Nowadays, almost every time you read a blog article you can find links pointing to other articles of the same blog. Internal linking is one of the most common strategies used by bloggers in their posts due to several reasons, which I’m going to explain in this post in order to let you know the secret behind this behavior.

Have you asked to yourself what happens with your old posts? And when I say “old” I want to refer to the posts you have published months ago… Well, let’s say that your visitors use to share your posts through social media networks, getting that post a good exposure and being a boom for some days. A week after, that post won’t be read with the same frequency which people read it in its first days with. Of course, if you do a good SEO you will attract visitors to that post through search engines, but it won’t be the same.

So there are other strategy which you can use in order to enhance the traffic of your posts, and that strategy is called Internal Linking.

The Advantages

What do you win by linking past posts? A lot! and I’m going to explain you why. If someone visits your blog for first time, you would like to make it subscribe to your blog right? Many times happens that people visit your blog and if they don’t like the first content they read, they just leave without reading anymore. If you link other related articles inside your posts, people will click all those links and this way, they will read more content of your blog.

Tip: is very important to use the attribute target=”_blank” in order to force that links to open in a new tab/window of the browser.

The problem is when you link many posts inside other ones, because the user will click all of them and then they won’t know what to read first. Sometimes that happens to me, I end with 4 or 5 articles of the same blog opened in my firefox and it could be hard to find a chronological order.

So once you learned that, let’s review the main advantages of internal linking:

• Promote your other posts.
• Make your visitors stick to your blog.
• Increase the possibility of getting new subscribers.
• Increase the number of backlinks pointing to your blog.
• Increase your ranks (pagerank, alexa…) because of the backlinks.

The Disadvantages

I think there are no disadvantages on this topic. Well yes, it is very important to remember that you should not bombard the users with plenty of internal links in your posts. As I said before, they could get bored or they couldn’t find an order among the posts you are linking, and this could end with a confused user closing all those posts that you linked. This way, you could get the opposite effect that you wanted to get which was the catch of a new subscriber…

Conclusion

Certainly linking other own articles in your posts can be a good idea to make your readers stick to your blog. Something you need to remember is to don’t bother them with several links, I suggest you to link 1 may be 2 posts and not more than that. More than 2 posts could result a negative reaction, and you don’t want to frighten your visitors . Any suggestions? Feel free to leave your comment and help this community to grow up!

RSS or Real Simple Syndication is the most common way to deliver the latest content of a blog to its readers. Have you noticed its buzz in the latest years? It has converted in a perfect way to connect a website with its readers. Every day, a RSS feed updates itself and this way the people can check the latest articles through a rss reader such Google Reader or Bloglines instead visiting the blog.

Although RSS is to deliver updated content, you can use it to enhance your performance in your marketing activities. How? Let’s review some of that techniques:

• Introduce your RSS into rss directories and search engines: On internet there are a several specialized directories, search engines and content aggregators available that you can use to expand your RSS. By submitting your RSS to these sites, you will be exposing your latest articles to millions of internet users who can be potential readers, and probably capturing some of them.
• Display external RSS sources to improve your blog’s content: Have you visited blogs with a widget on their sidebar that displays external RSS feeds? Well, this can be good and bad and I’m going to tell you why. The idea here is to display feeds which relates your blog’s niche. If your have poor content on your blog, your readers can start leaving through these feeds, and possibly never coming back. In  the other hand, if the content of your blog is good enough, those external feeds will complement your content with news, offers and related articles. This way, your blog will be attractive as much for your readers as for the search engines.
• Use your RSS to promote: Your RSS is an excellent way to spread in addition to your latest articles, other things such a good promotion, product or service. You can do this by using the header or the footer of your articles with the help of the plugin called RSS Footer, which you can add a html code and it will be automatically displayed on your feeds.
• Use your RSS to remind: With the same plugin I mentioned in the latest lines, you can add a little message to your feeds such a copyright or reminder. You can remind to your readers subscribing to your newsletter or entering to a contest, it’s up to you!
• Sell a text line on your RSS: Once again, the great RSS Footer plugin attacks, and this time is to give you a direct monetary profit. You can use it as advertising, selling a text-line of 50~80 characters for some bucks a month.

