I’ve seen many people simply not join a blogging contest because they have no chance at winning. I fully understand what it takes to win a blogging contest and it’s very exhausting for a blogger. If this is the reason you’re not joining guest blogging contests I think it’s time to reconsider.

Sure winning is great and we all love the extra cash but you have to understand all of the benefits that come with participating in guest blogging contests. This is your opportunity as a blogger to engage with other readers and gain traffic to your own website.

Building Relationships

I’ve meet so many people online during my last guest blogging contest at famous bloggers. I managed to gain many new Blog Engage members, rss customers and new blog readers. This has allowed our community to continue growing and excelling.

Creating Authority

Guest blogging can help you build authority in the blogosphere and help you gain respect from your fellow bloggers. This is how you can start making a name for yourself. Don’t miss out on these amazing marketing opportunities.

Writing Experience

I found by joining blogging contests it has made me more aware about the way I write on my own blog including things such as spelling, grammar and sentence structure. Guest blogging can help you build healthy writing skills you may have never learned or practiced other wise.

So if you’re sitting there in your PC chair and decided against joining our next guest blogging contest maybe it’s time to think again and reconsider. There’s so much potential and opportunity even if you’re not the winner. Remember you have to take advantage of all aspects within guest blogging.

Engage with your Readers

When someone replies to your guest blog make sure to engage with them. Visit their blog, follow them on twitter and reply to their comment. What you want to do is build up intellectual conversations that can turn into new relationships.

I hope my article inspires you to start guest blogging. I know it’s tough but you don’t have to win first place. There’s a ton of benefits that are included with guest blogging. Start taking advantage of this marketing opportunity and engage with bloggers in our next guest blogging contest.

<a href="http://www.blogengage.com"><img src="http://www.blogengage.com/images/blog_engage_promo_1.jpg" alt="Blog Engage Blog Forum and Blogging Community, Free Blog Submissions and Blog Traffic, Blog Directory, Article Submissions, Blog Traffic"></a>

Be sure to add me as a friend, bbrian017

Twitter, bbrian017

Thanks,

Brian

Official 2011 Second Guest Blogging Contest Post #16
Contest Article

Yes, you heard me right. Adolf Hitler, one among the evilest humans in this world, can teach you a lot about Blogging. Hitler was a great guy, had good skills. But, he used them in a bad way. He used them to bring ruin upon people ; because he wanted Germany to become a world power. In this post, we will talk about what Hitler can teach us [we will use them for good purposes, such as blogging]. Let’s talk about the mighty chancellor of Germany :-

Do you know why Hitler was so popular ; why we was able to gain popularity ? Most Germans didn’t even support his “massive killing of Jews” – believe it or not – they didn’t even know about it. But, they did support him. Why did Hitler become so popular, all of a sudden ? Is it because he supported Nazi party ? No. It’s because,

He was an Excellent Public Speaker

Hitler was so popular because he was able to convince people. He was a great public speaker. Adolf Hitler is still regarded as one among the greatest speaker (but this quality of his is not spoken about much due to the decisions he made). He was able to convince German Public. He was able to convince that Germany could be a World Power. He used the words. To a blogger, this is a great lesson.

Point #1 : Have a dictionary and thesaurus for reference

Take that old dictionary/thesaurus that is somewhere in your house. Find it (or you could use an online one). Keep it. Now, let’s talk about how we can use this to come up with excellent titles. Follow these steps when you write a title :-

• Write a draft title

Write a draft title. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just come up with one that works out best with your idea/content.

• Take the dictionary/thesaurus, Use it for reference !

Now, take the dictionary/thesaurus to come up with new title. Use words that can be substituted in for your title. After you have done that, you could do some keyword research [ to improve your ranking]. You could substitute in words and see how that works out, you could improve your ranking tremendously by changing a single word. That’s how powerful words can be.

You could also use dictionary for your body. You could use it to find better keywords. Just by having it by your side [I mean, you will have to use it ], you are also reducing any chances of grammatical/spelling mistakes. Hitler was very clever in the usage of words. He use many adjectives and decorative words to make this sentences meaningful – to describe, I would rather choose an example – You know the times when you hear someone speak and his/her argument is so great that you look at him and think, “Wow, this guy/gal is great !”. Same thing with Hitler.

