Making Money with Your Blog Traffic

Your blog is your traffic hub. In other words, it shouldn't be the final destination for your visitors. By giving them other places to go and other things to do, you direct them to places where they have the opportunity to spend money buying your products.

One place you want to direct traffic to is your newsletter. Include an Optin form to your newsletter in the top right corner of your blog. By placing it "above the fold," visitors don't have to scroll down to get to your form.

Make it as simple as possible for them to subscribe. Once they do subscribe, continue the relationship with them. Be personable and likable in your email correspondence. Offer them great content in your newsletter, perhaps information that is a little more in depth than what they read on your blog.

This will give them a reason to open emails from you. You want to give them such a reason because that is how you reach them with your sales and marketing messages.

Another place to direct traffic to is a sales page. By including links to sales pages, you give people the opportunity to buy your products right away. They might want to do just that if they like what they read on your blog. Also, include links to affiliate sites or any other sites you have that lead to cash.

Of course getting people to visit your blog is an essential first step. You have many ways to help you do just that. For instance, you can register your blog with Technorati.

Technorati is a search engine dedicated to tracking blogs. This is a valuable service in light of the fact that 175,000 blogs are created every day, and more than 1.6 million people update their blogs daily. This site follows all that activity as it happens.

Technorati tracks links between blogs and indexes thousands upon thousands of updates every hour. In essence, they monitor live blog communities and the conversations within those communities.

To help make your blog findable in this or any search engine, you need to format your permalinks so they are search engine friendly. A permalink is simply the way other sites see your links. By customizing the structure of these links with relevant phrases and keywords, the search engines are able to find you with much more efficiency.

To customize your permalinks, click on the permalink tab of your blogging dashboard. The default link will already be selected, but you want to select the "customize" option. In this field, enter the following information: /%category%/postname%/

Another way to make your blog findable within the search engines is to categorize all your posts. Every time you make an entry, select or create a category for that new post.

For example, if you have a blog about health, some of your categories could be Cardio Workouts, Strength Workouts and Healthy Meals. But if your post about a new supplement you're promoting doesn't fit into any of those categories, simply create a new one called Supplements.

By categorizing your posts, you create the specific information for your permalinks. Plus you keep all your information well-organized and easy for readers to find.

Another way to keep your readers happy is to post on a regular basis. So if you don't do anything else, keep your blog active. Update it consistently, even if the update is only a paragraph or two long. The purpose is to keep the content fresh so you stay in the sites of the search engines, ping other sites often and are constantly in contact with your RSS subscribers.

You can also start a Podcast. Podcasting is a sound file with an RSS feed. Instead of just posting words, you can post audio content that your RSS subscribers can listen to and be updated about when you post new files.

Finally, comments are great traffic generators. So comment on other blogs. Be a part of conversations other people start and include links back to your site. On your site, comment about other blogs. Create trackbacks and track your own.

Don't just comment on other blogs, though. Allow comments on your own. Not all will be positive, but if you want to have a conversation with your target audience, you need to hear what they have to say. Let them talk to you. LISTEN, don't just talk.

When you set up your Internet traffic hub properly, you then have the ability to direct that traffic to your money sites.