Website owners who are quite particular with the volume of traffic and visitors they get can now disseminate that into detail after Quantcast announced its country specific data solution for its growing number of international publishers and marketers.

Quantcast audience measurement is free and by providing the marketplace with unparalleled audience insights, it enables publishers to better represent their unique audiences and empowers advertisers to reach specific online consumers with accuracy and scale.

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Now this was something that got me.  I was reading over at Problogger about this, and the thought of it literally chilled me to the bone.

We all know that Google has a whole lot of reasons to kill your page rank, and most of them are things you’d deserve a penalty for.  If you’ve been selling text links, for example, or anything else that might be in violation of Google’s guidelines.  But what you may not know is that, at some point, for little or no reason, Google might kill your page rank and you wouldn’t even be responsible.

As it turns out, most search engines–and this includes Google–occasionally undergo changes to their algorithms, and when this happens, you might suffer an unaccountable, and unexplainable, loss in rank.

Now, this is for the most part generally temporary.  But if you should ever find your post ranking suddenly crashing, don’t panic.  It may well come back entirely on its own after just a couple days.  So take a deep breath, grab a drink, write your posts like normal and wait a couple days.  You might be surprised by what comes back.

Bear with me, experienced folk in the audience.  This one’s specifically for the new guys (and gals, if you want to be precise in the language) today.

I know you veterans out there understand the idea of submitting your blog to search engines and giving yourselves that extra push in building traffic.  I know you’re well aware of how important it is to do that, and how it can not only give you traffic spikes but also improve your rankings, help you get links and trackbacks, and help you push your bottom line up as well as give you a source of steady reliable readership.  I know that.

That’s why I’m apologizing to you up front.  See, it’s not just the veterans that come here.  We’ve also got the next generation of bloggers looking for tips and advice, so this one is just for them today.  You know I give you plenty of good advice too…so today, let’s just spare a thought for the folks just getting started.

And in case you need it, here are some links to where to submit your blog to search engines.

Google

Yahoo

Technorati

MSN Live Search

The Open Directory

Every blogger goes through this at one time or another–that horrible sinking feeling that, deep down, they’re really just screaming into an empty room.

Sure, traffic comes and traffic goes.  There’s even a good indication that people are reading your stuff and clicking your links.  But sometimes, it just feels insubstantial.  Incomplete.  So what do you do?  Take your act on the road, of course–down the information superhighway.

I know, a little outdated, but the metaphor fits.  Go to other people’s blogs.  Comment on them.  Talk to people there. Build a community.  It’ll help, and here’s how.

1. Commenting on other people’s blogs makes you more credible.  Again, back to credibility–if you’re seen as a person who knows what they’re talking about, no screaming, no ranting like a loon at every opportunity, then your opinion, your WORK (I really don’t consider the occasional caps screaming, more like emphasis without bothering with italics) more seriously.

2. Linking to other people’s blogs helps THOSE people find you.  When you put up a link, it’s like acknowledging someone else’s credibility.  That in turn helps that blog by letting a bit of your traffic go somewhere else.  Don’t worry, traffic isn’t a zero-sum game–traffic ebbs and flows.  But in turn, that makes other blogs more likely to link to you, and that keeps the flow moving.

3. Comments and links help establish your role in the community.  Remember that thing we did on blog carnivals?  About how they give you a place in a larger community?  Well, chances are your readers read other blogs too.  And if they go to those blogs, and talk about YOURS, you become part of a larger whole.  It’s about adding your own voice to the larger community and improving the whole as a result.

So if you want to make your blog bigger, go give some other people some blogging love.  It’ll help them, and it’ll help you.

You might wonder what a “blog carnival” is–well, on the surface, you’d think it’s self-explanatory.  A carnival is a gathering of booths and rides and other attractions all in one place for easy access by large numbers of people who then select what they want to see and do from the many available options.

In general, you’d be right.  And this gives you a great opportunity to help your blog’s traffic.

When you enroll your blog in a blog carnival, you basically become a booth in that carnival, allowing people with interests in finance or engineering or movies or celebrity gossip or whatever it is you’re writing about to have a better chance of finding your blog.

If you’re counting on people to find you via Google, you’re going to have a tough run.  Let’s say you wrote a review of the recent Rob Zombie movie, Halloween 2.  you join seven hundred and fifteen thousand others who’ve done the same thing, and that assumes people are searching for the exact phrase “Halloween 2 movie review”.  Leave out the quotes and the number skyrockets to over thirteen million.

Your readers aren’t looking for a needle in a haystack any more–they’re looking for a needle in a stack of needles.  And the chances of them finding YOUR needle…well…one in thirteen million if you leave out the quotes.

So if you want a better chance at being found in the great seething mass of needles that is the blogosphere, consider joining a carnival!

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

You maybe aware of the technique of visiting other blogs and leaving comments, both because you want to get your voice heard in general and of course because it gives you an opportunity to leave a link to your blog and therefore drive traffic.

The trouble is with millions of blogs created everyday how do you find the blogs that are relevant to your particular niche.  Well you could go the old fashioned route and just spend hours online searching for them hoping to be able to separate websites from blogs.  The alternative is a to use two of googles tools that are designed to make things easier.

The first is Google Blog Search like the regular google search it has an advanced search option and this is what I recommend you use. By using the keywords that are most associated with your blog you can find similar blogs.

Likewise with google alerts, the good thing about google alerts is that once they are setup they do the work for you. Enter you keywords, choose the “Type” Blog, decide when you want the information delivered and you are away.

Both of these will help you uncover blogs that are in the same area as you and that are good candidates for your comments, maybe even for some mutual linking.

If you are just starting out as a blogger and don’t have a specific genre in mind or if you are looking to focus your blog on an area but want to make sure its something that people are interested in, the data released by comScore this week maybe of use to you.

• Business/Finance - Taxes
• Travel - Ground/Cruise
• Career Services & Development
  - Job Search
• Career Services & Development
  - Career Resources
• Retail - Computer Software
• News/Information - Politics
• Travel - Hotels/Resorts
• Government
• Travel - Online Travel Agents
• Business/Finance - Online Trading

These are the categories that are making the most gains in internet traffic year on year from 2008. No surprise really that Taxes tops the list at this time of the year.  Job searching is no real surprise given the state of the economy and the number of people who have suffered a layoff this past year.

What is interesting is that travel comes in above it, in particular ground travel and cruises, both of which are more associated with vacations than business travel.  So perhaps people are either planning to use their severance package to get away for a while or not everyone is having a bad time in this economy.

The real bonus for bloggers with data like this being made available is that you can make sure that you are hitting these areas, even if it is only with some of your posts.  Earlier this week I posted about adding a job board or widget to your site given the placement of Job related traffic in this list it looks as though that is going to become an increasingly popular way to add traffic and revenue to your site.