My Top Referring Sites for 2010 and Year End Wrap-up

2010 was a great first year for the us to get up and running and established.

It took a few months to get the basic format established and figuring out my niche within a niche.

Starting out much like any blogger I was anxious to get some traffic coming in.

The purpose of this post is to give you an idea of where you can expect to get some actual traffic.

If you're not utilizing any of these sites/services you might want to look into them as they are my top referring sites for 2010.

1. Twitter - I run a pretty aggressive tweet campaign using software such as Tweet Adder that allows me to automate my tweets even while I sleep.

Doing this nets me many highly targeted visits, people click on my links because they found it interesting. My followers for the most part are some what interested in blogging, SEO or social media so I have a decent chance they'll check out my tweets.

Some other related referring sites: HootSuite

2. StumbleUpon - Believe it or not, when the dust settled for 2010 I received almost as many stumbles as I did traffic from my and other's tweets.

I actually had a few days where I received a couple thousand stumbles that seemed to just blow up. If you're not stumbling your own posts or allowing others to do so you can be missing out on some considerable traffic.

3. Adgitize - This is an advertising program you can earn credits or buy them for exchange of showing your own ads. I did both using credits and investing a little bit of money. For the effort it did produce results.

4. Facebook - A no brainer here, everyone and their mother is on Facebook so it makes sense to spend some time on it, make a page, post on groups etc. It has been a solid source of traffic throughout the year.

5. Entrecard - This is another free advertising exchange service that is really great for meeting new bloggers and getting traffic. You can check out my full Entrecard review to see why it's holding down the number five spot.

6. Paper.li - Paper.li is a like a virtual daily newspaper about a certain subject. It's all based off Twitter's hash-tags so that's another reason to start tweeting.

7.Bloggeries - Bloggeries is a great place for any blogger to be, you can submit your own blog and participate on the forums. Honestly I received more traffic from the forums than the directory listing, so if you have a blog about blogging this is definitely a site you need to look into.

Seeing as there are a few hundred different sites that gave me traffic this year I'll stop here.

My Most Successful Posts of 2010

Create Attractive CSS Text Effects | CSS For Bloggers: Part 5

Over 25 great sites to submit your blog and get it noticed.

10 Most Useful Blogging Communities To Help Promote Your Blog

I look forward to another year of blogging and expanding the site a bit. Thank you all for all the comments, retweets, e-mails and overall support!

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Get Trendy, How to Utilize Growing Trends to Generate Content and Traffic

Many of us bloggers get stuck trying to come up with great posts, or maybe we have just beaten the same topic to death. It's definitely good to have a niche but it's also good to sometimes do something new every once in a while.

Blogging about the same subject can become a bit tiresome. One way to counteract this and to breathe some new life into you and your blog is writing about something new and fresh. But what? Why not pick something that is insanely popular AND you find interesting. After all that's pretty much the whole point of blogging isn't it?

One way to see whats popular is by examining the global internet trends that are happening right now. You may even get lucky and find something very similar to your blog's main topic.

One thing you should keep in mind here is that your RSS subscribers, the people who read your blog everyday will see this post. You must treat each and every one of them as your biggest critic, after all they felt your blog was worth subscribing to and are expecting a certain brand of content.

With that being said, if I created a long post about how awesome Polamalu's superman tackle was I'm fairly certain I would lose at least a few readers. Accordingly, your "off the beaten path" post should at least be loosely related at best. It's a bit risky if you have a narrow niche but let's look at some of the benefits of using trends to find a suitable new and fresh topic.

Benefits of using Trends

1. Find a new popular topic to branch out on that may potentially attract new readers and as a result more traffic.

2. If you have varied blog with several topics or an anything goes type blog you'll have an endless source of topics. Think of South Park, there's a reason why they never run out of material.

3. It can get you out of your niche rut, or cure your writer's block if you stumble upon the right topic.

4. If you can write the post fast enough while still maintaining quality it may catch on pretty quick with it being so popular as it is. Strike while the iron is hot they say, and getting in on the ground floor of an emerging topic is always an amazing thing.

5. Even if you don't end up writing a blog post after examining the growing trends at the very least you'll be more cool. I'm just kidding, but you will have a small grasp of whats going on around the net and that's never bad.

So where do you start?
Well first and foremost I'm not saying you should write a post on the latest American Idol results because it's wildly popular to the masses. What should happen is once you have evaluated the emerging trend feeds if there is something there of interest to you go for it.

twitter.com

One website for acquiring some trend data on the fly is twitter.com It's ever-changing with user's tweets and you can click on the keyword to literally see what people are saying about the topic. After scrolling through a few pages of that the old brain should be stormin' at that point. If you sit and watch it almost becomes a chat room of sorts. If you find yourself wanting to jump into the conversation you might have just found yourself a new blog post.

http://www.google.com/trends

Use the power of Google to obtain trend data and popular searches. Most of the data will be very similar to Twitter's hot keywords due to most people use both sites. Grab even more data using Google Insights. This is a good tool to see what everyone in the entire world is interested in, talk about a content gold mine.

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