Point #2 : Individual speaking, Call to Action and I want YOU !

You know what historians say ? Hitler’s eyes had mysterious power over people. Of course, they weren’t describing “his eyes”. Rather, they were talking about his influence on teach person ; there is weird feeling (how can I describe it ?). For instance, you know when other people speak to you [in stage/public] in person, you will trust them more (it is a matter of trust). Now, let’s come back to blogging : Does your visitor have a feeling that you are talking to him, in person [through your post] ?

As bloggers, we need to work [heavily] on “talking” to each visitor. Your post should seem like you are talking to each one of them. This will have a greater impact on the reader. For example, you have better chances of getting a comment, a share or even a subscriber. Try to address your visitor individually. Write a different style of post with the “address”, see how it works out. Is it working ? Btw, you might have to try it out for 2-3 posts, because there are other factors involved : the quality and exposure of the post are a few.

Call to Action is another amazing tool that you can use. Hitler used this technique widely. He tried to convince the German public of his plan to conquer the world. And he was successful in it, for the most part. For your post, include Call to Actions (Ask for comments etc.). Asking for commenting is the most commonly used Call to Action in Blogging. Its just like saying “I want you to Join the Army” – “I want you to comment on this post ! ”

He was Motivational and Inspirational

Yup. He sure was. His motivational speech surely convinced many people to join the German army and fight for the cause. He was also inspirational. You know, even the allies had admired his ability to convince people to do something. To be a successful blogger, you need to be motivational and inspirational. You need to be able to inspire other bloggers to act, to follow your strategies. It’s not that simple, it’s not that complex either. He was also a great leader. He was able to educate his followers. He was able to motivate them to act. That’s where Hitler began his “successful career” began (although he didn’t achieve his goal, which is a good thing, considering that he order the murder of millions).

Self Belief – Confidence

This is the last thing I want to talk about. Hitler was confident. He was confident because he believed in this abilities (true, he believed in them because he thought that he was sent by God to conquer Germany). Well, in blogger you need to believe in your talents, what you can do. Never underestimate your ability. You never know when they can produce great results. When you have confidence in your abilities, you will be able to achieve more. But, be careful : Don’t ever be “over” confident. You need to have beliefs about your talents, but don’t think that you can always do the best, by not giving in much efforts. Remember : there is always someone better than you.

Conclusion

That’s all the lessons Hitler can teach you, at least for now. Anyway, I want your opinion about this. What do you think ? Was it worth reading this post ? Did you learn something new ? Was Hitler a great blogger ? You can help me out by commenting on/sharing this post. Thank you for reading !

I want you to Let me know of your opinion ! Thanks !

1000 USD 2011 Best Guest Blogger Contest Article Approved

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has gone with so many changes these days, changes that made us in doubt of our SEO strategies and changes just on the blogosphere right now that will alter the usual SEO practices as we reflect of it today. The way things are made now, are not the way they were made in the past. The same with the way things are being done now, will remain the same developments as ways of the future. It’s about to change and progress again once more. As a person whose job revolves around SEO, Blogging and Social Media, I am aware of these changes keeping track on these at all times.

Now, let’s get about some of the past biggest changes that we look forward to until now. Before I tell you what was happening, I hope you were aware of these changes as these are the changes that are present till now but we aren’t focus on these that much. The changes I am going to express may sound pretty old appalling, but I intent to merely make you attentive on these things. Reaching out the best SEO changes of the past in an easy approach.

Targeting Global Google on Local Search

First off, I am going to depict this important change as this happened quickly but it came very effective and successful. First you need to be aware of this, because many people won’t be.  For so many years Google has been proudly building the world seems closer by being the universal search engine as we know it. And now it happened to focus on being a “local search engine”. But you know before having local search, Google have already some other kinds of place search and local searches different from this one that we have today.

We need to recognize it thoroughly, because many will not know what in the world is happening with Google local searches and how are we going to simply qualify or be visible in it. Now, what does this mean to us? Simply, it only means that if you do not have a Google Local listing declared, your nearby local competitors will leave you behind in the dark when local consumers locate them instead of you at the peak of the Search Engine Result Page (SERPs) within Google Local Search.

