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Best guide for Ultimate SEO for a Blogger Blogspot Blog

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 06:03:00 +0000

A lot has been written about search engine optimization but when it comes to implementing it on a specific web publishing platform, beginners or technically challenged often struggle to apply it correctly. If you've hosted your blog on Google's Blogger platform and want to tidy up its SEO settings, this guide is written just for you. Search engines regularly update and improve their algorithms to ensure the results are contextually correct. Exceptional content is the cornerstone of SEO efforts but without core on-page SEO, we may not be able to get a good presence on the search engines. Through this tutorial, we are going to learn about the key SEO settings one must apply to a typical blogger template for better SEO to gain more qualified traffic from organic sources. All you need is basic code copy pasting ability to apply these tips which give you a better blogger template enhanced with correct SEO settings. So let's get started and quickly check out this step-by-step SEO guide written specifically for blogger blogs and sites.

Basic Dashboard Settings

Let's start with core blogger dashboard settings, to ensure that the most basic on page SEO is applied on each page. It is essential to start with these dashboard settings which are further augmented with added customization done within blogger template code.

Step 1: Open your Blogger dashboard settings and go to Settings → Basic option as shown below.

Provide an appropriate blog title (ideally shouldn't exceed 75 characters) and make sure the blog is visible to search engines. Visibility for blogger's internal platform listing is not mandatory. Similarly, you may notice that I've kept the description field blank.

Step 2: Go to Settings → Basic → Permissions section and ensure the blog visiblility is set to public as shown below.

If your blog is opened only for select users, you can make changes to this setting though making it private defeats the entire purpose of SEO efforts for better presence on search engines. This setting is public by default so in most cases you can leave it as it is.

Step 3: Now go to Settings → Search preferences → Meta tags/Errors and redirections sections. Here you'll find two most important SEO settings which must be completed.

The first important setting is used to supply the blog description used for the home page. Use it wisely to summarize what your blog is all about. Ideally, it shouldn't exceed 160 characters. Enabling this option also ensures you can write custom descriptions for individual posts while composing them within the post editing screen.

The next important setting allows you to create a custom 404 page whenever a visitor lands on your blog through a broken link. You can freely write your desired text in the text box as per your preferences. Custom CSS can also be added to the page content through a <style></style> tag.

Modified (Core) Header Meta Tags

The default blogger template includes few header meta tags which should be replaced by the ones listed below to ensure your blog's single post pages, static pages, and error page gets a better SEO structure. To do so, open your blog's template within the dashboard and delete everything between <head> and <b:skin> tags. Thereafter, paste the following code between these two tags.


<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

    <title>
      <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
        <data:blog.pageTitle/>  
        <b:else/>
        <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "error_page"'>
          <data:blog.pageName/>
          <b:else/>
          Write custom 404 page title here!
        </b:if>
      </b:if>
    </title>
    
    <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "archive"'>
      <meta content='noindex,noarchive' name='robots'/>
    </b:if>
    <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "static_page"'>
       <meta content='noindex, nofollow' name='robots'/>
    </b:if>
    <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "static_page"'>
    <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != "error_page"'>
       <link href='https://plus.google.com/+YourBlogGPlusPageAddress' rel='publisher'/>
    </b:if>
    </b:if> 
    <meta charset='UTF-8'/>

Note: If you're using a responsive blogger template, you must add the following meta tag at the end of the code snippet shown above.


<meta content='width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1' name='viewport'/>

After adding this code snippet, following things are taken care of.

All the automatically generated header meta tags remain intact and are included in the header.
Page titles are optimized for search engines for home page, single post pages, static pages, archive pages and of course 404 page.
A setting is done to ensure archive pages are not indexed or archived by search engines.
A setting is done to ensure all the static pages on the blog are neither indexed nor pass link juice to the search engines. You can change this setting if you want your static pages to be indexed as well.
For all the content pages, Google+ publisher credit tag is included. You must change the default link with the link associated with your blog's Google+ page.
And last but not the least, character set meta tag is included as well to specify the character encoding used for the HTML document.
In case, you're using a responsive template, do not forget to append the last meta tag shown separately at the end.

Advanced users who're bit familiar with blogger template tags can tweak and can make adjustments to this code snippet to match with their preferences.

Facebook Open Graph Meta Tags and Twitter Cards Integration

Nowadays social media is tightly integrated with publishing platforms for easy syndication and aggregation of content across different platforms. Facebook provides meta tags for displaying content on the social network in the best possible way. Similarly, Twitter also offers different types of cards to display rich media content on its timeline in a better way.

Every blogger must integrate these two important tags within their blog to get a better presence on these two social platforms.

1. Twitter card integration: Let's see how to integrate a typical photo card within a blogger template. A photo card is one of the most popular card types used by large numbers of websites. Here's how to do it.

Find the following line within your blog template.


<b:includable id='post' var='post'>

Right below this line, paste the following code.


<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
 <meta content='@blogtwitterhandle' name='twitter:site'/>
    <meta content='myblog.com' name='twitter:domain'/>
    <meta content='@blogtwitterhandle' name='twitter:creator'/>
    <b:if cond='data:post.firstImageUrl'>
       <meta content='photo' name='twitter:card'/>
       <meta expr:content='data:post.firstImageUrl' name='twitter:image'/> 
    <b:else/>
       <meta content='summary' name='twitter:card'/>
       <b:if cond='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl'>
          <meta expr:content='data:blog.postImageThumbnailUrl' name='twitter:image'/> 
       </b:if>
    </b:if>
    <meta expr:content='data:blog.pageName' name='twitter:title'/>
    <meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' name='twitter:description'/>    
</b:if>

That's it! Once integrated, you get a nice photo-rich tweet whenever your blog posts are shared on Twitter provided the post includes at least, one image within the body. Here's how a typical tweet may look like once Twitter photo card has been enabled on the website.

After integration of the code, validation needs to be done on the Twitter platform. It's a simple process which is explained in the following guide. It also tabulates other types of Twitter cards you may want to use on your Blogger blog.

In the above Twitter card snippet, you have to change blog site address and your Twitter handle in the first 3 meta tags. It may take few days after validation for rich photo cards to appear on the timeline.

Facebook open graph tags integration: And now, let's see how to integrate Facebook's Open Graph meta tags within a blogger template.

First add the following Open Graph namespace declaration xmlns:og='http://ogp.me/ns#'within the template's <html> tag. After, addition the entire <html> may look like this.


<html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b' 
xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data' 
xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr' 
xmlns:og='http://ogp.me/ns#'>

Thereafter, right before closing </head> tag, paste the following code.


<meta content='en_US' property='og:locale'/>
  <meta expr:content='data:blog.canonicalUrl' property='og:url'/>
  <meta content='Type Blog Title Here' property='og:site_name'/>
  <meta content='https://www.facebook.com/BlogFBPageAddress' property='article:publisher'/>
  <meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' property='og:description'/>
  <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
  <meta content='website' property='og:type'/>
  <meta expr:content='data:blog.pageTitle' property='og:title'/>  
  <meta content='Paste blog logo URL here (160x160 JPG/PNG)' property='og:image'/>  
  <b:else/>
  <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
  <meta content='article' property='og:type'/>  
  <meta expr:content='data:blog.pageName' property='og:title'/>
  <meta expr:content='data:blog.postImageUrl' property='og:image'/>
  </b:if>
  </b:if>

You have to make 3 changes in the code snippet shown above. Blog title, blog's Facebook page URL and blog's logo URL (should be a square 160x160px JPG or PNG image) need to be updated. In case, you're using a different locale, you may change the first meta tag too.

Validating & Correcting Structured Microdata

Every modern website uses microdata in different forms to enable search engines to extract and process key data related to content on the web page for better browsing experience for the end users.

In simple words, microdata enables search engines to understand the structure and information associated with the web content so that they can serve better search results to the users. At the very basic level, our blogger template must include the necessary microdata to allow search engines interpret key information associated with the blog posts. This key information is as follows:

entry-title (blog post title)
entry-content (blog post body)
updated (blog post's last modification time)
author [hcard] fn (post's author name)

It may be possible that this bare minimum microdata is correctly implemented in your current template. It is also possible that some other form of microdata is used in your blogger template. Whatever is the case, you must confirm if everything is done correctly and there is no error related to this structured data.

