It may take years to build a site up to the point where you are happy with the income, traffic, and exposure you get on a daily basis. Seeing traffic numbers improve is always a great feeling, but increased traffic doesn’t necessarily correlate to increased earnings.

You may notice that certain types of traffic convert well into sales, leads, or ad clicks. But, some traffic seems to be almost worthless. I come from the school of thought that all traffic can monetized if you get creative. This is why you should take many additional steps to make money with your current stream of traffic, instead of just relying on Adsense. Also, think carefully about traffic and monetization, before you create new content in your niche. Test, and test some more, until you find the best way to profit with your site’s visitors.

So, what steps can you take to turn your visitors into cash? and how can you create new traffic streams that convert?

1. Keyword Research

When i first started building websites, i would write articles based on the theme of the site. I did no keyword research whatsoever, and i lost alot of money as a result. Once i realized that there is alot more money in the competitive short tail, i dove head first into this type of research. When i write content now, i look at it as an investment. I try and create a destination for users that are seeking a product, have a problem i can solve, or need an answer that i can supply. I spend a long time creating a well written piece of content with images and video, but i also think about how i can monetize the content, before i produce it. It’s important to learn how to best serve your visitors, while using this opportunity to sell them products, generate leads, or get an ad click.

2. Monetize the Traffic You Already Have

Search engines rank pages, not sites. You will often notice that a large majority of search traffic will go to your most authoritative, well linked content. You should take extra steps to monetize these particular pages. For example, if you had a large volume of traffic coming to a page on your site about “relationship advice”, you should think hard about what these visitors really want. A person seeking “relationship tips” might have a relationship that is rocky, they might have just broken up with their boyfriend or girlfriend, they might even be single and trying to get into a relationship. The best way to figure out what your readers need is to create your own banner ads, email optins, or text ads, and rotate them. By supplying every option a user might want and rotating them all, you can determine how to best pitch these users by CTR, EPC, and long term value. Monetizing a high traffic page about relationships could be as easy as searching through Clickbank and CPA offers. Relationship e-books for the products “How To Get Your Ex Back” or “How To Meet Women”, would sell extremely well with thiskind of traffic and could increase your page earnings by large amounts. I was recently was able to do this with one high traffic page and increase the revenue 10x.

3. Developing a Product

If you have traffic for a topic that doesn’t have an affiliate product to sell, you can create one. Creating an e-book to sell on clickbank isn’t that difficult and can even be outsourced. All you basically need to get started is an e-book and a sales page. The sales page will be the most difficult part of the equation. You should create many versions of the sales page and rotate them all to see which will convert the best. E-books are great products to create because they sell well, require you to handle no inventory, and can be created for any subject. The main downside is piracy, but the revenue potential of an ebook far exceeds any financial risk you take to create one.

4. Creating an Auto Responder Sequence

Capturing a one time visitor’s email and turning this visitor into long time customer is a great way to monetize your site. Creating a profitable auto-responder sequence is a way that you can keep users coming back to your site over and over. When you create a sequence of emails, it is important to consistently deliver good content and not just sell the user in every email. If you spam a user with offers, they will most likely unsubscribe. Providing quality content that users care about gives you the potential to make revenue off of the customer multiple times. If you find out how much the average email subscriber is worth to you over the entire series of emails, you can buy traffic for less than this number and turn an even greater profit.

5. Get Affiliates to Promote Your Product

If you have created your own product, you should consider promoting it to affiliates on your high traffic pages. You can also promote it to bloggers and site owners in your niche. Try targetting webmasters by advertising your affiliate program on your high traffic pages. If you can get a few high profile people to promote your product, it can spread virally. If a site owner sees a prominent site promoting your product, they will be much more likely to promote it as well. You might even consider paying a high profile site to do this, in order to get the word out.

Making a good living with a web property becomes easier as you learn how to better monetize your traffic. Knowing your visitors wants and needs as they search through your site will help you promote or create products that sell extremely well with your traffic. By providing quality content to your readers, you can create a valuable relationship that will lead to increased sales and more profits down the road. Testing many different offers and ad placements is the only way your site can earn to its full potential. One you master product creation, autoresponders, and how to develop streams of high quality traffic, you will be able to create a much more stable internet business.

About the author: Ross Jackson takes an interest in all things personal finance and loves helping consumers with his site Great Credit Score. It offers unbiased information about credit, debt, the economy, and investing.

