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We’ve all heard about people making money online… But what about REALLY making money online? How about staring a blog and generating some passive income so that you can quit that job and escape the rat race.

We’re not talking about making $2.47 a month from your hobby. We’re talking about making hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars every month doing something you enjoy.  

Selling your time for dollars is one of the worst ways to make a living, but people do it because it SEEMS safe. But how many times have you seen hundreds or thousands of people without a job because of some corporate layoff? And do you really enjoy fighting traffic twice a day and barely getting an hour or two with your family when you get home exhausted and ready for bed?

Whether you’re seeking freedom or just some extra money, this is the best time to start a blog and make real money online.

Is Passive Income a Myth?

Well, it depends on your definition of passive income. Many people think that passive income is sitting around doing nothing while the checks roll in. This is not passive income, this is free money, like winning the lottery! Our definition of passive income is doing the work once and reaping the benefits (read passive income) for years to come. We call this mailbox money and making money while you sleep. There is nothing more refreshing than taking the day off and checking stats at the end of the day to see that, even though you were not working, you still made money!

Can You REALLY Make Money Online With Your Blog?

Absolutely! But, there’s a catch, the golden rule: it’s all about CONTENT. If you provide extreme value with great content, people will come back again and again, and you’ll make more and more money. It’s that simple.

Some people spend tons of time trying to trick the search engines only to find their income stream ripped out from under them the next time Google updates their search algorithms.

Content is king! Provide lots of good, relevant content for your readers and Google will love you for it. 

What about all those people making $2.47 a month with THEIR blogs?

As with everything in life, there are people who are very successful, and there are people who are not successful. Those who make a meager effort and quickly throw in the towel end up just wasting their time and telling everyone else that this blog thing doesn’t work.

But the successful ones, the ones who are willing to put in the effort, have escaped the corporate world and set themselves free!

And what about choices? There are many who choose to keep their corporate jobs and enjoy making a few thousand extra dollars every month.

Which group do YOU want to be in?

In just a few months we went from nothing to bringing in over $2,000 every month with our Dating & Relationship advice blog. We have personal friends making anywhere between $500 and $40,000 per month, all from their blogs.

STOP! Think about that for just a minute. What are the possibilities for you? What do you enjoy talking about, writing about, reading about? Why not turn your hobby, or obsession, into a passive income stream?

What TYPE of monetization will work best on your site?

Depending on whether you have a product-focused blog or an information blog, different monetization options will work best. But regardless, the most important concept here is to make an educated guess and actually implement a few of the following money making options. Only then will you know what will work best on your blog.

And remember - test, test, and test some more to truly optimize. We are constantly testing and trying new monetization schemes.

Top 10 Tips to REALLY Make Money with Your Blog 

Tip #1: Make Money by Showing Ads

Is it right to show ads and make money with your blog?

Hmm… the age-old question that’s been plaguing bloggers for years.

Should you provide great information to people free of charge? Do ads make your blog seem cheap and of lower quality?

To be honest we never had this problem, in part because we started our blogs specifically to help people and make a good living at it. Why go to a job when you can make better money actually enjoying what you do?

Visitors expect to see ads on successful sites. In fact, not showing ads can make your site seem small and unimportant because people EXPECT to see ads on popular sites. Every major website shows ads. Just look at Netscape.com, Amazon.com, About.com, etc… They ALL show ads.

Another example. You go to a job every day, and ask your employer for money if they want you to show up for work. Really, would you show up if they didn’t pay you? Nobody has a problem with that and yet many will not ask for money or show ads on their blog for fear that it will devalue the content.

Get over it and monetize your blog. You don’t have to market products or charge a subscription fee, but to us, ads are a no-brainer. 

How soon should you put ads on your blog?

Ok, now that we feel fuzzy about making money online with our blog, where to begin? Should you place ads from the very beginning? Do you need to wait a minimum of 90 days? How about waiting until you have 2,000 visitors a day?

The answer is simple - do it now! 

You COULD wait until the magical day when you receive 2,000 visitors a day, or even 10,000 visitors a day. Unfortunately it’s likely that day will never come unless you monetize your blog to help it pay for itself.

How would you like to see 1,000,000 people visiting your site every single month?

Guess what - that type of busy site costs money to run, and takes a LOT of time invested on your part. But here’s the wonderful part - if your blog is well monetized, you can quit your day job and work on your blog full time, writing about and promoting things that make you happy.

