Today I’m continuing with answers to the questions presented to me by my customers and readers. And question we will work with today is equally vital to the blogs of every size because it deals with most vital aspect that determines blog success – Targeted Traffic!

In the image above you can really see the less common variant of problem from a blogger who already gets decent amount of visitors and simply need to expand and continue with the growth. Overcoming traffic plateau is EXTREMELY vital as each and everyone of us will have to deal with it, at one point or another…

How To Overcome Traffic Plateau And Get More Targeted Traffic?

First I want to say – Congratulations!

If you are facing same “problem” as a customer who submitted question above – you have managed to achieve already more then many blogs ever will. 1800 unique visitors per day is nothing to sneeze on and quite an accomplishment! In fact in some niches it might be close to maximum of what you will see, unless you start taking more direction actions…

Step 1 – Evaluate Where Most Of Your Current Traffic Coming From

This will be the most vital step as we need to know exactly What Works for you right now! And in order to get this done – we need some form of Stats Tracking implemented that provides us with honestly detailed information.

I personally prefer and teach my Expert WordPress customers how to integrate Google Analytics, as it is free, simple to add to your blog (just insert their javascript before the </body> closing tag in footer.php) and provides decent level of stats.

If you haven’t been using Google Stats before – you need about a month worth of stats to get more or less accurate picture on where most of your visitors are coming from. Once you identify your traffic sources – go to step 2

Step 2 – Isolate 3 Traffic Sources And Identify What Promotion Associated With It

Time is precious and for us to increase amount of visitors coming to your blog we need to identify which of your promotional efforts or perhaps SEO strategies work right now and concentrate more effort on it.

Implement Rinse And Repeat Strategy!

If something is already working for your blog it only makes sense to do more of the same to get even more traffic. Couple examples could be:

• Search Engines show up as major traffic source but when you look at what content brings most of the traffic you find that you have many posts deliver a bit of traffic each but combined make a large Volume!
  Conclusion – Your SEO Efforts work and each post properly optimized for search engines delivers traffic even though only just a bit each post individually.
  Action Plot – Do a long tale keyword research, write more posts optimized for ranking for long tale ranking.
• eZineArticles.com shows as one of the largest Direct Referrals.
  Conclusion – your article marketing works as designed and article directory delivers you not only the traffic you need but also new loyal readers and blog subscribers.
  Action Plot – Continue your article marketing efforts and simply increase number of articles you submit. If you simply double the number of submitted articles you should effectively double the number of new visitors from that source.

And same principal can be applied to ANY traffic source. All you have to do is Identify The Source, Associate Promotional Effort Responsible for it, Rinse and Repeat but increase intensity!

In my personal experience 80/20 rule applies perfectly to the traffic driving strategies – 20% of your efforts will deliver 80% of your traffic and in this part I simply question that you identify what 20% of your Traffic Driving Effort produce results, cut out the other 80% and then…

Double Your “Proven To Work” Efforts – Double Your Traffic!

Now you still left about 60% of promotional efforts left unused after you cut out what is not working and doubling what does. So lets place this effort into…

Step 3 – Finding New Sources

While strategy above should help you overcome the traffic plateau and effectively get a lot more of visitors, it is based on thought of simply taking advantage of what already works and ignoring the fact that these sources might have their own limits.

Reality is – if you don’t branch out and continue to search for new sources of traffic – you will eventually hit the plateau again. Unique Visitors number might be a lot higher but problem will still be same – luck of growth.

You simply must continue to grow, don’t settle on any single strategy and when you find one that works – add it to your 20% of the “working efforts” and continue to search for new ones. This will obviously be different for each blogger as it will be determined but what you currently do that works. Here are some of the more common:

• SEO
• Article Marketing
• Social Marketing
• Forum Marketing
• Video Marketing
• Blog Marketing
• Link building
• Your own strategy here…

You get the point!

