Local listings truly only work if you have an actual business that caters around local retail and services.  It is of course important to have a good landing page and accurate contact information on your local listing otherwise any work put into local marketing will be worthless. But , now lets assume that you already have a listing up and want to start ranking higher.

The first thing you must do if is fill up your profile with lots of content and relevant keywords.

Upload as many pictures as Google allows.
Upload as many videos as Google allows.
Fill the title with keywords you want to rank with.
Fill your description sections with as much content as you can with keywords related to your industry.

Make sure you have all information about your company’s policy, hours of operation, and payments etc etc

Get your site reviewed ! Have customers leave you positive reviews , the more the better. Also if you have not already make sure you visit other local listings sites and fill out a profile and have them reviewed by clients. Sites such as kudzu , yahoo local, yelp all show up on your Google Local listing reviews.

Having reviews is so important in any local marketing campaigns  I have seen a lot of people fill out profiles or buy advertising on superpages, kudzu, etc and not have any reviews. Reviews are why people go to these sites , they want to know if your company is legit. Reviews are pretty much word of mouth and word of mouth is the best traffic  you can get.

Add a coupon , adding a coupon can attract new clients. Google loves this and makes  you stand out.

Try these tips on how to improve your local listing and watch the leads come in. Sometimes it takes a while for the results to appear. I have waited a couple of months for a listing to finally appear at the top. Depending how competitive your local market is for your store or service is will depend on how high you rank.  Getting these steps done will definitely help your business.
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So, how exactly can you optimize you blog design to get more visitors? (Image Credit: Draggin)

Making the Blog Header as convincing as possible

I  believe that the blog header in any blog plays the biggest role in giving out a first impression. And of course, first impression does the most when you’re trying to sell something.

As you can see, in ROCKFUSE, I have reserved a considerable amount of real-estate for the blog header. This is because I wanted to outline and highlight every major thing that I wanted my blog visitors to know in their first visit.

It is important that you give your visitors a clear view of your blog’s niche and what you blog about, in the most convincing method possible. So, I find it important mentioning a few pointers in the blog header that truly says what you blog is about.

However, the downside of nice blog headers is the amount of bandwidth it takes and the increased page load times. Of course, this can be improved to a certain extent if you just follow a few optimization tips.

Having the e-mail subscription form

More than half of my blog’s subscribers are e-mail subscribers. Which is really good. Why? Because, they have a solid subscription to ROCKFUSE and they are easier to be tracked.

I find that reserving the extra space needed to have an e-mail subscription form really pays off. It gives a straight-up impression that the visitor should subscribe by e-mail. And not to forget, some people barely have any knowledge of what RSS is so it’s really important you play it safe offering an e-mail subscription form too.

Of course, some would argue that having a simple button guiding you to the subscription form is enough. I do not disagree. But trust me, you’ll see better conversion rates with the extra effort you put into integrating a subscription form to your design.

Constantly reminding people to Subscribe

This really works. You may have seen the banner below all my posts. “If you find this post useful, why not subscribe?”. This can really get you those one-time visitors that came to your blog accidentally from a Google Search.

As if the subscribe buttons on my blog ain’t enough, you might say. True, but the secret of asserting something is to assert it until it registers in someone’s mind. Why do you think they run the same advertisement on TV multiple times?

Why Subscribe Section

I haven’t done this yet, but I do plan to in the future. It’s just a small simple page titled “Why Subscribe?” that people can click through and in which you can present your case – Why should you exactly subscribe to my blog.

I have talked to some bloggers who had great success with this. Basically, you should tell your audience the benefits of subscribing to your blog, in the minimum amount of words possible. Might seem like a bit out there, but, yeah, it works.

You really can’t expect all of your visitors to read that page. But, you have an opportunity to convert a good number of people that do.

Making your blog’s content more accessible

Although a good part of this article is focused on getting subscribers through methods that are merely assertive, the ultimate question at the end of the day – that a subscriber might ask is, how can I possibly benefit from subscribing to this blog? When that question is asked, you have to agree, so little can you justify with having an e-mail subscription form or a good blog design. People do not just subscribe because your blog design rocks right?

I believe the word I’m looking for is ‘content’.

