Photos: It’s no doubt that using photos of scantily clad women attract huge attention to your auctions. Check out this auction for some ideas.

Getting People to put your Auction on their Watchlist: Some ebay listings have quite ingenious ways to get you to add their auction to your Watch List. Check out this auction. The more watched an item is the more likely it’ll make it into the Most Watched Items List.

Know your Market: Spend plenty of time seeing what other people are doing. See who else is selling what you are selling, see who is doing it most successfully, see which of their products/titles is converting most often & build on that.

Writing Compelling Titles: You want to catch people’s attention so don’t write lame titles. You want to get the person into the auction & then start preselling them the product or service that you’re offering. I normally research my competition to write titles effectively, then split test them over the course of a week for performance.

Use Bold or Featured: Many people don’t want to spend the extra cash for these addons but depending on what your CPA is or what offer you’re promoting using these features could double, triple or quadruple the views on your listings.

Ending the Auction: I’ve found the best time to end an auction is between 6-9pm on a Sunday Evening. I always try to run the auction for the full amount of time aswell.

Increase your Reputation: Buy lots of small $0.01 items, I bought about 250 when I first joined to get my reputation up & instill some trust in my buyers.

Set up a Store: If you’re pushing enough volume set up a store. It’s only $15.95/month. You should end up selling up to 25% more of your inventory a month.

Use Auctionads: Link to you auctions using auctionads from your websites. You can use the string
auctionads_ad_kw = "seller:sellerid"; to show auctions from your own listings.

Use TurboLister: I use Turbolister to list all my auctions easily & quickly. This speeds up the process & allows me to spend more time on promotion.

That’s about all I can think of at the moment hopefully this helps some of you guys that have been struggling a bit

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So let’s get back into things. First up I’ve managed to wittle down the Blog Reviews to the last 7 of which I’ll be announcing today or tomorrow.

Secondly I thought I’d give you a little insight on how to really double your blog traffic from search engines.

On a blog there’s three types of traffic (excluding paid).

Direct Traffic: This is traffic that you get from feed subscribers & regular visitors.

Referral Traffic: The traffic that you get when you trackback, your blog is mentioned on another site or you get dugg.

Organic Traffic: The traffic that you generate from search engines.

You can manipulate each of these three traffic sources in different ways, however many people fail to do one thing in particular with their blog & that’s leverage off old posts. The focus of any blogger is to keep up to date with current affairs & stories so they can be the first to break an important piece of information & as a result leverage heavily off referral traffic & returning users.

However, what if there was a way to really bring your old posts back in style? Well now there is.

One of my main gripes & possibly the only one I ever had with wordpress was that you couldn’t set the page title (what we see between the <title> tags) independantly from the post title (the name of the post). Therefore this post would end up having the title “SEO Title Tag + Wordtracker = Goodness” which isn’t really very optimised for the Search Engines.

The rest of this post will show you how to optimise your title tags for WordPress in a way that will enable you to bring your old posts back from the dead & start generating decent traffic. Remember, if we managed to double each posts daily visitor count you’d be doubling your search engine traffic.

Here’s the process:

1. Installing WordPress Plugins
2. Grabbing a list of all the posts contained within your blog
3. Exporting the posts into an excel file that we can use to work on the title tags in a neat format
4. Research the title tags using Wordtracker’s free tool
5. Set the title tags in WordPress using the plugin
6. Sit back & measure results

So here comes the fun part, first up you need to be using wordpress for the following plugin to work:

Download the SEO Title Tag Plugin & Install it

There’s two important advantages to installing this plugin:

1. You can set independant title tags for pages, posts, categories & tags
2. You can get rid of your blog name coming before or after every post in the <title tag>

Once you’ve followed the instructions it’s time to grab a list of all the posts contained within your site. Download Xenu (which is free).

Xenu will allow you to grab a list of all the posts indexable in the search engines from your blog. To do this simply:

1. Goto File
2. Check URL
3. Input the URL of your Blog
4. Hit OK
5. When it’s done hit Control + T then save it on the desktop

You now have a tabbed file with all the posts from your blog. It’ll also contain other stuff in there like affiliate links, images etc so we need to clean it up.

