For one it is not about getting pay per click. Hooqy is all about traffic. Getting paid per impression is a better program in my opinion because regardless of whether or people come to your site and click or not you’re going to get paid.

Therefore the goal is simply to drive traffic. And the best part about Hooqy is that unlike Google where you can only set up three ad units, on Hooqy you have several different unique ways that you can use to make your money. But before we can get into all that we have to select a niche to work with.

Selecting a niche.
Unlike Google, we are not going after really, really, niche sites. We’re going after what gets the most traffic, what’s more popular, what people are interested in all the time; we are going after the broad topics.

In order for this to work our niche has to be very broad, there has to be a lot of forums, a lot of blogs, and a lot of different websites we’re going to borrow traffic from. I know that sounds like work, but it’s really not.

For example let’s say we chose the niche hockey. There are a lot of websites about hockey, there are a lot of blogs, and a lot of forms about hockey. This niche is big enough for us to continue.

The first thing I do is do a Google search on my niche (hockey) and sign-up to the biggest forums in that niche. Bookmark them because we are going to use them later.

The Method
Now that we picked our topic we are going to set up the page that we will be driving traffic to. Go to blogger.com and set up a free blog. You will be using this blog as your website.

The very first thing you should do is get rid of the blogger toolbar. This toolbar causes more problems than it’s worth between people reporting your blog or worse, using the search feature in leaving your blog. Go to the layout page on blogger go to edit HTML. In the header section, right under the template information enter this code:

#navbar-iframe {
height:0px;
visibility:hidden;
display:none; }

Now go to Youtube.com and pull up a few videos about your topic. So for our example:

Go through and add 10 to 20 videos as posts, as individual posts, on your blog.

Now go back to Hooqy We are going to get the ad codes.

Hooqy Publisher Member Area

After you have added the site URL, our system will guide you to get code. We recommend you check all ad type in order to maximize the earning:

In blogger, we recommend this banner sizes:

So you need to get three ad code in Hooqy publisher area.

The rest of setting up is pretty straightforward, simply copy and paste the ad code into your blogger blog as HTML widgets.

Now that advertising is added to your blog, add a feedburner.com subscribe box to your blog. This can be done by going to feedburner.com and burning your feed.

Go to publicize and select e-mail subscriptions. Activate it, then add the subscribe form on your blog as HTML widget. You can  put this right above the 100 x 600 banner, making it the first thing a user sees in my sidebar. You can see why this is important for recycling traffic.

The advertising will automatically appear in your website if you automatically approved it. We suggest using this option as it has not caused a decrease in the publisher earnings. Some of our publishers currently making $10-$15 a day on autopilot posting one YouTube a video on their blog per day using this method we recommend them.

Driving Traffic
Unlike building Google ad sense ad blogs we are simply going for traffic. This means no SEO for the most part. We are simply focused on getting as many eyes on our pages as possible.

Remember those forums we signed up for earlier? We are going to use them now. Create a large banner to put in your signature on these forums. It doesn’t have to be anything special just large and attention-getting.

Now make a few posts in the most popular threads on each forum. After your post count gets up you can then start posting your individual blog posts as threads on the forums. The more popular the forum is the more residual traffic you will receive.

Also comment on the biggest blogs in your niche with links to your blog and blog posts. Whenever you notice traffic dying in your Hooqy dashboard simply make a round of posts on the forms and the traffic will go right back up. Also exchange links with some of the popular sites in your niche. Don’t worry about SEO it’s not important and it will take care of itself.

That’s it for this method. Simply drive more traffic by participating in forums or exchanging more links whenever possible. You will notice they eventually you will start getting traffic from Youtube due to the statistics info under each video which shows your blog as a referrer. Also your feedburner account will start to grow on its own and you have many repeat visitors.

This is a very simple way to make money online if not the easiest. Expand your network of traffic and earnings will grow up. Our publishers can have one blog that makes me $10 or $300 a month and this method spent less than five minutes a day getting traffic for it. You can easily build a network of blogs and make thousands a month doing this!

Article Marketing

If you have been involved with internet marketing for any length of time, chances are you’ve heard of article marketing. Article marketing is essentially creating and distributing articles to numerous places on the net where they will in turn be distributed to a wide range of webmasters and publishers.

