There are a bunch of ways to attract new visitors to your website. First and foremost is to build relevant and fresh content. Once you have that down you need to go and find traffic wherever you can. The more permanent the solution that you come up with the better off you are. If you can find some forums to post to these will sometimes give you a little bang for the buck especially if you can assist in helping out with a relevant problem. You always want to put a link back to your site wherever you can, this will get people surfing through your site to see what you have to offer. The whole idea Is to get some fresh eyes on your site. If they like what they see then they might be more likely to come back.

One thing that I have learned is that persistance usually pays off. All you need to do is show you are an authority on the subject and the readers will usually come.

Whoever says that you can make money just by sitting home and doing nothing is crazy. I know it is possible, but only after you invest some time and effort into a website.

Once you have the site created and attracting some solid traffic then you could possibly sit back and do nothing for a while until you started losing your traffic due to inactivity.

Since I have rediscovered WordPress I have been busy converting my other sites over to WordPress and trying to keep up a blog on as many of them as possible. I just really enjoy the ease of adding all of the Web 2.0 technology to my sites with the click of a button.

I have read a couple different schools of thought on the subject of having several blogs or just one or two. If you have one main site instead of many then you could really concentrate on building the traffic to that one main site. However, I am a believer that certain niches will automatically receive more traffic than others just because of the popularity of the niche.

I can write on several different subjects and if they all pay off I will hopefully avoid spikes in income throughout the year.

The main problem with putting up all of these sites is that it is time consuming to get them set up properly. I admit that I would have more time to spend on one site if I wasn’t so busy building a network of sites.

Anyway, I am up to four of these blogs and I still have to go back and see if I missed anything on the set up process.

See ya.

I have found all of these great affiliate programs that will allow me to monetize my site but they are all pretty useless until I start getting some traffic.

I have been working hard at coming up with ways to optimize my site to bring on more traffic. Here is a list of some of the things that I have done in the past few days.

1) I went looking for Wordpress plugins and found a few that should help.

a) SEO pack - I have heard that this is a must have and it does a good job of adding titles, keywords, and descriptions into your meta tags.

b) Google sitemaps - it is supposed to be a good thing to add a sitemap to your site. This allows the Google robot to come to your site and it will go to your sitemap page which will tell Google where it should be looking for new pages.

c) Most Popular Posts - I added a plugin that will display a list of my most viewed posts and it shows a tally of how many times each post has been read. This probably won’t help in gaining any traffic but at least it gives me an idea of how many times my posts have been read and let’s me know which ones are popular. That way I would know that I should post more on the popular subject matter.

2) I created a Twitter account specifically to go with another plugin that I have that will automatically post my blog headline to Twiter with a link back to my site. This is done through the RSS feed on my site.

3) Speaking of RSS, I added a large RSS feed button to encourage people to subscribe to my RSS feed.

4) I added my feed to feedburner.com but I am still not quite sure what that is for.

5) I added my own homemade link exchange system to the site to encourage link exchange to build traffic.

Needless to say, I have been making a lot of changes, hopefully they pay off.

I have so many sites going up that I barely have time to think sometimes. I always worry about one site not getting updated enough and losing whatever traffic that it may have. Lately, I have been reading a  lot about review type sites. Like a camera review site or a computer review site or something like that. Whenever I come up with a product that I think might do well I start looking for a domain name and I usually find that the market that I am interested in is completely saturated. When I look further into the already registered domain names I notice that all of the sites are mostly just junk. It is a site that went up just for the purpose of ads. It’s funny how the domain names for a good niche are always the first to go. I think about all this and wonder how any of these people with these camera or computer sites actually make any money. The one thing that I do know is that the only way you could make any kind of cash in one of those niches is to stick with it for a long long time and hopefully it will eventually pay off. For the life of me, I can’t think of a product that interests me enough to write a review blog about it. I hate to say it, but the only thing that really ever interests me that much is probably cameras and computers. I always envy the guy that is at the top of that search string.

I have tried putting up stores in the past but I never really get past the building the site and populating it with products part. After that I usually let it sit for a few years and then I like to complain about what a dud that site was and I often ask myself what was I thinking when I built that one?

This time, with my new found enthusiasm to blog and gain more traffic to my sites I am determined to come up with a product that is not over saturated but still has a few people that are looking online for it. Preferably, I would like to review some type of big ticket item that would have the potential to bring me in a bucket load of profits but I have yet to come up with it. If you know of the niche product that I am looking for please let me know. Here are my current requirements that I am sure would pay off in the long run.

