Here we are again in the throws of another weekend! I hope you had a productive and fun week!

Today I want to talk about creating quality. There are so many blogs in every possible niche, you may be focusing on how to get traffic to your blog. If that is your focus, you may want to read some of my other blog posts such as, Ten Ways to Promote Your Blog, and Weekly Wrap-Up: Link Building.

But today I want to focus on how to create a following on your blog and how to keep folks on your blog longer, reading what you have worked on so hard to express. Obviously there are many reasons why you want your visitors to visit often and to stay on your site longer. One factor that I have noticed over the past six weeks of testing, is that my Alexa ranking (which is a rough estimate of how popular your blog is) seems to be more directly impacted by how long folks stay on my blog than how many visitors I have. And how do you get visitors to stay on your blog longer? You give them quality; you answer the questions they have come looking for, you entertain. By doing this you create posts of interests, post that others will Digg or Twitter, creating more visitors, more repeat visitors and visitors that stick around longer to see what else you have written.
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I just wanted to post a brief blog today to let you know about a new post at Kim Roach’s blog. It is called the Ultimate Internet Marketing Toolbox and it lists all of her favorite internet marketing resources.

Her resource list includes graphic design, wordpress themes, video production, ghost writers, copywriters, competitive intelligence and more. She has created a pdf file for downloading ease, and her post and the file contain all of these resources along with their links. As is everything that Kim does, it is quite a gem of a blog post.

Check it out. It’s a little bit like Christmas in September.

Until next time,

~Norene

I believe that one of the reasons it took me so long to gain a footing in the Internet Marketing world was because I did not find it fun. I would read guru after guru talking about how much fun it was to make money on line. I would think, “well if I was making a gazillion dollars a day, I’m sure I would think it was fun too!” But I found the whole concept overwhelming. Writing articles, setting up a blog, squidoo, autoresponder, PPC, affiliate marketing, social networking, forum posting, creating a list, creating emails….and on and on and on….Are You Kidding Me????

It wasn’t until I started the coaching program with Alex Jeffreys that it dawned on me one day that I Was Having Fun! The reason I was having fun wasn’t related to making money, as I hadn’t made any money yet, it had to do with the networking that was occurring as a result of the coaching program. Through forums and blogs I was learning more and more about Internet Marketing and these wonderful people that I was meeting along the way were making what had been overwhelming for years, doable. I had heard many times that Internet Marketing was simple but it was not easy. And I let that thought really paralyze me. What I found was that once I started networking with other internet marketers, all that I thought I could never do, really was easy. One step at a time.

Reading other people’s blogs, you really get a sense of the person’s personality and strengths. I came across so many really good, helpful, instructive, motivating posts and I wanted to share some with you. Today I will share some of my favorite blogs that were written in the areas of Blogging, Traffic, and Motivation/Attitude/Goal Setting.

I hope you find them helpful as well.

Blogging
If you are having trouble blogging or want to improve your blog, Matt Wolfe is truly one of the most knowledgeable bloggers that I know. One of his blogs that really shortened the learning curve for me was his blog post about plugins called The Best Plugins for Wordpress. He also has numerous short posts that are extremely valuable to the both the new and advanced blogger, making everyone who visits feel comfortable and competent due to how easy to understand his posts are. One such post was about scheduling blog posts in the future called How to Schedule Posts for Later. This was a simple post, but it gave me immediate information that I hadn’t known previously. Matt’s blog is just a wealth of information and he has a free course called WordPress Classroom that is outstanding.

Another blog post that I found really helpful was Lee Berlemann’s pinging post, Follow Up to My Additional Pinging Post. In this post he lists tons of sites that will ping your site bringing in more traffic. I would have never found and compiled this list on my own and I’m very grateful to him.

Traffic
Getting a constant stream of traffic is critical to an internet marketer’s success. The following blog posts were extremely useful to me.

Rob Willis lists 13 different tips for getting traffic to your website or blog. His list is detailed with how to set up these traffic generators easily.

