So I thought this might have been a custom-hack that somebody put together for WordPress, but then I stumbledupon the Referrer Detector WordPress Plugin.

WordPress Referrer Plugin

The plugin allows you complete control over which sites you have referral messages for. And you can even add in new sites, with custom messages. Everything is done in a WYSIWYG manner, making it extremely easy to manage.

By default, it comes with about 11 options, with all of the major providers covered: Digg, Reddit, Google, etc.

Installing the plugin is drop-dead simple, simply download it, put it in your /Plugins/ directory, activate it, and it’s ready to go.

From here, you can customize the text that is displayed and active/deactivate referral messages as you please.

Let me know if you need any help getting it setup.

I haven’t noticed any lagging or downtime, which is good news, so hopefully my investment of switching from Bluehost which sucks, to MediaTemple which is great, can help me stave off the Digg effect once again.

Here is a picture of the email, and another example of why MediaTemple is a great company to do business with.

Webmasters either make money via CPM (cost per thousand) advertising, CPC (cost per click) ads or some other combination of link-placement, CPA (cost per action) advertising networks.

So for the majority of webmasters, unless they’re on CPM networks, they’re not making much money from your visit. So for me, being a webmaster, I know the time and energy that goes into a site, so when I’m on their site, I make sure to subscribe to their feed and also check out their sponsors.

For the most part, you can find some quality advertisers, providing services that you may be interested in (you are, after all, reading the content on their site).

So the next time you’re on a site you like, will you courtesy click?

These are some of the best advertising techniques I’ve used to help me build my website in a very short amount of time.

Not all of these tips will be helpful to you, but if you pick up even one best-practice from this list, consider it a success.

If you have found this collection helpful, I would be extremely thankful if you Stumble! this post, as a small sign of thanks– and in the future, I hope to reciprocate the favor.

All of these tricks are tips I’ve learned from running my own blog. While my traffic is still quite modest, at around 15,000 uniques per month, I have only been using this domain for 4 months, and in my short time I have already had a frontpage Digg which drive more than 33,987 uniques to my site over 3 days.

In the past month, I have had 3,361 uniques from Reddit, 8,519 uniques from Stumbleupon, and 3,193 uniques from Google.