Just think, of all the times you actually subscribed to a blog, have you ever done it without going through the blog’s content, or at least the most popular posts? At the end of the day, subscribers are after content and if you don’t deliver what you should, you will not convert new subscribers, nor would you keep the existing ones engaged.

To serve this purpose and this purpose only, I’ve done a few major things in my blog. I have put my categories on the top alongside the popular posts, and I have used excerpts in the homepage to make sure I can display more recent posts. And these things are really easy to do provided that you have some html/php knowledge to play around with your template.

I guess at the end of the day, you can’t sell anything without showcasing what you are selling.

Technorati Tags: rss subscribers e-mail subscription blog design optimize blogging
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80% of your long-term blog traffic is brought to you by 20% of your content or less…

And, bringing you this kind of long term, non-expiring traffic, there is your blog’s timeless content.

What exactly is timeless content?

Timeless content can be defined in many term. I’m sure you must have heard the terms “Authority Content” or “Pillar Content”. These are two variations of timeless content. Basically, timeless content.,

• Gives you long-lasting Search Engine and Social Media Traffic.
• Can probably be converted into a successful Link-bait.
• Is content that people will find useful for a long time to come.

For an instance, a book like Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, had never gone out of print even if it was first published decades ago. Why do people still buy that book? Since what’s said in that book is valid for today as much as it was valid decades ago. In simple terms, that book offers “Timeless Content”.

By the way, Andrew Pavelski has got some more cool reasons on why exactly you should focus on timeless content.

How can I create timeless content as such?

Tip #1: Timeless content is not news

News is something you hear today and forget tomorrow. So, news can never get into the same category as timeless content. Of course, if you’re doing a news blog of some sort, this can’t be helped. The logic is simple – you need to create something that stands the test of time. Something that is not just valid for today. For more in depth tips on making your posts non-news, check this article on Daily Blog Tips.

Tip #2: Be ambiguous and leave out variables

A bit sneaky but, can’t be helped if you’re trying to validate your content for a long time to come. If you’re not sure whether “Google will penalize duplicate content over different domains”, just do not state anything about that. For a fact, Google does not do such a thing now. But it’s not yours to say whether Google will do it in the future – you get the idea.

Tip #3: When times change, so should your content

In an event of an inevitable change in circumstances, be sure to post an update or better yet, write a follow-up article. It’s your responsibility not to mislead the people directed to your blog as of your timeless content. If I mentioned “Google doesn’t penalize duplicate content over different domains” before in an article, I should really do a revision of it if Google actually starts penalizing content over multiple domains.

Tip #4: Do it right when you do it

Remember that how skillful of a writer you may be, you can not create such content that will make such and impact everyday, all the time. So just make sure you know when you’re writing one and capitalize on it. You won’t be able to do it always, so do it right when you do it. And by any chance if you’re capable of doing it all the time, just don’t overdo it!

Tip #5: Promote your timeless content confidently

You can not promote everyone of your posts on social media web sites. But when you’re promoting your pillar content, do it with confidence. The only reason why you wrote that content was because you thought people would find it useful over the course of a long time period. So, confidently do some Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing to put your best work out there.

Tip #6: Make the most out of it’s exposure

Finally, make sure the exposure your timeless content gets doesn’t get wasted without any use. Link up your posts that may actually be related to what you’re saying so that they get some of the star power rubbed on them too. Your timeless content acts as the doorway to your blog for many of the people who are actually going to be your loyal readers. That is, if you’re capable of making the most out of the situation.

(Image Credit: simpologist)
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If there’s one product that people didn’t ask for, and there’s another one that people absolutely wanted. What would succeed and sell more in an extremely competitive marketplace? So that’s the logic. We are not doing anything right until we give them what they ask for.

So the millin dollar question remains… How can you possibly find out what to cater to your crowd?

A no-brainer: Your blog stats

Your blog stats would tell you what your readers want from you in a limited scale. It can’t give you the full picture since it’ll only tell you whether what you have done so far had worked or failed. According to the comments count, the pingback count and the page views, you can get some slight idea of your “loyal audience”.

It might be especially helpful if you keep your eye on the traffic stats of your categories. Traffic divisions between the categories can tell you what subject areas your readers are most interested about. For an instance, after such a review, I found that “Making Money” and “Traffic Building” were my best performing category pages. I then extended it to take on my blog header.

