Welcome to Week 5 of 7 Weeks to Success. By week 5, you should have a working blog and submitted your blog to a lot of web directories. Hopefully most of those directory owners have accepted your links and has generated you hundreds of rich anchor text pointing to your site. Search engines should now be picking up your site now as well, if they haven’t yet.

As I said in past weeks, web directories is great for incoming links to your site, but they rarely get clicks. It’s important that your link is submitted to web directories because your Google PageRank will rise (important) and search engines will raise your search engine rankings (which means more traffic). So how do you get traffic? I’ll explain some methods I use below.

First off, you need to put your link anywhere you can. This includes signatures in forums, signatures in emails, in your AIM away messages, anywhere you can get it. Believe it or not, that alone will bring you in some traffic.

You may also want to try blog comments. If you can put comments on blogs that are related to your niche with a link back to your site, you’ll be amazed at the amount of traffic you can receive. You can even use a keyword as your “Name” to get some extra anchor text pointing to your site.

I recommend you only comment on blogs that have the DoFollow plugin activated. When you comment on blogs with DoFollow, they will help your blog gain PageRank, which is very important to a successful blog. If you’d like to find some DoFollow blogs, here are some “DoFollow search engines”. Simply search your niche and comment on those blogs:
BacklinkSpot.com – Search and Comment
Wibbly’s DoFollow Search Engine

Another great source of traffic can come from forums. When you join a forum, you have a chance to have a forum signature. Just put your link in your signature (using anchor text of course). You may even be able to link to more then one section of your site. A lot of forums have a 300 character signature limit. That means you can have up to 300 numbers, letters, and code in your signature.

You may even want to post about your site on a new thread, or find a topic related to your niche and post about your website on there. Just be sure you are providing posts that are of informational value. Nobody likes a spammer.

Next, you may want to try some social bookmarking. This will not only bring backlinks to your site, but others will be able to see your site and if they like it, they can vote for it, digg it, stumble it, etc. (all the other “bookmarking terms”). I’ve found a great site that will help you do this. It’s called OnlyWire and it’s a must-have blogging tool! Best of all, it’s free.

Last, you may want to try some article directories. Basically, you write an article, publish it in the proper category, and at the bottom of each article you have a chance to link to your site. Here is an example of what a short promotional paragraph would look like at the end of your article:

The author of this article is <your name>. He is owner of <anchor text to site>. If you’d like to learn more about <your subject>, you can visit <anchor text to site>. You’ll find all the information you need!

Note that I used anchor text to link to my site. Once again, this will help me increase my SERPs (search engine result page) rankings.

So where can you write and publish these articles to? Here’s some of my favorites:

1. EzineArticles
2. GoArticles
3. WebProNews
4. ArticleDashboard
5. SearchWarp

So start getting that traffic, money, and don’t give up! Once you give up on your blog, your visitors give up on you. And as I said before, visitors = money.