Getting a ton of quality backlinks can take forever and most people just don’t have the time or patience to wait that long. There are many great ways to get backlinks such as; blog commenting, forum posting, article submissions, social bookmarking and guest posting, but the problem with these backlink building methods is that you will end up spending too much time away from your site and more importantly your readers. Wouldn’t it be nice if getting backlinks could be set on autopilot?

Great news, there is a way you can set your link building on autopilot that only requires you to do a minimal amount of upfront work. Before I get into the methods that will put your link building on autopilot I want to make sure you understand that this entire method revolves around good quality content.

Remember, “Content is king”!

1. Utilize Yahoo Answers

If you have been building backlinks to your site then I bet you know that Yahoo Answers is really a No-Follow site, right? Well to tell you the truth, it is, but that isn’t the reason you want to post answers on Yahoo Answers. The reason you need to post on Yahoo Answers is because there is a piece of software out there called WP Robot that when placed on a blog has a tool that pulls Yahoo Answers off Yahoo and places it on their site.

Do you get why this is beneficial for you?

Getting links is not that tough. All you have to do is answer questions that have a descriptive title such as, “How do I make money online?” or “How can I lower my car insurance premiums?”. The reason you need to answer questions with a large niche in the title such as making money online, insurance, weight loss or whatever is so you have more people pulling Answers from Yahoo onto their site.

2. Create A Multiple Series List

There are a few reasons to create a multiple series list and all three reasons combined work very well to get backlinks and traffic. The first reason multiple series lists work is because readers can follow along better with a list, they are just easier to scan and make learning less complicated. The other reason why multiple series lists get more backlinks is because people love to link to lists and the more lists you have the more backlinks you will get.

Example: If you write a 3 part series titled, “15 ways to get more traffic through Facebook” I would be a fool to only link to one part on my blog, so instead I would need to link to all three. I don’t know about you but I would much rather have three links pointing to my site as opposed to just one.

3. Add Information To Wikipedia

This is something I tested a while back and it works beautifully. Wikipedia is the biggest online encyclopedia and has over 3 million articles just in the English language. This is why finding a page to edit is very easy to do.

Here is how it works, you first need to find a page that can use some editing (I recommend finding a page that doesn’t have a lot of content but has a decent foundation to go off of). Once you have found the page you want to edit and that relates to your site you need to make sure that you have an identical topic on your site so that you have a reason to link to your site.

Example of identical topics: If you had a site about blogging then I great page to edit would be the page of Problogger, Darren Rowse(considering you had something new to add). Now in order to make it every more closely related I would try to get an interview with Darren that way I could fill in some missing parts to his Wikipedia page. After I have done that I can edit the page, insert my website link and wait.

Something that you must know is that like Yahoo Answers Wikipedia is a No Follow site so the entire point of using Wikipedia to get people to see the article on your site and link to that instead of the actual Wikipedia page.

4, Exchange Site Links For Content

Something that I have done quite a bit for my niche websites is exchange site links for written content. This isn’t guest posting, this method involves a site owner placing a link back to your site in order for you to write a specified number of articles.

The reason this works is because site owners want to get more content whether it is to submit to article directories, sell or just put on their site. I know this may not make a lot of sense to you now but it will. If you spend enough time on forums then you will notice that not everyone wants to buy content for a decent price, so all you have to do is tell the person wanting to buy the article that you will write 1 article each month in exchange for 1 link on their site. Trust me, people like to do this.

5. Give Away A Gift

My favorite way to get backlinks is to actually put out some link bait(AKA give away a gift). The link bait I always put out is a $25 gift card for Amazon.com. Everybody wants to get the free gift card so I tell my readers that all they have to do is link to my site and they will be entered into the drawing for the $25 gift card.

How I set it up: Since I want to get traffic and not only links I make the requirement that in order to be entered into the drawing the linking site needs to send at least 5 visitors having all different IP addresses and anything over 5 will count as another entry into the drawing. Think about it, if you only get 3 links from quality sites it would probably cost you around $200 per month for those links, but instead you only pay $25 with the hopes that the site owner keeps your link up for the chance to win another gift in the coming months.

The biggest different between these 5 unique link building methods and the normal link building methods is the fact that these are a more set and forget type thing while the others have to be catered to constantly.

About the Author: Adam Snyder is a blogger, freelance writer, and internet marketer who loves the online lifestyle. He has been making money online for over 4 years now and is passionate about teaching others the methods that he uses to make money. If you want to see the techniques he used make sure you check out DormRoomCash.com.

