For those of you who haven’t had your head in the clouds, you know I recently had a blog comments contest. Today, I want to share with you some of what i have learned, as well as announce the winners of the 2 drawings that I am giving away.

This has been a great experience for me. I have run a giveaway before on my other blog, but this is the first time I have done one like this, and I want to show you what happened.

The Winners

First of all, let’s start out by announcing the winners of the 2 drawings

First drawing goes to….

Clayton of Journey of My Own. I have been following Clayton’s IM journey, almost from the beginning, and it is an inspiring story. He does not put on airs, or try to be an expert. He simply shares his experiences and willingly answers questions for others struggling to make their websites work.

Clayton gets 5 Unique articles on a topic of his choice, along with 10000 bookmarks spread across up to 10 urls.

and the Second Drawing goes to….

Kristi from Kikolani. I have recently come across Kristi’s blog, and I must say she has some really great stuff. I have really been impressed with what she has to say, even though our views don’t always see eye to eye. What works for her and what works for me are not always the same, but I recommend you check her out as you go through your own IM journey.

Kristi wins my IM Secrets audio series, where I go through some of the strategies that I have used to build my online business, choose niche markets, create content, and even a few strategies that I have used to spread my name around the net in various niches very quickly.

Congratulations to both winners. I will be emailing you both with your prize instructions.

My Results

This was a great opportunity for me personally. I have learned a lot from some of the things that I did, and I want to share them with you, in case you are wanting to run your own comment giveaway.

The first thing that I recommend is to target your contest. This time, I opened it up to all posts on my blog. this helped get some comments across the entire blog. However, it became difficult to keep up with all the comments going on. Select one or two posts to be the focus of your contest. Don’t drag things out and confuse yourself with too many conversations going at one time.

Second, Have your give away ready before you launch your contest. I had the IM Secrets recording, but I wasn’t happy with it, so I went back and recorded the whole thing again. The problem was that I came down with a summer cold, and wasn’t able to finish up at the time I should have. This is why it took my almost a week to announce the winners.

Have everything ready to go before you launch your contest. It will make life much easier in the long run.

Keep it short and simple. Rather than opening it up for a long term haul, keep the duration to a few days or a week at most. It became a distraction for me to have to keep up with the comments that were pouring in, and so I didn’t get some of the other work done that I wanted to. Clear your schedule, and be willing to focus most of your attention on the contest.

Next, Do more promotions. Although I spent a quite a bit of time on promoting during the contest, it didn’t build up as much as I wanted it to. I was distracted by a product launch going on, as well as a few other things and didn’t get as much traffic to the contest posts as i wanted to. Again, by limiting your contest to one or two posts this will give you a chance to focus more on promoting it properly.

If you know you are going to run a giveaway, spend some time pre-selling it before hand. This will get people interested, and ready to jump in before you begin. Perhaps a few days or a week before, make a post and drive a lot of traffic to that post announcing that you will be doing a contest, and what your contest rules are. This gives people the opportunity to plan on joining in when the contest goes live. Make sure you include the date that the contest will begin, so that people know when to schedule their time.

These are some of the things that I have learned real quick. As time goes on, I will probably see more things that could be better, and some things that went according to plan, so I will keep you up to date.

As I look back, all the way around it was a great experience for me. I got some really good comments, and I have learned a lot. Thanks to everyone who participated.

Thanks to everyone who came by during our comments contest. We are officially closing the contest now. Any comments up to now will be counted towards the contest.

Over the next couple of days, I will tally the comments, and do the drawing. I am going to announce the winner in a couple of days. They will be emailed with instructions, as well as getting a mention with a content link in post for their site. (we will use the url listed in the comments).

This is the first time that I have done a comment contest of this magnitude on this blog, and I learned a lot, which I will be sharing in the next few days. IF you are considering running a contest on your blog, you may want to check back, so that you can see some of the benefits, and some of the mistakes that I have made during the run here.

I also want to thank the folks from Famous Blogger and Comment Luv for the contest that they are running. I have met a lot of great bloggers, learned a few things for myself, and am enjoying the conversations that I have been a part of with other blogs around the web.