What is the best ad placement?

Different placement works better for different niches and for different ad networks.

Test, test, test. Changing the placement of an ad can make you dramatically more or less money, so test and track your results carefully.

What types of ads are NOT OK?

It’s all about relevancy.

Ads that provide value to your readers are generally welcomed by them. For example, recommended books and services that are truly related to the content your visitors came to see are great. But ads that are NOT related to the content your visitors came to see, will annoy and alienate your visitors - and will NOT make you money.

Use quality, relevant, ads that actually provide value to your readers, and you’ll be surprised at how well the ads are received.

Make it easy for advertisers to buy ad space on your blog.

This is the first step to making money with your blog - make your intent clear.

Always make it EASY for people to take whatever action you’d like them to take.
Create a visible page on your site to tell people exactly HOW to go about advertising on your blog. The easier you make something, the more people will go for it.

If someone comes by your site and would like to advertise, but they don’t immediately see how to do it, they’ll lose interest and move on to someone else’s site - and they’ll advertise with THEM.

Create a page that explains in simple terms what types of advertising spots you’re offering, what the rates are, and how someone can go about purchasing your ads right away. Don’t make them email you to find out the details. They won’t.

Make it simple and it’ll happen.

Tip #2: Make Real Money with Affiliate Marketing

Ah, the art of affiliate marketing… the well kept secret of some of the most successful Internet marketers.

Many people have tried and failed to make any money with affiliate marketing… usually because they have given up too quickly. Fact is, affiliate marketing takes some up front effort to get optimized and working right, but when it’s working, life is very good.

Most bloggers only use Google AdSense to monetize their sites. AdSense is a great revenue option, but affiliate marketing can easily bring in double your AdSense revenue, WITHOUT impacting your AdSense earnings.

What’s more, the work you put into developing a good affiliate marketing strategy will pay off for months and years to come. Now that’s working smarter, not harder.

How do you find affiliate products to promote?

You know your niche inside and out, don’t you? If not, go back to the drawing board and learn it!

To make thousands of dollars every month, your information must be top notch, and for that you have to be an authority on your topic. It’s that simple. 

OK, so now that you have an idea about what products MIGHT be interesting to your nice, you set out to find the best performing products. No, not just any products… you want to find the ones that are performing well for others, and you start there. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

ClickBank

ClickBank is a huge marketplace for selling digital products. And it has the easiest to use affiliate program out there. You literally just sign up, search for products to promote by keyword, and get the code to promote them on your site.

The downside: ClickBank has the worst stats tracking of any affiliate program out there. They don’t show you how many clicks you’ve sent to a product, which can be really frustrating. They only tell you when you’ve made a sale, and how much you made. This approach also doesn’t allow for testing to make sure your links are good. But alas, it’s basically a must for any serious affiliate.

So go sign up for ClickBank and find some products to promote.

Commission Junction

Comission Junction provides great stats for clicks sent, and also gives you great comparative numbers on how much others are really earning for sales across all merchants. But their products are generally not as juicy as those on ClickBank. But sign up for Comission Junction as well to round out your list of affiliate products.

The secret to affiliate marketing

The secret to successful affiliate marketing is that it’s all about the pre-sale. Putting up banners and links will get some conversions. But people want to see an honest, objective review of a product before they buy it. They want your seal of approval. So find great products, provide and honest review with benefits and weaknesses, recommend the product, and offer affiliate links to purchase them.

Must have affiliate marketing tools

Don’t waste your time fumbling around in the dark. You can easily waste too much of your already scarce time and energy. Find successful affiliate marketers and copy what they’re doing!

Rosalind Gardner, one of the most successful affiliate marketers of all time, laid out all the basics on how to really succeed with affiliate marketing in the Super Affiliate Handbook. 

Download the Super Affiliate Handbook and get the basics down BEFORE you spend lots of time and money with trial and error.

When you’re ready for advanced affiliate and ClickBank tactics, you’ll want to get Affiliate Project X. 

Tip #3: Create True Passive Income with Paid Text Link Advertisements 

Don’t sit around waiting for advertisers to come to you. People are out shopping for link ads RIGHT NOW in marketplaces like Text-Link-Ads. If you’re not in there, then someone else is going to get paid to put links on THEIR site today.