Okay, that’s a bit of a technical definition, I think the easiest way to explain this is by showing you an example. Let’s take a look at an example:

http://ezinearticles.com/?cat=Internet-and-Businesses-Online:Internet-Marketing

If you click on that link, you will be taken to EzineArticles (this is the best article directory, and we will cover it in great detail shortly). Here you will see several articles written on the topic of anxiety.

So let’s say for example, that you own a website about internet marketing. I am going to assume that your website already contains lots of helpful information. All you would need to do is pull from what you already have, and write an article about anxiety (we will discuss how to do this exactly). You then take the article and submit it to EzineArticles.

Once your article is submitted, it will now be property of EzineArticles and be published on their website. This is of huge benefit to you because EzineArticles receives A LOT of traffic.

EzineArticles is an article directory, which means that people will not only come just to read articles, but they will also come to grab content to publish on their own site. Once your article is published, people will have the right to download it and publish it on their own site, as long as they agree not to modify your article in any way.

So here’s the catch, at the end of our article, we will be permitted to have a few links back to our blog. This means that every article you submit will result in:
1) Highly Targeted Traffic
2) Backlinks
Article marketing is a fantastic way to “feel out the waters” with your cpa offer. It doesn’t cost you anything but your time. I would suggest taking an offer and writing a few articles. It also doesn’t hurt to check and see if others are doing the same in your niche.

Facebook Marketing

Facebook is a very popular social networking site. It is a place where people go to network, catch up with friends, and introduce themselves to new experiences.

There are a few different ways you can use Facebook to market your cpa offers.

Building a Presence on Facebook

One popular method is to establish yourself on Facebook and build up an account filled with people that are interested in your market. This can be done by creating a fan page or a group (or both!). The key to success is to not be forward with your marketing, but to establish yourself as a valuable resource, and fit the marketing in when it makes sense.

Before you know it, your group will go viral and it will begin to take on a life of its own.

Twitter Marketing

Recently the media has been talking about Twitter. It seems I can’t watch more than a few minutes of news without hearing a reference to “Follow me on Twitter”, or “I tweeted this today”. So what in the world is Twitter? And what
the heck is a “Tweet”!?!
Twitter is actually an incredibly powerful marketing tool, and if you are not harnessing it’s power, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. The things Twitter can do continue to astonish me to this day.

According to Wikipedia, Twitter is a “free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as “tweets”.

Twitter is a place where you create a profile for yourself (similar to Myspace or Facebook), but the focus is on interacting with others through sending out short (they can only be 140 characters long) bursts to everyone that is “following you”.

At first glance, it might sound kind of strange. Honestly, the first time I heard of Twitter I thought to myself, this sounds silly. But it works, it really does. People are crazy into this stuff!

Similar to Facebook marketing, Twitter is all about building a relevant list of people in your niche. One of the most powerful aspects of this is that you can market to these people repeatedly.

Youtube Marketing

YouTube is one of the most visited sites in the world. Did you know it can be used to get traffic and backlinks to your blog?
It is not that difficult to make a simple video consisting of slides and music (can be done using free software like windows movie maker). For example, you could make a short presentation that lists the benefits of blog, and why your visitors should check it out now.

Forum Marketing

The internet is quite a social place. A forum is a place where a group of people that share a similar interest go to discuss it. These are also known as message boards, or “bulletin boards”.

To market on a forum, you just need to find one that would contain people that would be a good audience for your blog. A good match for this is when you can be promoting in a market that you are actually interested in. You shouldn’t have any trouble creating some posts on a niche-relevant forum.

It is important that you not be too pushy with your promotions. Many forums allow you to promote in a signature. I have found that it is always better to establish yourself as an expert, as this will lead more people to trust you, and be
more likely to check out your stuff.

Blog Marketing

Another popular way to get links to your blog is by going to other blogs that are related to yours and making comments. Many blog owners love it when you come to their site and leave a comment, and often don’t even mind if you are using it as a way to link back to your site. You just need to make sure you don’t appear spammy!

What Is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, and it is essentially the process of preparing and promoting your website for the search engines. Whenever someone wants to find something on the internet, they use a search engine. The
search engines have an incredible task, they need to find relevant results for searches that people perform.

