Blogging Tips To Help You Build A Better Blog | MintBlogger

How to Survive and Flourish in a Crowded Niche

2013-04-29T15:26:00.000+05:30

Niche blogging is one of the most popular online publishing mediums responsible for large chunk of content generation for the web.

I started my blogging career through a niche blog way back in 2008.

Contrary to the popular belief, popularity has nothing to do with the profitability of a niche.

In other words, several low competition niches can give you much better returns than a highly competitive niche. But, it is often seen that newbies often deliberately select a crowded niche in hoping to make big bucks through different monetization techniques.

Today, we're going to talk about surviving cut throat competition in a crowded niche. Fortunately, it is not that difficult provided you've chalked out a detailed plan right from the beginning. Let's assume you already fulfill some of the prerequisites of niche blogging viz., passion for the niche, flair for writing and familiarity with general principles of new media marketing.

So, let's get started and see what it takes to get your share from the big pie of a highly competitive niche.

Research Your Competition

Start with a fact-finding exercise to dig out the details about the top blogs in your niche. This is a time consuming exercise that requires extensive analysis of different trends, data sets and strategies used by your direct competition.

If you're not familiar with this research process, here's a detailed and comprehensive guide to research your competition.

Start with the top ten blogs and gradually move down picking a dozen more down the ladder. This will give you ample data to come up with enough facts and figures that can help you strategize your own approach to stand out in the crowded niche.

But the big question is - "What are some of the most important details one must analyze during the research process to shape up their own plans?". Here's what need to be analyzed during the entire process.

Dynamics of content - Content analysis is the first and the foremost important step to get hold of the kind of content being currently served to the audience. This includes content scope, its format and how it is being packaged. This will also give you the details about the topics and subtopics that are generally covered by the leading blogs.
Branding strategies - One of the major reasons some blogs manage to witness massive growth in a relatively short period of time is their approach towards building a brand. Readers are more likely to trust your content and services if they're comfortable interacting with you and clearly know who the person behind the scenes is. During your research, try to find out how top blogs have built their brand over time.
Community building exercises - A blog doesn't grow in a vacuum. Almost every successful blog devices unique plans to strategically open several channels of direct communication with their readers. That's what you need to find out during the analysis phase to come up with more effective solutions for community building.
Monetization strategies - Seasoned bloggers always devise new ways to make money from their niche blogs. Whether through regular pay-per-click ads, through affiliate marketing, through email marketing or through the services offered by them. Detailed analysis can give you greater insights about these strategies so that you can leverage your budding niche blog to its full potential.

This entire research and analysis procedure will give you tons of useful information that will equip you with concrete data sets that may help you in coming up with a strong and effective plan to boost your blog's presence in a competitive niche.

Devise Your Own Way!

The research phase will let you know about the strategies used by your competition. The key to grow in a crowded niche is to come up with unique and effective solutions that none of your direct competitors are offering.

This is a challenging task where you have to analyze each and every prominent blogging activity of your competitors and have to formulate your own unique way to get things done. And that too, in such a way that not only makes you stand apart from the rest, but is effective as well helping you pull the traffic that converts.

Let's try to understand it with a simple example.

One of the most common blogging activities associated with niche blogs is their monetization. Generally, you'll find your competition using different techniques to leverage the traffic and reach. The most popular ones are inserting PPC ads and stuffing affiliate banners in different sections of the web page.

But, you can try out something different and can compare the results.

I'm not saying that these methodologies are wrong. I'm only emphasizing on getting things done in a better and unique way. In this case, apart from these regular monetization techniques, you can also try out serving custom ads depending on the context and visitors' attributes.

Never heard it before?

It's an advanced technique that involves sensing the context of the web page as well as capturing the demographic information of the visitor and then serving custom content based on the collection information. The end result is much higher conversions compared to the regular methods.

So, in a nutshell, here's what you need to do:

Pick a blogging activity.
Find out how your competition goes ahead with it.
Strategize and find your own unique way to do it.
Implement your solution and compare the results.
Rinse and repeat.

Let's take one more example to ease out the whole concept.

Another common blogging activity associated with niche blogs is - writing posts focused around a specific topic. Now, it's quite natural that you have to write on the same topic your competition is writing about.

So, what's the scope of uniqueness here?

Here's what I do when I'm writing about a topic already covered by gazillion of other blogs. It's as simple as eating an apple pie and gives you noticeable results in a positive way.

Head on to Google search engine and try out some common queries associated with the topic.
Capture the addresses of all the blog posts on the first 2 pages.
Open each one of them and thoroughly examine how they've covered the topic.
Note down what sub topics they've covered.
Start building your own copy that picks the cream (topics, concepts and subtopics) from the collected data and package them in a different way.
Spice up with some good examples and illustrations, if applicable.
Publish and reap the rewards of giving a new perspective to a popular topic.

Initially it may sound a daunting task, but gradually you'll find it very addictive. The goal here is to present the old wine in a new bottle. That's what is needed to stand out in the crowd.

Collaborate With Peers

Experts always suggest using your competition to grow yourself. Budding niche bloggers can collaborate in different ways to kick start their blog's growth. It can be in the form of service or product offering for the readers, providing platform for guest blogging or promoting each others content and services on social media platforms.

Do extensive research and make a list of niche bloggers suitable for a collaborative effort in growing each others blog. Preemptively email them your proposal and highlight the inherent benefits for both the parties.

Here are some of the examples how two bloggers can form an alliance to survive in a crowded niche.

Cross-promoting each others services - Let's take example of two niche blogs related to social media and meta-blogging. One of the blog owners offers custom blog design services while the other one offers Facebook page customization services. Both can collaborate and can divert prospects to each other through their blogs.
Regular guest posting - Another popular alternative is to provide guest blogging opportunities to each other to tap each others traffic in an easy way. The frequency of guest blogging can be negotiated between both the parties.
Social media promotions - Often group of bloggers form an alliance to promote each others blog's content on new media platforms. This is extremely effective if the promotion is done intelligently in a correct way leading to extra targeted traffic.
Publishing interviews - Another potent weapon is exchange of interviews that gives each involved party an excellent opportunity to connect with the readers on the other blog.
Technical help - Often bloggers provide technical help to each other to optimize and tweak the blog. If you're technically strong, you can offer your services in exchange of some other offering from the other end. In simple words, it will be a win-win situation that will help both the bloggers in some way.

While collaborating with fellow bloggers, avoid blogs with ambiguous owner details (incomplete 'About' page). Another important precaution is to avoid long term commitments in the beginning unless you've got positive results in your first short-term collaboration.

Build a Strong Personal Brand

And last but not the least, if you really want to get heard by the audience, you have to give your blog - a face. Every top blog in any niche is instantly recognized by the person behind it.

Isn't it so?

That's what you need to do with your own niche blog. Personal branding is an important part of blogging activity that'll help you survive in cut throat competition. When I say this, it doesn't mean that you have to strive for gaining the status of a public figure.

All that is required is that your readers, subscribers and people connected with you through your blog recognize you, appreciate your key skills (or are aware of it) and talks positively about your personality as a whole.

This aids in expanding the visibility of your blog on key new media platforms that eventually contributes in the overall growth of your niche blog.

Niche blogs - without a face - couldn't survive for the long term whether you're managing your blog alone or you're part of a team of bloggers. Create a powerful about page, interact with your readers and share your experiences on a regular basis.

Over to You

Are you running a niche blog in a highly competitive market? If yes, what steps you've taken to stay ahead in the race? Have you ever switched the niche in mid-way or completely abandoned one of your blogs?

You can share your experiences how you've managed to survive and flourish in a cut-throat competition against all the odds.

How to Build Community around Your Blog

2013-04-15T18:03:00.002+05:30

Every new media channel survives through a community built around it. The more vibrant and lively is the community, the more it flourishes.

Blogs are no different and each one of them requires a thriving community to accelerate its growth. Community around a blog is just like a lubricant to keep your car engine in a good condition.

Have a blog with no community around it?

Start your community building efforts today as it is vital for taking your blog to the next level. It's a long term investment that helps your blog flourish and grow year after year.

But the BIG question is - "What it takes to build a thriving community around a blog and how does one get started with it?".

Before we move ahead with this question, let's first try to understand "What community is!" - in this context. Good percentage of bloggers believes that the commenters on their blogs form the community.

Are you SURE?

Well, commenters are just a part of a larger ecosystem that forms a community around a successful blog. With the advent of multiple new media platforms, your blog's community is not just limited to comment form on its single post pages or archives. People who talk about your blog on different new media platforms ( for e.g. forums or social networking sites) are also part of that community.

And it's not just limited to online platforms. Offline community building is a must if you really want to make it big. We'll talk about that too in this guide.

Getting Started

Community building exercise is a time consuming process and you must be mentally and physically prepared to invest enough time for it. This also includes developing skills to handle negative feedback or comments that you may eventually face during the community building process.

So here's how you can kick-start your community building efforts.

Create outposts on prominent new media platforms - Gone are the days when blog's audience was limited to RSS feed readers and visitors leaving comments on your posts. You must do some research to find out the most promising social media platforms that may give you an opportunity to nurture a community focused around your blog.
Shortlist relevant blogs to comment on - Another important task while strategizing your community building plan is to create a list of select blogs that are not only relevant to your niche but are already experiencing lively community-powered discussions. This shortlisting process is solely for preemptively reaching out for these communities by proactively taking part in the discussions.
Build a free newsletter - A killer newsletter has the power to trigger discussions from the subscribers. These discussions can start through your contact page, comment form or through one of your blog's social media outposts. All depends on the structure of your newsletter which should contain something to chew and consume.
Start weekly/monthly polls - This is yet another potent weapon in your arsenal to further boost your community building efforts. But, if you really want to get some results through it, make the polls infinitely interesting. This way, you'll be able to spark lively discussions from within the participants.
Consider adding a discussion forum - And last but not the least, our good old discussion forums are one of the promising alternatives for nurturing a community around your blog. Start with a free discussion forum and you may start an optional premium membership option for serious buddies.

So, these were some of the important and preliminary community building tasks that can help you get started immediately with visible results. I must stress that depending on your exact requirements and your niche, you may or may not require all of these options.

Prerequisites and Precautions

Apart from giving your time and energy, community building process requires some other stuff too. Without it, no matter how hard you try, it's not going to give you the results.

And, what's that - STUFF?

First, we will talk about the prerequisites and then we'll move on to the precautions. The prerequisites mentioned here are applicable for almost every blog no matter what you blog about and what's your blog's goal.

Content is the cornerstone - Every community building effort revolves around the content publish on a blog. First provide something to ponder upon, only then you can expect people to take part in the community discussions.
Your own soft skills matters - Another extremely important prerequisite is your own approach to answering and addressing queries of community members. The more open and transparent you are, the more is the probability of your success. This also includes great listening skills that are so necessary while interacting with the community.
Facilitate easy opportunities to interact - Sometimes, potential community members try to express their views but don't find the right platform to do so. Extreme moderation rules or poorly designed interaction elements are some of the reasons people may not be interested in being the part of your blog's community.

Now comes some of the precautions while diving into community building routine. These precautions are some of the deciding factors that govern how successful your entire community nurturing exercise will be.

Put cap on 'Broadcast' syndrome - It's very easy to fan out scheduled updates on different media platforms and then expecting some interaction from the readers. I'm not against automation, but solely relying on it without any human touch is only going to ruin your community building efforts.
Formulate appropriate policies for every interaction channel - It's always better to come with clearly defined policies before some of the community members starts messing with you and with other members. You must not only tabulate these policies beforehand but should also facilitate easy access of the same.
Identify and prune spammers at the earliest - Be ruthless when dealing with spammers and trolls. Your ability to quickly identify these notorious digital entities will play an important role in building a clean, useful and lively community.
Avoid controversial topics - Another important precaution is to keep distance from extremely controversial topics that may hurt sentiments of the community at large. It's better to either delete such content or simply impose posting restrictions through strict filtering options.

Once, you're all set, you can move on to the next step of optimizing your existing community building framework by closely monitoring each and every channel and by analyzing the associated outcomes.

Nurturing the Community

The real challenge is not to attract new members to the community. It's all about retaining them and getting more through those retained members.

Most successful communities started with a small and open group of members.

There are almost always some key players in every blog-powered community. It's the blog owner's responsibility to identify these key players and to use them to further build and expand the community.

Following are some of the key techniques that'll help you grow your blog community in a fairly quick time with much less efforts.

Post and respond at peak hours - Now this is quite obvious but still some of us forget this golden rule of online engagement. Do extensive research and find out the best time during the entire week when your readers flock around various new media platforms. Create your schedule matching with this time to get maximum interaction opportunities with the community members.
Identify and delegate powers to the key players - As I mentioned earlier, key players within the community can help you expand it in a fairly quick time. You must identify these active players and must assign them bigger roles to not only expand the reach but also to optimize the overall interaction experience.
Keep check on hard-selling or extreme self promotion - Community building is not about hard-selling your own products and services or trumpeting about your achievements throughout the day. One must be very careful to avoid falling in this trap as it can ruin your community building efforts.
Share useful stuff from others - One of the secrets of growing a community is continuously coming up with extremely useful stuff for the members. And this can be achieved through sharing the best available stuff from others. This way, you'll not only retain the existing community members but will also be able to attract others whose content you're sharing on a regular basis.
Reward active members - Who doesn't like freebies and goodies? That's what is needed for active members who not only regularly take part in community activities but also helps in spreading the word about it. You can give swag, discount coupons or a free service or product on a weekly or monthly basis to such members.
Find new avenues - Instead of relying on good old methods of growing your community, continuously look for new platforms, methodologies and opportunities to give a boost to the existing member base. This will ensure continuous growth of the community despite low performance or failure of one of the channels or methodologies.

These handy tips can help you build a lively community around your blog provided you devote enough time for it. Remember, if something does not work, try a different approach shuffling the actions and routines tabulated in your plan.

Over To You

Now it's your turn to share your blog community building tips. You can also share some useful case studies where a business or an individual has managed to build great online community through a blog.

This will help us get more insights about the process of connecting with more people through this powerful new media platform.

How to Ensure a Successful Product Launch through Your Blog

2013-03-19T16:00:00.000+05:30

There's no doubt blogs have emerged as one of the best online platforms to launch products and services. The dynamic nature of content flow and the community around it makes it an ideal choice for delivering new products.

But a product's 'launch' and a 'successful launch' are two different things.

The former is easier to attain and the latter is equally easy as well provided you follow some simple steps. It's not the product that often fails, but it's the way it is launched that contributes in poor sales. If you're a small business or an individual planning to use your blog for your next product launch, follow this simple guide that'll show you some of best ways to guarantee a successful product launch.

But how does one define a 'successful product launch'?

In business terms, a successful product launch is determined by the increase in pre-launch orders even before the product is released and spike in sales soon after the product is launched.

You can relate this phenomenon with a typical iPhone launch by Apple.

So let's see how we can ensure that our new product do not wait for weeks for the first order after it's launched on our blog. The steps mentioned here are more tactical than technical so that everyone can implement them with ease.

Build Anticipation through Teaser Posts & 'Coming Soon' Page

Once of the common mistakes businesses make while launching a product on their business blogs is to directly write the launch post without any kind of prior announcement.

The most common excuse to follow this approach is to keep the competitors in dark about the product's features. Really?

In today's cut-throat competition, your competitors will come out with similar features in no time no matter when you public the details of the forthcoming product. A better strategy is to create hype about your product long before it is released.

Depending on the volume of potential buyers and the product itself, the teaser campaign can be started from six to one month before the product launch. The more anxious potential buyers are about the product, the more successful will be your launch.

Here are two essential components for your teaser campaign. You can either include both these components or can opt for one of them. If you're selecting one of them, I'll strongly advice you to go ahead with the teaser posts.

Coming Soon page - Clever marketers use this page for two different purposes. Firstly, it is used to showcase features of the upcoming product, and secondly, it is also used to build email list of anxious potential buyers. This way, you're not only building anticipation but are also paving a way to easily spread the message to the potential buyers as soon as the product is launched.
Teaser posts - If you're already delivering your posts to decent number of RSS subscribers, it's a powerful medium in your hand to build anticipation for the upcoming product. Choose a single day per week and gradually start revealing the features of the product in each of the teaser post.

Whether you're revealing features of a product through a dedicated page or through regular teaser posts, you must take care of some common things to ensure a smooth and successful anticipation-building campaign. Following is the checklist that must be kept in your mind before you share a new feature of the upcoming product to the general public.

Do not reveal the official name of the feature. (Your competitor may apply for a patent or a trademark)
Extensively use and showcase results of a feature through snapshots, teaser video or through an infographic.
Compare features with previous versions, if applicable.
Always conclude with how a specific feature will address a specific problem.
Talk about next teaser post with some vague hints about the goodies.

Remember, do not exaggerate things while revealing about your upcoming products. You must also be cautious about the duration of the entire campaign. Too long duration can frustrate the readers and too short duration can reduce the number of potential customers you may reach in a given time.

Share Beta Version with Influencers in Your Niche

As soon as your product's beta version is ready, make a list of all the influencers in your niche and send the product to them. This is one of the potent weapons in your arsenal that will help you spread the word about your upcoming product in an effective way.

Even if one of the influencers decides to talk about your product with his followers, your entire exercise of sharing the beta version with leaders will pay off. While sending the beta version, never ask them to share it with their readers.

Let them decide on their own after using your product.

If your upcoming product is downloadable digital software, all you need is an email copy with a link to the beta file.

But wait!

Sending emails to influential people is an art. If you do it the wrong way, it may land in their trash can. Here's an excellent guide to email successful people and how to get responses from them.

