19 Overlooked But Powerful Resources For Niche And Blog Marketers

Ok so I’ve been doing a tonne of research this last two weeks.

We have a massive new product coming, something to literally shake the foundations of the internet… but this post isn’t to talk about that.

I’ve been researching to find out the most hardcore of information about blogging, niche marketing and traffic generation and I’ve come across some GEMS to say the least.

I’ve found so much great free information from all corners of the web and I thought it would just be sh** of me not to share them with you too.

All of these are things that I’ve either read, subscribed to, bought or used recently for one reason or another.

If you’re trying to get more traffic to your blog, whether it’s a niche blog or an “IM” blog like mine, or if you’re an online entrepreneur of any kind, I’m sure you will find the following list of resources valuable!

Here goes:

1. You guys know I like Odiogo.com – if you’re not using that yet, ask yourself why… Easy backlinks and a medium to enhance the quality of your blog as well as it’s traffic – a no brainer. You can see my full post on Odiogo.com HERE.

2. I’ve also just started using a service called Entrecard. You can see the widget for it over there in my sidebar. This is a COOL idea and can help smaller blogs get traffic and it’s NOT just for IM bloggers. I think it will take some time before niche marketers with blogs on say Pets will get a big benefit from it (once the membership base grows I mean) but depending on your niche and your current setup you could see some extra visitors for it. I’ll save you the explanation here because if you’re interested you can read a full description of the service HERE.

3. Another thing I’ve been learning of is the importance of the look of your blog. Before you say ‘Are you serious? You’re only realizing that now?’- don’t because… I KNOW! What I mean is the importance of having your blog stand out that little bit more. The thing is, we do so many little things to try to get readers back to our blogs, always fighting for their attention but forget that sometimes a first impression from the eyes can mean the difference between the reaction “err.. see ya” or “Damn, let me check this out!” Ok so no ones brain would actually say either of those things, but you know what I mean!

The other reason I brought this up is that WordPress blog theme designers… I mean GOOD ones, are hard to find! I came across THIS SERVICE, that does INSANE cool themes for WP starting at $79 – if you’re wanting to jazz your site up, give it a look!

4. Oh while we’re on blog design, I should let you know that there’s an outstanding opportunity for new links when you create a unique WP theme for yourself. There are thousands of CSS directories that you can submit your design to, not really for any purpose but to generate new backlinks – here are just a few:

CSSMania
CSSRemix
BestWebGallery
WebCreme
CSSElite
CSSDrive
CSSHeaven
CSSTux
CSSGlobe
CoolHomePages

If you don’t want your main blog design copied, you can get your designer to make an edited version for a few extra dollars, that doesn’t quite have all the bells and whistles and use that one for submission. The quality is not so important but the better it is, the more people will use it and could link to you.

5. Have you ever heard of a Blog Carnival? Neither had I! But it can be a great way to get new content on your blog (ESPECIALLY for niches), get new backlinks, and get more traffic to your site. Basically a blog can host one of these carnivals. They list their carnival on a site like THIS ONE and this site helps promote the carnival. The carnival is like an event where for a period of time, users from around the web can submit content from their blogs or other blogs, to THAT persons blog. Here’s an example of a blog hosting a blog carnival (sorry about the religious topic :s)

Blog Carnival Example

Can you see the other readers submitting urls of posts on the topic from other blogs. That means this blog gets extra free content, links the works – it’s a cool idea!

The blog carnival directory sites look like this:

Blog Carnival Directory

See how they promote the various carnivals like an article directory – so you also get bits of traffic from their site too!

6. Check out the new Widget in my sidebar too that tells you where you’re from! It’s something we’ve had coded, not available to everyone yet but I think it’s more than just a little ‘fun’ widget. As marketers we know the value of personalization, and I think if a reader gets to your blog and sees a message dedicated to their own location – well it’s not going to send them reaching for the credit card but I’d say it might get them to take that one extra look that COULD lead to a sale This will be part of our new project and ready early in the new year…

7. Are you using TRACKBACKS? Trackbacks are (I hasten to say this because for many people it’s old as the hills now) ‘relatively’ new to wordpress but they can be a great way to get you some good traffic. What happens is, when you write a blog post that links to someone else’s post on their blog, (like you reference it and include the URL as I’ve done in this post) a comment comes up on that persons blog with a link to your post and the title of your post.

That means that without having to go and visit that persons blog again, you can get a comment, a link and traffic from the people who read the comments on the other person’s blog… making sense?

Here’s another article about trackbacks that you might find helpful… plus I’ll get a trackback from it … maybe!

Introduction To Trackbacks

8. I came upon a report the other day that for some reason, while I’d usually ignore it, I left it open on my computer and returned to buy it some days later. It was this report about making your computer faster… AT first I was like eh, I’m not that much of a geek, who needs it – but for some reason I was compelled to buy (probably coz it was only $10) it – (I’d been reading a tonne of time management stuff lately so that’s more likely the real reason)…

Anyway I did the couple of things in this report and while I’m going to sound like a raving testimonial idiot – it really worked! I cleared like 3gb of pure crap off my computer – everything moves really fast now, and even my internet is sped up! Translation – I can get more done, be more productive and have more time for fun stuff – or whatever OTHER than work I might want to do tomorrow! Here’s the link: PC SECRET FORMULA.