50 Tips To Drive More Traffic To Your Blog

• 1. Install All in One SEO Plugin so you can optimize your blog for SEO search.
• 2. Optimize your blog for a given set of small keywords. For this blog, I am optimized for “startup blog, andrew wise, start up blog, start-up blog.” All of these keywords you’ll find my site on the frontpage. It’s a small number of keywords, but these are the topics of my blog and where I want to drive incoming traffic.
• 3. Install the Stumbleupon toolbar, and start stumbling. Once you’ve built up a good profile, with complete information, start stumbling all of your articles once they’re published. Until you have a userbase that will do this for you, you need to start the work.
• 4. Make friends on Stumbleupon, stumble their articles, and join their sites. Don’t push people, but you’ll find if you’re friendly to them, they’ll reciprocate.
• 5. In your reading settings on WordPress or blogging platform, don’t limit your homepage to just the most recent 3 or so stories. Push that number to around 15. Including more stories will allow you to include more keywords related to your SEO optimization.
• 6. Check your site’s ranking on Google Rankings, it will tell you how many times your keywords appear. The more the better, obviously there is a limit on the benefit it provides.
• 7. Write original content. Sure, it’s great to be the mouthpiece for the blogosphere, but you need to generate your own content. Plan to write one original post per week, we call them authority posts (to prove you’re an authority).
• 8. Write opinion pieces. If you’re working a full-time job, you don’t have time to crank out original content all the time, so put a spin on what’s in the news. Take a stand on an issue. If you go counter to what everyone else is saying, you can often get recognized and highlighted on posts.
• 9. Write what you know. Talk about your life, your experiences, what is and isn’t working for you. This is what people want to read about, just look at Howard Stern’s success.
• 10. Cultivate a community. Talk to your readers, ask for their input, and write about issues that they want to hear about. Are they not telling you anything? Look at your most popular posts, and continue writ ing more like those.
• 11. Start a blogroll. Ask people who are commenting on your blog to trade links. People always reciprocate on blogrolls, so just be polite and ask for the link-back.
• 12. Check your traffic stats daily. Seeing a huge traffic spike is a huge motivator, it just makes you want to get up early and crank out more great content!
• 13. Showcase your best articles. Put up a popular stories list on your sidebar. When new visitors come to your site, you want to increase their time on the site, so give them your best.
• 14. Install the related posts plugin. In addition to showcasing your best posts, you want to give people an opportunity to check out similar posts as well — at the end of the post.
• 15. Watch the daily Google Trends it will show you what is popular in that day, and give you an idea for new stories.
• 16. Determine where your biggest traffic source is, and pump all of your efforts into driving more traffic from that. Whether it be Google, Reddit, Digg, etc.
• 17. Install Adsense, and make it the lifeblood of your blog. At the very least, your blog should pay for itself. So if you have hosting, look to make enough money on Adsense to pay for your hosting efforts.
• 18. Write your stories for your readers. Think about the questions people would be asking, and write your titles and descriptions for those readers, and what questions they may type into Google.
• 19. Write everyday. Even if you only write a quick note saying what you’re doing today, it is important that you maintain a schedule, and posting everday should be your schedule.
• 20. Look for your top performing stories on Google. Once you identify them, find out what keywords are driving the traffic. Go through and re-write the story to include more references to that keywords or better clarification within the story.
• 21. Ask your readers to support your blog. Ask them to Stumble articles, like this one, Reddit, Digg, etc. Thank them for their support (thank you!) and let them know you are the reason you write.
• 22. Comment on other blogs. Find the other big names in your vertical, and build a presence. You can network with them and gain insight, and you can also introduce some of their readers to your site.
• 23. Include your blog link in your email signature. You send a lot of emails everyday, and this is a great untapped marketing channel.
• 24. Build up your LinkedIn profile. Just like your email, you can promote your blog on LinkedIn.
• 25. Go on LinkedIn answers. People post a lot of questions about blogging, your particular area of expertise, and this is a great way to network and build up your authority.
• 26. Be the pre-eminent authority. Whatever you’re writing about, your goal should be the #1 source for that information. Gadgets? Politics? Startups?
• 27. Go the extra mile. When writing this list, I could slack off on a couple of points, but I would lose the effectiveness of the entire post. That little bit of extra effort is what’s going to make your blog sticky for readers.
• 28. Share your “trade secrets”. Let’s be honest, ideas are one thing, and execution is another. Don’t be afraid to share your personal practices for business, life, etc. nobody is going to replace you, you can only hope to get better by opening up a dialogue.
• 29. Open a dialogue with your readers. Ask an open-ended question and try to stir up conversation or discussion with your community.
• 30. Extend the conversation of your blog to FriendFeed or Facebook. Comment on your posts, or try to engage in discussions with other people on posts.
• 31. Write response-posts. If someone make an inflammatory post in the blogosphere, write a response. You can gain a lot of traction from their readers, and make a name for yourself a thought-leader, not just a follower.
• 32. Feature a poll on your site. What stories do you want me to write about? Are you going to buy the new macbooks? Engage your audience, and get them involved.
• 33. Constantly self-promote. If you have a poll on your blog, mention it throughout the week. Remind users to respond, post, comment, etc. and help market your content.
• 34. Ask your friends to read your blog. At the very least, you should be able to have your parents or girlfriend reading your blog. Their feedback can be helpful when you’re first starting out, and are feeling like nobody cares.
• 35. Install MyBlogLog. It’s the widget in my sidebar that shows the most recent visitors to your blog. Seeing new faces everyday makes me feel like I have a community and am reaching people.
• 36. Set a goal for yourself. For me, I want my blog to be able to pay for my iPhone 3G bill from AT&T. The bill is about $60, and I’m about on that target.
• 37. Be prepared to revise your goals. If you’ve met your goal, you need to set a new goal. And to do this, you need to take the time to write out the steps to meet this new goal. Each additional step takes more and more time.
• 38. Enlist more people to write on your blog. The hardest part about running a blog is writing everyday. While this can be the most rewarding, it seriously inhibits your ability to grow. Bringing on a reader to write for you can help you do more promotion, marketing, etc.
• 39. Hold a contest on your blog. Ask some of your favorite websites if they can donate any prizes. Then hold a contest on your blog to give away their wares. Everyone wins, and it’s a good intro to selling advertising.
• 40. Build up a heavy RSS client feed. I have 137 blogs I read everyday, and this gives me plenty of ammunition for new blog posts.
• 41. Create a favicon for your site. I’ve been tweaking mine, and now have a nice big W as my favicon, for Wise Startup Blog. It makes your site look more professional and put-together.
• 42. Always respond to comments on your blog. Make sure your readers have their voices heard. Start a dialogue in your comments. There’s nothing better than having 16 comments on a post.
• 43. Use plenty of pictures. For marketing tools like Stumbleupon, people LOVE pictures. Include them in every post, and make sure to optimize their size and alignment.
• 44. Find the best template/design for your blog. I have been through about 5 different templates on Wise Startup Blog, and now I think I have a good setup, although I’m sure this will change again soon
• 45. Create cool icons for your stories. If you look in my sidebar, you can see I made 125×125 graphics for my stories. It makes your site look more professional, and increases the chances someone is going to read your work.
• 46. Use your blog as your username. Whether it be on Disqus or Flickr, you want to constantly be promoting your site.
• 47. Register your domain for more than 1 year. Google penalizes sites that will expire within the year. Renew your ownership on your domain, and you’ll see better rankings in Google.
• 48. Make it easy for users to subscribe to your blog. Include an RSS feed icon in an easy to find place on your blog, and also an email subscription option (I actually need to add the email option back to my site!).
• 49. Do post recaps. If you had a particularly good week of writing a lot of really popular stories, do a recap. Tell your new readers what they’ve missed. You can also do a post-roundup of all your best posts.
• 50. Read as many of these articles as you can. You can always learn new things, just keep an open mind and keep experimenting. If something sticks, keep doing it, if it doesn’t stick, drop it and try something new.

