This guest post is by Issy Eyre of Fennel & Fern.

I’ll let you into a secret. One of the key ways I grew my traffic for my gardening blog Fennel & Fern wasn’t through clever SEO campaigns. It wasn’t through endless tweeting, or sucking up to other bloggers (although I’ve been guilty of all of those things—and more).

Instead, I used showcase websites to show off my content to a targeted group of users who I knew would love it. The lifestyle blogging community is lucky enough to have plenty of sites that showcase and link directly to quality blog posts, and these sites bring in a wealth of quality readers.

When one of my posts gets a StumbleUpon, I can get a thousand readers on my site within a couple of hours. But the average time spent on the site falls dramatically, from an everyday 3.5 minutes to just ten seconds, and naturally the bounce rate soars. These readers aren’t going to be digging into my site, or clicking on my advertisements, or subscribing to my emails.

But when one of my posts appears on the front page of TasteSpotting, 300 readers turn up, and the average time spent on site actually goes up to just over four minutes. The number of actions per visit is up as well, and I always see a little spike in email subscriptions. This is because showcase sites are targeted perfectly. I know that everyone who looks at my post on sundried tomatoes is a massive foodie, and so they’ll love my blog. They will read the whole recipe.

I’m such a big fan of the traffic-growing magic of showcase sites that I set up my own for the gardening blogging community, called GardenGrab. This also makes me quite popular with other garden bloggers, as I promote their content for them.

The best showcase sites

For food, try TasteSpotting, FoodGawker, Bkfst, and Refrigerator Soup.

For homes, craft and interiors, try ThingsYouMake, DwellingGawker, and CraftGawker.

There’s also WeddingGawker for anyone with a wedding blog.

If you’re a political blogger, you should try to get your content listed on the PhiWire of PoliticsHome (although many of the rules I list below about images etc don’t apply)

Word about these sites tends to spread through the blogging community they serve. A lot of blogs display badges which show that their posts are being accepted by a showcase site, so have a look at the sidebars of some of your favourite blogs for ideas. You can also search through tumblr for more showcase sites which fit your blog’s niche.

How to get your post accepted by a showcase site

A lot of showcase websites require you to register as a user and upload your post through the front page. You’ll need the full URL of the post, a description of the post, and a good quality image. On some sites you’ll upload and crop the image through the front page, while on others you’ll complete a form which pings to the site’s moderators so they can consider your post.

The first thing you need to realise about these websites is that they are entirely visually-driven. Your recipes might be the most delectable dishes ever produced, or you might be an incredible writer, but if you don’t submit a post with good-quality photos to any of these sites, then you’re wasting your time. There’s a useful guide on how to edit your photos so that they get accepted by a showcase site here.

All the sites listed above read every post submitted, so make sure yours is well-written. Most sites let you know when they have reviewed your submission by sending you an email, and the best give you feedback if your post has been rejected, normally on the basis of poor image composition.

Riding the wave

Probably the most useful post I ever read on ProBlogger was this one about surfing the wave of new users. all the principles in this post are even more important with a spike in traffic from a showcase site because your new visitors are already more likely to stick around and dig into your website.

Take this post I submitted to both FoodGawker and TasteSpotting on making sundried tomatoes. It ticks all the boxes for both sites, with eye-catching photography and an easy-to-follow recipe. But it is also ready for the readers when they come.

For starters, I’ve got a ‘Subscribe to our email updates’ button at the very top of my sidebar, and I’ve also got a related posts plugin at the bottom of the post, options for readers to share the post on nine different sites and a ‘subscribe to comments’ tickbox. All standard. But I want to give these eager foodies even more opportunity to dig further into my blog. So in the text of the post, I’ve recommended some varieties of tomatoes perfect for roasting. This shows that I’m an expert on the subject of tomatoes, and sends them scuttling over to the posts as well.

At the bottom of every recipe post I write, I always recommend my free to download postcard guides on growing the key ingredient in the recipe. It’s a great way of flagging up to the new readers that I have a product that can help them. Those cards are now the most popular page on my site, so the strategy is working.

Do you use showcase sites to drive targeted traffic to your blog? Which ones have you found most effective, and how do you engage readers once they arrive?

Issy Eyre started Fennel & Fern when she was just 21 years old to settle an argument with some friends that gardening wasn’t cool. Three years later, the blog now boasts a team of eight writers, its own gardening blog showcase site, GardenGrab, and a bunch of readers who agree that gardening is awesome. You can follow Issy on Twitter here.

