I’m not going to write a long explanation about this since I think you’re going to look straight to the list anway. This list, a compilation of many different techniques and levels, is meant to be a guideline for marketing for any site, especially blogs. Some of these are things you can easily do. In fact, it’s even possible to execute all of it. So without wasting anymore of your time, here are 30 tips for exploding your blog/website’s traffic.

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If your blog has been lacking posts for a while you might consider it is dead. Once a few weeks have gone past and your stats show that you are losing readers in droves it will probably occur to you to that its time to shut it down and walk away.

Before you pull the plug you might want to consider some other options that you have. Shutting it down is definitely not the only option and in fact might be the worse thing you could do especially if you are planning to write another later.

Over the next couple of days we will be sharing some thoughts on how you can achieve a blog resurrection.

Stay tuned.

They say that History repeats itself and that Historians repeat each other.  Sometimes the same is true in the blogging world, but looking back over your blog and your growth as a blogger is not always a bad thing.

In fact doing a review of what you have learned over the past year and sharing that with others makes for a very compelling post if constructed well.  Think back to the beginning of 2008, what do you wish someone had told you to do or not to do with your blog then that would have made a difference to where you are now.

Passing on this type of advice becomes not only useful for your readers but cathartic for you. By listing out the things that you think you did well and remembering those things you did badly will hopefully stop you from repeating mistakes - as they say, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.

What did you learn from 2008 that would help your readers?

I spend a lot of time in coffee shops. They are a great place to office out of, two have recently become my favorites. I like them not just because of the beverages, or the food, both of which are excellent. It’s not even the fact that they both have free WiFi service that is both reliable and fast.

What has actually drawn me to these particular coffee shops are the other customers.  One of the coffee shops tends to attract younger people, college age students and tech people. Every table has at least one person with a laptop or netbook out busily working away.  The other tends to attract an older crowd, but also very tech savvy, again lots of laptops, smart phones and netbooks.

So why does this matter to a blogger?  People are a great source of material for you. Doesn’t matter what you are writing about, take time to lift your eyes from the screen and look around you! Coffee shops also have notice boards, or at least my two favorites do - guess where my new Social Media business cards appear?  Want to generate extra readers, or even extra work?  Why not use your creativity and come up with an eye catching postcard sized ad (they usually wont allow anything bigger). Maybe something that says “Free Blogging Help Available”.  With all those people with laptops you can be sure some of them are looking for that kind of help. Or maybe run a teaser campaign, think about your topic and run a campaign over a few weeks that leads ultimately to your blog.  Lastly, approach the owner of the coffee shop, especially if you hang out there a lot, see if you can do a deal with them, provide a coupon for money off the price of a coffee for your local readers.

How does the world around you inspire you to promote your blog?

What follows are THE 5 steps to becoming rich from blogging:

How many times have you read that or something like it on a website, an email or some other form of communication?

Unless you already have a number one blog (and sometimes even that isnt enough), getting rich from a blog is a pipe dream.  Sure you can cover your site with ads from any number of providers, but unless you are getting thousands (and preferably 10’s of thousands) of readers a day you are unlikely to make much more than chump change.

Instead use your blog to provide you with a way of showing the world how knowledgable you are about a topic, use it as an advertising stream for your brand - whether that’s your company or even better your personal brand.   Use it to build credibility, and demonstrate commitment to the subject. Doesn’t matter if that is financial analysis or keeping rabbits, be the go to site for your topic and then seek the opportunities that your readership will bring you.

For those of you using Twitter, here’s a sly tip you might will find useful.

If you have recently followed me on Twitter, you probably noticed that you received a direct welcome message from me where I say thanks for following me.

Thanks for the follow! I look forward to your tweets. If you have time, feel free to visit my blog! 

The thing is, it’s actually a pre-made message that gets automatically sent out to my new followers. A few of my new followers who figured out that it was automated are then asking me how I did that very sly trick.

So how do I do it? I use a service called TweetLater.

TweetLater’s main feature is for scheduling future-dated Twitter tweets. But my favorite is the automated thank-you feature where my new followers will automatically receive a direct message as if I had sent it by hand. It requires some setup on your part which takes a few minutes, but its nothing compared to the amount of work you have to do if you send messages out manually. It’s a good feeling to know that it makes the follower feel special for getting a direct message from me. 

Well, there you have it folks. There are also other cool features from TweetLater, so don’t forget to check them out. If you liked this Twitter tip, don’t forget to follow me! I follow back everyone that follows me (which is actually also done automatically by TweetLater).

As an internet marketer who does a lot of work with websites and marketing, I know how much work I need to put in to SEO if I want to constantly get search traffic. SEO is a big part of managing a website because everyone knows the power of search engines. If you never ever promoted your site or bought ads on other sites, you can at least get traffic from search engines right?

With all the SEO blogs out there, it’s just hard to keep up. But fortunately for me, James Harrison from JameSEO asked me to review his blog. It was then that I discovered another undiscovered blog that has a lot of hidden treasures.

Who Is James?

My name is James Harrison. I’m an internet marketer working full-time for MEA Digital in downtown San Diego. I work as an Online Media Specialist in the Pay Per Click department and love every minute of it.

I truly enjoy working on the internet, especially in the field of search engine marketing.

