For any blogger is pretty important to have subscribers. Who would like to write when nobody reads the content? I’m sure not you… By increasing the amount of subscribers of your blog, you create certain loyalty between you and yours readers. That sense of loyalty will attract them each time you write a new blog post.

Once you have hundreds of subscribers it becomes easier, but how do you get your first 100 subscribers? And even more important, how do you keep attracting more and more people to your blog?

Now I’m going to list the most common things you can do in order to boost that RSS counter:

• Be persistent: The best way to attract loyal readers when you create a new blog is being persistent. Writing new content as fast as you can will be key to succeed. At least during the first 2 or 3 months of blogging you need to write new content constantly, lets say 5 posts a week. By doing that, people will note your dedication and will start following you.
• Write good content: This has a much to do with the first point. You can write 5 posts a day if you want, but if they say nothing interesting you will lose credibility and potential readers. Remember, is better quality than quantity. If you can only write 2 or 3 posts a week is fine, but make them bloody good!
• Socialize: This is the key of blogging. You have to socialize with other bloggers in your niche in order to know who your neighbors are. This way, you could be linked by them in link sharing posts for example, giving you exposure in front their readers… Also, using services like Twitter or StumbleUpon can expand your brand as you can’t imagine, attracting several people to your blog.
• Comment in other blogs: This is part of socializing. If you comment in other blogs with certain periodicity, you will attract people’s attention and they will visit your blog to know who you are and what you do. Of course, remember to leave good comments and not just a “good post”.
• Make blog contests: This is a well known blackhat trick. Contests are loved by everybody, who doesn’t like to win something for free? This is excellent to attract new readers and increase your readers, especially if you promote it well… I really recommend you to read this article in order to know more details about this matter.
• Write guest posts: Like the last point, you can do this when you have certain credibility on the web. By writing articles in other blogs related to yours can really boost your entire blog. Imagine that you post something in a blog with 500 readers, and lets say that just 200 know about your blog. The other 300 subscribers will visit your blog at least once to see what you write, with good chances to become loyal readers. Just remember, prepare and publish a punch of good posts on your homepage before writing the guest post to cause a better impression.

In addition of those 6 ways there are others that you will discover with the passing of time, they’re somewhat intuitive. Also remember to be patient, you won’t get 100 readers in a single day, increasing the subscribers of your blog is like a marathon…

Well I talked enough for now, I would love to know your techniques to increase your RSS subscribers, so feel free to drop me a comment for sharing your tips!

If you haven’t heard of it, Twitter is a microblogging tool that is all the rage these days. The basic premise behind Twitter is one of short, simple messages that are “twittered” or posted to the twitter platform from the web, text or desktop applications. Twitter can be a valuable source of information, connections and trending news and you shouldn’t miss out.

Here are a few ways to get more traffic to your website through twitter:

1. Post your RSS Feed to Twitter

There are multiple tools available that allow you to post your RSS feed in realtime. The most popular tool that most people use is Twitterfeed. Your followers will get immediate knowledge that your post has been created on your blog. This is excellent because not all of your followers on twitter will necessarily be readers of your blog, but by tweeting your feed they will gain knowledge of your blog.

2. Follow People In Your Niche

Follow other bloggers, send them tweets and become friends with them. Twitter allows you to communicate much more easily and build relationships faster then email ever would. Once you have become friendly with them, you can start guest posting, asking for more exposure, and getting your posts more readers and your blog more subscribers.

3. Hold Contests Via Twitter

Give things away via twitter. You will gain more followers, who will become more aware of your blog, your brand and will start reading your blog and its posts. The best way to do this is similar to the way the Affiliate Summit gives away Free Passes – ask people to twitter a reason why they should win the contest, the answer to a riddle, or what they think about your blog, for example.

4. Solicit feedback on Twitter

Ask friends and followers to give you feedback on new content, get their reactions, and continue the conversation on your blog or on Twitter.  Social media and Twitter are all about being interactive, so make sure that you continue the conversation in any and all appropriate mediums.

