But no matter how big your photo is, you will always be able to say that you were in Fast Company magazine under the “Most Influential People”. They let you upload a picture of yours in which you can tag your brand right in there like I has on his photo.

Go Here and Register for FREE now!! (Takes Less than 2 Minutes)

What does this mean?

From a marketing perspective, one of the best ways to earn credibility is to associate yourself with familiar brands. This makes it much easier to sell products. You can learn this from Nike (Air Jordan Brand). Associating a shoe with Michael Jordan made their sales go much higher than what it could have. You can use this opportunity to benefit your WordPress blog.

I already did for WPBeginner (See my Profile Here)

It has been a huge misconception that a good number of traffic (pageviews and uniques) is the result of good blog marketing. I, as a blogger, have seen a lot of bloggers attributing increased number of traffic as a success for the promotions that they do. Although we can say that it is somehow a factor, we cannot just completely base it there. Here in my short post, I would explain why good marketing IS NOT just about getting good amount of traffic.

Most new and intermediate bloggers make the mistake of doing what I call as “hard promotion” (kinda similar to hard selling). Aggressive promotion is when a blogger considers quantity more than quality. If you’re into the blogging for fame or money, you probably have heard of the cliche statement “Blogging success doesn’t happen overnight”.

The problem with the statement is that many people, including myself, think it’s already obsolete! Tell me, are you going to wait for some period of time to implement new methods when you can do them now? The same applies to bloggers on getting traffic. They see other bloggers get ahead of them, they become impatient and they do things “aggressively”.

Why it’s harmful to your blog?

Just like the saying “Slowly but surely”, it goes completely the same the other way as well. I’ve spoken with some of my blogger friends and they describe the aggressive marketing as “annoying”. The harm here is that if your target audience gets annoyed, they would more likely tune you and your blog out. This is bad especially if you’re trying to establish a brand for your blog. You may not want to be known in the blogosphere for all the bad and wrong reasons, do you?

Good Amount of Traffic/Pageviews/Hits Doesn’t Mean Good Promotion and Marketing

Sure we can get a thousand unique hits to my blog in a day, but is the quality of traffic we are sending to my blog a good one? Or are we targeting the proper audience? During some point last year I know I made this mistake and the problem you would normally get is inconsistency in traffic and a very high bounce rate. These factors are crucial, especially if you’re working out on a certain goal to make your blog well-known.

Talking about increasing traffic and all the stuffs about it has become really mainstream. We, oftentimes read ways on how to get a thousand hits doing this and doing that but the real thing here is conversion. Are we converting on the traffic that our blog gets? Whether you’re focusing on building subscribers or having a good lively and interactive community, it’s imperative to assess whether what we are doing is worth it or not.

What about you and your blog? Yea, you’re getting more traffic than I do and that’s given. But are you converting enough and reaping the benefits of having a well-trafficked blog? Do you have a lively interaction on it? If not, maybe its time to re-evaluate. Maybe time to list the marketing strategies you did and evaluate whether it’s proper or not. After all we (bloggers) live altogether with one goal in mind, which is to benefit from something that we’ve done.

Melvin is a young entrepreneur and student who has been doing internet marketing related stuffs for more than 2 years now. He shares his experience and ramblings in his blog located @ MelvinBlog.com in w/c you can subscribe to. He also uses Twitter and hopes to get followed by more people.

Many bloggers don’t know the right process of how blogs should be advertised. Its not a blatant statement I am making, I came to this conclusion after receiving many direct messages on twitter from people when I follow a them: Check out my blog – http://xxxx.com. I would never check out their blog because they didn’t give me a reason to do so. Instead what you should do is maybe sent a direct message of an individual post which might be useful to that person. And hope that the quality of your content persuades this person to explore more content on your blog and become a loyal user.

During the years that I have been working online, I learn that you can never get loyal users by simply advertising your home page specially when working with Discussion Forums, and Social Media Networks. If used effectively, both of them can bring you insane amount of loyal users for free. But you need to know how to do it the right way.

It might seem like that there is a connection with all top power diggers on digg, or all top users on twitter, but really there is not. They will digg or retweet your post, if it is worthy of it. So making that statement clear, I am telling you that you should not advertise all of your posts individually because not all of them are worthy.

The same way you should not put digg submit buttons, or reddit submit buttons on every article of yours. It hurts your site more than anything because not all your articles are digg worthy. And if your site is submitted on digg specially with an article like Attention Users there will be no post on Balkhis… Then you will probably get banned from social media networks. So refrain from abusing the system.

Now here is how you should do it. Lets take Twitter for example.