To do so, head over to Google's structured data testing tool and provide one of the blog post's URL for validation. If everything is correct, you may get the result something like this.

In case, something is wrong in the implementation, you may get an error like one of the samples shown below.

So, I'll show how to integrate the bare bones microdata mentioned in our template to help search engines better interpret our content. Power users can add more structured data in their templates if required.

Step 1: Find the following code snippet and add hentry class at the right location as shown below.


<b:includable id='post' var='post'>
  <div class='post hentry'>

Step 2: Thereafter, find the following code snippet and add the entry-title class at the two locations as shown below. I've included partial code snippet to ensure things don't get cluttered. You can see the two places where this class is present in the code snippet below.


<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
   <b:if cond='data:post.title'>
     <h1 class='post-title entry-title'>
        <b:if cond='data:post.link'>       
           <a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a>    
           <b:else/>
           <b:if cond='data:post.url'>
             <b:if cond='data:blog.url != data:post.url'>
                <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a>
                <b:else/>
                <data:post.title/>
               </b:if>
              <b:else/>
             <data:post.title/>
           </b:if>
           </b:if>
           </h1>
           </b:if>
          <b:else/>
        <b:if cond='data:post.title'>
          <h2 class='post-title entry-title'>
            <b:if cond='data:post.link'>
               <a expr:href='data:post.link'><data:post.title/></a>  
                <b:else/>
                <b:if cond='data:post.url'>
                <b:if cond='data:blog.url != data:post.url'>
              <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.title/></a>
             <b:else/>

Step 3: Next is the turn of adding microdata for the post author. Find the following code snippet and add the author and vcard classes. A class named fn is also added in the code snippet. You can replicate the same in your blogger template by following the sample shown below.


<span class='post-author vcard' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/Person'>
        <b:if cond='data:top.showAuthor'>
          By <span class='fn author' itemprop='name'><data:post.author/></span>
        </b:if>
      </span>

If you pay attention to the code snippet shown above, you'll notice that itemscope and itemtypeattributes are also added. Make sure you do not skip these additions.

Step 4: Next microdata class is the last post modification time. To add it in the design template, find the following code snippet and add the updated class at the right place as shown below.


<b:if cond='data:top.showTimestamp'>
    <b:if cond='data:post.url'>
        <span class='updated'><data:post.timestamp/></span>
    </b:if>
</b:if>

Step 5: And last but not the least, add the entry-content class in the following code snippet to let search engines easily extract the main post body from the page.


<div class='post-body entry-content' expr:id='"post-body-" + data:post.id'>

Note: The code snippets shown above may be slightly different in your blogger template. So, make sure you do not get confused and go ahead with the modifications despite small changes.

In case, you're running a food blog on a blogger blog, you must integrate recipe schema markup within the template to ensure rich snippets are shown prominently in the search results for better results.

So that finishes the integration steps of basic microdata classes within a typical blogger template. Once the integration is complete, do not forget to validate it against the structured data testing tool created by Google.

Miscellaneous SEO Guidelines for Blogger Users

And now, it's time to go through some of the best SEO practices that'll benefit your blog in the long run. Applying these methodologies will ensure you get a good presence on search engines and consistently get an influx of traffic from these organic sources. So let's get started and check out these best SEO practices aimed for blogger users.

Image optimization: Blogger users often struggle to correctly manage the images used on the blog. The first you need to understand is that uploading an original image is not the way to go. You must optimize them to reduce the size before using them in a blog post.

Google has clearly stated that site speed is now one of the ranking factors. Bulkier the images, slower is the page opening time.

Here's a simple workflow for using images on Blogger platform.

First of all, never resize your original images. Simply, web-optimize them using one of these two tools. If you're using a PNG image, use this tool. And, in case you're using a JPG image, try this solution.

Thereafter, grab the optimized image and upload it from within the post editor. Now switch to the HTML mode and resize the image by explicitly specifying the image width as shown below.

Make sure you also add an image description through the alt attribute of the <img> tag. Here's how it is added.

Once you start practicing these image addition guidelines, not only your blog posts will open much faster, but you'll also get good traffic from image search queries.

Custom permalink: Optimized post permalink ensures you get a place in search results for relevant topics and search queries. Fortunately, blogger platform allows you to specify a custom post permalink which can be optimized for search queries.

Make sure you leverage this feature to the fullest and do not rely on the default post slug created by the platform itself.

Do not create lengthy post slug and include at least one primary keyword you want to target. Use a natural search phrase in the post slug for the best results.

Custom post description: And last but not the least is the description which provides a brief summary of the post to be consumed by the search engines. Again, you must use this vital feature for better SEO of your blogger blog.

These custom search descriptions are often included in the rich snippets within search result pages. So make sure a post description is alluring as well to invite clicks from the potential visitors.

So, that completes the essential SEO best practices for blogs hosted on Google's Blogger platform. If you struggle to integrate or implement any feature mentioned in this guide, feel free to send me an email and I'll try my best to resolve it.

How to make your Blog Blazing Fast in loading Speed

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 05:57:00 +0000

Whether you're running a blog or a website, site speed is one of the important factors that decide its success when it comes to attracting and retaining traffic. All major search engines including Google encourage and recommend making sites responsive and fast. Today, we're going to focus on the latter feature and specifically for blogs hosted on Google's blogger platform. Before, we dive into the tutorial; I'll advice you to gain basic or working knowledge of copy and pasting HTML or CSS code within blogger templates. If you're already tinkering with your template design, nothing can be better than that. After completing the steps mentioned below, you can speed up your blog by many folds. Several principles mentioned here can be applied on other platforms too. As always, I'll warn you to first try these techniques on a dummy blog. And, while exercising it on your live blog, keep a backup of your existing design and content. So, let's kick start this optimization process for making our blogger blog, a flyer.

This guide aims to make a blogger blog as fast as it can by eliminating whatever we can.

Analyze Current Condition

We'll start with analyzing the current state of the blogger blog in question. For that, Google provides an excellent tool called PageSpeed Insights. Type the address of your blog in the text box and hit enter. After processing it, the tool will display speed score for both mobile and desktop mode along with the pitfalls and the suggestions to fix them.

As shown in the image above, you can see a sample score for desktop mode. Ideally, this score should be 85+ both for mobile and desktop mode. Anything below it requires attention. Remember, if you're publishing long posts containing large number of images, their score may still remain below 85 which is quite reasonable and can be safely ignored even after the optimization process is complete.

So, I'm assuming that you've used this tool and have got your PageSpeed score both for desktop and mobile mode and they're way below 85. Right below these scores, you'll find the reasons and descriptive suggestions to fix the bottlenecks.

We'll focus on the most important section which addresses render blocking assets responsible for slowing down your blogger blog.

So, the major culprits are external CSS and JavaScript resources you're using with your existing template. This may include Google fonts CSS, a popular JavaScript library like jQuery and additional CSS files. This is just an example of files which may be blocking timely rendering of web pages associated with your blogger blog.

You'll get a complete list of such render blocking files on the PageSpeed score page so that you can work on them. So let's started and start the speed optimization process.

Eliminate Font Files

Most blogger publishers use Google fonts for enhancing the typography of their blog. These fonts may pep up your template but they come with a cost. It's one of the render blocking resource that slows down the blog. So what's the solution? In case, you're using WordPress or some other CMS with your own web server, I'll suggest once trying this technique for optimized font loading times.

I've not tested this technique, so I'm not sure if it'll work correctly on your server. Now, back to our blogger blog that needs our attention. The solution is dead simple. Do NOT use any font file at all. I'm using Georgia, Arial and Helvetica on this blog and it works without any external font CSS file. If you're removing Google fonts, make sure you replace them with a right combination of web safe fonts which gels well with your design template.

So, if you're really interested in making your blogger blog, a zipper, simply remove any font CSS file requests in your template.

End Reliance on jQuery & Make Small Script Files Inline

Most blogs now rely heavily on jQuery for seamless working of various features and effects. But with the improvement of new HTML and CSS standards, most of these features can be completed with pure CSS & HTML code.

If you're still using some of the features that require jQuery, try to find a solution that doesn't need one. At this point, Google search engine is your best friend. Once you've ensured you no longer need jQuery, simply delete inclusion request of that file too.

It is either present in the header or in the footer of a blogger template.

