content – Page 5

How to get more traffic to your site

I’ve seen a few other people talking about increasing their website traffic by advertising on various sites. I suppose it could be anything from using Google Adsense, to paid link directories like the Yahoo directory or even advertising on some of the paid blogging sites.

I’ve been trying to think of ways to get more traffic to my sites. I’d like to do it without spending money if possible. Unfortunately the only way to get more traffic to your site without paying for it is to work very hard at it.

I’ve run websites, and now blogs for many years. I’ve never paid for advertising. Ever. I’ve worked very hard getting my sites listed in all the major directories and even smaller directories that suite the site. Niche directories. Where my websites are concerned I’ve made contact with other site owners and traded links, or given them permission to publish one of my articles on their site.

I’ve used similar methods for my blogs. I do think it’s a bit easier with blogs because you can leave comments on most blogs quite easily. Comment often enough on a blog and make your comments interesting, though provoking or humorous and more than likely the owner of the blog will come and visit your site. If you have good content on your site they might even add you to their blogroll or write about one of your articles.

What do you do to promote your site and get more traffic?

Blogburst – syndicate your content

by Tricia

Shortly after I started blogging in 2006 a new company opened for business. This company’s name is Blogburst. It’s a syndication service that places your blog content on top-tier online destinations. Namely online news sites like Reuters, USA Today, Gannett, McGraw-Hill, Fox News and Internet Broadcasting.

What could I get out of listing my sites with Blogburst? Well increased visibility for one – especially if any of my sites or posts got picked up by online news services, plus a greater audience reach and increased traffic. Online publishers in turn would get more material to use on their sites in order to broaden their reach and increase their own page views.

So I signed up my sites and kept on blogging as usual. Nothing much happened for a long time. I’d go and check my account to see if any of the news services had picked up any of my posts every now and then and I was disappointed to find out that they had not.

I wasn’t ready to give up though and I kept my sites listed on Blogburst.

Late last year Blogburst started a service where they would provide quarterly revenue to their top one hundred bloggers who’s posts got picked up by online services consistently. Obviously I was not one of those bloggers. I believe that Blogburst has plans to expand compensation to bloggers as their reach grows and more online services start to use Blogburst’s bloggers for content.

Yesterday while I was checking site statistics for my blogs and my husbands two blogs I made a surprising discovery. One of the sites bringing new visitors to my husbands site was USA Today! It seems that they just started picking up his weird news posts from Odd Planet at the beginning of March. We hope that they continue to do so.

Now that I’ve actually seen how it works I can tell you that the online service- In this case USA Today, will pick up a post and place a short summary of the post on their site. Visitors to their site who want to read the whole post are brought directly to your site. This increases visitors and hopefully your sites popularity in the long run.

Naturally we were thrilled that Odd Planet was picked up by USA Today.

Pleased, I went on checking site stats for our other sites and made another amazing discovery. USA Today, and IBS (I believe this must be Internet Broadcasting) had been picking up some of my posts from As the Garden grows since early February. I think that over 33,000 post views have occurred since early February via those services. How had I not noticed this earlier?

I promptly got busy and placed a number of our other sites on Blogburst. I’m now keeping my fingers crossed that posts continue to get picked up from As the Garden Grows and Odd Planet and perhaps some of the other sites that we added to Blogburst.

Maybe we’ll end up on their top 100 list of bloggers and end up making some money through Blogburst. As of now I’m just happy that we should see an increase in visitors.

This certainly is incentive to create excellent content on all of our blogs.

Put an Image in a WordPress post

by Tricia

I’ve been hanging out on some blogging related forums and one of the questions that often comes up is how to add an image into a post. There are actually several ways to do this, and once you’ve done it a few times you’ll find that it’s very easy.

I’m writing these instructions out for the WordPress blogging platform, but some of the techniques that I’ll discuss will likely apply quite easily to other blogging platforms.

How to add images to your blog post:

Method one – using image links:

If you have images uploaded onto a free photo hosting site such as Flickr or Photobucket you can easily add the image link to your post. Simply copy the image link from the photo hosting site and use the image button in the top of your post writing area to paste the link into the box that pops up after you’ve clicked the image button.

Just be sure that your cursor is in the area that you’d like the image to be placed when you click on the image button. Otherwise you’ll have to cut and paste the image code into the correct area.

Method two – uploading and image:

If you’ve taken photos with a digital camera or saved photos to your computer it’s pretty easy to upload them into your WordPress post. All you need to do is use the upload section that is directly below your post writing area in WordPress.

One thing to keep in mind before uploading photo files to your server and then into your post is the size of the file. If you are posting in Rich text format you can easily adjust the height and width of any image, but you can’t adjust the kilobytes. You should make sure that the file is preferably less than 20 kb in size before you upload it into a post otherwise it will dramatically slow the loading time of your post.

If you have photo editing software use it to edit the post for the web by making it a compressed jpeg or gif image – try to maintain the quality of the photo while you reduce the size in regard to kilobytes.

Now, when you are in writing mode in WordPress take a look just below the post content box. You’ll see an area called “Upload”. If the upload area isn’t open click on the + sign to open it.

You’ll see an area that says “File” within the Upload box. Select browse and find the image that you’d like to add to your post. You may chose to also file in the title and description information for the image file at this time as well.

Once you’ve selected the image file on your computer, click on the word upload in the bottom right of the Upload area.

After a moment the file will be uploaded and you’ll see a small thumbnail of the photo.

In WordPress 2.0 you must click on the picture to choose between adding the thumbnail of the image or the full size image to your post. Once you’ve selected which image size you’d like to use, place your cursor in the area of the post that you’d like the image to be placed, and then go back to the image and click on the words “Send Image to Editor”.

In WordPress 2.1 you’ll see several selections beside the thumbnail of the image. You can use the full size or thumbnail of the image, and you can also choose to link to the image file or not.

Since I often edit my images ahead of time to make sure they are of an appropriate size for the post I usually choose full size and none before selecting “Send to Editor”. If you’d like to use a thumbnail of your image in the post you might choose to link to the image so that your visitors can click on the link and see a larger image on a separate page.

Once you are done selecting the image size and any thing else that you’d like to choose for your image click on “Send to Editor”. Just be sure that your cursor placed in the area of the post that you’d like the image to be placed. Otherwise you’ll have to cut and paste to get the image in the right area.

Then TA DA you have a photo inserted into your post.

So how is that? Clear as mud or do you have a better understanding of how to place an image in your post now?

Don’t forget to read my article on how to center or align your image to the right or left of post text.

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