Did you know you can drive traffic to your blog by promoting other people’s content? It sounds weird but it is truth, remember that you can do whatever you want with the Internet’s help. In the latest days, I noticed that the quantity of links pointing to my blog has increased considerably. I think that I have attracted some blogger’s attention and they have included some of my posts in their “linking away” posts. I feel very grateful for this and I want to thank you very much for pointing my posts in your blogs, I really appreciate that.

Ok now, you may be thinking what about the traffic to my blog? Well, if you think for a while, you will get the idea immediately. You can use social media networks such Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook etc etc, to promote all those content where your blog is linked. By doing this, you won’t be promoting your own content, something that could be seen by others as spam. Instead, you will be promoting other people’s content which is very legitimate and normal in social media networks.

Of course, you need to be careful when you are going to do this. You need to promote the content which could be useful for your audience or followers. Normally, if you write about Internet Marketing, the people who follow you also are interested on Internet Marketing. But I mention this because on Mixx, you can share your submission with many groups. So, be sure to share your content with groups related to it.

Another good technique is to share the content through Twitter, Plurk, Pownce and this kind of services. As you know, those services can make something “viral“, and they can be perfect to broadcast anything among many people. In this case, is not necessary that your blog is included in the thing your want to submit. I will give you an example, if you blog about Food, and you read a great article about Sushi, you could broadcast this post through twitter with a little signature which relates your blog. I don’t know if I am being clear, so I will write a little example for you… By doing this, you can attract many people to your blog without promoting it directly. :

Twitter Message: Hey check this excellent post about Sushi ~ *link here* | Related to *your blog here*

Now, you know a few tips to drive traffic to your blog by promoting other people’s content, but I didn’t tell you how can you track all those content. Actually, by pinging search engines you can know how many blogs are pointing to yours, but I will give you another tip here which you will receive an email notifying you about those inbound links. I’m talking about Google Alerts that sends you emails of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. So, you need to create some alerts related to your blog. In my case, I have 2 alerts:

1. Alerts for: Mr. Javo
2. Alerts for: http://mrjavo.com/

With this, I receive an email with the latest updates of Google which includes those strings. Then, I just visit the blogs or websites pointing to my blog, and submit the respective page to the social media networks .

Wow, I’m tired of talking writing, now I would like to read your thoughts about this topic, and if you have another tip missed by me, please share!

Hello bloggers, as you may know WordPress 2.6 released some days ago, with some exciting features which you can see in this video.

However, if you upgraded your WordPress, you need to know about a security hole in this awesome platform ( I think this bug is in the past versions too ). So check this out to learn how to protect your blog from hackers!

The plugins’ directory is not safe! if you search in google for the index of the path where wordpress storage the plugins, it will give you thousand of websites as result, which you can access and check their plugins! Practically, if you want, you could steal information, paid plugins or even steal a blog…

Wordpress Security Hole

As you can see, your blog is not safe. How can you fix this issue? That’s simple!

You need to create a file called index.html and upload it to the Plugins’ folder yourblog/wp-content/plugins/. So, when someone try to load that location, the browser will load the index file and that person will get nothing important.

In the .html file you can write a message linking to your blog. Also, you could redirect that page to your blog… However, it doesn’t matter, the important thing is that your folder will be safe now .

Check my html file here . You can get a similar one by copying the following code into a html file:

<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE=”margin-bottom: 0in”><FONT SIZE=6>YOUR-MESSAGE-HERE</FONT></P>
<br/>
<P ALIGN=CENTER STYLE=”margin-bottom: 0in”><img src=”YOUR-IMAGE-URL-HERE“/></P>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”Refresh” CONTENT=”3; URL=YOUR-BLOG-HERE“>

Take care!

Yesterday, Graham has announced the partnership between Entrecard and SezWho. That’s why you will see the plugin of SezWho intregrated in Mr. Javo dot Com, but the big question is why, which’s the purpose of this partnership?