Social Media Explorations

Sometimes when I want to get the wheels rolling in my head I explore social media voting communities such as Digg, Sphinn and Mixx. I simply enter a keyword that comes to my mind and see what had become popular in that subject area in that particular social media community. For an example, if I’m looking to do a SEO article, I search for the particualr SEO terms and after exploing the first two results pages, I can spot a trend and build upon it to write a presentable article.

You kill two birds with one stone if you play your trumps right here. You might be able to develop an article people will find useful as well as make sure that it goes viral on that particular community.

Reader’s Requests

I have started using Skirbit – a widget that allows you to ask your readers what they want you to write about. For some reason, I haven’t had much luck with the whole thing.

But one of the most effective methods I have used would be, responding to comments. I manually review all the comments and when someone asks a question I try to be as detailed as possible. When that just doesn’t add up, I extend their question to a separate blog post.

Since the request came from a reader who read your blog post, chances are likely that the other people who read the same post would find the followup answer post useful.

Using the best of multiple techniques listed above and a little self promotion, I’m sure you can generate quite a few viral posts that would indeed serve you purpose well enough.

All the best!
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What effective forum marketing is not…

All the conservative forum promotion methods – well most of them – are ineffective.

Forum marketing is not, going to a forum to promote your last blog post by asking people to visit it and comment on it – or worse, spam the hell out of the forum and get banned. And, it is not about starting random threads to get backlinks for your blog. Just do the math and see.. You start a random thread, will receive a PR0, PR1 in the next Google PR update, 10 guys post on the first page having 3 links each on their signatures. PR1 – 30 outbound links… Is it really worth it?

What effective forum marketing is…

Simply put, finding simple and efficient methods that your competition is not aware of to get more from backlinks and more traffic. (I’m assuming that usually, all forum marketers are behind these two things.. Backlinks and Traffic)

How to do effective forum marketing?

Well, I’m going to let two cats out of the bag now. These have been methods that had done me wonders., and I’d like to share them with you. These are definitely not the only good methods available – there are a zillion. let your creative juices flow – it will show you the way.

1. If you’re after traffic:
   • Get a list some of your good articles. (ex: I’ve got an article about the Wordpress 2.6 release)
   • Find a niche forum that appeals to an audience that will necessarily find the article useful (ex: For a Wordpress 2.6 review article article.. I will choose Bloggeries – which is a forum for bloggers)
   • Search for threads going on about Wordpress 2.6… Simply Google it for – “wordpress 2.6″ site:bloggeries.com – which will return all threads containing wordpress 2.6 in it.
   • Go through those threads, offer something for the ongoing discussion and plug in your article saying – “if you’re interested, maybe you can check out…”
   • Remember to pick 2-3 top results from the Google results since that’s where more SEO juice and more SE traffic is.
2. Are you after backlinks? Well then… When a thread is a tad bit old, for an example, if it’s created before the last Google Page Rank, sometimes, certain threads may get a PR. Unfortunately this is a very time consuming method, but if you’re lucky, you may end up with some goldmines. Simply go through the forum’s most popular category and look for older threads that are abandoned. And have the Google Toolbar installed when you’re browsing and spot the PageRank. If you find a relatively short discussion that hasn’t moved on from the first page (because the threads in the next pages don’t have much PR at all) and if it has a good PR, let’s say PR 3? Leave a reply. So there you will instantly have a PR3 link pointing to your blog.

I’ve experimented these methods and I’m happy with the results. Experiment and see how it goes. If you’ve got any of your methods to share, please do let us know. I’ll reveal many other techniques to get more from Forum marketing as time goes by. So make sure you’re subscribed.
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I find forums as the most powerful means of social networking. Everyone is familiar with the concept so I don’t need to go ahead and tell you the ABC’s of it right? The bottom line is that it lets you engage in fruitful conversations with other bloggers while getting some quality traffic and a ton of backlinks to your blog. But, do the benefits stop there? How can you get the most out of your time committed to forums?