1. Open up the file in Excel & just delete columns B through to M
2. Next highlight column A then hit Data then Sort & hit Ok.
3. Now go down the column & delete all the URL’s that aren’t posts.

You should now have a nice Excel file with your posts in Alphabetical format. Now name Column A (Post) & name column B (Title Tag).

You can now use this excel file to work on the title tags for all of the posts in your blog. I also like to make other columns where I can chart the increase of traffic using a particular title tag but you don’t need to do that.

Now open up the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from wordtracker.

The aim here is to research much better title tags for your pages that will bring in traffic. So lets use this page as an example:

This page concentrates on Wordtracker, Title Tags & Increasing Traffic so I’ll get some numbers from those phrases & see if I can come up with anything else.

There’s not too much traffic for Wordtracker or Title tags & the term “Increase Blog Traffic” looks quite good. However it appears that term would be quite hard to leverage any traffic off since the top result has been featured on the front page of digg (& possibly other sites like techmeme) & also has 119 inbound links to that page alone.

Therefore I would then normally try & leverage traffic off the name of the plugin as I would assume a plugin like this would become pretty popular given what it allows you to do.

This would in turn give me a title tag such as: “SEO Title Tag for WordPress & Increasing Blog Traffic using Wordtracker” which is a good bit more seo friendly & should drive twice as much traffic, if not more than the original title.

Once I’ve decided on the title for a particular page I’ll then move onto the next page in the Excel list.

Another good reason to have a good title is for linking. If someone decides to link to your article, chances are they’ll use the title tag as the Anchor Text, so having keyword rich title tags can also help your rankings in more ways than one

I implemented this exact method less than 5 days ago & I’ve already seen a 32% increase in referrals from Search Engines.

Enjoy.

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I can personally say that I used to fall into this category, but over the years I’ve learnt that the only way to get what you want is to ask for it & pursue it.

Too many people will analyse what everyone else does instead of taking a stand & really getting your hands dirty. Especially with “making money online.” 99% of people would rather see what everyone else is doing than to come up with an original idea & test it out. Because that would be too much effort?

Getting into this frame of mind, whilst it’s non evasive is not doing you or your websites any good. You will be losing out on:

1. Exposure
2. Links
3. Friends
4. Revenue
5. Joint Ventures
6. Advertisers
7. Feed Readers
8. Email List Subscribers
9. Conversions
10. Traffic

It’s time for a wakeup call….
For example:

Jess writes an article, it’s the best article in the world. She puts it up on her blog (that no-one reads) & waits, hopes even prays for lots of people to come & read it, link to it & comment on her blog (she’s really excited). Then a week later Jess sits by the computer, hands in her head wondering why no-one has read her article or even dropped her a comment.

Bob on the other hand, writes a similar article. It’s not quite the best article in the world but it’s linkable & has original content. Once the article is finished Bob makes a shortlist of 50 blogs that might relate to the article. In turn he hand emails each blogger one by one using the following email:

Hi Blogger, my name is Bob & I run a fairly new blog on Bobs Things. I’ve been reading your blog for a while now & it has given me a lot of inspriation to share my knowledge & contribute in different ways.

I’ve written an article on Bobbing which addresses a number of themes that you discuss on your blog & I was wondering if I could possibly get some feedback or even a mention on your blog. In return, if I ever get a good audience I will make sure to return the favour

Kind Regards

Bob

What bob has achieved here has maybe taken an extra 20 minutes of his time. But in doing so he has potentially grown his blog readerbase by 50 people. Thousands more could follow if the article gets published on more blogs.

Don’t be afraid to ask for things. If you don’t ask you don’t get.

This can be applied across a number of different verticals:

Link Exchanges

Do not be afraid to ask sites that are relevant to yours for a link. If they value your website & think the content is linkable then they’ll do it. If you have a rubbish site that is clearly MFA or recycled content then don’t expect a link.

Affiliate Offers

If you’re promoting affiliate offers with reviews then ask for the business at the end of the review. Don’t expect the user to just click the link.

Thanks for reading my review of blah, if you enjoyed the review & want to purchase or find out more about the product please click here.

Affiliate Managers

If you’re running CPA campaigns & pulling more than 20+ leads per day consistently than you should really be asking your affiliate managers to do more for you & increase your CPA. They’ll usually be more than happy to bend over backwards for affiliates pushing “consistent numbers.”