You may still be using one or more JavaScript files which have no dependency. While your blog fetches these files from an external server, web page rendering process is blocked. The solution to this problem is very simple. Unless, these files are very large, just make their code inline within your template.

In simple words, instead of calling these files from an external server, you'll directly paste their code right within your blogger template. Start with saving all these files on your desktop and one by one open them in your favorite code editor. Make sure you comment out these script file inclusion tags in your template so that inline code working can be tested.

Remember, do not open these files in a rich text editor (e.g. Microsoft Word) else your code may get corrupted. For each file code, create the following snippet of script inclusion code block either in the header or right before the end of template body within the template. Let me explain it in the following steps.


<script type='text/javascript'>
/*<![CDATA[*/
// Paste file's script code here...
/*]]>*/
</script>

For each file code, copy it from the text editor and paste it at the place indicated above in the code snippet. Now copy this entire code snippet and paste it right before the </body> tag. Now once open the posts of your blog to check if the feature/function requiring that script code is working fine or not. If it's not working, transfer the code to the template header and paste somewhere before the </header>tag.

Repeat this process for all the small scripts you want to inline within your code.

Transfer Entire CSS Code in Header

Blogger template CSS is divided into 3 parts. The most common and visible part is the template design code embedded in inline form within the header. Users work on this CSS code to make changes in the template design. But, there are two other external CSS files which come under the category of render blocking resources contributing in slowing down the blog.

These two files are:

728935430-widget_css_bindle.css - This CSS file consists of the default code for generic blogger widgets like popular posts widget, labels widget and many more. (The numeric prefix of this file may be different in your template.)
authorization.css - This file consists of two or more lines of CSS code. To be honest, I'm not sure what its usage is.

Blogger platform automatically fetches these two render blocking CSS files with each page request. Now, to get rid of this problem, we need to remove these two files. But, if we directly remove these files, the template using generic blogger widgets may break distorting the entire design.

So, an ideal solution is to not only remove these files but also to copy their code right before our existing template design. This is a two step process which should be completed carefully. Make sure you take backup of your template before completing this step.

First of all save the contents of both these files in separate plain text files. Now, find the following code within your blogger template. It is present at the beginning of your template CSS code within header.


<b:skin><![CDATA[

Replace it with the following code snippet.


&lt;style type=&quot;text/css&quot;&gt;

&lt;!-- /*<b:skin><![CDATA[*/]]></b:skin>

<style type='text/css'>

Now, find the following code snippet. You can find it at the end of template CSS code within header.


]]></b:skin>

Replace it with the following code snippet.


</style>

Now, copy the widget CSS bundle code from the text file and paste it right below the first code snippet we've replaced earlier. Thereafter, copy the authorization CSS code from the second text file and paste it right below the widget CSS bundle code. Finally, your code structure would be something like this.


&lt;style type=&quot;text/css&quot;&gt;

&lt;!-- /*<b:skin><![CDATA[*/]]></b:skin>

<style type='text/css'>

[ Paste widget CSS bundle file code here ]

[ Paste authorization CSS file code here ]

[ Here is your existing template design code ]

</style>

Now, save your template. You've just fixed the two render blocking CSS files which were slowing down your blogger blog. By this time, your blogger blog is opening quite fast when compared to its older version.

Exclude Widgets & Google+ Script Files (Footer)

Another two render blocking resources are two JavaScript files included automatically by Blogger platform. One of them is a Google+ script and the other one is related to all the blogger widgets used on the blog. Both these files are called at the end of the template.

Disabling inclusion of these two files is dead simple. But, after excluding both these files, few changes happen within blogger dashboard's Layout section and some other important things need to be taken care of to ensure you do not break your design template.

First, let's see how to easily exclude both these files from our template. Go to the end of your template code and find the </body> tag. Replace it with the following code snippet.


&lt;!--</body>--&gt;&lt;/body&gt;

Now save the template. As I said before, excluding both these files requires more attention by the blog owner while working with the template. If you open one of your blog posts in a web browser and examine its source code, you'll notice lot of code commented out at the end of template which also includes both files we wanted to get rid of.

As shown in the image above, you can see both the script files are now commented out and no longer hinder the page rendering process thereby speeding up your blog significantly.

At this point, if you click the Layout option within your dashboard, you'll notice that the entire layout structure is now aligned vertically like a stack of boxes kept on top of one another as shown in the image below.

There's no need to panic. Just take care of one extremely important thing from here onwards. If you're making some changes in existing widgets within your design template, nothing needs to be done and you can edit them freely. But, if you're going to add a new widget or looking to delete an older widget, replace the code snippet back to the original </body> tag.

Once you've made that change and have saved the template, you can add or delete widgets. Once, you've completed the widget addition or deletion process, you can again replace the </body> tag with the code snippet mentioned above. This way, your template will not break and it will work smoothly.

So, this completes the optimization process for speeding up your blogger blog. You can again check your blog speed through the PageSpeed Insights tool and you'll notice that you're getting a good score which is way higher than your older score. Your blog visitors will also get surprised to see significantly faster load times of your blog posts.

Miscellaneous Guidelines for Speed Optimization

Apart from completing these vital steps, you can follow additional best practices and guidelines to ensure your blog remain blazing fast giving the best browsing experience to the visitors. Here are some of these tips.

While using images in blog posts, make sure you web optimize them to reduce the overall page size.
Do compress your template design CSS code to further reduce the web page size.
While adding all the inline JavaScript code snippets, make sure you compress these scripts too.
If possible, reduce the number of widgets used on your blog.
Use image sprites, wherever possible.
Create a responsive design and trim down unnecessary elements in the design for small devices. Sounds Geeky?

7 Effective Working Tips to load Google web Fonts faster in Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 05:51:00 +0000

How can you make Google Fonts load faster on your site? It is not uncommon to see unstyled fonts or different default fonts loading and then being replaced by your Google web fonts leading to a flash of unstyled text!

This happens because when the visitor visits your website, the browser loads the default web safe fonts like Arial etc. suggested in the CSS file, then when the Google font loads, it replaces the default font with the Google font … but for those early few seconds, it ruins the web design experience for your website, and annoys visitors. So you need to load Web fonts appear faster and the correct way.

We use the Oswald font for headlines and Open Sans font for article text. See how we load it for optimal results.

Load Google Fonts First

Place the Google import code such that it loads the first after the html HEAD tag, even before the CSS file. This will ensure that the font loads before the CSS. Remember that since the CSS file follows, you can style your tags with the fonts in the CSS file.

Use Link Format

Google font offers 3 ways to load the Google web fonts – @import, link rel and javascript. Using the link rel tag will allow you to place the code on top of the html and load it fastest before the CSS file.

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

@import code needs to be inserted into the CSS file, and although you may add it at top of the CSS file, you may still get a flash of unstyled text (FOUT) – which is a poor web experience for your visitors.

Load Fewer Fonts

So why do you need 4 Google fonts to display on each page. Its a good idea to choose a maximum of two fonts – one bold type for headlines and a high readability font for the article. The more fonts you choose, the longer they will take to load.

Combine Font Codes

You can load multiple Google fonts with a single line of code. You need not paste single line codes for each font you load. See the example below where we have combined the Open Sans and Oswald font.

<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans|Oswald' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>

Load Default Variants

Each font option allows you to load various styles of font. Do you really need to add all the variants and multiple the load times several times over. Loading multiple variants is equivalent to loading multiple fonts. Choose the default style of each font and it will load only one variant.

For example – loading Open Sans font default option give load time impact of 15

While selecting all options will increase page load impact by 10 times!

Load Faster Fonts

Google Font pages for each font make it very clear how long the font will take to load. The load meter beside the font shows how fast each font will load. If you keep adding more fonts, the longer time it will take to load. Some fonts are heavy and can take almost double the load time. So choose wisely and opt for faster loading fonts. For example Open Sans has page impact of 15 while Droid Sans will be more at 25!

Use Web Font Loader

For those who simply want to load their Google fonts before the CSS loads and need to be absolutely sure there is no unstyled text surprise, use the web font loader – a javascript which will make sure it loads before the rest of the site and avoid any flash of unstyled text. Though an asynchronous script is available, it is better to use the synchronous script to ensure your font loads first.

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1.4.7/webfont.js"></script>
<script>
  WebFont.load({
    google: {
      families: ['Open Sans', 'Oswald']
    }
  });
</script>

So try out these Google font tricks and change your website design for a greater impact.

