As you most likely know, traffic is a necessity to have a successful site, as no matter how good your content is, if nobody sees it, it's all a waste of time. Over the past couple of weeks, we have been exploring many different options for attracting new visitors to our site, and we would like to share our findings.

We will update this section any time we find new and interesting ways to increase your site traffic on the web.

Last Updated : November 23, 2006

Blog Listing / RSS Feed submission sites
Most blog sites nowadays have an RSS feed (for more information, see this post) which helps deliver updates to your readers without them visiting your site. Blog listing sites are also a great way of attracting fresh traffic and new readers alike.

Technorati – One of the most popular blog listing sites there is. A definite must for bloggers. Favorite us!
Feedburner – Great rss subscription based service for bloggers. Tracks your rss subscribers.
Blog Explosion - A unique concept, where you earn credits which you can transfer into free traffic. Sign up here Warning : This could be considered as "illegal page impressions" by google adsense.
Bloglines - Another popular blog listing and tracking service. Track us!
Feedblitz - Turn your rss feed into an email subscription service. Subscribe to our feed via email

Compendiums – Explore these over multiple sittings!
TopRank Monster RSS and Blog Directory List - A huge list of blog and rss submission sites.
RSSTop55 – Another quite extensive list.
ODP Weblogs directory - Another large listing of blog directories from dmoz.org

So far these have provided us with very little traffic, but their impact on page rankings is yet unknown.

Web tools
Here you will find some tools that we have found particularly helpful.

Blogrolling - A very useful tool for cross linking with others easily. (See our blogroll on the right)
Google Webmaster Tools - Lots of good tools to increase your visibility on google.
Google Adsense - Monetize your site with the best ad service out there. (Please use our Adsense button link on the right sidebar to support us)
Paypal – A necessity for online transactions.
RSS Button Maker - Nice and easy way to make rss buttons for loads of rss tracking services.
Google Ads Blacklist – Low payment per click for your google ads? Use this to eliminate most MFA and low paying advertisers. (Highly recommended)

SEO tools
Google Analytics - A superb tool to analyse your traffic, and where visitors are clicking, ad conversion rates, page stats etc.
HitTail - A tracking system that analyzes the way search engines see you. Helps with keywords and search traffic.
103bees - Another search traffic tracking system. This shows you where exactly users from search engines came from. For example, user searched "money journey", and you were listed on page 2 rank 23.

Pinging Services
Use these to let multiple listing sites know that you have updated your site.

Pingoat
Pingomatic
Feedping

Interesting Links
25 Tips for Marketing Your Blog
Building an RSS feed - How to build your own rss feed (tech knowledge needed).

Tips
1. Submit your site to google, and use their webmaster tools. Also, submit a regularly updated sitemap to them. You can try this software; we are currently using it and it's quite good.
2. Be patient! Traffic doesn't appear overnight, it takes time.

Feel free to comment with any other tips you may have, and we'll add them to this list (with credit to you of course!)

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Now that we are finally indexed on Yahoo and Google, a thought popped into my mind when I first saw our listing. It contains not only our title, but our motto as well.

“Making money is easy, we’ll prove it!”

I’m sure seeing this for the first time, you’ll have your doubts. Let me assure you however, that maybe this statement is not true in the traditional sense of the word, but after reading this, you’ll believe me.

Making money takes a lot of hard work, everyone knows this and if you believe that there is a magical “get rich quick” scheme out there, you are only kidding yourself. One common misconception however is that work is... well work; a tedious, annoying task that just has to get done. Here’s the key, if you are doing something that you are passionate about, work becomes enjoyable! You will put more effort into what you are doing, and the quality of your work will improve dramatically. Not only that, but you will want to work. For example, even though Chris and I are still full time students, pretty much all we can think about is working on our projects.

If you find something you love, you will want to learn as much about it as you can. In this way, your knowledge will increase and the results of your work will be much more profitable. Absorb as much as you can. Learning should not only be interesting for you, but might give you many great ideas for future endeavours.

The bottom line is that you have to work hard to make money, but if it is something you are passionate about, it’s easy! Try new things, experiment, and find something you love and run with it, just as we are doing. If you still need more convincing... we have found our calling, so keep checking in, and we’ll prove it!

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I’ve finally compiled some rough contest details for all of you that haven’t heard about it. Take a peek; I’m sure you’ll be excited to participate!

Tim and I have decided to hold a contest based on when we are going to reach our goal of earning one million dollars. To give a brief summary, there will be 4 milestones in our journey where you will guess which month of what year that we will hit the $100,000, $250,000, $500,000 and one million dollar marks.

This is how it will work. If you correctly guess the month and year in which we hit a milestone, your name will be entered into a drawing along with the rest of the participants who registered the same guess. The longer the interval since your guess, the greater the number of entries with your name are entered since it is much more difficult to guess farther ahead of time.

There may be additional twists and turns to get more entries, more ideas will come with further updates. If you have an idea, drop us a line through the comment field below! Also, the specifics on the number of times your name could be entered will come at a later date when all the details are finely tuned.

Now, we’re sure you are wondering what exactly it is you will be winning. Well, that’s simple; since the whole purpose of the site is to help people start their own business, then why not give them something that will help kick-start their business... MONEY! How much? Well we’re keeping that to ourselves for now, but we will make that known soon!

We hope by holding this contest, we will encourage you to join our community and share your knowledge, as well as learn from others; all in the hopes of helping you become a successful entrepreneur.

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If you remember a few posts back, I started writing about how investing is a great way to make money. Well that’s all good, but the problem is when starting from scratch like we are, you don’t always have much money lying around to invest with. That's alright though, because you have to start somewhere.

It’s an advantage if you have low financial responsibilities. For example, say you had a car loan to pay off, rent, and kids, among other things. While your business could be successful, it would be difficult to see it expand as all of your profits would go towards your immediate expenses.

In our case, we are quite fortunate as we soon will both have lots of time to work, and we have low financial responsibilities, so almost all of our profits can be re-injected into our projects and therefore they can grow. As our profits grow, we invest more. It’s a very nice loop. So, if all goes well, our journey could look something like this:

Of course, that’s a bit over exaggerated, but you get the point. It takes a while to get started, but once you have money coming in, you can re-invest it and make more faster. Now, I’m not saying that if you cannot re-invest your profits you will not be successful, far from it. It might be a bit harder, but if you have the drive, you will succeed no matter what.

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I’ve been reading up a bit more on blogging, since I am relatively new to this, and somewhere I picked up a notion that ads on a blog are usually frowned upon. Well, I’m not really sure if this is true or not, but I’ve been thinking a lot about this notion, and came up with a few thoughts.

First of all, as you know we are on the journey to a million dollars; this is only the first of our attempts to generate revenue. As you can see in our project section, we’ve got other things going (albeit slowly due to school, but that should change soon) and other ideas as well. So, if these ads are not well received, we’ll probably just take them down. However, this leads me to my second thought.

As we have mentioned, Google Ads are content specific, so what you see actually has to do with something on the site; in our case, making money. Our goal is really to give you the reader as much information, strategy, and ideas as possible to embark on your own journey to a million, and I think some of the opportunities listed in these ads really might help you out. We’ve tried to blacklist most MFA sites (made-for-[google]adsense, meaning spam ad sites) and are still testing things out, but most of these opportunities could be quite interesting for you if you’re willing to work towards your goal.

Like them or not, please let us know. Comment, start a forum topic, or e-mail us! Feedback is always appreciated, and we hope to create a community of likeminded entrepreneurs to help each other out towards many successful journeys!

We’ll be back soon with some more business ideas, as well as some information on blog/rss site listings.

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