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07 May, 2013

I Will Not Be Like Bawumia Who Is Now Learning To Lie In the Witness Box – Gen. Mosquito

I Will Not Be Like Bawumia Who Is Now Learning To Lie In the Witness Box – Gen. Mosquito

John Asiedu Nketia who will be representing the first and third respondents in the ongoing 2012 election petition filed by the NPP against President Mahama, the Electoral Commission (EC) and the NDC says he will not waste time like what the star witness of the petitioners is doing in the witness box when it gets to his turn to be cross examined. 

According to him, there is no need for a witness to learn what he already knows and has been asked to clarify during cross examination. This he believes elongates proceedings and such is what the court is witnessing during Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia’s cross examination. 

“There is no need for you to learn the truth you already know. If Bawumia had given straight forward answers, I would have believed by now we have reached far in the cross examination. 

“…If he (Dr. Bawumia) responds to question put before him in the witness box, and stay glued to his answers, the case will accelerate. His yes should be his yes and no to be his no.

“…Bawumia should stop using big English and his tricks in court to deceive the court, he must be straight forward,” he told Asempa FM.

He however expressed readiness to face the petitioners in the witness box and willing to make the proceedings move quicker than what Dr. Bawumia is doing.

Tsatsu has scored an own-goal - Sir John asserts

General Secretary of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie says he is elated by the Supreme Court ruling which allows respondents to ask questions based on pink sheets not tendered in evidence. According to him, the ruling vindicates the petitioners decision to challenge the conduct of the 2012 general election in court.

 The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled in favour of counsel for the third respondent, Tsatsu Tsikata, enabling him to ask questions on pink sheets which had not been filed as part of the affidavits by any of the parties, provided it is related to the irregularities raised by the petitioners in the case. Counsel for the petitioners, Philip Addison had objected to a pink sheet introduced in court by Mr. Tsikata for the key witness in the case, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia to identify. It was overruled.

 Speaking on Asempa FM’s Ekosii Sen programme Tuesday, Kwadwo Owusu Afriyie said the ruling has exposed the double standards of the respondents. He scoffed at the decision by Mr. Tsikata to bring in a pink sheet not tendered in evidence to prove an irregularity when hitherto he [Tsatsu]argued that there were no irregularities in the 2012 elections. The NPP scribe was of the opinion that Tsatsu Tsikata "scored an own goal" by veering off his party’s position to deny any irregularity in the election.
 Sir John as he is popularly called said the NDC is now clutching at straws because all their plans to delay the case has fallen flat in their case. He wondered why the NDC is now running away from their own shadows when they claim the NPP had no case.

 Sir John stated unequivocally that the erroneous impression being created that NPP is only seeking to annul votes of President Mahama is part of the NDC propaganda. He explained that the petitioners are also praying the court to annul some votes won by the NPP flagbearer, Nana Akufo-Addo. In a rebuttal, General Secretary of the NDC, Johnson Asiedu Nketia maintained that the petitioners "demonstrated in bad faith". He noted that the ruling by the Judges is the beginning of the humiliation the NPP will suffer at the end of the case.
 The NDC scribe posited that they have ample evidence to prove that the petitioners claims are just a figment of their imagination. Asiedu Nketia commended the Judges for not allowing the theatrics of the petitioners lawyers to sway them in their judgment.

Frustrated Tsatsu descends into the gutters






PRESS RELEASE

A clearly frustrated Tsatsu Tsikata, Counsel for 3rd Respondents in the ongoing Presidential Election Petition at the Supreme Court, 

on Monday morning lost his cool and threw tantrums at his learned colleague, Philip Addison, who represents the petitioners, and ordered him to “shut up”.

Lawyer Tsatsu Tsikata, who represents the National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the case - and who was cross examining Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, main witness of the petitioners - lost his cool as Counsel Philip Addison rose to object to a question he had posed to the witness on its relevancy to the issues being determined by the court.

But even before Counsel Philip Addison could make his objection, Lawyer Tsikata angrily exclaimed “would you shut up there” to the surprise of all present as the language was unexpected from members of the legal profession.

Interestingly, Counsel Tsatsu Tsikata is the one who had throughout the trial loudly insisted on the need for his colleague learned counsels to uphold what he termed as the “high ethical standards of the legal profession” and therefore comes as a shock that he would abandon those standards and rather go on the path of using unsavory words and losing his temper in the courtroom.