And here is what I have found other bloggers say about Traffic Plateau and How to Overcome It:

• Darren Rowse in 6 Reasons Your Blog Traffic Might Be Declining [And What to Do About It] stated: “While we all want to see our traffic rise the reality is that every blog has days, weeks and even months where traffic levels out or even decreases. This can be quite distressing for bloggers who have huge hopes and dreams for their blogs.”
• Tibi Puiu in Get Your Blog Moving: Break The Plateau! writes – “And just like life a blog will pass through several stages of existence from birth, to its moment of climax, to its inevitable death. During its lifetime, if it’s long enough of course, a blog will fluctuate numerous times on up-down scales and ever so often you’ll find that for a limited time it doesn’t go up, nor does it go down, but just stagnates. This is called a plateau.”
• Daniel Scocco in 4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic shares – “Just make sure to do the 4 steps as plotted and to spend the two hours and a half every day (obviously if you have more time available you can expand the time spent on each of the four steps proportionally)”

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Promoting a new blog can be quite daunting, but it doesn’t have to
be. As you might expect, breaking down blog promotion into small,
actionable tasks eliminates the mental road block you’ve probably
experienced when trying to wrap you head around how to get people’s
attention. You don’t have to do everything in this list, and some items
will have a greater effect then others, but every tactic will at least
drive some traffic, and any traffic is better than no traffic.

Content
1. Write a list of over 100+ resources or thoughts.
2. Write the definitive guide to something. Spend time making this awesome.
3. Release a manifesto.
4. Release 2 manifestos.
5. Interview cool people. People like talking about cool people.
6. After your articles are indexed in search engines, break them up into smaller articles and submit them to ezinearticles.com (and other article directories).
7. Or just pay someone to submit the articles for you.
8. Write a list of all the cool blogs and people in your niche.
9. Check out the most well loved content on high trafficked blogs. Make similar content but applied to your own niche.

Facebook

10. Start a page.
11. Make that page awesome.
12. Start a group.
13. Make that group awesome.
14. Make a Facebook app for your blog.

Fundamentals
15. Wait. After you’ve taken action it can take a small while for traffic to arrive.
16. Be patient. Some bloggers may seem like overnight successes, but if
you look back in their archives, they’ve been making content for a
long time.
17. Motivate yourself.
18. Read The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.
19. Have an fascinating tale and overall purpose.
20. Embrace the Law of Reciprocity. Everything you give will come back exponentially.
21. Make blogging simpler.
22. Take action every day. Just get one vital thing done every day
and eventually you’ll start getting traffic. The more you do each day
the quicker your blog gets traction.
23. Find people with blogs at a similar level to yours and help each other out.
24. Turn off your computer, do some cool stuff, turn on your computer again and blog about it.
25. Know the importance of context.
26. Be consistent. You don’t need to blog every day but try to stick to at least some sort of schedule.
27. Make it a numbers game. Choose upon a certain plot of action (eg.
20 blog comments per day, 1 guest post per week etc) and stick with
that.

Online Video
28. Make videos and distribute them through tubemogul.com
29. Or for wider video distribution trafficgeyser.com may work for you (expensive though).
30. Respond to YouTube videos with your content.
31. Include your full blog address at the TOP of your video descriptions.
32. Take your time with devising video titles and tags.
33. Convert your video to multiple formats, with slight editing
changes, and upload it to video sites multiple times, targeting
different keywords. The content remains the same but you can test what
videos and titles work the best.
34. Buy the accounts of well loved YouTubers and then add your blog address to the descriptions of their videos.
35. Start the first live show in your niche (Ustream, Justin.tv and LiveStream are well loved choices). Make sure you record the shows too so they can be distributed as a podcast later on.

