Oh my, never seen this before, simply the best commercial ever.

Sculpting your content is a magic spell that only wizards and lizards can cast. Common bloggers don’t know Jack about building traffic, as they are trying to gain readers all the time. Chance is you typed into google “increase Blog Traffic”. Now you will get a lot of common sense articles by people who spend their time in creating a blog and building a readership with the hopes of people linking to them for the utterly unique content. Sadly such content is neither unique, nor is it very useful. Blog about your passion you hear. But what is my passion you ask? And how do you gain readers who share it? After all, blogs used to be “the big thing” because they were found by search engines. Loads of text = loads of things to crawl by the search engine spiders and bots. Community = loads of linking to each other = important stuff people care about. This was in the early new millennium. Now everybody wants his 15 minutes of fame and share their story. A story that has either been told before, or that no-one wants to hear. There are three paths you can choose and you have to determine what you want: More readers, more money or pseudo fame.

Getting more Blog Visitors | Readers

So you decided to get more traffic. Well, I decided this for the sake of this article. Traffic equals money, at least if it comes from search engines and NOT from social media. Social media traffic converts differently and you can not monetize it immediately. So you want traffic, the right traffic so to say. If you like the idea behind social media and want social traffic and people reading about what they like and participating in your community, fine, go for social media traffic. Might work. Might not. The only thing that matters though are links you hopefully get from other bloggers, and please let those links have the right anchor tag. Otherwise they are nice, but not that useful. Now you know that you want search engine traffic, not social media traffic. Visitors coming from social media sites are wasting their time. They look for a place to fill a gap in their life that is empty right now. You fulfill that need for the next minute until they hit that stumble/next button or laugh about another link their friends send them. And they will send those links, that’s for sure. Those visitors are neither going to buy something, nor are they really into your stuff. They hop from place to place and you can call yourself lucky and name a star if a few people stick at your site and click on anything at all before they leave.
But how do I get people to like my blog? I put soooo much effort into it. Well, if you want quality readers, as in people who genuinely care, you need fans. So you either create stuff that people like, or you are recommended to them by someone they trust. You can’t get away with some sleazy ass content online. *lol* Sure hell you can, that’s why there are so many self improvement and lifestyle design blogs out there copying the greats of the industry with more than 1000 readers. Fuck all those. You can do better. All you need is another form of traffic, which is the oldschool way to get traffic. Back to the basics so to say: Search Engine Traffic. Search Engine Traffic are visitors, those guys are wandering around with the intention of finding something. They are actively looking instead of passively browsing like social media fanatics. How do you get search engine traffic? Through quality content. Ok, you knew that. Now you have to be actively promoting that content, either through asking others to link to it, or by doing incentives for others to link to it, or building your own small network and interlinking all of your content. It’s an old story, the story of getting links, links and some more links. Quality links. Links from places that are in the same niche. Links that are keyword related. In short, links that are usually too got to be free. The problem you will face, others know about link building as well, they don’t give away their links easily. They want you to pay for it. They want you to beg for it. And every once in a while they do it for free when they find something they really care about, which is almost never unless it’s a buddy.

Keep the content simple

Keeping it simple is easier said than done. With all those beautiful how to build a better blog in the back of your mind, you have been running your great lists, pushing old content forward and made up some great, engaging topics. Forget it. It’s nice advice, but the best advice you can get out of this article is to keep it as simple as possible. Like explaining your topic to a 4 year old, descriptive, short, easy to read. Underline the intention you have with an article instead of rambling about everything and nothing. I know, everything and nothing is a lot fun, but… it does not drive traffic. People care very little about individuals unless they are at least C level stars. And all of those internet celebrities are, maybe besides of Tucker Max and some Pick-up Artists, M Level celebrities. They are known on their convention, but that’s about that. They might have 10.000-120.000 readers, which is a lot, but even less than the city I live in. It’s a nice amount to make money from, build a fanbase, but all this shit takes time, commitment and a topic where you already are an authority. Sorry. If you have no credentials you have to fake it until you make it. Or you have to sell your skills to someone else and build from there.

Start with your most popular hobby

You are not successful yet? You already have a blog and can’t drive traffic to it? If you are not specialized on a topic, take the time and do that. Don’t build a make money blog if you don’t know jack on how to make money. Don’t write about SEO if you are not willing to tell people to buy links. Don’t write about blogging. It’s good to
start out with your most popular hobby and build a site around this. Simply the best way to go. If you want to make money blogging there are basically three models:

1. Blogging for advertisements, Sponsorships and Products on a Blog about popular topic.
2. Blogging for Bloggings sake with the goal of building a huge publisher deal and cashing in on this.
3. Blogging to promote your own products, ideas and texts to make money from the loyal fans you have.

Blogging for advertisements is our goal. Advertisements are anything from adsense, to direct ad sales or affiliate marketing. It’s the thing that will get you started. It will pay your hosting bills and earn you a few bucks here and there. You will start to have knowledge on how to leverage a blog. You will learn, network and build connections. It probably won’t make you rich, but if it does you will have a lot traffic. This is why you are gunning for good topics. Do not build a niche site, but a site, that will work on a certain topic. And I would tell you to stay away from news topics, as you will have to hardcore update your site and burnout pretty fast. doshdosh is mr. marketing. shoemoney made a fortune back in the days with ringtones. mr. problogger is running his photography blog. All those are legit sites that produce income. Well doshdoshs, I don’t know, it’s more of a case-study, yet there are some gems in his posts. I have a few different pair of shoes myself producing me a decent amount of traffic. I picked niches that are not saturated, yet have people who are willing to spend money. It’s fuckin hard to find these nowadays. I want to branch out in my local market a bit more, as there are some topics that I would love to cover. There are still a lot niches that are not saturated, but you have to be willing to go with less traffic, as there are far less people reading sites in my language. Creating Blogs to earn money for advertising are not the main goal for such a market. It’s more to push my own products and get a few gigs along the way.