Counsel Philip Addison who did not take kindly to the rude words used by Tsatsu Tsikata protested and urged the court to call the Counsel for 3rd respondents to order especially as he had developed a tradition of using insulting words in the courtroom since the case commenced. However, though the court did not issue a direct caution to the lawyer, with Presiding Judge William Atuguba urging all lawyers to go back to the rules of the game to preserve decency in the court.

Counsel Tsatsu Tsikata in previous days has come under a barrage of criticisms for what had become a boring cross examination of the main witness with many commentators including some lawyers questioning the hype around him which suggested time and again that he was a legal genius.

Before he commenced his cross examination, Counsel Tsatsu Tsikata was touted by the NDC and its commentators as their “legal Maradona” whose cross examination would collapse the case of the petitioners.

However, after four days of cross examination, the expected demolition of the petitioners’ case has not been witnessed with the lawyer virtually repeating the same cross examination tactics adopted by Counsel for John Mahama, 1st Respondent in the case, Tony Lithur which was seen as largely being pointless and irrelevant to the two issues being determined by the court, that is, whether there were irregularities in the conduct of the December 7th Elections and whether those irregularities, if any, affected the outcome of the December Presidential elections.

Earlier in his cross examination, Counsel Tsatsu Tsikata produced letters supposedly signed by the 1st petitioner, Nana Akufo-Addo delegating polling agents to some unknown polling stations but after a thorough check of the letters, Dr. Bawumia revealed that though the letters were purported to have been written between the 5th and 7th December 2012, the letters were amazingly received on the 3rd December suggesting that they could be possible fakes.

28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website


28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website



There are several lists with “ways to make money with a website” on the Internet, but none of them seem to be complete. That is why I decided to create this one. If you know a method that is not listed below, just let us know and we’ll update it.
Notice that ways to make money with a website are different from ways to make more money from it. Methods to increase your traffic or click-through rate will help you make more money, but they do not represent a method of making money per se.

For example, one could suggest that blending AdSense ads with the content is a way to make money from a website. In reality it’s not; it’s just a way to make more money by improving your ad click-through rate. The real monetization method behind it is a PPC ad network.
The list is divided into direct and indirect methods, and examples and links are provided for each point. Enjoy!

Direct Methods

1. PPC Advertising Networks
Google AdSense is the most popular option under this category, but there are also others. Basically you need to sign up with the network and paste some code snippets on your website. The network will then serve contextual ads (either text or images) relevant to your website, and you will earn a certain amount of money for every click.
The profitability of PPC advertising depends on the general traffic levels of the website and, most importantly, on the click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC). The CTR depends on the design of the website. Ads placed abode the fold or blended with content, for instance, tend to get higher CTRs. The CPC, on the other hand, depends on the nice of the website. Mortgages, financial products and college education are examples of profitable niches (clicks worth a couple of dollars are not rare), while tech-related topics tend to receive a smaller CPC (sometimes as low as a couple of cents per click).
The source of the traffic can also affect the overall CTR rate. Organic traffic (the one that comes from search engines) tends to perform well because these visitors were already looking for something, and they tend to click on ads more often. Social media traffic, on the other hand, presents terribly low CTRs because these visitors are tech-savvy and they just ignore ads.