Continuing our discussion of things you should be doing right now to improve your blog, today’s tip is:

8. Add an incentive to your email opt-in

Chris Garrett suggested this one on Google+ when I raised the topic of this post, and he’s a guy who has seen real benefit from doing it.

Chris offers a couple of ebooks when you subscribe to his list, and from what I can tell it significantly increase the opt-in rates to his lists. Of course, increased opt-ins can lead to many benefits over the life of your blog.

Have you incentivized your list subscription? Can you do it today?

This guest post is by Melissa Cassera of www.casseracommunications.com.

You write a blog post. You post it. You tweet, Facebook, Digg, Stumble, and perform every other type of online promotion to supersize your presence.

What are you missing?

Promoting “offline” using a major influencer like a national magazine can bring a blizzard of traffic to your blog. Not only is it great for exposure to have your name inked on the glossy pages of a national magazine, it lends the credibility and endorsement of a national magazine claiming you have the best blog on the block.

Read on to learn how you can get national magazines to sing your praises from the rooftop.

Why should I use national magazines to promote my blog?

Magazines have millions of readers. Literally millions.

National magazines are also nationally-recognized brands. They’ve cultivated a reputation of excellence and wield a substantial amount of power for those that are fortunate enough to grace their pages.

Bloggers have leveraged national magazine publicity into six and seven-figure book deals, scored high-paying speaking engagements, attracted fancy corporate sponsors, and commanded top-dollar for coaching and consulting services.

Magazine publicity is like winning an Emmy, Tony, Grammy, or Academy Award. It provides instant credibility and high profile status.

How do national magazines feature blogs?

Some magazines highlight bloggers individually. Other magazines will interview bloggers as expert sources for their story. (Example: Melissa Cassera from Casseracommunications.com said that national magazine publicity brings droves of new readers to your blog).

For example: Glamour Magazine’s August 2011 issue featured seven fashion bloggers in their article “Dress Like a Do Every Day.” INC Magazine’s July/August 2011 issue also featured several bloggers throughout the issue as expert sources.

How do I contact national magazines and ask them to feature my blog?

• Understand lead times. Magazines work anywhere from three to six months ahead of the issue. That means you should be pitching for the December issue in August. So, get crackin’!
• Find the right contact. Check the masthead toward the front of the magazine to note the appropriate section editor (beauty, fashion, technology, food, etc.). Always work from the bottom up (contact the associate or assistant editor rather than the executive or senior editor).
• You can also peek at the bylines for individual articles. Magazines hire freelance writers to produce content, and these folks are always interested in good sources and stories. Google their names and get in touch.
• Put as much effort into your pitch as you do writing your blog posts. Read the magazine and highlight the sections that would feature your blog and/or use you as an expert source.  Know the magazine’s tone and readership inside and out. (Quick tip: search online for the magazine’s media kit which includes demographic and other readership info as well as an editorial calendar highlighting specific topics they will cover in future issues).
• Build a relationship. Your goal is to get ongoing publicity for your blog in these offline channels. Your first contact with an editor should be a warm introduction to you and your blog and a newsworthy angle that would pique their interest to write about you. (Example: I’m a career blogger and would love to discuss the latest trend of unemployed people being told not to apply for jobs. My take on this is….).
• Offer to cover the magazine on your blog. Ask the editor if they would participate in an interview for your blog. This is a great way to build a budding relationship and to offer them a bit of promotion. (Example: A fashion blogger might interview a Vogue editor on the three hottest trends for Fall).

What do I do when I get national magazine coverage?

Promote away! First things first—you want to blog about your national magazine coverage.  Don’t automatically assume that all your readers will see it. Let them know how super fabulous you are to be featured in [insert favorite magazine name].

Add a “fame cluster” to your homepage. If you have no idea what that is, check out my homepage and look at the little cluster of media logos. You can also start a Press page that lists all of your media shout-outs.

Last, welcome your new readers. If you know your feature in Entrepreneur Magazine comes out in November (which means it will likely hit newsstands in mid-October), add a little line to your homepage near your RSS feed or opt-in offer that says, “Welcome Entrepreneur Magazine Readers! Sign Up Here to Stay in Touch.”

Take action: post the #1 magazine you want to feature your blog in the comments below. Then use the above advice to make it happen.