Optimizing your site means that you are spending time getting it ready to it will hopefully rank in the search engines. This will bring traffic to your website.

Why You Should Optimize Your Word press Blog?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is very important if you ever want to gain decent rankings in the search engine. Even though the word “SEO” can sound terribly intimidating, actually applying it to your blog is no where near as hard as it sounds. All you have to do is invest some initial time into learning the basics, and soon your blog will be better than 90% of the others out there, simply because you have SEO.

Here are just a few of the many reasons why SEO for WordPress is so important:

- SEO is actually pretty easy to do

- Most people don’t bother to do it.

- Keyword research can play a big part in increasing your natural search engine rankings.

- Bottom Line: The results far outweigh the time required to do SEO.

The Basics Of On-Page Optimization

Before we go any further, I would like to review with you the basic principles of on-page optimization. As we move forward in the videos, I will be applying each of these (along with many more advanced concepts) to a blog.

Here are the step of SEO

- Keyword Research

- Actual Page Name

- Title Tags

- Meta Tags

- Header Tags

- Bold, Italics, Underlining

- Keyword Usage

- Proper Link Structure

WordPress Plugins You Will Need

Before we start breaking things down one step at a time, you will need to download and install a few plugins. Please take the time now to download all of these plugins (if you don’t want to use some of them, that’s okay):
All in One SEO

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Google XML Sitemaps

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

No Duplicate

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-no-duplicate/

SEO Friendly Images

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-image/

Redirection

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

Subscribing to Comments

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/subscribe-to-comments/

Google Analytics

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress

Popularity Contest

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/popularity-contest/

Related Posts

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin/

WP Polls

http://www.lesterchan.net/wordpress/readme/wp-polls.html

Optimizing Your Permalink Structure

This is one of the most important things you should do to properly SEO your blog.

Even though WordPress is a great piece of software, it is not initially optimized for SEO. Let’s say for example, that you create a post entitled “Potty Dog Training Tips”. By default it would look something like this:
Myblog.com/?p=3
That isn’t very descriptive at all, is it! By making a simple change to something called the permalink structure, we can make it look like this automatically:
Myblog.com/potty-dog-training-tips

A lot better eh?
Changing the permalink structure is pretty easy, you just need to go to the settings section of your blog, and click on “Permalinks”. Make sure that you enter this as your custom link:
/%category%/%postname%/

Once this information is saved, your blog will generate some code that you need to stick into your .htaccess file. You can do this through ftp or a program like file manager through your cpanel.

Overview Of An Optimized Post

Before we go any further, I would like to outline the basics of what go into creating an optimized post or page:

- Title

-Importance of header tags

- Italics, bold, underlining

- Good content

- Keyword tags

- Optimized Images

This program will allow you to place ads from Hooqy Media on your website. When people click/display on the ads you get 60% profit share. It is a simple way to make money. A bonus to the program is that the ads are tailored to your website content.

Sell Newsletter ad space

If you have a popular newsletter then you can capitalize on this by selling ad space in your newsletter to other non-competing websites.

Join affiliate programs

You can join affiliate programs that are related, but not competing with your products. You can then use these affiliate programs to build up your website and your sales.

Sell banner ad space on your home page

If you have a nicely ranked site then it should not be too difficult to find buyers for advertising space on your home page.

Sell advertising space on your message board pages

You can capitalize on your message boards popularity by selling space for the ads.

Sell links

One way links are a great way to get a better search engine ranking, so people are willing to pay for them. Just be careful to not oversell yourself so that you start being more of a link site than a business site.

Build a directory

Start by offering free listings then once your directory starts getting some recognition you can start to make the listings paid spots.

Sell articles you have written or that you own

Every website owner is looking for good content. Make up bundles of short articles for different markets and sell them. You can sell old articles that you have used on your website or in advertising. Just be sure to let them know they are buying recycled articles.

Do not let monetizing get out of hand

While monetizing can be great for your business, it can also be harmful. Do not let it start to take over your business. The whole point is to utilize your assets in the best way to
boost your income, but not to over shadow your business.