List of popular CPC advertising networks:
2. CPM Advertising Networks
CPM advertising networks behave pretty much as PPC networks, except that you get paid according to the number of impressions (i.e., page views) that the ads displayed on your site will generate. CPM stands for Cost per Mille, and it refers to the cost for 1,000 impressions.
A blog that generates 100,000 page views monthly displaying an advertising banner with a $1 CPM, therefore, will earn $100 monthly.
CPM rates vary with the network, the position of the ad and the format. The better the network, the higher the CPM rate (because they have access to more advertisers). The closer you put the ad to the top of the page, the higher the CPM. The bigger the format (in terms of pixels), the higher the CPM.
You can get as low as $0,10 and as high as $10 per 1,000 impressions (more in some special cases). CPM advertising tends to work well on websites with a high page views per visitor ratio (e.g., online forums, magazines and so on).
List of popular CPM advertising networks:
3. Direct Banner Advertising
Selling your own advertising space is one of the most lucrative monetization methods. First and foremost because it enables you to cut out the middleman commissions and to determine your own rates. The most popular banner formats on the web are the 728×90 leaderboard, the 120×600 skyscraper, the 300×250 rectangle and the 125×125 button.
The downside of direct banner advertising is that you need to have a big audience to get qualified advertisers, and you will need to spend time managing the sales process, the banners and the payments.
Related links:
4. Text Link Ads
After Google declared that sites selling text links without the nofollow tag would be penalized, this monetization method became less popular.
Many website owners are still using text links to monetize their sites, though, some using the nofollow tag and some not.
The advantage of this method is that it is not intrusive. One can sell text links directly through his website or use specialized networks like Text-Link-Ads and Text-Link-Brokers to automate the process.
Text link marketplaces and networks:
5. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a very popular practice on the Internet. Under this system you have a merchant that is willing to let other people (the affiliates) sell directly or indirectly its products and services, in exchange for a commission. Sometimes this type of advertising is also called CPA (cost per action) or CPL (cost per lead) based.
Affiliates can send potential customers to the merchant using several tools, from banners to text links and product reviews.
In order to find suitable affiliate programs you can turn to individual companies and publishers like Dreamhost and SEOBook, or join affiliate marketplaces and networks.
List of popular affiliate marketplaces and networks:
6. Monetization Widgets
The latest trend on the web are widgets that let you monetize your website. Examples include Widgetbucks and SmartLinks. Some of these services operate under a PPC scheme, others behave like text link ads, others yet leverage affiliate links.
Their main differentiator, however, is the fact that they work as web widgets, making it easier for the user to plug and play the service on its website.
List of companies that provide monetization widgets:
7. Sponsored Reviews
PayPerPost pioneered this model, with much controversy on the beginning (related to the fact that they did not require disclosure on paid posts). Soon other companies followed, most notably Sponsored Reviews and ReviewMe, refining the process and expanding the paid blogging model.
Joining one of these sponsored reviews marketplaces will give you the opportunity to write sponsored posts on a wide range of topics. Not all bloggers are willing to get paid to write about a specific product or website (because it might compromise the editorial credibility), but the ones who do are making good money out of it.
If your blog has a big audience you could also offer sponsored reviews directly, cutting off the commissions of the middleman.
List of sponsored reviews and paid blogging networks:
8. RSS Feed Ads
With the quick adoption of the RSS technology by millions of Internet users, website owners are starting to find ways to monetize this new content distribution channel.
Feedburber already has its own publisher network, and you can sign-up to start displaying CPM based advertising on your feed footer. Bidvertiser recently introduced a RSS feed ad option as well, with a PPC scheme.
Finally, some blogs are also opting to sell banners or sponsored messages on their feed directly. John Chow and Marketing Pilgrim are two examples.
Related links:
9. Sponsors for Single Columns or Events
If you website has specific columns or events (e.g., a weekly podcast, an interview series, a monthly survey, a special project) you could find companies to sponsor them individually.
This method increases the monetization options for website owner, while giving advertisers the possibility to target a more specific audience and with a reduced commitment.
Mashable illustrates the case well. They have several advertising options on the site, including the possibility to sponsor specific columns and articles, including the “Daily Poll” and the “Web 2.0 Invites.”
Problogger also runs group writing projects occasionally, and before proceeding he publicly announce the project asking for sponsors.
10.Premium Content
Some websites and blogs give away part of their content for free, and charge for access to the premium content and exclusive tools.
SEOMoz is a good example. They have a very popular blog that gives advice and information on wide range of SEO related topics. On top of that visitors can decide to become premium members. It costs $48 monthly and it grants them access to guides, tools and other exclusive material.
11. Private Forums
While the Internet is populated with free forums, there is also the possibility to create a private one where members need to pay a single or recurring fee to join.

