Agilius

I have a blog where I post photoshop tutorials and resources. I started this blog 2 month ago and I started to write tutorials right away. Most of them were really good and got on the front pages of Pixel2life, Pslover, Good-Tutorials, Tutorialised and so on. The traffic was coming fast, I reached 800 UVs in no time but the problem was this: It only lasted for a few days (2 maybe 3 days at most). It's really hard to write good tutorials with all the competition out there so I tried the following things to promote the blog and to get more traffic.

1) Wrote more tutorials ( I won't be able to write tutorials weekly )
2) Started to write my content keeping in mind some SEO tips
3) Started link exchanges, I submitted my blog to some web directories
4) Started to be active on some design-related forums like this one, and showed my link in my sig

The problem here is that I don't get enough traffic to generate some kind of profit from my site. I stopped the tutorial submissions 1 week ago and now I have 150 UV/day, constantly, and almost all the traffic is coming from good-tutorials and pixel2life.

Do you have any suggestions? Maybe a idea about what I could write about on my blog? I am new, this is my first blog, first website ever, so any kind of information will be useful.

Thanks in advance for reading this huge post of mine and for replying.

Gino

Pay people to write tutorials for you such as http://psdtuts.com/ does. Almost all their stuff is user submitted so they always have REALLY good tutorials. If you cant afford it though maybe try to get people to submit in exchange for links and such.

I see good tutorials make it on the home page of digg.com once in a while so I would try networking on digg.com a bit.

Make sure to comment on other blogs and sites related to yours.

Read www.problogger.com they are the bets place to learn about blogging.

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WPCandy

As Gino said, PSDTuts pays people to write tutorials for them. So make a really good, your best one, and tell them about it. See if they'll accept and publish your tutorial. Getting on their site has got to give you some good traffic. Then you can take the money they gave you and use it on advertising your blog.

So even though your awesome tutorial won't be on your site, you'll get some good traffic and some good money from PSDTuts. And I'm pretty sure PSDTuts says you can publish your tutorial else where after a set number of days.

So that's what I would do. You get 3 things out of 1

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Agilius

I guess I'll give it a try. I'll write a tutorial for PSDtuts and see what I can do with it. I can't afford to hire people to write tutorials for me since I don't earn enough from my blog yet. Adsense is really disappointing for this niche in my opinion. Thanks for the replays, I apreciate it

Gino

I took a look at your blog. If you get any money I would invest in cheap hosting and your own domain as soon as possible. Also Maybe remove one or two Google ads to clean up the blog a bit while you are starting so you don't lose too many visitors to click on the ads.

Yeah I would start adding some other content to your site and try submitting to tutorial sites like psdtuts to raise some money for now.

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Agilius

I must say that I never thought of that O_o. I guess it's true, I do lose visitors... However at 200 uvs/day I don't think 7 clicks would make much of a difference...

Thanks for the advice.

BurningApple

Many websites allow you to post a tutorial with a link to your website/post.
Like pixel 2 life.

Agilius

Thanks for all the tips. It seems that thanks to all the suggestions and hints I've made it to PR3 on google

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Gino

NICEE!! Keep up the work and you should increase in PR again next update.

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seanHodge

Some great suggestions here. Definately get your own hosting. Its really cheap and worth it.

I've found guest posting drives lots of traffic. Getting on psdtuts is tough. I want to do that. But I have to come up with a cool tutorial. There tutorials are really good.

If you want to build a link leave a relevant comment on one of my posts on AiBURN. Also, I will have Gravatars set up soon on AiBURN. For sites you leave comment on that have Gravatars set up its a great way to stand out in the comments. The site is http://site.gravatar.com/

I wrote a blog post on it: http://blogelephant.com/article/bran...with_gravatars

It explains how to use more than one gravatar if you have multiple sites to promote. Its really easy to set up. My post on designing a self portrait http://aiburn.com/article/draw_your_self_portrait is what I used for my gravatar. I'll be changing my avatar here on the forumns shortly as well.

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