A lot of peo­ple ask me what’s my blog­ging strat­egy. They want to know, for instance, how I post arti­cles, build a list, and drive traf­fic to my blog. More impor­tant, they want to know how I make money with it. Those are good questions.

The short answer, of course, is to keep offer­ing great con­tent. Fresh con­tent. Con­tent you find valu­able. Con­tent you believe may be of inter­est or value to your readers.

But here’s some­thing you might find surprising…

I don’t use my blog as a busi­ness model like some A-​​list blog­gers out there. Mak­ing money is purely a byprod­uct. Sure, I do have ads on it, inter­spersed through­out, link­ing either to my prod­ucts or to prod­ucts I’m an affil­i­ate of. But they are not focal points.

Granted, those ads do help to pay the bills, keep my blog alive, and incen­tivize me to con­tinue post­ing what I hope is valu­able con­tent for my readers.

But some peo­ple won­der how I drive traf­fic to this blog and build my list of sub­scribers. After all, I don’t adver­tise it at all with any paid adver­tis­ing — other than in my sig­na­ture file on some forum posts, or on my social net­work pro­files like Twit­ter and Face­book.

I’ve revealed part of my strat­egy in some courses, such as Suc­cess Chef Uni­ver­sity, which is our flag­ship train­ing prod­uct. I’ve also revealed it in a few inter­views I gave here and there. I’ve also revealed a hand­ful of them on this blog in the past.

How­ever, there are very spe­cific things I do to help me grow this blog.

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After my recent push for Robert Plank’s Speed Copy Secrets copy­writ­ing spe­cial report on how to write copy in under an hour, I wanted to test a few other things from Robert, since he’s a gifted pro­gram­mer and offers some neat scripts.

(Actu­ally, I recently bought every­thing from Robert I could get my hands on, and so far I’m thor­oughly impressed. Specif­i­cally, his “Full-​​Blast PHP” and “Sales Page Tac­tics Vol­umes 1–3″ prod­ucts are fabulous.)

I’m test­ing just a cou­ple of Robert’s scripts on this blog, and early results are stun­ning. Let me share with you a few test results…

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As with sta­tic web­sites, the suc­cess of a blog depends on attract­ing a steady stream of new and return traf­fic. The dif­fer­ence is, blog pro­mo­tion tools are slightly dif­fer­ent, a bit more diverse, and largely much more effective.

Why? Because blogs are designed with inter­ac­tiv­ity and social net­work­ing abil­ity built in. They are ideal both for devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships and for mar­ket­ing your brand.

How­ever, don’t neglect stan­dard pro­mo­tional activ­i­ties in favor of blog-​​only traf­fic gen­er­a­tion meth­ods. You can and should use both.

In fact, tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing can become even more potent with a blog due to its nature.

For exam­ple, and most impor­tant, you will still want to uti­lize your email list, and use your blog to grow it, too. Ask read­ers to sub­scribe, and let them know when you post a new arti­cle just as you would with a new fea­ture or prod­uct on a sta­tic website.

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One of my coach­ing stu­dents recently asked me whether it’s bet­ter to offer a free trial or a $1 lim­ited time trial as an incen­tive to sign up for a paid newslet­ter subscription.

The answer involves the vital role of track­ing and test­ing through­out your entire sales funnel.

Gen­er­ally speak­ing, a free trial is likely to con­vert more vis­i­tors ini­tially, but the $1 trial may be the bet­ter choice over the long term. Such gen­er­al­iza­tions have lit­tle place in busi­ness. The only way to deter­mine the right answer for your busi­ness is to track and test the process from begin­ning to end.

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