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A large percentage of new bloggers want to make it big, to have a blog that tons of people visit and money pouring in. The truth is this rarely happens, and if your goal is to make money online, getting tons of people to your site is the wrong way to go about it.

I will probably get booed off the blogosphere for stating the obvious and so many people are ready to defend social media successes, but rarely do any of those defending it actually make money from the traffic that sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon deliver.

I won’t lie to you and say that if you make the front page of Digg you won’t get a ton of traffic, because you will. But did you know that most of Digg’s front page stories are generated by just a handful of people? The rest of the stories are generated by everyone else who is using the site. (Grip time) The traffic from these sites rarely comment, subscribe, buy, share or hang around.

When I first started blogging I used to think that social traffic was the end all and be all of blogging and that having good stats was better than anything. But if your goal is to make money, go where the money is and where you need to go in order to get paid. Provide for or target the people who are looking for a solution to their problems. Digg users aren’t looking for something in particular, they are looking for something random or weird that they can entertain themselves with for a few minutes while they kill time at work. They aren’t going to sign up for an affiliate program or buy a book. They are simply wasting time and floating from one thing to the next.

Making money online more often than not requires you to do and talk about the things that social traffic sites shy away from. This would be the niche blog or abstract art dealer site. By catering to the people who are looking for specific things like a service or collectibles you will find there is money to be made.

Before you persecute me saying you can convert that massive social media traffic, I will admit that many people can convert that traffic and have perfected the monetization of mass traffic flow. In the end, for me, if comes down to the amount of time spent achieving that goal and if that can sustain itself. If you stop for one week pressing, shouting, friending, digging, stumbling and so on, your business will wither. But if you set up a site that generates nice and consistent traffic and money you now have a business model. Don’t forget that a lead in the hand is worth more than a thousand fly by.

*For the record I have obtained mass traffic including having a number of posts hit the Buzz page on StumbleUpon, netting upwards of 35,000 page views per article. So it is possible, but simply unsustainable in the long run.

*Inspired by Vic and Grizz

This is where the person has something they are passionate about and just loves sharing that subject with others. People can easily in time become an authority on that subject and generate a huge following.

Blogging for opportunity

This is when a blogger is using his or her blog as a tool for a different means such as name recognition or networking. You might be using your blog as a leveraging device to help you meet your goals either in business, personal or finance.

Blogging for money

There is no shortage of MMO (make money online) blogs and more are created every day. These are the people who want to sell ad space, a product, service or even the blog. Blogging for profit has become a pretty big business and the short cut to that would be to throw money at it and save time, such as buying an existing blog. This also falls under the paid to blog area.

Blogging for branding

This is a way of quality control on information that you or your business release. This is also how to interact with your customers in a direct fashion, giving people the inside scoop on new products or services.

Why do you blog? What is your goal for blogging?

Anybody with millions of dollars in their advertising budget can run a huge and effective marketing campaign, but how do you run an effective marketing campaign online for free?

First off, none of these marketing techniques are new by any means, but they do sometimes get overlooked. So without further adieu, I present my top 5 effective marketing tips online.

1. Get involved

Build it, and they will come. The famous quote from the movie “Field of Dreams” goes half way to accomplish the task of marketing online. It takes more than just a unique or well-designed site to garner quality traffic. It also takes time and effort. That effort come from writing posts, commenting on similar sites, participating in forum discussions and writing guest posts for other sites. I wish it were as easy as flipping a switch, but to effectively market yourself online, it takes participation.

2. Reciprocate

You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. It is not hard to find others who are either in the same boat or similar boat as you in regards to development online. Team up with a few like bloggers and help each other out in ways that are mutually beneficial. Swapping posts, comments, ideas and strategies are very effective marketing techniques to use. Guest posts and comments will direct people towards your site, hopefully capturing the audience of another blogger. Not stealing their audience, but hopefully appealing to them as well.

