There are biggies like shoemoney.com, johnchow.com and many others who are providing the “Top Commentators” section on their blogs. This portion of the blog shows the highest commentator link with the anchor text. So now if you are present in this section you will get attention from all the visitors visiting this blog as your presence is on the home page of the blog. Also there are so many blogs like johnchow.com who have this section as do-follow list. So if you are into that section you are getting a backlink from a very popular blog. This way it also help you to increase credibility of your blog to search engines. The more you comment the more your chances to get visitors from the commented blog.

You can also put the “Top Commentator” section to your blog. You would say what is the benefit of that? Simple, Once a commentator sees this section he always wants to be a part of it and he start commenting on your blog. Now as competition to be listed to this section increases you will get lots and lots of comments written on your posts. So this way you can make your blog popular as well as traffic to your blog increases.

As always these are my own views. Your comments are always welcome! Also you can follow my updates on twitter .

Most of us know that to increase traffic we need to write some great quality content and start commenting on other blogs. Yes agreed this is really great and proven ways to increase your blog traffic and popularity. But we always starve for that X-Factor of massive traffic. Yes I have mentioned the name of Twitter to generate massive traffic. Then is there any other thing which can really get us some huge amount of traffic? Yes you got it right, I am talking about StumblUpon.

StumbleUpon is one of the leading social bookmarking sites which includes huge amount of web pages, videos and photos submitted by users.

So here I am discussing some steps to grow benefit from StumbleUpon. I am also getting really good traffic using StumbleUpon.

1. Create your account on StumbleUpon : Create your public profile on StumbleUpon by including your personal information, your picture, your interests and your short bio.

2. Thumbs Up or Review : Download the StumbleUpon toolbar and start stumbling the web pages of your interests. If you like the web page you can give a thumb up to that page by clicking on I like it button on the StumbleUpon toolbar.

If you have discovered a new page then when you click on I like it, you will see a dialog box asking you the review and tag of the page. Once you do that the site will be available to other stumlers to stumble.

3. Discover Daily : Here if you are getting new material from stumble community than its time for you to give back something. Try to discover new things everyday and submit to StumbleUpon. This way you will give something to your community and people will start noticing about you and you will automatically gain traffic for your blogs as well.

4. Make Friends : As I have mentioned above StumbleUpon is social bookmarking site so you will find so many people here of your interest so start making as many friends as you can. Wait, here if you are getting any friends request than first check for his favorites and if it suits you than you can add him as a friend (This way you can get rid from spammers). Also when you find some new person on the site you can check “How similar are you?” section of that person. That way you can get some idea about his interest which will help you to take decision.

5. Send your articles to friends : After you gain good circle of friends on StumbleUpon you can send your articles to them by using Sendto button on StumbleUpon toolbar. You can also request them to review or thumb up your article if they like. Similar ways there are chances that you get some articles to review from your friend. I am sure you will gain really good traffic by this way.

6. Don’t be Selfish : Yes! Just don’t submit your own pages only. If you are part of community then you should also submit pages if you like them. In that way you are giving something good to your community and the same way your community will give you some great stuff and of course some sweet traffic.

7. Get more and more subscribers : The more interesting stuff you submit there are more chances to get more and more subscribers. While making new friends you can humbly thank to the person and ask him to subscribe to your favorites. Here you would think that if I am getting friends than what is the need of getting subscribers. When somebody subscribes to your favorites, he will able to see all the favorites submitted by you and that way there are more chances you get some extra traffic.

8. Invest your time : Make above things your habit and invest some time to this procedure. What I suggest that you should assign some hours to your daily blogging routine to StumbleUpon. This way day by day you will increase the traffic around you and your blog as well.

9. Onsite Changes : Do some onsite changes related to StumbleUpon. After each post you can put a button asking readers to stumble the current post. You can also put some attractive request line after your post like “Don’t forget to review or thumbs up if you like this article“.

10. Continuous Analysis : Analyze the traffic continuously which you are getting from StumbleUpon. Check the reviews your articles are getting and do according needed changes to your future posts. Also check all the persons and make them friend who stumbled your articles this way you are getting sure shot for next time.

I am sure these 10 steps will help you grow your network on StumbleUpon and will sure help you to increase traffic to your blog. Correct me if I have missed something. Your comments are always welcome. And yes don’t forget to review or thumbs up it if you really liked this post.

So following are some myths which are increasing rapidly for twitter.

• The more people you follow, you will get more followers
• Everyone who follows you will surely click on your link
• Controversial updates are best way to get followers
• Updates are not important to get more followers

The more people you follow, you will get more followers

As shown in the above image this person is following 2000 people but gets only 655 followers. And I wonder that he has only 108 updates. Many times you will find this kind of scenario on twitter that number of followers is far less than the number of persons you follow. Here what I suggest you give more and more interesting twitter updates and I am sure you will increase the followers list.

Everyone who follows you will surely click on your link

It is not 100% sure that if you are getting one follower he will surely visit your link. Here what I suggest you to write an attractive bio about yourself and I am sure that chances your follower click on your link will increase dramatically.

Controversial updates are best way to get followers

As everybody know that if you update about something on twitter it will be disappear from first page within few minutes and like me most of the people rarely click on older entries. So by doing controversial updates you will get some visits to your twitter profile for time being but as soon as that update disappears from followers’ main page you will be forgotten for sure.

