Keep Your Blog Posts Archives Alive

How to Keep Your Blog Archives Alive:

Do you have blog posts that are Left 4 Dead?  If you have written many blog articles you will want to keep them from being ignored by your readers.  Most visitors to your blog will read the first one or maybe two blog posts on your home page.  Don't let all of those old blog posts that you slaved over get lost in the vast wasteland of old blog posts.

There are several ways to keep your old blog posts featured or highlighted so that new blog visitors will read these gems.

• Add a popular blog posts widget on your sidebar and feature some posts you believe your readers should read.


• Make your old posts into a series and link them all together.
• Use your Twitter account or Facebook page to add some of your old blog post links.


• Put links in your new posts to an old post that explains the topic further. 


• You can put up a new blog post just listing your favorite old posts.  Possibly a top 10 favorite blog posts list.


• Interlink old posts to one another.


• Post the top three posts at the end of each month.


• Have a related posts plug-in at the bottom of each post.

You can always find a new way to get those old blog posts some more love.  Try posting a follow up post about how the blog post topic worked or didn't work or is no useful to you.  Think about it for a little bit, maybe get creative, and you can breathe new life into your old blog posts.

Free Blog Traffic - 31 Day Challenge

My Blogging Fortune is going to go through an intensive 31 Day Course or a Challenge to get more blog traffic.

Take the Free Blog Traffic Challenge with me:

You may have heard about Problogger's 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, well I came up with a similar idea only he beat me to it by a long shot.  They say that  imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  So I hope that Darren Rowse sees this is a huge form of flattery.   Yes, that is an affiliate link and yes, I am trying to suck up to him.  Do you think it's working yet?

I thought if I made a plan for the entire month and really concentrated on doing all of the free blog traffic generation ideas.  I know that my blog traffic could potentially explode.  It may be frustrating and very time consuming but it should be well worth it in the end.

This month just happens to have 31 Days and so do several other months but you can start taking this challenge at any time because it will be laid out so you can do daily tasks.  This Free Blog Traffic Challenge will be tailored to my schedule and therefore be a much lighter load on the weekends when I like to spend time with my family.

Daily Tasks - Complete this list every day for all 31 days:
1. Make a blog post each day.
2. Ping your blog after every blog post each day.
3. Make 100 Entrecard drops.

Free Blog Traffic Challenge - Week 1:
1. Sign up at Entrecard.com
2. Article to GoArticles
3. Squidoo Lens
4. Article to Ezine Articles
5. Blog Carnivals
6. Bookmark on Digg, Delicious, and Onlywire.com
7. Make 20 comments to like blogs

I am only going to list the first week of my Free Blog Traffic Challenge.  I thought about filling in the entire calendar but then I thought that was too overwhelming so I am going to try this as a week by week thing.  I used a free calendar from Calendars That Work that downloads into a Word Document that you can edit and add your own daily items.  I am really liking this and think I may continue using the calendar in this way.

I hope to see some really great blog traffic results and I will let you know how it goes.

Day 20 - My Blogging Challenge Update

 Day 20 of my money making blog challenge.

 Here is what I have been up to in the last few days:

Because of my daily double posting I have not been spending enough time getting traffic to my blog.  I have definitely done a few things here and there, but not the big things that I had planned.  So now that I will only be publishing one blog post a day that will free up some time for me to work on getting all that lovely traffic that is needed to make money blogging.

•  I got my first comment, a result of making some blogging friends.
• Finally got my blog approved on Technorati.
• Working on a Blog Traffic Generation Course for myself that others can follow.

Still working towards my eventual six month goal of earning $300.00 a month.  I believe if I work on getting higher rankings and more traffic to my blog it will be a success and a money making blog in that time.

Your Favorite Free Traffic Links - Poll

Favorite Free Traffic Links

Please Take a few seconds to take the Poll.


Just a little curious to see what type of free traffic methods others are using to get visitors to their blogs. Thanks for voting!

Using Twitter to Get Traffic to Your Blog

Twitter for More Blog Traffic 

If you have not signed up for Twitter and you have a blog you are missing out on potential traffic and new blog readers.  Twitter can be a powerful blogging tool for blog traffic.

To get more followers on Twitter you can do a search on your blog's keywords, mine are make money online and make money blogging so I search for those.  Then you can see who else is tweeting your key words, they may be your competition.  Here is what you can do though, see who their followers are and go follow them.  Chances are, they are interested in your key word topic or blogging niche and will follow you back.  By doing this you gain two things, more followers and potential blog readers.

When you make a new blog post you also post a tweet about the blog post with a link.  That way your followers will see your blog post title and they can click through to your blog.  You might just get some loyal blog readers in this manner, and it's easy to do.

If you are not utilizing Twitter for your blog traffic you may want to reconsider and sign up today.  You may have noticed that my blog has a widget to show my most recent tweets on my blog.  I have also used FeedBurner to automatically post my blog title with a link on Twitter.

