goo.gl - url shortener by google

Just a quick heads up for everyone..Maybe you already noticed but I didn't until today. Google launched their own URL shortener service. So if you often use an external service to shorten your links this might be interesting for you as the goo.gl look pretty nice and not so bad as tinyurl.com or others but maybe it's just personal preferance.

Here is the first URL in shortend : http://goo.gl/pFpAC

Another nice advantage is that each goo.gl link has it's own statistics page.

Driving traffic to your site via images

A good and easy source of traffic for your website, blog or directly to an affiliate link is by posting images containing a URL. You should make sure that all pictures or info graphics you post on your own site with a watermark of your website. This way if other people use it and your content is used in other places or even goes full viral it'll draw loads of traffic to your site.

But you can also spread your pictures yourself by posting to relevant image sites. If it's useful and/or funny and hits the target audience of those websites it will also draw traffic to you or directly to your product.

Let's see an example of one of my newly created blogs which normally only gets about 5 views per day. I took a screenshot showing a useful trick, added my blog url and posted it to a image board which has lots of viewers interested into gaming. This is what happend the following days:

Traffic increase after image posting

You can see a small spike directly after posting the image at the start of the week. It goes up from the regular couple of viewers to about 50 on the day of the post. The next day most of the traffic was already gone as this image board is very fast paced so the images move down quickly and don't receive a lot of attention. The very next day someone else was sharing the picture on another site which drove even more traffic to my site for the next three days. Right now the traffic is back to normal with a slight increase. But it's a great way to drive traffic to your blog to make people notice it. Just make sure that the image is interesting to the place you post it and not considered spam.
Enjoy your traffic !