How Google Analytics Can Dramatically Help Your Blogging

In this post, you’ll learn how to make use of Google Tracking URLs, which are designed to help you more accurately track links shared through your site and elsewhere—Twitter, Facebook, etc. You’ll also be able to use this technique for marketing campaigns and other events.

22 Rapid Tips on Email Marketing for Bloggers

Learn how to better market yourself (and your blog) through an email and/or subscription list. Some of the tips include utilizing squeeze pages, make more valuable interactions, and other tips on email marketing.

How to Build a Coaching Practice with a Blog

Chris takes you through a few steps in the process of deciding whether you are fir to be a blog/marketing coach and what is required in the process of becoming one. Many bloggers don’t become coaches due to how much more planning it can take to run these types of services, compared to say, regular blog posting.

Lots of News Content Writers Need to be Aware Of

Even though you may be a SEO consultant, a content writer, or even an editor, you should be aware of the content that you are writing/editing and the site it is being hosted on. It is important to adhere to any copyright and other types of laws.

New Bloggers Beware: 3 Traps You Need to Avoid

Not all blogs are successful and success doesn’t always come easy. These are two of the three main traps you should avoid when launching a new blog or starting out for the first time. Check out the post for the other reasons and more in-depth analysis of the first two.

The Pros and Cons of Tumblr for Small Business

Although Tumblr has some negatives — not “owning” your content and seemingly frequent downtime issues — many small (and large) businesses have decided to start a presence on the booming micro-blogging service. You’ll read about some of the prominent businesses already utilizing the service for its great usability.

Conclusion

If you have read any other interesting articles/posts recently related to blogging, social networking, or marketing, please feel free to share them in the comments below or you can also comment on the posts above.

At this point, there is no date set for Version 3.2, although some of the main features have been laid out as a way to see what to expect in the next release. Dubbed “faster, lighter,” the next release will bring new improvements and will drop support for a number of older technologies, which are doing nothing but slowing down the development and speed of WordPress.

One of the most significant changes (at least in my mind) will be the distraction-free writing experience. While there is a “fullscreen mode” included in the current version, the next version will take that a step further, bringing a more streamlined and efficient version, akin to WriteRoom and OmmWriter. If you have ever explored writing in a distraction-free environment, you immediately know how valuable it can be to cut out other distractions.

Beyond this change, there are some fairly significant changes for plugin and theme developers, including List Table API improvements, requirements for PHP 5.2+, MySQL 5+, as well as upgrade improvements (which happens to benefit everyone).

So, I’d like to know what you think about some of the future changes and additions slated for WordPress 3.2. Do you think this is a good, natural evolution of the platform or would you like to see more done?

There are a number of constraints that people must work around. Having a background of starting up new sites/blogs, as well as working with others and building your network online can certainly help, but I’ll assume you have at least some background in designing new sites and operating online.

1. First of all, if you have no capital or money to start up your new site, you’ll have to start simple, using free services until you are able to work up to more professional hosting and services. I generally don’t advise people to start this way, but it can help if you are starting your first site, at least to get a background on running a blog.
2. Tied into how much cash you initially put into your site, you must think about how you want your new site to look. Professional, custom website design doesn’t usually come cheap. You can either use a free site design and customize it to get around this drawback, but you’ll need to spend time and effort learning about site design. On the other hand, there are premium themes that can dramatically reduce the cost of a “custom” design by giving you some easy control of your site.
3. Reader criticism can also be one of the major roadblocks in your pursuit of building a great site. There are people, whether they own their own site or not, who will leave negative criticisms about your posts, whether or not they even read the content. In many cases, they can’t even back up their ideas with facts, instead resorting a few key attack words. You have to forget about this, only taking criticism with a grain of salt.
4. As previously mentioned, time is one of the biggest drawbacks over creating a new site/blog. It may only take a few minutes to install and setup your site using automated tools, while it’ll take a few hours initially to get all the pages setup on your site, services added and connected to your site, and after that, some more time before you are finally able to get started posting. Not everyone will have all this free time available, especially those who work full-time apart from their Internet ventures. You can set goals for yourself, aiming to work an hour or so each day until you have each step accomplished.