• Genuinely be interested in helping others. It’s all about social networking and people will “dig you” if you “dig for them”.
• Quote the resources from your blogs with a link when it’s relevant. But don’t do this all the time, since it might set an alarm off at the forums moderators’ end.
• Offer to willingly help resolve other blogger’s issues directly via IM or e-mail. I usually mention my IM when another blogger goes through a problem I can do something about. This had done me good in finding loyal readers.
• Most blogs have a Introduce Yourself section. Check that section often and be sure to comment on their blogs. Make an impression on the newbies.
• Try to be engaged in newer discussions. Blogs have a section called ‘New Posts’, which will give you a chance to find all the new posts at one place. This will expose you to more forum browsers.
• Be consistent in your forum participation. People who hang on more tightly tend to harness better results than the people who tend to log on 1 day per week and post to 50 threads.
• Make sure that your signature makes sense. Don’t just put “Tech Blog”, when you can put “Tech Blog – Latest Gadgets, Reviews and Tech News”. It’ll help your CTR, and give you more power in the terms of SEO.
• Find other active bloggers in the forum and put their good articles under discussion. This will do you wonders in making connections with good bloggers out there.
• Brand Yourself! Brand your avater, language and signature. This will help you get noticed and stand-out.

If you’re looking forward to connect to a quality forum for bloggers, I highly recommend Bloggeries. I also hang out at DigitalPoint, but it’s more of a hang out place for Webmaster rather than Bloggers.

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Add Technorati Tags

This is something that I’ve been doing for the past few days. When Technorati users search for content on blogs, Technorati weighs the relevant tags more than the post content to find results. Just think of Technorati as an age-old Meta Search Engine that uses META keywords to deliver results. In this case, except for META keywords, you’ve got Technorati Tags.

This can be a painstaking chore. But if you use Windows Live Writer, you can easily add them via the in-built plugin. Or, you can get this plugin for WordPress, which will get the job done just fine. Remember, when you have some time off, go through your old posts and add Technorati Tags to them too. But, ping it with caution. Don’t ping it multiple times in frequent time intervals.

Automate RSS Submission

You are probably sick of hearing every blogger asking you to submit your site to RSS directories right? Well, you might be wondering how the heck you are supposed to manually submit your Feed to 729 RSS Directories?

Well, I say, don’t do it manually. It’s not a waste of time; but a waste of energy. Get a software like RSS Feeds Submit which will automate the whole process. No, you don’t have to buy it. It comes with a free 12-day trial period so you can make the most out of those 12 days. It holds a lot of SEO juice too.

Buy some cheap advertising

You don’t have to have a big advertising budget to get lots of traffic from advertising on other sites. You just have to find the right method, optimize you campaigns for the maximum returns and target the right sites at the right time. But before you jump-in, research the ad networks and other factors thoroughly.

Networks like Adtoll can bring you very cheap traffic. I bought more than 10,000 banner impressions for one week from Adtoll partners, for just $1. But beware, depending on your niche, the CTR(Click Through Rate) can vary immensely. So target the right sites.

Find one article that didn’t receive exposure and give it some!

In you early blogging life, did you write an article which you wished had received some more exposure? Which you think didn’t get the attention it deserved? Well, instead of brainstorming for a post to top your last traffic spike, dig up that old post and submit it to a couple of your StumbleUpon buddies.

If your attitude on that blog post is shared by your buddies, they will like it, stumble it, and more will follow! Remember – StumbleUpon is a killer system. Don’t abuse it or submit what you don’t think is worthwhile. That’s why you shouldn’t submit it yourself and go for a second opinion by asking a few of your friends to Stumble it.

Try them out. Or at least some. Let me know what happens, alright? You can probably cover the whole workload within two hours? The next 1 hour is just to pour some caffeine and stare at your live statistics:)

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Creating a unique blog brand

Blogs telling you how to blog had come to be somewhat of a cliche these days. So I created my own brand of a blog that said more than “creating money online through your blog”. I wanted to do something that people will instantly remember and something would probably make a statement, hopefully with an exclamation mark at the end. So I came up with the ’super-weapon’ term. My objective is to let my readers know how they can turn their blogs into super-weapons and then make money off it. No Bull, no gimmicks, no get rich quick tricks. It’s plain proven methodology.