Melissa Cassera is a publicity expert that helps bloggers and other small business owners score millions of dollars in free advertising using the power of publicity. You can download her free eBook on How to Pitch the Media Like a Pro here: http://casseracommunications.com/newsletter/

Continuing our discussion of things you could be doing right now to boost your blog, today’s tip is:

2. Start an email newsletter

This is another tactic that I know many bloggers are convinced of. But for one reason or another it’s seen as something they’ll do “one day”—maybe when they have more traffic, maybe when they have more time. The reality is that by starting an email list early on (and using it smartly), you’ll accelerate both the driving of traffic to your blog and the monetization of it.

Do you have an active email newsletter for your blog?

“A brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.”—Jeff Bezos, Amazon Founder.

This quote gets pulled out a lot by bloggers (I’ve used it three times in the last week myself) but I wonder if it might be time to give it a little more intentional pondering as we think about the brands we are trying to build around our blogs.

The brand of your blog is that lasting impression that people have of your blog. It’s the things people go away from your blog thinking—and, more importantly, talking about to others.

If this is the case, an important question to ask yourself as a blogger considering your brand is:

What do you want people to say about your blog?

Here’s a quick exercise that I’ve done recently that gave me a lot more clarity about what I’m building.

1. Grab a sheet of paper, open a text document or mindmap, or go to a whiteboard.
2. At the top write “What do I want people to say about my blog?”
3. Spend ten to 15 minutes brainstorming answers to this question.

As you work on your answers think broadly about your blog. What do you want people to say about your content, the style you write in, your voice, the community and interaction on the blog, your approachability, etc.

Perhaps another way to ask the question is, “What words do you want people to use to describe my blog?”

Also pay attention to the feelings and emotions you want people to have while they’re on your blog. My suspicion is that feelings and emotions are a big part of a brand. Do you want people to feel:

• a sense of belonging
• content and happy
• intellectually stimulated
• that they’re not alone
• informed
• …or something else?

When I recently did this exercise for myself (I did it for my main two blogs), it gave me a lot more clarity about the types of brands I’m attempting to build. I hope that this, in turn, will help me communicate that to others, and actually make those goals a reality.

This guest post is by Kyle Taylor of The Penny Hoarder.

I’ve been blogging for six short months and I’m bored.

I still love writing new content, but like many of you, I have spent so many countless hours commenting, tweeting, and begging for backlinks that I’m simply too bored to keep it up.

What makes the situation worse is that I have spent months establishing myself as a unique brand in my niche, yet I’ve been employing all of the same marketing strategies as my competitors. My marketing is the first impression I give potential readers and, by reusing old strategies, I have been leaving readers with the impression that I was just another personal finance blog. Sure, the traffic has grown, slow and steady, but I decided that I needed to do something different this summer; not only to grow the site faster, but to make marketing more enjoyable for myself.

My experiment

My first move was to step offline. Offline is a scary place, but there happens to be millions of people out there that have never heard of my blog. And these are the kind of people who aren’t trolling comment threads and message boards like the rest of us. I wanted to reach them and I was confident that once they found me, I could hook ‘em.

I once read in a ProBlogger article that when advertising online, you shouldn’t necessarily send people to your homepage. Rather, you should sent them to a page deep within your blog. I decided to run with that advice and apply it to my offline endeavor. Instead of promoting my entire blog, I picked a popular article on my site titled, “I Get Paid to Buy Beer,” bought the domain iGetFreeBeer.com, and permanently redirected the domain to the article hosted on my blog.

Maybe it wasn’t quite what Darren had in mind when he shared that advice, but what the heck?

It had all the makings of a page ready to go viral offline:

• A rather juvenile web address. Check.
• An article that represented my blog well. Check.
• And, well … free beer. Check.

My hope was that some of the new visitors would like what they saw in the article and start exploring the rest of the blog. The downside of promoting a separate web address was that we wouldn’t be promoting our actual brand or website. However, I was hoping the novelty of “free beer” would successfully launch our regular website to stardom, or at the very least, bring about world peace.

Naturally, this type of article and domain address was perfect to market to the under-30 demographic. To promote the new domain, we had simple bumper stickers made and hired willing college students from Craigslist.com and Fiverr.com to put the stickers up around their college campuses, apartments, and hangouts.

Results

All told, we spent about $120 dollars. The printing cost us $45 for 250 bumper stickers. And five college students were paid $15 each to put up 50 stickers in their towns.

The campaign is only in its second week, and we have already had more than 300 new visitors come from our bumper stickers. At $0.40 per visit, our costs are certainly cheaper than an AdWords campaign, and there is no telling how many more visitors we will get in the coming weeks.

It’s also easy to track our campaign using Google Analytics, because the visitors show up as a “referring site.” Plus, using the Advanced options, we can look at our visitors’ cities to see if word-of-mouth has found us readers in locations other than the ones we targeted with our stickers.