Here’s the simple yet effective tip to that, claim your free Google Local listing. Fill out the listing completely as possible and then strive to get some responses and reviews posted on your listing. By just simply doing that, you will go a long way toward success in getting the top rank in SERPs from your local SEO hardwork. So easy right? But why you don’t give attention to it?

Be the Best in Yahoo and Bing

While some people become almost weighed down with the fears of the Google Panda update. I found out that in SEO we must learn to cuddle changes because changes are our friend in this evolving world. We don’t need to shift our SEO strategies if we’re hesitant to where we gonna be after implementing our strategies. The truth is, we have a major advantage because we can know how to keep up and go with the change, where many don’t know.

Bing and Yahoo! made well on their established alliance – as well as the sharing of rankings. The about 22% of the search market volume of Yahoo joined the about 11% of the search market’s volume of Bing, combining it now to manage a full third or more of the search market today.So how does this influence us? Anyway, who among us is optimizing sites for Yahoo or Bing? What went before was that many people did not worry optimizing for Bing and Yahoo because it accounted for so little chances to be visible in the actual SERPs. And it’s true!

How could rankings soar in Yahoo and Bing?  Now, pay attention to Bing guidelines. Follow the important things on Bing such as:

1. Good titles that include your three most significant keywords and your brand name .

2. Descriptions that encloses your three most important keywords.

3. Make sure each keyword appears on the written pages about two to three times.

4. Make your URL be SEO friendly URLs. This is a big deal in Bing.

In Bing, you have to look back at a bit with history of search. SEO was all about attainment of higher rankings for the most important keyword phrases. That was early in the match and back then, some people assumed that was all we needed. After all if you show up number one for the best keywords in Bing then you must turn out to be a winner too in Yahoo.

Google Instant for Instant Traffic

As a Google Searchologist, I find Google instant annoying especially when my Internet connection is slowing down. I don’t like its preview thingy. But you know, I’ve able to grasp the importance of this change and it entails that we must make our website be attractive as we can. I tend to disregard sites that look boring in the preview. Thanks to Google Instant Preview for making it for us to have a glance on the site before visiting it. Or else we’re just wasting our time. Possible visitors no longer have to click on the search listing to choose if they like our site. The small magnifying glass icon gives us preview mode that shows an outsized thumbnail view of our web page. If the visitor does like the looks of our site, they simply click on it and there you have them.

It goes like the less people who visit our site, the lower our rankings will go because Google does keep an eye on site popularity and visits.

Here’s what you can do, make your site attractive and looks really good. I have visited several sites and many websites have just lost sales in having dull and dry designs and web templates. Be sure to follow the usability standards in blogging and that of have the design of the winners – winning the visitors by clicking your site from a preview through Google Instant.

I believe our job as Bloggers with knowledge on SEO is to keep advanced in an ever changing environment and keep ourselves be not be surprised of current and future developments. There are many ways to solve it, there are many alternatives, and there are many opportunities around, so just keep up!  You want to keep yourself conscious of what is upcoming next because that way, you’ll always be able to help out your readers with state-of-the-art skills and advantages not considering of the changing search world.

Please share if you would like to add something. I would really appreciate your insights A LOT!

Paid ad placement is a traffic-building strategy that can pay off like nobody’s business. It can bring in a whole new audience, build up a reputation, and even get the attention of top-tier blogs and Websites.

Unfortunately, many bloggers play it fast and loose when buying up real estate on other sites, even when intentions are pure. But instead of blowing your hard-earned cash on worthless, traffic-free adspace, here are the top 7 ad-buying mistakes you can make as a blogger, and how to avoid them like the plague.

Bad Placement

Under the guise that internet traffic is so diverse that demographics no longer matter since any kind of site can attract any kind of audience, countless bloggers have placed ads on absurdly irrelevant sites. Ensure that your blog is targeting precisely the same audience as the ad site to avoid placing ads about a Mozart blog on bieberfever.com or a quilting blog on youporn.com.