SEO Blackhat
 charges $100 monthly from its members, and they have thousands of them. Obviously in order to charge such a price for a forum membership you need to provide real value for the members (e.g., secret techniques, tools, and so on).
Performancing also launched a private forum recently, focused on the networking aspect. It is called The Hive, and the monthly cost is $10.
These are just two examples. There are many possibilities to create a private and profitable forum, you just need to find an appealing angle that will make it worth for the members.
List of popular forum software:
12. Job Boards
All the popular blogs are trying to leverage job boards to make some extra income. Guy KawasakiReadWriteWebProblogger… you name it.
Needless to say that in order to create an active and profitable job board you need first to have a blog focused on a specific niche, and a decent amount traffic.
The advantage of this method is that it is passive. Once you have the structure in place, the job listings will come naturally, and you can charge anywhere from $10 up to $100 for each.
List of popular job board software:
13. Marketplaces
Sitepoint is the online marketplace by excellence. Some websites and blogs, however, are trying to replicate that model on a smaller scale.
Depending on your niche, a market place that allows your visitors to buy, sell and trade products could work well. Over the time you could start charging a small fee for new product listings.
The problem with this method is that there are no standard software on the web, so you would need to hire a coder to get a marketplace integrated into your website.
You can see an example of a marketplaces being used on EasyWordpress and on Mashable.
14. Paid Surveys and Polls
There are services that will pay you money to run a small survey or poll on your website. The most popular one is called Vizu Answers.
Basically you need to sign up with them, and select the kind of polls that you want to run your site. Most of these services operate under a CPM model.
15. Selling or Renting Internal Pages
Million Dollar Wiki made this concept popular, but it was being used on the web for a long time around (check Pagerank10.co.uk for instance).
These websites sell for a single fee or rent for a recurring fee internal pages on their domain. Usually they have either high Pagerak or high traffic, so that people purchasing a page will be able to benefit in some way.
Implementing this method on a small blog would be difficult, but the concept is interesting and could be explored further.
16. Highlighted Posts from Sponsors
Techmeme probably pioneered this idea, but somehow it has not spread to other websites. The tech news aggregator displays editorial posts on the left column, and on the sidebar they have a section titled “Techmeme Sponsor Posts.”
On that section posts from the blog of the advertisers get highlighted, sending qualified traffic their way. Considering that the monthly cost for one spot is $5000 and that they have around 6 sponsors at any given time, it must be working well.
17. Donations
Placing a “Donate” link or button on a website can be an efficient way to earn money, especially if your blog is on a niche where readers learn and gain value from your content.
Personal development and productivity blogs, for instance, tend to perform well with donation based systems (one good example being Steve Pavlina).
A small variation of this method appeared sometime ago with the Buy Me a Beer plugin. This WordPress plugin enables you to insert a customized message at the bottom of each article, asking the readers to chip in for a beer or coffee.
18. In-text Adverting
In-text adverting networks like Kontera and Vibrant Media will place sponsored links inside your text. These links come with a double underline to differentiate them from normal links, and once the user rolls the mouse over the link the advertising will pop. Should the user click on it the site owner will make some money.
Some people make good money with this method, but others refrain from using it due to its intrusiveness. It is also interesting to note that very few mainstream websites have experimented with in-text advertising.
19. Pop-ups and Pop-unders
Pop-ups are a common yet annoying form of advertising on the Internet. If you are just trying to make a much money as possible from your website, you could experiment with them.
If you are trying to grow the traffic and generate loyal visitors, however, you probably should stay away from them. Just consider the hundreds of pop-up blockers out there: there is a reason why they are so popular.
Ad networks that use pop-ups:
20. Audio Ads
Also called PPP (Pay Per Play), this advertising method was introduce by Net Audio Ads. the concept is pretty simple: play a small audio advertising (usually 5 seconds) every time a visitor enters into your website. The user should not be able to stop it, creating a 100% conversion rate based on unique visitors.
The company is still rolling tests, but some users are reporting to get from a $4 to a $6 CPM. Regardless of the pay rate, though, this is a very intrusive form of advertising, so think twice before using it.
21. Selling the Website
Selling your website could be your last resource, but it has the potential to generate a big sum of money in a short period of time.
Market places on online forums like DigitalPoint and Sitepoint are always active with website buyers and sellers. Keep in mind that they most used parameter to determine the value of a website is the monthly revenue that it generates, multiplied by a certain number (the multiplier can be anything from 5 to 30, depending on the expectations of the seller, on the quality of the site, on the niche and other factors).
Some people also make money trading and flipping websites. They either create them from scratch or buy existing ones, and after some revamping they sell them for a profit.
Related links:

Indirect Methods

22. Selling an Ebook
Perhaps one of the oldest money making strategies on the web, using a website to promote a related ebook is a very efficient way to generate revenue.
You could either structure the website around the book itself, likeSEOBook.com, or launch the ebook based on the success of the website, like FreelanceSwitch did we the book How to be a Rockstar Freelancer.
Related links:
23. Selling a Hardcover Book
Many authors and journalists leverage their blogs or websites to sell copies of hardcover books. Examples include Guy KawasakiSeth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.
While most of these people were already renowned authors before they created their website, one could also follow the other way around. Lorelle VanFossen did exactly that with her Blogging Tips book. First she built her authority on the subject via her blog, and afterwards she published the book.
List of self publishing and publishing services:
24. Selling Templates or WordPress Themes
As more and more people decide to get an online presence, website templates and WordPress themes become hotter and hotter.
On this segment you have mainstream websites like TemplateMonster, as well as individual designers who decide to promote and sell their work independently.
Brian Gardner and Unique Blog Designs are two examples of websites that make money with the sales of premium and custom WordPress themes.
25. Offering Consulting and Related Services
Depending on your niche, you could make money by offering consulting and related services. If you are also the author of your blog, the articles and information that you will share will build your profile and possibly certify your expertise on that niche, making it easier to gain customers.
Chris Garrett used a similar strategy. First he created a highly influential blog on the blogging and new media niche, and afterwards he started offering consulting services to clients with related problems and needs.
26. Creating an Email List or Newsletter
Email lists and newsletters represent one of the most powerful marketing and money making tools on the Internet. They offer incredible conversion rates, and the possibility to call people to action in a very efficient way.
Creating a big list is a difficult task though, so if you have a popular website you could leverage it to increase the number of subscribers on your list.
Yaro Starak is a famous Internet marketer, and if you visit his blog you will notice that right on top he has a section encouraging visitors to subscribe to his email newsletter. Yaro generates five figures in revenues each month from his email newsletters, proving that this method works.
List of software to manage email newsletters:
27. Mentoring programs
People are willing to pay for someone or something that will teach them and give them knowledge (as opposed to mere information). Education is one of the biggest industries in the world, and the online landscape behaves in a similar way.
Creating a mentoring program related to the niche of your website could be very profitable if you manage to structure and promote it adequately. There is a wide range of media and tools that you can use to deliver the information, from text articles to audio and video lessons.
Brian Clark leveraged the success of Copyblogger to launch a mentoring program teaching people how to build membership and how to sell content online. The program is titled Teaching Sells, and it costs $97 monthly. Sounds expensive, but they have over 1,000 members.
28. Creating a conference around the website
If your website takes off and becomes an authority on its niche, you could create a conference around it. Depending on the size of your audience, the event could attract thousands of people, and you could make money directly from conference passes and sponsors.

Search Engine Land, for instance, created a series of conferences that visit several cities on the United States and on other countries as well. The conferences are called Search Marketing Expo, and the tickets and passes cost thousands of dollars.

7 Ways to Promote your Site with a Bit of Money

7 Ways to Promote your Site with a Bit of Money

Some time ago I wrote an article titled “Are you marketing your blog?” where I argued that there is a myth around the Internet that bloggers and webmasters should not spend money on advertising. The myth comes in great extent from the success stories of people that managed to create popular websites without spending a dime on advertising or other paid promotion techniques.

