Boost Your Blog Traffic with WPSyndicator
There is a new plug-in on the market that has fast become the must have tool for bloggers everywhere. It's called WPSyndicator and was created by a clever chap named Andy Fletcher. As you might realize from the name, this plug-in is made to help you syndicate your blog posts in a far easier way than doing it by hand.
What the plug-in does is syndicate an excerpt from your blog post onto up to 15 Web 2.0 properties all in one easy click. The sites that it posts on are: WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Vox, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Mulitply, Plurk, FriendFeed, Xanga, Identica, you are, Blellow and Bright Kite. It will also send a tweet about your latest blog post at the same time.
Now, you do have to take a bit of time in the initial set up of your plug-in. You need to create accounts at each of the sites, of course. You can do this right through the WPSyndicator interface as the menu will take you through to all the places that you need to sign up for the various sites. If you get stuck at all, there are some very handy videos that will guide you through the less obvious spots. This will take you from 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how fast you type and how fast you can get through it all.
Once the initial set up is completed, it's push button simple to syndicate your latest post. And one of the best features is that you can choose which sites to syndicate to with each post. For example, Identical and Blellow only take certain kinds of content so you wouldn't want to syndicate a post that will be seen as spam to those sites. You can easily turn those two sites off before you have WPSyndicator do its thing.
What gets posted to the Web 2.0 sites is an excerpt from your post and you can set the length to whatever you want. By default, it will grab the first 500 characters which will usually average about 100 words. With that excerpt, will be a link back to your blog that will be “Read more...” or you can set it to the keyword anchor text you want. With the micro-blogging sites, such as Twitter, instead of the anchor text, it will have a shortened bit.ly link.
So what does this mean? More traffic from those who read your material on the Web 2.0 sites and wish to read the rest of your article. They'll gladly click through to your blog to see what else you have to say. More subscribers, because once they're there, you will make sure they see your opt-in form, right? And of course, more backlinks that show the search engines how popular your blog is.
Analyzing Website Traffic
Analyzing Website Traffic
Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.
Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don't understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let's start by examining the most basic data - the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
These figures are the most accurate measure of your website's activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.
There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as "hits" and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.
The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.
The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.
It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.
Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page. If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page. As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign. Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice a exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page. After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it's time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor - meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase - the more valuable that keyword is. However, if you find a large number of visitors are being directed - or should I say misdirected - to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor's needs and motivations. Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.
Traffic Generation Tips
If you've got traffic coming to your site, you're 99% there. Obviously, this assumes you actually have a reason for wanting this traffic. Once the visitors arrive you can have them join your mailing list, purchase a product or subscribe to your RSS feed. The important thing is getting the traffic and sustaining it.
Let's talk about how to generate traffic...
These are the best and fastest ways to get free visitors coming to your site:
- Web 2.0
- Article Marketing
- Video
OK, so how do they work?
Web 2.0
By web 2.0 we mean any site where the users actually create the content. What this means for you is that you can join into the community and add your own content. And because of the highly interactive and popular nature of these sites, Google and other search engines "index" their content regularly. Which means the content on them gets "indexed" faster and with more weight. By placing links to your websites in this content you've created, you get traffic from the site and search engine ranking for the keywords you choose. The direct traffic from the Web 2.0 sites themselves is only part of the benefit. There are many more web 2.0 traffic tactics we don't have time to get into here, but this will get you started.
Article Marketing
The natural next topic is article marketing. This is because article websites are really web 2.0 site. Article directories are sites where users (including you) can upload articles they have written. And just like other web 2.0 sites, you get all the SEO benefits from having your content on them. But you also get the extra benefit of other users taking your article and putting it on their site. And in return for getting to use your content, these other users include links back to your website that gives you further search engine ranking and more free traffic. Here are a couple article marketing traffic tips:
- Figure out what keywords you want to go after
- Tailor the content of your article for the keywords
- Be sure to link to your site on the keywords you've chosen. Do this inside the article itself and in your author's bio.
Video Sites
And finally, we need to talk about getting traffic from videos. Just like article directories, video sharing sites also rely on user-generated content. And just as article directories give you great SEO benefits and allow others to redistribute your content on their sites. video sharing sites give you all these same benefits. And if all that wasn't enough, you also stand a much stronger chance of getting a high search engine ranking for the keywords you want with video than you do with text-based content.
OK, so how do you do effective video marketing?
- Get a YouTube account
- When people view your videos, you want them to visit your site, so turn all the other modules in your profile off
- Add tags to your profile
- Include a link to your main site in your profile
- Add at least one video to your profile
- In the title, the description and the tags for each video, include your main keywords
In closing...
If you want to get traffic to your site, then follow the advice in this article.