5. Embed a Twitter box on your web page

Let visitors to your web site know that they can always be instantly updated – install a twitter box on your web site that updates with your latest tweets, and invite your website visitors to follow you on Twitter. Why have your subscribers follow you on Twitter? It helps you build a brand, it increases loyalty, and it gives you more exposure for very little extra work.

Every time we want to create a website, we think about the sources of traffic. In my case, the most of my traffic comes from other sites, such as blogs and social media networks. In the case of search engines, I have noticed that I received many visits through the keyword “canonical url” due to a post that I wrote many time ago.

No matter what, the fact is that getting indexed and raking high on search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others, is a must if you want to get tons of traffic through them.

As you may know, this is very related with the Meta Tags you use, something that I have explained in other post but I will retook in this post.

Submitting your website on Search Engines

The only way you will make money with your website is attracting visitors to it! Understanding by website a blog, forum, social media or anything else. You won’t magically get money with your website if people don’t see what you are offering. Of course you can attract visitors with PPC, paid advertising or blog reviews, but in this post we will deal with search engines.

There are 4 main search engines that you should submit your website on:

• Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
• Yahoo!: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
• MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2
• dmoz: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

I will tell you the truth, the only search engine which you should submit your site on is dmoz. If you use the form to apply for the other 3 ones you will be wasting your time. Why? Because everybody submits its websites through that forms and there are big lists of websites waiting months to be indexed. There are other way to get indexed by those search engines without using its forms .

For example, getting backlinks from websites that are already indexed can help you a lot, because all these search engines are constantly sending their spiders to scan every website they have indexed. So when they scan a website which is not listed in their databases, they have a mechanism that put you in automatically. So if you think to launch a new blog for example, try to get some backlinks from sites related with yours and this way, you will get indexed very fast. When I launch this blog, I applied the technique that I’m sharing with you know and I get indexed in less than 24 hours .

Build a Search Engine-Friendly site

The main difference of ranking among the millions of websites listed by search engines is because ones are more friendly than others to search engines. What do I mean by? Everything in your website has an impact on your ranking. Websites with many images and few text are terrible for SEO, how they pretend to be analyzed by search engines? I know they have complex algorithms but it’s not so advanced! In the other hand, websites with less dynamic structures and more rich text are easily indexed by search engines, websites with headers, the footers, xml feeds, alt tags on images, titles on their links and that kind of things.

Keep in mind that search engines cannot red the following information:

• Multimedia files like Flash or words within images.
• Content in frames.
• Content on dynamic pages.

The last point has changed a little with the passing of time, because if you think about the case of the blogs, unless you force them to create a static page, your content will be created on dynamic pages. Nevertheless, using static or dynamic pages your content will be read and recognized by search engines without problems.

In the case of images and links, remember to add an alt tag and a title, search engines register that kind of things when they send their spiders, also know as crawlers or robots.

Optimizing your website for Google

As we know, Google is constantly changing its algorithm to determine the rank of a website, and reason of that is simple. Among other reasons, they do this basically to prevent big sites from dominating results permanently. So as you can imagine, optimizing your website for Google could be a hard task because they are shaking the things constantly.

Google bases its algorithm starting from keywords. So I recommend you to check my preview post Finding Good Keywords For Your Website in order to know more about this topic. The fact is that PageRank equation is a big mystery, no one knows with exactitude which are the components which help you to have a higher rank, but there are some hints which appear to have an extra value on the formula:

• Inbound  Links from related sites with high PR.
• Inbound  Links from blogs.
• Inbound Links from .edu, .gov or .org.
• Outbound Links to high-ranked relevant websites.
• The size and quantity of information on your site.
• A Google Sitemap. You can generate one for WordPress by using this plugin, or by visiting this site.
• Updated content.
• Visible Title and Alt Tags.
• Using keywords on your Heading tags, bold and italicized words.
• Site traffic.

Optimizing your website for other search engines, such as Yahoo! or MSN

As you could see in the preview part of the post, Google focuses its attention mainly on inbound links, or links that point back to your site. In the case of Yahoo!, MSN or other search engines, they seem to emphasize on Meta Tags.

Meta Tags appear at the beginning of the source code of your website, in the <head> section. They provide information about your site to the browser and search engines, and the most important of them are:

• The Title
• Page Description
• Keywords

The Title can be set by using the HTML code <title> and it sets the title of your website, being this the text which the browser will display when someone visits your site.