Go sign up with Text-Link-Ads right now. This is a real no-brainer.

There’s no work to do whatsoever, you just fill out a form, install their small code snippet on your blog, and your name shows up in their marketplace.

Yes, they keep 50% as their fee, but fact is that’s the cost of being in their catalog of links that people to go IN ORDER TO BUY LINKS. If you’re not there, they’ll buy links on another site.

One mistake many people make is to leave a very low price for links on their blogs. Of course, don’t set it too high… just value yourself appropriately as compared to other advertisers in your niche.

We consistently make over $500/month from Text-Link-Ads these days, with very little effort. We get an email to approve an ad, log in to Text-Link-Ads, and approve the ad. Whew… time for a break! THIS definitely qualifies as passive income - talk about Blog Monetization Zen.

Check out our review of Text-Link-Ads and how well it really can work for bloggers. 

Tip #4: Make Easy Money with Contextual Pay Per Click Advertising 

Google AdSense

Google AdSense is so successful because of their ability to show ads that are truly relevant to your site. Irrelevant ads annoy readers and also won’t make you any money.

For a blogger, Google AdSense is the easiest option to implement.

Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN)

YPN is the major alternative to Google AdSense. In fact, many publishers have changed from AdSense to YPN because YPN tends to pay more on a per click basis. But their content targeting is nowhere near as effective as Google’s, so in the end you’ll likely bring in less money with them.

Test your AdSense and YPN placement

Test, test test… start with Google AdSense and try out different placement options around your site. Track all your changes thoroughly, and make only one change at a time. Literally, only make one change at a time to placement, link color, and text color. If you change the placement and the link color at the same time and your click throughs go through the roof, how do you know which change worked?

When you’ve figured out what placement is the most effective for your site, you can try replacing AdSense with YPN for a few weeks, or few months, depending on your patience levels, to see how your bottom line results differ from AdSense.

Must have Google AdSense tools

Just like with affiliate marketing, it’s easy to waste months and months of your time with basic trial and error (mostly error). Our approach is to study what the successful people are doing, and learn from them.

There are many books and guides on AdSense, and we have a couple of favorites. Our favorite is Michael Cheney’s step-by-step AdSense Videos, because of all the detail he goes into. But beware - Michael goes into extreme detail on how to place your ads, what impact you can expect to see from different positioning and color changes, and so on. If you’re dedicated, these videos will be well worth your time.

Download Michael Cheney’s AdSense Videos and see step by step how you can get the most out of AdSense.

Tips #5: Make Money with Related Search Results from Ask.com

Ask.com just launched a really great monetization tool that can be implemented alongside AdSense and the other monetization items already in place on your site.

Your visitors click on these related search links, and they are presented with Ask.com search results. You make money when they click on the sponsored results at the top.

What do Ask.com Sponsored Search listings look like?

Here’s what these ad units can look like. You’ll notice that a publisher has full control of the layout, and even the search box and Ask.com logo are optional:

How can you sign up for this monetization tool?

Currently this program is invitation-only. Ask.com is also limiting the program to publishers with over 50,000 visitors monthly.

If you have a quality site and receive 50,000 total combined monthly visitors between all your sites, send us a message and we can make a personal recommendation which should get you accepted.  

Tips #6: Get Paid to Write Reviews for Related Products and Services with Sponsored Reviews

Your readers can feel your credibility in everything you write. Think of it this way - if you’re not telling the truth, the person you’re talking to can tell. It’s the same when you’re writing. People can smell BS a mile away. So keep it real and talk to your readers like you would to your friends.

There are several major sponsored review marketplaces today, but our best experience has been with ReviewMe.

Go sign up for Sponsored Reviews with ReviewMe right now, this is a real no-brainer. There’s no work to do whatsoever, you just fill out a form and your name shows up in their marketplace. When someone purchases a review for your blog, you get a notification to log on and review this offer. You can accept it, reject it, or ask for different terms. It’s literally that easy.

While this is not passive income, it can be a nice boost for your wallet. 

Tips #7: Monetize Your Content Automatically with Dynamic In-Text Advertising

Services like IntelliTXT and Kontera can dynamically embed ads in the text content of your website or blog.

Unfortunately these sites are generally difficult to get up and running, and we consider these dynamic text ads to be intrusive in the body of your articles. More importantly, our results have been less than impressive. In fact, this was he least fruitful of all our monetization efforts, even below the Amazon Affiliate Program.

