As I've said in the past, social networks play a big role in getting you traffic. There are hundreds of them spreaded out on the internet. The only thing you got to do is to sign up with them, and make a lot of friends. Why, should you make a lot of friends? Well, they are the ones who decide if your article will get any attention at all. No votes, no traffic.

Once you've added some friends, you'll see a great increase in your traffic. Keep in mind, that this traffic will slowly decrease. So, you need to be active on these social networks to constantly get traffic. You'll be thinking that's going to take a lot of work, and time. Don't despair! There are plenty of groups out there, that have been made to exchange votes like for example this one on Blogcatalog. Remember, all of these groups are based on give, and take.

Google loves social networks, these past few weeks I submitted some articles of mine on several social networks. I've noticed that a lot my articles got a pretty good ranking in the Google search engine, all thanks to the high PR of these social networks, that attract thousands of visitors each day.

My personal top 3 of social networks, that gave me a good amount of traffic.



1. Digg

This is my absolute favourite out of the three. It's easy to add friends, and you can reach 200 people with a simple shout.


2. StumbleUpon

Still trying to figure this one out, but I've heard a lot of positive reactions. I see great potential in this one.


3. Reddit

And last, but not least, Reddit. Great source to submit all of your articles, but I personally still prefer Digg.

Associated Content is a web platform that allows you to submit several different types of content like text, video, audio and images. You can write about almost everything, and you could get paid for it. If you don't like to write, you can always use Associated Content as an information source, there are a huge amount of interesting articles in their database on almost every topic.I just signed up with them, and I hope I will earn some money by submitting my articles.

Associated Content pays all of his members through Paypal every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but you must have a minimum of 1.50$ in your account. There's no limit on the amount of money you can earn with them. There are 3 ways, that you can earn money trough your content.

1. PPM (payment per thousand page views)

A lot of the Associated Content members earn most of their money through this feature. The more your content gets viewed the more you will be paid. When your 'Clout' level begins to rise you're payrate for every PPM will also rise, thus earning you more money.

More information click here

2. Upfront Payment

This is an advanced payment offered, before your content is published. To receive such a payment you have to be an United States citizen.

You may be unable to submit content for Upfront Payment for one of the following reasons: 1. You are under 18 years old. 2. You are not a citizen or legal resident of the United States. 3. You selected a submission template for a type of content for which we do not offer Upfront Payment (video, audio, slideshow or short story/prose).

'So, I won't be the one earning any money from this'.


You must focus on promoting your article to receive as much PPMs as possible. Here are some tips from Associated Content. Most of them are very useful. You can find them here.



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Free Annual Credit Report

If you never heard of Squidoo, imagine it as Blog, but with a little less options. Squidoo has been reviewed by The New York Times, Mashable, BoingBoing,... and is one of the 300 most popular sites in the US. Like on a blog, you write articles about the things you love or the things that inspire you. Every article that you write on Squidoo, is called a Lens, that is divided in several different modules. Every module is sponsored by a company like Ebay or Amazon, where you can promote their products, and earn a commission if you sell one of them. There's money to be made! You could keep all of the money for yourself, or you could donate a percentage of your profit to charity.

Squidoo has a large community with a forum. I would advise you to participate in this forum, certainly when you're a beginner, to attract readers and to learn more about Squidoo. The first thing you should when you've signed up is to make a nice profile, this way you'll get more attention. Squidoo is a perfect opportunity to get traffic to your blog. If you can make a good lens with links to your blog, and maybe reach the Top 100 lenses, you could get a good traffic boost to your blog.

Useful links:

Getting Started with Squidoo
The Squidoo Forum
Lens of the Day

I'll try to make a more detailed post soon.

Like every Blogger I'm searching for new visitors from various sources like BlogExplosion, MyLot, Linkreferral. A couple of days ago I've signed up with Traffic Swarm another traffic exchange program. The main difference with other traffic exchange programs is that you choose the blog category that you're interested in. For instance, you like web hosting sites. You go on TS, and choose the category web hosting. Now you'll surf on blogs that talk about webhosting. Be sure to put your blog in the right categories, or you'll attract the wrong visitors. Like every other manual traffic exchange program you need to surf in order to get credits to 'pay' your visitors.

