Blogging, Social Media

I ran a poll in the sidebar here for a few days asking people what their main goals were for 2010 in terms of internet marketing. The two clear favourites were: “Quitting your job to make a living online” and “Increase website traffic”. The latter, of course, is people looking for more eyeballs on their content. And, although it may not be obvious, so is the first.

You can make a beautiful, well-structured site that contains excellent content, but it isn’t going to make any money unless it starts getting visitors. No matter what webmasters like to say is ‘king’ online these days, everything we do is for traffic. It’s what matters on the web.

I try not to sound too egotistical when I say this, but over the past 12 months I have certainly been one of the ‘faces of guest posting,’ simply because I have had a lot of public success with the tactic. I’ve been interviewed about marketing using guest posts over 10 times, I’m mentioned on the homepage of a guest posting community and I’ve written far more of them than I care to remember.

Because of this, I feel I’m probably one of the best people to cover this subject with a long in-depth article. If you’re wondering what guest posting is or why you should even care about it then you’ve been missing out. You’ve seriously been unaware about one of the best marketing tactics available today. Thankfully, if you’re reading this article then you may have time to utilise this strategy before it is too late.

I recently stopped working on a number of large projects because I was not totally passionate about them. I’ve always lived my life around what interests me the most, but I’ve always still worked on things I don’t care about that much. That all changes now as I have sold a number of affiliate websites that make me money, but I don’t care about anymore.

This has given me not only a nice lump-sum of cash, but also a lot of spare time. I have decided that instead of starting multiple sites in fairly uncompetitive niches, I’m going to go for a ‘biggie’. I’m going to go for a niche that is highly profitable, but also ultra competitive.

Around two years ago I took some time out to analyse the top 50 Stumbleupon users. At the time, StumbleUpon was just starting to get noticed by internet marketers and as the service had the ability to send a lot of traffic to websites, people wanted to know more.

These days, Stumbleupon is about 8 million users bigger than the last time I did this and while it still has the ability to send thousands of visitors to a website, it seems to get talked about less and less. Now, some people will argue that there is no benefit to being a top user of the service while others claim that you should strive to be one if you want traffic from the site.

If you ask anyone what makes a blog popular, they’ll say content. No matter how many clever headlines tell you otherwise, content is still king. If your content does not offer value in one way or another, people will simply not visit your site. The two steps to building a successful and popular blog are simply: writing great content and having people talk about it.

Blog’s don’t grow on their own; they grow through people sharing them. By having people “talk about” your content, I simply mean people sharing your content. This could be via word of mouth, Twitter, Facebook, or even a link from their own blog. The latter example, surprisingly (or not) is what I’m going to look at today.