Bad Positioning

If you’re advertising on a site crammed with skyscrapers stuffed to the rafters with tiny ads, you might have been better off buying a single pixel on The Million Dollar Home Page. Google juice dilutes to homeopathic levels when you’re divvying up the pie to that extent and it all becomes a gray mass to the reader who will simply not bother to click on any of the ads.

Bad Content

As difficult it may be to imagine, a recent blogger’s ad read: “Beleive your sailsmen! There all talknig alot about my blog to!” Having illiteracy attempt to draw traffic to a blog is somewhat akin to hiring a 600 pound spokesperson to extol the virtues of your diet aids. Don’t just rely on your word processor’s spell check as: “Any miss steaks? Nun eye am a wear off!” passes the test but it’s still gobbledygook!

Bad Design

Does your blog ad look like a kindergartener designed it in MS Paint? There is no substitute for expert design to appeal to an audience and unless you have the Photoshop chops to conceive and execute a professional looking ad, you’re just wasting your time and money. Hire a freelance graphic artist and have them take over the design duties.

Bad Timing

All blogs have some level of inherent timing, from snowmobile blogs that go dormant in the summer to tech blogs that have nothing to report on Sundays. Your ads should be set to drive traffic to your blog at the times when there is actually content of immediate interest being posted. Placing your ads to fall at the wrong time is only going to succeed in speeding you off to bankruptcy court.

Bad Diffusion

Many bloggers are cash strapped so when they choose to place ads, they tend to make a big investment in one or two sites and then cry the blues when their traffic chart doesn’t show a single blip. Instead of handing over a big check to a single site, using an ad network will allow you to place your ad on various sites at once.

Bad Capacity

You’ve mortgaged your house, hocked your wedding ring, and borrowed money from Vito The Loanshark to place dynamite ads all over the web that are resulting in avalanches of traffic to your site… so much traffic that your server crashes. Or your host or blogging platform yanks your blog for exceeding your bandwidth limits and your visitors are treated to an embarrassing “Blog Suspended” page. In the blogging world great success is only a few gigabytes of traffic away from great failure.

Somewhere out there you’ll find bloggers who have committed all seven of these bad mistakes, thanks to poor planning, poor execution and other problems. Now that you can identify the pitfalls in buying ads, you can tackle ad buying with confidence instead of throwing money down the drain.

Every blogger occasionally faces a flat point in traffic to his blog… that’s no reason to panic. However, the sooner you begin to remedy that, the easier it will be. There are a lot of ways to build traffic, both short and long term. Here are a few ways in which a short term boost can be realized.

Some Short Term Traffic Boosters

• Contests – sponsoring a contest is a great way to generate a quick boost in traffic. Guest blogging, commenting, design, even e-scavenger hunts can all bring in a lot of traffic, when properly implemented and promoted.

• Controversy – this can mean making a statement or taking a position that might be considered to be controversial, or simply writing about some controversial issue or event. Nothing attracts readers like a scandal.

• Catchy Titles - “Officials Report Contact with Friendly Aliens” may land you some traffic from Twitter. But when visitors realize your “Aliens” are migrant farm workers, they’re apt to be a little disillusioned.

• Human Interest – a new slant on aid to disaster victims, a story on an octogenarian returning to school for a degree or a charity fund drive for a family that lost their home can jerk at folks’ heartstrings and bring your blog more traffic.

One thing that these all have in common is that they’re temporary in nature. Once the issue has either passed or has become boring, without something else to hold them, most of the new visitors will be moving on to something else.

Top quality content, taking care of your community and promoting your blog are like the three legs of a tripod. Neglect any one of them, and it won’t stand.

Short term boosts, however, can be beneficial, for a couple of reasons. First of all, if you’re serving up quality content, that’s enjoyable, informative or instructional, there’s a good chance that at least some of those new visitors will come back for more. Second, if you offer them something special for sticking around, you may be able to keep them from disappearing over the horizon. You can let your imagination run wild on those offerings.

In the long run, the most lasting traffic will normally be acquired through more natural means.

Some Long-Term Traffic Boosters

• Nurture – Treat the visitors you already have like royalty. Respond promptly to comments, respect your readers and work hard to deliver the kind of content they want. Protect them, and the community.