So for those of you looking to become one of the premier, best websites on the Internet, I hope these 50 how to tips have helped you. Remember, marketing and advertising your blog starts with being active everyday, no matter what.

And for those of you who made it all the way through the list, I thank you!

I hope these strategies will help you in driving more traffic and building the readership of your blog, and remember, if you liked this post, please Stumble!

Building a high traffic blog doesn’t happen overnight, it takes months and sometimes years of working everyday, and putting everything you can into your blog.

The check was for about 3 months worth of blogging, so technically I’m making about $33 per month, but at hosting costs from $10 – $30, I’m barely breaking even.

Luckily, like most things, momentum is starting to gather and I’m getting more and more traffic everyday. Now, looking back 3 months ago, I was nowhere in this position, I have gone through 4 different web design layouts and was at about 20 visitors per day.

Assembled below are the couple small things I do everyday to keep things alive and constantly moving forward.

Post Everyday. Yes, Everyday

It doesn’t matter what you post, just write something. On days I don’t have time to write any content, what I do is just reblog the news stories. Or I hit the Stumble button until I find something worth talking about.

The small effort it takes is worth it, as you never know when things could pay off and your story breaks.

Cover What’s New

Blogging is to in-the-moment, so it’s important to write about topics that are currently in the news. Other bloggers are constantly looking for different opinions on topics, so it’s an easy way to get a good reference. Also, it’s easy, just covering the news or putting a spin on something is what you do naturally when reacting to any new information.

Take a Stand

If there’s something the blogosphere is loving, take the opposite side. I personally stand by my belief that the Seinfeld ads were working for Microsoft.

Make sure you’re not just espousing on something just for the sake of it, because that’s just a waste of time and you’re going to get ragged on in the comments (which can be good as well).

Speak to Your Community

You may not know it, but you have a community around your site. I personally can identify maybe 2 people I know read the blog, other than that, there are lurkers. People love to take an interest in things that are new, and a blog with no traffic is definitely new, and undiscovered (lurkers, please comment so I can thank you!).

Share Your Tips

For those of you, like me, are just starting out blogging, share your first experiences and tips for the rest of the community

I was able to turn my traffic from a mere 2,000 visitors per month to well over 15,000, thanks to writing pieces catered to StumbleUpon and along the way I picked up a lot of good tips to improve my blogging style.

Take a look at the document, How to Drive StumbleUpon Traffic on Scribd.com or view the embedded version below.

If this helps you, please let us know in the comments below!

“StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests. Whether it’s a web page, photo or video, our personalized recommendation engine learns what you like, and brings you more.”

Tripled My Traffic

Write to the News

Looking at the graph above, that is how you should plan out your Stumbleupon pushes. You get a big boost, and hopefully your content can keep the users coming back again and again.

Now when writing content, you should write to what’s current in the news. Talk about the Presidential candidates’ resumes, or the Apple MobileMe gaffe or Google Chrome.

With Stumbleupon users, you only get a couple of seconds to convince them to ‘thumbs up’ your page, so writing about a topic they already have heard about recently can really help your stickiness.

Judge a Book By its Cover

The old adage, “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” definitely does not apply to Stumbleupon. Your title tells the reader everything they need to know about your story, so you better ensure its compelling and captivating, and invites the user to continue reading on.

Journalists know better than others that you need to leave your readers with a cliffhanger, so when writing your story, try to craft a title that entices users to scroll down just a little, and if they do, they’ll reward you with a ‘thumbs up’.

Often times I write a number of different titles until I find one that sticks. Don’t worry about constantly re-writing the title, the extra time will definitely pay off.

Write About Stumbleupon

Just like on Digg, Stumble users LOVE to read more about Stumbleupon and how great it is. In your articles, highlight how to drive more traffic to Stumbleupon or the quirks of the system, how to get banned by Stumbleupon, that you’ve reached the “end of the Internet,” you get the idea…

Stumble, Stumble, Stumble

The final point I’ll cover is your participation in the system.

Don’t expect to reap the benefits of huge Stumbleupon traffic drives if you’re not using the system in return. Try to spend a couple of minutes stumbling and reviewing sites on a daily basis.

I don’t know the exact math on these things, but I have seen better results since I started using the system more and more.

