Crosstown Traffic

There are several ways you can drive traffic to your blog. I shall discuss here what I consider to be the most effective and (probably) obvious ones. I won't cover the basics as you already know them but there are some points that I'd like to share with you. I do hope that you find them both interesting and helpful. 


How much traffic you want can vary. If you want to make money blogging you need traffic in

millions of page visits. A percentage of those (outrageously small) will either click your ads or buy your products. Having said this however, even if you don’t blog for money you still need traffic to come to your blog. From the traffic you get comments and potentially more traffic.

To get traffic to your blog, people have to know about you. You need to get indexed by Google to get organic traffic and there are countless articles which show you how to do that, using strategic linking so I won’t go into this through fear of confusing you with my own 'organised chaos' routine.

Practically every entrepreneur I meet these days is on Facebook. With over 62 million users and a 'sharing' popularity of close to 25% of the market, Facebook can’t be ignored for exposure and driving traffic. I have been on Facebook for some time and for a while I’ve hesitated at putting my business/music activities on my personal Facebook profile. After more than a little humouring, research and great advice (very important if you're serious) I set up a Facebook Fan page for my musical endeavours and it has reached almost 1,500 signed-up members in 12 months. No other sharing or comercial music site has come even close to this rapid increase. Facebook Fan Pages are pages you set up for your business profile. Fan Pages allow for great interaction between members and Page owners, a great if not the best business asset.

Personal Pages have a limit of 5, 000 friends whereas Fan Pages have no such limits. They are completely separate from profile pages, so you can keep the two separate if you wish.

You can import your blog posts with RSS and a lot more. If you want exposure and potential traffic for your blog Facebook Fan Pages are worth a second look. They are also indexed by Google. Keeping ones' Fan Page Wall updated with fresh content is of key importance.

Through Twitter I inadvertantly discovered Mari Smith. Mari has published an excellent article (in fact several articles) on her blog Why Facebook? She also has an excellent video tutorial on how to set up Facebook Fan Pages. They are completely separate from profile pages, so you can keep the two separate. You can import your blog posts with RSS and a lot more. If you want exposure and potential traffic for your blog Facebook Fan Pages are worth a second look. They are also indexed by Google.

For driving traffic to your blog Twitter gets a definite thumbs up. After initial reservations, Twitter traffic to my blog has increased exponentially. Twitter is fast becoming my second biggest source of referral traffic. On Twitter you register and select people to follow. After a while people will follow you and it grows from there. It does fluctuate and I have observed that having too many niche markets isn't the way to go. I'd suggest two or three and certainly no more that four, unless you have a system that pays your wage (yes, they do exist) while you're busy keeping people in each niche updated with exciting content. Irrespective, you will soon create an audience, or audiences, interested in what you have to say.

To use Twitter effectively, however, (in fact any Social Networking Site) sharing useful information, resources,

networking, and aiming to build relationships are the key things to keep in mind. It does require patience and work.  If you only ever tweet your own stuff, people will be less than impressed and you won’t gain much. 


Find and share information in your niche or niches and jump into the conversations and it becomes a two-way street. I am slowly (and predictably) finding that that people don't fall for the "get-this-free" routine. I am, however, finding that people are much more interested in a venture that is new, unique, and accessible to them for a discounted price, in favour of gimmics.


Whenever you do a new blog post, you can "tweet" about it on Twitter – giving you more exposure and traffic over time. You can even have your posts re-tweeted if someone finds them interesting enough and wants to share with their own followers. It's imperative to let people know what you're tweeting about. Just putting the link or TinyUrl isn't particularly enticing. Be inventive. We all need relevance and continuity. I make a distinct point of using hashtags for my music-related tweets. My other tweets are generally humorous, off -the-wall one-liners that do pertain to what is 'behind' my tweet, ie: what one can (almost) expect.

Driving and increasing traffic to your blog is part of marketing your blog. If you don’t market it, it doesn’t matter how good it is, no one will know you exist. So if you’re blogging, get out there and introduce yourself.

How do you drive traffic to your blog or site?

It's A Team Game

Affiliate marketing has many descriptions, yet all have the same meaning. Affiliate marketing is a huge business piece on the Internet. It is a co-operative effort between merchants

and an affiliates' website. For many years now, affiliate marketing has proved to be a cost-efficient, measurable method of delivering long-term results. It has become famous for Internet sites who are trying to make some extra or additional income for their site. Every day, people get interested in affiliate marketing and want to make money out of it, but in many cases these new affiliates do not fully understand the affiliate world and make costly mistakes. In other words, affiliate marketing has often been misunderstood.

One of the common misconceptions that are being associated about affiliate marketing is “selling”, although though selling is an important activity of affiliate marketing and the central function of a business operation. Another misconception is that affiliate marketing is commonly linked with “advertising”. While the importance of advertising in marketing a certain product can never be underestimated, the fact of the matter is that advertising, like selling, is merely a part of the many functions of marketing.

In affiliate marketing an affiliate is compensated for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided through his efforts. The said compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit. The most attractive aspect of affiliate marketing from the merchants' viewpoint is that no payment is due to an affiliate until results are appreciated.

Affiliate marketing is typically being run by affiliate networks and these affiliate networks are composed of two functional bodies; the group affiliates and the group merchants. Each has their special function and role when it comes to affiliate marketing. The affiliate network acts as a third party between the merchant and the associated affiliates. The network provides the technology to deliver the merchant’s campaigns and offers. The affiliate network also collects commission fees from the merchant and then pays the affiliates which are part of the program.