• SEO – List your blog in blog directories; ensure your metadata tags (Title and Description) are up to par; use tags on your posts; use alt. attributes on photos and graphics; submit a site map to the search engines.

• Comments – You’re hoping for bloggers to stop by your blog and comment, right? Doesn’t it stand to reason that you should be doing the same? Circulate around, and leave some worthwhile comments on other blogs. You’ll be able to leave a link back to your blog, and if your comment was interesting, it will probably attract some visitors from that blog, over to yours.

• Forum posting – If you belong to any forums, place a link to your blog in your signature. Decent comments posted on the forum may well attract visitors as well.

• Guest Blogging – There are many blogs that regularly welcome guest bloggers. Posting a guest blog has the benefit of putting your work in front of an entirely new audience, with the opportunity to attract some of them to your blog, to see more. Obviously, this is a time to put your best foot forward.

• Guest Bloggers – You can also invite other bloggers to post guest blogs on your site. Normally, they’ll let their regular readers know where and when they’ll be posting, and their loyal readers will visit to read their post. That’s a perfect opportunity to wow them with everything you have to offer. Make the most of it.

• Social Media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and a host of other social media sites all present outstanding opportunities to make people aware of your latest blog post. Don’t overdo it, though. If all you ever do is pimp your own blog, you can become effectively invisible very quickly. Post a variety of other things, and don’t forget to pimp your friends’ and contacts’ work, too. They’ll probably return the favor.

These are by no means the only ways to build blog traffic. They’re just a few of the most common methods. You should combine several or all of these techniques, for the best results.

Don’t allow yourself to get so focused on the traffic aspect, that you pay insufficient attention to the basics, though. Top quality content, taking care of your community and promoting your blog are like the three legs of a tripod. Neglect any one of them, and it won’t stand.

One thing that sets apart good bloggers from just the average ones is the ability of the former to drive traffic on a consistent basis. Driving traffic these days is easy but what counts the most is on whether the traffic that you’re going to drive is going to convert or not.

Conversion can vary depending on the goals that you set as a blogger but the bottom line here is that every serious blogger must aim for consistent and returning traffic, not just a one time spike.

In this post, I would like to talk about different things that you can do in order to get that consistent stream of traffic. But before that, let me just cover first the facts about traffic and why you need to aim for consistency.

Why Consistent Traffic?

This question is kind of like vague. It’s obvious that everyone wants consistent traffic on a daily basis but what’s a consistent traffic in the first place and how does one achieve it? To simply put it, just look at the top bloggers in the industry. They can rest or take a vacation for a week but does that decrease their traffic? Partly yes, but just because of how big they are right now, it’s more likely that the decrease wouldn’t be that much.

Getting that Consistent Stream of Traffic

Now a little bit about me and my blog. When I started last 2008 with MelvinBlog, it grew really rapidly (and of course some others grew even faster!). Just 4 months after the blog has been launched, I started slacking and thought I already had it going.

Long story short, I stopped writing and growing the blog and obviously the result was I lost some readership. That’s basically prematurely thinking that the blog has already consistent traffic. Now that story was long over and I learned a lot from it. I made sure that mistake will not happen again.

So here are now the 5 ways that everyone of us should work on to achieve that consistency. The list starts now:

1. Establish yourself initially via commenting

In the past few months, I’ve written so many articles already about commenting. I’ve always said that the best way to get known initially is to do bulk commenting. And that’s because when you’re getting started there really isn’t that much option. You can’t immediately ask bloggers to accept your guest posts and you cannot get them to link out to you so the way to go is to introduce yourself and the best way is to comment.

I’ve written a comprehensive guide on blog commenting on Famousbloggers and if you’re just getting started, I highly highly suggest you to check out that post.

2. Write for People, but build for search

These days we already know that most search engines, Google in particular, started moving into this model of ranking sites that people are reading the most. But that doesn’t mean that we have to stop caring about the basic things that we have to optimize for our blogs. I’ll be frank with you, SEO for blogs especially with WordPress is damn easy. So why not spend some time setting up things that have to be set up like the All in one seo pack, robots.txt, canonicalization and so on. Those things don’t take more than a day to complete but its long term effect can quite be dramatic.