In closing, you have to understand problems you’ll encounter as you grow a website, then develop a clear strategy for moving on. Sometimes the solution won’t be as clear as you want it to be, but there are still ways to move on without having to give up entirely. Alternatively, you don’t want to be left throwing resources at the dart board and hoping the problems work themselves out.

Twitter Analytics Screenshot, via Mashable

The service will likely help bloggers and anyone using Twitter to better gauge which of their tweets are the most successful and influential. You will also be able to determine which tweets caused users to follow (or unfollow).

While this service will likely provide additional insight into your Twitter account, it might be a little too late. There are several other services and options for viewing when you gain/lose followers, and methods of tracking tweets. However, this service will likely be more reliable – at least from the “analytics” standpoint.

What do you think about Twitter Analytics – will you use it when released?

Now, the plugin isn’t suitable for everything. For example, if someone deletes their tweet (either being controversial or for any other reason), you may be left with a display that isn’t formatted properly, as there is a slight delay before the tweet is properly displayed on your site.

Nonetheless, the plugin/integrated solution is a good solution for integrating tweets into your site. However, it would have been nice if something like this was available a long time ago, at least as clean as this version is.

I figure this is the result of close networks of people who are unwilling to branch out and include more of the community. These people are self-centered and want to keep all the profits within a close group of people. Nearly all new sales are generated from this group of people marketing to the same (generally large) group of people. While those inside of this group are able to constantly pump out new products based on their most successful products, there really isn’t much innovation going on within the circle.

Rather than spending so much time on increasing referrals, focus on these tasks and you’ll see a much higher return. Plus, it may come much sooner than you could have ever dreamed!

1. Learn about your visitors and connect with your greatest fans. You’ll be able to develop a closer relationship with your most valued readers.
2. Write as often as possible, as your content will sell itself. As you write more often, you’ll gain more natural links back to your content, especially through the social networking sites.
3. Spend more time developing a brand behind your content. Some people focus solely on creating the content, but you should also spend the time distributing the content, getting your brand name out as often as possible.
4. Be more generous. Sure, this might mean that you’ll initially lose some revenue, but if you get your good product into more people’s hands, then you’ll be able to sell more product down the road.
5. Change what you do. If your site is just a simple landing page, add a blog. Generally, you won’t have to spend much more than an hour or two each day writing on this blog portion, but you’ll see much more return.

Writing should be your top priority on your blog. If you instead focus on increasing sales, you’re likely to lose out on many sales in the future. These sales are likely to come as a result of visitors from search engines and through recommendations you normally wouldn’t have received if you had stuck to simply promoting links and the same old sales message.

Increasing traffic to your site is generally much easier than trying to increase sales, but having a clear plan going forward can lead to massive benefits. Your main focus should be on creating a product others simply can’t match and everyone wants to talk about. Sure, it may sound easier to say than do, but using these few simple methods for persuading your readers, you’ll be able to increase sales without changing your product or main focus.

1. Be sincere and know your product. The world’s best marketers didn’t get where they are selling products that don’t live up to their promises. By informing their potential customers and providing truthfulness in their marketing approaches, these people have been able to sell millions of products. In addition, they rarely diverted attention to the competitors’ products – they answered all the questions in their videos or articles to effectively persuade.

2. Influence your readers. While persuasion and influence go hand in hand, there is a difference between the two. Persuasion is the act of persuading someone to do something, while influence is the ability to impact or effect someone using your power. Get your readers to believe that your product or service will solve problems and they have a much higher chance of parting with their hard-earned money. This begins with selling a successful record of solving problems. A good way to do this is through testimonials, which leads into the third method.