13 Best Tips ever for Content Marketing for your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 04:56:00 +0000

Although paid search is our primary focus here at WordStream, we (along with almost every other company these days) are also in the media business. Purely by virtue of having a blog, we’re constantly looking at ways to not only optimize our content’s performance, but improve the content itself.

Since content is such a big part of what we do here at WordStream, we wanted to look back at our content marketing advice and collect it all into one, invaluable post. However, we weren’t “content” (pun most definitely intended) to focus on our content marketing advice from 2015, but rather the very best content-related content from the entirety of the WordStream blog.

So here we are – the best content marketing advice we have to offer. Whether you’re a seasoned blogger with strong traffic or a fledgling newbie with a small (yet beautiful), brand-new blog, you’ll find plenty of actionable advice you can use immediately in these 13 tips and strategies.

13. Only Publish Your Very Best Material – and Be Consistent

With so much content being produced, competition in today’s so-called “attention economy” has never been more intense. As such, it’s vital that you only publish the very best content possible, or you can’t possibly hope to succeed. It’s better to publish one excellent post per week than five mediocre posts per week.

Not only do you have to set the quality bar incredibly high, but you also have to keep meeting (or exceeding) this standard. This can be a challenge for even the most experienced content production teams, but it’s essential in standing out from an increasingly large crowd and making your voice heard. Accept that producing exceptional content takes time, effort, and money – and that there are no shortcuts.

12. Evaluate the Success of Your Content with Data

One of the most common misconceptions about content marketing is that simply by publishing blog posts, your business will magically take off and you’ll be besieged by armies of eager prospective customers clamoring for whatever you sell. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Smart content marketers don’t just produce excellent content, but also know how to measure the results of their efforts.

Some bloggers are content to glance at the number of social shares their latest post has accrued and make a judgment call on its success based on that. However, even the most widely shared blog post may fall short of achieving your business goals. What do you want your content to actually accomplish, and how will you measure it?

Whatever you want your content to do, it’s crucial that you evaluate the performance of your content using analytics and other data-driven approaches – otherwise you could be wasting your time and money on content that isn’t doing anything for your business. For some, success might be measured in overall traffic using Google Analytics. For others, social shares or “attention metrics” such as scroll depth might be more important, a metric that can be measured by tools such as Chartbeat.

However – and whatever – you measure, be sure you’re actually assessing the performance of your content consistently to ensure your time and money are being used wisely and productively.

11. Repurpose Your Content

The best content takes time, effort, and skill to produce. Even if you’re giving away your best content for free (which you should be), that doesn’t mean you can’t get a greater return on investment from your content. This is why so many businesses repurpose content from one format into several.

Think of the last blog post you published that performed strongly. Did it resonate with readers because it served as a valuable, evergreen resource? Did it offer your audience something they couldn’t find anywhere else? Then it would probably do well as a downloadable guide. Similarly, some blog posts might be well-suited to an email blast, or a live webinar. However you choose to repurpose your content, be sure you’re getting your money’s worth from your content production investment.

10. Reuse Your Best Headlines in PPC Ads

If you’re running a PPC campaign and producing content, you should also consider repurposing your most strongly performing headlines into your ad copy. If a headline resonated strongly with your readers, a variation of it will likely resonate strongly with prospective buyers.

If you think about it, PPC ad copy and content share a lot of the same “hooks,” such as an emotionally engaging angle, strong verbs, and easily understood benefits. They’re also similar (or should be) in length – AdWords and Bing Ads have mandatory character limits in their ads that advertisers have no choice but to follow, while shorter headlines of around six words tend to perform strongly from a content perspective.

If a recent blog post, webinar, or whitepaper exceeded your expectations, run an A/B test to see if it performs as strongly as an ad. Check out this blog post on how to think like a content marketer for PPCfor more tips on how you can make your content go further.

9. Accept That Not All Content HAS to Tell a Story

One of my biggest pet peeves about the content marketing industry is the focus on storytelling. Don’t get me wrong – I firmly believe that storytelling is a crucial skill for aspiring (and even experienced) content marketers to cultivate, and that brand storytelling is one of the most effective ways to reach prospective new customers with your message.

However, that doesn’t mean that all content is storytelling, or that all content marketers are storytellers.

You are not a storyteller - Stefan Sagmeister @ FITC from FITC on Vimeo.

Not all content has to tell a story. Sometimes, a straightforward blog post that serves a purpose and provides value for your readers is more than enough. Oftentimes, the people who talk the most (and loudest) about storytelling in content marketing are those who either don’t do it, or don’t understand it. Don’t listen to these people, and don’t worry if you’re not a natural-born storyteller – it’s far from a prerequisite for content marketing success.

Don’t shy away from telling stories if that’s what makes the most sense for your content, but don’t buy into the hype that every single piece of content has to be an engaging, complex narrative – it simply isn’t true.

8. Be Bold and Speak Your Mind (Especially When Others Don’t Dare)

One of the biggest challenges facing content marketers is competing with and overcoming the sheer volume of content being produced. With literally millions of blog posts being published every single day, making your voice heard over the tsunami of (poorly written, useless) content can be an almost insurmountable task – unless you take a stand that nobody else is willing to take.

So much of the content being produced (especially in tight-knit industries such as digital marketing) merely parrots and regurgitates the opinions and viewpoints of a select few. This is why readers are rapidly becoming desensitized to content – if there are hundreds of blogs all saying the same things, why should readers waste their time consuming that content? This is what makes producing contrarian content so powerful.

Taking an unpopular stance, speaking your mind when others won’t, and flirting with controversy can be a powerfully effective strategy in your content. Of course, you should take care not to offend or be contrarian for its own sake, but dare to be bold and speak your mind. If nothing else, your readers will likely appreciate your candor. In addition, you’ll probably sound and appear much more authentic than you would by merely repeating what others have said.

7. Go After Specific Keywords with Your Content

In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to worry about SEO. We’d publish insightful, thought-provoking blog posts about our chosen topics, and find enormous online audiences eager to learn from our experience and buy whatever we’re selling.

Obviously, we don’t live in that world, and we do have to think about SEO.

Some content experts advocate for a “keyword-less” approach to content; publishing content that serves reader interests first and foremost, and doesn’t concern itself with anything as “distasteful” as keyword targeting. Again, this is great in an ideal world, but it’s a jungle out there – if you’re not thinking about keyword targeting, you can bet your competitors are. That’s why it pays to target specific keywords with your content before you produce it.

A topic as broad and complex as keyword targeting for SEO is far beyond the scope of this post, so I won’t try to condense it here. Suffice to say that you should be thinking of keywords you want to rank for before you sit down to write a blog post or produce any other type of content.

6. Back Up Your Arguments with Data

In today’s digital media environment, trust can be hard to come by. With fact-checking and journalistic due diligence at all-time lows, it’s easy to see why so many readers have become reluctant to accept “facts” as the cold, hard truth. That’s why it’s so important to back up your assertions with data.

Using data in your content should be as natural and commonplace as spell-checking. If you make a point, include statistics and facts to back it up. Similarly, if you cite data to make a point, be sure to cite it appropriately and, if possible, include a link to the original source. After all, you wouldn’t want somebody else using your data in their content without tipping their hat to your research, right?

5. Ensure Your Content Reflects Your Brand’s Voice

Content marketing is one of the best ways to develop and refine the “voice” of your brand. However, even large, well-funded businesses with dedicated content teams can struggle to identify and define what their brand voice actually sounds like, especially when working with larger teams.

Ensuring continuity of brand voice, especially across larger teams, can be a challenge. It requires constant review of editorial standards to ensure that both quality and tone are consistent, as well as a higher-level overview of your blog and content in general. However, while developing brand voice through content can be challenging, it’s definitely worth considering.

For each and every post, ask questions about how the content advances and develops your brand’s voice. Does the writing reflect your company’s values? What does the tone say about what it’s like to do business with you? Is your brand voice sincere, or forced and artificial? These are all questions that can help you take control of your brand’s voice and refine your messaging through content. By answering these questions (and correcting course when necessary), you’ll also provide your audience with a more cohesive experience as a brand, something to which all blogs should aspire.