Updates are not important to get more followers

Here you will think that I am double minded about the updates on twitter. Here I would like to tell you that only regular meaningless twitter updates will not attract people. People will be attracted by interesting updates like some funny quotes or some shocking headlines. Also you can market about your product with some interesting small descriptions to that.

I am sure that there are so many other myths about twitter which I may not have covered here. I would surely like to know if you have some more information about it. Till then you can follow me on twitter here.

With the thousands of blogs out there social media is the most important tool to promote them. Probably social media is the best and the number one way to promote your blog quickly. Here is the list of 3 coolest sites for all the bloggers / website owners where they can surely promote their blog and get really great amount of quality traffic.

Blog Catalog:

This is one of the best web directories I have ever seen on the internet. It has very wide varity of blogs listed over there. Blog catalog allows free submission of your blog to their directory and your blog get nice exposure to the blogosphere. Here you can join different groups and advertise about your blogs.

MyBlogLog:

MyBlogLog is one of the greatest and original social networking sites of its kind. Here you can register your blog and make new friends in your network. You can also create community and grow your community which can help you to drive a good amount of traffic to your blog. Here you can also track information about your blog or website and know what your community users are interested in. You can join my MyBlogLog community here.

Twitter:

I believe today it is the best way to get the instant massive traffic. Twitter is a short (140 characters) answer to the question “What are you doing?”. This tool is used as a mini-blogging tool. The more interesting twits you have, you will gain more followers and you will increase traffic from twitter. You can follow me on twitter by clicking here.

There are also a lot other sites which are cool for blogger hangout. I will give more information in my future posts.

So using that I have made some analysis and below are some terms which can be in the Google hot trends list in the year 2008. I have made the list keeping the US traffic in mind you can check it according to country you want to target.

Christmas Eve Keywords:

santa tracker

santa radar

norad santa tracker

walmart holiday hours

santa locator

where is santa claus

Christmas Day Keywords:

restaurants open on christmas

after christmas sales

stores open on christmas

walmart christmas hours

disney christmas parade

This way you can easily be prepared for all recurring event of the year.

What is twitter?

Twitter is answer to a question “What are you doing?” in just 140 characters. Twitter is a different kind of social marketing and it is also known as mini blogging or micro blogging because you have to twit your views by just using maximum 140 characters.

You might have thought that how can i generate massive traffic by just writing 140 characters at a time?

Yes thats the power of Twitter. How? here we go

1. Increase Followers on Twitter – Increase Traffic to your blog

Twitter has a great functionality of following each other. The more followers you have the more traffic you gain for your blog. Here whenever you post a new post on your blog just twit the link on the twitter and it will be seen to all your followers at a time and the chances of hits are equal to the number of followers you have.

2. Twitter is Being used by Most of the internet users

Now a days twitter is used by almost all internet users starting from newbies to hardcore SEOs and from customers to biggies like buy.com. So your presence on it is a great impact to your presence on internet.

3. Short and to the point

Twitter only allows any message of 140 characters, so you need to be strong and specific enough to share your views. Once you get grip on this i am sure you will not need to search for followers they will come automatically.
4. Twit from anywhere

Twitter is giving facility to twit from mobile so you can twit from almost anywhere in the world.

Still you are not on twitter then what are you waiting for? Just visit www.twitter.com

Also you can follow me on Twitter

Your views are always welcome. See you soon on twitter

• Avoid link exchange with bad neighbourhood. Because as per google, your PR is also depending on your link with your neighbour. So always be careful for what you are linking and where you are linked.
• Do not waste your efforts in automated link submission. It will never work. So better put your efforts in genuine link building.
• Always be careful when you put reciprocal link on your blog. As I described in my previous post it may harm your pages’ PR.
• Dont ever think of spamming. I can assure you that by spamming google will kick you out soon from its index.
• Be careful while you buy a link. Do not buy link for 1 or 2 months, buy a link atleast for 6 months or 1 year that will surely help you. Also do some analysis that is it surely going to profit your PR? If the answer is above 70% (my view) then you can surely go for that.

• Do not waste time in researching the Meta tags. Just put few basic meta tags which indicated the interest of your blog.
• Do not forget to put title and description for all the pages of your blog. Title is the most important element of your page as it is the first thing seen by the google when it crawls the page. Always give unique title to the page, dont just copy and paste.
• Never change the title of the pages which are already doing well in google. One time I did it for my one of the best performing page and I swear I suffered like anything to get that page back in the same position.
• Avoid so many useless links on the page. As I have described earlier they are going to take some share from your PR.
• Also make sure that you nofollow login, registration pages as well as header and footer links.
• Always do proper formatting of the content. Try to use strong or italic tags as and when needed for content to look better. Search engines also consider this.
• Try to avoid excessive use of ajax, javascript and flash for any kind of content display. Yes you can give facility to the users using these things but dont involve them with content of your blog.

My blog has started growing and this is the result of that. Because of my link building strategies I have achieved this and hope to achieve this again and again.

I am planning to grow slowly and steadily. But the reason why you are not seeing updates for last couple of days is bit personal (Some family health issues). Also I am setting up my new offshore development centre in India.

I introduced kontera to this blog in middle of this month. Now let me give you some small breakup of my earnings

Google Adsense: $127
Kontera: $6

This month total: $133
Previous month total: $100

Total Earnings: $233

I know my earnings are so low than the other biggies in this niche. But sure I am trying my best to provide good content and earn more.