It’s been 15 days of blogging; building content, improving design and mostly trying to get some traffic. Even if you find and write down the solution for “World Peace” you won’t get any visitors without some effort. There is lot of “what to do” lists to drive traffic and I applied most of them (trying to stay away from spamming) and will review the short term results.
Social Bookmarking Services
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StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a toolbar which you can use to stumble through web pages people liked and it will drive traffic to your page if you have a good content. StumbleUpon is the source of the most traffic to my blog. It is superior than other social bookmarking services because it can’t be spoiled. Most of the social bookmarking services depend on you to promote your link and ask people for votes. StumbleUpon prevents such actions because it bans your account if you submit your own pages too much. If you have a good content people will favor it by clicking “I like it!” and your page is displayed to other stumblers and attract more audience. Even if you find a way to promote your page from several accounts or stumble exchanges people who stumble your page will rate it and the traffic will vanish in time if there is no good content. To benefit from StumbleUpon you must be a good stumbler and contribute to the system. (You can start being a giver by giving a thumb up for this post if you liked:) I will write a more detailed review about StumbleUpon in following days, it deserves more attention.
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Digg
Digg is another social network service which has its own ups and downs. It has good integrating with your blog and widely used system among bloggers but I think that it’s losing it’s purpose. If you are not in the first page of digg there isn’t much chance that you will get traffic and to get into first page you must ask people for diggs. I think that this service isn’t the dream service for beginner bloggers because you have to spend too much effort for getting diggs and I beleive it is better to spend this time blogging.
-Sphinn
Sphinn is a new social bookmarking service just like Digg, but unlike Digg it is not spoiled yet. There are people actually commenting and reviewing each others submits and I think it is a great place for starters. For me it doesn’t drive much traffic but better days are to come 
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Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us introduced the tag system for internet searches and still widely used del.icio.us creates traffic to your submitted posts.
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Reddit is another social bookmarking service with a cute logo and they create some traffic. Compared to the effort you spend on other services this one is an easy to go service. Just use it.
Blog Networks
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Technorati
Technorati is a blog search engine working with a voting system for submitted posts and you can fave your favorite blogs. (You can favorite BloggerDollar by the image above) Technorati is actually ranking each blog by a ranking system called authority which is actually number of links to your blog. So as a new blogger you will have a low authority which means low traffic. I had one of my topics in Hot WTF’s for days but still didn’t get any noticeable traffic. They have canceled submitting new WTF’s lately so I guess there will be a change in their system.
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BlogCatalog
Although named as a blog directory, blogcatalog has a good forum like network where you can meet new bloggers or ask for diggs and votes.
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Bumpzee
Bumpzee is a more advanced bloggers network letting you use a widget for viewing the recent visitors to your blog and they have a community system like in blogcatalog.
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BlogRush
Blogrush is an eye candy widget displaying posts from other bloggers on your sidebar. You earn credit for your traffic and your posts are displayed in other blogs. They recently started cleaning out their users for a higher quality of posts. I started receiving a little traffic from them so I try to see the light at the end of tunnel. They also have a referral system so that people who sign up from your blog earns credits for you also. So why don’t you be a good boy and sign up from here (Don’t worry it doesn’t effect your credits)
Blog Directories
There are also lot of blog directories that I signed up which you can see in the side bar. Some of them require placing their link on your blog, some of them don’t (I put them all in my sidebar to share with you). They don’t create much traffic but a good way to increase your blogs visibility in search engines.
Socializing
If you are a blogger and you want attention to your blog then you must pay attention to other blogs. Visiting other blogs and commenting on their posts will both spread out your name and also motivate people to visit your blog. As I said before don’t be a taker be a giver.
Most of the listed services won’t bring you traffic immediately (Actually StumbleUpon does) but those methods will help you in long term so participate in each service and experience it yourself. If you have any other services you want to recommend please comment.
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I remembered the milestones I was thinking of at the beginning of this road and I was planning to be receiving a cheque each month by the end of 2009. While my journey I’ve managed to find ways of earning money from blogging and I’ve also saw that the best way to keep a good consistent earning for beginners was writing articles (Hubs) for Hubpages. Up to day I’ve written 32 Hubs. Considering that this is my main source of money I should be writing more Hubs and I should do this by setting my self goals. So I decided to write 6 Hubs of different topics each month. So starting from this month I should have nearly 70 Hubs and that should bring me double times the money I make now.
I choosed a palette named “We Got the Call..” which is highly poetic. The artist defines to describe the colors with the words: “So.. I was going to try to write a poem about the sadness and anguish people must go through when they see their husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and loved one being deployed to war but..” Whatever, enough of melancholia, I loved the colors and decided to use them with my blog. The palette is given with the hexadecimal colour codes for each color and you can try each color as background, title, links colours. First Start with the best background colour for your sidebar, and header then decide what colors to use as titles, sidebar text colors and etc..