Double free gifts as promotional items

Anything you give away should have your business name on it. This is a great source of free advertising and a good way to boost sales.

Create lead lists to sell

You have to be careful about this, but you can do it. You just can not sell names or information that you got under a privacy policy that said you would not sell. You may be able to build a list in other ways. These lists are going to be valuable tools that you can sell for a nice profit.

Build keyword lists

You know how hard it is to build keyword lists. So why not take your knowledge and build some lists for new businesses to help them out.

Put your blog to work

Place ads in your blog. It is a nice space where people are likely to frequent. Use it as ad space, but do it carefully.

Team up with another business

Make sure the business is not competition but offers something for the same target market. You can team up to improve your online presence and power.

Sell your newsletter

You may find someone who is in a similar market as you that needs a newsletter but doesn’t want to write their own. Sell them yours.

Sell your blog

Blogs are hot these days, but they take time to manage and create content to put on them. Some business owners may not want to take all that time for a blog, but still desire to have that aspect on their website. Sell you blog to them.

Make a membership area

Put all of your good advice, information and valuable content in a paid area for members only.

Buy up good keyword domain names and rent them out

Top domain names are a hot commodity. People want them because they are one of the keys to getting good traffic. If you buy up a handful of hot names and rent them out then you can capitalize on that.

Use tagging sites

These sites are kind of like social networking. They allow you to get exposure in a large way. By joining up with tagging sites you will get far more visitors and make more money.

Use in-text advertising

You have probably seen random words highlighted to a clickable link. This is in-text advertising. When you click on the link it takes you elsewhere. You make money from this. It has benefits over other types of ads because it is not distracting or invasive.

Add a search box

You can add a search box to your page that allows users to search your website or the web.

Build your own paid advertising programs

You can build up your own advertising program, like in-text ads and Ad Sense. All you need to do is write up a sheet explaining that you sell ad space and keep it out there on your site for people who may be interested.

Sell your Ebooks

If you give away Ebooks as incentives and have some sitting around that you do not use anymore then sell them to others. You can usually sell Ebooks to multiple people so you can keep making money on them. It is worth looking into the art of selling an Ebook.

Sell your expertise

If you are established as an expert then you can be a consultant and sell your services. People will pay good money to get an expert to give them advice.

Set up a donation account

You can simply ask for donations to help keep your site running. This is not as effective for business sites as for non-profit sites, but it can still bring in some money.

Add RSS feeds

You can make commissions off running RSS feeds on your website. Just make sure they are non-competing.

Get a sponsor

You may find a company that loves your website and business so much that they are willing to be a sponsor for exclusive advertising rights. Of course, you need to negotiate a deal wisely so you do not end up losing money because this means you can not offer space for other advertisers.

Set up a seminar course

Use all your resources to develop a course where you tech whatever you are an expert about. As long as you are a recognized expert you can expect a good turn out.

Write a blog for another company

Instead of just selling your old blog entries you can actually offer to write someone else blog. Companies will be likely to hire you because you have a proven record of writing a business blog.

Join a program where you can make brand merchandise

There are companies that will custom make branded products for you to sell and make commission from. This is a combination of a way to make money and a way to get your name out there.

The first method, selling clicks, means placing ads, like banners, on your site. When your customers click the ads (or occasionally when they simply view them) you collect a payment from the advertiser. In this case, your customers are companies to whom you sell access to your readers.

The second method, selling coffee cups, is not limited to ceramic drinking devices, but to anything you sell directly to your readers. In this case, your readers are your customers, purchasing from you products that advertise your site or information only you can provide.
Selling clicks is the easiest and most popular of the two methods, so let’s take a look at it first. But first, let’s take a look at your readers.

Readers don’t love ads. They don’t love banners. They don’t love intrusive, flashing distractions and you’re not going to please them by placing ads on your page. Thus you must take the advice Machiavelli offered his prince six centuries ago: “While it may not always be possible to be loved, it’s critical to avoid being hated.” That advice, delivered in a political context, holds true in an advertising one. It’s critical that if your ads do not attract readers to your site (and it’s a guarantee that readers are not coming to admire your banners), you should at least make an effort not to drive them away.

