A blog focused on helping bloggers and online retailers make more money online.

Increase Targeted Website Traffic through Social Bookmarking, Personal Contact Websites, and Word of Mouth!

Starting today, our AffinityClick blog will feature a 10-part series based on the points of our first blog post of the year – Top 10 Ways to Help Monetize your Blog for 2010. I’m going to expand on each of the ways we suggested to help you make money blogging, and give you some concrete and practical suggestions on how to get it done effectively and respectably!

If you have anything to add or comment on, feel free! These suggestions are pulled from our experiences and conversations with our community members, but I know there’s more to be said. So let’s make this a repository of ideas that are tried, tested and true!

So the first point I’ll try to tackle is ways with which to expand your audience. Although the concept is simple, putting it in practice can be a challenge. Right off the bat, make sure that you have links your readers can connect with to share your content with others. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn Profiles, MySpace links…they’re all standard. RSS feeds are a great way of establishing a committed readership, and pushing your content in an immediate fashion. But what about other social bookmarking sites like Digg.com, Technorati.com, Reddit.com, Delicious.com? There are so many of them yet each of them has a purpose and should, in the least, be made available as a method of virality on your blog. But how can you get all those little icons to appear so nicely and organized right on your blog? Social Bookmarking Widgets!

Social Bookmarks

Here are a couple of social bookmarking widgets or tools to check out that will add those unmistakable icons that help make your content viral and add a little splash of colour and interest to your blog.

1 – AddThis.com – Self-proclaimed smartest sharing tool ever hosting the largest collection of services, automatically translated in over 50 languages. (Flickr.com photo via Clearspring)

2 – ShareThis.com – Over 125,000 users worldwide use this tool to increase traffic and engagement. Customizable look including colors, logo integration, and sharing options available on rollover. (Flickr.com photo via gustovandenberg)

3 – SocialMarker.com – Boasting integration into 49 of the best social networking sites on the net within 15 minutes. (Photo via socialmarker.com)

4 – AddToAny.com – Self-proclaimed smartest, fastest, lightest, most optimized, accessible, customizable universal sharing tool in the world; plus automatic personalization, localization, updates and analytics. (Flickr.com photo viao Micropat)

Setting up any one of these widgets on your site will allow for additional virality, which in turn should increase targeted website traffic. But don’t forget, you should make sure to set up profiles these bookmarking sites as well. And when you do release your blog posts, make sure to add your blog posts to as many of these tools as you can, it’s like fueling the fire…or in the least getting the fire started.

Market yourself a little.

What else can you do to expand your audience to increase targeted website traffic? Self promotion! Remember, this is all tying back to best ways to monetize your blog. If you increase targeted website traffic, the likelihood of increasing revenue also spikes! So don’t be shy – market yourself. For example, on your Facebook profile, make sure your promoting your blog as much as possible. In fact, you can connect your blog to your Facebook profile with the Networked Blogs Facebook Application. It’s received great ratings within Facebook and is definitely a great way to sync up your content, save some valuable time while engaging your Facebook friends with your blog who may not have otherwise knows about your blogging.

And then there are the traditional methods, such as making sure you talk about it to your friends, tell them to spread the word. Do you have any business cards? Make sure to add your blog URL to those cards, not to mention your Facebook and Twitter feeds. One last suggestion, make sure to add yourself to contact card websites such as Jigsaw.com and ZoomInfo.com. Add your title as “Blogger”, or something you feel that fits your profession.

Anything else to add here? Share your thoughts! And stay tuned for our next post in our series – “Keeping up with the Jones” – ways to manage your original content distribution across various social media platforms.

If you missed our first blog post, be sure to check out our Top 10 Ways to Help Monetize your Blog for 2010.

A blog post in response to “Why Is It So Hard for a Blogger to Find Advertisers on Her Own?” and “Networks May Be the Easiest Solution for Bloggers, Marketers”.

Lenore Skenazy wrote a post today on “Why Is It So Hard for a Blogger to Find Advertisers on Her Own?” on AdAge.com regarding her difficulty in finding sponsors, or in our terms, advertisers for her blog. It’s a legitimate question to ask, because undoubtedly it must be next to impossible to find the time and the energy to track down specific advertisers for your blog. But I immediately thought…”Well, maybe that’s a bit of a backward mentality?” I’m just not convinced that generally speaking, it’s only up to the advertiser to search the blogger out. How the heck is a motivated advertiser supposed to find relevant and high-traffic blogs in and amongst the endless and ever-growing number of blogs that are online? What an exhaustible effort that must be. I’m thinking that if you’re a blogger with targeted website traffic and you’re thinking that you could make money blogging, perhaps it should be more of a 50/50 effort between you the blogger and the advertiser to actually accomplish that task?

In response to Lenore Skenazy’s blog post, Danielle Wiley wrote her own blog post “Networks May Be the Easiest Solution for Bloggers, Marketers” – and we think she’s got it on the money! Her reasoning of networks closing that gap between advertisers and publishers is exactly why AffinityClick came into existence – we’re the middleman, the one who does all the work matching the high-quality blogs with lots of traffic (or little, for that matter) with the advertisers looking for niche-related content to produce contextual advertising. So part of that 50/50 effort between the bloggers and the advertisers comes from motivated merchants finding relevant locations with which to showcase their product feeds, so they come to us with the goal of us marrying their products with blogs that relate to the products they are aiming to advertise. And for Ms. Skenazy (and bloggers like her), not only does she not need to put in any effort hoping that a motivated sponsor will find her nor the additional grunt work of she herself finding a couple of related advertisers, she could use our software and we’d provide her with a network of advertisers and product placements that will dynamically serve ads that not only relate to the great content that she’s created, but will enhance the look and feel of her blog.

Some advantages to using AffinityClick product placements and our advertising network are:

• Effortless, fast and free setup
• Immediate access to over 40 million geo-targeted product placements from 10,000 motivated and highly respected merchants (advertisers)
• Customizable product placements that match your blog’s theme with various layouts, vendor’s logo, ratings, click-through button, and price
• Access to keyword data that can help you evaluate topic trends in order to optimize advertising payout
• You make 70% of the total revenue generated from the clicks

And much more, but ultimately you – the blogger or publisher – don’t have to do any of the leg work in finding relevant and contextual advertisements. All AffinityClick product placements served will relate directly to the content you publish on your blog or website. And with advertisers like Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, Walmart, Dell, and oh so many more, you can be sure that the product placements will not only be relevant, but high quality.

How easy is that!?

To learn more, visit www.affinityclick.com and sign up to receive your access code today.

You can also follow us on twitter @affinityclick !