As you can see, there are many ways to use your RSS to enhance your marketing activities, some of them are very useful ( as the first tip ) because they can give you backlinks to your blog, improving your rankings on search engines.

In the case of the RSS Footer plugin, as you could see it depends of your imagination. You can use it of many manners which certainly will help you to make a kind of broadcasting among your readers.

Hi bloggers, as you know leaving comments in other blogs can be a great way to get traffic, expand your brand and impose your authority on Internet. I like to leave relevant comments in the most of the blogs I daily visit, receiving many exposure in front of many people.

Today, I want to introduce a tool which can help you in this task. May be you have heard about Traffic Kahuna, a paid tool which you can boost your website, getting a lot of traffic and ranking better on search engines. The same team has a free tool called Comment Kahuna, which you can get targeted backlinks to your blog, without using risk techniques that can destroy your search engine rankings.

As you could see, this is a powerful tool which you can make quicker the process of commenting in other blogs. Also, by searching for blogs without no follow you can get some backlinks, useful to increase your PR.

Micro-Blogging has been a technique adapted by many bloggers and advertisers to promote their stuff. Due to this activity is easier and quicker than blogging, it has become a perfect way to send little notifications, share links with your friends and this way, spread your word.

The simplicity of micro-blogging has caused an impact on many internet users, increasing the use of websites which provide this service. Let’s check the main services and how they have increased in the latest months:

There is a graph of Unique Visitors of five of the main micro-blogging services: Twitter, Plurk, Identi.ca, Pownce and Tumblr. As you can see, Twitter has devoured the other competitors with its service, reaching almost 2.500.000 unique visitors monthly, and that number continues increasing.

Besides twitter, Tumblr is the other commonly used service, reaching almost 1.000.000 unique visitors monthly. About the other services: plurk, identica and pownce, they are in the same point, with few ups and downs but at the end, they could be represented by the same line, reaching  an average of 185K unique visitors monthly.

This graph made me think about what is happening here, specially with Twitter. I’m a twitter user, and daily I receive hundreds, may be thousands of messages of people notifying their latest blog posts, the latest news, sharing their photos etc etc… And daily that’s becoming a viral thing, and even more now because of the apps for blackberries, iphones and now because of TweetSMS, a service which you can send and receive twitter statuses through sms.

But how important is to use this kind of services?

Analyzing the graph provided by Compete, you can noticed it could be a good strategy to use twitter to promote your products or services due to the number of people using it, but it’s a must or not? Well, it depends of your business model. If you use them to promote your stuff; twitter, tumblr and others are perfect for that kind of businesses which are constantly changing, e.g. blogs or pinging services… Those models of business are the most common you can find on twitter, besides the random stuff, links, pictures or anything else without any relation with a business.

Now, let’s analyze the case of a landing page, for example. Let’s say you have a landing page and you want to drive traffic to it besides advertising, should you use twitter to promote it? or even better asked, what impact do you think it could cause on the users? I think it would be a waste of time trying to promote that kind of things through twitter because basically, a landing page is something static and it won’t ever change. The users could visited once, may be twice and then they won’t visit your landing page again because they will not find anything new there.

So when you deal with services for micro-blogging, you should think well about what you would like to share on them. Not every business model is designed to be promoted by this methods, and also there are other business perfect to be promoted through them but for some reasons, it doesn’t work for us. You need to study if micro-blogging is for you, make your tests and stick to that things which work for you.

Some days ago, I noticed someone linked one of my posts related to an affiliate program and checking the statistics, I saw that many people left my blog through the affiliate link, something good for me. Yesterday, I was checking that affiliate panel to verify how many people joined to my network, but I couldn’t find those affiliates… what happened here?