Contextual Ads Program

You’ve seen the towers on hundreds of sites: ever-changing boxes of text ads that reflect the content in front of the reader’s face. If you are reading about an election, the ads may be related to political parties. If you’re reading about automobiles, the ads may be hawking car parts. Whatever the ads are selling, they are somehow related to the content and therefore of interest to the reader.

Hooqy Media provides this nature to the website owners.Hooqy Media ads can be found on thousands of blogs and retail sites, and there’s a reason for it: with Hooqy Media Publisher program you don’t need to choose which ads you’ll display and you don’t have to find your own advertisers. You simply sign up for the program and Hooqy Media Ad System will scan your page, assigning advertisements based on your content and displaying them in a Text/Graphical Banner, In-Text Ads, CPV Pop Ad or Interstitial Ads on your page through a small piece of code you integrate into your design. When a reader clicks/view on the ad, you receive a commission (60% profit share) for delivering that reader to the advertiser’s website. Because the ad content is related to your page, the odds of a reader clicking/viewing are much higher than random ads you might otherwise feature.

Blog traffic exchanges are sites that guarantee visitors will visit your blog and spend a pre-determined amount of time there. But there’s a price: for each visitor that views your blog, you have to view the blog of another in the same manner.

Here’s how it works. When you register your blog on a traffic exchange, you create an account specific to your blog. You earn credits to your account by visiting the sites of others, which are displayed inside a frame with a timer that measures how long you must remain at that site. After an amount of time determined by the site, you enter a code into the frame (this ensures that individuals are actually at their computers) and move to the next site. For each site you visit, you receive credit which is “spent” by your blog being viewed by others. The more blogs you visit, the more visitors you will receive in return.

Most traffic exchanges do not give 1-for-1 credits, meaning you’ll have to visit more than 10 blogs to receive 10 visitors. In fact, the ratio is usually only a half-credit per visit, meaning you’ll visit 20 sites to receive those visitors, but free, bonus, or mystery credits may be awarded randomly to keep your ratio a little better than one visitor for two visits. The excess credits are generally sold by the traffic exchanges to advertisers who pay for visitors and save themselves the time of waiting at the various sites.

You’ll get traffic in proportion to how much time you spend surfing (and don’t tell anyone, but you can often have separate browsers open to separate traffic exchanges for simultaneous surfing), but it’s important to realize what kind of traffic you’re receiving. To learn the thoughts of your visitors, take a look inside your own head: you’re visiting, not to read the blogs, but to get visitors in return…and so it everyone else. Does that mean the traffic is worthless? Not at all. When you look at hundreds of blogs, you’ll find a lot of them with features worth emulating and content worth a link or two. You’ll also receive visitors who are looking for the kind of content you present. Like-minded and even opposite-minded readers will leave comments, link to you, and may eventually become regular readers. However, it’s important to understand that the vast majority are only visiting to get visitors in return and are probably filing their nails while they wait for the allotted time to expire. Then they move on to the next blog.

If you lack the time to sit at your PC manually generating traffic, many traffic exchanges will sell you their surplus visitors for as little as a penny apiece. Five bucks will earn you 500 visitors, a fair price since those visitors are in no way targeted to your content; they are bloggers who are trying to earn your visit in return. You can also purchase banners on many traffic exchanges, which will give you fewer visitors (they are sold by impressions, not clicks) but they will be more interested visitors.

Many traffic exchanges, like the blog directories and blog rings discussed below, will require you to place a small banner on your site, which may limit the number of traffic exchanges you join unless you have room on your page for 15 or 20 tiny banners all in a pile.

One final note: before you join a traffic exchange, try to get a feel for how established it is, i.e. how many blogs it features. A brand new traffic exchange may only have a few dozen blogs. That means not only will you to look at the same 20 blogs over and over, you’ll have the same 20 bloggers visiting you. Unique traffic is valuable traffic, so stick with those traffic exchanges that can deliver hundreds of unique hits to your blog.

Here are a few of the more popular traffic exchanges:

BlogXchange
Blog Clicker
Blog Explosion
Blog Soldiers

Blog Directories
With the popularity of blogs increasing every day, it’s nearly impossible for a reader to know what blogs exist and where to find them all. That’s the beauty of the blog directory: it organizes and categorizes the thousands of blogs listed its database so readers can find your blog more easily. Blog directories are generally free to the blogger, though they will often require you to feature a small, approved banner on your site.