Another obvious benefit of this is that it can be really rewarding if done properly. Some sites that really do well from search engines almost no longer need to add new content to their site because the search traffic that it gets is already worth it.

3. Establish your social media presence

This is probably one of my biggest regrets in blogging. I dived heads first into social media thinking I can get tons of traffic just by submitting each and every of my posts. Obviously that’s wrong.

Like most things, social media is all about establishing and building your connections first before reaping the benefits. These days I really get good amount of traffic from social media and that’s because I’ve used it as I should and unlike before, I already have connections. Think about it, if you’re just into a new territory and you want people to do things for you, do you think they’re going to do you that favor?

4. Set  Guest Posting Goals per month

Well if we’re aiming for consistent traffic then why do we have to guest post every month? My simple answer is that simply because there are hundreds of new readers everyday. Why do you think guys like David Risley, Daniel Scocco, ViperChill do guest posts even though they’re getting over 1000 uniques a day? It’s because of they know that there’s just so much potential out there and also plenty of untapped traffic sources to get into.

That should be it for you. 5 guest posts per month shouldn’t be that hard. Make sure to set some goal in this and it could really give you a lot of return traffic.

5. Keep Funneling your readers

Assuming you have 30-50 visitors on a daily basis, what do you need to do then? Two things, first is try to work more on getting more traffic and second is funnel those existing readers to make the most out of them.

Funneling them could be as simple as letting sign up to your newsletter or subscribe to your rss and follow you on twitter. Or it could be as complex (and rewarding) as getting them to buy your stuff or join your membership program. All of these depend on what you initially planned and how you want to execute that plan through your strategies.

Conclusion

So that’s it. Just 5 things, but as you can see it involves a lot of hard work and dedication. That’s why I always tell people that blogging isn’t hard, but just needs a lot of hard work. The fact is that people will read this but nobody will do anything which is why only really few people get traffic and eventually make money from their blog.

I hope that in this article I’ve given up some good information on getting consistent traffic and how it can be done. Remember, its not about the quantity, its the quality that you get that counts the most. I’d rather have 50 people reading me and following me over and over again than 1000 people that I’m not even sure if they’re real person or bot, that would follow me for just one day and disappear the next day. What do you think?

For those who’ve started a blog with hopes of using it as a potential source of revenue, it doesn’t take long to identify one simple problem: lack of traffic. That’s right, if you’ve ever started a blog or website, then you know exactly what I’m talking about.

It can be excruciatingly difficult to generate a worthwhile amount of traffic to monetize your blog. In many cases, it’s sufficiently challenging that many bloggers simply give up over a relatively short period of time. The basic premise of making money from your blog is seems pretty simple:

Throw as much traffic at your site as possible, then don’t leave anything on the table.

However, the hard part of this equation is generating enough traffic to make your blogging efforts worthwhile. Most bloggers tend to learn and focus on various elements pertaining to improving both their on-page and off-page search engine optimization. Naturally, this is a very important aspect of blogging and with recent trends in guest blogging, there are a number of useful strategies available.

At the same time, many bloggers lose sight of other methods for branding their website and generating traffic. No, I’m not referring to article marketing, Adwords campaigns, or directory submissions. What I’m referring to are good old fashioned offline methods for driving traffic to your blog. Think of it this way, what would you do to promote your business if it were not a website? Okay then, let’s imagine this, it’s 1980 and the Internet isn’t available. What then?

How to promote traffic to your blog with offline methods?

To start off with, you would probably rely heavily on Word of mouth advertising. Just like for your blog, you would probably tell your mother, spouse or partner, and a few friends about it. You might purchase a listing in your local Yellow Pages or newspaper.

If you provided good products or services, over time, your customers would tell their friends about your company. Though some may consider this option to be tacky, you might even have your company logo/website spray painted on your vehicle. If your business was your sole source of income, you might be less reluctant to consider that type of advertising.

For many bloggers, however, they rely on advertising or affiliate revenue instead of selling products directly or providing services. In the instances where you have this type of revenue stream, some of the previous ideas don’t seem to make a tremendous amount of sense. Advertising in your local Yellow Pages or newspaper is not inexpensive, after all. What’s more is that you probably wouldn’t be able to achieve a positive return on investment with the thin margins on affiliate revenue or the relatively low returns on blog advertisements.

