I’ve finally finished installing and tweaking my new blog… what do you think?!

My old blog theme was starting to look a bit tired, but the main reason for the change was less to do with aesthetics and more to do with function and ease of navigation.

I’d tweaked so much code in the old one, that it was also taking an age to load and certainly didn’t like me adding any plugins to it!

I’ve tried to keep it simple this time as I wanted a cleaner, less ‘busy’ look.

An important lesson I’ve learnt from Alex Jeffreys is that your subscribers need to know you, like you and trust you if you are ever going to be able to market a new product to them.  If you are constantly trying to hard sell something to your subscribers then they are quickly going to lose trust in you and drop off your list.

Don’t forget, we are in the game of Internet Marketing, NOT Internet Selling.

The world of Internet Marketing is rapidly changing and the techniques that used to persuade people to part with their hard earned cash are becoming far less effective.

Just a quick post this evening to show how leaving a few comments on other peoples blogs can make a big difference in traffic. (see previous post)

Ok, so it’s not a massive increase in traffic yet, but this is a method that will keep getting traffic organically and the more (interesting) comments you leave, the more traffic you’ll get.  I only left a handful of comments on sunday and yesterday and it’s already resulted in 12 more visitors that might never have found my blog!  That’s powerful stuff!

Here’s the new screen shot from Google Analytics (click on the image to enlarge)

Today I’ve been using a simple and free technique Alex Jeffreys taught me to generate traffic to my blog.

Alex calls it “Oil Rig Hopping,” and the idea is to get your blog linked to from external sites, by leaving comments on other peoples blogs.

Each time you comment on someone elses blog post, you’ll have the option of adding your blog URL, therefore, people can click on your link and be directed to your blog.

The key to this method’s success, is that the comments you leave have to provide some extra value or point of interest.  That way, anyone reading your comment will see you as someone with credibility and hopefully decide to visit your blog.

SET UP YOUR BLOG!

The second step is… Start driving traffic to it.

A blog is the perfect platform to start building an online income because it’s relatively easy to set up and as soon as you start adding content to it the search engines will pick it up and start sending traffic your way.  You can then monitize your blog by adding affiliate links and adds and as long as you provide some great free content and real value along the way, people will start to know who you are, like you and finally trust you… and once they trust you, they’re more likely to buy from you.