4. Don’t Copy Other Corporate Blogs – Look to the Indie Superstars Instead

In the past, I’ve worked with several clients who asked me to make their corporate blog “sexy” and more appealing. In such discussions, corporate content managers often point to the blogs of influential solo bloggers who have established vast, loyal readerships as an example of the direction they’d like their blog to take.

This is a more challenging task than it might appear.

Even large, well-established corporate blogs can learn a great deal from the influential blogging superstars who dominate web publishing. For one, these blogging rock stars simply ooze authenticity, because they’re writing as themselves and representing their own brand by being themselves – a challenge for many corporate blogs. They’re selling themselves by being themselves, a valuable lesson that any corporate blog could stand to learn (and practice).

Whether you’ve been tasked with revamping an ailing corporate blog or launching one from scratch, don’t look to other corporate blogs for inspiration. Study how the individuals behind the most popular and influential blogs on the web have established their audiences, and emulate those strategies instead. Your readers will thank you for it – and come back for more.

3. Constantly Hone Your Writing Skills

One of the questions I’m asked the most often is, “How can I become a better writer?” To many would-be content producers, their relative lack of experience or confidence is the biggest obstacle to their aspirations, and there’s nothing worse than telling people to just stick with it in the vague hopes that their writing skills will improve.

I’ve been blogging professionally for quite a while now, and although I’m confident in my abilities, I’m always trying to improve and seeking out advice and help from the experts. Writing, like many skills, is a craft that you can always improve. Read more widely and extensively by reading material you may not ordinarily read (and yes, I mean actual, honest-to-God books, not just blogs). Write every single day – yes, every day, even if it’s only a hundred words or so. Be relentless in your pursuit of excellence, and don’t settle for mediocrity.

Even if you know what you’re doing when it comes to content, adopt the mindset of the perpetual student, and never be satisfied. Strive to push your writing skills to their limit – then push even farther. The more time and effort you invest in honing your writing skills, the more readers you’ll attract.

2. Answer Complex Questions with Your Content

Earlier, we discussed the value of targeting specific keywords with your content. If you’re already doing this, the chances are pretty good that you’re targeting (and hopefully ranking for) a solid number of simple keyword terms that are relevant to your business. While this is still a worthwhile strategy to pursue, going after rankings for complex search queries can have an even bigger payoff, namely ranking in the Google Featured Snippet – or, as Moz’s Dr. Pete Meyers calls it, position zero.

The Google Featured Snippet is some of the most coveted real estate on the search engine results page. If your content answers a complex question by appearing in the Featured Snippet, not only could you drive a ton of referral traffic to your site, but you could also give your brand a major lift in terms of subject matter expertise. User trust in the content promoted in the Featured Snippet is high, meaning that if Google chooses your content to answer a complex question, your brand wins big.

1. Start Content Remarketing

So much time and effort goes into content production, only for a blog post or whitepaper to underwhelm you. Along with the actual overheads of producing content, it’s this (sometimes inevitable) poor return on investment that dissuades newcomers of content’s value to their business – a fallacy that even larger companies and experienced marketers can buy into. However, there’s a surefire way to make sure that more people see, interact with, and respond to your content, and that’s content remarketing.

Just as you’re (hopefully) using remarketing in your PPC campaigns to maximize their impact, you can use remarketing to get more eyes on the content you’re producing. First, you define the audience to which you want to remarket your content, then you tag visitors who come to your site so that you can remarket to them using banner ads on the Google Display Network later. This results in greater brand awareness and – hopefully – greater engagement with the content you spent so much time and effort producing.

25 Tips and Ways for Content Marketing you should know.

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 04:46:00 +0000

Content marketing has become a big part of consumer engagement and attracting the attention of the right audience online. That means that a lot more companies are doing it, and it’s getting harder to stand out amid the sea of audio, video, images, documents, blogs, and more.

To make matters worse, virtually every marketer and business owner have found themselves in a rut trying to create enough content, get the desired engagement, and find interesting ways to innovate.

Courtesy of Pexels.com

They’re not alone. Research shows that that 70% of B2B marketers are creating more content than they were the year before, and 54% find it difficult to produce engaging content.

There’s a distinct difference between B2B and B2C marketing, and each comes with its own unique challenges. Despite that, you can still benefit from these tips to get out of that rut and start to churn out something new and exciting.

Here are 25 content marketing tips you need to know in order to be successful:

Use your content to gently guide your customers through your buying cycle. Don’t treat it like a speedboat, full-throttle through to conversion.
Use social ads as a way to amplify the reach of your content marketing when you push it out through your social channels. A $10-20 boost on Facebook can go a long way.

Promote your content through a .com domain as often as possible. 84% of top-ranking pages use .com as their top-level domain.

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing,” says Tom Fishburne of Marketoonist. If you have to force your audience to see the value in the content, or hard sell it, it won’t work. Build content around a takeaway for the audience.

Don’t write short posts just to get the job done and over with. Write long-form content of 1,000+ words to help improve your search rank, traffic, and value to the reader.

Create a buyer persona before you start planning or producing content. That way you have a better understanding of who is reading it and the answers they’re looking for. That leads to much higher conversions.

Guest blog on popular industry sites and put a link back to your site within your byline or bio. This builds traffic as well as personal brand authority.

Avoid verbose headlines and go with short, simple, optimized titles that get the point across. The closer you get to looking like click-bait, the more wary your audience may become.

Never skip an opportunity to leverage email in your content marketing.80% of businesses report that email is directly tied to their primary revenue.

Blog consistently, not sporadically. In a Hubspot survey, 82% of marketers who blogged daily reported acquiring at least one customer via their blog, compared to 57% who were only blogging monthly.

Share your own content and use the social sharing buttons next to your content. You can use a plugin to make this process even easier.

Repurpose old content in a new way to bring something fresh to users who may not have seen it. “In the end, the repurposed content needs to provide some level of unique value to people, or it’s not worth doing,” says Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing.

Syndicate your content to reach a new audience and drive referral traffic back to your site.

Always create a content strategy. The most effective content marketers are more likely to have a documented strategy in place.

Create a strategy for content promotion. Use a checklist for each post that lists all of the social channels and applications you’ll use to promote your content.

Always have a plan for building your audience. Use time-saving content marketing tools like Narrow.io that work with you to help organically grow your following.

Make reference to influencers by linking to their content or quoting them within your content marketing. Then reach out and let them know when you’ve mentioned them, either through manual social notifications, via email, or with a tool like ContentMarketer.io.

Sometimes the best type of content marketing is a genuine thank you email or letter. At When I Work, the team sends out handwritten thank you cards to all new customers. Nearly 70% of the time, the cards get shared on social media, and referrals are up by 23% as a result. It’s such a simple thing, but it’s a win-win for both the business and its customers.

Don’t generate one-off pieces of content. Create series pieces to drive repeat traffic. A great example of this is Neil Patel’s $100,000 Challenge series.

Remember to use the basic principles of conversion optimization so that all of your content, on every channel, has a higher chance of generating leads and sales for your team. Think about headlines, visual engagement, content layout, and call to action, just to name a few.

Pay close attention to your analytics so you can keep track of the most popular topics and content types that are bringing in or driving traffic to your site. Do a lot more of what works, and cut the dead weight from your strategy.

Trending content is important, but remember to include evergreen content that will continue to product traffic month after month, year after year.

Always keep the focus on your audience when you produce content, no matter the type or channel. “Don’t focus on having a great blog,” says Brian Clark, Founder of CopyBlogger. “Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.” Need help building the right audience to promote content to on Twitter? Try using Narrow.

Talk and write as if you were having a conversation with a friend. Your audience is far more likely to relate to and engage with content that is conversational in nature. Speak on their level. You’re not a textbook.

You can’t force good writing. Try different conditions, influences, and times of day for writing. Find the conditions that are most conducive to your creativity. If you can’t manage, you can always turn to freelancers to help you produce the content that your audience is hungry to find. -- Article by forbes

Do you have any tips in your playbook to make content marketing easier? Share them in the comments below.

4 Basic Methods to get More Tons of Traffic from twitter

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 16:43:00 +0000

No matter how much blog traffic we get, we will always want more, right? More blog traffic opens the door to more opportunities, relationships, and sales.

Not only do we want more blog traffic, but we also want to get blog traffic from a variety of platforms. This is why many bloggers are active on multiple social networks.

