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Creating a custom button for your blog to be used on the Google Toolbar is a great way to promote your blog. Once installed, the button can act as a graphical bookmark to your site. You and your readers can search your site using the search bar in the Google toolbar, without having to be on your site. In fact, you can highlight any text on any web page, click on your custom icon in the browser, and you will perform a search the text you just highlighted on your blog. The custom button can even list your last several entries, with data pulled from your feed.

I recently updated my Google toolbar for Simply Recipes and created a new one for a new site, Food Blog Search. (If you want to see the Google Toolbar in action, follow the instructions to add a button on the Food Blog Search site.) Google's instructions for making a custom button can be convoluted and overwhelming. It took me several hours over several days to work out the correct code for the toolbars. So to save any of you similar pain, I'm presenting the steps here.

Step 1: Install Google Toolbar

The Google Toolbar requires using either IE or Firefox for your browser. Go to this page at Google to install it.

This article is part of a series of posts on How to Build Blog Traffic (see Intro).

If our goal is to increase our blog traffic, the primary question we need to ask ourselves is, how do people get to our blogs in the first place? Understanding how people learn about our blogs, and make their way over to visit them, will help us better understand how to use technology to increase our visibility.

So, how do people find out about us?

This article is part of a series of posts on How to Build Blog Traffic (see Intro).

When I first started blogging in 2003, I viewed the exercise mostly as a way to express myself. I didn't know what a "blogroll" was, nor did I care that much when I learned. Over the last few years I have found that the main distinction between a blog and any other website, other than diary-like entries, is the interconnectedness with other bloggers who care about the same things I do. It's being part of a community of other similarly interested people that make blogging so compelling.

Engaging the community of people who care about the same things you do can exponentially enhance your blog's visibility. The following tips are obvious to me now, but weren't when I first started blogging:

This article is part of a series of posts on How to Build Blog Traffic (see Intro).

Everyone knows that if you want a successful blog you have to start with great content. But what does it mean to have great content? Your friends and family will read your blog because they know you and like you. To reach out beyond your social network to a much wider audience you need to provide something valuable, something a reader can't easily get elsewhere, or can't easily get all in one place. Here are some things to consider regarding what goes on the pages of your blog:

Be Useful, Entertaining, or Timely

The most successful blogs are useful, entertaining, timely, or a combination of all three. Of these three, probably the one that will have the most legs is "useful". When you present something that's useful, people will return to it over and over again. A blog like Darren Rowse' ProBlogger.net is filled with practical advice for bloggers. You can spend hours going through Darren's archives. The addictive Life Hacker blog recommends ideas and software to help us all become more productive. A new favorite is Lara Ferroni's Still LIfe with... blog about food photography. With each of these examples, the content doesn't expire the day it is written, but remains valuable to readers for months or even years.

You spend hours, days, weeks, months writing, photographing, uploading, editing your blog. At the end of the day you hope that someone (or more than a few someones) takes the time to read it. One would think that it is pretty obvious the steps one must take to build an audience, or build traffic to one's blog; you have to have great content, right? But less obvious are the roles that community and technology play in increasing your blog audience.

In preparation for a workshop I'm leading at BlogHer '06 I'll be writing up a series of posts about all the different things you can do to increase traffic to your blog - content, site traffic - what it is and how to measure, the stats you should care about, how people find your site, Google, search engines, and SEO, site design, RSS, community, and tags. The three main themes that we'll see over and over again are content, community, and technology.

Everyone loves full text RSS feeds; they make reading blogs so much more convenient. The downside for the creator of the feed is that RSS makes it incredibly easy for anyone to pull content from a feed and publish it on a website, without the explicit permission of the content creator. If you publish a full feed, all of your content can be put on someone else's site. There are now automated programs that search the web for feeds, aggregate them based on subject matter, and publish them onto websites with the sole purpose of earning a few Adsense bucks from those who find the site through search engine results.

Many bloggers won't care. But if you make any Adsense revenue yourself from the content on your site, or you enjoy high Google page rank for your pages, it might bother you to find the content that you spent hours creating appearing on these essentially scam sites.