Other Blogs
36. Be the first commenter on the posts of well loved blogs. But still provide value.
37. If you can’t be the first then comment anyway. But try to be the first.
38. Stumble and Digg cool blog posts you find and let the blogger know
via a comment. If you have something worthy on your blog, they’ll
probably reciprocate.
39. Use google.com/blogsearch to find fresh blog posts and then leave intelligent comments.
40. Link to blogs of a similar size. They’ll notice and then excellent stuff may happen.
41. Write a guest post for a large blog. You may not always get
published, but when you do the traffic spike will be significant.
42. Write a guest post for a small blog. You’re more likely to get
published and build relationships with the next wave of A-List bloggers.
43. Write some more guest posts. Can’t hurt, that’s for sure.
44. Join a blog network.

Paid
45. Start a StumbleUpon Ads campaign.
46. Get reviewed.
47. Buy some ad space.
48. Send out a press release.

People
49. Attend relevant meetups.
50. Tell your friends and family about your blog. Have them tell everyone they know.

Podcasting

51. Start a podcast and submit it to the iTunes directory.
52. Convert audio files to video files (just use Windows Movie Maker or iMovie) and send them out via tubemogul.com
53. Submit it to some other podcast directories.

Search engine optimization
54. Write linkbait.
55. Have any video or audio content transcribed and posted to your blog.
56. Register your domain name for 10 years.
57. Take advantage of sites scraping your blog’s feed by interlinking posts. Simple way to get deep inbound links.
58. Use Thesis.

Social networks
59. Join every social network you can.
60. Or, just join a couple and be really active.
61. Become active in relevant ning.com communities.
62. Convert blog posts to PDF files and submit them to Scribd – include your blog url in the description and document itself.
63. Add your Scribd documents to relevant groups.
64. Submit your best posts to blog carnivals.
65. Join relevant forums, add your blog address to your signature and start posting intelligently.
66. Sign up at ping.fm and use twitterfeed.com to auto post your latest blog content to a bunch of social networks.
67. Make lists on Amazon.com
68. Write reviews on Amazon.com
69. Better yet, make video reviews for Amazon.com
70. Answer relevant questions on Yahoo Answers, leaving your website as the source.
71. Or on Mahalo Answers.
72. Or even through LinkedIn Answers.
73. Start your own Slinkset, and feed your RSS feed into it automatically.
74. Submit your site to alltop.com
75. Write an article aimed at Digg (okay, that article won’t help much).
76. Also, befriend one of the many Digg powerusers.
77. Make a new thread on a forum and write up a really fantastic guide
with no self promotion. Simple way to be seen as an authority figure and
to elicit comments on your writing (don’t forget that signature link
though!).
78. Submit your content to dofollow social bookmarking sites.
79. Or have Bookmarking Demon do it for you (certainly a bend in ethics though).

StumbleUpon
80. Become an active stumbler to know what stumblers like.
81. Friend people who stumble your content (they may just want to stumble more in the future)..
82. Have other people initially submit content (or “Learn” it as it’s known).
83. Place a Stumble button in your post template.

Su.pr
84. Sign up at su.pr and use it for all your small url needs.
85. Post content to your Facebook and Twitter stream.
86. Install the WordPress plugin to automate the process.
87. Identify the times that result in the most clicks and schedule tweets for them.
88. Setup your blog as a promoted website.

Twitter
89. Include hash tags (#tagname) in your tweets.
90. Search for your niche and answer any questions people have.
91. Place a Retweet button in your post template.
92. Follow relevant, well loved, and fascinating people.
93. Send @answers to relevant, well loved and fascinating people.
94. Tweet links to your content at multiple times during the day.
95. Like a product from a company that’s on Twitter? Review it and they
may just notice and tweet about the review. It’s happened to me.
96. Sponsor some tweets.
97. Find cool people in your niche who live nearby and organize a tweet up (a meet up where you invite anyone on Twitter).

WordPress
98. Install All In One SEO Pack.
99. Automatically ping lots of ping services.
100. Make a theme, include a link to your blog in the footer, and then release it for free.
101. Make a plugin and release it for free. Add a link to your blog
within the admin area. If it’s a excellent plugin people will like you for
it.