3. Give credit

When someone helps you out or you get an idea from another blogger, send them a link and quick note stating that they made an impact on you. You’ll be surprised what happens in return. I have this on a number of occasions and still receive hundreds of visitors a day as a result. People like to be recognized and usually are willing to mention that to others. Its simple, yet effective.

4. Give freely

I can’t stand ebooks that cost money. In the world of light speed information exchange, trying to make a couple bucks off of an ebook seems ridiculous to me. In my perfect world, all of that would be free. Unless that ebook is a service that goes beyond the digital covers of its confines, give it away. When you talk about your tips, tricks, techniques, experiences and opinions freely, people listen. You might as well become that authority on the subject and beat out the person who is charging for it. I would rather effect change in 1,000 people’s lives daily than make $20 by selling information people can find for free.

5. Admit mistakes

All publicity is good publicity, right? Well, it is if you know how to use it to your advantage. When you make a mistake, handle it in the right way. Usually the right way to deal with a mistake is to admit fault and offer a solution or experience. If you deny or try to cover up your mistakes, it will normally lead to more bad publicity than you desire. People will understand that you are human and will quickly move on if you allow the subject to rest by dealing with it.

Conclusion

I know you were probably expecting some Digg or Stumbleupon gaming techniques or how to make money beating the lemming to the gold mine. But effective marketing online begins with principles and strategies, not gaming schemes to get traffic. What good is traffic that is here now and gone tomorrow?

In a recent post, I mentioned I built backlinks for this blog and my girlfriend’s blog, www.thatmutt.com. A couple people asked me to explain more about what I did. Despite what many new bloggers believe, traffic isn’t everything. Break down where your traffic is coming from, dissect the numbers, and you’ll see. One visitor coming from a Google search is more likely to stick around, read your article, purchase your product or seek your advise than one random visitor from either Digg or StumbleUpon. I have said before that I would trade 1,000 unique visitors for one commenter / subscriber. In the end, it is the people who get involved that will add the most value to your blog. So here are some ways to build backlinks to your blog and dominate your niche.