We do however know bloggers who make good money with this type of advertising - as much as a 20% increase in revenue. These sites are focused on technology and gadget topic. Basically product and technology oriented blogs tend to do well with this type of in-text advertising.

Tip #8: Make Money with eBay AuctionAds 

Unlike Amazon, eBay shows some serious lovin’ for it’s affiliates. In fact, in June 2007, eBay nearly doubled it’s affiliate payout amounts. That’s some serious affiliate lovin’.

eBay pays you both a flat reward for each referral you send them (a customer who creates an eBay account and eventually buys something) and also a percentage of the sales generated from the referrals you send them. Now that’s pretty cool.  

What’s the best way to add eBay listings to your site and make money? 

Until recently, it’s been a challenge to add eBay listings to your site in a visually appealing way, so as to really get your visitors engaged. But AuctionAds makes it very easy to do this, with their easy to customize widgets. You can customize the ad unit on their site, copy the little code snippet, and add it to your site. Done - you’ve got eBay auction ads.

Can you make more money with eBay by using AuctionAds?

YES! The eBay affiliate program is tiered to pay you a lot more money as a high traffic affiliate. So if you have a lot of sales and referrals every month, you make much more PER REFERRAL than someone with just a few sales / referrals per month.

By joining AuctionAds, your commissions are based on the entire AuctionAds member base, not just your own sales. So each referral and sale you generate are compensated as a very high traffic affiliate. Again, this is working smarter, not harder.

Sign up for AuctionAds to add eBay auctions to your site - and make money as a high traffic eBay affiliate.

Tip #9: Make Money Online with a Product Review Blog and Chitika

Product Blogs are focused on discussions and reviews of products, such as electronics and other goods, as opposed to providing information and advice. The readers visiting these product blogs are generally in the market to purchase the products they’re reading about. So you’re inherently writing to an audience of perspective shoppers. 

In contrast, information blogs are visited by people who usually have no particular goal of purchasing anything. For these blogs, the publisher has to be much more creative in selecting very compelling offers that tie directly in with the content presented, so that the reader will immediately see the benefit and consider making that purchase.

Chitika

Once you have your product blog set up, you’ll want to make it EASY for people to purchase the products you’re talking about.

A great way to do this is with Chitika. They provide all kinds of graphical widgets, dynamic product photos, interactive product comparison shopping widgets, and even custom shopping portals, for most any product you could be talking about on your site.

A comparison shopping widget is a great way to engage the reader of a product review. And get this - you make money when your reader just CLICKS on the product widget. Yes, this is a CPC program. So even if you don’t have a lot of site traffic, you should see good results from adding Chitika to your site. 

Chitika is a natural extension for any product blog, and it’s also quick and painless to set up.

Click here to sign up for Chitika, to easily add interactive product comparison shopping to your site and product reviews.

Tip #10: Don’t Forget to Include The Amazon Affiliate Program 

For some truly bizarre reason, the Amazon affiliate program is one of the most popular and successful affiliate programs in the history of Internet marketing.

Maybe it’s because it’s downright easy to set up Amazon affiliate links for your site, and start making a little money. More likely, it’s because we all BUY books and other products from Amazon regularly, so we’re comfortable with it. And we know that others buy from Amazon as well.

Here’s the catch though. Amazon pays you roughly 5% of the revenues you generate for them. That is lower than just about ANY website and blog monetization scheme out there.

While it is another monetization option, there are just too many other better options with much higher payouts.

Knowing this, should you still sign up for the Amazon affiliate program? 

Yes, you should definitely still sign up for this program. You will eventually either refer to or actually review various books on your website. These books will likely not have direct affiliate options, so the only way to monetize these referrals will be through a quick link to the Amazon product page.

Also, that Amazon affiliate link is a great way to provide your reader more information on the book you’re talking about, and make it easy for your readers to purchase the book.

Amazon also has a really neat feature for affiliates, which creates a dynamic preview of the book when your readers hover their mouse cursor over the book link on your site. All it takes is a tiny JavaScript snippet you’ll get from Amazon. 

For an example of the Amazon product preview pop-up, check out this post on AskDanAndJennifer.com answering a reader question about steamy date night DVDs - hover over the DVD titles. 