The merchant is any web site owner that wants or desires to take advantage of performance based marketing. The benefits to the merchant are many. First, the merchant maintains and operates the affiliate program. If it would be extracted, the merchant needs to do their part by researching interested affiliate websites to ensure that they are a good fit for that particular website. Finding a 'fit' for their merchandise would be the key to more generated income. The merchant has access to markets and customers without him spending valuable time searching out. Banner ads on affiliate sites are not distracting to the site user. It might produce interest for that product and drive the consumer to the merchants’ website. It is also the merchant who decides how much he is willing to pay for each sale that results from a visitor sent from an affiliate.

The affiliate or the affiliate marketer also sees a lot

of benefits. The affiliate is a web site owner that promotes one or more merchants and their affiliate programs. Affiliate marketing can generate a full-time income for the affiliate. But this is not an easy task to accomplish. The affiliate needs to have a better understanding with the merchant what the commission will be, expected payment method and time involved in the contract. The affiliate has also the responsibility to stand for the merchandise their user base would be most interested in. For example, if the site has a user base of mainly stay-at-home mothers, then on-line job openings such as surveys would be a good match for them. This group may also appreciate direct links to children’s products and informational sites. I hope that I don't sound sexist, I certainly don't mean to. Statistics don't lie and I worked as a State Registered Nurse.....for 23 years.


I'm not going to even begin to pretend that I use or even own every single product that I advertise, nor am I going to promise you that you will get rich yesterday. What I can guarantee is that the products I do use haven't let me down. My research and preparation on each product campaign is meticulous, which is why I would be lucky if I use or advertise 1% of advertisements that fly at me. 


Additionally, I'm not going to tell you what products that I do and don't use. It's a free world and we're all big boys and girls. I CAN tell you that any products that I'm within a bulls-roar of have been of benefit to me and thus my family. I'm not here to mess around and I'm not here to mess you around. To me, that hard-sell, overnight-wealth stuff is patronising, rude and irksome. I don't see myself as having any of these traits and hopefully you see me as such.


If you happen to follow-up any of the leads on this page I do hope that you view them for what they are. I have brought but a few here for you as I truly believe in them; and I do so because they have benefited me. It has taken time and it has taken outlay. Don't let anyone even think about trying to convince you otherwise. If they do, ask yourself why they're all using the same 'cheap-and-nasty' looking pages that YELL at you with (false) claims of how much value you're getting for nothing, only to scroll to the bottom of the page to see that there is, infact, a cost despite being told it's all free. 


I recall a great line from the late Ian Dury from a spoken word piece that he penned called All The Room In The World. The line goes; "....I'm still not too old to mind being patronised." There's not a day goes by where I find myself mentally speaking that line. Whilst on a musical bent, The Beatles may well have sang "....The best things in life are free...." but they didn't write it.

Affiliate marketing is a great tool for both the marketer and the affiliate. Working together, they can be advantageous to each other. It makes sense, is an easy and inexpensive (if not free!) way to start and takes little time to achieve real results; usually only a few days.

From what I have researched, gaining traffic is of key importance. and I shall be sharing my findings in that area in my next entry.

Happy 'affiliating.' ;-))

The Question Is....

In what can only be described as a period of financial turmoil, the poor condition that the economic system is in many people are trying to start an additional source of earning money. For all those who are genuinely

serious about making money on the internet, internet paid surveys are a great way to relieve the fiscal loads that are persisting in many homes. Working from ones own home is one of the foremost paths to supply some supplementary income and internet surveys are a ready and instant way to begin. Paid surveys are definitely one of the best ways to make money online.

Admittedly, it's not just a matter of Google searching, signing up and away you go, down the merry road to 'wealthdom.' Unfortunately the vast majority of sites begin sending you offers to visit this site and that site. Before you know it your day is over, you've visited countless fruitless, irrelevant sites all for $3. Many sites, usually the more lucrative and consistent, take some time to 'generate.' Be patient with them. It pays. These sites also may not have the high-gloss appearance that one may expect either so it really does pay to check them out. Groundwork is imperative.

With so much doubt in the global economic system and the tight times we are living in, it is so much more crucial to create supplementary resources of earning money. Working from home completing surveys is not just one means, but as well a really good path. Even if you have never done a survey, this way of having extra income from home is very simple.

Branded companies are always seeking feedback from consumers about their service or products, likely products to be introduced, or their standard thoughts on a particular merchandise or service a certain company provides. These enterprises will compensate individuals to provide those thoughts and this is how somebody can make supplementary cash from home answering money making surveys.

Therefore those of you who are looking for means to make some supplementary cash I would recommend

that you sign up for a internet survey company. This is a great way to start working from home. This is an enjoyable way to earn money online to assist handling your day to day general expenses.

Many people will have doubts and anticipate that there is a catch or something else to doing online surveys and making solid money working from ones home. But the good news is - there is no trick, unless you are expecting to earn thousands of dollars every week. Paid surveys will help you to get other work from home options by using the money that you make to delve into broader options that can help you work out full time from home. Thus if you are simply expecting to earn some extra money, if you have an internet connection, have a computer and want to have a flexible schedule for those people,  surveys are an ideal solution.

The big question and normally the first that remains to be answered is how much cash you can earn working from your house with paid surveys? The response is that this will depend on points such as how much time you want to put in and what kind of surveys you desire to take. Some individuals can do surveys few hrs a day and some individuals that may be temporarily unemployed can take surveys all day if required. It is genuinely feasible to pull in anywhere from $10 to $20 per per hour.