Once you've sent the beta version to the leaders in your niche, hop on to the next stage of follow up. Generally, you should wait at least a week before you even attempt to start a follow up campaign. The bigger the name, the longer is the wait!

I'll strongly suggest you to send only one follow up email and that too short, simple and straight to the point.

And last but not the least, if you find an influencer talking about the beta version and sending a surge of traffic towards your blog; do not forget to preemptively tell him about giving the release version for free as well. This is a killer technique to create a never ending flow of prospects coming through influential people.

Announce Additional Benefits/Goodies for First X Customers

As soon as your anticipation-building campaign comes to an end, write a dedicated post announcing the additional bonus/features/gifts/goodies first 10 or 20 (or whatever you feel is the right number) customers will get without paying anything extra.

Do not publish this post just before the product launch. Keep a one week buffer period between the launch date and the bonus announcement post. This way you and your network will have enough time to spread the word about the announced benefits.

Use a tabulated checklist of benefits or goodies in this post to emphasize the same. This methodology is known to convert very well as an average reader tends to consume it easily rather than picking things from long text paragraphs.

Following things must be kept in mind while writing such kind of post.

Do not disclose the price structure.
Do not disclose the actual product launch date.
Do include the value/price of free goodies customers will get.
If possible, include a dynamic counter showing the number of customers left, who can claim the additional benefits for free.
Do not forget to emphasize that it is a one-time offer.

The entire layout, structure and content of this post governs how successful will be your offer for the potential customers. The more time you spend in spicing up this post, the more leads you will get.

Publish and Push Both Product Launch Post and Newsletter

While launching your product, instead of feeding the product launch blog post to your email list, create a separate newsletter featuring the new product. Utilize both channels (regular blog post & a custom newsletter) to push the product launch details to maximum possible readers.

But, should we publish both of them at the same time?

It's a capital mistake to push your newsletter the same day you're publishing the product launch post on your blog. The reason is quite simple. A good percentage of RSS subscribers are also the part of the email list on a typical blog.

Delivering both post and newsletter with almost similar content in their inbox on the same day is only going to trigger annoyance due to redundancy. This may backfire instead of giving you any kind of benefits.

Send your newsletter anywhere between 2 to 7 days after the product launch blog post. Also ensure that your newsletter layout and content arrangement is quite different from the launch post. This will help you push the product details twice in a completely different way to your feed subscribers as well as to your email list.

Start a Series of Case Studies and Testimonials

Prospects always look for credible data before they make their mind in favor of a product. Real customer testimonials and their case studies are some of the best ways to present that credible and trustworthy data in front of your readers.

As soon as the product reaches your customers' hands, shortlist some of loyal subscribers and people on your email list to share their experiences with you. There's no harm offering them an incentive for the same. Collect as much data as you can from each of the customer who's sharing the product's advantages with you. Following things must be kept in mind while publishing a testimonial post on your blog.

Explain how a customer was able to solve a specific problem through your product.
If possible, include photo of the customer.
Include quotes from the customer.
Share statistical data in a tabular format, if applicable.

Fix one day in a week to share customers' testimonials on your blog. Do not forget to provide the correct details of the customer as well. Providing vague details about the customer is only going to nullify the effect of a good testimonial post.

You can also send a short survey to the existing customers and can share the results in a separate blog post showcasing the usage trends for your new product.

Publish Contest and Giveaways Post

Along with testimonials, you can also publish a special post announcing the contest and an associated prize that includes few product giveaways for the winners. This is the best way to further spread the word about your product through your blog.

You must share this post on popular social media platforms as well to expand the reach and visibility. Through your contest post, you can get another chance to capture emails of the participants. This email list can be used to send custom newsletters featuring your product benefits in different ways.

Keep the contest duration extended and continuously update the contest post with the details about the progress. This will give both you and the participants' ample time to share the post with as much contacts as possible.

Regularly Publish Product Tutorial Posts

No matter what you're trying to sell through your blog, support and guidance is an integral part of the entire process. Whenever you come up with new help manuals and tutorials for your product, share them within your regular blog posts to keep the users updated about the same.

Include usage best practices with examples from current customers. While writing these posts, generously link to testimonials as well as product squeeze pages on your blog. This will help you divert potential customers to the key landing pages showcasing the features and benefits of your product.

Create parent-child categories for these posts so that visitors can easily browse these product tutorials. Using hierarchical categories can also help you pull the right child tutorial post for the reader depending on the parent tutorial post he is reading at that time.

Use Sidebar and Footer Sections for Product Promotion

Right from the launch day, include custom banners and creatives in your blog's sidebar and footer to give entire inbound traffic a chance to know more about your product. Link these banners with your key landing pages that describes your product's features in detail.

You can also use custom floating top and bottom bars to divert visitors towards optimized squeeze pages to get more leads. Use custom hyperlinks within these floating bars to describe the benefits of your product.

Frequently change the featured content within these sections to cover all the features offered by your product. Experiment with their placements and layout.

Rinse and Repeat

Collect data associated with each step discussed above and optimize it for your next product launch. Business blogs are often ignored in the product launch cycle. It's up to you how you leverage this powerful medium to boost the sales of your new product.

The key here is to continuously update your blog in such a way that your readers get to know more about your product and its benefit.

How Combining Minimalism and Color Theory Can Give You More Readers and Subscribers

2013-02-27T20:37:00.000+05:30

Are you exhausting yourself in an effort to create extraordinary content to attract more readers? Are you spending endless hours in designing your key landing pages without any results?

What's one of the common problems a blogger face while trying to fetch more readers?

I asked the same question to one of the bloggers last week and his answer was...

"I write good content, I promote it aggressively on social media and I network with peers. But the results are very dejecting."

From his perspective, the problem was almost negligible results DESPITE doing everything right. It's not just him, but large numbers of bloggers face the same situation.

Sounds a familiar story?

The big question is - "Why one does not get the results despite writing good content and creating all necessary sections, forms and pages on the blog?"

Sometimes, we manage to divert decent volume of qualified traffic towards our blog with NO results!

In such cases, most of the times, the culprit is a poor design. Your premium theme with a custom design is not a guarantee of a high conversion rate. What matter's is, how intelligently you design your theme.

Professional and business blogging requires careful crafting of theme such that each page is designed with a goal in mind for maximum conversions. Apart from incorporating regular theme layout principles, you need two more ingredients to convert the inbound traffic. Let's see both these important elements that have the power to boost your on-page conversion funnels instantly.

Applying Minimalism - The Right Way!

Whenever we talk about minimalism that's directly related to the blog design, people often compare it with a stripped down theme with almost no color or additional content sections.

NO, minimalism is not about making a naked theme!

In this context, it's all about keeping the most important options for the visitors that are necessary for a conversion and removing all other elements. Human psychology clearly suggests that the more options and alternatives a person has the more double-minded and confused he is.

If you want more subscribers, first you should work on removing unnecessary content, plugins, images and forms from your blog. The more choices a visitor has, the more is the probability of a failed conversion.

Minimalism (in blogging context) is all about keeping the most essential elements on the web page that directly contributes in a conversion.

To understand it in a better way, we'll see a live example of minimalism. Below is the screenshot of the home page of Rockable Press. It's a perfect example of minimalistic design that not only includes the essential elements on the web page but also keeps it soothing for eyes.

The first thing you'll notice on this page is the absence of standard content sections normally present in a typical website. For example, almost every blog or a website includes a long primary navigation on the top.

In our example shown above, the designer has cleverly encapsulated the primary navigation menu within a drop-down list. This eliminates one of the distractions so that a visitor can focus on the real stuff.

The other two content sections above the fold are large 'Featured book' section and the 'Free eBook' section with a sign up form to build the email list. This is what I call - "Minimalism at its best!".

The whole purpose of showing this example is to give you an idea about what exactly minimalism means in this context. Stuffing endless colorful ads, social media streams, top commenters section, traffic stats section are some of the examples of wastage of the real estate available on your blog.

This extra 'STUFF' not only occupies the precious space but also acts as a major distraction bringing down the conversion rates. So here's the final summary how minimalism can ensure you actually get subscribers.

Make a list of existing visible elements on a single post page.
Assess the importance of each section in relation to the conversion.
Eliminate unnecessary sections that don't help in conversions in any way.
Carefully design each element without adding bells and whistles.
Align them cleverly such that they complement each other pushing for a conversion.
Test, test and TEST!

Now let's move on to the next important concept that can make your theme layout, a killer conversion machine. If you're a web developer, you must be already familiar with this concept.

Applying 'Color Theory' To Leverage Human Vision Sensitivity

Human brain and vision works in tandem and are very sensitive to colors and shapes. Intelligent web designers take advantage of this sensitivity and design key page elements in such a way that not only grabs the attention of the potential subscriber but also stimulates his nerves in a positive way.

Before we go ahead, you may ask - "What the heck is color theory and how is it going to help me get more subscribers?"

In simple words, color theory is a collection of several principles that explains how to use colors effectively in almost any process related to our day-to-day life. The three most common and important sections of color theory are:

Color wheel
Color harmony
Color context

By combining these 3 concepts you can come up with the right color schemes for the critical content sections on your blog. This will eventually lead to more conversions as the color-optimized sections will leave a positive impact on the visitors and will persuade them to interact with the elements (e.g. buttons, forms, downloads) included in the section.

Does it work?

Absolutely! Let me explain these 3 concepts with some illustrations so that you can grasp it clearly.

Color wheel: The first concept of color wheel is simply a visualization of how different colors originate from 3 primary colors viz., red, yellow and blue. Since web designers now have color pickers and color generators to assist in mixing and generating the desired color, we can safely skip its detailed explanation.

If you're using a premium WordPress theme that includes a design options panel or a drag 'n' drop editor, you can easily find a color picker to choose the right color for the page element you're designing at a given time.

But the big question is - "Which color to choose for a given page element?".

That's where next two color theory concepts can help you in coming up with the perfect combination of multiple color schemes for a group of key visual elements you're designing to grab subscribers.

Color harmony: So let's see what color harmony is all about and how it can help us arrange different colored page elements in a better way. This concept simply explains how one can closely arrange different elements close to one other in such a way that they appear soothing to eyes and stimulates viewer's nerves in a positive way.

In simple words, color harmony represents the arrangement of colored objects having the right color scheme such that they trigger comfort for the human eye. Color harmony exists in two forms viz., analogous and complementary. Let's understand each one of them through a graphic.

Analogous color scheme arranges different elements having color shades that are near to each other. Although the hue and saturation level of these colors is close to each other, the arrangement of elements makes the entire graphic appealing and harmonious.

How does this apply to a blog design?

A classic example can be a feature comparison table consisting of cells on a squeeze page. If you're using an analogous color scheme for this table, it will be more effective, legible and pleasing to the eyes. In other words, if you're grouping large number of common or closely related web page elements with each other and that too in a limited space, using an analogous color scheme is the best choice.

Now let's take a look at the complementary color scheme.

Complementary color scheme is just the opposite of the analogous one! This color scheme involves arrangement of two or more elements having completely different colors that are far apart from each other on the color wheel. The combination of these colors is such that it again creates a pleasing visual for the human eye.

Again, how does this apply to a blog design?

If you're designing buttons with text, custom banners and image sliders (carousals) for your blog theme, use of complementary color scheme is highly recommended.

To understand it better, let's take the example of a green button I'm using at the end of this blog post. If I use analogous color scheme for this button, I'll choose a different shade of yellow or green color for the button text. This will make the button text almost illegible and will create an awful experience for the visitor resulting in extremely low sign ups. Here is the illustration to visualize this fact.

Now that you've got a fair idea about the concept of color harmony and the associated color schemes, let's move on the the last section that'll compliment both the concepts discussed so far. In fact the combination of color harmony and color context helps in generating highly-converting color schemes for both sign up forms and custom squeeze pages.

Color context: This concept is all about how colors appear or behaves when combined with different other colors and within a specific shape. This concept is directly related to the background and foreground colors used in the web page elements and their contrast.

We may opt for the right color scheme (analogous or complementary) for a given web page element, but what about their behavior and contrast intensity once they're used with each other?

A wrong color combination can act as a repellent resulting in a huge spike in your blog's bounce rate. If you're combining two extremely dark complementary colors for your text and its background, you're doing a huge mistake. The content on such a web page will be illegible and a human eye cannot withstand such type of color combination.

You can clearly see that the third example includes two complementary colors and both of them are dark. But the end result is poor legibility that will easily annoy an average visitor.

So, here's what we've learned from the color theory.

Generate colors with the help of color picker applications.
Choose the right color scheme for each of the web page element.
Pay attention to the behavior and contrast while combining two or more colors.

If you follow these three simple rules, the resulting blog theme will help you get more readers and subscribers in a fairly quick time. Of course, it should be supplemented with a minimalistic design that should be further topped with some great content and an aggressive marketing strategy.

Hope you'll use these simple concepts to design better landing pages and sign up forms for your blog.

How to Calculate Your Blog's Worth

2013-02-22T12:27:00.000+05:30

Whether you're planning to sell your blog or looking for direct advertisements, calculating the right value of your blog is an important exercise.

Failing to do so can result in loss of revenue or profits.

But the big questions is - "How one can assess the value of a blog?".

There are several ways to come up with a reasonable price of a blog, but relying on just one of the value determination techniques is not advisable. Although there's no perfect way to quantify a blog's worth, we can certainly come close to the right value by combining several methodologies. These methodologies may change depending on the type and niche of the blog.

We'll go through different strategies used by seasoned players for calculating their blog's value. You can improvise these techniques to come up with a right price for your blog.

Your Blog's Niche Directly Affects the Base Price

A blog's valuation metrics includes its niche too. In simple words, your blog's niche can increase or decrease the overall calculated value by miles. This is independent of your blog's traffic, revenue or reach.

Let's try to understand it with an example.

If you're running a blog (with decent traffic) about insurance or finance sector, you bound to get the price several times higher than the price for a blog about meta-blogging with equivalent traffic.

What's the REASON behind it?

One of the reasons could be extremely high cost-per-click rates for contextual ads for both finance and insurance sectors. In simple words, the profit margin is several times higher than several other niches.

A blog's niche directly affects the valuation that eventually increases or decreases the base price substantially. Meatier the niche, higher is the base price!

In fact, there's a sharp division within a broader niche that can be branched out into various sub-niches. If you creating a blog solely for the purpose of selling it at a later stage on a higher price, do extensive research about the popularity and profit potential of a niche. This simple exercise can land you a much lucrative deal at a later stage.

Buyer Always Want To Know Running and Maintenance Costs

Whatever final price you'll quote during the deal, every potential buyer will try to deduct the running and maintenance costs from the gross amount. This does make sense as the money spent in the maintenance of a blog is simply an expenditure amount and has nothing to do with the actual revenue generated after deducting the expenses.

A potential buyer may ask for the following details while the valuation is in progress.

Hosting fee - Although a typical shared hosting plan ranges anywhere from $5 to $10, it can be much more depending on the traffic and load your blog experiences in peak times of the week. For example, if the buyer finds your blog chokes in peak hours and needs a VPS plan to function properly, maintenance costs can inflate significantly.
Annual fee of premium tools and software - If you blog is using multiple premium products like plugins, themes, analytics software, email marketing service and social media marketing service, the overall maintenance cost shoots up further and the buyer will take account of all these expenditures too.
Payments to writing staff (if any) - Once a blog starts giving handsome returns, bloggers often hire staff to generate premium content on a regular basis. If contract-based writers are working for your blog, that also comes under the radar of the potential buyer.

Hiding all these details from the buyer can result in a canceled deal at a later stage. Always make a correct and detailed list of the expenditure to give a clear picture to the potential buyer.

Remember, this list should not be given in the preliminary rounds of the negotiation. If you do it, you'll be putting cap on the deal even before it is matured. Nobody like to hear about expenditures rather than profits while purchasing a digital asset.

Brand and Social Value Matters

Traffic has its own value, but brand and social reach outweighs it easily. For large number of niches, brand value and the scale of social connections earned through the blog are good enough to generate huge business.

If your brand is well recognized among the community and you have active and effective social media presence, the quoted price can easily go up. Some people relate it with accounts having massive following on popular social media platforms.

Well, number of followers has nothing to do with your ability to generate business through these platforms. What matters is, how actively you're engaged with your connections and do they listen to you?

If people recognize your brand on social media and you're getting leads from these platforms on a consistent basis, your blog's price shoots up.

Once the deal is finalized, a blogger has to hand over all active social media channels to the buyer. These accounts are huge assets for a blogger and one should nurture them with all care as they greatly contribute in elevating the value of your blog.

Process for Valuating a Blog

As I mentioned before that there is no standard way to calculate blog's value. We'll mix some common as well as unique techniques to understand how the entire valuation process works. You can definitely make necessary changes in this procedure to get a near to accurate price for your blog.

Step #1: Start with good old method for calculating the base price.
The most common practice to come up with a reasonable price for a blog is to multiply the monthly revenue with multiples of 12.

For example, if you're earning $500 per month from your blog, you can multiply it with 12, 24, 36 or 48.

Why these 4 different multiples?

The more profitable is the blog, the more is the price. For a relatively new blog, a buyer may pay up to 12 months of blog's monthly revenue. For highly popular blogs, this may even go up to 48 months of monthly revenue.

Here I must tell you that this method has several flaws though it's used widely for calculating a blog's price. One of the major flaws is incorrect calculation of monthly revenue. Let's try to understand it with a simple scenario.

A blog giving $100 to the owner may give 5 times the revenue when it is sold to the new owner. This can happen due to several reasons. The most common reason is failing to monetize the blog to its full potential. Another common reason is poor design of the blog that drives away leads and prospects.