When you work online, creating customer connections is the key to finding your success.  I am surprised by how many people online don’t care, and don’t think that customer service applies to them. The fact is, every client you work for, every visitor that sees your site, and every person who signs up to your list is a customer, whether they buy from you today or not. You never know who they will refer to you, or how much they might spend in the future.

So, that leaves the question,  How do you connect with your customers? You should use every means possible to get people interested in your site.

Using Chats
One thing I like to do is chat with people in my market. I connect with people on instant messenger. Always make sure that you save your chat logs, if you want to do this. That way, you can go back and copy your conversation. Now, unless you have permission from the person that you are chatting with, I don’t recommend using the chat directly.
However, you can use the conversation as a launch pad to create some awesome content. Take the questions that they ask you. Use those for your subheadings. Then fill in with your answers.

When they ask you questions that you do not know the answer to, use it to do some research. This way, you help your readers, and increase your own knowledge and expertise.

How do you get people chatting?

One way I use to get people chatting is to offer it as a consultation. When you promote a product, offer a one hour consultation as a bonus. You can do this via chat, email, phone, or however you want to do it.

I do recommend that you make it a valuable consultation. I have received consultations before which did nothing to help me. All they did was pitch a membership program or paid consultation.

Now, if you want to do a consultation service, go for it. However, spend more time during your consultation assisting people. Don’t just use it as a way to promote products to people. You will lose more trust than you will gain this way.

Social Networking Sites
More and more, online marketing is a social game. Whether you use Facebook, Twitter, or other social sites you need to spend time connecting with people.  One thing that I find helpful is to post a daily tip, or motivational quote. This can build up interest, and will be noticed.

I did  this on one of my fan pages on Facebook. I wasn’t seeing comments or anything, so I stopped doing it. All of a sudden my fans started asking where the daily tips went. I never realized people noticed, since they wern’t saying anything. Just because you aren’t getting feedback doesn’t mean it goes unnoticed.
How do you connect with your customers? Let me know your experiences, good and bad. Tell me how you keep people coming back to see you again and again.

I just got a question from one of my clients asking how much time I spend on building links, and social networking. This seems to be the biggest struggle that people have with marketing their websites.  The biggest problem is that you can easily spend 80% of your time or more building links to your site.

I started in the same boat

Now, I won’t give away all my secrets here, but I will break down some of what I do in a day.

When I wrote my website traffic secrets report, I faced the same challenges. Now, this is still a good strategy, and if you are just starting out, you should really consider getting it to kick start your business. However, I found that it was still consuming too much of my time, so I started looking for a better way.

I am now writing a new e-book, which will be more detailed, and show everything that I am doing to build traffic to my sites. It still incorporates the traffic formula, but as times have changed over the last few months, I have found some easier ways. My new strategy incorporates more time on social traffic and less time wasted on posting links on worthless sites.(all my friends who have the Traffic Formula will get  free copy before it is released, so go ahead and jump on the traffic formula for now!)

How much time do you spend?

This all hinges on the keywords that you choose. You can go after keywords with 1k-3k searches per month, and get rankings with a few hundred back links to your site. However, doing this, you still spend most of your time off page.

Personally, I want to spend more of my time building my own site.

When you cut it down, and look at keywords with perhaps 500-700 monthly searches, you can easily get page one rankings with as little as 100 back links, and sometimes even less. I have one article that is on page 1 for its keyword with 10 back links. One thing that I have found with targeting these really long tail keywords is that I also tend to rank for other long tail searches, giving me even more exposure.

When it comes to my sites, I target the home page keyword for about 5-10k monthly searches, then 500-700 searches for my internal pages. This way, I can target more relevant traffic. As I build links to my internal pages, I also link to my home page, building up massive links to that page, and getting good rankings there.

If you just look at it page by page, you will start saying, this is crap. After all, you are not targeting enough traffic. But, this is because you don’t look at the big picture. I can target a keyword with 3k monthly searches and spend the next two weeks on back link building. I would write about 30 poorly written and spun articles, and spend hours submitting those articles to get enough back links, and hope I get my rankings up.

Give up on the crap content submitted to worthless sites.

In the same time, I could have written 10 high quality articles targeting 5oo monthly search keywords, giving me a wider range of potential customers, and totalling 5k monthly searches for those terms. And that doesn’t count all the other long tail searches that I can easily rank for with those same articles. I could spend a little more time writing a few high quality articles and submitting them to sites that give me traffic, and I have saved myself hours of work.Notice, I am not doing much time on back link building here.

