Thinking of Monetizing Your Blog? Some Tips to Increase Your Traffic

I’ve recently spoken to some friends who’ve confided that they would like to try to monetize their blogs and have asked how I've done it. To monetize means to earn money through blogging by advertising. One can advertise various ways, such as by displaying ads, doing product reviews, or using blogs to promote your own business. I’ve decided to do all three! The drawback to monetizing is that ads can be a bit distracting. I recently polled my blog viewers to ask if the ads bothered them or if they understood that I was “just trying to fund my 9.5 kids college tuitions”. Most were understanding, or maybe it’s just because I have such awesome blog readers and they were trying to be nice, I don’t know, but people haven’t complained too much...except for my sisters, but they complain about everything.

The benefits, or course, are that one can earn money through monetizing, thus the term. If you choose to monetize, one of the most important concerns you’ll need to address is how you are going to drive traffic to your blog. The following is a list of things I did when I first started blogging followed by a list of things I’ve recently started doing that has nearly doubled my traffic.

How I began:

1. I visited many blogs a day and left comments to let people know I was out there.
2. I started a weekly homemaking carnival, made a little button for it at scrapblog.com, let people know about it by leaving comments on their blogs and invited them to do link exchanges with me. However, you don't need to start your own carnival to do link exchanges, just ask fellow bloggers and most will say yes!
3. I posted often, at least 3 or 4 times a week, but sometimes as many as 6 times a week.
4. I had my blog listed at various blog listing sites. (See buttons at the bottom of my left sidebar.)
5. I tried to write material that would interest readers. Posting photos of your kids is cute sometimes, but unless you’re a really good photographer, that can get old. If you are posting those types of photos as a journal or for your family, it's great, but if you want to drive traffic to your blog, you'll have to expand your repetoir. I try to ask myself three questions when it comes to what I write. 1.) Can it teach something? 2.) Is it inspiring? 3.) Is it entertaining? I don’t always succeed at answering yes to at least one of these questions, but that is what I try to have in mind as I think of things to blog. For an amazing post related to that, you should go check out Brent Riggs’ blog entitled “On Building a Better Blog”. His entire blog is inspirational, but this particular post will drastically improve the way I blog, I believe. Click HERE to go there.
6. I participated,and continue to do so, in other's weekly blog carnivals. Some of my favorites are Not Me Monday, Tempt My Tummy Tuesday, and Wordless Wednesday at 5 Minutes For Mom.

Things I’ve done recently:

1. I’ve been part of facebook for quite sometime now, but I never realized how effective a tool it could be at driving traffic to my blog. Every time I post, I announce I did, then include a link to my post page. I have also recently joined Twitter and do the same there. There is actually an application where you can post your status to Twitter and it will automatically update your Facebook status. Love time-savers like that!
2. I’ve joined a community called The Blog Frog (click HERE to get there) and have actively begun participating in popular forums. This step alone has probably increased my blog traffic by about 30% to 40%. If you have any questions about that, just leave a comment.
3. I’ve added the widget called “Link Within”. While this doesn’t actually increase my unique visitors, it has increased my page views. You can find it at the bottom of each post listing related posts with attached thumbnails.
4. I’ve included easy ways for readers to subscribe to my blog, such as through email or other reader.

At this time I think it would be appropriate to sincerely thank all of you who visit my blog! It means so much to me that you care about what is going on in my life and that you visit, leave comments, subscribe to my posts and follow me in your readers. In the past fourteen months, you have changed my life for the better and I soooooooo appreciate it! Thank you, again!

So what do you do to drive traffic to your blog? Let's talk about it in the comments section! Thanks for listening!

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