Destination Infinity asks:

There are two ways to approach writing an article about a particular topic – One is to write a long article covering all the sub-topics in a single page. Another is to write shorter articles about each sub-topic, and publish them on different days. Which approach do you think is better?

The first one, hands down.

In fact this is an issue I faced on one of my websites recently. I hired a new editor to take care of the content, and he asked me if it would be fine to break long posts into smaller ones, and publish them as “Part 1″, “Part 2″, “Part 3″ and so on. My answer was that publishing the long post in one piece was preferred.

Why is that?

Because one big post will bring much more traffic than two or three smaller ones, both in the short and in the long term.

When you publish a long post covering all the nuances of a particular topic you are basically offering a complete solution to someone’s problem, a one-stop shop. As a consequence people reading that post will be much more likely to share it on social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Digg), and this will increase your traffic on the short term.

Additionally bloggers and webmasters coming across that long and structured post will be more likely to link to it, increasing the search rankings of that post for related keywords. Over the long term, therefore, the post will keep getting traffic from Google and other search engines.

Breaking a post down into smaller parts and publishing it sequentially has some benefits too. For example, it’s a nice way to create loyalty among your readers, as they will develop the habit of visiting your website more frequently. Most of the times, though, the benefits of publishing the post in a single piece weight more.

Finally, keep in mind you can do both things as well. Suppose you have one post listing the top 20 websites for learning how to play the guitar online. You could start a series and write one small post with a single website every week, and once all the 20 post have been published you could publish a big one summarizing the series and including all the 20 websites. Using this technique will make your big post lose some buzz (as most of your readers will have seen that content already) but it’s a good compromise to get the best of the two approaches.

Thoughts?

Forums have been around since the earliest days of the Internet, and people have been using them ever since to drive traffic to their websites. While they’re not hip and sexy Web 2.0 darlings like Twitter or Facebook, forums are still a great way to drive targeted traffic to your blog. Below are 8 things you need to keep in mind when using forums as a traffic driving strategy.

1. Pick the right forum

Choosing the right forum(s) to participate in makes a big difference. Hopefully you’re already an active member of a forum or two. If not, hopefully you’re at least aware of some of the popular forums that cater to your niche. If that’s still not the case, Google “YOURNICHE forum” or check out Big-Boards.com.

If there are multiple forums in your niche, you should focus on being active in just one forum at first. You don’t want to spread yourself too thin, and you want to be sure you become a prominent member of the community. That’s hard to do when you’re trying to post in half a dozen different forums. Once you’ve become established in one, then you can determine whether joining another would be best for you.

If you’re not already active in a forum and you have multiple forums to choose from, there are a couple points to consider. How large and active is the forum? You won’t get much traffic from a forum that has 30 members and the last post was six months ago. Do you like the look of the forum? I’ve chosen to participate in certain forums because I just like the way they’re designed. Does the forum allow signatures? Some forums don’t allow signatures, which will make it harder for you to get traffic (see the “Put a link in your signature” section below). And finally (and perhaps most importantly), do you like the community that has built up around the forum? You’re going to be spending a lot of time there, so make sure you like the kind of discussion that’s going on.

2. Choose your username carefully

Your username is your brand out there on the forum for everyone to see, so it needs to be chosen carefully. Ask yourself what message you want your username to send. Using your name as a username gives your interactions with others a more personal feel than if you just used the name of your blog or business. It’s important that you username fits in with your niche and the forum. For example, if you’re posting to a realty forum and the forum community you’re posting to has a very professional feel to it, you’ll obviously want to steer clear of usernames like “xfallenangel1987x.”

3. Put a link in your signature

Your signature is the couple lines of text that appear below each one of your forum posts. Putting a link to your blog or to a particularly good post is the backbone of any solid forum-based traffic strategy. This is how you’ll get the majority of traffic out of the forum.

A standard signature will include the name of your blog and maybe your blog’s tagline or what your blog is about. Linking to an especially informative or interesting post can also be a good strategy if you want to drive traffic to certain parts of your blog. Remember that you can also link to a newsletter signup page to help grow your list.

You can read more about putting a link in your signature in this previous Daily Blog Tips post.

4. Craft your profile carefully

Your profile is what people see when they click on your username, and it usually consists at least of your avatar, a short bio, and a link to your website. Most often, your avatar should be a picture of you. We like to know that we’re interacting with a real person, and a photo gives a face to the name and helps create a more personal interactive experience. If you prefer anonymity, then use anything you want as long as it fits in with 1) the feel of the forum, and 2) the image of your blog or business. Using the realty forum example again, you wouldn’t want your profile pic to be a funny animated .gif of a guy getting hit in his private parts with a baseball. Likewise, you wouldn’t want to use a serious, black and white photo of yourself if you’ve got a fun and colorful blog about funny YouTube videos.

