Tiffany Washko

One of my biggest “secrets” for blogging success involves carnivals and tours. Specifically I am talking about blog carnivals and blog tours and I as a blogger I don’t ignore either of these two important avenues for traffic generation and/or income.

The benefit of Blog Carnivals are really not touted enough in my opinion. They do many things for my blog…they increase traffic, they increase my technorati ranking and link popularity, and they increase my income. Blogcarnival.com is the main hub where you can find carnivals to join. Basically a carnival host sets up a carnival for a certain niche…let’s say green widgets. Then everyone who blogs about green widgets can submit their post to the carnival host for consideration. The carnival host chooses some or all of the submitted posts and creates a special article on their blog that links to all the submissions one by one. Readers that are interested in the subject of green widgets visit all the blogs that appear to have interesting green widget information…increasing your traffic.

If you join carnivals on a regular basis then you are constantly getting new links to your blog. Even if you submit to the green widget carnival every time they have a new edition (let’s say every two weeks) you still might be getting new links as many carnivals rotate hosts to spread the link love. Links to your blog increases your link popularity and potentially your search engine ranking. It also helps you to rank better with Technorati and that is good news becuase many blog ad networks and pay per post networks require a good tehnorati ranking to participate in their programs. Your technorati ranking can be directly impacting your ability to make money with your blog.

Blog Tours  can be very similar to a carnival. Sometimes they are just an organized group of bloggers that all post about a certain topic and link out to each other. I have participated in a few of those and I really like them. However, the type of blog tour that I was referring to above are organized groups that attract bloggers to review products. The blogger signs ups to participate in blog tours. Large companies and book publishers contact the tour organization to help them spread the word about their new product or book. The organization then solicits bloggers within their network to review these items and write reviews for their blogs. The bloggers that get accepted then get the review products via mail and they write their reviews according to the tour schedule.

The benefit to the blogger is free product, links from the tour organizer, and sometime compensation as well. I did a dozen or so blog tours last year and for half of them the biggest perk was free product but for others I got paid anywhere from $20-50 per tour with Amazon gift certificates and I got the free product. Last year I reviewed books, software, and food for the most part. Not long ago I got a free educational  computer program for my son and then I got paid to write about how he liked it. Pretty cool.

So if you want to get more out of blogging don’t forget to join the tour and go to the carnival.

Need something worthwile to blog about? Check out Natural Mom Plr.

Technorati Tags: blog tour, blog carnival, product review, make money blogging

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Nell reminded me how much I love Wordpress. It is an absolutely amazing way to manage a content site and I have probably a dozen different WP blogs now. I do the installations and customization my self usually…although I have been known to outsource a custom skin. That can set me back about $500 or more so I don’t do that often.

When I install a new blog the FIRST thing I do is change the permalink structure to be more SE friendly. By default the permalink structure includes the full date (month, day, and year) inside the URL. I change this right away to get rid of the date and usually just leave the post title and the post number.

Next I add some plugins I can’t live without. These are the tools that work behind the scenes to make blogging easier and more productive.

Spam Karma - This plugin gets rid of the spam that can attack your blog daily. If I didn’t have Spam Karma or something similar I wouldn’t blog because the spam would be overwhelming.

All in One SEO Pack - This nifty little tool adds a custom title to each page (different from the post title), a custom description, and keywords…for each individual post. I like this plugin because post titles should be catchy to get the readers attention but that might not be the best title for SEO purposes so this plugin allows you to have your cake and eat it too.

FeedBurner FeedSmith - This redirects your RSS feed to your custom Feedburner feed. This allows you to customize your feed and track subscribers.

MightyAdsense - If you use Adsense on your blog this is the easiest way to add it. You just add the code and select the location….simple.

Related Posts - This plugin adds a string of links to related posts at the end of each post based upon keywords. If you blogged about Squidoo for instance then it would have links to other posts you wrote about Squidoo at the bottom of the post. However, I find that this plugin is testy. You have to run a database script to get it running and for no apparent reason it works sometimes and not others…even on brand new blogs and databases.

RSS Feed Signature - This adds a signature to your RSS feed. It can be text or anything in html. I use this plugin to add an affiliate link or banner to the RSS feed to promote to feed readers who don’t visit the blog to read my latest posts.

Share This - This plugin adds links to social networking and book marking sites like Digg and Stumbleupon. It also allows a reader to email the link to a friend.

SimpleTags - Adds technorati tags to the bottom of each post…although you have to write them manually.

WWSGD - This adds a box to the top or the bottom of the first post to remind readers to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Depending on the blog I also add a few other plugins but those are the main ones I look to first. What ones do YOU use?

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There is a brand new article pack being offered at Natural Moms PLR! The article pack, All About Breastfeeding, is…you guessed it….about breastfeeding and the benefits, challenges, and joys that come with it. I think our natural mom niche group will love this information but I think any web site that caters to moms and babies will love to add this information to their web sites. There are 10 high quality articles with lots of information, tips, and support for moms that are breastfeeding or those that want to.

Get more information and order YOUR breastfeeding plr article pack!

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