With the unique design of my header, eliciting this exact image, I was able to somewhat entice the one-time readers to wander into the depths of my content. And at the time, I was getting some good StumbleUpon traffic also. So this was extra helpful in turning the heads of stumblers a bit, hopefully to make them stop for a second and tell them it’s not something that they are getting every time they hit the ’stumble!’ button.

Commenting Policy

I switched to threaded comments. Some people might think that it messes up the site design and all that but threaded comments had been really useful for me to build conversations with the readers. I can make sure that whoever comments and needs something back doesn’t go unanswered in my blog.

Also, I implemented a few plug-ins to enhance the quality of the site discussions which can be found in this article. The plug-ins being mentioned in that were helpful in capturing those one-off visitors and converting them to followers.

Viral Contests

I had two contests within these 50 days. The current one – “The 10 second entry contest”, is just going viral. For a simple e-mail subscription, the subscribers are getting definite 10 Entrecard credits and a chance to win $250 worth of prizes. 50% of my current subscribers were conceived this way.

Some bloggers tend to hold contests to have backlinks to their blogs, in order to improve their link popularity. But, what most of them don’t understand is that half of the people are not at all interested in doing something like posting about a contest in their own blogs. One – it may make a blogger look like a sell-out and two – some people don’t always go thorough the trouble to do so. And let’s face it. If a blog is really really popular, what makes you think that blogger will actually post about a random contest that he/she sees in the blogosphere? And if you can’t get a backlink off a popular/good blog, what’s the point of getting a backlink at all?

The way the Google PageRank works tell us that, it’s better to get 1 backlink from a blog that has a PageRank of 5 than getting 500 backlinks from a blog that has PageRank of 0.

What I learnt from my experiences is that, when you set the bar a bit lower than other people, you tend to get more people to come and try out for the high-jump.

Networking

Through Blog Networks such as Entrecard, I got to know a good number of great new bloggers. And it really paid off to communicate with them and share ideas. Although I must confess I haven’t been on the lookout for any forum traffic from all the blogging forums out there, I believe forum traffic is more sustainable in the long-run than the plain Entrecard traffic.

All in all, I believe Networking is indeed one of the greatest aspects in building a blog. Especially because when you kick-start a blog, you tend to have more time dedicated and efficient networking through bloggers is worth every minute.

For an example, I contacted Mike of Blogging-Ads for guest blogging. (Me blogging for him) There was an article I was working on for over a week called “Are you a Sniper blogger or a Gattling Gunner blogger?”. It was one of the most original posts I’ve done, and probably one of the best. With Mike’s help, I published that in Blogging-Ads, and the reactions were just phenomenal. Blogging-Ads had experienced and is experiencing a rapid growth and I was exalted to see my guest post being well received in the community. And at the moment, it stands as the #1 in the Blogging-Ads Most Popular Posts.

Not all guest bloggers are fortunate to say something like that, and I believe I am one of the lucky ones.

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It seemed like the right time to give up. Although I was going well before December ‘07, the blog was in peril so I thought I needed to change the niche and do something with this. Now, just in case, if you don’t believe what I’ve said up-to now, you can check this post out. Convinced?

So, let’s do a bit of a comparison of the statistics between the two ends of this timeframe.

It might not be ‘really huge’ in certain aspects but, building a blog from zero, I am pretty happy with where I stand now. So, I am going to give a bit of an inside perspective on how I did it, because, with few spicy ingredients off my recipe, you can make your super potion to boost your blog.

Being controversial always works

NO. really! It always works. I tend to agree with John Cow fully when he says nice bloggers end up last. When I hit rock bottom, the only way I could motivate myself to keep on doing what I love to do was to do something quick to get back to bikini bottom with Spongebob. So, I made my first post of controversy. 5 reasons why slblogs.org can’t be the Sri Lankan blogosphere. I live in Sri Lanka, as most of you might know and slblogs.org is a blog aggregator.

I personally think the time of non-niche blog aggregators are long and gone and I didn’t and still don’t think it’s an idea worth investing your time in. So, I came out with that ‘ouch!’ factor to get some evil traffic. I had to face a lot of criticism, a lot of harsh comments. But then again, that’s all in the package. In the end, it all played out for me since everyone who criticized me were kind enough to give my block some backlinks, despite of their harsh words and, hey! I spoke my mind out and got my thing across.