Your bio should include relevant information about you. Again, make it professional, but don’t be boring and one-dimensional. Sure, talk about how much experiences you’ve got in your particular field, but also talk about any other interesting information about yourself. If you’re on a rock climbing forum, you could state that you’ve been rock climbing for 12 years, that you are an avid backcountry skier in the offseason., and that you love watching Lost. Give people more reasons for them to interact with you.

And while we’re on the subject of getting people to interact with you, be sure to include a line in your bio (preferably at the end) that you welcome people to contact you with any questions or comments. This can help people feel comfortable about coming to you for any additional help or information beyond what you provide in your forum posts.

Many forum profiles have a space for your website’s URL or the URL of your favorite website. Be sure to put your blog in there!

Finally, take advantage of any other profile features your forum might have. Some forums let you enter your Twitter handle, for example. Others let you enter your other interests. Use these elements to further differentiate yourself from others, to establish yourself as an expert in your field, and to set yourself up as a person people want to interact with.

5. Don’t be spammy

When you’re networking with people in person, you don’t shake their hands and immediately stuff a business card down their throats. You want to get to know the person a little bit before interacting with them on a professional level. To put it another way, you wouldn’t go all the way on a first date, right?

Sure, you’re using the forum to promote your site, but that shouldn’t look like the main reason you’re there. Stick around the forum for a while before you start promoting your blog openly. No one likes it when the forum user’s first and only post is, “Hey guys! Check out my sick awesome new blog!”

6. Provide quality content

We’ve all heard that “Content is king” for getting traffic to your blog and getting people to subscribe to your blog. The same applies to forum posts. For example, don’t just respond to a question by saying “Yes” or “No,” but justify your response with a clear, well-thought-out, informative, helpful reply. Provide the best content you possibly can. Link to other resources both inside the forum and elsewhere online to provide even more helpful content.

Another tactic you can use is writing content especially for the forum. Think of it like guest posting for the forum: you provide your own content for free to the forum, and in exchange you get more exposure for your blog. At the end of the forum post, you can include a line of text that says something like, “This was written specifically for the Whatever Forum. If you found this information useful, check out my blog at WhateverIsAwesome.com.” You’re adding value to the forum while at the same time giving people a reason to check out your blog. Win-win!

Having said all of that, not all of your posts need to be long and epic. Quality content can be as simple as posting a funny YouTube video that a lot of people in the forum community can enjoy.

7. Start new threads

If someone opens up a thread to read it, that person is obviously going to read the first post in the thread, right? The first post in a thread gets read more than any other, so being in that position is a great way to leverage your forum posting.

It’s important, however, that you start the right kinds of threads. If you’ve got genuine questions about something, then by all means ask about it. If you don’t have any questions, a great way to go is to ask people’s opinions on a topic that they all can have input on. If you’re posting to a mountain biking forum, for example, ask people what they’d do if they had $5000 to spend. Would they spend it on a new bike? Upgrades to their current bike? Travel to that place they’ve always wanted to ride? More examples can be asking people on a Corvette forum to post sweet pics of their ride, or encouraging members on a photography forum to post links to their portfolios.

8. Post often

Forum posting isn’t the best passive traffic strategy. You can’t just spend a week posting multiple times a day and then sit back and expect the traffic to roll in forever. The threads that you spend all that time and effort posting in will eventually be pushed further and further down the page until they disappear from page 1. It’s sad, but that’s just the way it is. Participating in – and getting traffic from – forums is very much an active process. To get the best results, you really need to commit to it and make it a regular part of your blogging process.

Above all, just try to enjoy the experience. Hopefully you’re talking about things you like, and you might as well be building blog traffic while you’re at it, right? In addition, forums are great way to get post ideas for your blog, so keep your eyes peeled.

Pick a forum, do your best to become part of the community there, apply the above 8 points, and you’re sure to see the traffic start to come. Good luck!

About the author: Tristan Higbee just launched Blogging Bookshelf, where he reviews books and ebooks specifically for bloggers. Subscribe to the Blogging Bookshelf newsletter and get his ebook, “101 Ways to Battle Blogger’s Block”, for free.