To get listed in a blog catalog, visit them and submit your site, accurately describing your blog (an inaccurate description will result in less targeted traffic). Check their requirements for banners and be sure to use the link they generate for you – this will ensure you get credit if another blogger joins from your page. Most blog directories will require you to host their images on your own server space, so be sure to follow their directions. Stealing their bandwidth is a sure way to get de-listed in a hurry.

Here are a few of the more popular blog directories, in alphabetical order:

Blogarama
Blog Catalog
GetBlogs
Globe of Blogs
LS Blogs

Blog Rings
The concept behind the blog ring is a simple one: similar blogs join in a ring, each placing a link on their page to the next blog in the ring. Visitors interested in the subject those blogs feature, be it model trains or Green politics, are encouraged to click on the link that leads to the next blog. It’s usually a bad idea to send your visitors away, but in this case you’re receiving a price for the service: other blogs in the same ring are sending their traffic to you.

The number and type of blog rings is limited only by the types of blogs online, which is to say that unless your blog is absolutely unique in the blogosphere, there is probably a ring or three that will meet your needs. But be careful joining a ring simply because it exists – remember, you’re sending some of your traffic away, and it’s not often wise to send traffic to your competitors. That’s why it’s important, before you join a ring, to surf it around once or twice. You’ll not only get to see the competition, you may learn a way to one-up it, making your blog stand out in a sea of similar information.

There are specialized blog rings for Australian blogs, romance writers, even those who blog about knitting. With a little searching, you can find a blog ring that fits your content perfectly.

Link Exchanges

A number of programs, known as “link exchanges,” will allow your link to be listed on the blogs of others, so long as you carry on your blog a small ad that lists the blogs of others who are members of the same program. A link exchange works the same way as a blog ring, tying all the featured blogs into a big circle, with the exception that the blogs you link to may not be similarly grouped as they are for most blog rings. When you sign up for the link exchange, you’ll receive credits every time your page displays the links of others, and your credits are used up as your blog is displayed on the blogs of other members of the link exchange.

While link exchanges are a convenient way for you to have your blog prominently displayed on the blogs of others, there are several possible side effects that you need to examine before signing up for any link swap program.

The first caveat is that, because link swaps are generally not grouped by subject or content, you may find that your blogs is linking to content that you may find objectionable, like adult content, opposing political blogs, or competitors in your industry. Since it’s important to keep tight control on where you send your customers, it’s a good idea to watch the blog swap closely to ensure that you are displaying the content you want and that you’re not going to alienate your customers and readers by displaying offensive content.

The second issue you may have to deal with is the speed at which some applications operate, especially if they download a java application to your page. Many load more slowly than the average page, forcing your customers to wait or ‘jerking’ the page they are reading back to the top once the application is fully loaded. If the link exchange application is causing your loading speed to suffer, it’s probably going to cause you more trouble than it’s worth. Remember, your readers want to jump right in and read what you have to say. Jerking the page around as soon as they dig in to your content is not going to make many friends.

A final issue is one of cosmetics. Because some link exchange applets are one-size-fits-all, the layout size or colors may clash with your blog. Be sure that you can modify the application to make it unobtrusive before you put something on your page that will prove a distraction to your readers. You want them to notice the links, but like everything else on your page, they should add to it rather than detracting from it.

Here are a few popular link exchange programs:

Gotlinks
Gotop
LinksPal
Be sure to look farther than this list, however, as there are certain to be link exchanges that cater specifically to your content or your geographic location.

Visiting Other Blogs – Meet the Competition

Once you have staked out your little corner of the blogosphere, it’s time to really size up the competition. You may have met a few of them through blog rings and traffic exchanges, but now it’s time to really read their sites and – gasp – get to know them. Just because a blog is a competitor does not mean the blogger is an adversary, and an excellent way to build your reputation and increase your traffic is to introduce yourself to your fellow bloggers and their readers through the comments section of their blogs.