The reality is that most of those successful websites were pioneers on their niche, hence why they became popular without spending money on advertising. Now a days the market is crowded and you have thousands of websites and blogs even for small segments. As a consequence paid promotional techniques are becoming an important factor of any successful marketing strategy.
Below you will find 7 ways to promote your website or blog with a bit of money. You can use them to generate raw traffic, improve your search engine rankings, gain visibility on your niche and so on. Despite the initial investment most of those techniques will pay off on the short to medium term. If you are expecting to make money with your website there is no reason to assume that you will not need to spend some as well, right?
1. AdWords: Google make billions of dollars every year from the AdWords-AdSense combo. Why is that? Because they work. Adwords is probably the most efficient method to generated raw traffic for your website. In order to get started you should create an account, add lots (by lots I mean hundreds if not thousands) of keywords that are related your site and set the maximum Pay-per-Click rate at $0.01. After that raise the rate by $0.01 every week or so until you start getting the desired amount of daily clicks. Notice that at lower bids the keywords will be reported as “Inactive for Search”. Do not worry about it, it just means that your ads will not appear on the search network (Google’s search results), but they will appear on the content network (websites of people that use AdSense).
2. Site-Specific AdWords: if you pay attention to the AdSense units you will see that most of them have a link titled “Advertise on this site”. This feature enables AdWords advertisers to create customized ads that will be displayed only on specific websites. Those ads work on a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) rather than a CPC (cost per click) basis, but they can generate a good amount of very targeted traffic since you will be in control of where the ad will be displayed and of the message. You can get even better results if you use some creativity when designing the ads, click here for some examples.
3. StumbleUpon Ads: StumbleUpon is a very innovative social bookmarking site that allows users to discover great websites by using a browser toolbar. When the user clicks on “Stumble” he will be delivered a website that people with similar interested rated positively. The user is also able to give positive and negative ratings to any website that he visits on the Internet. StumbleUpon also offers advertising campaigns, called StumbleUpon Ads, where you can deliver your website directly to those “Stumblers”. It costs $0.05 per page delivered, but since the websites that appear on StumbleUpon usually have a high quality it is very likely that part of that paid traffic will convert into regular readers.
4. Text Link Ads: if you are trying to increase your search engine rankings to leverage organic traffic you should consider buying some text link ads. While those text links can also generate direct traffic the biggest benefit you will have is an improvement on your search rankings, specially if the links are placed on authoritative and relevant websites. There are several places to buy text links, including specialized companies like Text-Link-Ads and Text Link Brokers or online forums like Digital Point‘s market place.
5. Direct Banner Sales: most established websites sell banner ads or sponsorship plans directly. Those advertising deals usually are structured with weekly or monthly fees, regardless of the number of impressions or clicks that you will get. Despite this characteristic a banner placement can represent good value for money because apart from the direct traffic you will also create visibility and brand awareness. Readers of the website where you will display your banner will associate the message on the banner with your site or blog. Should they come across that banner or message two or three times it is very likely that they will get curious and decide to check what the buzz is all about. Another advantage of banner placements is the fact that people will unconsciously think that the author of the website endorses your content or product.
6. Sponsored Reviews: buying some sponsored reviews is a good way to kick-start a website. They will bring backlinks, traffic and RSS subscribers. There are many market studies confirming that “word of mouth” is the most efficient way to capture people’s attention, and that is just what you get with sponsored reviews. You can either pay a low price (sometimes as low as $5 per review) to get a large number of reviews from small sites or you can focus on large players (which can charge several hundreds of dollars for a single review) that are authorities on your niche. The best way to purchase sponsored reviews is through sites like SponsoredReviews.comReviewMe orPayPerPost.com.
7. Blog Networks: there are several blog networks founded around a traffic exchange principle. Basically you create an account for you blog and you earn credits by surfing other members’ blogs. Afterwards you can use those credits to make people visit your blog or to display your banners around the network. The interesting part is that most of those blog networks allow users to purchase credits with money, and the price is really convenient. You should be able receive hundreds of visitors or to get thousands of banner impressions for less than 10 dollars. Some blog networks that sell credits include Blog ExplosionBlog Soldiers and Blog Advance.

Blog Hacks to Help Show Readers Your Best Stuff


9 Blog Hacks to Help Show Readers Your Best Stuff


Are you letting your killer posts languish in your archives, sandwiched between January and March? How many great posts have you published in months gone by that new visitors will never see?