You should not just tweet your own articles. Tweet what you think your followers will like. Bring variety to the table. Its all about sharing the love in order to get it back. Contribute to the community and then community will appreciate you and will send its love to you.

So on average if you are tweeting 5 of your own links then tweet 10 of other people links. Now those could be the links that your friend tweeted, or asked you to retweet via DM or others that you found on the web.

Now when other sees that you are sharing useful information, they will begin to retweet your tweets, and next thing you know that your own site is being retweeted by others as well. Now if you simply put check out my site www.wpbeginner.com, most people won’t click it, but if you put check out 21 Mindblowing Premium-Like Free WordPress Themes then more people are likely to see that article and your website indirectly.

This is killing three birds with one stone. Because you got the user to your website, you advertised the article, indirectly they saw your website as well, and now they are your loyal reader because they liked the article. So quality is a must.

Now when you are in social media networks, it is about making new friends. You can ask the friends to check out this link, and retweet it through a direct message. This way their followers can retweet as well. You can do the same with digg, facebook, and any other social media network.

What I am trying to say is don’t just stop after publishing your post. Instead you should go out and share it with others.

Right now Transformers is at #1 in Box Office with 112.0 Million, and I will say the main reason is because they have loyal followers. So in this post I will share why they will have alot of sales in the second movie.

Quality Product

They have a quality product. Their first movie was so good that people rushed to see the second movie. Now second movie in itself was good, but without the first movie, it wouldn’t generate a buzz like it did. So remember if you have known to produce good products, your next product will automatically be trusted. Learn to Gain Trust.

They had loyal followers

Since they have gained trust, they got loyal followers. Who were eager to see the next movie which is why they rushed to see it. The key in series products is to have loyal followers. So whatever you produce, whenever you produce, they will be there to buy it.

Original Plot

One of the main reason why I love Transformers is because of its original plot. Even though the second one was a sequel, it had its own unique touches. You must not forget when making a series product, don’t let it too heavily dependent on the previous post. Leave enough room for people to start from this level.

Hot Girl in the Cover

You think this technique doesn’t work? LOL. It will always work as long as there are men in the world. Megan Fox in this movie got alot of people to go and watch the movie.

Now even though I saw it in theatres, when it comes out in DVD, I will buy it as well because I am a crazy fan of this series. I think if they keep going, they will surpass James Bond and Harry Potter.

Now on average I am getting 2739 visitors monthly from Forums!

That is a big accomplishment in my opinion. I think the only reason I got this traffic was because I was being real in forums. I was not trying to make up posts, I was not trying to obsessively link to my own sites. I was simply trying to be helpful. In this post I will step by step guide you through the process of forum posting and getting traffic. I will show you exactly what I did and how I did it.

1) Picking the Forums

You would think that you can comment on any forum and get alot of traffic. Well NO! You will only get traffic from forums that are related to your blog’s niche. This plays an important role in the results that you will get. Do not limit yourself to the top forums. Try to get exposure in smaller forums because there your effort will be highlighted. The advantage of smaller forums are that they are more targetted, and there are only so many users. They will bound to check your website out, but in larger forums sometimes your website along with posts get ignored.

You must remember that you should only pick the forum that have interesting categories for you. Place where you think you can write genuinely. A place where you don’t have a problem sharing your opinion. I personally chose to post at a few forums. Because this way I can be active in these communities.

2) Picking a Username

I think a good username can get you better credibility and exposure. Be original with your nicknames. Use the name that you have been using on all forums. Avoid using your website or blog name. Because then if you link to your own website multiple times, then you would be considered a spammer. And even if you don’t link to your websites, majority of the time people won’t consider you an authority figure in my opinion. So go with something generic. I usually take “smub” because that is my initials. Syed MoizUddin Balkhi. Short and simple.

3) Pick Categories

Often times you would see forums with alot of categories. They will have General Chat, and other BS Categories. My knowledge is in Blogging, SEO, Web Design, and Templates, so I will be in those sections. Reason because that is where most of my audience is. So in forums like digitalpoint, I limited myself to these sections. This way I can get more targetted visitors to my website.

4) Posting and Linking

Mostly, the threads I was posting were support posts, so this way the user on the forum knew that I care. They were checking my website out left and right. Since I stayed under my specialty area, I knew what I am talking about. I was able to help the users and this way they came to my website searching for more help or tutorials. If the question is something that I have already answered on my blog, I would link my post occassionally because if you do this heavily then you will get infarctions. I recieved a few of those in my process of learning. The solution to those were you link to a social media page where your post was. So indirectly you are sending the users to your website.