Over the years, I’ve seen some very successful blogs use some unique and innovative strategies to brand their website and promote traffic. One blog managed to help coordinate and promote a local charity in conjunction with a local television station.

At the time, I maintained a blog in the same niche, and was amazed at how well they aligned their blog with a local charity to help establish their website’s brand. Watching the local news, their website was mentioned and featured by the news station, repeatedly. Not only were they helping a very good cause, but they received a tremendous amount of positive exposure for their efforts.

Another example may hold relevance to some, but not all blog niches. I’ve seen blogs hold local contests. They ask readers to make funny and interesting signs featuring their website domain, then take pictures of themselves while they’re at major sporting events. The readers then submit their photos taken at local sports team events to the website. Obviously, this has more than one benefit starting with your website being advertised in public with the signs. If the event pictures are reasonably tasteful and funny, you not only engage your blog readers, but receive interesting content to post on your website.

Overall, it can be a challenge to think outside of the box with relevant methods to promote your blog or website outside of the Internet itself. However, if you’re able to find innovative strategies that work, it can be tremendously valuable to establishing and promoting your brand. Have you ever tried unconventional methods to promote your website? If so, what would you recommend?

Jarret Morrow is the co-founder of the Hive Health Media blog network which provides health and fitness tips. He also maintains his own natural health website called, Supplement Updates.

A link bait post is just a post or an article worthy of getting tons of trackbacks and recognition.

A link bait is just a post or an article that is the type that receives ton of attention which others want to link to; this will push you up the search engine ladder.

So let’s see what makes a successful link bait post

Know Your Audience

Before you even start you should have a good idea and know what you want to write about, most importantly however is that you need to know what you audience wants. This is what makes link bait posts like bait posts. You won’t get anywhere if your audience does not like it.

The Headline

You will want to write a catchy title at the beginning of the link bait article as this works best most of the time. Some argue that you need to write the title after the body of the post. Whichever the case make sure it catches the eyes of your audience.

Look at your site’s statistics to see what your visitors like. Also look in Google Trends what is currently popular. Google Trends always shows you a graph if it is going up or down.

Content is king

This is obviously the most important factor in writing a link post. You will want to make the link bait post filled with useful information. Make sure it is well written and informative. Always make sure that you write about a subject that you know a lot of. Don’t add unnecessary stuff; just provide the reader with what they want in an easy to read way.

Make sure the post is full of useful and information and make sure the post doesn’t drag on.

Chunk it up

With link bait posts you want to break the post up in chunks and include a lot of clear headlines. This will make the article easier to read and is also nice for skimming. Not a lot of people will read a huge article and this is important for the masses that just skim through, it also looks nice.

Visualization

This is not as important as there are many excellent link bait articles out there that do not include images, but including images will boost your link bait post just that much more

Hitting the Sweet Spot

• Research what topics are popular and write about what you know a lot of.
• Write informative and helpful posts; include resources and a tip or two.
• Break down the important points, people don’t like to read long paragraphs
• Make sure the post doesn’t drag on, keep to the point.

Good Link Baits

Good link baits are usually meaningful and insightful which the majority of internet users accept. Most good link bait posts are timeless.

Bad Link Baits

Bad in this case doesn’t really mean bad, it’s more like a bad attitude really. Bad link baits are usually controversial, while sometimes it might be a good thing. A lot of people find such posts distasteful.

Rank a product or service.

Ranking a product gives the rated product or services some free publicity; some companies may thank you for it. These posts are usually top ten lists. Lists especially make good link bait posts as you may have seen.

Controversy

Say something controversial that others might not say. This is actually an example of a bad link bait post but it might do you more benefit than harm.

Breaking news

It is quite difficult to report breaking news first if you are not well connected in the industry. But if you do manage to succeed here you will get some great publicity.

These things will in no way guarantee a successful link bait post, but may increase its chances. You cannot be sure if it will succeed or not. The only advice I can give you it to keep trying; you will definitely get better with it.

Thank you for reading.

This is a guest post written by Stefan Jacholke of Techno-Flux – The ultimate computer tips and tricks site.