This is a strategy I use to get backlinks and traffic to my blogs. Basically, the idea is to find popular blogs related to your niche and visit them occasionally and post comments on the articles that you are interested. This way I gained some PR juice as well as some traffic. This is something you will see the benefits in the long run, so do not expect a traffic overload in one day. Just, post your comments patiently and you will see it. On the table below, you can see the traffic that I got from blog commenting.

Recently, while organizing my bookmarks, I noticed that if I used Google Reader for that purpose, it would be faster and easier to comment on the blogs that I follow. So, what I did is I collected all the blogs that I am following in a folder in Google Reader and classified them according to their subjects. This way, now I am able to see all the new posts in one screen and choose the posts that interest me and comment on them.

You can see a screenshot of my Google Reader account where I have blogs related to affiliate marketing in a folder.

Note that what I talked about is not spamming others’ blogs with nonsense comments or posting thousands of automated comments at a time. What I do and urge you to do is to contribute to the discussion, this way, you will gain more traffic to your sites and establish your authority in the niche faster.

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That one is a Blogger blog and it is about general tips and news about different topics such as, internet, technology, world and things like that. You can see it here: Simple Web Tips. I haven’t been updating this blog for a long time, after this PR update I will definitely work on this a bit more.

Differently from DailyAffiliateTips.com, I did some link exchanges with other webmasters of similar blogs. Firstly, I found some similar blogs which are not much popular but have good content and I contacted to their webmasters asking if they would like a link exchange. Some of them responded as they would like to and from that time, I have their links on my site and they have my link on theirs too. Although there are only 3 websites that I exchanged links, I am pretty sure that they helped a lot in terms of PageRank juice. Because one of them is PR4, one is PR3 and the other is PR2.

This is a really nice example of how link exchanging will benefit your site in terms of PageRank and traffic.

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1. How Did I Achieve PageRank 1
2. Effective Use of Google Reader in Blog Commenting

I know this is not so big and doesn’t mean much but it is one of the steps that motivates me.

So, what did I do to reach a pagerank of 1? Let me tell you that I didn’t do any special things, no tricks or bulk backlink submissions. Mainly I have backlinks from two forums related to internet marketing as signatures. One is Warrior Forum and the other one is Digital Point Forum. Next, I have a few articles on ezinearticles.com and other article directories and I have some blog comments here or there. All done in a natural way, without a “how to increase PR” mindset. Adding all these contributed to PR1.

Now, I will try to get to PR2 but again in a natural way, doesn’t matter how much it takes.

See you.

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At this point, we can conclude that you have an active and interested crowd that click on ads on your site and it will be wise to test some other means of monetization which can bring an additional income each month to you.

One of the monetization methods is promoting affiliate products. You can try this by inserting affiliate links or banners on your site such as Amazon Associates or Clickbank. There are lots of other affiliate programs and networks to try but these two are the ones that convert really well if done properly.

Amazon affiliate program works really well on niche specific sites and blogs. Clickbank does also convert if the topics covered in your site are closely related to the product you promote.

Another thing you could try is to insert in text ads like Infolinks, Echo Topic or Clicksor. You can add to the list many more. On some topics in text advertising really works well and people click on those types of ads.

CPA offers are another thing to be tested with your traffic. Sometimes, you can’t imagine how well it can work. Finally, if you have a good amount of traffic, you could sell backlinks for a monthly price to those with related web sites. It could be really profitable.

As you see, there are lots of ways to monetize your blog, you can find much more if you do a little research on the subject. Of course, I am not telling you to fill your website with ads and banners and annoy your visitors. You should test each method slowly and make small changes on your site in order not to piss your visitors of. I mean do not put ten ad blocks on a single page or have both adsense, Amazon, Clickbank, CPA and in text links on your homepage. This will not work and you will start losing visitors even if they are paid ones.

Just test two methods at a time and see if it works. If it works well, try adding a third method. If it doesn’t, step to the next method and continue testing.

By diversifying your monetization, you will be not relying on a single source of income and this is what we prefer, since a wise marketer never puts all his eggs into one basket.

Farewell.

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