Through the blogoshpere, there are several blogs with great posts but for some reasons, the people who visit those blogs don’t comment on them. The reasons can be many: because the author doesn’t know SEO, because they don’t spend money on advertising or because the people that would comment are slightly too lazy to do it… No matter what the reason is, the fact is that Graham of Entrecard, wanted to change this!

Why SezWho?

SezWho is a universal profile service for the social web that improves community engagement and enables content discovery to be added to blogs, forums, message boards and other social sites. SezWho works with most social media platforms without taking over the content on the site.

The SezWho system is so powerful, that your comments are leveraged tremendously via their suite of features, to deliver an incredible amount of exposure and traffic. A great comment left with SezWho will bring in the traffic and readers of 10 comments left via traditional means. I was so wondered with this because although I hadn’t account on SezWho, when I signed up, it tracked all my comments since I started blogging!

How It Works?

To get started, I recommend you to see this video to learn how SezWho works. What do you think about it? I really like it! That’s why I integrated its plugin in this blog . If you have not account in SezWho, you will need to create one. You can do it through the Entrecard’s Dashboard, or through the SezWho’s website.

Then, you need to install the SezWho’s plugin in your blog and don’t worry because it supports almost all the platforms. Download the plugin here

• If you have WordPress, you’re going to download the plugin, upload it to your plugin folder, and activate.
• If you have Blogger, you’re going to add a page element HTML/Javascript and paste some code. You don’t need to re-register if you’ve already registered through Entrecard. Also please note that if you have Blogger, SezWho takes a few hours to crawl and start sending notifications to us.
• If you have Movable Type 3.3 or 4 …oh who are we kidding, no one has Movable Type.

What next? Well now, you are ready to earn entre-credits! Yes, you will start earning credits when you leave comments on other blogs, and others will earn credits when they leave comments on your blog. With this incentive there will be a dramatical increment in the frequency that people leave comments in other blogs.

But wait, this will not to promote spam? No way, the community will be responsible for rating comments, and rating them truthfully. Depending on how well your comments get rated, and who rates them, your comments will earn you a sliding reward ranging from 1 to 10 credits. If your comments get rated poorly, especially by a blog’s owner, you won’t earn anything.

Another thing great I noticed of this partnership is that it will reduce your bouncing rate, and that’s because many people use Entrecard just for visiting your blog 3 seconds until they drop their cards. Think kind of things increase considerably your bouncing rate.

So what do you think about this? I think that it’s good to incentive many people to write relevant comments in the blogoshere, I think that comments like “great post” or “nice advice” won’t be seen again. May be I’m wrong, just the time will tell us how successful will be this partnership.

In the last post, I talked about how to drive traffic to your affiliate programs, touching some important points such advertising and building links. Promoting an affiliate programs is different than driving traffic to them, and it’s something misunderstood by many people in Internet.

Some weeks ago, I signed up to Market Leverage and promoted it in my blog by writing a little review about that program. What you can find there, in the review’s post, is a reflection of how to promote your affiliate programs.

If you want to be recognized and create an authority on Internet, you need to Be Honest with your readers. Many people lie in the blogosphere, even more when they are promoting a service or product. They do that with the purpose to convince the people who read their blogs about something that is not true. By catching them as referrals, they will earn money from their sales and from each activity the referrals make in the affiliate network.

Now, I will tell you why you SHOULD NOT to do that. At the first instance, you will earn more money with all those deceived referrals, the problem isn’t that, who don’t like to earn money? The problem starts when you are going to promote another affiliate program, in the future. What do you think will happen with all those people who signed up under your link in the past? Obviously, if they were deceived they will not trust in you anymore. Surely, they will sign up to the program referred by you, but through another blogger who inspire them more trust.

To be successful promoting an affiliate program you need to be transparent, telling to the people what they will find in the program, the most important features of the program, how much they will earn… All those kind of things, and if there is a catch, tell them. For example, many people get angry when they expect something for free and suddenly they need to pay a quote to receive the information.

