Art Of Money

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My name is Tyler and I am an avid Art of Money reader and fan of Jon’s work.  I am honored that he allowed me to write this guest post for him while he is away soaking up some rays in Arizona!

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a banker and have no background in technology whatsoever.  However, I am a huge hockey fan and a clumsy amateur blogger.

I started my blog, NHL Digest.com, in September of last year in an attempt to get my feet wet with this whole blogging craze. I also wanted to see if I could make a little bit of money while having some fun with my favorite sport.

We all know that one of the key ingredients to making any sort of money online is traffic.  I can honestly say that NHL Digest started off with almost nothing.  I actually got excited one day when I checked my stats and I had 40 page views.  I later realized that the stats being tracked were my own as I cruised around the blog making adjustments. Sad…I know.

I realized then and there that what I needed to focus on was creating and maintaining traffic.  I decided that I needed to develop a strategy that consisted of different channels to get some traffic.  I also decided that I wasn’t going to pay money for traffic.

Here are the tactics that I used at NHL Digest.com to build my traffic.

1.)     Humor  

I noticed that even though Hockey wasn’t a very popular subject with social media sites like Reddit and Digg, everybody like a good laugh.  That’s when I decided to submit this post to Digg, where it reached the front page and received over 1000 Diggs.

2.) Categories 

When I was setting up my blog, with a lot of  Jon’s help, I decided that the category titles should be of some keyword significance.  I really don’t have any proof that this makes a hill of beans difference in SEO, but I do know that NHL Digest shows up in the search engines for some of my blog categories.  It really doesn’t hurt to do this because your content should be developed around your keywords anyway, so each post should fit within one of the keyword categories.

3.) Post Titles  

This is standard SEO, but it needs to be emphasized that post titles do create a great deal of clout in the search engine rankings.  I use post titles such as Nike Bauer Vapor XXXX Skates and see it show up on the first page of Google in just a few days.

You will also notice that the post title is arranged prior to the blog title in this search.  Jon says that this doesn’t make much difference in the rankings and didn’t include it in his Real Blog Videos tutorial, but it has seemed to help me.  If you are not doing this, it doesn’t hurt to give it a try. 

Just open up your header.php file in WordPress and replace your <title> XXXX </title> with the following:

<title><?php wp_title('',true); ?><?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> | <?php } ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title> 

4.) Make Friends  

It doesn’t matter how great you think your content is if nobody links to it.  Links are huge in building a successful blog.  This subject has been beaten over and over again, but that is probably because it is so important.  It is my contention that the best possible way to get links is to give them out.

I like to use summary posts or NHL Links Around the Rinks where I will link to some blog posts that I like as well as some main stream news.  I have gotten the attention of other bloggers this way and I also think that linking to highly respected main stream sites might have a small ranking factor with search engines. I do this link posting in a “Speedlinking” type format, where I am sure to include some of my own links as well…let’s talk about this.

5.) Anchor Text and Deep Linking  

Even if we are successful in getting links back to our site, we can’t control the anchor text that the other blogger uses.  However, you can control the anchor text that you use when linking to your own past posts.  For instance, to help solidify my ranking in Google for Nike Bauer Vapor XXXX Skates, I always use that anchor text when linking back to that particular post.  The same goes for my ranking for the new RBK
9K0 Reebok Hockey Stick.  Let’s take a look and see how I rank for the Reebok 9K0 in Google.

There you are, 5 blogging tips from an absolute beginner.  I guarantee that they are worth at least as much as you paid for them

Tyler

-Writing posts that make Jon money so he can chill in the Arizona sun.