It’s in many top-10 lists of things to do to drive more traffic to your blog: promote your blog in your email signature. It’s difficult to track how much traffic one gets from email signatures but I’m convinced it works. Having your blog name and URL as well as links to your Skype and facebook/Twitter pages under each email you send provides your contacts with more options to connect with you. Furthermore, each and every person you email is a potential reader of your blog. In addition, signatures give your emails a distinctive touch.

Until recently, I used Gmail’s built-in signature option to add my name, blog URL and Twitter account to every email I sent. Then, a few weeks ago, I discovered WiseStamp.

WiseStamp

WiseStamp is a brilliant application that allows its users to create customized email signatures. You can include your own text, change the colour and font style, add an image and URLs AND it features a nifty set of social media icons to which you can link your various facebook, Twitter, flickr accounts. These icons are included at the bottom of every outgoing email – you can specify if the signature appears only in new emails and/or in replies/forwards. You can also create separate signatures for personal and business emails.

sample email signature

That’s not all WiseStamp offers. You can also include your MSN and Skype names – these appear as icons as well. The best feature, in my opinion, is the simple RSS feed that adds a link highlighting your latest blog post.

WiseStamp is still in beta and is currently available for a limited number of browsers, such as Firefox and Google Chrome (they’re working on including Safari soon). It also only works with the big names in webmail programs: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL.

I’ve been using WiseStamp for about a week now and I’m pleased with its many customizable features – the coolest thing is seeing my latest blog post at the bottom of every email I send. WiseStamp certainly gets a thumbs up from me!

Follow WiseStamp on Twitter.

In the past few months, I’ve received a steady amount of traffic from sites like Mashable, ProBlogger and recently, the New York Times. At first I wondered why I was getting traffic from these sites, then I realised that I’d left comments on various articles. The traffic I receive isn’t much – at most 5-10 views a day – but it introduces new readers to my blogs. I once left a comment on a Mashable article that was trending. My contribution to the discussion prompted a modest ‘rush’ (30-50 visits a day during the first few days) to my blog.

This has taught me that leaving relevant comments on other blogs or websites does help to increase the readership base of your blog. Most blogs/sites allow commenters to add their URL’s and that’s how readers find you. Leaving comments on other blogs/sites is now one of my strategies to drive traffic to my blogs. I’m not too particular about which blogs I leave comments on – just as long as the post piques my interest and I have something to say about it.

When leaving a comment, please keep the following points in mind:

1. Read the post!
2. Leave a comment that’s relevant and which adds value to the discussion
3. Fill in your URL
4. It’s ok to add a link to one of your blog posts if you think it adds value (don’t include more than two links)
5. Go back to the post a day later and see if anyone has replied to your comment. If appropriate, leave a follow-up comment.

I wrote an article several months ago about the role travel bloggers can play in marketing travel. My fellow travel blogger, Andy Jarosz recently published an insightful post about travel bloggers promoting destinations. Since my first ‘Marketing Travel’ article, I’ve been on two blog (or ‘fam’) trips.

Travel bloggers in Barcelona

Travel Blogger trip to Catalonia

The first was to Catalonia, Spain, organised by the Tourism Department of Catalonia. Ten travel bloggers from Spain, the Netherlands (me), France, England and the USA were invited for a four-day all-expenses paid trip to Catalonia. The tweeting started in earnest in the run-up to the trip. A hashtag for tweets #catexp (for Catalunya Experience) was created, making it easy for everyone to follow the trip. The trip itinerary was diverse and action-packed, from a culinary course in Barcelona to hiking and quad-biking in the mountains to a Segway tour of Barcelona. The organisers did a brilliant job and the trip received tremendous exposure by means of thousands of tweets and retweets, and a broad array of blog posts (in English, Spanish and French), videos and photos. One of the participants, Rich Whitaker, compiled a list of the blog output generated by that trip. The amount (30 blog posts, 10 videos & 6 flickr photo sets) and quality of the content is truly staggering. Here are the stats of my three posts:

• Experiencing Catalonia: 940 views, 26 retweets.
• Culinary Journey: Castellar del Riu: 1,081 views, 53 retweets.
• The Delights of La Boqueria: 1,328 views, 85 retweets.