I have experimented with dozens of different methods for gaining more blog traffic. I pin, post on Facebook, and write guest posts, but my most successful platform for driving traffic to my blog is Twitter.

Twitter alone is responsible for close to 50% of the traffic that my blog gets, and the amount of traffic I gained from Twitter has dramatically increased in a short period of time. In 2013, Twitter brought 3,408 people to my blog. The following year, Twitter brought 97,321 people to my blog. The big increase in traffic also led to a big increase in opportunities, relationships, and sales.

Many people ask me how I made such a quick transition. How did I suddenly go from getting 3,408 visitors from Twitter to almost 100,000 visitors from Twitter in just one year? I am going to share with you the methods I used to get more blog traffic from Twitter and make my big shift in just one year.

Pin A Tweet Of Your Most Popular Blog Post

When you pin a tweet of your most popular blog post to the top of your Twitter timeline, that tweet gets more exposure because its lifespan is infinite. The reason most tweets get some engagement when they are first posted but then get virtually no engagement a few days later is because most tweets have short lifespans.

Although the lifespan of each tweet differs, most tweets’ lifespans end in a day because other tweets take its place on your feed, and your followers’ home feeds are filled with other people’s tweets at that point. Pinning a tweet to the top of your profile page guarantees that the tweet will be seen by anyone who views your account. Thus, the lifespan of the tweet is infinite (until you unpin it from the top of your feed).

Pinning your most popular blog post to the top of that feed will lead to more traffic for that blog post, and all of that extra traffic for your popular blog post will equate to a better search engine rank.

The first tweet I pinned to the top of my feed was a tweet that promoted one of my free eBooks. While most of my tweets get around five retweets and favorites, the pinned tweets has been retweeted and favorited over 100 times.

Pinned tweets will get more engagement than your average tweet, so if there is a popular blog post that you want to give special attention, tweet it out and pin the tweet to the top of your feed.

Include Visual Content In Your Tweets

The value of visual content can no longer be overlooked. On every social network, including an image in the post leads to more engagement than not including the image in the post.

On Twitter, including the image in the tweet leads to a 150% increase in engagement for that tweet. It makes sense that tweets images get more engagement because the human mind processes images 60,000 times faster than text.

Buffer tested out what type of impact images have in tweets. Here’s what they found:

Including an image in your tweets is important, but not any image will do. The best images are often the ones that we create ourselves because we can create an image based on what we want in the image instead of trying to find the best (but not perfect) match on Google.

IT turns out that creating your own picture is surprisingly easy. Here are the two tools I use to create my own pictures:

#1: Canva

This free tool lets you create pictures in any pixel dimensions you want, and the tool also offers pictures perfectly sized for social media posts. Canva comes with numerous free features and images to choose from, and if you can’t find the image you are looking for on Canva, you can upload pictures from your computer to Canva.

Canva easily allows you to add text to your images and play around with the background.

#2: KeyNote/PowerPoint

Normally, when you think of KeyNote or PowerPoint, you think of creating a presentation. However, these tools also allow you to create your own pictures.

You can resize the slides in your presentation to any dimensions. You can make a slide 1000 pixels wide and 4000 pixels high if you wanted to. You can add shapes, text, and other pictures from your computer to the slide.

I primarily use KeyNote for creating Infographics because of the flexibility that KeyNote provides. I can easily move one part of the slide anywhere I desire, and I can see a full preview before I put the infographic on my blog.

Tweet The Same Blog Posts More Than Once

One of the biggest secrets about Twitter is that it is okay to tweet the same thing more than once. If you do it right, it is okay to tweet the same thing more than 100 times.

I schedule my tweets using the HootSuite bulk scheduler which means I send tweets in a cycle. Every 4-8 days, you will see the same tweets delivered in the same exact order, and these tweets always get engagement.

Since I send over 100 tweets every day, the identical tweets are barely noticeable. I get interaction for my tweets to this day as if I had never tweeted them before. Here are some reasons why it is okay to tweet the same blog posts (and for that matter, identical tweets) more than once:

#1: You are going to get new followers who have not read any of your tweets before. For these followers, your tweets are actually new.

#2: Many of your followers will miss your tweet the first time. If you send your tweet at 4 pm on a Monday, then your followers must be logged in at that time to possibly see the tweet on their crowded home feeds.

#3: The world has different timezones. If it’s 4 am in New York, then it’s 9 am in London. If you send a tweet at 4 am eastern time, many of your followers from New York won’t see the tweet. You can schedule the same tweet the following day at a better time for your followers on the east coast so they can engage with it all the same.

Optimize Your Tweets For More Engagement

Having an image in your tweet is just one step towards optimizing that tweet for more engagement. The more you optimize your tweet, the more engagement it will get. Here are some of the additional methods you can use to optimize your tweets for more engagement.

Make your tweets 70-100 characters long
Use 1-2 hashtags in each tweet
Include a number in your tweet
Occasionally include an exclamation point in your tweets
Use popular words. Dan Zarrella, the social media scientist, compiled a list of the 20 words and phrases that will get you the most retweets.

Twitter is the main reason my blog gets so much traffic. In one year, my blog traffic jumped leaps and bounds primarily because I focused my time on growing my Twitter audience and promoting my blog posts to that audience.

Getting hundreds of daily blog visitors from Twitter takes patience, but that patience will eventually allow you to get hundreds of daily visitors to your blog from Twitter alone. Constantly experiment with your tweeting frequency and what you tweet to determine what impact it has on your audience and blog traffic.

Do you use Twitter to get more blog traffic? And if you aren’t using Twitter to get more blog traffic, when will you start?

12 Tips: How to use Twitter to Get More Traffic to your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 16:35:00 +0000

If you don’t promote your blog, how will anyone know about your great content? Driving traffic to your blog is about as essential to your blogging success as your writing itself.

Take the opportunity to cross promote your blog on Twitter. Tweeting about your blog can be an incredible way to reach out and connect with your consumer. With over 500 million users, you can find lots of new readers through tweeting too.

If you use Twitter well, it can drive tons of traffic back to your blog. But simply tweeting the title of your blog post with a link back to your site will not work.

You need to be pro-active. You need to be creative. You need to use great marketing when you are tweeting about your blog posts.

Here are 12 simple, actionable tweet formulas to market your blog. Try these out to drive more traffic to your site.

1. Use Short, Provocative Tweets

A tweet is pretty short in and of itself. Generating compelling content in 140 characters or less can present a good little writing challenge. Short tweets, under 100 characters get a 21% higher interaction rate.

When you’re tweeting a link to your blog post, get creative. Try making really short tweets that invoke interest in your blog article. They work.

When you’re tweeting about your article, keep in mind that you don’t need to stick with the title of your post.

Check out this example from Copyblogger’sBrian Clark. In six words, and less than 55 characters, he creates a call-to-action, and makes you want find out what his article is about.

The title of his article is actually “3 Modern Marketing Mistakes and How to Fix Them”.

(Ok, Brian is one of the most brilliant copywriters there is, and you may need a bit of practise to reach his excellence. He’s great to learn from though!)

Here’s another example of a provocative tweet that links to a blog article. Mashable generates disbelief - and interest - in eight words.

Try it out for yourself. Take a blog post you wrote, and write out five variations of tweet that’s 10 words or less. Tweet them to see what works best.

2. Include an Intriguing Quote from Post

Give your followers a taste of your blog post. Include an intriguing quote from your article. Try to find a quote that’s concise and gives a flavour of the contents of your post.

Check out this example of a blog post I wrote for Wishpond, and then tweeted about:

Again, you don’t need to just tweet the title of your article. Show your followers a little more about what your blog post is about.

Quotes in general do really well on Twitter. Studies have shown that a tweet with a quote is 54%more likely to get retweeted. If your followers like your quote, and retweet it, they are also likely to click through to your website.

3. Include Statistics

People love statistics. (Well, that’s what the data indicates.)

If you have any interesting statistical information in your article, tweet about it. And to have even more of an impact, use numbers and characters - not just letters. The numbers and characters will make your tweet stand out in the river of tweets your followers get in their timelines.

Here’s an example from Hubspot. They use a short “did you know” question, and include numbers and characters to convey a pretty amazing fact from their article about display ads. They include the shortened link to the blog post after their fact.

4. Use #Hashtags

Hashtags are a great way to spread your tweets to various topics. For those who still don’t know what a hashtag is - basically, it’s a word or two behind a # that makes a common discussion subject.