So go ahead and sign up to the Amazon affiliate program as well, but don’t spend a lot of time putting up their banners and other sales tools. Instead, us this as a laser focused way to monetize reviews and references to popular books that you include in your articles.

And suddenly you have ONE MORE revenue source paying you every month…

Bonus Tip #11: Add CPM Banners and Make Money With Every Single Page Viewed on Your Site

CPM banners are banner ads that pay you a certain dollar amount for every thousand impressions shown on your site.

Nobody has to click on any link, buy a product, or anything else. You’re guaranteed that revenue for just showing those banners on your site. That’s it.

You will, however, have to reach a certain traffic level (normally around 100,000 page views per month) before most CPM agencies will approve your application. So once you’re established this is a great way to add additional revenue. 

One of the more popular CPM ad companies, especially for bloggers, is Tribal Fusion. The application period takes about a week, and then the implementation is very simple.

Bonus Tip #12: Make Money While Helping People - Answer Questions and Give Advice

Once your sites starts to grow in popularity, you will gain a regular reader base and a growing following. Many of your readers will start asking you questions about how to do this, how to do that, how you you would solve this problem, and so on.

This is an opportunity for you: offer to help your readers in exchange for monetary compensation. 

Yes, you could help them for free, but you’ll quickly see that all your time is spent solving other people’s problems, and you won’t have time to run your site and grow your business. All this while you’re probably still going to a job every day, working for someone else. Yuck.

Also you’ll likely not have time to help every person who asks you for help. Adding a paid options helps to prioritize which questions to answer first.

Take control of your time AND give your readers a chance to get a guaranteed response.

Some people have issue with asking people for money to help them. But understand this: you can always help as many people for free as you CHOOSE to.

Now think about your readers, from their perspective. Why not make it fair to them, and offer them a guaranteed, helpful, well though out, and timely response to their problem, for a certain fee. Your employer pays you for your time, and that’s OK. Then why not allow your readers to decide for themselves if they are willing to pay you for your time, to help them with THEIR problems?

Check out www.AskDaveTaylor.com and www.AskDanAndJennifer.com for some great examples of how this can work.

Your next steps… 

1. Bookmark this article to be sure you implement all the choices above.
2. Are there any great monetization options we’ve left out? Leave a comment below and let us know what’s worked best for you.
3. Then, sure to subscribe to our RSS feed so you don’t miss the great series of follow-up articles. We’re going to be delving into the juicy details of EACH monetization method above - hot insider tips, what works best, what will just waste your time, and what to really watch out for.

Tags: affiliate marketing, Amazon affiliate, AuctionAds, blog, blogger, blogging, Chitika, ClickBank, Google AdSense, make money, make money online, make money with your blog, passive income, sponsored reviews, Text Link Ads, yahoo publisher network

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WordPress gives bloggers amazing power to engage their readers and to make their blogs very appealing to search engines.

This means you’re giving the search engines what they want, and they’ll reward you with more and more web site traffic over time.  Yet, many WordPress bloggers aren’t taking advantage of some of these hidden gems.

Of course, many people host their blogs on Blogger.com or TypePad, but that’s another story for another day. The short version is that while WordPress may look a little intimidating at first, it’s just as easy to manage as TypePad, and has immensely more flexibility than either Blogger or TypePad.

Oh, and if your free Blogger.com blog mysteriously disappears overnight (as we had happen once), you have nobody to call. So if your blog matters, get yourself a good web host and give it some WordPress lovin’.

These are the Top 10 Must-Have WordPress plugins that every serious blogger should be running. Yes, they are a handful at first, but it’ll be well worth it. Set aside an afternoon to give them a try, and watch your readership and your free search engine traffic go through the roof. 

Get lots of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) goodness with a Tagging Plugin

We’ve all been seeing tags show up all over the place, as a replacement for categories. They’re everywhere, from Amazon.com to all your favorite blogs. Their main purpose is to segment your information so your readers can easily find it - kind of like categories, just a little more flexible.

But tags are very important for SEO, since tag pages rank very well in natural search engine results. This means that a well configured tagging plugin can help you get more web site traffic for free.

We use the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for tags, and recommend it highly. It’s a little complex to configure at first, but then it just works.

After you install and configure your new tagging plugin, remember to display the tags for each post under that particular post. The tagging plugin will create a "tag page" for each tag, so clicking on a tag will list all the posts on your blog pertaining to that tag.