Build Links Links Links

I am probably not the first one to say this, but the most powerful way to gain traffic and dominate the search engines is to either team up with a few blogger in the same niche, who are actually your nemesis as they target the same peer group. Unless you just want them to read your stuff you are not having big problems. If you start to sell your own stuff, they might actually help you, but if you are trying to get your visitors to buy an affiliate product that all the other blogs are promoting, you have shot yourself in the leg. You don’t need friends if you want to build a niche blog system. Once you have identified a small well paying niche it is time to build 3-5 blogs and create a network building links to each and every network pointing to your main site. Build a few blogs on different platform, create satellite pages on a few other free platforms, write comments on a few blogs to get the search engines started and build more links. The beauty of this concept is that there is only one site that should be really powerful, your main-base so to say, while your other sites may remain smaller with just 10-40 articles. It’s far more important to get links and new people visiting existing sites than trying to push out more content that is read by the same people over and over. Readers are nice for your ego. They might even buy your products and give you good money, yet it is the hardest way to go. It’s tough to sell advertising spaces in a downswing economy. It’s tough to get people to buy your stuff. Yet it is easier to lead people, who are willing to buy to places that offer what the people are looking for.

A 10 Step guide to dominate a niche

1. Find a niche that is searched and has potential for the sake of an example: Pocketsized Nuclear Powerplants
2. Get a domain with the keywords in it. PocketsizedNuclearPowerplants.com would be the best, words added to the back are ok, words added to the front will decrease your search engine ranking. Keyword domains usually rank better for specific search terms than arbitrary words.
3. Get a few more domains relating to your niche.
4. Publish content on each of those sites and link them together. Don’t link all sites together, maybe even consider different hosting accounts and platforms (html site, wordpress, blogger, typo3). Try to make those sites look real. Add a few deep links from articles on your satellite pages to other articles on satellite pages. Don’t link to your satellites from your main page, instead link your satellites there.
5. Build more niche sites for each and every blog. Squidoo, hubpages, tumblr, posterous, all those sites are great to create small niche sites with a few posts about your topic. Content is king as they say and your ultimate goal is not to have 1 site sitting atop of the serp ranking, it’s to have 2-10 in the top10. That would be called total domination. Post articles to ezine articles and hope people use them. Learn that it is less about content, it’s about content with links to the right sites!
6. Interact with the community. Write comments, don’t spam. Write good guestposts to get backlinks. Get people to write articles for you. Do whatever it takes to write content to accompany your links.
7. Ask for links from others. Bribe them, flirt with them, do whatever it takes to get more quality links. Not those cheap mass links from russia or wherever that will probably only hurt your rankings in the long run. Make it natural and stick through the first dry months. It might take 3-4 months, or even longer to gain traffic. Work on other projects. Build something everyday and at the end you will have spread your assets and hopefully a few will start turning a profit.
8. Make sure you can make money with your pocketsized nuclear powerplants, or all this hard work will be useless.
9. Try to catch the beginner. Those are the guys willing to spend money. Looking for shortcuts without having found their leader yet. Those are the guys that use a search engine to find what they are looking for. Don’t rely on people who have read everything.
10. Build more links, write an occasional article every month and enjoy the money that starts to tickle in. The more sites you call your own, the more money you can make. You can always try to get a homerun, it’s probably less work. Yet you need a lot more love from Lady Luck than you can probably afford.

So now you know, making money online is not that easy. It’s hard work. But it is work that can turn into a muse, which means you use all your energy to push that lazy car until it starts again, or leave it on the side of the road if it does not start at all. The better your car, the less pushing it needs.

The last months have been sad for the german MMA community, as the politicians worked against the TV company broadcasting the events. I am glad that I can at least read about what’s going on over the ocean in the biggest league for my favorite sports show. CBS will broadcast the first live MMA show, a feature fans have been waiting for a long time. The sport should get some recognition for the amazing and entertaining fights it has, yet all the people complain how violent it is. Those people love to fight. It’s their job, if you stop them from competing and get in the way of broadcasting and an increased fanbase those guys will be underpaid for a long time. There have to be some changes, the fighters need more sponsors and more money, especially the guys who are not the top5 in the world. It’s a joke what they are making compared to boxers, even though those guys put on boring shows compared to that. It’s all about lobby work. There were at least 3 people who died from boxing last year, but no fighter ever died in the octagon, so what do you call a dangerous sport? Oh man I am really hyped for the next fight of Brock Lesnar vs Shane Carwin at UFC 116. Brock Lesnar is a guy that is very popular in the US and draws a lot of media attention to the game. Yet he only fought 5 times, won 4, lost 1, is the reigning UFC Champ and fought through a life threatening illness. Carwin on the other hand is an engineer who is 12:0 knocking never seeing a second round so far, because he knocked them all out in the first. Those guys are giants and I really look forward to see those titans of MMA fighting in the Octagon. But hey, wait, there is no way that we will see that here in Germany, as there is no more UFC broadcasting… MMA is not a crime, it’s a sport with rules, where people fight. It might not be about flowers and rubberduckies, but it’s entertaining Entertainment for adults and there is no reasons why they should disallow broadcasting after 23.00, while they allow Boxing to be broadcasted. It’s a freaking joke if you ask me, but you obviously don’t.

Oh yeah, going to university might end up delivering some good information. Can’t wait till it’s august, not talkin about a stripper bame or the summersun itself, but this movie. Guess this will make a few bucks for good’old Sly.

Pretty neat slideshow about viral marketing. Kinda reminds me of my viral marketing vampires. Just different. And totally not like what I drew back in the days.