The Page Description can be set by using the HTML code <meta name=“description” content=“Your site description here” /> and basically this is the text that search engines will show when someone find your site through they.

By the way, the second one is the result showed by Yahoo! and It seems that it’s not updated…

The Keywords tag can be set by using the HTML code <meta name=“keywords” content=“keyword1, keyword2, keyword 3…” /> and it lists the relevant terms for a website. Remember that it is really important to set only relevant keywords or you could get slapped by search engines! Also, I recommend you the following things in order to optimize your website for any search engine:

• Try to keep your keyword list under 20 elements. I know it could be hard, in fact I’m using like 40 now, but once you see which keywords are converting are which not, you should eliminate them from the list.
• Long Tail Keywords or keyword phrases are more useful that a single word. Basically this is because the competition and the macro-view, the more specific you are with your keywords the higher will be your rank.
• Do not include articles or prepositions ( a, an, the, on, from, by…). They are not necessary.
• Use lowercase in your keywords. If you capitalize them, capitalization will be required for match.
• Plural words include the singular ones when they are in the same root. For example, the keyword roots includes root, but companies does not include company.
• Phrases include the same words without spaces, i.e. make money online includes makemoneyonline but not vice versa.

Remember that when you use phrases, search engines try to match your keywords with the search manipulating your keyword, i.e. inverting it, mixing it…

What about dmoz?

This is The Open Directory Project from directory.mozilla.org, and it is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. It uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.

It also feeds its results to Google, AOL and other directories of the web, spreading your website through many sites if you are listed there.

Once your submitted your site to dmoz it will be study. They don’t accept all the sites, you need to cover some requirements and possibly you will be rejected at the first time. Just remember to add your URL in the right category, this is a really important factor which helps you to get in, because if you are a little away from your path, you will be rejected automatically.

To Conclude

It is vital for a website to be indexed by search engines in order to get targeted traffic and attract new readers or customers. I encourage you to check my other post related with keywords and SEO in order to complement the extensive information provided in this post. I hope you like the tips! if you have any special thing that you want to share feel free to leave a comment!

Some days ago I wrote about how you can use your RSS to “boost” your blog. In other words, I talked about different ways that you can use your RSS feed in order to increase the traffic of your blog. Besides some other methods, in that post I mentioned the use of rss directories in order to expand and spread the word of your blog.

One of my loyal readers asked me the following question in one of his comments:

Could you do a follow-up and list some of the rss directories and search engines?

Of course I can Dennis! I never thought about doing a list of directories, but thanks for the excellent idea. So then, I collected some RSS directories and search engines where you can submit your Blog’s feed and this way your blog will be exposed to a bigger audience so surely you will capture new readers .

• Feedest
• Blogoculars
• 2RSS
• FeedsFarm
• RSSfeeds
• FeedsHoster
• Free RSS Directory
• FeedOoyoo
• Plazoo
• FeedFury
• Octora
• FeedBase
• DayTimeNews
• MillionRss
• Yahoo RSS
• Read A Blog
• RSS Network
• Golden RSS Feed
• BlogDigger
• 88tem
• WeBlog ALot
• FeedBoy
• BlogPulse
• IceRocket
• Jordo Media
• FeedShark
• FeedPlex
• RSS Feed Submission Directory
• RSSMotron
• RSSMicro
• Syndic8
• WebDevTips
• Search4RSS
• NewzAlert
• NewsIsFree
• Feedage
• RSS MAD
• FeedCat
• AddYourBlog
• All-Blogs
• Crayon
• EatonWeb
• RSSMountain
• FeedSee
• FeedBees
• Best Directory
• Blogged
• GeekySpeaky
• ReadBurner
• Blogotion
• RSSHuger
• Finance Investing
  
• RSS Locator

That big list has rss channels, aggregators and directories where you can submit your rss feeds. Some of them are good, some of them are better but remember to submit your feed in the right category! That’s a really important thing because then you could be slapped by those search engines.

Enjoy submitting!