If you know your topic (and your customers) well, you can do all that in less than 2 days, depending on how much time you have to spend.

Now, once you get these posts done, you don’t have to spend so much time on back link building, freeing you up to socialize, and create content for your own site. If you target a niche you are passionate about, you can do this without feelling like you are working, and still be getting good traffic.

How much time should you spend socializing?

Personally, I spend about 2 hours  a day, spread out across the day reading and posting in forums. At the same time, I am usually on Facebook, talking with friends, posting interesting tips to my followers, and building my relationships there.

I spend about 1 hour per day on other social sites:

Digg, Stumbleupon, Hubpage, & Multiply just to name a few of my favorites.

I spend about an hour a day spread out among other things using the Social poster at Article Productions (not using the aff link here, but if you want to support me, use the one in the sidebar), bookmarking my sites, and other sites relevant to the niche.

Also, I will spend about 2 hours per day searching commentluv blogs related to my latest post. I usually can read and comment on 4-5 blogs in my niche.

Now all this seems like a lot of time, but I am usually doing two or three of these all at once. I often have 7 or 8 tabs open on my browser, all with different sites that I am working on. For example, right now I am reading up on forums, chatting with my girlfriend on Facebook, writing this post, and answering comments on my relationships blog, all at once.

In the middle of all this, I will research and write 2-3 guest posts for other blogs, and check the conversations I have going on other sites to keep up the reputation I have built there.

Plus I have several folders open on my desktop with other things that I am working on.

Now, not everyone can multitask this way, so do what you can. Only you know how much time you have to spend. Also, start taking the knowledge you have, and build your own personal strategy. That is how I started. Besides, I am always looking for  a way to be more efficient with building my sites, and getting more exposure.

The fact is, social traffic is hard to work for, but if you do it right, you will find that you don’t need the search engine traffic any more. It can take some work to build up your reputation. This is especially true if you run in a niche like IM where people are always pushing products, and trying to sell you rather than trying to help you.

so, how much time do you spend on back link building?

what are you doing to give your site more exposure?

leave a comment on how you go about getting traffic to your site.

Ever since I did my guest post at FamousBloggers, I have taken a serious look at when to shut up and listen to my readers.  As I reflect on how to start a conversation with someone, I realized that I wasn’t really doing that myself.  Creating long enough content is important. However, knowing when to stop talking and listen is just as important.

One thing that a lot of the comments said was that they disagreed with how long your posts need to be. Upon reflection, I see where everyone is coming from. Perhaps I do tend to get a little long winded. I am figuring out when to stop talking and let my readers have their voice.

When you engage in a conversation with your friends, who dominates the conversation? You don’t want to ramble on and on for ten minutes. You get in, make a statement, and then shut up and listen. You let someone else talk, and then you may jump in and say something else. However, you have to know when to shut up in order for the conversation to flow.

As I am reading some of my previous posts, I realize that they sound more like a speech than a conversation. It’s time to quit preaching and learn how to engage people.

It will all come down to two things.

First, you have to know your audience. Do they want to read a long post, or are they looking for a quick read?  Some people are in a big hurry, and don’t want to read a long drawn out post. On the other hand, some people want to read an in depth post that really gets into the groove.This will do more to draw them into the conversation.

The second thing to look at is how you are writing. Every time you write for your blog, read through it. A long post can be effective, if it is necessary.  A lot of people proofread their articles for grammar and spelling, but do you ever look at it to cut out the fluff? I haven’t really done this up until now. Don’t be too lazy to write less. Go back through your post, and take out anything that is not necessary. You can cut a 1000 word post down to 700 or 800 words, just by killing the extraneous filler.

It will take a little time to get used to the flow, but you can if you take the time.

The funny thing is I have been writing about communication in relationships. Until this, I didn’t really apply it to my blog.  but that is what the blog is all about. You want to build a relationship with your readers, and draw them into the conversation. If you learn to listen to your readers as much as you talk to them, you will find that you never run out of things to say, and you may even find yourself with more than just a reader. you may wind up with new friends.

I want to know what you think.

How do you cut the fluff?  How do you tell when to shut up and listen?