Loosing Your Referrals

Many people when you invite them to a network through your referral link, delete your referral code to give you nothing of their sales. Here is how it works:

Step 1 - Copy Link Location

Step 2 – Paste the link in the bar and select the affiliate code

Step 3 – Delete the referral code and load the page

So, if you load https://users.marketleverage.com/ you will be redirected to http://www.marketleverage.com/ . After then, the people will join to the program by “themselves” and you won’t get any commission for that.

This is a really bad problem because you are losing money, you could be earning a lot of commissions from the people who didn’t join with the referral link you gave them. And this problem is not only on affiliate programs, there is another services like Plurk which you can join with a referral link, giving some karma points to the person who invited you.

Of course, not everybody do this for bad. Sometimes the people are reading a post very quick because they need to go or something like, and when someone invite them to a network they don’t click the link, instead they memorize or take a note of the network’s name. Then when they have time, they search on google for this network to know more about it, joining to it without a referral link.

How To Solve This Problem

Some time ago, I noticed many bloggers sharing their referral codes in a different way, I thought it was a plugin or something like that… May be you have seen this before, something like theblog.com/out/marketleverage.php for example. Well, this is called Link Masking, and you can do that to protect your affiliate links.

When someone click on that link, it will be redirected to your referral link, avoiding the steps explained above. But the question is… How do I make that php file? Well honestly, it can be a html or htm file because the little code don’t use any special php function, but it’s more common to use that extension because wordpress is written in that language…

However, you need to follow the next steps to create that file:

Step 1 – Open a new text file and copy this:

<html>
<head>
<title>Your-Referral-Tittle-Here</title>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<script> window.location="your-referral-link-here"; </script>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1; url=your-referral-link-here">
</head>

<p align="center">You are being taken to the correct page.
<br>If the page doesn't load after 5 seconds, <a href="your-referral-link-here">click here</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>

Step 2 – Save that file as thenetwork.php, i.e. marketleverage.php.

Step 3 – Use an FTP program ( I use filezilla ) to create a folder into the main directory, you can call it out, links, go or whatever you want. I called it go.

Step 4 – Upload the .php file to the created directory.

So then, you need to create a file for each referral code you want to share. This way, you will protect all your referral links and you won’t lose anything in a future.

Enjoy protecting your affiliate links!

The bloggers feel the same in some point of their blogging career, they lose their ideas or their motivation, even some of them feel lost and don’t know how to keep their blogs. In a preview article I talked about how to overcome the moments when you feel exhausted of all the activities you do as a blogger, so in this article I will touch the same idea but with another point of view.

This week I felt without motivation, the vacations are like a two – way street, can work with you or against you. In this case, it worked against me, it made me lazy to do some blogging things. So today, I started looking the statistics of my blog: rankings, subscribers, comments… And after then, I noticed somethings never noticed by me before. For example, I didn’t know that my blog reached almost 18k unique visitors in its second month, getting a big peak of 30k monthly visits on February ( You can check this stats with compete ).

So then, I took some minutes to make a complete analysis of my blog, to deeply understand the work I have been doing here… After some minutes, I felt so proud of myself, motivating me to continue improving and doing what I know to do.

So when you feel bad or without motivation to keep working, I suggest you to do the following things:

• Analyze your blog: Check all your statistics, incomings and profits. Visit every social network you are registered on, and study how do you impact on their users.
• Take a break: Take a day to do whatever you like to do, aside blogging. Get away from your business and clear your mind, this way you will have more energies to keep working the next day.
• Set Goals: Sometimes the bloggers lose the interest because they don’t set goals. Setting a short – term goal, like reach X quantity of subscribers can be a perfect motivation to keep working on improving your blog. Also, you should set long – term goals, like something you want to reach in a year. This will help you to see a light in the horizon and keep following that way.

Well buddies, in the next days I will be writing the third part of my series “Building a Business Through Blogs” which is about Creating a Blog. I won’t be online this weekend, so tomorrow I will give you some useful material that I found this week by surfing the web to keep your mind busy!