So you have your blog up and running. You have some great content that even your mom loves. Now what? You need some readers. His process is one of the hardest and longest processes you will find. There are literally millions of posts on how to get people to come to your site. How do you know which ones work? Start with the big guys. The coveted “A-list” bloggers know what they are doing. They are experts in the field of making money online, having successful businesses, and driving nice cars. Now my MINI Cooper is pretty nice, but I don’t have the other qualifications they have. Everything I learned came from their advice, their posts, and their guest posts (this one is the key).

Guest Posting for Guest Posters

This is a phenomenon when performed correctly can draw large numbers to your site. It’s like opening for Hannah Montana, you know who they are really there to see but if you can get the crowd going before the show they will remember you. When it comes to writing a guest post you have to give it your all. You have to submit your absolute best work. You also need to be relevant to their blog. Submitting a post about how to make the worlds best Jello pudding wouldn’t be a great idea if your sending it to a weight-loss blog. It would be a great post to send to Bill Cosby. Just remember make it great, make it relevant, and just ask. I even recommend just sending it in. It’s easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

And The Next Contestant Is

Contests! Another great way to get your blog started. People love stuff. People love free. Put them together and what do you get? That’s right folks…free stuff! Free stuff can come in the forms of many things. It could be a monetary prize, it could be a free gift, it could be services or even in the form or reviews. Whatever it is your giving away make sure it’s something of value. Value has many different meanings to many different people. Reality is based on your perception. My reality is based on my perception. I see value in spending time with my wife, taking the time to complete a project, or helping other people. Chances are your values are different than mine (especially the first one, I better not catch you spending more time with her than I do). Based on this it’s reasonable to say that not everyone will find your giveaway as something they’d want. Try to be as broad as possible when coming up with your idea, and if all else fails “Cash is King”.

 Now in order to win a contest you will obviously need your readers to do something for you. It could be writing about it in their blog and linking to you, subscribing to their feeds, or something even more mischievous. Whatever it is you require I do have one suggestion. Announce the winner of the contest to subscribers and only on dates specified in the contest. This gives your readers another great reason to subscribe to your threads and to check it regularly.

Comments

What better way to show that you love or hate an article than writing about it in the comments. Not only does this show your interest in a topic, but it also puts your name out in front of everyone else that reads those comments. With this technique shameless plugs do nothing for you. People aren’t going to go to your website just because you spam it in somewhere. You have to be witty, straight to the point, open-minded, or possibly quirky. Just make sure that the comment is relevant to the subject and shows a little of your personality. This way people somewhat know what to expect from you. The second part to this is to make sure you are an active commenter on your blog.  People love to be acknowledged and to know they are heard. I often hear from the “big guys” that there is a tremendous amount of comments left on their blogs and that it’s a nightmare to go through them all. I would love to have that problem. I would love to have so much traffic to my blog that I couldn’t handle it all myself. So bring it on!

The Wrap-Up Show

Seems fairly simple right? It should be, there isn’t a lot to getting yourself out there. What you have to remember however is that it’s a constant battle. You have to constantly be pushing your name, pushing your style, and pushing yourself. It’s easy to give up because you can’t build traffic to your site. You think I’ve never thought about giving up or moving on to something else? Once you start building up steam the momentum will carry you and your site to the next level. I haven’t given away any brilliant revelations (I barely scratched the surface on the topic) and I definitely haven’t told you anything you don’t already know but one thing I will promise to you…I will let you know every technique I use, and how I implemented it in order to build a reader base. Generating traffic is one constantly evolving dynamic that will take a long time to learn, and longer to master. Nice thing is you’ll get every mistake I make, and can use it to learn from.

You’ve got your brilliant idea now what do you do? Glad you asked. A great man once said if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Success doesn’t happen by accident. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of generating a plan and executing it. You think the military is successful because they wing it? Of course not. They follow strict guidelines and procedures they set out for themselves, take their time and execute their plan flawlessly. It’s not willpower, it’s structure, they just don’t know how to do it any other way. It’s that kind of dedication to your plan that will make you successful.

Formulating the plan of attack

As I’ve found out though not every plan is a good one. In fact I’ve worked on plans that were so flawed in the beginning that I don’t know how they even worked. The thing that I find helps me is to know which direction I’m heading in and where I want to end up. Try to be specific as possible. When you know where you’re going, it’s easier to figure out how to get there. Take my plan for example, while it’s relatively simple (Start: Create Blog - End: Make Money) I didn’t realize how many points in between there would be. I had to first figure out how to get my blog designed, online, and active. Enter Wordpress.