The Catalunya Experience travel blogger trip is a classic example of how tourism offices and tour operators can collaborate with travel bloggers to generate buzz for a certain destination. Using the boundless possibilities of social media (primarily blogs, twitter, facebook and flickr), travel bloggers are able to generate publicity for destinations that can reach thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of people. The best thing about a blog post or online video, as opposed to a newspaper or magazine article, is that it stays on the internet for as long as the blog exists. In addition, social media channels are interactive platforms which allow readers to ask questions and find out more, making it even more appealing as a means to convert initial interest into a booking.

Publicity for City Inn Birmingham, with their iMac-equipped rooms

Birmingham

My second fam trip was my recent weekend in Birmingham, England. The trip was sponsored by Visit Birmingham and bmibaby. Unlike the fam trip to Catalonia, I was on my own this time. I specifically asked for lots of free time so I could experience the city on my own. I tweeted as I explored the city, sending photos and links of places I visited to my Velvet Escape Twitter account. I also wrote two posts on my Velvet Escape blog covering the trip. To provide an idea of the kind of publicity that can be generated by a single blogger on a fam trip, I’ve listed below the stats of my Birmingham tweets and blog posts (all stats as at Feb. 2nd, 2010, though the numbers will rise after this post is published).

Posts

• Experiencing Birmingham (1st post): 667 views, 117 retweets: http://su.pr/2h1l8u
• Ten things to do in Birmingham (post-trip post): 888 views, 48 retweets  http://su.pr/2kOmka

Tweets with links

• 180 views; 11 retweets: And… it’s stopped raining! #brumtwitrip Off for a pint now before dinner at Asha’s http://su.pr/1baAa5
• 139 views; 1 retweet: City Inn has attentive service, good b’fast selection, iMacs/free wifi in evry rm. Bthrms a tad small tho! http://su.pr/2ScyIj #brumtwitrip
• 228 views; 5 retweets: I really enjoyed my tour of the BBC. See my news broadcast by entering code: 012478578 in BeOnTV http://su.pr/5L77Ec #brumtwitrip

Twitpics

• 121 views: http://www.twitpic.com/z6xmo (me & my iMac in the room: City Inn)
• 61 views: http://www.twitpic.com/z9arv (Brindleyplace)
• 26 views: http://www.twitpic.com/z9aym (ferris wheel B’ham)
• 61 views: http://www.twitpic.com/z9bas (curry at Asha’s)
• 47 views: http://www.twitpic.com/zdu4c (BMAG)
• 72 views: http://www.twitpic.com/zducr (the Bull)
• 72 views: http://www.twitpic.com/zdun0 (jelly bean bull)
• 121 views: http://www.twitpic.com/zdux8 (Selfridges building)
• 72 views: http://www.twitpic.com/zdvjo (Baskerville font)
• 57 views: http://www.twitpic.com/zdvvu (Custard Factory)
• 91 views: http://www.twitpic.com/zdwg7 (interior Selfridges)
• 51 views: http://www.twitpic.com/zdz9c (interior BMAG)
• 56 views: http://www.twitpic.com/zj23f (Mailbox building)

A quick glance will tell you that thousands of views and hundreds of retweets were generated by this trip, and it doesn’t stop there. These numbers will only grow as time passes. Moreover, these numbers were generated by a single travel blogger. Imagine what a group of travel bloggers could do!

Velvet Escape (@velvetescape) offers travel writing and travel marketing services while Velvet Connect (@velvetconnect) offers social media advisory, community-building/management and networking services. In addition, I am well-placed to collaborate with tourism offices/travel companies and/or PR agencies to select the best travel bloggers for fam trips as well as to generate exciting ideas to facilitate a successful travel blogger fam trip.