By being honest at time of promoting an affiliate program could give you more chances to multiply your earnings in a future. Then, when you suggest to your readers to sign up to an affiliate program, surely they will do it under your name and this way, you will get many commissions from them.

As you may know, the success of the affiliate programs resides in the traffic you drive to them. I have seem websites with several affiliate links but they have not success because their webmasters don’t know how to drive traffic to those pages. So the key to be successful in this business, is to drive traffic to your links!

There are many techniques which you can do it, besides to crossing your fingers, let’s study some of them:

• Advertising: This is the first thing you can imagine when you talk about promoting. By buying advertising you can drive a lot of persons to your landing page, giving you high probabilities to catch some of them and earn money. You can advertise with programs like Adwords of Google, Blogads, StumbleUpon or another network like Bidvertiser, which gives you $20 in clicks for free.
• Building Links: If you are a blogger and you want to promote your affiliate programs, you should start checking your past posts looking for those ones where you talk, or just refer/mention something related to affiliate marketing. When you find those posts, you need to optimize them to be potential landing pages. You need to build links into your posts pointing to your affiliate programs, but in this case you need to advertise the post itself. But wait, just build the links only if your post is related to it!
• Placing Banners: Well this is part of advertising, but I want to mention something very important. Some of those affiliate programs provides several banners which you can use to promote them. When you are going to place a 125×125 banner on your blog for example, you should study which one is the most impressive and catchy to the eyes. This way you have more chances to attract new affiliates… Remember to use just 1 banner, placing 3 or 4 banners won’t give you more affiliates, instead you could be scaring them, it’s suspicious when someone place several banners of the same type.

Well guys, as you see, to make money with affiliate programs, you need to invest some money on this. Once you are established in this business, it will pay itself so don’t worry about that. Just be sure to promote it in the right way, avoid spamming and drive traffic to your landing page and you will start making money online .

Once you have written a post, either on your own blog or on another one, you could want to know its effectiveness to apply the same strategy in the future posts. Normally, we study past posts to learn how the implemented keywords has influenced in its effectiveness.

What is Effectiveness for you?

I’m talking about effectiveness but I didn’t mention its meaning. I consider that a post was effective, when it brings me the bigger number of traffic, attract the bigger quatity of subscribers or when it gives me a sale. Sometimes you can write a post with a good title and great content, but if it brings you just a little number of readers, you can’t consider it as effective. In these cases, you could try to promote it, this way you could explode its potential.

Beside that, there are another factors which can help you to recognize an effective post:

• Inbound Links: The inbound/incoming links, also known as links pointing to your post, can be a good indicative of how effective was your post. The more inbound links you get, the more effective it was. This means that your post shook the blogosphere and it is being commented in many blogs. Intead, if you didn’t get any inbound links, you know what it means…
• Comments: I think this is one of the best factors which help you to recognize when your post was or not effective. The more comments you get, the more effective it was. This is obvious, if you get several comments it’s because your post rocks! Surely it is very controversial or interesting.
• Votes: The votes a post can get in the social media networks certainly helps you to recognize if the post was good or bad. If you visit the front page of Digg for example, you can see articles with 500 votes or more, and a post is not there for nothing! Surely it is very informative and catchy.

These 3 elements, combined with the other ones mentioned in the first parragraph can help you a lot to recognize the effectiveness of a post. Some time ago, I invited a blogger to read one of my posts, and minutes later he bought an 125×125 ad on my blog. What happened there? He really liked the content and he decided to buy me a spot, so that was my proof to recognize the potential of that post.

What next?

Once you have recognized an effetive post, you need to do two things. The first one, promote it! It could be a good way to attract new subscribers, helping you to impose your authority on a niche. Advertising on StumbleUpon could be a good idea, because it’s relatively cheap and it can bring you a lot of traffic.

The second thing you should do, is to optimize it to be a good landing page, where the people can visit, get stuck and subscribe to your blog .