Let us know what has worked for you in driving Stumble traffic in the comments.

Don’t expect to hit virality with that one big release, it takes time, and if you follow these steps, you can mimick the success we’re now seeing with Grooveshark.

1. Be Everywhere On The Web

Greg Rollet was kind enough to mention us when talking about owning Twitter. If someone utters your name on Twitter, be there to thank them for their support, help them with their question or to learn from their gripes:

When you see these notes come out, whether they be on Twitter or on a blog, the best move is always to say something. Even if the guy is telling you how much he hates your service, you should acknowledge their objection and still thank them for their time. If you listen to someone, no matter how vile they may be, you could end up turning them into one of your biggest advocates. Never miss an opportunity to interact with your users, they’ll remember it and it’ll pay dividends for you later on.

To help you out with monitoring the web, here are a couple of services:

Google Alerts
Sends you an email whenever anyone mentions your name on the web. Sometimes emails are delayed, so if you have a big release coming out, you can ping Google Blog Search every 5 minutes. With enough creativity, Google Alerts can be modified to follow competitors as well as your own properties. I have about 15 different alerts setup and it makes it real easy to have a quick response time to any comments or posts.

TweetScan
Sends you a daily roundup email on every instance of your keyword mentioned on Twitter for that day. Tweetscan is really helpful for doing a bulk @-reply to all your fans, friends, and whiners

2. Be Prepared for Launch Day

When the fate of your entire company can rest on 1 or 2 days, it’s pretty important that your team takes the necessary steps to prepare for launch day. When planning to launch a new product or your simply launch your product for the first time, you must be prepared or it’s all over.

How many times have you seen a startup get on the frontpage of Digg only to be taken down minutes or hours later. Well what if you have this great plan in place, and despite your best efforts, your server meltdown because you couldn’t afford to buy enough resources prior to the launch. Well, what does your 404 Error Page or 500 Error Page look like?

It better be pretty, and explanatory of the situation that’s going on: “We’re sorry, we had such a great response from our fans that our servers took a nose-dive. We’re working as hard as possible to restore service and we wanted to thank you all for your support. Best, XYZ.”

The planning extends from securing every level of coverage, to hardware uptime, to the inevitable downtime or hiccups.

Startups aren’t perfect, don’t think that even because you have $20 million in the bank things are going to be any different. Look at Apple, their market cap is whatever $200 Billion, and their MobileMe launch was horrific.

In the short lifespan of a startup, you only have a few opportunities to show your face to the world. If you fumble your words and end up looking like a moron, your startup career is going to be very shortlived (although you may have a YouTube career on your hands).

Put an action plan in place, stick to it, and plan for the unexpected. You only get 1 or 2 chances to do this right. Being best means being precise executing at maximum efficiency.

3. Get the Interface Right

Speaking from personal experience, if you don’t have a product that wows people from a visual level, you don’t have a very good chance of going viral. Sure, Craigslist isn’t the sexiest site in the world and you can’t say much for Wikipedia, but there are only a handful, and a very select handful at that, of websites that are able to go viral on content alone.

Don’t get me wrong, you need the content, but if your website is sexy as hell, people will make exceptions. It’s a scientific fact that, as a whole, people make exceptions for good looking people and make assumptions about them succeeding, despite knowing nothing about them. The same probably applies to websites, so make sure you’re among the fashion elite.

When designing your website, make sure you have the help of a skilled graphic designer being involved in the process. Have them go through, clean things up, gloss them up, and make sure the site looks really polished. The difference between a clean, well designed site and a, “developer-designed,” site is night and day.

Plus, the truly key element in going viral is making a good first impression. Your goal as a startup entrepreneur is to break into the mainstream audience, and the one thing mainstream people care about is looking good. They can’t tell you a PHP from a P2P, but they can say if something looks good or not.

Using sites like Stumbleupon for advertising is where having a great visual interface really pays off. Stumbleupon costs $.05 per user, and used correctly, can net you tens of thousands of uniques each month for pennies on the dollar. Stumbleupon users will make a decision good or bad on your page based solely on the looks.

If it looks good, they thumbs up, if it looks bad, they thumbs down. Simple as that. Make sure to invest in a really really good graphic designer, otherwise, plan on building out your content to the maximum extent, spending wayyy too much money on advertising, and plan for some tough growing pains.

——-

When looking at our growth, and the reasons people have heard about our site, it’s a combination of a couple of references:

1. Word of mouth
2. Read about you on XYZ website
3. Stumbleupon

And honestly speaking, I think Stumbleupon leads us to the first and second references. People are blown away by the design, they check out the site, they write a blog, and they tell a friend. Rinse, repeat.

If you want to create a community that is best in class, and inspires others to put together “the best of website” lists, you need to be humble, always learning, and cognizant of every detail.

Any tips to share on how your site went viral?