3. Provide answers and reasoning behind the product or service. Launching a product or service into the marketplace can be quite challenging, especially if it is your first or if you are trying to enter into a whole new product category. On your sales pages or through video, answer as many questions as possible, leaving very little potential questions unanswered. Another way to do this is through “testimonials.” I place this in quotations as testimonials have been so abused, especially in the age of the Internet where everything can be forged.

4. Think of persuasion as an art. Like an artist, it’ll take time before you know what works and what doesn’t. It’ll also be a skill that you can’t learn overnight and not everyone will be able to be successful at it. Simply trying to sell someone a product won’t work. People are able to single out and isolate advertisements – this is one of the reasons why you need hundreds of thousands of visitors each month to make a good income online and millions of watchers on television.

5. Paint a positive picture. Continuing from method four, you should always try to paint a positive picture of your products and services. Often, you’ll find negative reviews of your products on blogs due to people who didn’t understand how to use your product/service. If this is the case, you should reach out to answer their questions or solve their problems. Rather than losing slaes, you’ll be able to convince them that your product is effective, resulting in an increase of sales. You don’t want people to even think about comparing your product to what the competition offers.

Conclusion. Having an effective approach in persuading your readers is extremely important. It can mean the difference between one sale and a hundred. More often than not, landing sales is the result of just a few lines of copy – the lines that truly convince your visitors that your product is much better than anything your competitors offer.

The ElegantNews theme recently caught my eye, as it offers all the features a “news” blogger needs in a template. In addition, it’s fairly clean looking and well-designed.

Main features of the theme for bloggers include an options page for changing some of the main settings, post thumbnails support, a featured content area for highlighting your best posts, and a banner ads area in the sidebar for the popular 125×125 pixel ad format.

In addition, the theme includes three columns for making the most out of the browser space you have. Gravatars and widgets are incorporated into the theme, so you won’t have to spend time coding these in.

The coding is optimized for search engines and you shouldn’t experience issues with users who can’t view your site properly: it has been tested to work across all the most popular browsers.

For more information about the theme and to take a look at the demo, please visit the theme’s release page.

TweetDeck recently announced several new changes, including plans to move to the browser – at least as an alternative to using it as a mobile or desktop app. The main reason for moving in this direction is for development. Currently, they are building a different version for the various app stores, and this results in some inconsistencies across them.

The HTML5 version is not expected for several more months, as they are focused on delivering a product that includes all the features currently available in the desktop version. When the web-based version is available, there will certainly be more integration with the TweetDeck accounts – you’ll likely need to sign in to access all the columns, saved searches, Twitter accounts, and more.

Update: A number of new services will also be included, such as geotagging support for users of Google Buzz and Foursquare.

A popular quote many live by is “The only real failure in life is the failure to try.” Apply this same quote to blogging, and you’ll quickly find another source of failure.

Success is an arbitrary term for many and has a far range when one applies it to blogging. For one, it could mean that you receive ten new comments per day, while to another person it means making a full-time income through the blog.

Beyond these two main sources of failure, there are several other reasons you aren’t seeing success as a result of your work.

1. When disaster hit (bad press about your business, a search engine rank hit, etc.), you didn’t have a plan for how to deal with it.
2. You don’t have a plan for the future, and you run your blog day-to-day. Sure, this can work for a month or two, but it won’t last.
3. You aren’t providing support to your blog visitors. Again, “support” can have a huge range in meaning. Respond to comments as well as emails. Don’t neglect any visitor or customer.
4. Do you provide a product or service people need? See if you can describe what you offer in just a few sentences. Otherwise, you have something people don’t have a need for.
5. Are you simply copying the competition or following trends? Recreating the success of others works, but it won’t get you too far, especially with how inter-connected all online businesses and blogs are.

Once you understand what is preventing you from becoming successful, you’ll be able to change your method for growing your business. No matter whether you focus on visitors, readers, or customers, keep these few basic ideas in mind when you write your next post or promote your blog.