I know the feeling. It’s late, you’ve been on Twitter for hours (why didn’t they warn me it’s addictive?!!) and you’re about to nod off. Just one last tweet to sign off, you think. Before your fingers hit the keyboard to say “Good night”, think again about the importance of that last tweet.

The great thing about Twitter is it’s global 24/7 character. We can interact with people from all walks of life, across the world, throughout the day. Our Twitter feed doesn’t stop when we shut down our computers and go to bed. It remains a hive of activity as your followers in other time zones (or the insomniacs among us) continue to tweet. While you’re sleeping, many others will be checking out your profile to see if you’re worth a follow. With this in mind, it’s worthwhile to save a link to an interesting article (it could be your own) for your last tweet. Save the best for last… as they say. If you haven’t saved anything, run through your tweet stream and re-tweet anything that takes your fancy. If you find it interesting, chances are, your potential followers will find it interesting too and will hit the ‘Follow’ button in a flash, and re-tweet.

By the morning, your last tweet may have gone viral and you would’ve added loads of new followers. Something like this probably wouldn’t happen if you’d simply tweeted “Good night”!

In the wonderful world of WordPress, thousands of plugins are available which have a myriad of functions. There are plugins which do some serious behind-the-scenes work while others simply add an appealing touch to blogs. When I visit other blogs, I always make it a point to check out which (visible) plugins are being used and if there’s one which may be handy for me. That’s how I made my latest (and biggest) discovery – an absolutely brilliant plugin – but more on that later.

I currently use 16 plugins on my Velvet Escape blog and 10 on Velvet Connect. I’m always careful about adding new plugins as they may make a blog pretty heavy and hence slow down the page load speed so I try to keep the number of plugins used to around 15 (though less is better). There are some plugins though which are indispensable as they add enormous value to blogs, either behind-the-scenes or aesthetically. I’ve listed below eight of my favourite plugins which I cannot do without:

1. Add to Any This plugin inserts a small bar under each post which allows readers to email, bookmark or share the post on a variety of social media platforms.

2. All in One SEO Pack Another must-have plugin that does great behind-the-scenes work. It optimises blog posts for SEO purposes by, among others, automatically creating meta tags. It’s perfect for blogger newbies as you only need to install it and it does the rest.

3. Google XML Sitemaps This plugin automatically generates an XML sitemap, hence making it easier for search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to index your blog. Anything that makes it easier for search engines to find my posts and index them gets a thumbs up from me!

4. Ultimate Google Analytics enables Google’s famed analytics on your blog. It’s a great plugin that tracks traffic, external links, email links, links to downloads, etc…

5. WP Spam Free This was one of the first plugins that I installed. It helps to eliminate spam on blogs, both in the comment fields and the contact form. So far, it’s blocked almost 6,000 comment spam on my blogs!

6. StatPress Reloaded Ok, you might be wondering why I use two analytics plugins. The answer is simple, I’m just hooked on this plugin! This plugin’s biggest draw is that it provides real-time stats. It also features a graph which provides an insightful illustration of my traffic stats with just one glance. Oh, and there’s the Spy feature which shows who’s just visited my blog and it also tracks traffic generated through Google Images searches (and the search terms).

7. Broken Link Checker It’s quite annoying for readers when links stop working – they may get so annoyed and never return! This plugin continuously scans all links on my blog and checks if any link is broken. Any broken link is immediately highlighted on my Dashboard, prompting an action.

8. Ahhh… I’ve saved the best for last! I discovered this plugin a month ago and I’m totally blown away by its features and the enormous value it adds to my blog. It’s called Apture and I highly recommend it. What does it do? Gosh, where do I start? It allows you to easily search for relevant content (be it a map, an article, an image, a video, etc… on Google Maps, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, etc..) and either link to it or embed it in your blog post. You can also upload and embed your own content such as pdf’s, Powerpoint presentations, Word documents or Excel worksheets. I can’t stop raving about this plugin and I recommend you check it out. There are so many features, many of which are still unknown to me, but an article on Problogger provides a detailed description of this brilliant plugin!