Get creative

Start brainstorming ways you can promote your website that you haven’t seen done before. Get crazy. Have fun with it.

Maybe you could make a video of yourself planking and post it on Youtube? Maybe you could give out free lemonade at the beach and put your blog’s logo on the cup? What about passing out flyers at the farmer’s market?

The strategy you choose will largely depend on your site’s niche, but if you want to be different then everybody else, you are going to have to start thinking differently about your marketing.

Have you ever completed offline marketing—or done something completely outside the box? Let us know how you went in the comments.

Kyle Taylor is a personal finance blogger that blogs about weird ways to make money at The Penny Hoarder. Connect on Facebook or join the newsletter and get our “5 Wackiest Ways to Make Extra Money.”

This guest post is by M.Farouk Radwan of http://www.2knowmyself.com.

Today, every successful blogger knows that diversifying traffic sources is a practice we can’t afford to ignore. Search engines update their search algorithms all the time, social media sites keep rising and falling, and new traffic sources keep appearing and disappearing.

In order to ensure your long-term continuity on the Web, and in order to be able to live through these changes, you need a team of evangelists who can help you market your content whenever a new traffic source appears.

For example, if you had a blog before the time of Twitter, and then Twitter came into existence, you need loyal evangelists who can help you develop strong presence on the social network, who tweet your posts, retweet your tweets, and follow you.

In this post I will tell you about powerful and effective methods that can help you recruit evangelists for your blog.

Recognize potential evangelists

How many times you ignored a mail, a comment, or a request of help from a reader? Each of these people can become potential evangelists when you provide them with the help they need.

When I get a mail from someone asking for help I do my best to answer him on time. If he replies to say something like “thanks,” or if he doesn’t reply at all, I don’t consider him an evangelist. But if he replies saying that he is very thankful, I then ask him to become an evangelist for my blog.

Of course I don’t ask him to do this in a direct way; instead I tell him something like, “You are most welcome. If you want to help me as well, then you can do that by sharing my content.”

People who send you thank you emails are evangelists. When they use powerful words, you know they are already existing evangelists who are eager to do what you ask. Never be ashamed to ask someone for a favor if you really helped that person through your blog.

Never block all communication channels

I often come across blogs that have no content forms, no method to comment on a post, and no communication method that can help you reach the owner of the blog.

Of course you might want to disable one or two features for technical reasons, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t keep at least one communication channel opened between you and the people who might become evangelists. After all, if those people can’t reach you, you will never be able to recruit them.

Spend more time communicating with people

Before understanding this fact, I used to spend no more than 30 minutes answering emails, and sometimes I allowed many messages to accumulate in my Facebook inbox. After understanding my mistake, I started spending more than one hour per day answering emails and searching for potential evangelists.

Post an announcement

Even if you keep all communication channels opened between you and your readers, there will still be many potential evangelists who won’t offer help unless you ask them to do so.

Post an announcement that states that you need help from loyal readers in your forums, on your blog, or on your Facebook page.

Assign tasks to your evangelists

1. Once you have a team of evangelists, you can ask them to share your content and to promote it on the newest potential traffic sources.
2. Keep an excel file with the names and emails of your evangelists, so that you can reach them whenever you want.
3. Keep looking for potential evangelists and keep increasing their numbers all the time.

Remember: successful blogging is all about connecting with your loyal readers on a deep level so that they can help your blog come into the light.

Avoid overburdening your evangelists with tasks

People who believe in you should be treated as if they are precious treasure. You don’t want to overburden those people with tasks and have them turn away from you.

If you asked one evangelist for help, make sure you don’t ask her again for a reasonable period of time. In the Excel sheet where you keep the names and contact details of your evangelists, make notes so that you can check which ones have been contacted before, and which have not.

Also, repay the favor your evangelists gave you, even if you have initially helped them. For example, if you sell products or have membership areas, give those people free access to some of your products.

This will help to increase their loyalty even more, and they will never turn away from your blog. The key point to keep in mind is to not ask for more than those people can tolerate, or else you will risk losing them.

And the next time you need help, ask those loyal evangelists indirectly, for example, by announcing on your fan page that you need help with a task. Only those who really want to help another time will get back to you, so you can be assured you’re not overburdening anyone.

Does your blog have evangelists? How did you build up a core group of loyal followers? Share your tips in the comments.

Written by M.Farouk Radwan, the founder of http://www.2knowmyself.com, which gets more than 600,000 page views per month.