There are several other variable factors that may further increase or decrease this base price. We'll look into each of these factors one by one to see how its affects the base price of a blog.

Step #2: Evaluate and add social media & brand value.
Bloggers holding strong presence on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ can afford to add more cushion to the base price. Although there's no hard and fast rule for the same, it can be done in several ways.

First, you must present concrete data about your social reach including examples of leads generated through the same. Once the data is verified and evaluated by the potential buyer, you can safely add reasonable value to the base price.

A typical example can be fixing a value for an active and genuine follower and multiplying it with the total number of followers.

For example, let's say we set $0.01 value of a genuine follower. If all the combined followers across all the social media platforms are 75,000, the final value comes out to be $750. Remember, you're not selling your followers but simply adding value of your strong social presence to the final price.

Step #3: Evaluate high conversion traffic channels.
Unless you're looking to monetize blogs through CPC contextual ads, high traffic doesn't necessarily signifies good returns. The quality of traffic coming to your blog decides how much more cushion can be added to the base price.

Even with low traffic, a blogger can earn huge amount of money provided the inbound traffic is qualified and is looking for the services and products already being sold on your blog. A potential blog buyer always asked for web analytics data (for up to 6 months) to evaluate the kind of traffic and conversion rates.

If you're able to show him a perpetual source of very high converting traffic, you can certainly ask for a higher price. This demands proper tracking of all the conversion funnels through your web analytics software.

Once the buyer is assured of quality traffic on your site, numbers don't matter.

Step #4: Analyze citation index and valuate the credibility.
If authority sites are quoting and citing your content on a regular basis, you can further elevate the price of your blog. These references are not only vital for SEO but also acts as a seal of credibility.

If you can highlight this data to the potential buyer showcasing leading blogs linking to your content, you can again add some cushion to the base price. Remember, these references should link deep to your internal pages.

Blog's citation index is one of the important metrics to quantify its value. The healthier is your citation index filled with links from authority sites, the more liberty you have to increase the price.

You can easily mine this data through Google webmaster tools. Fortunately, it has a handy export option that can be used to quickly analyze and prepare a report for the potential buyer.

Step #5: Balance the gross amount by deducting a percentage of expenses.
Not all the expenses for running your blog should be included while balancing the final blog price. For example, expenditure on a typical hosting plan is quite obvious and every potential buyer is well ware of that expense. It makes no sense to consider it for your deduction list.

However, recurring yearly expenditure of vital premium tools and services must be mentioned in a separate list and you must show it to the potential buyer before the deal is finalized. It may lower the final price a bit, but it will help you close the deal by giving the right information about the maintenance cost of your blog.

This step is only applicable if the running costs are significantly high and the blogger is using several premium services for critical operations.

In fact, if the buyer has no plans to continue the use of a specific premium product, there's no need to consider including it in the expenditure list.

What's Your Methodology?

This was my general outline of calculating a blog's worth. If you have some more useful methods to assess the value of a blog, do share your experience with us.

In case, you're planning to sell your blog but are struggling to calculate the right price, you can contact me to valuate it for you.

2 Primary Reasons Writer's Block Haunts You Repeatedly

2013-02-14T16:00:00.000+05:30

It's always a good feeling when your blogging dashboard is full of drafts. But that's not always the case.

Sooner or later, almost each one of us confronts the dreaded - 'Writer's Block'.

That's when you run out of ideas and your editorial calendar is empty week after week. Sometimes, it can stretch to several months making your blog almost dead. I've gone through all this way back in 2008-2009 and know very well how hard it hits your readership and organic traffic.

Today, instead of focusing on countless solutions to come out of 'Writer's Block', we'll try to understand the root cause of this problem.

What's the use of talking about REASONS rather than providing SOLUTIONS?

Addressing the root cause is like taking a preemptive step to avert such kind of situation. In other words, prevention is better than cure!

The reasons for writer's block can be broadly divided into two parts. The first one is associated with what you blog about and the second one has more to do with your blogging routine.

Addressing the first reason can help you minimize the risk of falling into writer's block by leaps and bounds. So let's see both these primary reasons that are known to entrap large number of bloggers.

Picking a Wrong Niche

If you haven't yet started a blog but are planning to do so, you must be very careful while choosing a niche for your blog. One wrong step can land you in a perpetual cycle of writer's block.

What blog's niche has to do with - 'Writer's Block'?

Well, almost everything!

One of the primary reasons bloggers run out of ideas is there alienation with the subject they're blogging about. A common example is blogging for your client on a topic you know nothing about.

Seasoned players can do it with some success but that's not the case with everyone.

Same thing applies to newbies who pick a specific niche just because their friend or a peer has also opted for it. This is like a digital suicide!

Your passion for the topic you're blogging about reduces the probability of facing a writer's block by miles. The more knowledgeable, passionate and comfortable you're with the niche, the more comfortable you're with coming up with new ideas to churn out content on a regular basis.

Pure Exhaustion

And this is why sooner or later we all face writer's block. There can be literally infinite reasons a blogger may get exhausted.

The most common factor is stress associated with professional blogging. Again there can be numerous reasons for the same.

It can develop due to unhealthy lifestyle, maintaining lot of blogs simultaneously or due to taking lot of projects at the same time. Once you start putting pressure on yourself, stress and fatigue automatically leads to writer's block.

The best remedy here is to acknowledge your limits.

I maintain my own three niche blogs and couple of more for my clients. But the posting frequency is not the same for all. I know my limits and accordingly I've created my editorial calendar.

The moment I'll try to do anything adventurous, it will completely ruin my blogging routine. So the key here is not just about acknowledgement of limits but also about guarding ourselves against overstepping.

What Else?

As I said before there can be dozens of reasons a blogger faces writer's block. I'd like to know how you tackle this condition and generally what are the major factors that may lead to this condition?

When I faced the same situation in 2009, the best remedy was a complete break from blogging. That refreshes and rejuvenates your mind and you're ready to rock again.

If you have an effective methodology to combat this situation, do share with us in the comments below.

5 Useful Google Analytics Alerts and Custom Dashboards for Bloggers

2013-02-06T18:21:00.001+05:30

If you're sitting under a mountain of data but don't know how to find the required information from within it, it's worthless.

I've always said - "Web analytics is not just about staring at the page views on the dashboard".

Are you doing the SAME?

Unfortunately, large numbers of bloggers simply use their web analytics software as a visit counter.

Almost all of us use Google analytics but only a handful really digs in to find useful insights about the trends and events happening on our blogs.

If you're happy with the default reports provided in your GA account, you're making a big mistake.

Google analytics is quite flexible and can be utilized to mine extremely valuable data for optimizing a blog through various methodologies.

The easiest method to filter useful information from the raw data is to create custom alerts, custom dashboards and custom reports. So, let's get started and see how we can use these three methods to find important trends, events and happenings related to our blog.

Custom Alerts That Makes Sense

I've worked with several clients who were using Google analytics alerts in a wrong way. The most common example is comparing the traffic deviation compared to the previous day.

What's wrong with it?

If you look at the traffic pattern in a typical week, you'll notice that it starts to soar up from Monday onwards and subsides down as the weekend arrives.

Now comparing traffic deviation of Saturday and Friday in general makes no sense. In most cases, the volume will be more on Friday than Saturday.

This pattern is repeated again and again unless something unexpected happens.

Here's a better approach to compare such type of traffic deviations. Instead of comparing the deviation with the previous day, do it with the same day in the previous week.

In simple words, you should compare the traffic of Wednesday (current week) against the traffic of the same day (Wednesday) in the previous week.

This gives you a better picture about how your traffic is changing over the weeks in a given month. So let's quickly make a custom alert for the same.

There are two things that must be decided before you create such type of alerts.

Percentage of deviation to track - You must decide how much change in traffic should be tracked by your custom alert. There's no hard and fast rule for the same but a deviation of 10% is a good starting point. You can fine tune this depending on the intensity of traffic change on your blog.
Type of deviation to track (positive or negative - or both) - Increase of traffic is always welcomed by all of us. But, monitoring decline of traffic is equally important. Therefore, creating alerts for both deviations is highly recommended.

So let's quickly see how to make these alerts. Head over to the 'Admin' tab and select the website profile. Thereafter, go to 'Assets → Custom Alerts → Create new alert'.

Custom Alert #1: Increase/decrease in page views (10%) compared to the same day of the last week.

The image shown above includes a simple alert for monitoring the increase in daily page views by over 10% compared to the same day of the last week. A similar alert should be created for monitoring the decrease in traffic. I've taken page views as the metric which can be changed to unique visits too.

Make sure you add your email address where you want to receive the alert. You can make a similar alert for monthly traffic too.

Now let's move on to the next interesting alert. You may or may not use it but it will give a starting point to explore more useful stuff.

Our next custom alert will send you a notification if you get NIL traffic from social media, the very previous day. For new or very low traffic blogs, this custom alert may not be of any value.

But for those blogs who get decent traffic from social media platforms, this alert can be modified and enhanced to get timely notifications about the change in traffic from social media sources.

First, you must create an advanced segment to filter social media traffic from the combined data.

Thereafter, you can easily create the following alert.

Custom Alert #2: NIL traffic from social media!

You can improvise on this alert and can create separate alerts for popular social media platforms. For example, you can set notifications for traffic deviations from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

Bloggers who receive very good traffic from these new media platforms must create such type of custom alerts to track deviations in inbound traffic. In fact, I'll suggest you to create a similar custom alert for overall traffic as well. Triggering of that alert will indicate some major problem with your blog.

Let's take one more example that involves goals.

If you do not know how to create and track goals through Google analytics, here's an excellent primer for the same.

Through our custom alert, we'll be monitoring the deviation in goal conversion rate. You can do it on a daily basis, weekly basis or on a monthly basis.

Custom Alert #3: Deviation in goal conversion rate.

For each important goal, you can create separate custom alerts to monitor their performance (at the macro level) without any need to visit the dashboard again and again.

Note: While creating custom alerts, the percentage of deviation should be realistic and should be in accordance with your blog traffic. Otherwise, you may either never receive a notification or your inbox will be flooded with tons of notifications.

Custom Dashboards for Quicker Analysis

Now let's move to the next exciting feature available in Google analytics. We're all familiar with default reporting dashboards in our analytics account.

But, how about making your own custom dashboard?

Through a custom dashboard, you can easily decide what information will be displayed in different sections of the dashboard. This gives you an excellent opportunity to create targeted custom dashboards for quicker and easier analysis of relevant information.

You can easily create your own custom dashboard through 'Reporting → Dashboards → New Dashboard'. Here's the first custom dashboard that every blogger must include in his Google analytics account.

Custom Dashboard #1: Social media analysis at one location.

This useful dashboard is populated with extensive information related to social media actions, events and happenings related to your blog.

Once included in your account, you can visualize and quantify the value of each social media platform very easily. You don't need to make any change in your existing analytics script currently installed on your blog.

This dashboard automatically filters the relevant information and populates different sections with all the goodies needed to make you an analytics ninja.

To use this dashboard, use the link below and it will be automatically imported in your Google analytics account.

Click to import this custom social media dashboard

Next custom dashboard has everything to do with blog optimization. Here optimization means the blog's performance in terms of load times and other similar information.

It's a site performance dashboard giving you several technical details about how well your blog and web server is performing. It's very useful when you're experiencing heavy traffic or your current web server is not giving the desired performance.

Custom Dashboard #2: Site performance dashboard with technical data.

You can see how valuable in this dashboard for monitoring the performance of your blog. This dashboard can help you in identifying problems related to frequent downtime or alarmingly slow load times.

Bloggers who're using a content delivery network will find this custom dashboard extremely useful as it helps in monitoring site performance on a country basis too. Here's the link for this second custom dashboard.

Click to import this custom site performance dashboard

Can you modify and extend this dashboard?

Yes, that can be done easily as Google analytics lets you modify any custom dashboard as many times as you want. I would love to see enhanced implementation of these custom dashboards.

If you can come up with a more useful and better version, do share it with us in the comments below.

Over to You

Now it's you turn to share the goodies you're using within your Google analytics account. Whether it's custom report, advanced segment, custom dashboard or custom alert, I'd love to explore intuitive and useful methodologies you're using to get more out of your analytics account.

If you have any specific question related to the dashboards and alerts presented here, do leave a comment and I'll try my best to resolve the problem.

How to Create Killer Landing Pages For Higher Conversions

2013-01-30T19:48:00.000+05:30

If you're planning to sell or promote a product through your blog, custom landing pages are your best bet.

Why?

They're easy-to-make, highly effective and almost always exhibit high conversion rates. A well designed landing page can bring you TONS of sales in a short span of time.

But how to create one?

That's what we're going to learn ahead. No matter what you're going to sell or promote, the success depends on how effective is your landing page's layout and content.

In general, every marketing effort done online is a combination of technical stuff combined with the best practices relevant to that effort. It applies to custom landing pages as well.

Before you go ahead creating one for you, these questions must be answered.

Do you have enough technical resources to create a landing page?
Are you clear about the goals and returns associated with your landing page?
Are you familiar with the basics of lead capturing system?
Are you ready to devote enough time in analysis and optimization?

If the answer to all these questions is YES, you've already taken the first step towards creating a killer landing page.

So, let's get started and go through a ~~not so~~ simple process of creating a powerful custom landing page.

One Page - One Goal

I'm assuming, you've already done your preliminary homework and you have the answers to the following questions.

What product or service you're going to sell or promote?
How it solves the most common problem of the prospects?
Who's the target audience?
How you're going to channel them towards your landing page?

Phew! Is that too much even before you start thinking about the design of your landing page? Well, all this research and information will serve as a foundation to build a business generating page.

With all this information in hand, the first thing that needs to be taken care of is the goal or purpose of your custom landing page.

That's where most landing pages fail.

Either the goal is not clearly reflected through the content or one landing page unsuccessfully tries to accomplish several goals at a time.

A landing page should address one and only one goal - Click to Tweet

The moment you plan to sell two or more products on a single landing page, you're a dead duck!

Remove Distractions and Unrelated Exit Doors

Landing pages are like honey pots made for capturing sales. A slight distraction can hurt your efforts to generate business through it.

In this context, what do you mean by DISTRACTION?

Well, any web page element that contributes in diverting the mind of the prospect is considered as a distraction or a conversion killer.

There are two types of distractions that ruin even a well designed landing page populated with killer persuasive content.

Unnecessary content sections - Apart from the primary content section, a good landing page needs none other to avoid any kind of distractions. Often bloggers do not remove header, sidebar and footer from the landing page. This is one of the huge mistakes that lead to poor conversions.
Unnecessary or irrelevant hyperlinks - Links like privacy policy and disclosure should be completely removed from the landing page. They can distract a prospect very easily. And if these links are present near the checkout section, nothing can be worse than that.

The more you prune and weed out unrelated junk from your landing page, the more it converts.

A good landing page avoids irrelevant or unnecessary exit doors - Click to Tweet

If you struggle to mess with code for removing these elements from your landing page, you can take help of this plugin to get things done quickly.

If you're making several landing pages with almost similar layout, it's always better to create a WordPress page template to reuse it again and again.

Combine Text, Bullet Lists, Illustrations and Videos (if any)

Instead of going ahead with a long text-only version, opt for using all the available visual elements for presenting your value proposition in a strong way.

The two most effective options are bullet lists and illustrations.

Depending on the type of product you're selling, you may also include short intros through videos. But, two things need of to be taken care of while preparing videos for your landing page.

They should not exceed 2 or 3 minutes in length and must also include prompts, speech bubbles and other effects to make them interesting and irresistible.

If you lack the necessary skills but have enough budget, you can hire professionals to create a highly converting video for your landing page.

When it comes to including bullet lists in a landing page, one common mistake ruins your entire effort.

What's that?

Instead of using default (plain) bullet list supported by your content management system, use custom lists that includes image as the bullet.

Does that make sense?

Similarly, typography and white space plays a big role in designing a killer layout that doesn't repel the reader.

Fonts used for different sections (titles, headlines, sub headlines), margins and alignment of key sections must be designed with great care.

Use C.R.A.P principle to get things done - the RIGHT way!

I'll strongly suggest you to avoid use of multiple loud colors (as a background) in a limited space on the landing page. It's one of the conversion killers that are hard to detect through analytics tools.

If you're embedding multiple videos on your landing page, DO NOT stuff them at close proximity to one another.

The sooner you learn the art of combining various on page multimedia elements in a correct way, the better landing page comes out from your design efforts.

Testimonials Does Make a Big Difference

Although there of hundreds of active landing pages that convert very well even without any kind of testimonials, adding them can certainly give a huge boost to your existing squeeze page.

Inclusion of this important section becomes more essential if the product is relatively new and has a decent price tag.

Testimonials can backfire too!

What???

Don't panic, I'm talking about the poor implementation of the same.

Have you ever seen a testimonial that appears crappy, artificially crafted with no credible information about the person who's firing a one liner - 'Great product!'?

With such kinds of testimonials, all your time and energy spent in designing an appealing landing page will go in vain.

First, we'll see what options you have at your disposal to collect the right kind of testimonials.

There are two common ways for the same.

Either you compile a list a testimonials provided by the company who created the product or you directly contact some of the customers to get the relevant data.

The latter option may be a bit cumbersome but the results are above excellent.

Before embedding a testimonial in your landing page, make sure it fulfills the following criteria.