One thing you may not realize at first is that for every tag you create, a new page is create on your blog. You can quickly go from 20 pages to 800 pages - tons of good quality content for Google and Yahoo to slurp… 

A bonus tip: when showing these tags, configure them to point to the particular tag page on your site, i.e. NOT to Technorati or elsewhere, which is often the default configuration. This way the search engines will also find and give importance to these pages.

Make it easy for readers to RSS subscribe to your blog, with Feedburner

Just a year or two ago, RSS was the domain of the hopelessly nerdy and geeky. Fact is, most modern desktop software, from operating systems to Internet browsers, is coming out with RSS support. And your readers want to access your content over RSS. So are you going to make it easy for them or not?

What’s the best way to configure and track RSS for your readers?

While WordPress comes with good built-in RSS support, FeedBurner provides some great "finishing services" that you won’t want to miss out on. They’ll transparently format your feed so that any RSS reader will be able to read it. Also when people click on your "sign up my RSS feed" button, they won’t get a jumbled confusing mess in their browser. FeedBurner detects a regular browser and shows them a pretty HTML subscribe page. 

More importantly for many bloggers, they’ll give you feed analytics. Yep, you’ll find out how many people are actually reading your RSS feed. Pretty cool.

To get set up with FeedBurner, download and install the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin. Then follow the directions to create a FeedBurner account and configure your new RSS plugin with the specifics of your new FeedBurner feed.

As an added bonus, your new FeedBurner plugin will automatically redirect all your current RSS subscribers who are on your blog’s original feed, and get them all pulling on that shiny new FeedBurner feed. So you’ll have real numbers on who’s reading your blog by RSS.

Should you provide a full or just a partial RSS feed?

This debate has been raging in blogger circles for years. Many bloggers are afraid to provide a full feed, because some spam blogs may pull their feed and get their original content scanned by Google first. This means the spam blog will get Google original content credit.

This is technically a fair concern, thought it’s a little short sited. A professional blog with a strong following will be Google cached MUCH more quickly and frequently than some fly-by-night AdSense spam blog. Those tend to have a short life expectancy to begin with.

On the other hand, there are people who will read your blog ONLY if they can get it as a full RSS feed. They like to use their feed reader, and that’s it. So it’s up to you to decide if you want those readers or not.

More often than not, your best bet is to listen to your audience and give them what they want, the way they want it. Don’t base your decisions on fear and a lack mentality. :-) 

Keep your readers engaged and on your site longer by showing Related Posts

Visitors to a new site are amazingly flighty. They take a few glances around and decide quickly if it’s worth staying. The ones who stay are usually sucked in by the great content on your blog.

What’s the point of showing related posts? Does it really matter?

When a reader comes to the end of that very captivating article, what is it they want more than anything in the world?

Since they took the time to read your article, their brain is focused on that topic, and it’s feeding on that very yummy content. And by it’s very nature, it’s screaming for more! Showing a list of related posts at the end of an article is a brilliant strategy to keep readers engaged and ON YOUR SITE!

How and where should you display related posts on your blog? 

The best place to show related posts is a bulleted list right at the end of the article. Our stats show that links just below the post have the highest click through of any location on the page!

We went with the WASABI Related Posts plugin, since it’s the most popular related posts plugin, and it just works. Keep those readers hooked. Remember, the first taste is always free!

Add related posts to your feed as well

As an added benefit, you can display related posts  Just like showing related posts under a particular blog post on your site, this is a great way to engage RSS readers by giving them more options. This means more to choose from if they don’t like the particular item they’re reading, or they just want more!

Use this plugin which brings together UTW and WASABI Related Posts to add a list of related posts to your feed.

Dust off and feature some of your older posts by showing Random Posts

Over time, dozens and then hundreds of posts get buried and abandoned in the archives of most blogs. A great way to bring these out is by featuring Random Posts in a spot either in your sidebar or somewhere around the list of Related Posts.

There are many reasons to pull up these. First of all, the search engines are still sending visitors to those post, IF they know how to find them. Getting even more activity there means better rankings for those posts in the search engines, and thus more web site traffic. Yumm.

This is now easy to do since the good people who brought you the WASABI Related Posts plugin have also made available the excellent WASABI Random Posts plugin. 

