Six Steps to Attracting Website Visitors with an Ultimate Top List

Josh Dunlop reports:

"Whether [it's] people, websites or tips, you need to get a list together, and if you’[v]e been working in your niche for any [real time], this won’t be hard, but it will be time-consuming. You need to ideally find at least 20 potential candidates so that you have room to pick and choose...You need to bear in mind the types of people who[m] you should be including in your list...I used Twitter, Facebook and Google to help me find the most influential bloggers...I found them on Facebook and checked out how active they were on there and how many fans they had. Next, I checked them out on Twitter...and then if they were popular enough, I subscribed to their RSS feeds and noted down how many people were subscribed to that. Once I had all the information I needed to help order the list, I divided it up into who I personally thought was important, [and] wrote the best, regular content, who was the most popular on the [I]nternet and who would be most likely to link to my site in their blogs and Facebook. From that, I came to a result that included everyone, in an order that would reflect how influential they are, and how likely they would be to share my link...[Writing about each entry] is somewhat time-consuming, but not all that difficult, seeing as everyone has a personal website and bio these days. You need to include WHO they are, WHAT they do, HOW long they’ve been doing it, and WHERE they’re from if they’re from anywhere a little unusual. Remember that there’s a strong chance that one of their fans will link them to your list, so you need to make sure that you’ve got the information right. If they specialize in anything in particular, have an interesting USP or can be found elsewhere in books or on the [I]nternet, it’s important that you include all of this information. A lot of people will only look at the name and the photo, but the people who actually read what you’re writing are your most important visitors, so make sure you write as well as you can...I’ve stressed in the past how important it is to use images in a blog post, even when they don’t seem particularly important. I took a [screenshot] of every website, [then] put them all into Adobe Elements under a template that I’d made that was 600*300px with a dark fade on 3 sides. I then angled each image and saved them down under relevant names. Adding relevant names will help to drive traffic from Google image results and ultimately drive traffic to your site in time. You’ve got your first obvious link, the name...but you’re likely to have 20 images that are much more visual than a small name. This is a little time-consuming, but it’s a great idea to link all these images to the site or person that they link to – it’s boring and repetitive, but it’s not difficult...The rest of the writing on the list is yours to link to. When I write, I try to include as many [keywords] as I can that I know I have set up to link around the website to different posts that I’ve written. So long as this is set up automatically, it doesn’t look intrusive and anyone that reads the text is then likely to be sent around the website to different post[s] that you’ve written. Even though you’re writing a post that links to other websites, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t link to yours as much as possible – it shows that you’ve taken the time to provide the best information possible...If [your readers have] made it to [the] end of your post, then you’ve got their attention, and it’s acceptable to plug your own website...When you’re all done, you should have a post that draws in thousands of visitors, and looks so good that people judge that you have the authority to be writing the list, even if you don’t."