Kim Roach lists 21 ways to get traffic in her blog post titled, 21 Untapped Traffic Sources. I have written more extensively about Kim and her traffic generation strategies in a previous blog post.

Another very extensive description of ways to increase blog traffic can be found on the problogger.net website. Additional information on what might be causing a decline of traffic to your blog can also be found on the problogger blog.

Motivation/Attitude/Goal Setting
One of the most important part of an internet marketing business is to maintain a positive attitude and to keep motivated. I found several excellent posts about this topic.

One of the best posts I have read about goal setting I have mentioned before. It is Paul Norwine’s blog post titled, Goal Setting for Dummies. In this post he explores being specific about your goals and how to whittle down your goals to one main goal to focus on.

Another excellent post is Rob Willis‘ blog post titled, Simplify – Prioritize. Rob lists 5 action steps to help prioritize to make attaining your goals achievable.

A fun blog post was created by Huddson Lee titled What I Learned From My Dog about Online Marketing. It is a post about setting priorities and living in the moment. Well worth the read!

Heine Wentzel writes about his method for always staying positive in his post SOTOFOT.

Finally, a huge part of goal setting and moving your business forward is to remember the importance of continuing to learn. Many people, especially those who are comfortably successful, slow down or even stop learning new ways to use the internet. This attitude can quickly leave you behind. Daniel Scocco talks about this in more detail in his post, Always Be Learning New Skills.

The internet is a big place. Learning from others, networking with like-minded folks, this is what makes this business fun!

What are some of your favorite blog posts about Blogging, Traffic and Goal Setting/Motivation/Attitude?

In a recent webinar from Alex Jeffrey’s coaching class, Rich Schefren made the comment that one should buy “just in time” and not “just in case.” The point being that while building you internet marketing business you will discover what you don’t know or what you need and you can seek out the specific information that would benefit your business at the time.

If you buy ‘just in case’ you might need it someday, then you probably will never use it. Even if you do need it someday, by that time the information will most likely be out of date.

Since hearing him put product launches in that prospective, I have cut down considerably on what products I purchase. This has also helped me to focus on what it is that I am doing to grow my business and spend my time planning and implementing instead of getting into the loop of buying, reading, buying and reading and then buying some more.

What I discovered that I needed at this moment in time was a good understanding of how to drive traffic. To that end, I purchased Kim Roach’s Ultimate Blogging Challenge video series. I have spoken about Kim before — I consider her one of my mentors. In this series, Kim showed how she started a blog in a brand new niche and drove 1200+ visitors to her site in 7 days. I was going to blog about what I had learned from applying her methods, but in the meantime, she, herself, blogged about her tactics. The blog entry is called 21 Untapped Traffic Sources. Her course was amazing, and the information was timely for me.

So instead of blogging about her specific tactics, I will tell you how putting them into practice worked for me.

I put to use her information on article marketing and finding hidden forums to become members of. She stresses the importance of submitting content articles to high-profile content syndication sites — ie, sites that cater to that specific niche, instead of (or in addition to) the broader sites like ezinearticles. Likewise one should focus on very specific niche-related forums, instead of the broader category forums. Not just talking theory, she discussed specific article directories and forums for given niches, and how to find these obscure sites for whatever niche you are in.

Within a week of doing just these two strategies the traffic to my site tripled and my alexa score dropped by more than 130,000. It was pretty high to begin with — in the 2 million range, but I thought that drop, happening so quickly, and having done nothing different than implement what I was already doing, but with her twist, was pretty impressive.

One strategy that she mentioned that I had not thought about in the past was guest blogging and the power that it has to drive traffic. That is a strategy that I hope to begin to implement next week.

One cannot deny the generosity of the information that she shares. For all of the information I have gathered on driving traffic over the past six months, many of her strategies and sources were new to me, and now she is sharing them with the world.

If you want to see the details of her tactics yourself, read her blog. It will be your best read of the day.