Thumbnail image - If people can see how the person looks who's already reaping the benefits of the product, nothing can be better than that.
Full name - Instead of using the first name, provide complete name of all the individuals included in the testimonials.
Short intro or bio - This essentially means who the person is and what he does! I must also include that this entry is not mandatory.
Link to his website or social media account - This is one of the huge credibility boosters that validate the testimonial. You don't necessarily need to hyperlink the same, but a legible entry is a must.
Meaningful testimonial - And last but not the least is the real part - the testimonial itself. Instead of collecting one liners (e.g. What a great product!), concentrate on collecting real testimonies where the beneficiaries are talking about several benefits they're enjoying since the product purchase.

If you have enough testimonials in your database, spread them across the whole page at the targeted locations.

Testimonials are like adrenalin for a landing page - Click to Tweet

I must repeat it once more.

Use testimonials very carefully on your landing page. They should be authentic and should not appear artificially crafted at all.

Test, Track And Optimize

I call it a BIG SIN, when landing page elements are not tagged at all.

Do you track and analyze your website's or blog's traffic? Yes?

Then why not do the same for one of the important pages that can bring you tons of money?

What's the advantage?

You track them, you collect data, you find pitfalls, you find weaker sections, you optimize them and in turn you get more business.

Here's an easy-to-follow tutorial for using Google analytics to track your landing page performance.

If you're already getting large volume of traffic, deign multiple landing pages for the same product and test each one of them simultaneously.

There's one more TRICK to make most out of your tracking efforts.

Through this advanced Google analytics tracking script, you can monitor how prospects scan your landing page. This essentially means that you can easily keep an eye on causal scanners and readers.

Your analytics dashboard is the key to more sales - Click to Tweet

Biggest affiliate marketers and professional bloggers use web analytics to come up with killer landing pages through extensive testing and tracking on a continuous basis.

It's not that hard and once you get hang of it, you can easily come up with unique and intuitive ways to track important actions and events happening on your landing pages.

What's Your Biggest Concern?

Now it's your turn to share your experiences with custom landing pages you've built till date.

What's the biggest challenge you always face while designing a landing page?

If you're landing page is not giving the desired results, here's a simple exercise for you.

Go to your landing page and note down at least two important factors that may be hindering conversions.

Share it here and we'll try to remove the obstructions, if any.

2 Insanely Easy Ways to Get More Subscribers, or Readers (with Low Traffic and Visibility)

2013-01-22T19:03:00.004+05:30

A lot has been said about ways to get traffic that actually reads your blog or subscribe to it.

But, have you managed to get READERS through countless blogging methodologies found all across the web? I'm talking about conversions, NOT raw traffic!

One of the biggest challenges for most of us is to convert the incoming traffic.

BUT HOW?

One of the common or prevalent strategies that a blogger may tell you is to come up with exceptional content combined with aggressive marketing of the same. There's nothing wrong with this strategy.

But, the content alone is not going to convert majority of prospects. Not convinced?

I'll show you how businesses and smart internet marketers manage to generate massive amount of sales by following - two simple steps. You don't need to be an expert internet marketer to apply this methodology.

There has to be something that clicks in the mind of an average visitor triggering the subscription process. You just need to find out, what makes your visitors' stay longer on your blog?

It's all about identifying the most pressing needs of your audience.

What after that?

Create a Strong & Unique Value Proposition

What the heck is that?

In blogging context, it's the benefits or value a subscriber or reader WILL GET if he signs up for a newsletter or a blog feed. Some bloggers loosely compare it with a dangling carrot on a stick for the potential subscribers.

But, this comparison is totally wrong.

Value proposition is not about hanging a freebie for gaining a subscription. It has more to do with long term benefits of the subscriber.

In simple words, you're going to promise some key (practical and quantifiable) benefits, a prospect gets once he is on your list.

So let's see some of the basic ingredients that are needed to prepare a killer value proposition. No matter what you blog about, the recipe of creating an alluring value proposition remains more or less, the same.

Here I must warn you against promising stuff you really can't deliver.

Broadly, a typical value proposition consists of the following two parts.

Primary benefit - That's the driving force of the entire conversion wheel running through carefully crafted offers. You must define the biggest benefit a subscriber will get, once he starts following your blog.
Associated benefits - Every big prize or bonus almost always brings numerous other benefits at a smaller scale. That's what you need to tabulate in front of the prospect.

Is that all you need to take care of while scribbling details of a value proposition for your inbound traffic?

The answer is a big NO!

So, what else is left? We have all kinds of benefits for the subscriber. Isn't it sufficient to convert a visitor?

The benefit alone doesn't bring you subscribers because that's what your competition is also offering. So what's the key to come up with a highly converting value proposition?

You must also take care of the following things while creating an irresistible offer for your audience. Benefits are definitely the foundation, but you need to pimp them up with the right kind of ingredients which are as follows.

Unique - How different is your offer plays a big role in coming up with an irresistible value proposition. When I talk about uniqueness, it doesn't mean to be absolutely different from your entire competition. The trick is to craft such an offer that reflects its uniqueness in the mind of the prospect at any given time.
Quantifiable - The most common mistake bloggers do while creating a value proposition is to talk about benefits that cannot be measured in an easy way. Work on this aspect and come up with a clearly defined list of benefits that can be quantified at a glance.
Relevant - Some of you may say that it's obvious to come up with a relevant offer, but unfortunately I've seen a fitness blog offering premium image editing software to its potential subscribers. I don't think I need to stress much on this point.
Easy-to-understand - No matter how relevant, unique and quantifiable are the benefits offered through your value proposition, unless you do not make it damn easy to interpret the entire offer, you're not going to get any positive results.

There are some critical DONT's that must be kept in mind while creating a value proposition.

It's NOT a kind of advertising channel where you're shouting slogans or statements hard selling your products. It's a direct conversation with the prospects where you're talking about real benefits in an easy-to-understand language.

It's also NOT about bashing your competition.

With these things in mind, let's move on to the next step of giving shape to the value proposition which is on the paper.

Present And Make It Damn Obvious!

Now comes the most important part of presenting your irresistible offer to your potential subscribers in a correct way.

We'll see some practical examples of "Value Propositions" which are used successfully by businesses across the world. This will help you in the design process to come up with an effective copy, that'll really convert.

First, let's try to understand the anatomy of a typical value proposition.

It consists of a primary headline, sub-headlines (optional), small persuasive paragraph, bullet list of benefits, relevant image and a strong call-to-action.

It may also include comparative analysis against your competition.

The key here is to present your offer in such a way that a prospect grasps it within few seconds.

The more time he spends in trying to understand the value proposition, the more is the probability of a failed conversion.

So, here are some of the real life examples of killer value propositions. Pay attention both on content and the presentation.

Example #1: Social Triggers

It's a classic example of an excellent value proposition.

Here's the dissection of all the major parts.

A bold headline triggering 'Curiosity' emotion.
The next line shows what's unique - 'Use of psychology to build online business'.
It's followed by clearly defined benefits.
You can also see a highly relevant image.
There are two strong call-to-actions within the entire layout.

What are the key takeaways from this example?

First, contrary to the popular belief, you don't need a fancy graphic-intensive layout for presenting your value proposition.

Second, igniting prospects' emotions WORKS and works very well! (Use of psychology in action)

Third, following the KISS principle works here as well.

Now, let's move on to the next example.

Example #2: Conversion Love

This is yet another powerful value proposition example.

Once can easily dissect all of its major sections.

The primary headline summarizes the biggest benefit.
The line right below it tells broadly how (uncovering visitors' intentions) the benefit is materialized.
The image clearly indicates conversion funnel optimization.
The bullet list tabulates all the benefits in a clear and concise way.
The sign up section has been intelligently populated with 3 strong call-to actions.

Can you find out the key takeaways from this example?

I leave this as an exercise for you. You can share your findings in the comment below.

Are You Ready...?

Now that you know what two steps need to be followed to get loads of subscribers, it's time to replicate this process on your blog.

Research and find out the best value proposition you can craft for you blog. If you can come up with multiple versions, that will be an added advantage.

Share it here in the comments below and I'll be giving feedback for all the interesting and sincere entries to KICK START your conversion process.

Image Credit: rafizeldi

10 Content Marketing Options for Professional Bloggers

2013-01-15T16:45:00.005+05:30

Content marketing is a broader term used by businesses, marketers and professionals to help connect with their customers to promote and sell their products and services. New media has added more sparks to the content marketing dimensions giving more options to market, promote and connect with our potential customers. Professionals and business bloggers have ample options for using various content marketing techniques to build their business. We're going to take a look at some of the most popular content marketing methodologies that'll give you enough flexibility to try different channels for promoting your products or services in an effective way.

Articles

This is obviously one of the most common methods of reaching your audience and prospects. You can not only produce general consumer-oriented articles for your own blog, but can also find other platforms to share useful information for expanding your presence and reach.

In fact, this is the foundation of content marketing strategy for every business blog. All other supplementary content marketing channels rely heavily on this primary technique. Unless you're not providing killer articles on your own blog, no amount of tertiary marketing activities are going to give any kind of benefit to your business.

While creating articles for your blog, diversify the content and come up with useful how-to tutorials and list posts to build the foundation on which you can exercise other options available at your disposal.

eBooks

It is one of the powerful ways to promote and generate business in quick time. Fortunately, creating eBooks is not that hard and you only need to know the bare minimum ingredients needed to create a killer copy that attracts more leads and prospects. There are two broad ways to use this powerful medium to grow your business. First methodology is to create a free eBook for pulling leads for your conversion funnel. The second method is to come up with a low-priced eBook to generate direct sales as well as to pull leads for your services.

The latter method is obviously bit tougher than the former, but there's no harm testing both of them on your blog. If you're running a service-oriented blog, I'll highly recommend creating an eBook for your subscribers. It's effective and is one of the easiest ways to bait your readers.

Videos

Various studies have suggested that audience for video content is growing at an exponential rate both for desktop and mobile platforms. Several popular bloggers rely completely on video content to pull massive amount of readers. Although creating video content on a regular basis is a challenging task, but the benefits easily outweighs the efforts and investment in creating powerful and entertaining videos.

It's not necessary that you include yourself in every video created by you. Not everyone has the necessary skill to speak confidently on a video shoot. A simple solution to the problem is to use your voice over for informative tutorials containing a mix of illustrations and video streams. This is one of the common methodologies used by lot of bloggers to create highly entertaining and useful videos for their audience.

Podcasts

Quite similar to video content, audience simply loves to consume useful podcasts. It is not only much easy to grab audio content, but it also gives you an excellent way to directly engage and connect with your audience. Once your podcast starts getting positive reviews from the subscribers, there's no looking back.

If you'll ask me about some of the best podcasts that may help your business blog grow rapidly, I'll recommend this one published by Derek Halpern. It's complete free and gives you some of best the techniques to grow your online business. If you're a good orator or have enough budget to hire one, do not hesitate to create your very own podcast series.

Newsletters

If you want to know about the most powerful and effective way to grow your online business, I'll instantly say - email marketing. And newsletters are an essential part of it. A killer newsletter can generate tons of sales for you provided it is done correctly. The most challenging part is building your mailing list. Newsletter creation involves rinse and repeat cycle to give the very best to your subscribers.

Whenever you’re launching a new blog, pay special attention on building your email list as well as in creating a useful newsletter, right from the day one. If it is done the right way, your conversion rate will be very high giving the highest possible returns. And last but not the least, if you're planning to create a newsletter for your audience, instead of relying on a free solution, go with the best premium service to get the best tools for creating an alluring newsletter series.

Reviews

Business blogs often use this content marketing channel to promote their products and services. It's an excellent medium to exhibit the features and benefits of your products. But, indulging in excessive product reviewing can backfire. If you're coming up with a product review in every alternate post, it's only going to annoy your readers. Use it intelligently mixing it with a series of useful articles that are relevant to the product being reviewed.

Bloggers who extensively rely on affiliate marketing can also use this medium to generate sales. While writing reviews on your blog, you must explicitly disclose that you're writing the same for a specific product. eCommerce portals can utilize this medium to the fullest on their company blog to divert prospects towards the collection of best products they have on offer.

Interviews

Who doesn't like to get featured in an interview and that too on a popular website in its domain. That's what good numbers of bloggers do to get more visibility and too establish themselves as an authority in their niche. When a blogger is relatively new, getting interviewed on good and relevant blogs is bit tough.

The same thing applies for the other side of the coin when you want to interview experts in your field. Normally, businesses use this medium when they have to promote a new product or service. Interviews give you an opportunity to present your views in a more personal and informal way to the targeted audience. It's also one of the best methods to boost your credibility. Once you start giving interviews, people get to know you better and they trust your products and services more than ever before.

Infographics

We all know that - "Picture says a thousand words". That's what infographics is all about. It is now one of the widely used content marketing options for businesses and individuals. People love nicely designed infographics filled with useful statistics and data. They're successfully used both for traffic building as well as for gaining backlinks.

There are dozens of free and premium solutions to make a killer infographic. You don't need to be an expert graphic designer to create visually appealing infographic. What matter most is the data presented in the infographic. If your company generates interesting statistics on a regular basis, I'll strongly suggest you to share it with your audience in the form of an infographic on your company blog.

Webinars

Probloggers and marketers often use this immensely effective content marketing tool to directly engage with their audience. The advantage of hosting a webinar is that it allows for two-way communication and you can address queries of audience almost instantly.

Although there are thousands of applications to host a webinar, but my favorite solution is Google Hangouts On Air. It's free and is extremely reliable including tight integration with your YouTube channel. Businesses often use it during product launch or during official workshops related to services or products. Since almost all webinar tools lets you record the entire streaming, you can later use it as part of your video content marketing strategy.

Slide Presentations

And last but not the least is the good old method of creating a collection of slides focused around a hot topic. You can either host the slide presentation directly on your blog or you can host it externally. Slides give you an easy way to distribute information through different types of multimedia content like text, graphics, animation or videos.

If you plan to use slide presentations as part of your content marketing strategy, make sure you create at least 10 slides in one collection for the best results. Focus on creating illustrative slides with clear prompts or speech bubbles. It's always advisable to choose trending topics for creating slide presentations.

How Technical Know-How Helps You Blog in A Better Way

2013-01-08T16:38:00.000+05:30

Great writing, marketing and networking skills are three of the prerequisites for creating a successful blog. Your journey to build a blog that gives business can become easier if you're familiar with associated technologies. The technical know-how can help you to be one step ahead from the competition. Almost every successful blogger, no matter what's his background, strive to learn all important technical know-how to design, optimize and nurture his blog in the best possible way. Absence of basic or essential technical knowledge can restrict your blogging experiments in several ways limiting your creativity.

Whether you're a lawyer, an accountant, a programmer or a housewife, the day you start your professional blogging journey, you must devote some time to learn all the important technologies that are needed on day-to-day basis for making your blog a better place. How does it help you in blogging and in what way being technical can make you a better blogger?

You Can Easily Grasp Technical Blogging Tutorials

One of the advantages of gaining such knowledge is that you can easily understand the technical solutions related to blogging. Often several bloggers land on a technical tutorial and leave it dejected simply because they're technically challenged and cannot implement the solution provided in the article.

I've encountered this situation in my early blogging career and I know how it feels when you want to take advantage of a feature but you fail to do so due to your limited technical knowledge. It is such a frustrating experience when you see that your competition has implemented a feature and are benefiting from it and you can only watch them race ahead due to that. That's why I always suggest newbies to grasp important technical knowledge right from the day one. You cannot learn everything in a day, but you cannot afford to wait for such a situation where you're clueless about implementing a killer blogging feature that requires some technical knowledge.

You Can Easily Tweak Your Blog's Theme

When I talk about gaining technical knowledge related to blogging, that doesn't mean that you need to learn hardcore programming. Simple working knowledge of CSS and HTML can do wonders and can bring you the best possible results. One of the most common problems that large number of bloggers faces is their inability to make minor changes to their blog's theme as per their preferences.

This can significantly boost your conversion rate if the required tweaks are done to get a more visitor-friendly layout containing targeted sections. Fortunately, almost every WordPress theme can be tweaked quite easily provided you're comfortable with basic CSS and HTML. This way, you can not only change the default appearance of the theme, but can also optimize it for better visitors' experience. Branding plays an important role in professional blogging and a unique blog theme helps in creating your brand that makes you stand apart from the crowd. I'll strongly suggest you to learn to basics of both these web programming languages so that you can change or optimize your blog theme at your will.

3rd Party App/Widget/Code Integration Becomes Easy

No matter which blogging platform you're using, the default features are never good enough to implement all the required functionalities. For example, if you want to disable native WordPress comments and want to replace it with Facebook comments, you must integrate the respective social plugin provided by Facebook.

And to successfully implement it on your blog, you must have working knowledge of HTML and theme tweaking. Whether it's about adding widgets in the sidebar or it is about inserting ads at targeted positions within your theme, being technical helps in completing these simple tasks with ease. So do not wait more and start practicing integration of popular third party apps and services on a test blog. This will give you ample options to experiment with, and to provide the best possible content and features to your valuable readers.

Leveraging Advanced Web Analytics Becomes Easy

Normally, we're quite happy with our default web analytics tracking system and the metrics we get in our analytics dashboard. It only requires a simple script insertion and that's all we need to do to start tracking our visitors. Unfortunately, good numbers of bloggers are unaware about the sheer power and flexibility a typical web analytics program (e.g. Google analytics) has on offer.

To take advantage of all the advanced and powerful features of your web analytics program, you must be technically sound and must have sound knowledge of essential analytics vocabulary. This can tremendously help you in capturing leads and sales at the rate that you had never thought before. At weekends, you must devote some time to learn advanced web analytics tricks to get more out of your blog.