One last note about Twitter:  Twitter can be a personal thing but if you have a blog that is not about your personal life, then you don't need to post personal stuff.  If you have a money making blog you will not want to post about the weather or what you ate for lunch.  If you have just found a great deal for bloggers you could always tweet about that. 

You can follow me on Twitter here:  BloggingFortune

Why Your Blog Will Fail

Why Your Blog is Destined to Fail

Many people start blogs every day and the majority will never even reach the minimum $100 Google payout.  It is easy to start a blog, but it is not as easy to actually make money from blogging.

Reasons Blogs Fail:

• The blogger never made goals for their blog.
• The blog just does not get enough traffic to make money.
• Just posting is not enough.
• Inaction on the bloggers part.

I want to liken a brand new blog to a new restaurant in a big city.  If you opened up a new restaurant (not a franchise) you would make sure that you advertised as much as possible right at the grand opening so everyone would know about the new place.

At first you might see a trickle of customers but there is potential.  If your restaurant is appealing and the food is great and the service is good you will get free word of mouth advertising.  So you do lots of advertising at first and build up a good following and let your regulars use word of mouth and they will advertise for you.

The same thing must happen with a new blog.  The internet is a vast city with new blogs opening on every corner.  You must advertise to get people to visit your blog.  Then once you get a following your regulars will use word of mouth or link love to advertise for you.  If you have a funny post or important post they just want to share with friends or maybe they will bookmark you for many others to see.   They might make a post about your blog and put up a link for others to go check you out.

The restaurant is a pretty good analogy for blogging.  If you don't advertise in the beginning no one will come.  Likewise if your blog sucks or there is no real content people will quickly move on to the next one that came up in the search engine for your key words.

You have bloggers like Yaro Starak and Darren Rowse and they are the McDonald's of restaurants.  Which means that if they wanted to they would never have to advertise again.  Because all of their loyal fans and followers are doing the advertising for them.

How to Make $300.00 a Month with Blogging

Monthly goal of $300.00 from Blogging

I recently read a blog post over at Problogger called,  "How to Make $30,000 a year Blogging."  posted by Darren Rowse.

The basis of the article was to realize what your money goals for your blog are, and then focus on trying to break that amount into monthly or daily goals so it does not seem too far out of reach.  My goal is to be making $300.00 a month in 6 months time.  Right now with only a little traffic that amount of money seems unattainable in that time frame. 

If I break down that monthly goal into a daily goal, I will only need to earn $10.00 a day from my blogging efforts.  Well - ten dollars a day does not seem like all that much.  Don't get me wrong it will take time to get to that point but breaking down the larger amounts of money into smaller amounts, it just appears to be more manageable.

So now I am going to focus on trying to earn just $1.00 a day.  That one dollar a day is not much but with a new blog it certainly would not be bad either.  Every little bit will add up and once I reach the $1 goal then I can move on to $5 and then to $10.

By breaking my money making goals down into smaller more easily handled chunks I can focus on the smaller more easily reachable goals and not give up so quickly because I am no where near my intended goal.

Another 5 Ways to Get Free Traffic to Your Blog = 15 Tips

Another 5 Free Blog Traffic Tips

5 Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog

5 More Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog

And now: Another 5 Free Traffic Tips to drive targeted traffic to your blog to help you make more money from your visitors.   OK the title is a little different but I thought maybe it would get you to click on this blog post about free traffic ideas.  It worked right, you are here reading this.

So if you have already read the other previous 5 Ways and the other 5 More Ways for Free Blog Traffic Generation Ideas then you need more free blog traffic ideas.  Again the key to these ideas is to actually do them and if at all possible do them over and over again.  If you like you can set up a checklist of your traffic steps and do them all daily or weekly.  You will need to continue to get traffic to your site until you are popular enough that the traffic comes on its own.

Another 5 Free Traffic Tips:

1. Offline Promotion - Tell all your friends, email them the blog link, call all of your aunts and uncles and let them know about your blog.  Make up business cards with your blog's URL.

2. Blog Post Frequency - Minimum posting should be 3 times a week, once a day is better.

3. Answer Questions - Post your blog link on answers that you leave on questions sites like Yahoo Answers and Blurtit.  Make sure the questions and answers are related to your blog.

4. Press Release - Write up a press release about your blog and submit it to a distribution service.

5. Trackbacks - If you don't understand this there is a great description here: How Trackback Works.

If you have implemented the 15 ways to get free traffic then you should see some visitors trickling onto your blog.  You need to make sure that you continue to do these free traffic generating ideas to keep getting new blog readers. 

Each time you implement one of the ideas you should see a serge in traffic but then it may dip back down again.  Keep on putting your link out there and eventually you won't have to rely on these methods, but this is where you need to begin. 

Go Get That Traffic!