Using TrafficSwarm to Increase Your Blog's Traffic

TrafficSwarm is in the same vein as BlogMad and BlogExplosion. Its completely free to join and can help you as you start to build traffic to your blog. Just for signing up you'll get some free credits that you can redeem to get people to visit your blog. Then you can also earn additional credits by surfing other TrafficSwarm users' blogs. A great way to get ideas from other people's blogs, leave comments (with a backlink to your blog) and get some traffic to your site in return.

TrafficSwarm also lets you sign up for a free subscription to Revenue magazine, just for joining TrafficSwarm. Revenue is a magazine devoted to the latest trends in online and affiliate marketing.

Using Feedburner for Syndication

Feedburner is a great way to syndicate your content and get more people to read what you write. Feedburner offers a bunch of different services to help you build awareness of your content, keep stats on who is reading and even will help you with ways to monetize your blog.

A few highlights of Feedburner:

1. The Feedburner PingShot automatically notifies a bunch of web directories when you post new content.
2. Feedburner lets you easily setup email subscription lists.
3. Gives you serveral different chicklets to put on your site to make it easier for people to sign up for your feed.
4. Allows you to automatically add links to social bookmarking sites (e.g. Digg, del.icio.us, Slashdot, Furl, Spurl, etc.) on each blog post and also in your FeedBurner feed. By using these links you can have your readers promote your blog for you. This is a very powerful tool for you to use as you grow your blog.

All in all, Feedburner is an awesome and free tool. Definitely worth checking out.

Moving From BlogSpot to My Own Domain

I realize that at this point this blog is pretty small time but I'm hopeful that it can grow to be something significant and helpful for people. For the past few weeks I've been tossing the idea of moving to my own domain around (my apologies for the recent lack of content while I tossed the idea around). After some thought I've decided that its time to move to my own domain. At this point I'm not certain what the domain will be but I should know in the next week or two. In the interim I plan on continuing to post here a little more and then once I've secured the domain and web hosting (anyone have a favorite?) I'll copy the content from here to the new site.

In light of my decision I wanted to take a minute to address why I'm moving and hopefully encourage others to do the same. My first and primary reason for the move is to allow this site to develop its own personality. It seemed to me that continuing to host on blogspot labels the site as being somewhat amateurish and doesn't leave much room to become any sort of authoritative source on increasing traffic to a blog. I'm also moving because I want to have the flexibility that having your own web space provides.

It seems that the longer I would have waited to move the hard the move would have been so I decided that the time was now. My own domain will cost about $8 and then a year of hosting can be just a few bucks a month, easily worth it I think.

If you're currently writing on blogspot, typepad, wordpress or some other blog hosting service make sure that you consider your goals for you blog and determine if having your own web space will further reaching those goals. If it will then its probably time to make a move.