Feed Subscribers

Ask people to subscribe to your feed, don’t just expect them to click the feed button & add you to their feed reader. Have a call to action at the bottom of each post:

Enjoy this post? Then subscribe to my feed for future updates!

Email List Subscribers

Again, if your plan is to get people to subscribe to your email list don’t just plop the box up there & expect people to put in their details. Either ask them to or make a call to action that will make them do it (i.e. giving something free away). Aweber allows you to have autoresponders that will email the free gift to the subscriber straight away.

Social Networking

If you want your readers to digg a story, just don’t plonk the button at the bottom of the post, encourage them to digg it. 15-20 initial Diggs can really get an article moving quickly.

Development Staff & Designers

Don’t expect them to churn out superb work off their own bat. Have goals & objectives for each site that you want them to work towards. Tell them when someting isn’t working the way you want it, get their opinions & work together.

Conclusion

Be proactive with your blog or your website, don’t sit there & analyse everyone else then expect your blog to do really well. It takes hard work, patience & the ability to take a few knockbacks here & there. But it’ll be worth it.

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Sometimes it can be difficult getting backlinks to these types of sites. Especially to the dedicated product review pages & many people completely overlook the power of Trackbacks in WordPress.

A trackback basically places a link on another site letting them know you’ve mentioned their post or your post is related to theirs. The good thing about a trackback is that it’s almost as good as a free link.

I’m not going to get into the discussion of “but most trackbacks are rel=nofollow” because I can tell you now, trackbacks DO help you rank & DO help you get indexed quickly.

Eli at Bluehatseo showed me some proof last week that you can get a whole 178 page site indexed in 2 days from using trackbacks only & I’ve seen the benefits myself.

Anyway, if I’m reviewing a product or service I’ll normally fire the keywords into Comment Hut (if you’re cheap you can just use Google Search or Blog Search). I usually use all three because it allows me a greater depth of search. I’ll grab all of the URL’s & sort them by pagerank & relevancy (talk about the same product or service I’m posting about). I’ll then trim the list down to anywhere from 5-20 blogs.

Then I’ll grab all the trackback URL’s from the blogs & put them in the trackback section in the post in WordPress. Whenever I hit publish there’s automatically instant links on anywhere from 5-20 sites that are relevant to my content.

Some webmasters do delete trackbacks, I know I do if they’re spammy. But if you’re writing good articles with good content most Webmasters will actually be flattered to get a trackback, as they think you’re “citing” them.

Quite often I’ll also get the other webmaster even signing up to my RSS Feed or becoming a regular reader of the blog when they notice the trackback, so there’s other advantages to making sure you utilise this technique more often.

A great example of a post that would kill trackbacks would be something like “The Top 500 WordPress Themes ever released” then submit a trackback to every single wordpress theme release page. It’d take time to put together but you can see where I’m heading with this post. Be Creative!

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There’s a number of ways to do this, please be considerate towards other bloggers though you don’t want to piss them off. Especially if they’re in the same space as you are. Anyway, these methods are non-invasive (apart from one :p) & if anything might bring you & other bloggers closer together.

Guest Posts: Bloggers go on holidays, go to events & shows. When no-one is around of course they need someone to fill their shoes! Building a good relationship with another blogger can be a good way to get a guest spot on their blog. If you write good content that attracts readers then you should have no problem dropping some links to your own blog. If they like what you have to say you’ll definately increase your readship twofold.

Submit Tips: Some blogs allow you to submit tips & tricks. If you’re a smart blogger you’ll try & think outside the box for this one. I get emails everyday of crap recycled tips. Generally they’ll get deleted straight away, that’s also why I stopped doing the Blog Carnival thing, hell all the submissions I got sucked. Try to be original, give them something they’ll be thrilled to post on their blog & you’ll definately get some attention.

Leave Comments: Comments are the easy way to generate some traffic from another blog. Try to make the comments on topic & also provide some useful information that perhaps wasn’t in the main post. If you can make the first comment on a post you’ll get the most views & traffic. I like to subscribe to Feedburners Email updates for this, it allows you to get notified as soon as a post is made. Hence get in there first

Adsense Advertising: I read a good post about this earlier on John Chow’s blog about how he advertised on Problogger then Darren replied with the amusing ad on the right. God knows what the CPM cost is for an Ad on Problogger, probably around $5-$8 CPM (Cost per 1000 Impressions).