On-page SEO Becomes Easy

No matter how good content you're writing for your readers, you cannot undermine the role of basic on-page SEO that is essential for making a search engine friendly blog. Working knowledge of the same can add a layer of cushion on top of your great content. This can help you get targeted traffic from organic sources and can keep your blog in the good listings on all the major search engines.

Working technical knowledge of modifying theme files and directory permissions is vital for implementing core SEO features. Absence of this technical knowledge and slight incorrect SEO settings done inadvertently can result in penalization even if you're writing top notch content. Right from day one, you must strive to learn all the essential technical knowledge related to on-page SEO that determines your success in getting organic traffic.

General Blog Maintenance Becomes Easy

And last but not the least, every professional blogger has to perform dozens of peripheral blog maintenance tasks to keep his blog in a healthy condition. Almost all of these tasks need sound technical knowledge to securely and efficiently perform key housekeeping jobs related to your blog.

For example, fixing broken or non-functional links and taking regular backups are some of the important blog maintenance tasks that every blogger must learn and master. All this technical knowledge can be easily gained through a test blog hosted either on your PC or on your web server. You must add these maintenance tasks in the list of technical things you need to master to milk your blog in the best possible way.

Understanding the Science of Subscriber Acquisition and Retention

2013-01-03T18:48:00.000+05:30

Almost every form of online marketing involves a strategy to capture leads or subscribers. It's one of the fundamental ways a blogger manage to sell his products and services. In the long term, subscribers may turn into your regular customers depending on the type of services and products you're offering through your blog. Seasoned players use human psychology to build their subscribers base at a rapid pace. It's an art that's mixed with technical know how to create an effective subscriber acquisition channel that's continuously optimized and tested to get the best possible results. Let's see some of the core principles and practices of acquiring subscribers for our content, services and products.

Prospects' Profile Creation

Demographic data captured from various web analytics tools provides us with tons of information about the type of visitors who're spending more time browsing the content on our blog. If your current analytics system is lacking demographic data, you must consider an alternative as soon as possible.

Through this valuable data, you can come up with a generic visitor profile that appreciates your content or services. To get a clear picture, the data set should be large enough to get clear trends about each and every attribute. This includes their average age, gender, purchasing power, education, geographic location and much more.

Apart from regular demographic data manipulation, you should also consider analyzing psychographics data that gives us more useful insights about visitors' behavior, attitude and their purchasing pattern. Capturing this data is not easy and it requires some extra efforts to gather these extremely important statistics. One simple way is to run surveys both for existing subscribers and for the visitors. The other option is to hire an agency or to buy specialized software. Popular email marketing services provides facility to capture such type of data for optimizing the campaigns.

Creating a subscriber's generic profile helps you strategize and design the acquisition system more effectively. Businesses and leading blogs in their niche do extensive research about their visitors and subscribers to build a profile for designing better lead capturing systems. Depending on the interest lists and services, you may segment the prospects data to come up with multiple profiles for each of the segments.

Interest Lists Segmentation

Based on the generic subscriber profiles you've created, you must carefully divide your content, products and services into different groups. Business or niche blogs covering wide array of information and products must go through this process to create a set of digital assets for each segment of subscribers.

It is quite common that a single subscriber profile share more than one interest list segment. Each interest list may contain different types of digital assets viz., text, podcast, video, eBook, online service, downloadable product. This whole exercise helps you determine the different types of acquisition channels that need to be designed for each segment of visitors.

Segmentation of interest lists also triggers an important routine of segmenting the subscribers list. This saves you lot of time and effort that you may spend trying to divide one massive list into different segments at a later stage. Based on the created interest lists, if you're creating different segments of subscribers' lists right from the beginning, it will not only save your time and energy but will also help you target the subscribers in a much better way.

Subscriber Acquisition System Candidates

For each segment, relying on a single acquisition system is like trying to fish on the first location secured by you on the river bank. You must design different forms, links and squeeze pages for each of the segment to find out the best performing combination.

Creating multiple versions lets you do extensive split or A/B testing in an easy way. Do extensive tagging and other relevant procedures to capture important events for each design in your analytics dashboard. Finding out the right combination of subscriber acquisition system is a time consuming task and sometimes it may take several months before you get the perfect conversion system. Following are some of the common acquisition systems used on professional blogs.

Custom email capturing form - If you're using a popular email marketing solution, designing these custom lead capturing forms is a cakewalk. There are several types of email capturing forms that brings different results. Unless, you plan to push the new subscribers into several other secondary conversion funnels, it's better to keep just one email field in the form. Otherwise, it's better to capture the first name of the subscriber as well.
Custom squeeze/resource pages - This is yet another powerful way to capture new subscribers. Resource pages are perfect candidates for embedding subscription forms at targeted places. I general prefer to embed three subscription forms on a typical resource page. One at the top, second one in the middle and last one right at the bottom of the page. An example is my 'About' page where I've strategically placed 3 subscription forms for new visitors.
Top and bottom subscription bars - Another common way to acquire subscribers is to deploy customized collapsible bars either at the top or at the bottom of the web page. Hello Bar is one of the popular alternatives used by thousands of bloggers. The advantage of using these bars is that they're unobtrusive and immediately attracts attention of the visitor.
Popup subscription prompts - Although I'm not a huge fan of deploying popup subscription forms, but still I recommend it for select niches where the audience is not technically sound. It may not work in every case, but there's no harm in trying this option for your blog. The success also depends on finding the correct settings for each of the attributes associated with your popup form viz., delay in time to load, modal status, appearance, placement and much more.
Custom links and forms - And last but not the least are custom prompts, forms and links designed from scratch. If you're technically sound or have the budget to hire a developer, you can come up with a unique solution to get the best possible conversions. I generally prefer the custom solution due to the level of flexibility it offers.

For each of the interest lists you must create and test the related acquisition channel with different types of capturing tools mentioned above. My favorites among these are email forms and custom resource pages. Both of them have given the best results in the various tests I've done on this blog. But if something is working on one blog doesn't necessarily means that it will work on the other one too. Extensive testing is the key here.

Trailing Subscribers' Activities

No matter how good sign up forms you design with high conversion rates, sustaining and continuously growing a healthy subscribers list is a big challenge for every professional blogger. Once a visitor is on your list, tracking and maintaining his interaction history is of utmost importance if the stakes are high when you've already spent enough in acquiring him.

Sometimes bloggers don't pay much attention on the inflating subscriber acquisition costs when their existing list is already shrinking with equally high unsubscribe rate. That's where monitoring and analyzing the activities of subscribers plays a big role. Very few applications or services provide subscriber level detailed activity trail to get meaningful insights.

If you're using a free solution like Google analytics, you can still track lot of important data through event tracking, custom variables, advanced segments and multi-channel funnel visualization.

Normally, you can't use these techniques effectively if you're distributing stuff through a 3rd party system. But the simple solution is to create your very own newsletter through your WordPress blog. Then these techniques can be implemented right within the newsletter posts to get detailed insights about subscribers' activity.

Optimizing Existing Acquisition Systems

This is one of the most challenging parts of the entire subscriber acquisition and retention cycle. You've created subscribers' profiles, have designed killer sign up systems and are also gathering the activity details. Now what? At this stage, there are two important challenges in front of you. First, to keep the conversion rate high and second to reduce the unsubscribe rate to the minimum. The latter part is more challenging than the former and requires careful analysis and planning. Here are some of the important metrics or signals that need to be monitored to filter out dead or stagnant subscribers.

Open rate - This metric can be used to identify both inactive and volatile subscribers that may press the unsubscribe button anytime. If a subscriber is not or rarely opening your delivered stuff, it's a red signal for you and you must analyze the associated activity data of that subscriber to find out the reasons of his low engagement.
Exit link click activity - One of the simplest metrics to examine how actively subscribers are engaging with the delivered content is to monitor the clicking activity for the exit links. Good monitoring software can easily sort the subscribers records based on the number of exit links clicked and that too on newsletter edition basis.
Unsubscribes - Once you start tracking nonperforming newsletter editions, you must analyze the structure, appearance and content of the newsletters resulting in high volume of unsubscribes. Sometimes, it's just the title of the newsletter that may repel the readers. This is a tricky thing and the ability to correctly analyze the probable reasons comes with experience.
Bounces - If a subscriber is regularly following different exit links within your newsletters that doesn't necessarily mean that he doesn't need your attention. You should extensively tag your landing pages where the subscribers may land through one of the exit links within the newsletter. Visits resulting in immediate bounce should be filtered and analyzed by you once the campaign is over.
Returns - And last but not the least is your return-on-investment. There's no sense investing in building large email lists that gives you no return. You must keep check on the key events (extensive tagging of landing pages) that results in sales or revenue generation in some other form.

Here's an excellent guide to correctly analyze and monitor your email campaigns. Correctly analyzing subscribers' activity data takes both time and experience. But that's the foundation of building optimized acquisition systems that not only grow your email list rapidly but also exhibit very low unsubscribe rate.

Subscriber Retention Strategies

Getting back lost subscribers is a herculean task. This becomes more difficult if the unsubscribe event was triggered due to irrelevant or poor quality of goods delivered to the subscribers. Who determines the quality of content you're including in your newsletter? A useful newsletter for one subscriber can be a piece of crap for the other.

Nowadays almost every email marketing system (free or premium) provides unsubscribe notifications. Simple notifications have no value unless you act on them. What matters is your action once a subscriber leaves your list. There are three types of subscribers those should be pursued to retain them for a longer period of time.

Dead email entries - Those subscribers whose subscription has not yet been confirmed or their open rate is zero are considered dead in an email list. If the volume of this segment is more than 10%, it's an alarming signal for you and you must take an appropriate action to reduce this count.
Low activity (volatile) subscribers - A segment of subscribers who rarely open your newsletter or never click any link within the content are considered volatile in nature. They have a high probability of unsubscribing from your list any time. This is the second segment that needs your attention.
Unsubscribed entries - And last but not the least are those subscribers who've already left your email list. Getting back this segment is most challenging. Although the acquisition rate for this segment is fairly low but still there's no harm trying to get them back.

All these three segments can be targeted in different ways. If implemented correctly, you can recover a large chunk of lost subscribers which can prove extremely profitable in the long run. Often, the result of retention exercise is not that great but that's quite normal and their no reason to get dejected in the absence of some good figures in your dashboard. Here are some of the common retention strategies to recover stagnant or lost subscribers.

Recovering unverified entries - If you're using double opt-in for your email lists, you may notice good volume of unverified subscriptions. Instead of waiting for them to get verified within few days, you must preemptively initiate the relevant process to get these entries verified. If you're using Feedburner, you can easily extract the unverified emails from your account and can send a follow up email to remind about the verification.
Sending special newsletter editions to volatile subscribers - This segment needs special attention due to their low or almost nil activity. Instead of waiting for them the press the unsubscribe button, you can craft special newsletter editions with some freebies to increase the engagement. This technique works effectively in turning these volatile entries into loyal subscribers.
Recovering lost subscribers - There are three common ways to follow up and to attempt recovery of a lost subscriber. Depending on the system you're going to use, results can vary and it's up to you to find the best option that works well for you. Here are these three common techniques.
- Goodies in unsubscribe notification - You can design a custom unsubscribe notification email and can embed some freebies for the lost subscriber. Make sure the freebies are only accessible to verified subscribers. This way, you can neutralize lot of unsubscribe attempts.
- Diverting to custom unsubscribe notification page - Another effective strategy is to divert them to a custom landing page once they press the unsubscribe link. Place the unsubscribe button right at the bottom of that page and create optimized content sections or freebies sections to divert the subscriber's attention. This technique is not possible with free solution like Feedburner since it doesn't provide any kind of redirection facility for unsubscribe events.
- Sending a personal email - If the volume of unsubscribes is very low and manageable, you may try to mail them individually with a link to a survey or asking the reason of their action. Getting a personalized email from you can persuade them to rethink about getting on your email list again.

All the retention techniques discussed in this section can be easily implemented through a premium subscriber acquisition system provided you're fully utilizing the features offered by your email marketing solution. If nothing works, it's better to look at the other side of the coin to find out the reason of high unsubscribe rate.

Over to You

All the methodologies discussed above may or may not be implemented on every blog. If you're running a high traffic business or niche blog, it's imperative to invest in deploying all the important techniques discussed here to get a high converting subscriber acquisition system that brings you more business. If you're using some other popular techniques to pull more subscribers for your products and services, we would love to know about it. If you have any interesting case study or example of a powerful subscriber acquisition system, do share it with all of us.

How to Track Important Links and Forms on Your Blog

2012-12-18T16:17:00.000+05:30

Almost every blog contains different sections on the web page filled with important links and forms. These elements can be within the primary content section, comments section, sidebar, header or footer. Generally, an average blogger never bother to individually track clicks on important links or RSS & newsletter signups. But, the advantage of tracking these important on page elements is extremely beneficial for not only optimizing your blog in general, but also for increasing your conversion rate. Today, we're going to learn simple and effective techniques to track all the important links on our blog. It's very easy to implement and you only need to tag each of the links and need to create a corresponding goal for each one of them in your Google analytics account.

Identify Links & Forms

The first obvious step is to shortlist all the prominent links and submission forms that you wish to track. These links can be general RSS subscription links, custom squeeze pages, affiliate links and so on. Submission forms are also present in various forms for exp, contact forms, newsletter signup forms, RSS subscription forms, service related lead capturing forms and so on.

Once the short listing process is complete, you should group common links and forms. For example, email subscription forms can be present at different locations on different pages on your blog leading to the same landing page. You must group all of these links in a separate group. Segregation of common links helps in easy creation of goals and tracking code.

Generate Tracking Code

You never need to modify your existing Google analytics tracking code currently installed on your blog. Y0ou only need to add one line of tracking code at the appropriate place and the generic structure of this code is shown right below.

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Label', Value, Event Type]);"

Let's discuss some practical examples of generating and deploying this tracking code. Let's take Feedburner email subscription signup link as the first example. This link is common and is present on almost every blog. Let's assume you have a simple Feedburner email signup link that you intend to track. Remember, you can only track up to clicking of Feedburner email signup popup. A visitor may not complete the signup process and may close the Feedburner window later on. But still, this tracking mechanism lets us know which pages or signup links are giving us maximum conversions. So let's go ahead and first create the tracking code for the same.

Category - I've discussed about grouping of common links in the first section above. Category parameter should be used to specify the group in which this link can be included. For our email signup example, we can name it 'Feed Subscription'. Both email and RSS subscription links on your blog can be included in this group.
Action - Here you can provide the information about the data or action a visitor is going to provide after following the link. In our example, we can safely use 'Email' for this parameter since the link asks for the potential subscriber's working email address.
Label - This parameter can be used for two purposes. First, for giving a recognizable name to the tracking code and second also for mentioning the exact placement of the link on your blog. In our example, we can use 'Top Sidebar' for this parameter if the email signup link is located right on top of your blog's sidebar.
Value - This is an optional parameter that allows you to provide a numeric value for the event. You can provide any integer value for this parameter. Let's say you've used '1' for this parameter.
Event Type - The last option is also optional and can be safely ignored in most cases. If this parameter is set to true the bounce resulting from the click is not counted within the website's overall bounce rate.

So the final tracking code may look like this after supplying all the parameters we've discussed above. You may modify these parameters according to your needs.

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Feed Subscription', 'Email', 'Top Sidebar']);"

I've omitted the last two optional parameters in the example shown above. Remember, the first 3 parameters should be included in apostrophes, while the last two parameters shouldn't as one of them is a numerical value and the last one is a Boolean value.

Deploy Tracking Code

Once the tracking code has been generated, it's time to embed it at the right place within your blog's code. In our example, we're tracking Feedburner email signup link, so here's how you'll be inserting this tracking code within the signup link.

<a href="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=YOURFEEDNAME&loc=en_US" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Feed Subscription', 'Email', 'Top Sidebar']);">Subscribe via Email!</a>

As you can see, adding tracking code within the link is very simple. Make sure there's a white space between the href and onClick attributes. The same procedure is applicable for contact forms as well, where you add the tracking code to the input field of type 'Button' to monitor all the submissions.

Create a Corresponding Goal

Creating and deploying the tracking code alone doesn't do the job. You have to create a corresponding goal in your Google analytics account to fetch the data and reports from the server. To create a goal, first the select your blog's profile, then head over to 'Admin → Profile Tab → Goals Tab'. You can create up to 20 different event tracking goals in 4 different sets. This is good enough for tracking all the important links on your blog.

The image shown above elaborates how you can create an event tracking goal for the example we've discussed above. You may give a different name to your goal, but make sure it is easily recognizable so that you can interpret the reports easily.

You can see I've left the last parameter empty, which is an optional parameter. If you decide to provide a numerical value for this parameter, make sure you change the tracking code accordingly. The default goal value option can also be left as it is in most of the cases. In case you want to provide an approximate or accurate value associated with a particular event, you can select the second radio button and can provide that value.

Over to You

Do you track links and submission forms on your blog? If yes, what other techniques have you used to monitor important sections of your blog? If you some more useful and easy techniques to monitor links within a blog, do share with us in the comments below. You may also share the information about how you've used the tracking data to optimize your conversion rate.

How to Connect With Your Readers

2012-12-11T20:28:00.001+05:30

No matter what you're writing about, nurturing a community around your blog involves sincere efforts to closely connect yourself with the readers. Direct connection with the readers helps you not only present your views and ideas much strongly, but also ensure that they listen and apply your advice wholeheartedly. There are several ways to make a strong bond with the community around your blog. It does take some time and effort, but the implications are always positive helping you build your brand and authority. Before even attempting to make a connection with your readers, you must prepare yourself to bring the necessary changes in your general online marketing and promotion strategies. So let's see how you can develop a close connection with your readers that will eventually give you an identity as well as will bring you more business from your blog.