Do you know that your work is protected by copyright law, even if you don't put a copyright notice on your site? It is, unless you have released your content under a Creative Commons license, and then it is subject to the terms of that license. Photography, original literary works (like the words on this entry), original graphics, are all protected. Methods, recipes, basic 1-2-3 instructions aren't. (They are protected under Patent law, if you choose to file for a patent.)

So, what to do.

Updated March 9, 2007

The Amazon Associates program allows you to receive a sales commission from the sale of Amazon products that you promote on your website. The easiest way to take advantage of the Amazon Associates program is to use Amazon's Build Links feature to build some simple links to specific products or groups of products. If you don't want to use the graphical ads that Amazon provides, you can customize the link and select a basic display to get the specific URL for the product you want.

Amazon.com also allows developers to tap directly into its product database through Amazon Web Services (AWS). In addition to simple product links, as an Amazon Associate, you can use a number of scripts, programs, and services to serve up ads that vary upon browser refresh and even full-fledged Amazon stores. Here are a few options:

rsContext

rsContext is a PHP script which displays ads for Amazon.com (and Amazon.co.uk) products, using Amazon Web Services. One benefit for rsContext ads is that they can easily be displayed as the "alternative ad" for Google's Adsense ads.

rsContext requires both PHP and MySQL. It helps to have access to phpMyAdmin or a tool like it to edit your MySQL database. The rsContext Setup Tool helps to generate the alternative ad code you need for the Google script.

Here's an example:

If you are interested in driving more traffic to your blog, the first thing you should do is create useful, compelling content. The next thing you should do is make sure that content is easily found in search results from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Movable Type does a few things automatically that are very helpful to getting ranked higher in search engines. For example, Google likes pages that are well structured, with header and title tags, and with lots of text. The default templates in MT ensure that the pages of your blog are well structured with H1, H2, and H3 header tags, and even title tags that include the name of the entry in them.

Here are some additional steps you can take:

DO's

1. Pick easy-to-reference titles for your entries. If your entry is about armadillo sleeping patterns, use "Armadillo Sleeping Patterns" as a title for your entry, not "Desert Dozing". Search engines work off of "keywords". Think about what words people would use to search for your entry and then use those words in the title. This advice goes against the conventional wisdom of having "catchy" headlines for your blog entries. Catchy or obscure titles are fine if you have an established readership like some of the more popular bloggers out there. But if you want to attract people who may not know you exist in the first place, and you have content that would be useful to them, keep the entry titles simple and straightforward. Put keywords in your titles.

Make sure your the title tag in the header of your individual entry archive template includes the name of the entry.

Google has some useful tips on how to optimize the use of Google Adsense on one's web pages. No surprise - the hottest "hot spot" for the best click-through returns lies right in the middle of your content.

How does one place a Google Adsense ad (or any other ad, bit of text, or image for that matter) between entries on the main index page of your MT weblog? By using a simple trick of the "lastn" and "offset" attributes outlined in the MT manual section on Displaying Entries.

Normally on your Main Index template, you would have your MTEntries section laid out like so (MT3.2):

This article was written several years ago. There are no plans to update it. A great site to read if you are interested in making money with your blog is Darren Rowse's ProBlogger.net. ~Elise March 1, 2007

If you are putting hours into writing content for your blog, you may want to make a few bucks (or more) to help pay for hosting charges and other costs associated with running it. Some bloggers find that they can make more than just small change, but most not enough to quit their day job. In any case, here are a few of the more popular methods.

Several ways by which you can make money with your weblog include Google Adsense, Amazon Associates, various other affiliate programs, advertising, and donations. Keep in mind that the success of these programs is highly dependent upon your content and the level of traffic you get to your site.

Google Adsense

Since its launch in the spring of 2003, ads by Google have proliferated throughout the world of blogs and other sites, making it easy for thousands of website owners to make money from the content on their sites. Usually it's not a lot of money, but the ads are easy to implement, relevant to the content on your pages, and unobtrusive compared to the blinking banners and seemingly self-propagating popup ads on many sites.