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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Kelly McCausey has been talking a lot lately about examining and improving your existing business. Basically the idea kicked off around the start of the new year and instead of coming up with all sorts of new ideas for your business to expand it…you just knuckle down and an examine and improve what you already have.

While I do have some ideas and plans for NEW stuff I have also been starting to really examine ways to improve what I already have going for me. I started with my naturemoms.com site. I have been going through the site page by page…adding content, tweaking Adsense, examining the Adsense activity with Adpsy Tracker, adding new affiliate promotions, chucking affiliate promotions that didn’t perform very well last year, and generally just improving each page. Oh…and I added a nifty script to the footer that will keep my copyright date current. Thanks Lynette!

I had quite a few slap on the forehead moments when I realized that I was ignoring some prime affiliate promotion opportunities and I had tough decisions to make about dropping certain products and promotions. For instance, I had a quite a few banners promoting Earth Mama Angel Baby products but yet my last check from them was only $9.00….blah. So I decided to give up that real estate to a new product and test the waters.

I worked on that throughout January and still have 1/3 of the pages left to do but I am already seeing results. My Adsense revenue jumped $80 from the previous month and that particular site became my top Adsense earner. Amazon sales jumped about that much too and since I am switching out my Amazon tracking IDs I am better able to see where the sales are coming from. As suspected, one site dominates. So when I focus on my other big content site next month I will step up the Amazon promotions.

I am also “improving” my attitude about outsourcing. I am very much a control freak and I like to be able to everything myself. With the exception of a few tiny things I do EVERYTHING myself… BUT last month I made the leap and signed a 2 month contract to outsource some things that were weighing on me. Already I can see that it will be well worth the expense.

Here is to mining for the gold you already had!

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I LOVE to travel. I used to travel quite a bit actually and even having my first child didn’t slow me down. During the first year of my oldest son’s life you could find me carrying him in a sling as I walked in Times Square or hopped a subway from Jersey to Downtown Manhattan. I took him to Chicago to see Shedd Aquarium and Navy Pier. I rented a condo on the beach in Pompano and we had fun in the sun. He went to Disneyland, DisneyWorld, and Sea World several times before he was three. But when my daughter was born I found it got a lot harder to travel. I tried to squeak it in but it was getting exhausting. I found I was pregnant with a third child while on a 1 month trip to the East Coast and I thought I might never travel again.

It is a goal of mine to be able to take my business and my family mobile for several months of the year. Since my kids will be in public schools we pretty much have only the summer to work with but I dream of running off with them for 3 months out of the year to see new, exotic places and be able to maintain my business at the same time. To do that AND take my hubby with me…we need to be able to save enough every year to fund our summer holiday and maintain two homes during that time. I have a marketer friend that spends 6 months of the year in Costa Rica so it can be done….I just need to keep planning.

I found an encouraging article today that lists the Top 10 Destinations for Independent Travelers in 2008. It even lists a few places where you can get hotel accommodations for less than $10 a night.

1. Buenos Aires, Argentina
2. Budapest, Hungary
3. Morocco
4. Chiang Mai, Thailand
5. Ethiopia
6. Queenstown, New Zealand
7. Sicily
8. Jordan
9. Belize
10.  Nepal

Can you imagine having the freedom to spend 3 months or more in Thailand or Nepal? If you can dream it you can do it right?

If this became a reality for you where would you go?

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Technorati Tags: travel, business, kids

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