Wordpress and your baby

Soapbox time! I love Wordpress. I used to do some web design back in the late 90’s which of course hasn’t changed a bit since then. SQL, php…OMG WTH! Wordpress single handedly saved me hours of frustration and research into building my very own blog. It’s all done for you, fully automated and simple to work with. It has custom themes, indispensable plugins, and functional widgets it’s the best thing that happened to blogging since Al Gore invented the interweb. Regarding themes your advertising space is your blogs real estate. You can make a tremendous income off of it. Try to stick with a theme that can do that for you. Once you have your baby all set up it’s time to take it live.

Waking up Frankenblog

At this point your blog should be mostly ready. Now is the time to make sure everything is working for your rabid readers. Test out your plugins, widgets, links, correct spelling mistakes, and most importantly set up an RSS feed and email list. This will allow you to prove your worth to your advertisers which in turn allows you to eventually charge more for your advertising real estate. Once all is complete you are finally ready to blog on your blog about blogging.

The Running Total Recap

While there isn’t much here that will give you an epiphany it should help you get started down the road to success. As my blog continues to grow I’ll be posting more articles on how I did it, and give you all the planning tips I can. So to recap:

•  Plan
•  Get Wordpress
•  Set Up Your Blog
•  Test Your Features
•  Start Blogging

And you thought it would be hard.

Next step “Affiliate Advertising”.

Welcome to The Running Total dot com and thanks for coming. This post is our first official post and will be forever archived as the one post that either made us or broke us. So help us out, read on…you might actually enjoy it.In a world of overproduced, mass marketed, heavily duplicated blogs only the few sparkle like diamonds. What makes one blog better than another? Exactly the question you should be asking. (Thanks for the narrative Don Lafontaine)

There are literally millions of blogs out in the blogosphere and more created every day. As of December 2007 Technorati was tracking over 112 million blogs. In case that number doesn’t sink in here it is again 112,000,000. Here’s you: 1. As you can see there is a vast difference between those two numbers. You can see how easily this could overwhelm and discourage many ambitious bloggers, personally I just see it as a number. In my mind, which at times can be very distorted, 1 in 112,000,000 doesn’t carry any weight on my success. This can either make me a little crazy, or at the very least a little crazy but who cares about numbers? Blog about what you love, blog about what you know and success will find you. At the very least I want to motivate every one of my readers to do what they love. I can’t tell you how much I love breeding success. I find successful people are much happier and when your happy and you know it you clap your hands.

Now, what’s your Catchy, Brilliant and Unforgettable idea?

What Should I Call My Blog dot com

Hopefully the title explains it all. Now you’ve found your idea you must find a home for it. This home has to be somewhere your idea can relax, spread out and grow. Your domain name can make or break you. The best domain names are short and memorable kinda like Danny DeVito. Once you have an idea of the name you’d like to use see if it’s available at somewhere like GoDaddy dot com. If not try to use a similar name or something completely different just make sure it doesn’t end up being http://www.ivefinallyfiguredoutwhatiwanttocallmyblog.com because seriously who’s going to remember that. The other recommendation I have is to try refrain from using a number in place of to, two, too, or for. It makes too many variations and it also means your site will be less memorable.

The Knights Who Say Niche

Finding your voice will be a hugely important part of your idea. This is YOUR blog, write how you would. I try to do everything I can to be unique in a lot of my life but that’s how I am and that’s how I write. Some people are going to absolutely love your blog and hang onto every word, others won’t find it interesting at all. Lucky for you there are over 6 billion people in the world. If you figure at least .001% can access your blog and love it you’ll have 1,000,000 readers! How’s that for a reader base? Again it’s just a number and not very realistic but my point is you’ll find your readers. Your niche is out there but it will take time to pinpoint it, perfect it, and bring it on home.

Will you keep reading?

So what did you learn so far?

The identity of the movie trailer voice guy?
That I might just have an idea or two that can help you?
That success will come to you if you do what you love?

Whatever you learned I hope that you learned that I am here blogging for your success. I love helping people, I love positive energy and enthusiasm, and most of all I love my wife. If you enjoyed reading my ramblings, ideas, and corny jokes don’t forget to join my RSS. Thank you again for reading…Happy people take it away!!