14 Tips for Increasing Traffic to Your Blog

You hear about this awesome new invention called blogging. You decide to give it a try. You get a free blog at Blogger or WordPress.com. You pick a template. You start cranking out posts. About a week, month or year later it finally dawns on you.

No one is reading your blog.

Don’t feel bad. About 90% of the blogs on the internet are standing shoulder to shoulder with you on this Dock of Shame. The good news is that with time, focused effort and a few of these suggestions, you can overcome your no-traffic nightmare and turn your blog into the rockin’ place to be.
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How to Write a Great Article

Many people believe that writing an effective article is a difficult task. They bite their fingernails and anguish over the fact that they cannot write like the “experts”. The truth is, with a little forethought and creativity, anyone can churn out a great article. All you need to do is ask and answer the following three questions:

What is the article’s purpose?

Before you write the first word, you need to figure out what you want the article to do. Do you want the article to educate your audience? Entertain them? Get them to buy something? When you know why you are writing the article, you can position the information in your article for maximum effect.
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How to Get Your Website Listed in the Search Engines

Search engines are the librarians of the internet world. Every day they send out their interns, called Robots, into cyberspace to forage for information. Each piece of information that is returned to the library is filed in a digital catalog. To access any piece of information in this catalog, all one needs to do is go to their library of choice (Google, Yahoo, MSN or ASK), type in a few search words and wait while the librarian (the search engine) serves up sites matching the query.

As a webmaster, you may be wondering how to get your brand new, still in the bubble wrap, website listed in these giant cyber catalogs. Well, there are two ways robots find new websites. Either by following links from other sites or from the queue of direct submissions.
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Stop Being a Google Slave

Exploring a few blogs today, I’m seeing a reoccurring theme that has to do with Google’s recent PageRank update. Google, it seems, is being aggressive in its war against paid link ads and devaluing websites who sell them.

PageRank is a sort of meter that Google uses to signify how relevant or trustworthy the content is on a particular web page/website. The theory that most website owners and web marketers work with is that when people use a search engine to look for information about a subject that they will not look past the first two pages of results. Therefore it is best to be ranked within the first one to two pages of the results. Google’s PageRank supposedly tells a website owner where their site/page ranks on the first page of results. So if your site/page rank is a 3, that means it will be listed third on the page starting from the bottom.

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How to Make a Billion Dollars in One Easy Step

People like to try and make you think that making money is this hard and complicated thing. It really isn’t and anyone who says differently is probably trying to sell you something.

In all actuality, making, say a billion dollars is quite possibly the easiest thing you could do in life. It is so easy that you can do it one step and I won’t even charge you to share with you what that step is.

How to Make a Billion Dollars

Step One

Convince one billion people to give you one dollar each. Since there are approximately 6.5 billion people in the world, finding enough people shouldn’t be that hard.

Alternatively you can convince one person to give you one billion dollars and to make life even easier for you, here is a link to a list of the world’s billionaires.

Now I know you are probably thinking that I’m having a great laugh at your expense. You would be partly right. The fact is that there is a very basic and simple business lesson to be learned from this which is that when it comes right down to it all of the financial goals you have in life depend on the willingness of others to share their money with you.

It does not matter if you are providing a product or service or if you are looking for charity, the ideology is the same. Why do you think businesses spend so much money in advertising and so much time building their reputation? In a world where people have a multitude of options literally at their fingertips, they, the businesses, are trying to convince as many people as they can to give them a dollar.

If your financial goals seem overwhelming just break it down. I’ve even provided a cool chart that I made myself to give you a starting point. Now what you do to convince people to give you money is entirely up to you but know that making money really is that simple.

Entrepreneurial Inspiration

I am addicted to entrepreneurship. I dream of owning my own business but lack the self confidence to launch myself off that side of that cliff without being 100% certain that the parachute on my back will open. Which, of course, is impossible. Only two things in life are guaranteed. Death and taxes and with technology advancing at the speed of light, I’m not so sure about death.

I received the latest update email from an entrepreneur’s community I joined called StartUp Nation. In the email was a link to the web forum that listed ideas about starting a business. There were some really good ideas in there. As always, though, before getting involved with any of them, do your homework and make sure you are not involving yourself into some kind of scam.

If you don’t want to sift though pages and pages of posts there are a few sites that will provide you with ideas for starting a business such as:

Springwise

Iconoculture

Entrepreneur.com

For myself, I’ve decided to get involved, somehow, with technology. I love to cook and hope to open my own coffee shop/bakery one day but I thought about it more and decided that that’s something I want to do in my golden years after I’ve made my multi-billions in technology.

I’ve got an idea which still needs fleshing out a little more. The main thing I’m trying to work out is how much it is going to cost to get started and where the capital is going to come from. I want a debt free company so loans will be the very, very, very, very,very,very,very last thing I look at and I do not want my company to be publicly held so selling shares is out of the question. I have this fear that I will put a ton of work and effort into building the company and someone will come along and try to take it from me.

A friend of mine’s husband owned his own software company without loans or going public so I’m going to see how he did it.