Text Link & Banner Advertising: There’s also heaps of other ways to advertise, Direct Ads, Banners & even text links with brokers like textlinkads.

Textlinkads currently offers $100 discount on text links so loads of webmasters have been testing out the effect of having a link across 3 or so major players sites for a month.

Use Trackbacks: If you’re commenting about a post on another blog don’t be afraid to use Trackbacks. They’re an excellent way to let the bloggers know you like what they write enough to write a post about it. Readers can also view the trackbacks so that bit of extra traffic doesn’t hurt.

Mybloglog: Using Mybloglog is a great way to get additional traffic to your blog. Check out the post I made about Mybloglog last week telling you how to increase traffic.

Now all you need to do is make sure you can convert those new readers into regular readers. Check out my how to increase feed subscribers post from a few weeks back

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Well, I’m back! Refreshed & ready to go for some new posts & new ideas to help keep you guys (my readers) one step ahead of all your counterparts (my non readers :p).

I’d also quickly like to congratulate Eli over at Bluehatseo on his first full year with the blog. Congrats & keep up the good work buddy!

Right, now down to business! I’m sure some of you have noticed that I’m using Mybloglog on the right hand side of the blog just where the categories are.

It looks a little something like this:

It was recently acquired by Yahoo & has soared in popularity over the past few months. A lot of the big bloggers are now using it on their sites. This means you have a lot of potential to have your profile & blog seen just by visiting other blogs momentarily. In fact, you don’t even have to read the blog. Just stop by then leave, as long as you’re logged into Mybloglog it’s fine.

I could create a huge list of bloggers using Mybloglog but it’s probably best that you sit down & gather about 100-150 blogs that are Popular & related to your niche. Visit them daily, hell set up a script to automatically visit them for you if you wish.

In doing this everyday you’re opening your own blog up to their visitors. If they cick on your profile pic they’re taken to your page within Mybloglog where they can leave a comment, add you as a friend or even visit your own network of sites. This is AWESOME for networking with other bloggers.

Now this is where it gets fun. I set up a profile for one of my other blogs & set my profile picture to a beautiful female. I visited as many blogs as I could within my niche that had Mybloglog on them. I also set up a profile in Technorati with the same picture of the beautiful girl.

It seems that when guys see a lovely girl has been visiting & reading their blog it sets off a chain reaction that sparks their curiosity. Just within 7 days of doing this my feed subscribers have doubled & I’ve been getting loads of wierd & but also friendly comments on the profile.

Here’s a perfect example of a profile that’s embraced the technique

Another good trick is to admire other bloggers within Mybloglog. When they log into their account they’ll see that they have a “female admirer” & delve a little deeper to see who she is

Now this technique, whilst it can be somewhat deceptive it’s tapping into the fact that most males are inquisitive & horny creatures. For example if you guys thought I was a pretty girl you’d probably be totally ASTOUNDED at the content I was writing & maybe I’d have thousands of subscribers. But, because you know I’m a guy & there’s much more competition not as many people care :p

This technique also works well on technorati. What I like to do is create a profile for the blog with the same picture. Maybe try & blog about some of the “Top 10″ things that are in the most talked about list (and related to the topic of my site, most times they’re not related), sit back & watch the suckers come flying in.

*insert evil laugh here*

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So now I’ve gone from 250 pages indexed to over 1,650 indexed pages. I’m ranking for words in other languages that I wouldn’t have ranked on naturally in the normal serps.

I’ve seen traffic DOUBLE inside 2 weeks. Not forgetting that it’ll also take time for the new lanauges to start ranking.

The plugin translates into the following languages:

• German
• Spanish
• French
• Italian
• Portuguese
• English
• Japanese
• Chinese
• Korean

I’m not entirely sure how good the translations are, you can choose a number of different sources to pull them from. It’s not really a huge issue for me though as I’m opening up the possibility of reaching a far wider audience of people than just the english speakers.