Another thing I did was I linked to the guest posts that I have made on other blogs. This was also sending the visitors to my site indirectly, and it was raising my reputation in the eyes of the other blogger whose site I blogged on because I wrote good content.

You should also use every opportunity where you can link to your social profile like twitter or some other network. Because this way you will get more followers and users will indirectly come to your website.

The important part that you guys should not miss is that all posts must be helpful. They must raise the level of communication. If someone has already answered the question, and you have nothing better to add, don’t go and repeat the person because that is the most annoying thing you can do in my opinion.

5) Forum Signatures and Avatars

Most people don’t know how to use forum signatures effectively. Why? Because they link to their homepage. Yeah that is ok and is acceptable, but highlight your content also. If you have a post that you think will attract new users, then post that in your signature. I have a post that attracts audiences from so many different sources, 13 ways I promoted my blog to success. I usually link this in my signature.

A problem you would face doing this is that there are character limits in signatures. How can you fit these long urls. This is why url shorterning services are here. You use these url shorterning services to make your url shortest possible. Then you link them. This way you can have more posts in the signature. Remember when the user checks one of your post, they will most likely check the homepage if they find the post interesting.

Next thing is avatars. You don’t necessarily have to have a brandable avatar. Brandable one is nice to have. Don’t put your url all over it. Make it eye friendly. Don’t make it bright red thinking it will stick out because it looks really freaking spammy. Use your avatar well.

You do this process for a time period of 3 months and you watch your traffic grow like crazy. You might be wondering why I hid the link to wordpress support forum. Because this post is ranked really high, and I love the traffic I am getting hehe. I don’t want to share that.

Another thing you might notice about my stats is one is coming from Darren Rowse’s 31 Day Build a Better Blog Challenge Forum. It has only been 12 days since the challenge has started and even lesser than that since the forum has been officially launched. I have recieved 157 visitors as we are speaking, numerous twitter followers and alot more contacts. I recommend you all to join. This is a perfect example of how 7 days of posting got me 157 visitors from a small forum.

If you like this post feel free to share it, digg it, stumble it, tweet it, and most of all share your opinion on forum posting.

What is Digg

“Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users.” (Digg’s About Page) Now in a simple terms, Digg is a place where people submit articles that they like, and if others like it. They vote it also called digging it. The more people digg your article, the popular it gets.

How to make use of digg as a blogger?

• To Stay Updated – A lot of bloggers use digg to stay updated. I am one of those bloggers. I often check out Digg to see what is going on around the world. I mean there is so much going on, you can watch CNN one hour and won’t find out, but you can see digg and you would know. So I use digg to stay updated.
• Get Ideas for Post – Well as I am reading and staying updated with the world. I often find interesting things that I can blog about. Interesting articles that I like and I can share on my Sweet Monday Link Roundup. A lot of tutorials that I can use for myself and post on my blog. So I use digg as an inspiration as well.
• Digg to Connect – It does get a bit hard to connect with anyone on digg, but digg is the way you can find new people. There are so many people that become a fan of yours, and you can add them as a friend. Check out their website and so on. That is why my digg profile page have a few of my important links. Make more mutual friends because they will be the one who see the articles that you digg.
• Advertise your articles – It becomes spam if you submit all of your own articles, but if you submit your own articles once in a while it doesn’t effect you. Although having a power digger digg your article will get you a lot more diggs. But you can use digg to increase traffic on your own site. If you hit digg’s home page, you will get insane amount of traffic.

How to get crazy amount of traffic from Digg?

Digg can bring enormous amount of traffic if used correctly. If not directly from digg, then it will be from Search Engines because people see digg articles rank higher than your own article for extremely competitive keywords, so read the tips below to find out how you can get crazy traffic from digg.

Write a Killer Headline

If you ever take a quick look at Digg’s Homepage notice the way how the titles are constructed. They are not exactly the title of your post. They are different, unique, and most of the times use competitive keywords. Most importantly they are catchy. So write creative headlines. You will not get this on your first time, so keep practicing.

Get a Lot of Diggs

Sounds hard, but it is doable. All you have to do is write a quality article. People who visit your article, and if they like it. They will digg it. If they don’t like it then they will bury it. So the better resource your article is, the more you are likely to get more diggs. Getting a lot of diggs at once is the key to get on the homepage, so you need to spread the word around fast.

Use the Share button. Go to Shout it, and then shout the article to all of your friends.

But if you have more then 200 mutual friends, then you can only send it to 200 at one point. So you might have to manually select them. It can take time, but it is worth it.