Hashtags have been in use on Twitter for many years, and they provide a great way to connect with twitter users beyond just your Followers.

There a few methods to use hashtags when you are tweeting to drive traffic back to your blog. Here are two examples.

Use theme specific hashtags. If you want to promote a particular blog, landing page, contest, or ebook, you can create your own hashtag for it.

In this example, Guy Kawasaki wrote a post on his blog about the good and bad reasons to write a book. He uses the hashtag #APEtheBook, which is the common hashtag he created to promote his ebook.

You can use this method for your entire blog on your website, or specific events like a contest on your blog (we’ll get to this tactic shortly).

For example, you could set up a hashtag like #myawesomeblog. This creates a place where others on Twitter can dialogue about your blog too. If anyone tweets using your hashtag, it will show up in the feed for that hashtag search. This can generate more interest in your blog, and more traffic to your site. (Of course, it helps to be very famous for this technique to work really well.)

Use general post related hashtags. Include hashtags with the topics about your blog. This gets your tweet seen by other Twitter users searching for the topics you’ve written about.

For example, Bored Panda writes about crazy news in their posts. They connect with readers on Twitter by using hashtags of the news topics. In this case, they use #thunderstorm and #supercell for their coverage on a Texas storm.

This extends their reach to all of their followers on Twitter, and to other Twitter users interested in the Texas storm.

5. Use @mentions

A mention is how you include Twitter users’ @usernames. They are a way you can send a tweet directly to followers, customers, or anyone on Twitter.

You can use @mentions in a number of ways.

If your blog post comments on prominent bloggers, companies or customers - mention them in a tweet that links back to your post. Not only will they appreciate the mention, but it might just get your tweet retweeted to their followers too.

In this example, we at Wishpond wrote a blog post about Sephora, and how they create outstanding board on Pinterest. We mentioned them in our Tweet.

Mention people who’ve made good comments on your blog post, too. This is a great way to thank your loyal blog readers.

You can also mention the author of the blog post. Whether they are a guest blogger, a new blogger, or even a regular blogger on your site, mention them in a tweet that links back to their post. It’s a nice gesture, and will likely result in a retweet to their followers.

In this example by Shauna Miller of Penny Chic, she mentions a first time blogger on her fashion blog.

6. Retweet Mentioned Blog Content

If someone mentions your blog content on Twitter, retweet their tweet.

This example shows a tweet from @Econsultancy. They @mentioned Wishpond, and included a link to their blog on which they published our infographic on Social Media Marketing. At Wishpond, we retweeted their tweet to our infographic.

7. Ask for a Retweet (or RT)

This is a great way to get your blog related tweets retweeted. Simply ask your followers to retweet, or RT your update. Tweets that ask for a “RT” or “retweet” get 12 to 23 timesas many shares as those that don’t.

To get more traffic to your blog, ask for a retweet when you tweet a link back to your blog post.

In this example, Guy Kawasaki asks his followers to “Please RT” on a tweet linking back to his blog site.

8. Use Visually Appealing Images

The more appealing and enticing your blog post tweets are, the more they will be interacted with, and the more they will drive traffic back to your site.

Attach a really cool image in your blog post tweet. Make sure that it relates to your post. Try to find an image that will intrigue your followers, and make them want to find out more by clicking through to your blog post.

You could even include a visual Call-to-Action, such as an image which includes the words “click the link to read more…”

In this example, Intel tweeted a very clever image on the 4th of July. Their blog post is about the technology of fireworks. In just 10 hours, this one tweet alone had 90 retweets and 49 favourites. As you can see, the image is colorful, visually appealing and related to the science of fireworks.

9. Ask a Question Related to Your Topic

A question in your tweet can generate lots of engagement. If the question generates enough connection and curiosity with your followers, it will get more clicks to your blog.

In this example from HootSuite, the tweet could have simply tweeted the title of their blog post. Instead, they posed a very playful question to their followers. It relates to their users by asking about browsers - not offices. It makes the reader feel ok if they tend to be on the messy side. And it can pique their followers’ interest to click through to their blog post.

Try this method of update for your next blog post tweet. What question can you ask your followers to make them want to click through to your blog?

10. Tweet about Your Blog-Hosted Contest

Running a contest, sweepstakes or group offer on your blog is a brilliant way to drive traffic to your site. It creates engagement with your readers, and gives great incentive for new readers to visit your blog.

Tweeting about your contest can drive even more traffic to your blog.

Check out this example from AOL. AOL is promoting their contest, to increase their Twitter followers. They are offering a summer prize pack. To learn more about the contest, interested participants need to click through to the AOL blog.

11. Promote Your Tweets

Promoted Tweets are a pretty inexpensive advertising option provided by Twitter. They can help spread your content to your target market. Instead of just showing up in your followers feeds, the tweet will show up in other users’ feeds too. You can set up your Promoted Tweets to target by geography, interests, device used, and even by keywords.

By promoting tweets that contain a link to one of your blog posts, you can broadcast your tweets to Twitter users that wouldn’t normally see them. This is an effective and cool way to drive new traffic to your blog.

Check out how Jeff Bullas has used Promoted Tweets to drive more traffic to his popular digital marketing blog. The icon on the left hand side shows that it is a paid tweet, but it’s quite subtle. His tweet is direct and includes numbers, making it stand out in a user’s twitter timeline.

12. Include a Blog Link in Your Bio

Your Twitter bio is what your followers (and others) see when they visit you on Twitter. It doesn’t change unless you make changes to it. This lends itself to being a perfect opportunity to drive more traffic to your blog.

Include a link to your blog, or even a particular blog post, in your about and/ or contact sections of your bio. Both sections have clickable link capabilities. You can include CTA’s to entice your followers to click through to your blog too.

For example, if you have a great post you’ve written and you’d like drive traffic to it for a few weeks, make a CTA, and include it in your bio. Express the benefits of clicking through, similar to some of the above mentioned tweets.

Mari Smith uses this tactic, to drive traffic to a specific landing page on her blog. This particular link cleverly brings you to a post about Mari’s new Facebook Marketing Online Course. It’s a smart way to drive more traffic to her already very popular blog.

Conclusion

Cross-promoting your blog posts through Twitter can be greatly beneficial in driving more traffic to your blog. It also gives you a lot of engaging content to tweet about!

What do you think? Have you tried any of these Twitter marketing methods? What has worked for you? What hasn’t worked so well for you?

How to use Facebook Groups to get more Traffic?

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 13:04:00 +0000

Frustrating, isn’t it?

When you publish another article you’re not sure anybody will read.

And you don’t know if it will attract traffic – or crickets.

Even if readers do show up, you don’t know if they’ll engage with the content or lurk in the shadows, staying silent.

Every new post is a toss-up – and it’s agony.

You know it shouldn’t be like this. It feels as if something’s missing.

And you’re right. You should listen to your gut. Something is missing on your blog.

It’s the magic cure to the frustration of never knowing whether your next post will even get noticed.

What is it?

Community.

Why Community Is the Secret Sauce for Blogging Success

Have you ever been to a town that you instantly clicked with?

Somewhere you instantly felt at home. A place you belonged.

Great feeling, isn’t it?

Conversely, you’ve probably been to cities or towns that felt cold to you. You couldn’t wait to leave because, even if they were beautiful places with a lot to offer, they were missing something – at least for you.

So what’s the difference between the first case and the second? How can one place make you feel at home and another make you feel like an unwelcome stranger?

Well, the answer is community.

If you don’t feel you’ve found your natural home when you visit a town, you won’t want to stick around, move in, and put down roots.

And your blog is the same.

When visitors first land on your blog, they might spend a little time exploring what it has to offer, much like a tourist visiting a new city. But they won’t stay for the long term, engage with you and other readers, or give you their unwavering support unless they feel like they’ve found “their people” – a community of like-minded readers that fits like a glove.

Not only will an active community turn your visitors into readers, and your readers into fans, but it also gives you these other valuable advantages as a blogger:

Traffic and engagement on demand. If you want to get as many readers as possible for your blog posts, there’s no better way to achieve that than by sharing it with a community that already eagerly anticipates your latest content.
Audience research baked right into your blog. When you have a community of people who engage with your blog, you can find out what they want to read, share, and even buy just by listening in on their conversations, or asking them.
Less pressure for you, the blogger. Communities are great for connecting people and providing members with the ability to foster relationships. This takes some of the pressure off of you as the blogger from being the only one supporting readers and answering questions.