The plugin is easy to install & they customise it fully for your blog. It costs $30, but imo for me it’s been money well spent. Especially when I look at my feed subscribers going up steadily

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That’s why on many of my blogs I prefer to make dedicated pages for each product. The page might have a review about the product or some information which has the affiliate link embedded into it. If you use the product personally it’s also good to endorse it & mention that you use it personally.
There’s one major advantage to using this type of approach for affiliate marketing:

You have a chance to rank these pages in the search engines!

I’ll give you two examples of Dedicated Product Pages:

1. Seo Book
2. Textlinkads

You can see that I’ve created a page for each separate service. I can link to these pages as often as possible from within my blog, not only driving potential customers to use the service but, the more I link to the pages the more chance they have of ranking well in the engines.

If your page ranks well you have the opportunity to get more sales from organic searches than you previously would have from merely just using the affiliate link alone. You also have more opportunity to catch buyers towards the end of the buying process depending on what type of keywords you target in the page title & link anchor text.
So before you think about linking directly to an affiliate product, maybe take the extra time to create a dedicated page, endorse the product if you use it yourself & you may find that your sales increase over time instead of going for that one off quick hit.

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Your referrer header is what will appear in a webmasters logs whenever you visit their site. So if only you could manipulate this value somehow….

It’s simple, simply fake your referrer header so that any site you visit will see the referrer as your website. I’m sure you’re thinking what is this good for? Well a number of reasons:

• Freaking People Out (i.e. setting your referrer as kinkybumsex.com :p)
• Making people think you’ve linked to them (but you really haven’t )
• Getting people to visit your site because they see it in your logs

Now, being a typical webmaster I’m not going to throw up the opportunity to miss out on free web traffic. However, setting my referrer as this blog would probably give the game away since this post is at the #1 spot.So how’s it done?

Download Privoxy, this is a local proxy that you can use to run your web browsers through. It’ll also do cool stuff like block ads, cookies & popups.

Here’s a photo of the settings you should have (Taken from Bjornblog):

Make sure your settings look like they do above, however change the add-header line to whatever your website is. Voilà !

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Generally bloggers aren’t too worried about Pageviews, since most of them monetize with Adsense; they would much rather have the clicks & the cash than the load on the server. However, increased pageviews can also lead to more subscribers to your blog rather than people leaving via an advertisement. Increased readership can increase your linkcount, trackbacks & also your online presence via word of mouth.

I’ve put together a small collection of tips to help you keep your readers longer:

Deep Linking within your Site: If you come to read a particular post via the search engines, chances are that you’re interested in that particular subject. Linking posts on a similar topic or subject together is a great way to keep the user browsing through your blog & content. Comment on previous posts that you’ve written with a link, think of this as how a comedian would refer back to previous jokes to keep the audience gripped.

Don’t Post your Full Content in RSS Format: If it can be helped just keep your RSS Feed to show an excerpt of your posts. Not the whole thing. This stops users from reading the posts in a Reader & forces them to come back to your site.

Refer to the Users not yourself: Capture the users attention & strike a bond with them. Talk about things that could potentially help them in your posts. If they find your blog a useful resource with lots of on point knowledge & information you’ll increase page views easily.

Targeted Traffic: Getting traffic from the engines that is highly targeted to the topic of your blog will increase the overall user satisfaction of your blog. Try to target specific keywords related to the blog & the post in your Title Tag & Copy.

Related Posts: If you’re using WordPress there’s a nifty little plugin that will allow you to show posts that are related to your current one. This will hopefully allow the reader to find more of your older posts & navigate deeper into your blog.

Good Navigation & Tagging: It’s important to tag your posts & place them in a good navigation system. You can also implement features such as the top 10 most read posts or the featured post plugin.

Creating a Series of Posts: Organising your posts into a series will almost certainly attract return visitors. A series could contain any number of posts, each revealing more & more information as time progresses, kindof like a soap opera :p

Responding to Comments: When a user comments on a particular post, take the time & effort to reply to any concerns or ideas. This helps you strike a bond with the reader.

Extra Features: Readers love functionality, polls, gravatars, email subscriptions, competitions all help increase the overall user experience for your blog.

I’m sure there’s hundreds more, if you have any good ways of increasing pageviews. Leave a Comment

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