Bloggers love comments because readers who are engaged in a discussion in the comments section will return to a page again and again. Some popular blogs have hundreds of comments on some entries, and for every commenter you can be sure there are dozens who are following along but who do not care for whatever reason to get involved in the discussion. Comment areas will usually allow you to enter your email address and blog address in addition to your name, so for every comment you make, you’re insuring that another link to your blog is placed in front of people who might be interested in what you have to say.

However, avoid “comment spam,” the practice of dropping comments just for the link or blatantly advertising your site without adding anything useful to the discussion. It’s not only a good way to alienate potential readers; it’s a good way to get you banned from a site. A good commenter will often earn a link from the host, and if the host has more traffic than you (and it’s a good idea to comment only on those blogs that are more established than yours) you’ll often pick up readers who see your site linked from that blog. Be sure to reciprocate quickly and thank the other blogger for linking. You’ve made a friend who will consistently send targeted traffic your way. If a site has an established link policy, be sure to follow it to the letter. You want to give other blogs every reason to link you and no reason to cut you off.

Traded Links – a Valuable Asset

Here’s a little lesson in supply and demand: your demand for links will be insatiable but your supply will be limited. The best possible world for you as a blogger would be to have every blog in the world sending traffic to you, but your blog will have only room to send traffic to a small percentage of them in return. As a result, your links are valuable, and you should treat them as a treasured commodity: hoarded until needed and then spent with the attitude that you must squeeze the most value out of each one.

As you begin building your Blog Empire from a small duchy on the outer edge of the blogosphere to an empire covering much of its virtual continent, you will, to be honest, not have a lot to offer other bloggers. Your traffic will be small. Your brand will be unknown. The big blogs will ignore you and the little ones will do you no good. However, that’s no excuse not to start trading your links for whatever you can get for them.

Do an occasional internet search for pages that link to you. Many times, your control panel will pick up any page that links to one of your entries, but much of the time it will mean using Google, Technorati, or MSN searches to see who is linking you. Then check out their blog to see what it might have to offer. If it’s a teenage girl’s rant blog that seems to have 3 visitors a day or if it’s a blog that is updated monthly, it may not be worth a reciprocal link. However, if you discover that it’s a popular destination for people who might be interested in what you have to say, then it’s probably worthwhile to drop in, thank the blogger for the link, and join in the discussion. Those readers who are interested in your entry will probably pay you a visit.
Just remember, your links are valuable! Check them constantly to ensure that each one points to a blog that is earning its keep on your front page. Those blogs that have gone into hibernation or that have dropped you should be eliminated. Cull your links repeatedly and mercilessly and always be on the lookout for opportunities to upgrade.

Search Engines and News Engines

There are a million sites out there that promise to submit your site to hundreds, even thousands of search engines. Before you choose one – giving them your money or email address – think for a moment about how many search engines you use. You probably have a favorite or two, as do most people. And in many cases, they are the same ones. That means that so long as your site is listed in the major engines (Yahoo! and Google and MSN, to name a few) there’s really no need to pay for someone to submit it to a search engine no one uses or to give them your email address (which will coincidentally be deluged by spam from that day forward). It’s worthwhile to manually submit your site – ONCE – to the bigger engines, but once you have a few blogs linking to you, search spider programs find you anyway by following from another site.

A second way to avoid paying for others to submit your site to search engines is to pick a blog host or software that features a blog ping, an automatic submission engine that tells blog search sites that you have updated. Many of them allow you to choose which sites you’d like to submit your blog to (choose them all, of course) though there may be a restriction on the number of times you may ping the engines per day (e.g. Blogspot has a once-per-12-hours limit) because over-pinging, like multiple submissions to search engines, can result in your blog being blacklisted. It’s far better to err on the side of caution and let the search engines do their own work.

News engines are a different story. If you do a search of Google News for any specific subject, you’ll find a number of blogs listed right along with the major media outlets. Some of these independent outfits, like the Blogger News Network may even beat the major news outlets to a story. If what you write is original and newsworthy, submitting your site as a news source will ensure that someone looks over your content for inclusion along with CBS and the New York Times as a source of news. In this case you have little control – other than to ensure you entries are newsworthy – over whether blog is included as a news source. However, a successful listing is worth its weight in gold and is definitely worth pursuing.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkmCwB5XsLY