E-Newsletters and Free Article Sites - Pt 2 of Tips to Increase Traffic
As stated in the overview to this series, the most fundamental way to get more traffic to your blog (or website) is to have more sites link to you. As many other bloggers have stated, you want to gain these links organically. That is, these links should be acquired gradually, and the link text shouldn't be the same for every linking site. Moral: don't buy links.
So how do you gain links organically? One technique for building backlinks to your website or blog, and thus web traffic, is to write articles for re-use by other publishers. I write "free articles" for EzineArticles.com, both to build credibility for certain topics, as well as to build backlinks and traffic. (There are other sites, but this is my preferred "free article" site.)
Recently, in my email, I received a December summary for EzineArticles.com. At the top of the contributions list was one author with what I thought was over 350 visits to a single article.
Hmm, I thought. That's not so much. Then I read the enclosing text, only to find out that this author had contributed nearly 300 ARTICLES in the month of December alone. Think about how much traffic this would generate. Let's do some simple math.
EzineArticles has a high Google PR (PageRank), and their authors often place highly in the Google SE (Search Engine) for either their name (not always a big a deal) and/or various keywords (a big deal). Links from EzineArticles.com will thus help build your own Google PR. As well, other sites and ezines will re-publish your article (following the terms set out by EzineArticles), thus increasing your potential backlinks.
[Note: Some SEO experts and bloggers claim that Google PR isn't that important for getting traffic. Take it from me, it is, to varying degrees. When I moved my four cooking blogs into a single website, the lack of Google PR for the new site made a huge difference. I had to come up with ways to promote it on the old blogs.]
I've only had my first article at EzineArticles.com for just over 3 weeks, with 3 more articles published over the past two weeks. So far, these 4 articles have had about 223 pageviews at the time of writing - with the current daily rate at 23 pageviews per day. Not a great deal, but they have brought me extra traffic to this blog, and its early yet. There are reports of some articles on EzineArticles getting well over 100,000 pageviews in a year, just on the site alone.
As well, each of my first 2 articles have been republished in e-newsletters 4 times already. That doesn't sound like a lot, but some of the ezine publishers that use EzineArticles have subscriber counts up into the mid-five and low-six figures.
Apparently, these articles are potentially seen by a half million people, depending, obviously, on a number of factors. But even if a couple of your articles are seen by 100,000 people over time, and 1% of them follow the live link from the email (or the republishing site) to your website, that's an extra 500 visitors per article - in addition to any visits you may receive from the EzineArticles website.
If you prepare yourself for the extra traffic, you can make your website or blog even "stickier". Some of these visitors may just become your subscribers, if you put in a bit of effort and set up your own e-newsletter subscription. It doesn't take a lot of effort. Of course, you could later parlay the traffic into sales of ebooks.
If you have webmaster skills and your own domain, your hosting company probably already provides you with the infrastrucure you need for setting up ezine subscriptions: a database (such as mySQL) and a scripting language (such as PHP).
The alternative is to pay for a monthly service to automatically email your e-newsletter at regular intervals. However, in addition to the cost, you will have to configure the service. For the money, though, you do get additional features that you may not have if you did it yourself.
To do it yourself, all you need is a little web script - say using the PHP or Perl scripting language - which you can trigger manually, each time you're ready to send out the next newsletter. Such a script would massage your RSS/ Atom/web feed, which all blogs typically generate automatically. The content would be massaged into an ezine format, complete with links to your own full-text articles.
I'll have a more in-depth article about ezine subscriptions in the near future, and a free service set up in a couple of months. Just check on my main website, Chameleon Integration, for an announcement in this regard.
(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/
Technorati Tags: blogspinner, ezine, newsletter, web traffic
So how do you gain links organically? One technique for building backlinks to your website or blog, and thus web traffic, is to write articles for re-use by other publishers. I write "free articles" for EzineArticles.com, both to build credibility for certain topics, as well as to build backlinks and traffic. (There are other sites, but this is my preferred "free article" site.)
Recently, in my email, I received a December summary for EzineArticles.com. At the top of the contributions list was one author with what I thought was over 350 visits to a single article.
Hmm, I thought. That's not so much. Then I read the enclosing text, only to find out that this author had contributed nearly 300 ARTICLES in the month of December alone. Think about how much traffic this would generate. Let's do some simple math.
EzineArticles has a high Google PR (PageRank), and their authors often place highly in the Google SE (Search Engine) for either their name (not always a big a deal) and/or various keywords (a big deal). Links from EzineArticles.com will thus help build your own Google PR. As well, other sites and ezines will re-publish your article (following the terms set out by EzineArticles), thus increasing your potential backlinks.
[Note: Some SEO experts and bloggers claim that Google PR isn't that important for getting traffic. Take it from me, it is, to varying degrees. When I moved my four cooking blogs into a single website, the lack of Google PR for the new site made a huge difference. I had to come up with ways to promote it on the old blogs.]
I've only had my first article at EzineArticles.com for just over 3 weeks, with 3 more articles published over the past two weeks. So far, these 4 articles have had about 223 pageviews at the time of writing - with the current daily rate at 23 pageviews per day. Not a great deal, but they have brought me extra traffic to this blog, and its early yet. There are reports of some articles on EzineArticles getting well over 100,000 pageviews in a year, just on the site alone.
As well, each of my first 2 articles have been republished in e-newsletters 4 times already. That doesn't sound like a lot, but some of the ezine publishers that use EzineArticles have subscriber counts up into the mid-five and low-six figures.
Apparently, these articles are potentially seen by a half million people, depending, obviously, on a number of factors. But even if a couple of your articles are seen by 100,000 people over time, and 1% of them follow the live link from the email (or the republishing site) to your website, that's an extra 500 visitors per article - in addition to any visits you may receive from the EzineArticles website.
If you prepare yourself for the extra traffic, you can make your website or blog even "stickier". Some of these visitors may just become your subscribers, if you put in a bit of effort and set up your own e-newsletter subscription. It doesn't take a lot of effort. Of course, you could later parlay the traffic into sales of ebooks.
If you have webmaster skills and your own domain, your hosting company probably already provides you with the infrastrucure you need for setting up ezine subscriptions: a database (such as mySQL) and a scripting language (such as PHP).
The alternative is to pay for a monthly service to automatically email your e-newsletter at regular intervals. However, in addition to the cost, you will have to configure the service. For the money, though, you do get additional features that you may not have if you did it yourself.
To do it yourself, all you need is a little web script - say using the PHP or Perl scripting language - which you can trigger manually, each time you're ready to send out the next newsletter. Such a script would massage your RSS/ Atom/web feed, which all blogs typically generate automatically. The content would be massaged into an ezine format, complete with links to your own full-text articles.
I'll have a more in-depth article about ezine subscriptions in the near future, and a free service set up in a couple of months. Just check on my main website, Chameleon Integration, for an announcement in this regard.
(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/
Technorati Tags: blogspinner, ezine, newsletter, web traffic
