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As a blogger, you are continuously creating content and you distribute it through your most effective channels. Hopefully, those actions will results in high volume traffic and plenty of backlinks across the blogosphere.

In that post, I would like to introduce you another way to create traffic and backlinks with your existing material. The only requirement is to already have enough valuable content, so that you don’t have to write anything else to use this strategy.

Creating pages that target a very specific audience may be very powerful to generate new traffic and backlinks. In fact, the first thing you have to do is to select your targeted audience. Are you targeted beginners in your niche? Intermediates? Experts? Or, maybe you want totarget business with low budget? Non-profit organizations? There are countless ways to segment your audience. However, it is critical to define it clearly and carefully; this is the basement of your whole strategy.

Once you’ll have you targeted audience properly defined, you’ll need to select the content that best fit with that audience. What would be especially useful and valuable for them? What would be meaningful and attractive for them? Some of your content will easily be selected, but some may not be so obvious. In that case, the best things would be to experiment. Just try to insert it in your selection and do some popularity measurement. How many pageview do you have on each article you select? You may be quite surprise to see that some article that were obvious to you are not so popular in reality. You may also observe that the opposite is also true!

You may be interested to see an example. The following screenshot shows how Darren Rowse integrates something close to that strategy to probloggers.net.

I would expect more benefits to create a real new page for that specific information. For example, creating a new page will allow you to be rank in search engines. In fact, it may rank very well if your articles are properly selected. And this is especially true if your new page gets plenty of relevant backlinks. In addition, you may also consider optimizing it with specific keywords. However, this kind of action may be done very carefully, because doing so may lead you far away from your initial goal: create a targeted page with relevant and valuable targeted information.

As usual, you will then need to promote your new targeted content. Note that this new content may help you to promote your blog by opening some doors. In fact, you may find new communities precisely interested on your targeted information. The more your content is targeted, the better your market penetration will be. Take the time to make a list of communities related to your content and create a true relationship with them. Moreover, this may help you to increase your visibility and your branding; which may finally ends, as an extra, in loyal readers.

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Create Viral Content

I’m planning to write 1 or 2 articles related to viral content in the next few weeks. In the meantime, I would like to share with you a great video from SEOmoz. This video is titled Whiteboard Friday - Why Your Viral Content Isn’t Working. It is well presented and quite relevant. I really recommend it!

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My article of April 4th was related to the Guest Blogging Contest of the Search Engine Journal (SEJ). In that posts, I was saying that you cannot loose by participating; you may only be a winner!

The contest is now started and I guess you may want to read the article I submitted. As a bonus, you’ll see my picture! The URL is the following: The Secret to Developing a Popular Blog

Of course, I would highly appreciate your support. The best way to support me is to read the article and to distribute it everywhere you can. It can be by sending it to a friend, twitting, commenting, make a post on it, send it to social media like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, reddit, etc. Also, as usually, I will highly appreciate your feedback!

Thanks in advance to all of you!

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Entrecard is a relatively new service based on the concept of online business card exchange. The business cards are 125×125 buttons. Now, let me explain how the whole system works and what the benefits are.

How it Works

First, you need to signup with Entrecard. The subscription is free. In fact, all you need is 5 minutes of your time and a 125×125 button that will well symbolize your blog. This will be your personal online business card.

You will then need to integrate the widget (piece of code) on your blog. There are 3 widget formats: the 127×148 slim widget, the 200×127 medium widget and the 250×127 wide widget. I would say that the last one is my preferred one and this is the widget I use in my sidebar. If you wonder which one you should choose, I would answer that it depends of your blog design. In my case, I have a large sidebar that allows me to use the wide format. Try to use the widget that will best fill your sidebar. Personally, I don’t like the medium one, so I would choose either the slim widget or the wide widget, but this is my personal opinion!

This widget allows you visitors to drop their business card. You earn 1 Entrecard credit each time someone drop its business card on your widget. You can earn additional credit by dropping your card on other blogs and when people buy advertisement on your Entrecard widget. Note that the price for buying advertisement is expressed in term of Entrecard credits. The price to advertise on your widget is determined by how many drop you did on other blogs and how many drop you get from others. For example, it cost actually 82 Entrecard credits to advertise on Catchtheposts.com.

Every request for advertisement on your blog passes by a moderation process. You have full control on the ads that will appear on your blog. The requests are first queued and you will be notified by email that someone waits for your approval. You may approve the ads or decline it. A reason for declining may be because the business card doesn’t match your quality standard or because the content of the blog is not relevant or may be offending.

You will notice that there is a queue and a waiting concept to advertise on some blogs. This means that even if you pay the appropriate credit number, you may need to wait your turn to show up your advertisement. For example, you see that the spot is full on Catchtheposts.com – which means that there is no place available – and the waiting time is 9 days.

The Benefits

There are 2 main benefits to use the Entrecard service. The first one is traffic generation. Of course, we are not talking about millions of hits, but this is a good traffic source for blogs startup. Wherever you drop your business card, many bloggers will drop back their business card on your blog. Don’t forget that any new visitor is a potential reader. The conversion is on your hands! If you have an attractive blog design and if your content is original and valuable, you may found some new readers with Entrecard. You will notice that your control panel informs you about who dropped their business card on your widget. It will allow you to visit their blog back and give traffic in return. This is just a matter of exchanging traffic and learning about other blogs. Maybe you’ll find great partners there!

The second benefit is the brand exposure. Entrecard gives you the opportunity to expose your brand by exchanging your business card with other blogs. Please, don’t miss that opportunity! I see day after day business card with simple text and few colors. How do you want the other blogs to see you? Do you want to be associated to professionalism and quality? Do you want to seriously build your brand? Don’t miss the opportunity to make a good first impression: create a great business card with your own blog signature! You don’t have to pay for a professional 125×125 button. You just have to take some days to sketch it and create it with Photoshop or Gimp, which is a free graphical software. And if you don’t figure out how you could do it, just contact me and we’ll find a way to build you something nice!

For more information on Entrecard, take a look at the official online guide.

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