Another traffic exchange program is Fast Easy Traffic. It's easy to sign up with, and it even has videos on how to use it. Again you'll have to surf sites to get visitors, most of the sites you visit offer money making schemes, that promise you to make tons of cash in only one month. So, it's really annoying to every time see those SCAM sites. If they have the 'program' to make someone rich, why don't they use it themselves? Now, back to the program, once you've gathered some visits you can allocate the credits you've earned to a site of your preference. I can assure you that you'll get visitors! You'll think, WOW, this is wonderful I'll sign up right away! Then when you go to your Google Analytics page at the end of the day, you'll see plenty of visitors from Fast Easy Traffic, but all with a bounce rate of a 100%. How did that happen? Well, all of those visitors are just like you: they want traffic, and won't mind checking out your blog for five seconds to get one credit to allocate to their blog. Maybe Fast Easy Traffic would be a better program if they insert categories like TS.

I'm not so sure if traffic exchange programs can bring you good traffic. You could get a 1000+ visitors of those programs, and get maybe only 10 visitors who really read your blog. Is it worth spending hours on those programs for just 10 'real' visitors?


Get paid for reviewing my post!

Creating contests on your blog can bring you a big traffic boost. Giving away things for free has always been a good way to attract people to a blog. Who doesn't want to get something without really doing anything? Tons of companies promote their products by giving away free samples, authors of ebooks always offer a little preview of their book. As you can see giving away free things is a common used promoting technique. Ok, you'll think 'what do I earn from it?' First of all you'll get a lot of visitors who could become potential subscribers, and therefore could make your blog more popular. Ultimately, you could generate a lot of backlinks to your blog if you play your cards right.

The first thing you should consider before starting a contest is : "Do I have the means to start a competition?" People want contests who are worth participating, if you can't offer them a good price, they won't join. If you haven't got anything you could always search for a sponsor, there are always some generous bloggers who would like to give you a hand, obviously you should mention them in your contest. Haven't got the means or the sponsors? You could always try to be creative, and who knows what could happen. Plenty of people have managed to set up a succesfull contest simply by using their imagination.

Once you've set your price you should promote your contest to the max. You can promote your contest by putting it on forums, social networks, communities, emails, ....Try to do your best in promoting it, thus your contest will have a lot of benefits.

I hope I have your attention. For me there's no real secret to blogging, but as Juvenal said 'Mens sana in corpore sano' translated a 'healty mind in a healthy body'. This especially applies to bloggers. A blogger needs to find a balance between blogging and real life. If you achieve this, then you're well on your way to becoming a successfull blogger. I personnally impose or atleast try to follow these 3 rules:

1. Time

Many bloggers spend hours on their blog, checking every 10 minutes if someone clicked on their Adsense ads. I admit the first day I put ads on my blog, I checked every 5 minutes. The result was always the same 'a big fat zero'! Eventually I stopped checking my account, and decided to maybe look at it every two days. I applied the same thing to Google Analytics, and other traffic statistics. Remember blogging takes time, work, and a lot of patience. Everyone who starts a blog to earn money with it shouldn't expect to see any income the first days ( there are always some exceptions of course), but don't be discouraged by this.

2. Healthy Lifestyle

I'm not a doctor, but if I were one I would certainly tell you to get out of that lazy chair, and take walk outside to refresh your braincells with some high quality oxygen. Join a sportclub or go drink a beer just make sure you get away from your computer, and forget everything about blogging. A healthy diet also contributes to a healthy lifestyle, don't fill yourself with junkfood this will only make you fatter, and not a better blogger. Eat black chocolate in small portions, it's scientifically proven that it improves your little braincells and makes you feel happier, just read this.

3. Too long in front of your computer



Staying too long in front your computer in a wrong position could cause you a lot of problems like: back and neck problems, cramps, and you'll be amazed what problems a computer mouse could inflict to your hand, read this if you want to know more. I don't want to scare you, but I just want to remind you that too much blogging isn't healthy.


To end this post with a bit of humor:

Social community sites are very important for every blogger. They can help you get traffic, and also help you to get in touch with fellow bloggers. In this post I'm going to talk you about MyLot. MyLot is a growing social community with 133,900 members, who are relatively active.

You could compare it with BlogCatalog, like Blogcatalog you can add new friends, start discussion, share your interests, ... One major difference is that you can get paid for contributing to the community by posting, commenting and starting new discussions. You can even get paid by referring new members to MyLot. However it takes a lot of effort and time to earn a decent amount of money. When you reach the minimum of 10$ you can get paid, but don't be fooled by members who say they earn 100$ a day, even if you post and comment on MyLot 24/7 you can't get that amount of money.

MyLot is not only good for earning something extra, but it could give you a lot of referrals to your site if you put your link in one of your discussions or comments.