by Irene Lizarraga

Created on: June 20, 2009   Last Updated: July 27, 2009

If you want to monetize your blog the first step is getting enough traffic on it to start earning some money via advertisements. To accomplish that, writing good and relevant content is crucial, since that will get visitors to come back for more and recommend it to their friends... but it's not enough. There's many ways of increasing the traffic to your blog or website, but the ones listed here are free and only require some time and effort on your side.

Search Engine optimization (SEO)

If your content is relevant and clearly organized, your domain and urls have the right keywords on it, and generally your website follows the SEO guidelines, you have a lot done. Every time somebody searches for the keywords you have optimized for, you will get new visitors. If they find your site topical and interesting they will stay and probably browse more articles.

Your main priority is that your users enjoy your content; keyword stuffed articles that are a pain to read are not going to accomplish that. To help search engines rank your articles highly, make your article titles relevant and try to stay on topic; if there's something else you want to talk about you can write another article on it later. Selecting the right keywords is also useful, most often than not long tail keywords have less competition and work better, since they are more similar to what people actually search for. Black hat SEO will only get you banned or penalized, so avoid it even if it might offer quick results.

Digg, Del.icio.us and other media sites

There's plenty of media sites that work by allowing their visitors to submit content they find interesting all over the Web and displaying links to those articles on their pages. You can get many visitors if your articles get Digged, so make it easy for your visitors to do that by providing them with buttons to automatically submit your site to those media sites.

Enabling the ping feature on your blog software will also notify services such as Weblogs.com about your new article, and that will lead more visitors to your website, as well, at no effort from you.

Joining conversations

If you want visitors you must be the first promoter of your blog. Post relevant and useful comments on other blog articles that you find interesting, making sure your user name links to your blog. Nobody likes a spammer, so don't post things like "Oh, I really loved your blog, by the way, here is a link to mine," since that will get you banned and will give a bad

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