Reveal Yourself

This is the first step towards making a connection with your readers. Unless they don't know who you are and how you look, they'll find it very difficult to listen and trust you. Readers like to connect with a real person whom they can identify and can converse with. Unless there is a strong reason to conceal your identity, create a good 'About' page and tell about yourself including your personal and professional achievements.

You must also include your photograph to let people know how you look. This helps in elevating your credibility and in removing any kind of suspicion in the minds of the readers. Create your author box with a thumbnail image and a shot bio. This instantly provides concentrated information about you without any need to click a specific web page.

Write Strategically

Writing blog posts is trickier when it comes to creating connection with the audience. You must employ all the available methods to directly converse with your readers. This is done in several ways and you just need to learn the tricks of the trade. Here's how you can do it.

Think like a reader - Start with putting yourself in readers' shoes. This way you can better assess what needs to be done to directly approach them. Visit your own blog as a reader and find out how and when you can personally connect or converse with your audience. Note down your findings and implement it in the upcoming posts.
Use active voice - The strongest way to directly converse with your readers is to write in passive voice. This opens the door for directly addressing your audience. You can be more flexible and personal through this approach leading to direct conversation with the reader.
Share your personal experiences - While presenting a case study, it will be much better to present your own experience rather than picking from somewhere else. This way you can instantly relate it with your readers creating a close connection with them. Remember, the more you start sharing your own findings, the more you have the liberty to relate it with the reader.
Ask questions - While crafting your blog posts, you can also ask relevant questions to directly start engagement with your readers. This is one the best methods to start receiving comments on your blog. It opens the door for starting conversations with your readers creating a trust between you and the audience.

In a nutshell, the core of connecting with the readers starts with your blog posts. How you craft them and what necessary elements you use within them govern how quickly you'll create a strong bond with your audience.

Reply Individual Emails

If you're not getting very high volume of emails, you can definitely afford to reply emails from your readers that deserve attention. This works wonderfully well and helps in fostering the community around your blog. If you find a genuine query, complain or suggestion by a reader, you must address and reply it to trigger the conversation. Once you win that reader, he will not only be your loyal fan, but will also spread your blog across his network.

This methodology is used by large number of bloggers as it effectively helps in creating strong connection as well as trust among the readers. Keep the weekend for such kind of email activity and answer selective emails from the readers who've sent a genuine email that can initiate a constructive debate. You will be surprised by the positive results and will definitely continue it without any fail.

Engage Within Comments Section

This is yet another powerful strategy to create a strong connection with your readers. All you need is identifying opportunities to capitalize on. If you're receiving decent volume of comments, keep an eye on new comments (critical or constructive) to kick start a conversation. It provides you as well as the reader an opportunity to know each other well. It also let both the ends express their views in a more casual manner which is not possible within the article or a blog post.

To benefit from this methodology, you must also enable comment subscription facility, so that the participating readers can get timely notifications to keep the conversation going. Do not hesitate to quote, highlight and elaborate your views while replying the comments. The more you give a personal touch to your comments, the more you connect with your audience. But, you must take care of trolls while extensively engaging through comments.

Reward Loyal Fans

Generosity is one of the common traits of successful bloggers. Your regular readers deserve more than just a daily or weekly dose of quality content. Identify active community members and proactively reward them in different ways. Readers, who regularly comment, share your posts and refer or recommend your blog must be given their due. Here are some of the techniques to reward and create strong bond with your readers.

Link or quote them - This is the biggest reward a loyal fan expects from a blogger. You can link back to their top content and can quote them while crafting your blog posts. This gives free exposure to them and also signifies that you care for them and acknowledge their contribution within your blog's community.
Pamper on social media - If you have a large following on popular social media platforms, you can mention about your loyal readers to let your network know about them. This can be done either by sharing their content or simply by greeting them.
Write a personalized mail - You can also appreciate their loyalty by individually replying them through email. Although this is not possible for large number of readers, but you can certainly connect with some of the top fans to give them a reason to come back to your blog again and again
Invite for guest post - You can also ask your readers to submit guest posts giving them the platform to share their knowledge with you and with other readers. This is one of the best incentives for the readers that help you connect with them.

Apart from all these methods, you can also use some other promotional tactics like highlighting the top commentators in your blog's sidebar. You can also devise your own ways to give incentives to your readers. Since each blog is unique, the owner himself can come up with unique ideas to find out the perfect ways to reward his readers.

Start Monthly or Weekly Newsletter

Although some may argue that newsletters are primarily suited to market your services and products, but you cannot undermine their value when it comes to initiating engagement with readers. Newsletters give you the liberty to converse with a personal touch through a dedicated section within the template.

You can ask questions, discuss a hot topic or ask readers' view about a trending development within your domain. You may insert links to quizzes and surveys within the newsletter to increase the engagement with your audience. You can also feature the most active reader of the week in your newsletter to create a strong bond with each one of them.

Are You Working Towards Long-Term Blogging Success?

2012-12-04T16:13:00.002+05:30

It's a universal fact that despite thousands of blogs popping up each day, very few taste success to the level where the owner not only earns but earns handsomely. This earning can be in terms of leads, sales, projects, contracts and last but not the least in the form of direct monetary income through different monetization techniques. In some cases, it can be defined in a totally different way and depends on the owner's perspective about how he defines success. Blogs aren't made for achieving overnight success. Though it is powerful medium to connect with people, getting returns from it takes time.

Long-term blogging success can be broadly defined as a consistent flow of the right kind of returns for a long period of time. In simple words, you generate business from your blog on a regular basis and that too month after month for a longer period of time. Creating such kind of blog takes lot of effort and time. Are you aiming for a similar kind of long-term blogging success? Are you taking the necessary steps to ensure your blog transforms into a perpetual business generating machine?

Change Your Mindset

Lot of new blogs fail simply because despite having all the technical and non-technical skills, the blog owner's mindset is more diverted towards unrelated or illogical presumptions about blogging success. For example, lot of newbies plaster their infant blogs with tons of ads to make quick money. What's more interesting is this that they read about not doing it with a new blog and still they go against the advice given by the seasoned players. Why? Simply because of their mindset which is preoccupied with their own definitions of achieving blogging success. That's not going to help you my friend.

I've always said that the business or money you're going to generate from your blog is just the byproduct of a successful blog. So the key here is to focus on creating an immensely useful blog. Now what is a useful blog? Is it that gives you $1000 or $3000 per month? Nope, that's just a byproduct. A useful blog delivers easy-to-implement solutions for the target audience and that too in an easy-to-understand language. Here's what you need to do. Instead of focusing on placements of affiliate ads on your new blog, think about how you can make your target audience happy. What are their common problems and how you can provide exceptional solutions for all these problems?

The moment you start thinking like this, you've taken the first step towards creating a hugely popular blog. And when a blog tastes success, returns (byproduct) comes automatically through different channels. Change your mindset today and think what exactly you were doing till now!

Follow the Advice

Change of mindset should be supplemented with the right kind of actions needed to pump new life in your blog. Every new blogger follow two paths to acquire all the necessary blogging skills with passage of time. One path takes him to the archives of seasoned bloggers who share their experience and advice accordingly, and the second path involves self-exploration.

The former is generally is first method to gain preliminary skills and the latter one is followed as you gain more experience. Now the question is - Are you following the advice given by seasoned players? Spending time on archives of seasoned players is only worthy when you intend to follow whatever they're preaching. You can definitely optimize their methodologies, but going opposite to the basics is only going to put you in an infinite loop.

Stick to the basics to make a strong foundation for building more advanced and optimized methodologies on top of it. Generally it is observed that some advice is followed immediately, while select suggestions are overlooked. The latter tendency is closely connected with the mindset of the blogger. Your mind simply can't accept the advice you intend to overlook. The sooner you come out of this denial mode, the better it will be - both for your readers and of course for you.

Have Patience & Be Persistent

Even if you change your mindset and start following the advice given by experts, results won't come overnight or in a short span of time. You'll need lot of patience and zeal to persist month after month before you'll taste the initial success. Being persistent is not just about implementing the basics on a continuous basis, but it's also about developing new and better ways to get things done.

Create realistic and achievable short-term milestones that ultimately lead to your primary goal. Hustle your way towards reaching these milestones without giving up your patience or persistence. Let me be honest, a typical blog takes at least 2 years (leaving the exceptions) to establish itself as a popular and useful blog. This time frame can deviate slightly towards both ends, but the average time frame remains around two years. The question is - Are you patient enough to consistently deliver for such a long period? Yes, 24 months seems long when you're trying to build a profitable blog from scratch.

You should be aware of this situation and must prepare yourself both mentally and physically to be patient and persistent month after month without getting dejected or annoyed of your slow growth. Happy blogging!

Blog Maintenance Checklist for Professional Blogs

2012-11-20T09:34:00.003+05:30

Regular blog maintenance is a critical and essential task for every professional blogger. It not only keeps your blog in a healthy condition, but also keeps you well prepared in advance to tackle any kind of emergency. Some of the routines included in a typical blog maintenance checklist are more or less similar and are done by almost every blogger. I currently manage three niche blogs and one personal blog and the maintenance routine discussed here is same for all of them. Before we go ahead, I must stress that some of the tasks mentioned here may not be applicable for your blog and you can safely ignore them.

Weekly Blog Backup

Without any doubt, this is one of the most important blog maintenance routines for every blog. Instead of daily backups, I prefer to do it on a weekly basis, mostly at weekends. If you're publishing lot of content on a daily basis, you can increase this frequency to suit your needs. I use three different ways to backup all of my blogs.

The first one is quite simple that includes backup of important files (/wp-content, .htaccess, wp-config.php & robots.txt) and database to my desktop. The other two techniques are tree replication and cross-server replication which I've already discussed in detail. This helps me keep my data on three different physical locations. In the event of any mishap, my first option will be to use the tree replicated on the local server as it will help me restore the blog very quickly. The second best option is the backup lying on a different server and the last resort is the backup lying on my desktop.

Monthly Dead Links Audit

This is often ignored by good number of bloggers that results in bad visitors' experience. If the number of broken links is large, it may also affect your search engine presence. I analyze these dead links in the first week of every month. Since I do it every month, the number of broken links detected are low and it doesn't takes much time to fix each of these links.

Instead of using a plugin, I use this tool to find all broken and non-functional links on my blog. Yes, it's not just the non-existent links that need to be fixed, but you must deal with non-functional links as well. A typical non-functional link simply hangs and doesn't open for a long time. For both types of links, I either remove it altogether or replace it with a different and relevant link.

Quarterly Archives Optimization

Every 3 months or so, I head over to my archives for various reasons. One of the reasons is to continue my internal cross-linking effort to facilitate better inter-post navigation. The second reason to traverse all the old directories is to improve and update non-performing content.

Make no mistake about it; archive optimization can improve your blog by leaps and bounds. The time spent on this optimization activity is totally worth it. If you're not doing it on your blog, try it once and see the difference. If you're not posting on a regular basis, you can extend this optimization interval to twice a year. If your archive is extremely large, you can target each category every month.

Quarterly Optimization of Key On-page Sections/Elements

This is an important exercise to get more out of your blog. Here I'm talking about various visual elements and content sections that must be audited and optimized for better results. A common example is your blog's sidebar. That's the first content section under my radar while optimizing different sections. You must be familiar with at least one web analytics program to correctly assess the performance of various content sections of your blog.

Recently, I updated the design of this blog and added some key content sections based on my research from the data I got through Google analytics. I've revamped my sidebar, footer and the home page to include some important sections that were non-existent before. I'm already experiencing positive results both in terms of better subscription rate and the number of leads I used to get earlier. Remember, although I've mentioned that I do this quarterly, but it doesn't mean that I change different content sections every 3 months. I simply assess their performance and if needed only then I go ahead for the change.

Monthly or Quarterly Ads Optimization

I use both affiliate and pay-per-click advertisements on all of my niche blogs. What blog maintenance has to do with these ads? Although ad optimization is not strictly part of a typical blog maintenance routine, still I prefer to keep it under this list.

Quite similar to optimization of select content sections on a page, ads optimization ensure you're blog is giving you the returns to its full potential. I regularly (almost every month) analyze the performance of my PPC ads and make necessary changes accordingly. I also use URL tagging for select affiliate links to assess their performance. Since I use my theme's internal affiliate link generator facility, I can easily tag them without any problem. You can also tag key page links to monitor visitors' activity on them.

Weekly Spam Cleaning

Although you can use auto-cleaning feature of various spam plugins, but I prefer to delete them manually. The reason is quite simple. Before deleting them in bulk once a week, I glance on the first page whether any legit comments are caught in the spam queue or not.

If you're getting very high volume of spam comments, you can either switch to auto-deletion or you can clear the spam queue on a daily basis. Since I get limited number of spam comments, I use weekends to clean the spam queue after quickly inspecting for any legit comments. If you want to reduce this cleaning activity, you must disable pingback and trackback notifications through your blog's dashboard.

Plugin/Theme/WP Core Updates

Experts always suggest keeping your blog's CMS and its components up-to-date to avoid any kind of security issues. If you're using WordPress as your blogging CMS, you'll be dealing with three kinds of updates on a regular basis. First one is the update related to the WordPress core. Here's how I do it.

Generally, experts suggest immediately updating the WordPress core as soon as it's released. But, I do not do so for a simple reason. What if after the update your blog goes down? It happens with lot of bloggers, isn't it so? Here's my update cycle for the WordPress core. First, I update the replica of my blog installed on my local system having exactly the same customized theme and plugins. Once it goes well, I do make sure to check for any negative feedback about the newest version on the internet. If both are positive, I go ahead with the update process on the live blog.

This reduces the chances of inadvertently breaking the blog. Same thing applies to plugin and theme updates. You must also make sure that you've taken the backup before you attempt to initiate any kind of update process.

Quarterly Database Optimization

With passage of time, your WordPress database accumulates lots of redundant as well as some unused meta data associated with your content. To reduce accumulation of redundant text in your database, you can disable post revisions. This will help you keep your database size in control as more and more content is piled up in your archives.

MySQL inherently supports database optimization options which repairs and optimizes tables in your WordPress database. You can do this in two different ways. You can either use various database optimization plugins or you can use phpMyAdmin web interface to do it manually. Depending on the amount of database activity of your blog, you can increase or decrease the frequency of this database optimization process.

Miscellaneous Maintenance Routines

Apart from these core maintenance routines, there are several other important tasks that come under a typical blog maintenance schedule. Depending on the type of blog and the entire setup, you may not be using all of the routines mentioned in the list below. If it's applicable to your blog, you must include it in your blog maintenance checklist. So here we go...

Check your blog feed every week to find out whether it's functioning correctly as expected or not. If you're offering multiple feeds to your subscribers, regular check up of all of the feeds is essential to avoid complains from your subscribers.
Once a month, check all kinds of submission forms present on your blog. The best way to test them is to provide a dummy submission for each of these forms. You must also test them in the latest versions of all major browsers to check whether they're rendering correctly or not.
Monitor and optimize all of your squeeze pages (if any) every quarter. This also includes other important pages like your 'About', 'Services' & 'Archives' page.
Once a month, do general blog health checkups related to DNS lookup, ping and page load times. You can use powerful tools provided by Pingdom to perform all these tests very easily.

How to Write Successful Product Reviews That Converts

2012-11-13T15:42:00.001+05:30

One of the best methods for selling your affiliate products is to write amazing product reviews for obtaining high conversion rates. But, writing such kind of product reviews is an art and very few manage to write great review copies on a consistent basis. Apart from your writing skills, you also must know about human psychology related to online purchasing behavior. Combining the two, you can come up with a powerful and highly converting product review that can give you high returns for a long duration. Today, we're going to learn about the same and will brush our existing skills to churn out more fruitful review copies from our publishing desk.

Ensure Product's Relevance

No matter how good is your review copy, conversions depend on its relevance when it comes to addressing problems of your target audience. Newbies often write paid reviews about products and services that have nothing to do with their blog's niche. This is like an attempt to sell combs to bald men. The best way to start selecting the right product for a review is to identify your readers' needs. This way you can shortlist the products and services which can solve their problems. What are some of the important things that must be kept in mind while selecting the products for reviews? How does it affect your review copy and what are the implications of reviewing irrelevant products on your blog? Here's what to look for while finalizing (assessing relevance) a product for a review.

Does it address one of the common problems of your readers?
Does the solution provided is feasible and easily implementable?
Does the product include easily understandable instructions?

Crosschecking the product against these questions ensure that it's completely matching with the interest of your core audience. Be very careful about what you promote or review. One wrong choice can shrink the community built around your blog. If you're choosing those products that makes your readers' life easy then you'll always find yourself at the winning end.

Lesson: Product's relevance is one of the core attributes of a successful review copy.

Share Your Own Experience (wherever possible)

Potential buyers always want real life examples and case studies about the product they intend to purchase. It's always a good feeling to embed slogans and marketing phrases while compiling a review. But, that only works in advertisements. A review is more like a personalized product recommendation, isn't it so? Having said that, one cannot expect or presume that you're personally using every single product you've ever reviewed. It's just not practically feasible.

If you're running a health or medicine blog, you cannot test and consume every single medicine you're going to review. In such cases, sharing personal experience is not possible. But, I strongly suggest you to prefer reviewing those products which you've used yourself. This adds credibility to your review and readers get to know about a real case study. For products, which are not used by you, you can interview an existing user and can publish his experience.

Lesson: Always prefer reviewing products you've tested yourself.