1) I need an item that will sell like hot cakes
2) It needs to be a big ticket item that would pay a hefty commission
3) I would prefer it to be a product that has repeat sales (often)

As I read back, I think that I know the perfect product… drugs. If they ever became legal there would be a great market that hits all of my earning requirements. Unfortunately, I am sure even those domain names are all taken and of course they are all filled with ads.

Something I have wondered for a while now; Is gaining traffic through niche marketing all dependent on the niche that you choose?

I have several websites, many of which I haven’t touched in months. I am always curious about how many visitors each site gets and why. For some reason, I really enjoy analyzing webstats. Somethings that I have noticed is that some sites actually do get more traffic than others and I can only attribute it to the subject matter of each particular site. I have done a pretty good job of putting sites up in several different niches and can see obvious spikes in certain ones.

I know that there are a couple of sites out there that will help you to find good keywords but I always kind it so time consuming because I always find keywords that I do not have too much desire to keep up with on a regular basis. The only subject matter that I am really interested in is usually the over saturated key phrases and the highly targeted key phrases that get no traffic whatsoever. These were usually domain names that I acquired just so that it would be easy to get good search engine rankings with. Usually they are nut no one really has any interest. That is why I think that if toy want to make any money at this you mostly need to just stay dedicated to the niche that you know and keep at it until Google thinks your an authority on the subject.

Today I got sucked into all of the gadgets that I have been trying to avoid wasting my time on. I got a big old RSS subscribe button, a share and bookmark button, and I got feedburner hooked up (I think). Because I am trying to encourage more traffic, I signed up for a twitter account for this website and added a plugin that will feed the headline of all my blog posts as a Twitter post with a link back to the article.

It’s kind of neat having all of these great tools available within WordPress but as usual it gets a little time consuming. All I can say is I hope it all pays off in the long run. I started thinking about it and decided that it ought to be worth my time to do some of this stuff. After all, I was thinking that I am spending so much time creating the content, I may as well come up with a few ways to distribute and advertise that content as much as I can.

This blog seems to be going OK but I am having a slow go at getting my other blogs going. It’s the little tweaks that I went through today that I end up going through for all of my new sites. I always end up with design issues that frustrate me, and I always want to add all the bells and whistles that I have added on my other sites. This doesn’t always work out as planned because all of my sites are based on a different niche and they all seem to have different needs that I think would help the site. In the long run, I always end up wasting too much time adding all the little gadgets and I never get down to actually doing the things that actually matter.

I freaked out a little before because I noticed that this site had not been indexed by Google yet.

I know that this site is supposed to be about making money online and all I can seem to talk about is building traffic to your website. I am trying to post regularly to this blog so I am sure that I will eventually get around to discussing ways to monetize from your site. I think I can take this website as an example. Currently, I do not have any ads or any other way to monetize on this site. The reason is because I have not figured out how I want to go about it. I always fear putting any kind of ad program on a site like this because I am afraid that I will be violating some kind of terms of service or something. One thing that I have heard people repeatedly say is to be better safe than sorry. For this reason, I have been looking into affiliate type programs that I have bought into in the past or new ones that might be emerging. At the very least, it always seems to me that if I bought it, maybe somebody else might want to buy it too. After all, this site is about making money, I may as well lead a few people in the right direction.

My point going into this post was supposed to be about my commitment that I am trying to make to this whole blogging thing. I have been bragging to my friends and family for years about how I can see that there is a lot of money to be made on the Internet and I really haven’t even scratched the surface as to the full potential.

I base most of my opinion on the results that I get from one of my sites in particular. I currently have one site that I have not touched in nearly a year and it is bringing in nearly $200 per month in ad revenue, so it doesn’t take much math to figure out that I don’t need too many of those sites to make a decent income. This income is coming from my site that gets about 13,000 visitors per month. My theory is that if I can replicate several sites to get around 10,000 plus visitors per month I should be able to make some decent change.

Previously, I never put too much effort into building the traffic on my sites. I have always known that if I put in just a little effort it would gain me new prospects almost instantly. I was always selling my own product of service so I did not pay too much attention to monetizing off ads or affiliate programs. I started to like the checks that would come in each month and it did not require me to do any billing or deal with any customer issues. I honestly just sat around and the checks just come in. Lately, I have been thinking that maybe I should put forth a little more effort into this. The only problem is that there are no guarantees in the end. There is no telling when it will start to pay or how much. Therefore, I decided to try to make a commitment. My goal is to get a minimum of 50 blogs going and load them with fresh content and then optimize them for the search engines. If I can just get half the success on those 50 sites as I am getting on my one that has sat idle for year. I could stand to make $50,000 annually by just sitting around. I am not going to say sitting around doing nothing because it will require a lot of writing. I have found that it is not too difficult to write but I am sure that there will be some sort form of burn out (there always is).