RESOURCE- http://www.dailyblogtips.com/ 

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There are many ways to make money online like making a blog in a
niche you are most interested in and generate income from it by showing
pay per click ads, affiliate links and banners or textual links that
are sold privately or via a text link selling marketplace. Apart from
these ways to monetize a blog, there is one more simplest and fastest
way to make instant money from a blog in any niche that’s via various
paid blogging (Get paid to blog) networks.
From advertiser prospective, there are many blogs who performs really
well in their specific niches. And advertisers want to place some links
or written content with some link back to their websites to increase
their search engine rankings and to spread words about their website
and services in blogsphere.
And when you work as a publisher or blogger on a paid blogging network,
you will get some fee or percentage of total review cost if you
complete a review about an advertiser website successfully. So to start
making money with paid blogging, all you have to do become a member of
some well loved paid blogging networks with the best blogs that you
have. Some blog networks have conditions about your blogs like it must
be more than 3-6 months ancient, updated 2-3 times a week, some excellent PR
and Alexa ranking.
Once you get approval from some blogging networks, visit your account
on these websites to see if there are some open opportunities waiting
for you there or place some bids on the open opportunities that are
available. Some paid networks even send e-mail notice about open
opportunities or task waiting for your approval.
When you get an opportunity to write for an advertiser, write your
content according to the terms about that task. And once you have
written and published that content on your blog, inform that blog
network with the Post URL and other details. And when your written post
is approved, you will be paid the chose amount. Most of paid
blogging network send payments into your paypal account and if you
don’t have a paypal account, can request for a check as well. All
networks send your earned money through paypal or via check at least
once in a month. Some network even sends your earnings at an interval
of 15 days or even weekly.
And as far as the amount of money that we can earn for each post that
we write depends upon our blog niche, its popularity, Page rank and
Alexa rankings. You can reckon of making any money from $5 to $100 or so
for each approved post on a paid blogging network.
So here is the list of some of well loved paid blogging networks we can use to make extra amount of money from our blogs easily

• Payperpost (PPP):
  To be included on this paid blogging network, you must have a blog
  with a minimum age of 3 months. And if your blog has some excellent PR like
  5 or 6, you have fantastic chances of making some huge money with Pay per
  post. They send payments via paypal once in a month.
• SponsoredReviews:
  SponsoredReviews give 65 percent of a fulfilled task to the bloggers
  and keep the remaining 35 percent in their account. They have lots of
  advertisers waiting for your bids to be placed according to their
  mentioned budgets. The minimum budget for an open opportunity that I
  have seen so far on SponsoredReviews is $5 and maximum budget is
  $1000. They send payments via paypal twice in a month. So their
  payment system is quite strong.
• ReviewMe: You have a
  fantastic chance of making some huge money with ReviewMe if you have a blog
  with Excellent page rank, Alexa Ranking, Technorati Ranking and high
  number of RSS subscribers. Some of well loved blogs in blogging and
  ‘money making’ niche are registered on ReviewMe.
• Smorty: To approve your
  account on Smorty, all you need is an active blog having age of 3
  months and must be indexed by major search engines. Minimum amount of
  money that you will be able to earn by writing a review for an
  advertiser available on Smorty is $6. Once you have made the post and
  submitted the details on Smorty, your blog post gets approved within
  next 4-5 business days. They send your earnings on weekly basis into
  your paypal account. 
• Linkworth: They have
  lots of options for bloggers to earn money with their blogs like by
  selling text link ads, PPC ads, contextual links and paid reviews.
  They have 50-50 and 70-30 revenue split for publishers. They claim
  that when we chose to go for 50-50 revenue share as a blogger, we are
  offered higher amount of money making opportunities. They send
  payments via Paypal, Check or Direct deposit on the 12th of every
  month. 
• Blogsvertise:
  make a publisher account on Blogsvertise with your most well loved and
  active blogs.And when you get a task for writing, you have to end
  that within next five days. You have to include at least three links
  to the advertiser’s website in your review.
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  FANTASTIC 2 SITES 2 JOIN-
  
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  2.