9. While we’re on Time Management – have you read Tim Ferriss’ 4 hour work week yet?

I bought the book while in the states (it’s not out in Australia woo!) and i couldn’t put it down – everyone’s raving about it everywhere so I won’t bother – just BUY it! I can’t even be bothered to find an affiliate link, just CLICK HERE and get the darn thing – I GUARANTEE it will flip your perceptions and change the quality of your life, both business and personal if you read it. Go to 4 Hour Work Week

10. There’s a cool thing alot of good bloggers are doing (that you can only really do if your blog has some readership already) now to free up more time which is to allow guest posts on your blog. While I couldn’t find a plugin for this (I’m sure there is one and we’re in the process of developing one also) you can have users submit content via email to have it reviewed by you to put on your blog – free blog content for as long as you want. And if your blog has some traffic already, people will be dying to distribute their content to you – easy!

Better yet, there’s a site that helps you to find guest bloggers to add content to your blog so you can take a holiday:

Blog Sittter

11. I have learned that there are 9765 lists of ‘My Favourite WordPress Plugins’ on the web – and most of them are nothing new or special but this one happened to have some good plugins that I’ll be starting to use:

A Good/Different Plugins List

12. Do you guys have free PLR packs related to your niche lying around the place? Well you probably know that article directories are swamped with rewritten PLR crap but you might not know about a better way to use that content.

You simply compile the content into an ebook, put the articles together in MS word with mini chapters etc and distribute it to free ebook directories. They are much less crowded with this kind of thing and there are actually more of these directories than you’d think. Good backlinks, more exposure and all for some crap you probably have lying around your harddrive not using anyway! Here are some directories to get you started:
MindlikeWater
ebook2u
Jogena
WisdomEbooks
GetFreeEbooks
EbookPalace
EbookMall
Scribd
Published.com
Ebook88
Virtual-Ebooks
EbooksTemplateSource
Ebook Tags
Ideamarketers
EbookJungle

13. Here’s an important lesson – alot of social networks SUCK! If you’re submitting your content to Digg waiting for some ‘digg effect’ of enormous traffic, give up now! The posts that generally get dugg alot are from people highly active in the digg community, who tell all their friends to go and digg their posts. Anyway there are some niche marketers discovering that all social networks have different dynamics and that there ARE some smaller less known up and comers that can send niche sites like yours and mine some great traffic. HERE’s a great article on some different but potentially better social networks to look into for traffic:

http://tropicalseo.com/2007/top-17-niche-social-media-sites-that-actually-send-traffic/

14. Back to personalization of your blog. I found a great plugin that does the following:

If your site gets found in a search engine, from a particular phrase – a widget at the top of the post says to the reader: “I see you found this page by searching WHATEVER in WHATEVER search engine – you’ll probably find THESE posts helpful also:’ and it lists realted posts, like the related posts plugin. It’s pretty rad – It’s called Landing Sites – you can find it HERE:

Landing Sites

15. Having always just posted every day articles to my niche blogs, I’ve come to understand the power of tweaking your posts to make them more compelling. Alot of people tell me that their niche blog has started to get traffic, but they’re not getting alot of click throughs to their affiliate pages. The main reason is of course that you’re posts aren’t that compelling.

At the same time, when you’re running a number of blogs, you don’t want to get bogged down in tweaking and fiddling round with a bunch of different posts and variations and… you’ll use it to postpone other things. With some simple tweaks your posts can get seriously improved readbility and hence click throughs and sales. I’ll let a master teach you this one, check out this great article HERE:

How To Write Great Blog Content

16. Are you using reciprocal linking? Some people say it’s dead but some people still use it to get great traffic. Personally I think if you can get reciprocal links from relevant sites, you CAN get increased SE rankings and increased traffic. A simple way to get started is to get a links page on your site. There’s an easy script you can use HERe:

Skalinks

17. Have you ever considered using video to market your niche site but realized that you don’t have anything to make a video on/with? This point is just a reminder that some of the most viewed videos online are people sitting at their computer in front of their webcam (I needn’t bring up that stupid Chris guy and the Britney video) talking or doing something their passionate about. Quite often a simple video of you talking can improve the stickyness of your blog and your rapport with subscribers, even if it doesn’t get you more traffic! Got a web cam, you should consider it..

The thing I think that’s overlooked with video marketing is video SEARCH ENGINE marketing. People talk about how to get their sites distributed around the video networks but much less about how to get their videos ranked in the search engines. With the introduction of Google’s integrated search thing, videos show up as ranking for keywords now – with a few backlinks to your video (Video’s are getting favored in Google too and my hunch is that it will be much easier to get a video to rank for a given keyword than a static page) and some SEO (using keywords in your video tags etc) you could get great rankings for some awesome keywords related to your niche…
Something to think about!

18. An oldie but a Goodie – if anyone doesn’t use the [tag]SEO[/tag] plugin for Firefox, and you call yourself a blog or niche marketer, you’d better try it asap. Helps you analyze search results, competition lots of cool stuff. There’s a great post on it at Aaron Wall’s blog here:

SEO Firefox Plugin

19. The SNAP plugin for wordpress is cool even though its becoming mainstream. It lets users see a preview of outgoing links on sections of your blog – it can help the user judge whether the link is what they want and may help keep someone on your site longer: Get SNAP here.

http://ajaydsouza.com/wordpress/plugins/snap-preview-anywhere/

20. Actually I hate long lists, look at the size of this thing – I’ll continue this in another post

Hope you enjoyed! Please share the love by clicking the Share this icon below and submitting to your favourite site if you found it worthy.

Andrew