During the day, I manage pay-per-click campaigns on Google, Yahoo, MSN, Business.com and other 2nd-tier PPC interfaces.

But, during the night I’m a SEO working on personal websites and studying new search engine optimization strategies. 

As you can see, James is the real deal. He works for an interactive agency as web SEO. This guy knows his stuff.

According to James about page, his blog has two simple purposes: 1) it’s the place where he records all his SEO marketing notes, and 2) he wants to rank #1 for the search term “James Harrison” (his name). The first purpose is understandable, but the second? JameSEO.com as #1 for the term “James Harrison”? Last time I checked, he’s only 7 spots behind from news stories of the NFL player James Harrison! With over 1,000,000 search results and claiming the #7 spot, he truly is doing something right.

The Design

So now let’s talk about the blog and its design.

To be honest with you, I don’t really like the design. I think that it’s one of the things that would repel readers away, or keep them from coming back. My simple advice to James is this: try out different themes and see how they go. You might have picked this one because of its simplicity, but there are other good ones out there that are really nice looking. Just get rid of this one.

The sidebar, meanwhile, has too much stuff going on especially the section with all the little buttons. I’m sure that you might need them because they’re required to be put on the blog somewhere, but try to keep the only ones that are necessary. The SiteMeter button, for example, can be placed in the footer while the Yahoo “Links to This Site” can be completely removed. There’s too much stuff going on and you need to fix them.

SEO Tips and Tricks

Now let’s get to the treasures within the blog. What I like about the articles that James writes is that he actually walks you through each and every one of them. He also adds in images that complements what he talks about.

Anyway, below are 5 great articles from JameSEO that I’ve read. You NEED to read them because I promise you, almost all of them will be new to you.

• 13 Search Operators for Ultimate Link Building
• Keyword Placement: Thinking of Places to Place Your keywords
• A Few Backlink Factors I Tend to Think About
• Link Tunneling Explained - Link Building SEO
• Onpage SEO: Title Tags Change Search Engine Rankings

Other than the great articles that James writes, he also composed a lists of tools and resources for SEO, so make sure to check them out.

The Sly Guy Recommendation

James clearly is an expert on the topic of SEO. If you own a static website or a blog, then you must check out JameSEO and subscribe. As JameSEO grows, it will just keep on getting better with more and more SEO tips and tricks. James will eventually get a new and better design (preferably a premium theme) that will compliment with the great content that he writes. So go ahead, visit JameSEO!

This guest post is from Salwa, a 22 year-old digital artist, designer and blogger from the U.K. If you enjoy this post, be sure to check her out at BlogRiffic.com and subscribe to her RSS Here.

Search engine optimization is a big part of managing a website, whether it’s a blog or not. It’s a surefire way of getting organic traffic through search engines like Google. Even without any type of promotion done by the webmaster, sites can always expect traffic coming from search engines.

There are several ways to optimize your Wordpress blog for search engines. Here are five that should be at the top of everyone’s list.

1. The title of your post contains the most important words of your post. It is used to describe the topic of the post and helps readers to decide whether they want to read it. It should contain keywords that you think readers will type into their web browsers. Make sure the title is a live link. If Wordpress hasn’t already done this automatically, you should be able to conduct a search on the web for the necessary code to do this. You should also make sure the page title tag is optimized. This will allow you to use a more descriptive, keyword-rich title for your blog’s main page and will use the title of your post as your page title to make your keywords prevail.
2. Use link bait. This is the latest hot topic in SEO and is becoming the preferred way for natural link building. Link baiting is used to attract backlinks to your blog by getting people talking about it. This is the art of writing content that gets natural links. You should post your link bait on all of the major social network sites. Also, make sure you include a “link to me” textbox, which is a Wordpress plug-in that provides a coded box automatically. Link to and reference other bloggers with similar blogs to get attentions from them. If you have a good blog, they may link to it in return.
3. Always check your Wordpress blog on a mobile phone since so many users today are on the go and tend to check in periodically via mobile phone web when they have a quick opportunity. Don’t have a ton of ads on your blog. This isn’t the place to be selling shamelessly. Having a lot of ads and graphics will only slow your site down and irritate visitors.
4. Most of the link power will be coming straight to the home page of your blog and then goes out to the rest of the links. Make sure you have a good link structure. They should link to your most important articles and pages from the home page. Simply make a category with your best articles and then make a list of them on the index.php file. You can install a plug-in called “related posts” and have those articles link to other relevant articles.
5. Make sure you pay attention to your design. Keeping it simple is always best. Use larger text with large, clear headings. There should be nothing that takes your attention away from the text.  Make sure your content is the first thing your visitor sees, they should not have to scroll to find your content.  If you can make your blog look more like a website than a blog, the larger social networking sites will like it better.

The WordPress platform, along with much of the other blogging software available today, is search engine friendly right out of the box. It does a very good job of handling many of the technical areas of optimization for you so if you aren’t a technical genius you can still have a great blog. Simply provide informative, keyword-rich content that people will want to read and link to, and you are pretty much set to go. Blogging is not hard; it just takes some time and effort. Just take care not to get your blog up and running and then think that it will simply take care of itself. Take the time to optimize it as much as you can or your blog will eventually disappear in the search engines.