Get Traffic From Blog Comments
Big blogs like John Chow and TechCrunch have thousands of people reading each post. If you are one of the first commenters and you leave a well thought out message, you’re bound to get people to click back to your blog. While this won’t result in a huge spike of traffic, it’s an extra 10-30 visitors for a minute of work.

You can also get some traffic from commenting on smaller blogs, albeit less. The good thing about small blogs is that the owner almost always checks comments and reciprocates them, which brings us to the next point:

Networking With Blog Comments
If you are a frequent commenter on a certain blog, the owner will notice and you can contact eachother. If it is someone from your niche, you can learn a bunch of great tips and share strategies with them. This networking can lead to mutual promotion, job opportunities, and more. In short, building bonds with other bloggers is essential to success.

Getting Links From Blog Comments
While most blogs use the rel=”nofollow” trait (stops Google from counting the link) on their comment links, some will pass some nice link juice towards you. Dofollow websites are those that have turned off rel=”nofollow,” and these are the best for link-oriented commenting. Here is a handy search engine for dofollow blogs.

In addition, blogs that use plugins like CommentLuv and Top Commentators give you a free backlink when you comment. These links have search engine benefits and will rank you higher in SERP’s.

The Art Of Commenting
Don’t comment purely for the purpose of getting another backlink or a few extra visitors to your site. No one wants to read things like “great site” – it doesn’t contribute anything. Bot comment spam is already a huge problem, and useless blog comments are almost as bad. Think of commenting as a way to express your opinion about a topic; the traffic and backlinks are just a nice benefit on the side.

While our previous 75% was very generous (compared to other blog sites offering 50% or 0%), the team at Paid to Blog really wants our bloggers to succeed and earn some extra money. This revenue change will be for a limited time, but guaranteed until the end of the year. Enjoy!

If you’re just starting out and you haven’t yet built targeted lists of interested niches that you can market to, I recommend you start with short form and email submit type offers that appeal to everyone and convert high. The biggest tip I’m going to give you is to always chat with your account manager and see what offers are currently converting the best – the managers at Market Leverage are a great help and will literally bend over backwards to answer your questions and provide you this information. Once you’ve decided on an offer that’s converting well and pays high, it’s time to start bringing them some leads!

In this example, i’ve picked, “Email Submit: Arm & Hammer Toothpaste! (4946)”, an offer that pays $1.40/lead and offers a free trial of toothpaste. This is a decent payout for email submits, and who doesn’t use toothpaste?!? So you’ve got a great offer to use, but like most beginner marketers, you don’t have a good idea on how or where to market your offer. The first thing you need to do is get an idea of your offer’s environment. To research the niche, go to google and type in “arm and hammer toothpaste” (keywords related to your offer), or use any of your favorite keyword research tools. In the results of my Google search, I notice 2 or 3 results related to “toothpaste coupons” and “free samples” on deal websites like dealcatcher.com and dealofday.com. These deal sites love people to sign up and post links to free stuff and deals, so I’ve just found 2 very targeted places I can market my offer to! Create a new thread/post about the offer “Free Sample for Arm & Hammer Toothpaste” and use your Market Leverage affiliate link, or reply to existing threads with a casual reason like “if the first link isn’t working for anyone, try this one”. This a great, free way, to bring solid leads to your affiliate offers. By leveraging the community and search engine power of these deal and coupon forums (and that’s the secret here), your link will receive high converting traffic that only takes an email to convert – and it will convert high.

Just don’t post the link to your offer more than twice on the same site or make your thread sound spammy or it could be deleted. I haven’t seen a whole lot of people using this method in the time i’ve done it, so it should be a great new unique avenue for everyone.

Happy New Years!

How To Find A “Blog Niche”
There are multiple factors that come into play when you pick a niche. You need to carefully evaluate all of the following:

• Is the niche popular? Do people want to read about it?
• Is the topic something you’re knowledgeable about?
• Are you passionate about the niche?
• Are you prepared to make a commitment to this topic and write about it often?

If the answer to these questions is “yes,” then you’ve found a great niche. If you’re not sure, here is some more in-depth information on all of these topics.

Determining Niche Popularity
Although the popularity of a niche shouldn’t be as major of a factor as how passionate you are about it, it is still important to pick a niche people like. Because there are sure to be thousands of people that share your interest, you are generally safe in any choice you make. Still, there are some very useful tools for determining niche popularity:

• SEOBook’s Keyword Tool
• Google’s Keyword Tool

Just type in the keyword for your niche and see if it is searched often.

Passion And Knowledge
To truly write well about something, you’re going to want to be either passionate or knowledgeable about a subject – preferably both. Is your topic something you want to write about bi-weekly? Weekly? Daily? Can people be confident in the information or opinion you provide them? Blogs about a hobby, sport you play, or your job are all great topics.

Once you’ve found your topic, try writing a few posts. If they were tedious and boring to write, try re-evaluating your niche before committing. Remember: it’s the most crucial decision in your blogs life.

]]> http://paidtoblog.com/blog/blogging-tips/how-to-choose-your-blogs-topic/feed/ 0 http://paidtoblog.com/blog/site-news/major-upgrade-completed/ http://paidtoblog.com/blog/site-news/major-upgrade-completed/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:57:46 +0000 admin http://paidtoblog.com/?p=30 Last night we took the site down for maintenance and did a major upgrade. As you may have noticed when logging in, the blogging backend has been upgraded and sports and entirely new look and layout. Some of the features have been removed such as friends and custom backgrounds, but we will be re-adding some of this later in the coming weeks We are working on performance enhancements currently so that blogs on the network load lightening fast, as of now they are a little too slow.

Soon we will have some tutorial videos for blogging newbies and will be adding new information focused on helping you succeed with your blog, so you can make more money!

Beta phase will give us a chance to test all services out and receive feedback from members in order to have a successful live launch sometime next month!