The sure way to get at the top of any blog toplist and boost your traffic

March 3rd, 2007 § 40

All bloggers want to promote their blogs to drive in traffic. Submitting blogs in blog directories and Toplists fitting particular category help people find you quicker, this said if they noticed your blog. How better could you do this than getting at the top position of Toplists like Top100Bloggers,UBSquare and others. Today I’ll show you how. This trick is simple yet powerful and you can even use it in your profiles page in any account like your Hi5,MySpace,Facebook account to promote your blog among your friends and visitors. Infact the possibilities are endless from promoting your blog in forum or on anything that allows you to display any picture file with your account.

All we’ll need is for you to create a banner picture and getting your feeds burnt at Feedburner. The principle behind is that good content acts as a traffic bait and showing it to those TopList visitors get them coming in, increasing your traffic and thus your rank position in the Toplist for more and more traffic. The trick resumes in the blog banner that the toplist allows you to display for your blog on the list. We’ll use it to display your best latest posts randomly and hence attract in visitors. After reading through, you’ll get a traffic bait like this in those lists and start collecting visitors :

creating your “smart” banner
Get to your favourite Toplist account and note the dimensions it allows for banner picture. Next launch your favourite graphics program and create a new picture of that dimension with a white background(to easily read your content). Put in your cool pictures on that banner(without blog name or description) making sure to leave a white space of about half the size of the overall banner in the lower part. Don’t forget to get the banner as rocking as possible to capture the attention of visitors on the toplist. It should be looking like this :

When it’s done save the image in the .gif format making sure it’s of reasonable size since lots of toplists impose a banner picture size limit.

giving content to the banner
Now we have got our nice banner picture ready to promote our blog so let’s continue with the most important part : getting your content on it. Login to your Feedburner’s account or create one for free and burn that feeds of yours. Onto your Feedburner’s account section, click the Publicize tab.

Move on to the left sidebar and click on Headline Animator. It’s here that we’ll built that great banner of yours. Scroll to the lower part of the page until you hit the Theme section. From this Theme’s dropdown menu, select Provide your own background. A popup dialog box will appear to tell you to overwrite your themes settings, click Ok to continue.

We’ll need to put that banner we created above in there so first we’ll need to upload it somewhere and provide the given address/url. Get to any picture hosting service like ImageShack or Flickr, upload your banner and get the address to it. Put that same address in the Image URL field under the Background Image section and click on the Load button next to it. It should then appear in the lowest part of that page in the grid area.

Now it’s your turn for the fun part. Tick the title and date checkbox filling them respectively with your information in the appropriate format for the date one. Play with the width you want to set for the date and the headlines(posts on your blog) to appear and all changes you make will appear in the grid area with your banner picture.

You can move the respective text lines in the banner picture to suit the different components’ section position and layout. Position the date and headline text within the white space you made on the banner so that your content can be read easily and clearly. I would also suggest you moving them to the left side for better placement while giving your Headlines a width of the maximum size to fit any long post titles. You can also play with the colour in the colour palette to fit with your banner picture and overall site design.

After setting all your options and colour preferences, click the Activate button in the lowest part of the page to complete the process and get everything working.

Wait! Don’t close that page yet! Move to the top side of it until you spot the Your Active Headline Animator section where you’ll also be provided with your great banner displaying your content. There you’ll see your banner code(with link tag). You can place that piece of code anywhere allowing you to display a banner/picture to promote your content and hence increase your traffic.

For Blog Toplist which require you to place an image link, just copy the image link from the code which you’ll find inside the image source tag. Here’s an example for clarification purpose.

Original code offered by Feedburner :

< a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/squarerss">< img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/squarerss.gif" style="border:0" alt="BlogoSquare" / >< /a >

here’s the banner link from the above code : http://feeds.feedburner.com/squarerss.gif

So grab this link, store it somewhere securely and place it anywhere that allows you to place a banner/image along with your profile. For blog toplists, just login to your account and provide that banner link to be used for your blog.

a universal traffic catcher
Here you’re with the most powerful traffic catcher in the form of a simple image link as simple as that. The most important part also relies in your banner look. The more attractive it is, the more people will remark it and follow on to your blog. How did you find this article? Did it help? Would you need any further clarification on any part of it? Please leave your comments or contact me. This guide is by no mean the ultimate one for getting all the traffic you deserve, so make sure to follow on with my future posts which will detail you that.

Digg this article if you found it useful.

Recommended reading:

  1. For all those new to Feedburner
  2. Feedburner covering on Headline Animator

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