I have been plugging away on this blog without too much trouble, I really wonder how many of these I can do and have them all produce.

For now, I have been writing this one O.K. and I have started writing another and I just loaded up another WordPress blog today. We’ll see how well I do three.

I think that I may have stumbled onto a little traffic building tip. I have noticed that there are websites out there that just go out and scrape other peoples content, I have more than a few sites that do this as well. However, what never really dawned on me was that if I created the fresh RSS feeds then other sites would come through and scrape MY content. I presently see this as a good thing because when it is done properly it creates a link back to my website from theirs. If there are as many people out there scraping websites as I think there are, then I expect a lot of free backlinks. This is just another example of some of the things that I like about WordPress they have made it easy to create and implement a lot of the old SEO techniques into my site without any effort on my end.

One of the tactics that I have tried in the past was to create a link exchange directory on my website. I must admit that I found definite advatages to having a link exchange on my site. Surprisingly enough, I seemed to get a lot of increased traffic to my site when I did this. It would work in two different ways.

First, I always felt that taking the time and sending out a well thought out email to a targeted bunch of people increased my traffic and my sales because I was basically targeting my customer prospect lists for these link exchanges. Many times they would just go visit my site to see who I was and what it was that I did. Also, many of these people did not know what a link exchange was or let alone how to do it. All they new was that someone took an interest in their site, enough so that someone would actually want to exchange links with them.

Second, once in a while I would stumble onto someone that actually did want to exchange links and usually these were web savvy people and their site (or my link) would not be going away anytime soon. If done right, you can see traffic trickle in from your link exchange campaign for years to come.

I will get back to my original point of how I am noticing that people are actually scraping my content and distributing it out over the Internet. As long as link comes back to my site this sounds like a new kind of link exchange to me, only I do not have to add any extra links on my site so these links that are out there that link back to me become one way links. And if I am not mistaken, one way links have always been a good thing as far as Google is concerned. The Web 2.0 world is ever changing and it ideas like this that make me want to embrace it.

I have been addicted to buying new software for no apparent reason for quite some time now. I spend so much time surfing around the Internet getting hooked on everything that I see, most of the time I think I am worse than a kid watching commercials from their Saturday morning cartoon. You would think that after being sucked into every single marketing scam and purchasing every single useless item that is out there that I would eventually wise up. Unfortunately, that day has not arrived yet.

Everytime I get involved in a new project (like this one) I start looking around for other examples. It is then that I start my little buying frenzies.

What sparked my desires this time is blogging templates, plugins, gadgets and other WordPress related items. I am relatively new to WordPress and I have committed myself to sticking with it but I have noticed that several sites out there are utilizing some pretty nifty gadgets. As usual these gadgets don’t come preinstalled on all templates so I end up spending a lot of time figuring out what the thing that I want is called and how I can get this thing for my site.

This time around I am trying squelch my desires to buy and stick with the goal at hand, keep up with inputting the new content and let the rest fall into place. I will now take the time to go into my little rant about traffic. The one thing that I have confirmed is that new software added to my site does not bring new traffic to my site. I can have a site that has all of the bells and whistles but no new content and a boring old site that is filled with fresh interesting content and the boring old content filled site will win the traffic everytime. Ideally, I would like to have both bit I think that my point is, don’t let the knit picking slow down your content adding process. The content will pay off in the future and the software will just empty your wallet.

All that being said, here is the list of desires that I am currently working on, I think they are all WordPress gadgets or plugins.

1) FeedBurner - I noticed that they were bought by Google and that always interests me because it is usually free. It looks like Feed Burner will organize my feeds for me and let me know how many subscribers I have.

2) WordPress Gadgets - in general I just want to know what they are. How hard it is to add them into my site and do they hurt the site from a search engine point of view? I am assuming that it is all good but I never like to assume anything.

3) WordPress Plugins - specifically SEO related plugins. I ran a few tests on the template that I am using and it could use a little more beef for the search engines. As usual I want to add things for the positive and not harm my chances for traffic in any way.

That’s all for now. I am sure that I will have a few more needs very soon and I will try to share the outcome of my current rant.