And also, a nice boost in traffic and subscribers, creating my blog a lot of exposure.

Content is the king

I’m sorry. I know this is no secret but, it’s too important to be left out. The best method of proving you’re “that good” to be followed is to get your content across. I had to be really original, really sharp and really picky on what I posted in these 50 days and my posting frequency. Once you lose a subscriber, you’ve lost him/her forever. So what not to do? Post total useless ramblings.

Note that 6 out of 10 of my most popular posts were written in these 50 days.

New makeovers

Prior to writing my own theme for MindBlogger, I used the 3cWPTP theme. But, I needed to bring out the professionalism of my blog and my brand of blog more effectively. So I wrote my own theme the, way I wanted. Maybe this is something that everyone of you aren’t able to do. But it always helps when you try to customize a widely used theme or try to find a theme from un-explored depths of wpthemesfree.com.

I received a good number of positive comments about my blog design and it successfully gave the boost I needed to the growth of my blog. When designing or picking a theme, your should know what your blog really needs. Just because a theme looks good, doesn’t mean that it will cater to all of your needs. The first impression matters and that means your theme!

[contd...]

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What if you wake up on morning and find out that you’ve got a huge traffic spike from., let’s say StumbleUpon? what would you do? What would your reactions be? Well, of course, you can jump for joy and throw up a party. But party’s going to be all over when you’re down to (little more than) your 30 unique visitors the next day. It might get you some quick bucks from those CPC ads you put up on your blog. But does the one day party really matter?

If your post got stumbled and you receive a decent amount of traffic, good for you. But, did you really think of any means of converting those Stumblers into your loyal blog readers? It’s possible, is it not? StumbleUpon traffic is targeted traffic. People find your blog through relevant reviews and tags right? But, don’t forget, after a while, StumbleUpon traffic, like any social media traffic is eventually going to go away!

True enough, it can give you a sense of accomplishment on the very successful article you did or the breakthrough news story. But when your site stats tell you 8000 people have visited your blog and the next day, it’s only 1% of that, the 8000 doesn’t really matter. The quick AdSense bucks don’t matter. The traffic spike doesn’t matter.

What matters is sustaining that traffic!

There are more bloggers trying to build organic traffic spikes than bloggers trying to sustain real traffic. Organic traffic is what comes by when you exploit a system or go hardcore on a system. Things like power-dropping 300 Entrecards a day and using a spammy commenting software! (You won’t believe how many people use these) Maintaining sustained traffic usually takes half the time of creating organic traffic. So, in the long run, organic traffic is well, an organic solution.

See, traffic is like rain. You should let it come naturally or planet earth will have it’s fury on you. If your blog is dry and facing a drought, huge showers will ultimately give it some life. When the rain goes away, you’re back to your usual dryness. But if you can develop some means of saving some water during the wet season, you’re better off. But unlike rain, the cool thing is, if you know your blogging, you can create rain anytime.

But, what if you could move your blog to the tropics? Where you get rain every day? Or make the monsoon last forever? The only proven way of sustaining traffic (monsoon-everyday) is by:

Building a better blog!

Why? Because people are there, in the very blogosphere that you exist, getting 8000 unique visitors a EVERYDAY. Sometimes, your biggest traffic spike ever, can’t match the usual daily traffic they get. And the only advice they followed, the only motive they had and their prime objective was “building a better blog”. Isn’t it the most magical blogging tip ever?

If you spent the first six months of your blogging life trying to find a quick fix that would drastically boost your blog, then you might have found that there are no magic blogging beans in the blogosphere. It’s pure hard work and well, sometimes, circumstantial luck. I have never posted about gaming a system or exploiting a social network site because, by experience I know that; one, they don’t last and two, they can get you in trouble. Much like creating artificial rain would mean lesser natural rain fall. (Mark my words – “By experience”)

May your traffic spikes be natural or organic. You’ll excel anyway if you are concentrated on building a better blog. I know, because that’s the only level 1 blogging tip I followed. Call me a conservative, but if you could really pay $100 for 100,000 quality visitors that would subscribe to your blog no matter how bad it is, then, I’d say my fairy god-mother granted me this blog:)
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