and participate in the interactive online discussion.

Visit the TalkCast event page for more details:
http://opensourcemarketer.com/blogcatalogtalk

VIDEO TUTORIAL:
If you still have questions about how the conference all works, the
watch this short 3 minute video to learn how call into TalkCasts:
http://opensourcemarketer.com/howtotalkshoe

The information you will hear is extremely valuable so make plans to be on the call this Friday at 7:00 pm CST. I guarantee it will be the most important part of your week.

Seeking clarity,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Our next article, “Using Del.icio.us To Build Website Traffic”, is almost finished. But, in the mean time I couldn’t help but write a short post about a great article I read over at ProBlogger. Darren Rowse wrote an excellent short piece on using CrazyEgg.com to track and analyze blog title click throughs for a group writing project. He posted the results along with screen shots from CrazEgg and he gave an interesting break down of what the number meant. Checkout the article if you are interested in the details.

What is CrazyEgg.com

CrazzyEgg.com is a simple to use click through measuring tool I recently read about in Yaro Starak’s Blog Master Mind Course. I have to tell you, the tool will change the way you look at creating posts for your blog. Read the rest of this entry »

The term social media can mean different things depending on who you listen to. Some say it involves user generated content (UGC). Some say it’s all about social bookmarking. Some view social media as a maturing of the internet. Some say it is a waste of time. In the next few articles we will look at some of the top social media sites like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Twitter, FaceBook, BlogCatalog, and MyBlogLog to understand how they work and how you can use them to get visitor traffic to your website.

You see it doesn’t matter what anyone “says” social media is. What matters is how people are using it and what you can do with it as a marketer. Even if you don’t use every social media site out there, you need to at least know what they are about and how other people are using them. Social media sites are where people are coming together online to interact and that means you have an opportunity to get your website content in front of a bunch of people with little to no cost.

To get us started, here are seven things that social media sites offer people online

1. The ability to categorize and bookmark sites
2. The ability to share content and resources with others
3. The ability to communicate with others directly
4. The ability to create personal profiles
5. The ability to add user defined tags to content
6. The ability to group together by topics of interest
7. The ability to rate or rank the quality of content

In our upcoming articles we will examine each of these points as they relate to our chosen social media sites and we will discuss how we can use each of these capabilities to market using social media.

Until then I encourage you to visit Del.icio.us and learn what the site is about. Sign up for a free account and learn how to use the tool on a basic level. By using the tool and seeing how others are using the tool you will be better equipped to understand how it can be used to help you accomplish your marketing goals.

Meet you back here in a few days,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

There are a number of recently popularized social media methods of getting website traffic, but many of these methods involve activities that are very technology focused and don’t leave much room for real social connections or direct personal feedback. If you’re looking for a more personally connected way of generating website traffic, then consider starting a group meeting on Meetup.com. In this article you will learn what it takes to setup a Meetup group and start generating website traffic almost overnight. Read the rest of this entry »

In the last post we watched a video about keyword and keyword phrase research. We saw the combined use of WordTracker and Google Trends to come up with a method to find high search volume, low competition keywords and keyword phrases. In this next video we see the concept taken a step further with the use of the regular Google search.

Overall this quick hit method is a low cost way to dig into keyword and keyword phrases. It’s good to have ways to quickly test ideas without spending lots of valuable time on a concept. Since Google and WordTracker are already tapping into existing data you are much more likely to get a fairly accurate picture of what keywords are doing.

Give the video a squint and let me know what you think in the blog comments.

Dreaming up new stuff,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Keyword research is an extremely important part of optimizing blogs and understanding what words or phrases to use in blog posts or articles. Today’s post is a quick hit on combining WordTracker’s Keyword Tool and Google Trends to come up with a reasonable estimation for potential keyword search traffic.

Here is a video from the guys over at the Thirty Day Challenge that highlights some of the issues you need to consider when doing keyword research. The video also points out some good ways to correlate keyword data into a better visualization of historical visitor traffic for a given set of keyword s or keyword phrases.

Try the WordTracker Free Keyword Tool for yourself and see what results come back for your keywords of choice. You will be surprised at what you can find. However, as the video explains, you need a reasonable way to estimate the real long term potential for search traffic. Pit your keyword or keyword phrase against some long term trends using Google Trends.

The WordTracker keyword tool was a big help to me when I wanted to optimize one of my sites. Using the tool I was able to discover people really were not searching for the keywords I thought they were. It helped me to understand what was really being searched for and I was able to tweak the keywords on my site to match. Although the overall change was small, the increase in traffic from using the right keywords was measurable literally overnight. The project now get regular search visitors for the keywords and keywords phrases that is was not getting before.

While I didn’t use Google Trends at the time to cross reference the keywords search history, I did use Google’s adsense keyword tool to get an idea of adsense competition versus general search traffic. This gave me a rough estimate of what to expect for my keywords and keyword phrases. The adsense keyword tool is not nearly as easy to understand visually and it doesn’t give you the big historical picture that Google Trends does, but it does give you the adsense competition for keywords and phrases so a combination of all three tools might not be a bad thing.

Just remember, a little research up front can save you a lot of time and effort later on.

Keep on keeping on,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Related Article:
Learn To Use Google Trending For Your Marketing Efforts

Would you like to get 18,077 visitors to your website in 7 days? Of course you would!

Read on and I’ll tell you how it’s been done.

Website traffic is the life blood of your online business so finding creative ways to generate website traffic is essential to your success.

Well, check out how one website is using creative marketing to drive visitor traffic and how they plan to keep that visitor traffic flowing. Read the rest of this entry »