Next thing you need to do is ask your friends to digg the article on other social media networks such as Twitter and Plurk. If your article is extremely useful in your opinion, you might as well share it on forums and more people will digg there.

Search Engine Ranking

See how your blog is doing with Search Engines such as google and which keywords you are ranking for. Try to use some of the powerful keywords in your digg title and you will rank high in search engines. Which means high indirect traffic from digg.

Disadvantages of using Digg

There are too many advantages such as high traffic, ideas, serps, connections. But with good there have to be something bad as well. One thing that Digg can really hurt bloggers is beating you for a Search Engine Ranking Position. Digg tend to rank higher then your own article, so if you were number 1. Now digg will take that spot most likely unless your website have more authority then digg. Another problem with using digg is waste of time. Sometimes people get crazy over digg, and the effort of becoming a power digger takes the best of them. People waste too much time digging useless stories in a hope that one story will hit the top page and they will become power diggers. So you can technically waste a lot of time.

Bottom Line

I am telling you guys to begin using Digg. It will bring insane traffic to your site directly or indirectly. It will get you more connections and gain you more readers. Digg is well worth your time if you use it effectively. Remember use it don’t abuse it

BTW: If you like this article then feel free to digg it

One thing that I have learned is that it is very lame if you are only known by webmasters. I have been following bigger bloggers like Merlin Mann, and Darren Rowse. Their presence is very widely known. People who are not even into blogging know about them. I have seen even mommy and daddy bloggers naming these two guys as an inspiration. The reason why they started a blog.

So I will share with you how I became a nobody from a somebody by using Social Media.

I started with Digg. Where I was relatively unknown. But I started finding nice articles and getting those in. Even though those articles weren’t my own articles. I was not affiliated with those. Well I added a few people as my friend. Now I have over 520 friends, and I can tell you that over 75% are mutual friends. Does that say anything. It says people who add me as their friend, don’t remove me from their list. These people doesn’t really have to be in the webmaster industry.

So if I really digg, and shout to all these people, imagine how many diggs I can get in a few minutes. Well that is the power of being somebody rather than being a nobody.

When I started this blog, I was popular in the directory industry. Before that I was that kid who have a big proxy network. Before that I was in domaining. So people have been following me since then. I started Balkhis with a bare of 90 – 100 readers that have followed me from the directory industry and previously. Now I am almost hitting 1800 subscriber mark.

The reason for that is that I market myself rather than marketing my product. If I start a website, and start marketing that using social media. Make all my profiles for that. And then end up selling the site. My efforts went worthless. Well It did good for that site, but now again I am a nobody. That is the reason where ever I go, I try to use my name in it. Balkhis for Balkhi, Syed as a combo of last / first name, or I try to use Syed Balkhi as many places. I have been known around for smub (my initials) on a lot of places also. So people can recognize me wherever they see me. Not by the owner of a certain site. While I would like to keep those in my portfolio as well, I don’t want people to know me as an owner of idk.in, and when I sold idk, they still think I am the owner. You don’t want that to happen. So market yourself.

A lot of people talk twitter all day. While twitter is great and all the traffic that comes from twitter is awesome as well. I will pick Plurk over twitter any day. Why? Because plurk gives me a sense of community. I can easily read what everyone says and have conversations without getting lost about what the reply was for. Twitter is very unorganized. But use all social media networks to get your name there. But you don’t have to be active on all those.

Stay active on the ones that you really like. I like Digg a lot, and ofcourse I like stumble, but I don’t use my stumble account a lot. I love using plurk, even if I don’t tweet every day. I try to have at least one plurk every day. These microblogging is something that is very hard to adjust to because I don’t have internet on my phone, so I can’t update it as often as a lot of people, but I am getting a hang of those.

People who think social media is a distraction need to think again. You can be active on webmaster forum for all you can. Remember there is no point of having the same user read your blog, and another person blog and another person blog. It is better to have those and then some more. So use social media. I cannot stress how important of a role social media has played for me and Balkhis.

I have noticed that whenever I write a good article, I can ask for people to stumble/digg for me, and almost all the time, I get very good response. People stumble and digg it for me. I do the back if I like the article that others ask me to digg. But this is the way how you can increase your presence around the web world. Not just webmasters use social media, the whole world uses social media. So they are the best way to reach other audience aside from webmasters.

Get on with Social Media and become a somebody. Because there are too many nobody’s in this industry. If you want to see a list of social media networks that I am a part of, scroll down to the bottom and see my profiles. Add me to your friends if you like Have fun with Social Media.