Readers come to your blog for its content, so it’s important to show them straight away what you have to offer.
Your recent posts will hopefully go some way towards doing this, but to rely on them alone is to short-change the long-term effort you’ve put into building your blog. This post contains 9 blog hacks you can use to show new (and regular) visitors the best that your blog has to offer.
1. Introduce highlighted content. This could be a list of reader favorites, popular posts, most commented posts, and so on. Most bloggers handle this with a ‘Popular Posts’ widget. This is one of the most important elements of your sidebar, as it shows new visitors straight away why your site is worth exploring.
2. Take control of your highlighted content. Though most bloggers handle ‘Popular Posts’ with a plug-in there are plenty of benefits to doing it manually. You can choose which posts you want to highlight, and mix up new and old content. If you’ve got a guest-post at another blog, or if one of your posts makes it big on social media, you can tailor your ‘Popular Posts’ to suit the incoming audience.
3. Make your highlighted content unmissable. Your list of killer posts is probably more useful and interesting to new visitors than anything else in your sidebar. The perfect place for it is right under your feed button, towards the top of your sidebar. If you want to be more inventive with your placement you can, but keep it above the fold.
4. Use images to draw attention to your best posts. Images are eye-contact magnets. Rather than displaying your best posts as text links, why not create images for them? The strategy I use on my own blog is to make a medium-sized button from the image I included with the post, and add the headline as text over the image. It’s something a lot of readers seem to enjoy interacting with, and it adds some more visual interest to the blog.
5. Regularly change your highlighted content. Don’t forget about regular readers when highlighting content. If your list is static then visitors will engage with it once and forget about it, thinking they’ve seen everything it has to offer.
If you regularly change your highlighted posts you give new and old visitors a reason to engage with the content you’ve highlighted. One advantage to using images to highlight your content, as suggested above, is that it’s immediately clear when you’ve added or subtracted an item from the list.
6. Give readers somewhere to go when they’ve finished reading. Many bloggers use a ‘related posts’ plug-in, and while I do like this plug-in, I suspect that it suffers somewhat from being outside the content of the post. Firstly, feed readers miss it. Secondly, readers turn down their attention levels once they’ve finished an article. One way to best ensure readers explore your related content is to recommend it at the end of your article. For example:
Interested in this topic? You might enjoy another article I’ve written called …
Adding the suggestion to your article will catch readers while they’re still in ‘reading mode’ and devoting maximum attention to your words. However, I’d suggest using this only when you’ve written something else directly related to the topic. If your recommendation is spot-on, readers are likely to listen to other recommendations you make in future.
7. Weave targeted internal links into your posts as you write. This can be done badly, or it can be done well. A good guide is to make sure your links are highly relevant to the keywords you’re making a hyperlink. Linking a specific match (for example, linking the words ‘writing with clarity’ to an article you’ve written on the same topic) will be appreciated by your readers. Linking vague terms (like ‘blogging’, or ‘making money’), however, is not good usability because it’s simply too unclear where the link will lead.
8. Mix up posts linking out with posts linking in. A great way to draw readers deeper into your blog is to highlight great content in dedicated posts. You could highlight a selection of the best posts last month, or the most popular posts on a specific topic. You might highlight posts from this time last-year, as Lifehacker does, or list some undiscovered gems from the early days of your blog.
9. Give readers a birds-eye view of your blog. Your archives present the perfect opportunity to allow readers to view your blog from a top-down perspective, with everything it has to offer on one page. The SRG-Clean Archives plug-in presents all your post headlines under sub-headings for each month, and displays the comment count besides each. This allows readers to browse through your headlines and explore those they’re interested in.