Some time ago Yahoo! announced the launching of Yahoo! Buzz, a service which you can share stories, images or videos with million people. Now, Yahoo! Buzz is opened to the public and you can enjoy of its services, being perfect to drive traffic to a website.

If you manage a website, there are some buttons that you can add to your site to buzz your content. The people can vote up/down any article, so as you can imagine the most voted stories will be show in the home page of this service, getting exposition in front of million users.

Will Yahoo! Buzz Beat Digg?

As you see, Yahoo! Buzz is a social service like Digg, Mixx, Reddit and that kind of networks… Yahoo! has the power that any social network actually have, being this a big company with years of experience, do you think that Buzz will Kill Digg? I personally think thatt Yahoo! Buzz could be a good competitor of Digg, the categories are basically the same but there are some differences between them.

In the social aspect, at Yahoo! Buzz you cannot add comments to a story, something that reduce its points in front of Digg. You can send the stories by email to your friends or coworkers, like every network allow it.

However, I think that Yahoo! is not comming with a competition’s attitude because you can share the stories submitted on Buzz in the most popular communities: Delicious, Digg, Facebook, Propeller, Reddit and StumbleUpon. So I think they are comming with a friendly attitude, aimed to improve the web.

I think if they integrate a profile system to Buzz which you could comment, flag users and that kind of things, it would be better to them. I mean, it would be nice to have the MyBlogLog’s profile merged to this service, what do you think?

Yahoo! Buzz Plugin for WordPress

You can manually add the Buzz buttons to your site or blog. But it don’t took much time to be a plugin for wordpress, letting you to integrate the buttons to each post. Travis Johnson has created this plugin, thank you for that!

The following ones are the steps you need to follow to integrate Yahoo! Buzz to your blog:

1. Download the Yahoo! Buzz WordPress plugin.
2. Unzip the file in your computer.
3. Upload the file wpbuzz.php to the plugins directory.
4. Activate the plugin from your wordpress blog’s admin section.
5. Now go to Settings -> Buzz on Yahoo!
6. Select the look and feel of button you would like. Here the button details are given in text without graphics, so this Yahoo buttons page would be of your help.
7. That’s it, you would see the Yahoo buzz button appearing at bottom of each of your posts.

Something I think it can be improved in this plugin is to have options like the Sphinn button plugin, which you can place the button at the top, botton left/right of your posts.

What do you think about this new Yahoo! service? I would like to read your opinions!

Many bloggers in a desperate attempt to improve their blogs, attempt to do any method they read in other blogs to get more readers or traffic. They should know that each blog has a particular way to be successful, and the methods shared by those bloggers won’t help you every time. For me, a particular method could be successful as many I have shared with you, but may be for your blog, the tips I give you could not always work and the reasons could be many. From the theme to your writing style, there is a fan of possibilities which can influence over the success of your blog, and no matter what you read in other blogs, you need to analyze your blog looking for things which can improve it and grow it up.

Many times, I have read my past posts looking for material to write about, in a present. As me, I recommend you to scan the post you have already published because sometimes, you can write about a topic but you didn’t developed in a deep way the main idea of that post. So you can find material to write about by looking in your past posts, and even reading the comments and ideas shared by your readers.

Also you should analyze carefully the statistics of your blog, looking for those posts which have attracted the more quantity of visitors. Once you find a couple of posts with that characteristic, you need to study them looking for what elements made them so successful. Those elements can be many, they could be the topic or may be the way how do you structured the post, the important thing is that you need to recognize what made them successful and then, you can write more posts including those elements which made your past posts so successful before, to have the same or even more success in the present.

As blogger, based in my experience I know what things attract more visitors to my blog. Of course I cannot make that things whenever I want because it can be very difficult and hard to maintain, something that requires a lot of dedication . But don’t worry, you can’t be constant every time! As human beings we need to relax and get out of our work (sometimes ). But well, I suppose that you know what things attract more visitors to your blog, so you could make a campaign every month to realize those things and grow up your blog progressively each month.

Remember, you are the only one who can make your blog grow, so you need to analyze your own work and recognize what are your doing bad and what are you doing well. So then you have your mind clear, you will be able to take your blog to the next level.