Get your readers involved and keep their interest with Latest Comments

People love to talk and share their opinions on all kinds of topics. But most people don’t want to be the first to say something.

Get them talking and involved by highlighting the latest comments across all the posts on your blog. As your blog grows in size, you’ll find people landing on older posts from search engine or direct traffic, and leaving comments on those. Showing those comments in a "latest comments" list will prompt more discussion on those topics. And more content on those pages is a great way to get even more search engine traffic.

This is great to feature to add in your sidebar, thus getting yet more comments and visibility to those previous posts. We recommend Brian’s Latest Comments plugin. It’s simple, very customizable, and works great.

Show off your Most Popular Posts - new visitors love these

Capture the interest of your new visitors and regular readers by giving them easy access to your best and most popular articles.

The most popular articles are generally those that are the most interesting to your readers - unless you do very strong and focused social media or other promotion, but this is generally not the case.

Be aware that there IS a little increased overhead on your system with this, since the plugin will record EACH view of EACH post on your site by logging ALL these views in your MySQL database. This shouldn’t be an issue, but can add up if your site gets over 50,000 visitors a month.

We use the Top Posts by Category Plugin.

Give visitors and search engines an easy way to navigate your blog with a Site Map

New visitors often like to look around and get their bearings

A site map is very helpful to give your visitors an at-a-glance view of your site, how it’s organized, what information is available where, and so on.

Search engines depend on site maps to find all of your buried articles

Search engines can’t send you traffic if they don’t know what great content is hiding on your site. Let them quickly and easily find all our your articles with a dynamically generated site map.

For a quick example, see what we’re doing with site maps in the footer of our www.AskDanAndJennifer.com Dating & Relationship advice column.

First, create an automatically updating HTML site map page for your visitors

This is mainly for your visitors, but also for some search engines that happen to find it. This is not a plugin per-se, but rather a custom WordPress page that auto-generates your site map. Get it here. 

Then, create a Google XML site map for your favorite search engines 

Get the Google XML Sitemap Plugin, which auto-generates a site map in Google Site Map format. This plugin also updates the site map every time you make a blog post.

You absolutely do NOT want to be updating a site map by hand every time you post. Unless of course you would find that therapeutic.

Bonus tip: To get the most benefit, add your UTW tag pages to your dynamic site map with the Google Sitemaps - UTW Tag Addon plugin.

Help your visitors promote and spread the word about your awesome articles and get you more web site traffic

People love to share cool stuff they find with others. They also like to bookmark good articles and websites for later. Social media makes sites like del.icio.us and even Netscape.com and Digg make it possible to do BOTH of these at once.

Make it easy for your readers to spread the word about you, and they’ll do it. Use a social media plugin that automatically pre-fills the fields for these visitors to submit your article to these social media sites.

Many people use either Alex King’s Share This plugin or the newer but very popular AddThis.com plugin.

Place this widget in a prominent spot toward the end of your post, and watch others spread the good word for you.

Encourage bloggers to comment on your blog by linking back to their sites 

When people leave comments on your blog, it’s customary for them to enter their web site address. It’s only fair that people who leave insightful comments should get a linkback from your blog to their site, and get some search engine goodness from it.

Whether you think it’s fair or not, this is still a great motivator to get ambitious bloggers involved in the discussions on your blog. 

Disable the WordPress nofollow tag 

WordPress is configured to mark all these linkbacks with the "nofollow" attribute, so that they are ignored by Google and other search engines as far as SEO value to the commenters blog.

There’s a movement to encourage comments by disabling this "nofollow" tag for comments left on WordPress blog. Of course, there’s a DoFollow plugin that will do this for you.

Feature your top commentators on your sidebar, with a full link to their site

A similar and more powerful way to encourage serious commentators to become involved in the discussions on your blog is to feature the top 10 or so commentators in your blog sidebar. Only the true top contributors will show up in this list, and it’s well worth the sidebar real estate to encourage the conversation these readers will often facilitate.

This can easily be done with the WordPress Top Commentators plugin.

What plugins do you use? Which are your absolute must-haves?

There are many other plugins available for WordPress, to perform just about every imaginable blog task. Leave a comment below and let us know your favorites.

Tags: blogger, Blogger.com, FeedBurner, random posts, related posts, site map, tagging, top 10, TypePad, Ultimate Tag Warrior, wordpress, wordpress plugins, wordpress tags

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