How to Increase Traffic and Make Real Money Off Your Blog

[BRoper]

This article is taken from my new blog BRoper Money Online, I hope you all find it useful .

Do you have a blog attracting a lot of visitors? Thinking about starting a new blog? Want to make some extra money? This will show you exactly how to turn your blog into an automated earning machine without spending a penny.

How Much Money Can I Make?

Many people make their living blogging and are earning 6 figure annual sums! If blogging is a hobby or is not your day job, then of course it will take longer to generate this level of income but it depends entirely on individual commitment to the idea. Making money from blogs, although profitable, is not an overnight process and will take a lot of dedication and time to generate effectively.

Traffic = Money

The first thing to know when trying to make money from your blog is that no matter how great your blog is or how many ads you have on your page you wont make a penny if people don't know about your site. This is where the majority of the work comes in, gaining traffic to begin with isn't easy (which is why you start at an advantage if you already have a well established blog). However there are a few tried and tested methods of gaining traffic that I will go through.

Firstly make sure that every article, podcast, etc you make is original, valuable content that will keep the reader hooked and hopefully want to read more of your writing. This is a vital step in gaining traffic because great articles are linked and visited much, MUCH faster by blog communities than your run-of-the mill post. Don't make the mistake of thinking that creating hundreds of articles is going to bring you more traffic, I would rather read one good article than have to look through hundreds of poorly written ones. However do try to keep a consistent amount of articles flowing, even if its just 4 or 5 well written articles every week this means that you keep your readers interested and feed the search engines whilst still creating great posts.

After you have created some articles the best thing to do is to start getting involved in blogging communities. Start by posting comments on other blogs, making friends and asking other blog to link back to you. This should bring in some initial traffic and hopefully a few subscriptions! Another great way to get your blog out there is to submit your best articles or even your whole blog to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. All of these guarantee you visits, but if your article is good enough you can end up on the front page of sites like Digg and these can attract MASSIVE amounts of traffic.

Another effective way of attracting traffic is through blog carnivals such as www.blogcarnival.com. These are magazine like, monthly releases of all the best submitted articles in your genre. The carnivals can be small or they can have thousands of viewers, but whatever happens you are guaranteed traffic if your article is posted. Lastly add your site to the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and try to optimize your blogs wording so that it can be found more easily.

Sources of Income

Once you have a steady stream of traffic you can start earning money off your blog. The first and most effective way of generating income is to sign up for free pay per click advertising services such as Google Adsense and Chitika eMiniMalls. These place related adds on your blog and you get paid a certain amount for every person that clicks on the ad, this is perfect for high traffic blogs and can produce remarkably large amounts of income.

Another way of generating income is to sign up for affiliate programs such as amazon, these offer a variety of free services such as text and image banner ads and even your own blog store that earns you up to 10% of the price of every item that gets solf through your store. Another way is to get private sponsorship from companies to advertise their products or site on your store for a fixed amount each month, however this is mostly for larger more popular blogs that are already successful.

The best way to generate income is to have multiple sources of income at once and to experiment with the layout of advertising and see what works best for your blog, no blog is the same. Also keep researching new ways of making money from your blog, things change quickly and just because something is currently earning you alot does'nt mean that you should assume it will stay that way.

On the other hand if you prefer to simply just write and would rather have your traffic and advertising handled by another company for a percentage of your articles earnings then a system like Triond may be best for you. I hope you enjoyed my article and thanks for reading. Check out the rest of my blog at BRoper Money Online.

[derekanders]

Great information. Hope the new blog works out for ya!!

[rowelldioniciodotcom]

Can't make any money without traffic ;]

Thanks for the information

[ahojvole]

Traffic = money simple equation but to have the traffic value high is hard

[edyst3]

Thanks for sharing.

about blogcarnival, is it ok if we post our own article that is already posted on our blog?

is blogcarnival like article directory?

[BRoper]

Yes its fine to post articles already on your blog because the carnival just displays a link to your blog page with the article on it.

[Mamitah009]

a great info thanks my dude

[chleoku]

thanks for the great info on driving traffic

[flashgordon]

Nice article. However, it does paint a fairly positive picture. I think one needs to remember that some niches make more money and get more traffic then others. However, it is realistic in the amount of time and effort one needs to put into blogging.

[aspiringentrepreneur]

Yeah, driving traffic is really really hard. You have to do good in SEO's if you really want your traffic to shoot up.

But in my case, I don't do SEO's as I don't want to divert my readers. Hopefully, I can increase my readers by posting to forums like this.