1. Comment, comment and comment. I have about 60 blogs that I frequent on a regular basis and leave thoughtful comments when I do. I typically do this every 2-3 days to allow for people to update their blogs with new posts. If they have added more than one new post, I will try and comment on each new post. This builds my network. If you try this, you will find that in time they just might write a post about you or your blog. If people are writing about you and your niche, the search engine looks at that like you just won a gold star. Enough gold stars and you start to rank #1 in searches for your terms. You will have a higher ranking, more search engine traffic and better visitors coming to your blog. Problogger wrote about this yesterday and his blog receives 46% of its traffic from Google (P.S. he gets a lot of traffic).
2. Contests. I know most contests are a lot of work to maintain and it sucks to do them often, but they are a great way to build backlinks. The owner of the Winning the Web contest got a lot more from hosting the contest than any single person who won something. He received 1,000s of backlinks, more RSS readers and a lot of name recognition from hosting one contest. Here it is a month later, and I still know about the contest and where it was, and I never even entered it. The same goes for the contest held at Sense to Save. If you don’t want to take the time to cook up a contest, simply find all the contests you can, and donate something to them. I got about 20 backlinks from donating to the Sense to Save contest from other bloggers re-posting the list of donors ;).
3. Social networking and social linking. Before you start claiming I am a hypocrite, I will elaborate. I use social sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to build in anchor links. An anchor link is a link used in context with the keywords you want your site to rank higher in. For example, if I want my site to come up when people search the term “really expensive watches,” I would put the HTML <ahref=”http://www.joshwhitford.com/”>Really expensive watches</a> in the comments or description of the post I am submitting to the different social networking / bookmarking sites. The text “Really expensive watches” will be linked to my site. My site might never say anything about having “really expensive watches,” but if I get enough of these links out on the Internet, eventually I would rank #1 for the term. Ranking is all about links and link building. A great site to help with this is Social Poster. Other really good programs do this same thing but much faster like BookmarkingDemon. But if you don’t want to pay, then stick to the free ways of gaining backlinks. In a couple of weeks I have gone from page #10 on Google to page #1 for a variety of terms.
4. Get your link and keywords on sites and blogs with good Page Ranking (PR). I have done this a number of ways. I actually have a number of bookmarking folders in my browser that I have labeled PR1, PR2, PR3… and so on. When I come across a blog that has a good page rank, I will bookmark it for later. Then when I have the time, I will go through each folder and see what the source code is for each site and if they have a no follow tag for their comments or not. If you go under “view” and then “source” in your browser, it will open the code for that page as a search engine would see it. If there is a rel=”nofollow”> followed by the name and comment, then I won’t use that site as a method of gaining backlinks. If I like the site and it has good traffic, I should continue to leave intelligent comments (not spam) and gain the trickle traffic from curious people. Remember they are sharing their page rank with you and you should be thankful for that. Leaving worthless comments does you no good. Recently, I commented on Tim Ferriss’s blog about the post I wrote about contacting Warren Buffett. The comment section is a “no follow,” but the links found in the post are normal “follow” links. When he took the information and link from the comment and inserted it into the post I gained a link from a blog with a PR6 (more to this but this is the basic idea).
5. Pay, bribe, barter and swap. I don’t recommend purchasing or advertising the sale of links. The reason against it is simple. If someone wants your spot on the search page and knows you have paid for links, you are one report away from being kicked to the Google curb. If you can barter or swap links either in posts or with things like Entrecard credits, then it is much harder to prove any wrongdoing with Google or other search engines. This is why blogs who take on PayPerPost tend to get taken to the woodshed come time for page rank updates. Google knows when you are promoting sites for money and will punish you for “gaming” their algorithm. This is why John Chow doesn’t even show up on page #1 for his name. It really doesn’t matter for him if he shows up on page #1 because he makes good money selling paid links and ads on his blog. But, if a blog gets most of its traffic from Google and gets sent to page 5, then that could destroy that url’s future for traffic. Tread lightly and research before you act on the Internet.

This by no means is a complete list of ways to gain backlinks or is it the complete ins and outs of SEO. But the more you play, the better you will become. Everything about search ranking and page rank is based on the foundation of good backlinks and anchor text links. The more links you have pointing towards your blog on certain keywords, the higher you will rate for relevancy of those keywords. Nothing is impossible, and if you would like to rank #1 for Business you can, although you might spend 2 years building backlinks to do so.

The ides of networking and using all of the different social networking sites to gain traffic and stature seems a little off to me. Maybe I am reading into things a little too much here, but I know for a fact that maintaining even a couple social networking profiles is time consuming. I am going to run a few hypothetical numbers here and see what you think.

Let’s propose that I spend 1-2 hours a day using sites like Entrecard, StumbleUpon, Sitehoppin, Digg, del.icio.us and so on. These are all great ways to get my name and brand out onto the open Internet market. But could that time be spent better elsewhere? I am willing to bet that spending 1 hour a day finding blogs just like your own that focus on similar niche topics would be much more worthwhile. 

What if you emailed each new blog or website you found and offered to swap blogroll links for the month? Or perhaps swap 125 avatars or maybe even blog posts… Would that be too crazy? I am going to run a live experiment here, doing just the things I am talking about. Each day I will spend the time to connect with at least 2 different bloggers. I know this might not seem as easy as using Digg or Stumble, but it will be easy to send similar emails and ideas to different bloggers.

Time spent actually connecting with others just like you would do volumes more for establishing yourself within your niche. If you aren’t ranking #1 or on the first page in a search, will Digg or StumbleUpon improve that? The people who will stick around and add the most to your blog are going to be the people who find you while searching for what they are looking for, not finding you by accident. Start small and build from there.