Include both Pros and Cons

Consumers have become smart nowadays and can easily differentiate between an honest review and a cleverly crafted marketing pitch. It's always tempting to write a positive review that only talks about merits of the product. This tactic works well for sales or squeeze pages made specifically for diverting leads to the product's website. But, when it comes to writing reviews, the balanced approach works best.

This becomes more essential when you're sharing your own experience instead of presenting someone else's case study. Divide pros and cons into two different sections so that readers can easily assess the merits and shortcomings in an unambiguous manner. This approach also makes your review more realistic and readers are more comfortable trusting about the qualities mentioned by you.

Lesson: Avoid writing a sugar-coated review copy. Leave that for a squeeze page.

Decide On Standalone or Comparative Analysis

Generally, product reviews can be divided into two broad categories. One good old method is to only talk about a product you're targeting throughout your review copy. The other method involves comparison of the product with its rival and then providing an in-depth analysis and feature comparison of both the products. Generally, it includes tabulated figures related to almost every aspect of the two products under scanner.

Now the question arises - Which approach is the best? It depends on several factors including what you're promoting, its existing marketplace, its audience and above all - the competition against it. If you opt for the latter approach, it may backfire if not done correctly. There's no secret formula to find out which approach is better for a specific product. I'd say you must experiment with multiple review copies written in different formats to see the results. You can take help of Google Content Experiments to find out what's working for you and what's not.

Lesson: Review format should be chosen after considering its negative implications.

Be Ready and Vigilant To Clear Potential Buyers Doubts

Once your review has been published, it's not the time to relax and wait for conversions. It's time to both analyze and interact. A good review copy can lead to explosion of emails or comments related to the product. That's where your vigilance matters the most. Failing to respond in time can dry up your conversions.

The response alone doesn't help. How you clarify the queries and how you prevent deviation from your original review decides the success of your entire effort. Make no mistake about it, the better your review is, the more you're going to be bombarded with queries. So better be prepared for it in advance so that you're not overwhelmed by the sheer volume of questions raised by your readers.

Lesson: Excellent product reviews inherently invite equally good number of queries.

Miscellaneous Tips for Writing a Good Product Review

There are several small but important things that must be taken care of while writing a product review. Some are learned by experience, while others are so obvious that missing or ignoring them can cost you dearly. So let's see what else need to be done to strengthen our product review exercise.

Always disclose your affiliation while writing a product review.
Do not hard-sell. Yes, you may offer discounts or coupon codes, if any.
Always include your summarized verdict at the end of the review.
Always research about the purchasing power of your audience.
Try to include practical real life examples in your reviews.
Stand by your review and do not fall into being trolled.

How To Refine Your Content Creation Strategy

2012-11-06T15:38:00.000+05:30

No blog can survive without regular supply of useful content on a consistent basis. Whether we create a content strategy or not, with passage of time almost each one of us develop and follow a de facto set of rules to create and publish content on our blogs. If you're following a predefined set of rules for content creation and still not getting the desired results, probably it's time to rethink and optimize your existing strategy. We're going to learn how a blog can increase its readership through a better and targeted content creation strategy. If you haven't yet created one, this is the right time to formulate and benefit from a concrete and result-oriented content generation strategies.

Analyze Your Competition

I'm assuming, you've already researched and have identified your target audience. But, you must check out your direct competition as well that’s already enjoying massive readership. No matter what you're blogging about, you'll always find big players already taking big share from the pie. This is followed by other bloggers right below them on the ladder. Your content strategy should focus on what the competition is offering to the audience and how you can stand out in the crowd.

The best tool to assist in researching about your competition is Google search engine. Use common queries used by your target audience. Instead of focusing on prime keywords, select long tail keywords to see who's offering what. For every topic, create an excel sheet and note down the content that comes up in the search results. This is a time consuming task, but it equips you with all the information needed in identifying the content that's currently read by your audience.

Define Scope of Your Content

This is an important consideration while formulating your content strategy. Almost every niche includes several primary topics which can be further exploded into subtopics. If you're blog is relatively new, start focusing on the primary topics. Once your blog is out of the infancy stage, you can start exploring subtopics too.

Prepare a list of primary topics you're going to include in your editorial calendar. This will help you focus on the right kind of ideas for creating new content. Defining this boundary is necessary so that you do not divert your attention on non-performing topics that are not entertained by your target audience. You must also ensure that all the primary topics included in your editorial calendar do have decent search volume on search engines. You can find that out easily through this tool.

Decide On Posting Frequency

This is one of the big debates within blogosphere. Your content strategy must also include how frequently you'll update your blog. Google just loves websites and blogs who regularly come up with fresh content. If you carefully observe publishing frequency of different blogs, you'll notice that they all differ in their posting schedules. Some blogs post multiple times a day, some publish once every week and others have longer posting frequency ranging from once a week to once a month.

My experience suggests that there's no ideal posting frequency. This doesn't mean that you should post at irregular intervals. Decide on the posting intervals and stick to it throughout the year. This frequency can be daily, weekly or monthly. What matters is your ability to stick with a posting schedule and delivering the content accordingly on a consistent basis.

Develop Your Own Unique Style

Content creation for blogs is an art. Good command over written English (or your preferred language) alone doesn't help you succeed online. Popular bloggers create and develop a unique pattern for crafting their each blog post. They follow their adopted style for each new piece of content and benefit from it. While developing your own unique style of crafting content you need to focus on two primary things.

Structure or anatomy of a blog post - That's the core you need to take care of while developing your unique style. It's all about how you arrange different important sections within a post in a correct way to make it more readable and interesting. It also includes your approach towards explaining complex things in a simple way. Sometimes bloggers use anecdotes to help their audience understand a difficult topic. In a nutshell, you must develop a unique way of explaining things and you should stick to that style for each new post.
Packaging of content - The next important thing is how well you make your posts visually appealing. Your custom blog design plays a big role in it. You must learn the art of spicing up your blog posts to make them more attractive through the use of illustrations, pull quotes, bullet lists and other visual elements.

Focus On Delivering Practical Solutions

That's the crux of a powerful content creation strategy. No matter what you're blogging about, your target audience is always expecting easily applicable and practical solutions to their problems. That should be kept in mind while building your editorial calendar. No matter how detailed your research is about everything discussed above, failing to understand the need of delivering solutions for your audience is going to ruin your blog.

After defining the scope of your content as discussed in one of the sections above, you must research about common questions or problems specific to each of the primary topics. That's the base for your content creation strategy helping you come up with the right kind of content that will be relished and shared by your readers.

4 Simple Steps to Get Better Presence on Search Engines

2012-10-30T15:49:00.003+05:30

Frustrated that despite churning out content on a regular basis and doing other necessary stuff, your traffic isn't moving ahead as expected? Well, that's a common problem we all face sooner or later in our blogging career. The importance of social media cannot be undermined in giving a push to an upcoming blog. But, search traffic forms a major part of traffic volume for almost every blog. Today, we'll try to understand what it takes to help our content show up higher in highly relevant search queries. I'm not going to discuss the technical on page SEO implementation in detail. I'm assuming that you're already doing it with no luck. So what else is left?

Before we go ahead, let me ask you a simple question. Why Google should rank your blog posts higher up in the search results? Almost each one of us will come up with N number of reasons to answer this question. For example - I have a great blog design, I write very good content, I do killer SEO settings, and I'm very much active on social media platforms and so on. Despite doing all this, why some blogs experience a drought when it comes to getting traffic from search engines?

Understand Reader's/Visitor's Perspective

Yes, that's the first step towards gaining good rankings on search engines. Whenever a potential visitor queries for something on a search engine, what essentially he is looking for? Is he looking for a great blog post or a killer blog design? Your great blog design simply aids in retaining the visitor once he lands on your blog post. From reader's perspective, whenever he queries about something, he is simply looking for the best possible solution to his problem.

And that's what Google tries to offer him in the search results. A visitor checks out some of the links provided on the first page and choose to read and apply the best solution. He may bookmark that post and may keep track of fresh new content on that website. That's how things shape up from the visitor's end. He queries about a problem, Google provides him with a list of best possible solutions and finally he picks the best one out of them.

As a publisher, what's in there for you? Think about it!

Assess Your Content's Worth

I've always emphasized on creating solutions for your audience. Your entire archive should focus around creating best possible solutions for common problems faced by your target audience. Can you say with confidence that at least 50% of your posts are providing unique, easy-to-understand and practical solutions to the readers? If not, probably you've to rethink your entire content creation strategy.

Scan your entire archive, shortlist posts providing solutions to your readers and compare them with the competition already ranking on top of the search results. To make sure you don't have to do it again in future for your old posts, apply the same technique for every new post you're planning to write. Research and analyze what your high ranking competition is already offering to the audience.

Come up with a different yet practical and unique solution, and you're bound to get your share from the organic sources. Don't hesitate to delete thin content from your archives altogether. It's not going to help you in any way.

Remove Weeds with Surgical Precision

Optimizing archives and coming up with the right kind of new content should be supplemented with several other precautions to get the best results. Post Penguin and Panda era has seen lot of SEO changes that includes suspension of several good old SEO practices prevalent from a decade. I'll strongly advice you to diversify anchor texts in your archives. If they're more or less similar for the same content in good numbers, you're going to suffer despite coming up with the right solutions for your readers.

Religiously scan and no-follow all unnecessary links including your comments section, header, sidebar and footer. De-clutter your entire blog's layout. Ensure it's not sluggish. Make all navigation paths obvious.

Add Some Flesh

Use illustrations, custom infographics and videos. Include free resource downloads, wherever possible. Create resource pages that are known to perform so well on search engines. Ensure you've correctly configured Google+ author and publisher tag correctly on your blog. Google has given clear indication about preferring the author tagged content over others in the long run.

Use a custom related content section with thumbnail images in a grid. Serve custom or select content according to visitors' intent and behavior. This is a very effective methodology that increases the worth of your content. It increases the length of visits on your blog which is taken into account while assessing your blog's overall value and usability.

How to Get More Out of Your Blog Archives

2012-10-24T08:43:00.002+05:30

With passage of time, every blog piles up enough content that can be used smartly to get more engaging visits from the new visitors. The more diverse and rich are your blog archives, the more is the possibility of coming up with unique solutions to divert your traffic deep down towards your old but evergreen content. Today, we're going to discuss some common yet extremely effective techniques that can be used to offer more than what is generally visible to a new visitor. The goal is to let visitors know about the goldmine hidden in your archives. Before applying these methodologies, make sure you have enough quality content in your archives.

Resource Pages

This is one of the best ways to open up select and premium content for your visitors. Initially, you may need to invest some time in creating these pages, but the end result is truly rewarding. But, what exactly is a resource page?

A resource page is a collection of quality posts focused around a topic and is packaged in such a way that attracts more clicks from the visitors.

The whole idea of creating multiple resource pages is to group the best content associated with various sub-topics on a single page for easy access and navigation. This way, visitors never have to scan your archives in a reverse chronological fashion. They simply visit the resource page (centered around a topic) and gets easy access to the best content available on your blog. Here's how you can make resource pages for your blog.

Choose popular categories getting most traffic - Start with selecting those categories that includes the most popular content of your blog. You can find it easily through your web analytics program.
Select the best posts under each category - Once you've identified the categories, find and list all the performing posts in each of the categories. Arrange them in the order of maximum traffic each post is receiving.
Create a dedicated page with alluring title - Create a dedicated page for each category and write a persuasive headline for each page. You should keep the resource page title short including the primary keyword related to the category.
Arrange selected posts - While including all the selected posts in a page, remove the sidebar and spice up the listing with thumbnail images associated with each post. If possible, use the grid layout for featuring all the premium content related to a category.

Once all the resource pages are completed, create a secondary menu and populate it with links to all the resource pages. Make sure you customize this menu and make it loud enough to grab the attention of the visitors. Place it right above the content for easy access. Create one more resource section the sidebar and populate it with links to all the resource pages. You can also create a banner for each resource page for getting the maximum clicks.

Featured Content

Quite similar to resource pages, you can highlight the best content in different ways. One of such ways is display of select content in the 'Featured content' section both in the sidebar as well as in the content section.

Bloggers often use 'Featured post' section right on top of the content column on the home page. This section generally includes a large image with the post title and a link to the single post page. If your theme allows it, you must take advantage of this feature to showcase the latest and most trending article on your blog. Another simple way to showcase your best content is creating a 'Popular posts' section in the sidebar. You can either manually select the posts for this section or you can use a plugin for the same. I personally prefer the manual approach as you handpick the best posts on your blog without relying on automated selection algorithms.

Almost every blog use this methodology to divert visitors towards the archives. The best place to embed links to related content is the end of the post. Once the reader has finished reading the post, he can get more options for consuming similar content through a related posts section.

Generally, this section is populated dynamically through a plugin, though technically sound bloggers implement their own code to fetch the matching content. The design of this section can be implemented in two different ways. The first one is basic and simply includes general text links with the post titles. The second and the most popular option includes grid-based layout with thumbnail and post title as used just below this post. The latter option grabs the attention of the visitor and is known to perform better.

In-content Cross Linking

If used correctly, cross linking your old posts is one of the best ways to keep your readers glued to your blog. But, you must ensure that you're not bombarding tons of links in each post to unnecessarily create countless links back to your archives. This can backfire instead of giving some positive results.

The first thing that must be kept in mind is that each link pointing to an old post should complement the post from which it has been linked. For example, the link included in this section talks about cross linking technique that completely matches with the heading of this section. You must also ensure that each time you link to your archives, diversify the anchor texts to avoid any negative SEO penalties from Google.

Custom Archives Page

Generally, we rely on default archives pages generated by WordPress. They're available in two popular formats. One format is made up of post titles, while the other one includes post title and post excerpts. Both these archives format are not considered good when it comes to providing easy access to entire blog's archive to the visitors.

The best way to overcome this problem is to design your very own custom archives page. Investing your time in creating this page will eventually payoff in the form of more traffic on your blog. Some premium themes have built-in facility to create custom archives page. If your theme supports it, you must use this option. Once your page is completed, do not forget to link it from different prime locations on your blog.

Search Box

I've seen few blogs devoid of search box with no option to search archives for a specific topic. I've experienced it myself when the old design on this blog did not have any search box. I regularly received emails from several visitors about the same. If you're receiving decent traffic and if you're tracking internal search traffic through your web analytics program, you'll be surprised to see the volume of page views your blog's search box contributes.

Simply including the search box doesn't do the job. The placement and the default text within the box play a big role in diverting traffic towards your archives. The box should be placed at a prime location such that it is easily visible to the visitors. Make sure the default text within the search box is simple and alluring. Do not try to make it fancy and follow the KISS principle while embedding search box on your blog.

5 Traits of a Good Blogging Consultant

2012-10-16T18:36:00.000+05:30

If you're planning to hire a blogging consultant, think twice before signing up the contract. Companies and individuals often hire an expert to either raise a blog from scratch or to rejuvenate an existing one. In both the cases, the results expected from the customer end are more or less the same. Hiring a blogging consultant is an important process especially if you're signing up a long duration contract. We're going to discuss some of the top qualities of an experienced blogging consultant. Some of these qualities can be quantified instantly, while others can only be weighed when you work with the person. Let's take a look at some of the traits, a good blogging consultant possess.

Good Listening Capabilities

This is one of the most important prerequisites for a capable blogging consultant. As a service provider, before you start applying your expertise, listening to customer requirements, thoughts and plans is vital for the success of the project.

Before you hire a blogging consultant, arrange for a short telephonic call and monitor how patiently he listens and notes your thoughts. This also includes how frequently he interrupts you or tries to divert the issue you want to discuss with him. This assessment call can save you big money in case you've approached a wrong person.

Ability to Explain Things in Layman's Language

Generally, customers are not aware of various terminologies and technology related to blogging. It's always a challenging task for the blogging consultant to make his client understand a technical issue so that a decision can be made. Sometimes, issues are non-technical in nature but still it involves various terminologies that a client doesn't understand at all. Some gentlemen prefer to use fancy technical terms to impress their clients while discussing a strategy.

A good blogging consultant tackles this situation in an intuitive way. The best strategy adopted in such cases is to compare the issue in hand with a simpler and generic incident or system experienced or used in daily life. For example, if you want to explain about limited bandwidth availability in the current hosting plan, you can compare it with the petrol availability in the car. Simplifying things for a technically challenged customer is one of the best qualities of a good blogging consultant.

Provides Data/Statistics to Justify a Strategy

While formulating a blogging strategy for the clients, consultants often come up with several options for resolving or addressing a specific issue. Solutions are shortlisted and are pondered upon for their efficiency and outcomes. That's where supporting data or statistics are so vital to justify the proposed solutions.

These documents can only be produced when the consultant has done the research or is experienced enough to provide the case studies of similar issues. Simply proposing a solution makes no sense (especially when decent money is involved) until you support its effectiveness through a concrete data set. If you're getting relevant supporting documents and statistics for the proposed solution, you've chosen a right blogging consultant.

Technically Sound

Here we are not talking about hardcore web programming or about configuration of an advanced setup on an unmanaged dedicated server. It's true that your blogging consultant must be familiar with all major blogging technologies, but you cannot expect him to be an expert in every single technology related to blogging. Having said that, one must ensure that your consultant possess good understanding of every concept and have the ability to get it done through an expert without any glitch.

You can test and can get some idea about your consultant's technical abilities even before signing up the contract. The assessment call we discussed in the first section can be used for this purpose. Simply talk about a custom solution that needs additional software or configuration along with a regular and standard implementation. See how he reacts to this and what solution he proposes. Once you're satisfied with the answer, you can definitely go ahead with the hiring process.