Best Traffic Generation Tips


30 Traffic Generation Tips


First of all a big “thank you” for every one who participated. As I said before the number of entries surprised me (and the quality as well,I will definitely apply some of those tips myself).
Now, without further delay, the 30 Traffic Generation Tips:
1. Sridhar Katakam
Keep track of blogs and leave comments on them. A good way to keep the conversation going is to install a MyBlogLog widget and visit the blog of people visiting your site.
2. Ian Delaney
Nothing creates long-term traffic more than value. Consider writing posts with resources or explaining how things work. Useful things get linked to and they get onto del.icio.us, which is far better long-term than a digg front page.
3. Scott Townsend
Inform search engines and aggregators like Technorati (using the ping functionality) when your blog is updated, this should ensure maximum traffic coming from those sources. (check the List of Ping Services)
4. Kyle
Simplify. Pay attention to complex issues in your field of work. It may be a big long publication that is hard to wade through or a concept that is hard to grasp. Reference it and make a shorter “for dummies” version with your own lessons learned and relevant tips. When doing this, I have been surprised to find that the simplified post will appear before the more complex version in search results. Perhaps this is why it results in increased traffic; people looking for more help or clarification on the subject will land on your blog.
5. Grant Gerver
Try to be polemic. I write obsessively about all-things political from the left-wing perspective in the form of humorous, sarcastic one-liners.
6. Daniel
A simple tip that will probably boost your page views: install a translator plugin. I decided to use a paid plugin for this, but if I am not wrong there are some free ones as well. The translation is not very good, as you can imagine, but it helps to attract readers that are not fluent in English.
7. Rory
Submit articles to blog carnivals (http://blogcarnival.com) that are related to your niche. Your article almost always gets posted, and it must generate a handful of visitors, at least.
8. Ramen Junkie
Newsgroups. I always see a spike when I post a review to a newsgroup.
9. Eric Atkins
Create a new design for your website. Not only will it be more attractive to your regular readers, but you can submit it to some CSS gallery showcase sites that feature great designs. This will give you exposure on those sites while generating a lot of traffic and backlinks from those types of sites.
10. Megan Taylor
Participate in conversations on related blogs. Start conversations on your own blog. Don’t just post about a story and leave it at that, engage your audience, ask questions and call to action.
11. Guido
Comment on blogs, write useful content and make good friends on forums.
12. Brian Auer
You must be active to generate traffic. I post comments on other blogs that are related to mine, and I post my site link in my signature at the forums. Spread the word about your blog and it will certainly attract readers.
13. Shankar Ganesh
Just browse around MyBlogLog.com and you will surely get visitors to your blog. Also try to join as many communities as possible that are related to your topic.
14. Andrew Timberlake
A great tip for generating traffic is off-line by including your url in all your off-line liturature from business cards, letterheads, pamphlets, adverts through in-store signage if applicable. I even have our website on my vehicle.
15. Cory OBrien
Read lots of other blogs. Leave trackbacks. Make sure your blog is optimized for search engines. Leverage social bookmarking sites like digg (both for new ideas and for traffic).
16. Jester
Leave comments on other blogs. If you’re already reading them, it takes
just a couple of seconds to leave a message agreeing or disagreeing
with the author, you get to leave a link to your site, and you will almost
ALWAYS get traffic from your comments.
17. Goerge Manty
Post 3-5 times a day. Use ping services like pingomatic or set up wordpress to ping some of the ping services. Engage your readers. Put up polls, ask them questions, give them quizes, free tools, etc. Make them want to come back and tell their friends about you.
18. Engtech
Community. It’s one word but it is the most important one when it comes to blogging. The only “blog metric” that makes sense is the vibrant community of readers it has. Building a community around your blog will bring you increased traffic, but how do you start? The boilerplate response to building traffic is always “SEO, social networking sites, and commenting on blogs” but it can be simplified to “be part of a community”. The easiest way to seed your blog is with an already existing community. But the only way to do that is to be part of the community yourself.
19. Chris
Squidoo Lenses are a good way to generate traffic. By using a lense,
you can generate your own custom “community” of webpages, including some
of the more popular pages in your “neighborhood.” Including your own
webpage in such a list is a good way of generating traffic.
20. Splork
I’ve had good success writing articles and submitting them to EzineArticles. Articles that have been written from well-researched keyword phrases and accepted by EzineArticles tend to rank very high in Google for that search term. Placing anchor text in the footer of those articles so the reader can visit my relevant website has always increased my site traffic.
21. Jen Gordon
I came upon some unexpected traffic when my blog popped up on some css design portals like www.cssmania.com and www.webcreme.com. If you can put some time into the concept behind and design for your blog, I’d recommend submitting your site to a design portal not only for
additional traffic but to build an additional community around your site.
22. Kat
I’ve recently gotten involved with several “MySpace-like” community sites that focus on my target audience. I share my thoughts in their forums, post intros to my real blog on their system blog and I’ve even created a group for my specific niche. It’s been very, very successful for me.
23. Inspirationbit
Well, obviously everyone knows that social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, etc. bring lots of traffic. But I’m now submitting some of my articles to blogg-buzz.com (a digg like site for bloggers), and I always get not a bad traffic from there.
24. Mark Alves
Participate in Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers where you can demonstrate your expertise, get associated with relevant keywords and put your URL out there.
25. Tillerman 
Be the first to write a post about the ‘Top Ten Blogs’ in your niche. The post will rank highly in any general search for blogs in your niche and other bloggers in your niche write about the post and link to it.
26. Nick
Participating in forums is a great way to get loyal readers. Either link baiting people in your signature or posting great advice and tips will give you high quality traffic, which will result in return visitors.
27. Brandon Wood
A simple trick I’ve used to increase traffic to my blog is participate in group writing projects. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now.
28. Alan Thomas
Don’t forget your archives. I just posted a roundup of all interviews I did over the past seven months. One of them generated a new link and a big traffic spike from a group of users that look like they will be loyal readers now.
29. KWiz
Write something controversial. I don’t think it’s good to write something controversial just for the purpose of getting traffic necessarily (especially if it’s only for that purpose and you’re being disingenuous), but it works.
30. Dennis Coughlin
Find the best blogs on your niche and contact the authors. Introduce yourself and send a link of your blog. This might help them to discover your blog, read it and possibly link to it.