In every bloggers life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better. (more…)

Local marketing can be a great way to attract targeted buyers to your affiliate site.  By doing some research and locating the most profitable cities, you can begin a local marketing campaign.  Optimizing your site for local searches is imperative along with a paid advertising campaign. 

For long term success affiliates need to optimize for the organic listings by gaining local links and effectively using keywords.  To create short term success a paid advertising campaign is necessary.  Through trial and error decide which keywords offer the best ROI and continue to improve your paid campaign. Landing pages must be well-designed, informative and a clean passageway from your site, to the merchant’s site to make their purchase.

Targeting local listings is valuable because you are harnessing customers who are in the mood to buy.  By targeting potential customers you are increasing your chances of a conversion, meaning more commissions for you.

Since signing up for the Internet Retailer conference a couple months ago I have received an enormous pile of what I would consider junk mail.  Companies sending out postcards left and right, “Visit my Booth and Win this …!”  Quite frankly sending me these postcards is a waste of time.  For the most part it is the lack of an interesting and unique presentation that equals one look for the card and then to the trash.  Everyone offers free iPods, coffee, and free consultations.

There have been a few post cards I have seen that stick out from the rest.  The ones that stick out are the ones that least resemble sales pitches.  They aren’t overly flashy, but rather informative and enlightening.

When I see some form of advertising and I feel they are trying too hard it makes them look desperate and you can guarantee I will not be hooked.  Much like the sites on the Internet, I would rather see strong content explaining core issues.  Until tomorrow when I get another 20 post cards in the mail.

On Saturday I wrote about some of the ways web press releases bring traffic to a website.  Here are the top 5 positive effects a person/company can gain from a quality press release.

·        Collect One-Way Links

You can collect quality backlinks from pages with high Page Rank.  You can easily gain over 100 hundred one-way links from a press release.  Maybe 1000 if you are in the right industry

·        Earn High Rankings in the Search Engines

By optimizing your press release for the search engines you give your self the opportunity to bring enormous amounts of traffic from quality news source sites.

·        Improve Keyword Success in Search Engines

You can gain high rankings from keywords very fast with a strong press release.

·        Creates Visibility

Press releases are a low-cost way to reach a large market.  Press releases are effective at bringing in a short-term wave of traffic, and with a quality website to back up the press release, you can retain a portion of the press release viewers.

·        Strengthens Brand Image

Using web promotion sites, such as Prweb.com and pr.com, you can show the Internet world your work.

Google is ruffling some more feathers, this time in the UK regarding Internet privacy laws. Google stores their data for up to 2 years and the EU says a line may have been crossed. Google received a letter from the EU asking them to explain why data was kept on file for so long. Schaar’s spokeswoman, Gabriele Loewnau had this to say about the case:

We first wanted to give Google the time to respond before we comment,

Google will of course claim their innocence and blame the whole industry for the lack of privacy on the Internet. It is true though, there are companies aside from Google who do use their data for personal or corporate financial gain. Google for the most part has proven to handle personal privacy issues pretty well. More to come if the EU acts on their claim.

Affiliates often times forget or don’t know the power of SEO and how it can raise your website’s performance. This is good advice for anyone with a website that wants to promote and bring traffic. A press release in and of itself is easy to create, but optimizing it will bring targeted traffic. Here are the 5 most important steps to optimizing your press release.

1. Research Keywords – keywords are very important in getting you ranked in the search engine. Do your research and pick no more than 5 keywords for your press release

2. Keyword placement in press release – always use your main keyword in the title and as often as you can in the first 2 paragraphs without breaking up the flow of the release.

3. Create Solid Anchor-Text

4. Optimized Landing Page- the keywords in the press release will do no good unless your landing page is optimized for the same keywords.

5. Tagging Strategies - with Web 2.0 as strong as it is, you need to take advantage of the current state. Tags are enormously popular with sites such as Technorati and de.lic.ious, use them to draw more people to view your press release and your site

I just purchased my second domain name this afternoon through register.com.  I grabbed … travel-denver.com, and I am excited about the possibilities.  I am going to begin putting the site together this week hopefully.

If Microsoft feels the need to escape from their latest purchase of aQuantive they will have to shell out $500 million to the advertising company.  If the reverse is true, and aQuantive bails on the deal, then they will owe Microsoft $175 million.  The deal claims that if either side violates the terms of the agreement then the deal will be repealed.  aQuantive is also allowed to listen to proposals from other entities until the deal with Microsoft is complete.

Critics of the deal claim that Microsoft may back out simply because of the $6 billion price tag.  However, Microsoft will need aQuantive after Google purchased DoubleClick earlier this spring.  This purchase may take time to pay dividends for Microsoft, but in the end they obtained a great company with enormous growth potential.