Respects Deadlines and Time Frames

Projects often fail due to mismanagement of time. A good blogging consultant always provide time frames for each task (except few) to deliver the results within a limited time period. If your consultant is hesitating in providing deadlines for implementing common tasks, probably he is not capable enough. Few tasks like pulling X amount of traffic from search engines can never be completed in a definite time frame.

For everything else, your consultant must create a calendar and deadlines so that your blog is up and running with all the necessary customizations in time. This also includes his availability for various consulting sessions. If he is giving a time for a consultation call or a video-based training session, he must be present beforehand to entertain the customer's query. Sometimes, a person cannot make it in time, but frequent absence and missed deadlines are a big no for a blog consulting business.

2 Reliable Backup Strategies For Your WordPress Blog

2012-10-09T10:02:00.002+05:30

WordPress is prime target for hackers due to its popularity across the globe. A robust backup strategy is a must for every professional or business blog. This helps you recover quickly from an unwanted incident that may cost you big money. There are several ways to backup a WordPress blog that directly affects your restoration strategy. If you're relying on a single backup option, probably you're making a big mistake. There should be at least two backup options so that if one of the options fails in the emergency, you always have a replacement to get back your blog as soon as possible. Let's see some of the popular backup strategies for a typical WordPress blog.

Tree Replication on Your Web Server

This is the simplest and the fastest way to backup your WordPress blog. This methodology must be used in conjunction with other options. Relying only on this option is not a wise move as all of your data is saved on the same web server where your blog is running. To implement his technique, create a separate folder out of your install tree that is not publicly accessible. Create a simple database backup script that can be scheduled to backup all MySQL tables to this directory.

The next important part is copying the entire installation directory tree to the backup folder. This has two advantages. First the restoration is extremely fast and secondly there's no complexity involved to save your backup. You must copy the installation tree recursively so that it can be restored in the same way without any hassle. Here's the command to copy and save your installation recursively.

cp -r /your_site_root/html/install_tree_directory /your_site_root/backup

The copy command given above uses the -r switch and instructs to copy the installation tree recursively to the 'backup' directory. This way you'll have both database as well as entire directory tree backed up on your web server. In case your blog is affected by a malware and the infection is limited to the blog's installation tree, you can restore your blog very quickly. Start by dropping the entire database and then importing it from the backup. Now delete the infected installation tree and again use recursive copy command to copy the backup tree to its original location. This will help you recover your blog within minutes.

Never overwrite the infected directory tree and it may leave some extra infected files intact even after copying the backup tree. Always delete the entire infected tree (recursively of course) and then copy the backup tree back to its location. This technique only works when the infection is limited within the installation tree or the web server itself has no problem. It will not work if the server itself is down or it is experiencing system wide infection.

Cross-server Replication

This is yet another interesting backup strategy that's fast and reliable. This methodology requires two parties who mutually agree to provide their server space to backup each others data. Both parties sync the data stored on a remote server in their local directory. This way, if one of the web servers fails, the data can be easily restored from the other web server. The challenge to implement this solution is to find a trusting partner who is ready to be a part of this solution. Since both the parties are beneficiaries, mutual agreement may not be a big problem if both blogging buddies are in good terms with each other.

So let's get started and see how to implement this solution. First, let's assume that both the parties have zipped backup in a separate directory on their web servers. The goal is to simply sync this zipped backup across both servers periodically. In simple words, party A syncs and keeps a backup of party B on his own server and party B syncs and keeps a backup of party A on his own server. It's a win-win situation for both the ends.

If you don't know how to create a zipped archive for the entire installation tree, here's a simple command to do that. Make sure you're in the backup directory created specifically for storing these compressed archives.

zip -r archive_`date '+%Y-%m-%d'`.zip /your_site_root/html/*

This command will recursively compress your WordPress installation directory tree and will pack it in a dated archive. Now we move on to the most important step of remotely syncing the compressed archive. Remember, if you're looking to sync your data to the remote server, it's not you who will use the relevant command. It will be fired by your partner from his end to pull and sync your zipped archive on his web server and vice versa. This essentially means that both the parties have to exchange their server log in credentials to connect and fetch the archived data.

Use the following rsync command to connect and sync your friend's archived data on your web server.

rsync -e ssh -a —delete you@dummy.com:/friends_site/backups /your_site/backups

While using this command, you have to supply the log in credentials to complete the syncing activity. If you want to automate this process, you can use this excellent tutorial to implement automated cross-server backup syncing. Restoring a backup simply requires usage of rsync command from the original server where backup needs to be copied. If you have a trusted blogging peer, I highly recommend using this methodology to keep a secure backup of your blog.

4 Direct Monetization Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Blog

2012-10-02T15:20:00.003+05:30

Out of countless ways to generate money from a blog, direct monetization is one of the popular options. Millions of blogs rely on this method using different strategies that works best for them. Direct monetization is like a double-edged sword. If implemented correctly, it can bring loads of revenue and if done in a wrong way, it can make you pack up your bags in no time. Today, we're going to discuss some of the most common mistakes a blogger commits while monetizing his blog. These wrong monetization practices are quite prevalent among some of the newbies who're over enthusiastic and wants to make big money in quick time.

Selling Everything under the Sun

It's always tempting to promote high paying affiliate products. There's nothing wrong signing up for several ad networks, but what matters most is the type of ads you're going to host on your blog. There's no point selling irrelevant products that doesn't match with your blog's niche. Enthusiastic newbies often try to sell combs to bald men.

The more irrelevant ads show up on your blog, the more it earns bad name among the community. Content-aware ad networks must be used if you're not sure about the kinds of ads you want to host. These ad networks serve the most relevant adverts that closely matches with the web page's content. If you're selling ad spots directly to the advertisers, be very careful before approving the deal. The biggest wealth is your readers. Everything else is secondary.

Monetizing an Infant Blog

Start early and you'll win! This is what we hear from experts regarding mastering any skill. But, it's not applicable for monetizing a new blog. If you're blog is lacking both traffic and quality content, do not think about plastering it with advertisements. Devote first six months in piling up good amount of useful content and in building community around your blog.

Thereafter, you can slowly start monetizing it in phases. It's a universal fact that adverts receive most attention from organic traffic sent by search engines. A new blog with little or almost no content is only going to hurt your traffic building efforts instead of making some money out of it. The rule of the thumb is - Get some meat on your blog before trying to sell something.

Obstructing Content with Countless Ads

This is yet another common mistake committed by good number of bloggers. It's always good to experiment with ad placements provided you do not choke your content below loud and colorful banners. There's no harm surrounding your content with adverts, but stuffing banners between article bodies is not appreciated by the readers.

No matter how many ads you're stuffing on the web page, your primary content shouldn't be overshadowed by them. It's your content that brings readers and that should be given prime importance among all other elements. Quality guidelines of several popular ad networks also suggest keeping a good balance between the number of ads and content pieces on a single web page. Ad placements can be aggressive but in no way they should overwhelm the content.

Hosting Deceiving Links and Banners

This is the worse form of monetization found on crappy blogs. An example of such type of monetizing trick is offering freebies (extensions, skins & plugins) that only work with a premium product. Creating deceiving & ambiguous creatives and text links also comes under this category.

It may work for a short period of time, but eventually you'll be experiencing retaliation from new visitors, community and from your ad networks. It's good to create custom advertisements and making bridge pages for promoting select premium products, but make sure you're not cheating your readers through false and deceiving ad content. Keep things absolutely transparent and do not add features and capabilities on your own that doesn't match with the official version.

8 Lessons I Learnt While Blogging Professionally

2012-09-25T15:39:00.003+05:30

I causally started blogging way back in 2006 writing a personal diary on Google's blogspot platform. After 4 or 5 months, I deleted that blog and almost forgot about blogging. In the beginning of 2008, I noticed lot of literature about blogging popping up all over the internet and decided to take a deeper look into this awesome publishing medium. This resulted in birth of my first niche blog, in March 2008 which you're reading right now. Since then, I've never looked back and now I run 3 niche blogs and one personal blog. During all these years, I learned tons of things that made me change my blogging strategies several times. Today, I'm going to share some of the blogging lessons I got while nurturing and building my niche blogs.

Readers First, Search Engines Second

There was a time, when bloggers used to generously stuff keywords and links while creating content for their audience. It was like a race to rank on the first page of Google for targeted keywords. Thanks to new changes made by Google, these old tricks no longer work and publishers producing junk on the web are literally kicked out of Google's index.

It's all about creating useful stuff for the target audience rather than attempting to please crawlers for getting more visibility on SERPs. Think about this, you somehow gain good rankings and manage to pull decent traffic, but what after that? Absence of quality content is only going to dry up that traffic with passage of time. Write for your audience and look for providing solutions to them. Do it and you're automatically going to get your share from the organic sources.

SEO Isn't Rocket Science

As a newbie, I used to spend lot of time reading about ~~secret~~ SEO recipes to make my blog search engine friendly. The reality is this, when it comes to SEO - less is more. I'm specifically talking about on-page optimization strategies. There are tons of products, courses and eBooks providing you with endless SEO settings to gain higher rankings against your competition.

If you look at what the search giant suggests about search engine optimization, you'll notice there are no bells and whistles that need to be implemented for formulating a killer SEO strategy. Use the KISS principle and only focus on the basics. WordPress bloggers are blessed with several out-of-the-box SEO advantages and you only need to tweak it a bit for maximum benefits.

Free Blogging Platforms Handcuffs Your Growth

As a beginner, I started with Google's blogger platform. Although, Google has recently added tons of features to this popular free blogging engine, still it lacks in some of the key areas. First disadvantage of using a free blogging service is that you never own your blog. It's service provider's property and can be deleted or suspended anytime without any notice. Secondly, you never have complete control over your blog when it comes to customization or extending new functionalities.

If you're an absolute beginner and simply want to test the waters before plunging into a full-fledged professional blogging business, you may try these free platforms, but the sooner you switch to a self-hosted WordPress blog, the better it will be. This will give you complete ownership and control of your blog and will let you extend it the way you wish it to be.

Great Content Doesn't Markets Itself

Great content will automatically pull readers - that's what every confident newbie swears. The reality is just the opposite. Brian Chappell sums it up very well through his tweet. Churning out pillar content on a regular basis doesn't guarantee success. If you want to expand your reach, you must master the art of seeding your exceptional content on targeted hubs where it can be further shared and discussed among your targeted audience.

Content is NOT king - seeding and promotion tactics of said content is king.
— Brian Chappell (@brianchappell) July 17, 2009

And that's where social media plays a big role by providing you the right kind of opportunities that disseminate your content to the masses giving a boost to your blog's overall growth. Learn the art of connecting with power users within your niche to get more eyeballs for your content. This is an era of aggressive content marketing done on various social media platforms, without which your growth will move ahead like a snail.

Own Product or Service Beats Everything Else

The most common and popular method to earn from blogging is monetization through different kinds (ppc or affiliate) of advertisements. But, if you really want to make it big, work on creating your own product or service. This is the best way to earn handsome money from your blog even if you're not getting tons of traffic.

For example, if you're a mommy blogger running a food blog, why not create your own eBook filled with your very own cooking secrets? That way, you'll not only generate decent revenue but will also establish yourself as an authority within your niche. Bloggers who're technically sound have more opportunities to come up with different kinds of services and products, provided they do it in a correct way.

Investing In Blog Design Does Makes Sense

Newbies often hesitate to spend money on getting a custom blog design or for purchasing a premium theme framework. Readers are getting smarter these days and they now expect nicely designed blog devoid of any clutter with fast load times. Sometimes, all your energy spent on creating exceptional content is simply wasted because your blog's design instantly repels new visitors.

If you cannot afford a premium solution, you must find some ways to tweak your existing theme to get a unique and branded skin to stand out in the crowd. This design optimization is extremely effective in increase sales and traffic on your blog. When I was using blogger platform way back in 2009-2010, I designed custom theme for this blog and found that the traffic increased by about 35% soon after activating the optimized blogger skin. Analyzing the traffic revealed that visitors were comparatively spending more time on the archives due to easy access for the same provided through deliberate design tweaks.

Invent Your Own Ways to Get Things Done

If you look out for advice on a specific blogging activity, you'll find more or less similar kinds of suggestions and techniques all over the blogosphere. It's not that these techniques are wrong or ineffective, but what matters is that how effective or productive are these techniques when used for your blog. A strategy that's bringing tons of traffic and business for a blog may not necessarily work the same for another one.

Here's where innovation and creativity comes into play. Successful bloggers always come up with unique ideas to get things done that works perfectly for their blogs. This involves identification of problems in time and formulation of unique strategies to get optimized and result-oriented solutions. I've advised it earlier and I myself regularly practice it for all of my niche blogs.

Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

I'm sure most of you will disagree with this, but that's what I've learned after spending all these years blogging for myself and for some of the clients. This is applicable on almost every kind of online business. If you're good at something, focus all your energy in growing it as quickly as possible. The more you spread your tentacles, the more you divide your energy in different domains.

This results in missed deadlines, incomplete products and under-optimized strategies. It's good to think about multiple sources of income that can increase your earnings by ten folds. But how about working on a single solid income source that comparatively gives you much higher returns on a consistent basis? And that too without putting too much stress on mind and body. Think about it, and if required, make changes in your existing strategy to build a core service or product built around your blog.

4 Simple Ways to Optimize Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy

2012-09-18T15:26:00.003+05:30

Almost every niche blogger uses affiliate marketing as one of the tools to generate income from his blogs and email list. Only a handful of them manage to earn huge amount of money from their affiliate marketing efforts. There are numerous variable factors that can directly affect your marketing strategy when it comes to selling products on niche blogs. Today, we're going to discuss some of the unique ways to push our existing strategy to the next level to give much higher earnings than expected. Successful affiliate marketing involves building smart techniques that analyze and understand potential buyer's psychology. Let's see how we can leverage this phenomenon to optimize our existing affiliate marketing strategies.

Use Content-based Advert Injection

Generally bloggers prefer to display various kinds of affiliate ads on every post page. This includes text links, small or large banners or widget-based ads in the sidebar. If you really want high conversions, there's no need to fill every single web page with tons of affiliate ads. Content-based ad injection is an excellent way to show targeted advertisements to the qualified buyers. For example, if a visitor lands from Google searching about WordPress theme, there's no point showing him ads about 'Twitter automation tools'. There are several ways we can implement content-based ad serving and it entirely depends on what works best for you.

Category-based ad serving - This is an excellent way to group buyers into different segments and then serving them - the most relevant ads. You can pick a post category and can deliver select ads for that content section to let visitors receive the most relevant offers. The more diverse is your category index, the more targeted ads you can deliver through this technique.
Popular content based ad serving - Another effective method is leveraging the popularity of your premium content that have good search engine presence. Generally, popular posts address demanding issues and are highly targeted towards a section of visitors. You can analyze most popular posts on your blog and can find the most relevant affiliate ads for them.

You can experiment and can invent your own interest-based customer segments to deliver the most relevant ads that work best with content-based ad delivery engine. This ad personalization brings good results and significantly boosts your earnings. Some other segments can be tag-based targeting or search engine query based targeting. There are several plugins available to deploy this conditional ad serving. You just need to experiment to find the best combination for your blog.

Use Bridge Pages for Premium Products

Products that are known to perform well and also offer good commission shouldn't be left on the mercy of pre-made banners. Bridge pages work best for such type of products adding more curiosity and desperation to the buyer's intent. This simple yet extremely effective strategy involves creation of dedicated product description pages and then linking those pages with the banners and adverts. In other words, instead of sending visitor directly to the seller's website, potential buyer is first diverted to the custom bridge page and then he is finally pushed towards the actual product page through various call-to-action buttons or text.

Some may argue that it may lead to low conversions as it involves more than one click for reaching the actual product page. But the reality is quite opposite, provided you do it in a correct way. The whole idea of this strategy is to supplement additional information about the product such that the buyer cannot resist a visit to the product page with a positive intent.

Design these bridge pages for each premium product and include persuasive text with strong call-to-actions. To get the best results, use bullet lists to explain the product's features on these pages. Make sure you consume just a single line for explaining each feature within the bullet list. This technique works quite well in almost every niche. Invest some time in designing these product description pages and divert your visitors to these bridge pages through custom banners placed at targeted locations.

Combine Deadlines and Discounts (Coupon Codes)

Buyers just love to get discounts and you must leverage this tendency to push more sales for a popular product. One of the proven methods of selling more affiliate products is to offer killer discounts within a time frame. Lots of affiliate products (e.g. web hosting packages) let you generate your own discount coupons. You can create large custom banners that not only highlight the discount coupon but also mention the deadline.

This triggers more conversions as potential buyers simply don't want to lose the chance of owning a premium product at a discounted rate. Make sure you do not overdo it with every single product you're promoting. It works best when you're using it for select products and that too for short time frames at regular intervals. You must also ensure that your deadline (time frame) is of reasonable length and is not overlapping weekend period when sales goes down for almost every niche.

Combine Case Studies and Testimonials

These two elements are prefect candidates for inclusion in bridge pages discussed earlier in this post. Trust factor has always played a big role in successful affiliate marketing. You cannot try and test every single product you're promoting on your blog. But, you can definitely find out and include case studies and testimonials for popular premium products. Sourcing this information is not that difficult for extremely popular products.

You can directly approach product users and can take permission for including them in the testimonials. A good percentage of them will respond positively as they get exposure and reach for free. If you're using a case study in a bridge page, you must supplement it with charts and figures to give some credible insights about the product. While including figures or data in your case studies, do not hesitate to cite the source from where you got the figures. You can also consider including a chart or datasheet within large custom banners to increase the click-through-rate.