Each candidate is presenting a message, and a candidate’s effectiveness is demonstrated by how many people this message reaches. The way to make your message stand out and kick someone in the face is to put a unique and new brand to your campaign. Some inventive students at the University of Florida have done just that by creating what they call the ObamaBot.

The ObamaBot greets you with glowing eyes and it’s endearing orange and blue color scheme and rapidly presents you with two signs that ask you to vote early and vote Obama. It is displays like this, flashy and interesting that have helped to give the Obama campaign momentum, at least on the University of Florida campus. If some engineering students can do it, why can’t you?

Branding your site is simple and can have huge returns for your business. The ObamaBot cost less then $300 to make and operate, a similar gimmick may work for your site as well. If you can find one unique thing to brand your site with, to make a difference and make you stand out, why shouldn’t you? This online competition is you against the rest of the world, make sure you bring your A game.

*Many sites could fit into one or more of these categories, so make sure you explore everything to its fullest potential.

Bookmarking Sites

1. Bookkit
2. Gruks
3. Tagtooga
4. ClipClip
5. WireFan
6. Bloglines
7. Yahoo MyWeb
8. MyBookmarks
9. Murl
10. MobleoBeta
11. NetVibes
12. Favoor
13. NetVouz
14. myPIP
15. starton
16. furl
17. EasyBM
18. de.lirio.us
19. tabmarks
20. Startaid
21. Bookmax
22. BuddyMarks
23. Aboogy
24. Blue Smiley
25. Faves
26. Delicious
27. Blinklist
28. A1-Webmarks
29. Social Bookmarks
30. Spurl

Networking Sites

1. Plurk
2. tumblr
3. Twitter
4. Friendster
5. MySpace
6. Pownce
7. imeem
8. Ning
9. ClipMarks
10. Facebook

Search Engines

1. Scour
2. Slashdot
3. Diigo
4. BackFlip
5. Rollyo

Rating Sites

1. Digg
2. reddit
3. Technorati
4. StumbleUpon
5. PlugIM

That concludes a list of social media sites that you can use to promote your sites. Note from Syed: Thanks Amanda for putting up an excellent list.

Traffic Exchange System

Did you ever hear about this one? Well traffic exchange system is a system in which you visit someone’s website, and they visit your website in exchange. In some scenarios, the ratio is 1:1 or it might 1:24. That depends on how you go about in your strategies.

Its good because it gets you traffic, but majority of that traffic is not targetted traffic. So some numbers in your Stat sheet will look good. Those will be your Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Hits. Whereas others will look bad such as Bounce Rate, and Referrals.

Yes, you will have a high Bounce Rate. Do you want to know why? Other people are doing the exact same thing. They want to drop cards on as many sites and in the shortest amount of time. So most of them don’t really care about reading your blog. They just drop on your site, because you drop back. Now there are some major disadvantages to High Bounce Rate. First, it doesn’t look good on the stat sheet. Second, it affects your Google Adsense Earnings (Decreases). Third, your Alexa will be lowered as well.

Referrals, it doesn’t look very nice if you have a ts25.com ranking at #1 in your referral list. Why? Because it is a traffic exchange site, where you can buy off your visitors. Entrecard is no different, I’ll go ahead and say it is slightly worse. Because ts25.com atleast makes the user stay on the site for a certain period of time. When a user is buying a website, they see something like that, they automatically know that the traffic is not reliable. Once you stop dropping cards, or buying traffic from any other place, it will stop. So it is a turndown for your buyers.

Next disadvantage of any traffic exchange system, is it wastes time. You will be wasting time in making your list to drop on people. You will be wasting one hour, or half hour each day to do your drops. Now out of those, you might find some new readers, but what are the chances of finding alot of new readers? None… And since you are wasting so much time on this, you won’t have time to write quality content. If I have to give up one thing, to improve my blog, than it would be entrecard not my content. Through content, I will always find new readers. But through entrecard, I can bring the readers in, but how many of those will stay?

Now, you might be thinking heck I am getting unique visitors, It is helping my stat sheet. I am not going to stop you. I will say go ahead, try it out and learn from your experience. My experience says it otherwise. Picture says a thousand words, If you didn’t get it, I would like to explain it. You can shine with the exchange for a little bit because you are lighting yourself up. But sooner or later, your fuel will be out, and you will be burned out.

If you are one of those who want to go ahead and try entrecard. I will save you some time by giving you tips that I used when I was trying out entrecard. If you use the tips that I give you effectively, and you have a decent connection then you should be able to drop 300 cards within 30 minutes once you are used to of it.