The story behind many blogs is roughly the same. Someone started it as a hobby, maybe to vent some steam or simply to get their thoughts, views or expert analysis out into the open and hope that someone is willing to listen.

Some blogs flop, whilst others snowball, creating minor celebrities from those at the helm. The so-called “prophet of doom” blogger in South Korea, whose anonymous observations on the global financial market under the pseudonym ‘Minerva’ caused major ripples within Asia and beyond, was traced and prosecuted (though the case was later thrown out) for supposedly spreading false information.

Then there is incredible success stories such as Mashable, which is an internet news blog started by Scot Peter Cashmore in 2005, and is now one of the top websites in the world. Some blogs are always destined to succeed, such as Matt Cutts, who is head of Google’s Webspam team. Anyone in such a lofty position at Google is always going to attract a lot of people to their personal blog; but the content still has to be of a high quality for people to visit repeatedly.

However, the one thing all blogs have in common is that they’re global from the moment they are uploaded onto the World Wide Web. Anyone from Michigan to Malawi can access your site, post comments, follow tweets and hang on every word that emanates from the blog. And whether you’re an aspiring blogging superstar, or you’re already well on your way to a million unique viewers each month, the end-reader is why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Now consider this: a quarter of the world’s population speak English, 94% of which do so as a second language. This poses a serious question about whether you’re reaching as many people as you otherwise could be.

Some European blogs have side-by-side translations of the content, one in the native language and one in English, which is the most commonly spoken second language in the world. So you have to ask yourself whether or not a similar set-up would benefit your own blog? Or maybe you’re happy to assume an ‘English only’ stance with your blogging escapades?

The practicalities of multilingual blogging do seem rather daunting at first. If you’re a monolingual blogger, then there’s the first problem right there. And even if you are blessed with fluency in several other languages, do you really have the time to translate all your posts?

There are of course countless free ‘machine translation’ tools online, notably Google translate and Babel Fish. These can be rather good actually, if you’re not too fussy about the grammar being 100% accurate.

To help maximize the chances of hitting a good machine translation of your blog posts, you need to consider how you write your English text in the first instance. The likes of Google translate isn’t clever enough to know slang terms and colloquialisms, so you’re best avoiding ‘swell’ time and sticking with ‘good’ time, whilst opt for ‘food’ over ‘chow’.

Adopting a controlled language model in your English language blog may restrict the creative dexterity of your words, but it will help ensure a greater degree of accuracy with a subsequent machine translation.

You can also reduce the number of nouns and verbs used and impose a strict rule that stipulates ‘one word, one meaning’. English quite often suffers from an excess of words for one concept (e.g. ‘dog’, ‘hound’) as well as allowing for nouns to be used as verbs (e.g. ‘hammer’). The controlled language approach seeks disambiguation through a strict adherence to a controlled vocabulary where each word can only have one meaning. Once you learn what words that Google translate likes and what it doesn’t, you can build an internal glossary of the best terms to use.

Moreover, translation plugins are available for most of the common blogging CMSs such as WordPress. When you download the plugin, it generates a series of national flag icons which, when clicked by the user, automatically translates the content of your blog into the desired language.

If you would rather go down the pre-machine translated route over the user-generated one, but you’re not entirely comfortable publishing machine translated content on your blog, then you can pay for the services of a native-speaking translator to proofread the text. They will check for errors and it will help avoid any potential embarrassing situations. So you can in effect maintain the creative flow of your English text, whilst ensuring any slang/colloquial terms are picked up by the proofreader.

This is cheaper than having a full-blown translation carried out, where you send your English text to an independent translator or translation company, who then carry out a full creative translation of the source text. But if you’re serious about making inroads into international markets, then it could be money well spent.

So let’s assume you’ve set up a foreign language version of your blog. You obviously want to drive traffic towards it from the relevant countries, which will require a little optimization. The one golden rule of multilingual SEO is NEVER translate your keywords.

Suppose a lot of traffic arrives at your English-language blog for the search term ‘Money Saving Tips’, and you now want to optimize your text for the Hispanic market. A translator won’t know which search terms people use to search for ‘Money Saving Tips’ locally, there will be countless ways to translate this phrase, people may use acronyms, abbreviations or synonyms. You must research your key search terms for each target country.

And there you have it. A beginner’s guide to multilingual blogging!

About the Author: Christian Arno is founder of global translation company and localization specialists Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over a hundred employees working in five countries and clients in over sixty countries, leading to a turnover of $6.2m USD in 2009.