Let’s be blunt. When you first sign up on Triond, you think to yourself, “This is great! I can finally write articles to my heart’s content and make good money off it too!” Then, within a month of signing up, your view changes to, “This sucks! I already have 10 articles, they’ve each got only 20 views or less, and I only have $0.10 in my account.” Now, to be fair, I can understand your anger. At a real job, minimum wage is usually at least $10.00 an hour. If it took you 5 hours to write those 10 articles, you should’ve made at least $50.00 – not a measly 10 cents.

Well, that’s where advertising kicks into play. Chan Lee Peng put it best when he said that, “Back link is by far the best strategy which is used to attract readers/ visitors to your article/ website” in his article entitled “How to Get Non-stop Traffic and Page Views to Your Websites or Articles.”

Aside from submitting your article links to the major search engines, and like Chan said, using Yahoo! Answers and E-pinion, I have 5 additional tips to add. I have tried all of the strategies myself and they seem to be working, at least for the moment anyway.

Affiliations

If you have a website or a blog, it’s quite common to affiliate with other websites and blogs. Placing a small text or picture link on your site in exchange for placing your text or picture link on another site is relatively common practice these days. It’s not that someone who views your site or the other site will click on the affiliate link, but it’s more of the fact that the more sites the link to your article is on, the easier it is for search engines to find it, and the higher up in the search results your article will be.

Free Banners

If you’re good at using Adobe Photoshop, you can take a look at Free Banners, a banners-exchange site whereby placing a small banner code in your website will let you earn credits that are automatically used to advertise your banner on other websites. In addition, if you place the banner code at the top of your website pages, you’ll automatically obtain Gold Membership from Free Banners, allowing other Gold Members to view your banner, thus increasing the number of people checking out your articles.

Your banner can even be as simple as a plain white rectangle with the name of your article on it.

Invision Power Boards

There are many forum board hosting services on the World-Wide-Web, but the major ones are phpBB 3.0, Invision Power Boards, and V-Bulletin. Of these three services, Invision Power Boards has the best search engine crawling capabilities. It has a feature in the Administration Control Panel of its boards that lets forum administrators allow “Search Engine Spiders” to crawl your board’s pages and add them to the engine’s search results. For example, in the Administrator Control Panel on my forum board, my statistics show that Google crawls through my forum at least 5 times every day, adding new forum post links to their search engine.

Keep in mind that Invision Power Boards is completely different to InvisionFree, an older version which does not have the same success when it comes to search engines crawling your pages.

Even if you have no interest in creating or maintaining a forum board, create one just to post links to your articles. Enable the “Search Engine Spiders” option in your Administrator Control Panel, and search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Live and HotBot will crawl through your forum board. Any links on your board to your articles will also be crawled through and added to the search engines as well.

Link Referral

Previously called Link Exchange until it was bought over by Microsoft and its original site transformed into a Microsoft Office advertising page (go figure, here we go again with greedy powerhouse Bill Gates), Link Referral is just what its name suggests – a site where you can refer a link to other people. The site has thousands of members, and hundreds of thousands of submitted links in their database. In short, it’s like submitting your site to a search engine. The difference is that YOU alone control how high your link appears in Link Referral’s Search Engine Database.

Every day, you have the option of viewing 30 other member-submitted links, posting 5 reviews on other links, selecting 1 link as your favorite for the day, and writing 1 post for the Link Referral forum board. If you do all of this on a daily basis (they say it takes 45 minutes per day, but in my experience it takes about 2 hours), your link’s position on the site’s Search Engine results will substantially increase. Also, the more detailed reviews you post on other people’s sites, the better grade you get as your review rating. A higher grade also affects your link’s position. I have an ‘A’ grade, and by completing the 30 visits, 5 reviews, 1 favorite and 1 forum post, I can get my site to within the top 3 positions in the Link Referral search engine. The top 5 spots in the search engine rack up 20 to 60 visits each day, so you can see the earnings potential when you add up the number of people viewing your Triond article.

Triond Community Forums

The official Triond Community Forums, where all Triond members are encouraged to communicate with other Triond members. Expand your reputation, and you’ll gain more exposure and thus earnings for any content you submit to Triond itself.