So how do you build a community around your blog?

Fortunately, there’s one hack that will make your life as a blogger far easier.

It will give you the perfect platform for building a community your readers will love, and it’s there for the taking.

The Perfect Platform for Community-Building That You’re Already Using

Want to know the best way to build a community around your blog?

It’s something you use every day…

Something everyone you know uses regularly, too…

It’s Facebook.

I know, I know. Facebook is for stalking your ex-girlfriend and ogling your boss’s vacation photos, right?

Whether you love it or hate it, Facebook truly is a blessing sent down from the community-building gods.

Need proof? Here are a few reasons why Facebook is the perfect community-building platform:

Facebook attracts a huge crowd. With 71% of the adult online population on Facebook, it’s hard to imagine a better gathering place.
Facebook users are active and engaged. Surveys show that families spend as little as 36 minutes together each day, yet the average Facebook user spends 40 minutes per day on the social network.
Facebook fosters the community mindset. You probably log onto Facebook to see what your family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues are up to, right? These groups make up your community. So when you log on to Facebook, you’re already in the community frame of mind.

The Facebook Feature You Can Exploit to Build Your Community

You might think you’re already using Facebook to create a community around your blog.

After all, most bloggers create a Facebook page where they post their latest article or the occasional status update, hoping that readers will “like” the page and see their updates.

But in reality, since Facebook modified their algorithm, posts are actually seen by only a small fraction of your fanbase, unless you pay to sponsor your posts. Even if your page has thousands of fans, only a few hundred may see each update.

So trying to build a community through your blog’s Facebook page becomes either exhausting or expensive.

That’s why smart bloggers are moving away from Facebook Pages toward a different feature altogether…

Facebook groups.

That’s right. The same feature you’ve used to share family photos or organize a party can be used to build a strong community for your blog.

Here’s how to get started.

4 Simple Steps to Create the Facebook Group Your Community Craves

STEP 1) DECIDE ON THE FOCUS OF YOUR FACEBOOK GROUP

When I’ve helped my coaching clients set up Facebook groups around their blogs, a question that inevitably comes up is whether the groups should be focused specifically around their blogs, or around the wider subject matter they cover (often having to do with a goal or goals held by members of the prospective community).

There are pros and cons to both approaches:

Creating a community focused on the goals of your target audience – the wider subject matter – means the community and your blog are only loosely connected, which means that some members may not even be aware of your blog. The group conversations become less focused on your content, but have the potential to reach more people.
Building a group specifically to foster conversations between members of your blog’s tribe can exclude your wider audience, because it’s less relatable to people who have not yet heard about you and your blog. However, it creates a tight-knit community around your blog.

Here are a couple of great examples of both, from my niche of entrepreneurship:

The Entrepreneur Incubator is a great example of a group created to focus on the goals of a target audience using the blog as the backdrop.
The Screw the Nine to Five Community is a great example of a group created to foster conversations between existing blog audience members.

There’s no right or wrong way, but the answer to this question will affect how you set up your group.

STEP 2) CREATE YOUR GROUP

Creating a Facebook group is straightforward:

In your personal Facebook account (you can’t set up a group through your blog’s page), press the down arrow icon on the top right corner and press “create group.”

Name your group according to its focus.

If your group is focused on the goals of your target audience, make the name reflect those goals.

For example, you might call a group for keen tennis players The Tennis Mastery Community.

When setting up your group, you must add one member to start. My poor mother gets added to all of my groups. You can always remove them later.

Choose a “closed” group. Not only do closed groups make your community feel safe to have conversations that aren’t public to the entire Facebook network, but they also create an air of exclusivity, which will help your members feel like they are part of something special. Another benefit of a closed group is that it will also discourage trolls from spamming it.

When your group is created, you’ll need to:

Perfect your description. Make your description as detailed as possible so users who happen upon your group outside of your blog know whether they’ve found their people. (Even though the group is closed, its existence will still be publicly visible – only the conversation inside it won’t be.)

Include what the group is about and why it exists. For example, the description for my Facebook group includes a link back to my blog so readers know they’re in the right place, and my vision of the purpose the group will serve:

Choose the right keywords. Your group is searchable in Facebook through keywords, which you can set when you start your group. Facebook calls these “tags,” and to capture users who aren’t already reading your blog, set these keywords to be what your blog and group are about. For example, if you have a blog about Crossfit, you might set your “tags” as “Crossfit,” “Fitness,” and “Get Active.” If a tag is valid, it will pop up as you begin to type the first few letters.

For example, this Facebook group for Etsy sellers used three keywords that are relevant to its target members:

Upload a cover image. An attractive cover image will make your group more visually appealing. You can use your existing logo, or create a compelling cover image with a tool like Canva, which has a built-in Facebook Cover creator. Make sure your image is instantly recognizable to people familiar with your blog’s color palette and logo.

Here is an example of the cover image of a Facebook group I’ve recently started to help people get their Etsy shops up and running:

Create a welcome message. When members join your group, your welcome message will greet them and give them a sense of what the group is about. Include details like who the group is for, why the group exists, and your vision for how members will use the group.

To make sure this information is always in view, pin the post to the top of the page.

Here’s a screenshot of the welcome message for my group:

After it’s up and running, you need to get people in your group.

STEP 3) SCORING YOUR FIRST GROUP MEMBERS

It’s the age old-question about communities:

How do you get people to join?

When you’re first starting out, it can seem daunting. After all, the last thing you want to do is to start a deserted group. That makes you feel like you’ve thrown a party that nobody shows up to.

In fact, many bloggers shy away from starting groups simply because they fear nobody will join.

But don’t let that hold you back, because as daunting as it seems, getting group members to join your group is not rocket science.

Here are some ideas for scoring your first members:

Promote your new group in your email signature. One of the things that has been the most effective for increasing membership to the free Unsettle Facebook group has been simply adding it to my email signature:
Showcase your group in your blog’s menu. The menu on your blog should be reflective of what you want people to pay the most attention to. That makes it a great place to put a link to your Facebook group.
Broadcast your group on social media. When you first start your Facebook group, post a link on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and any other social media platform you have.
Promote your group with a call to action. Good bloggers have a call to action at the end of each article. Rather than asking your readers to leave a comment in the comments section after reading your post, prompt them to join your Facebook group instead.
Send an email to your list. If you have an email list, your subscribers are perfect candidates for joining your Facebook group. They already like you and your blog enough to subscribe to your email list, so send out a quick email letting them know that they can connect with like-minded people in the Facebook group.

So now that you’ve landed your first members, how do you get them talking? How do you engage them and make the group a real community?

STEP 4) IGNITE THE SPARK OF CONVERSATION

Wouldn’t this be terrible?

You open the doors to your Facebook group. Slowly, readers start joining. Before you know it, you have a couple hundred people in your group, and yet…

Nobody speaks. You could cut the silence with a butter knife. And the only posts in the group are from you.

That’s a community-builder’s biggest nightmare.

Unless someone breaks the proverbial ice, your Facebook group can be as silent as a library.

As the host, it’s your responsibility to get the conversation cracking. Here are a few ways to do just that:

Pose a question. Your Facebook group is new, so you have to train members to be active. That means that you need to lead by example. Post a few questions in your group to get the first few people responding. For example, if you are building a Facebook group around your nutrition blog, you might ask what ingredients group members put in their smoothies.
Ask a group member to get the ball rolling. When I started my group, a good friend happened to be an Unsettler and joined. I asked her to start conversations and post the questions that she was asking me privately in the group.
Encourage group posts in emails and articles. To get people talking initially, instead of sending an email about a blog post and asking for your readers to leave a comment on the post itself, ask them to discuss it in the group. Give them specific talking points.

When you’ve started sparking the initial conversations, the group will naturally begin to come alive.

How to Ensure Your Community Grows Up Happy and Healthy

Whether they’re online, at work, or in your local neighborhood, all successful communities have some rules, even if they’re unwritten.

In your town, they’re the local laws. They exist to make community members safe, to keep the community functioning and happy, and to set boundaries.

It’s crucial that your community members feel comfortable, safe, and included in your group, too. If they don’t, your community is unlikely to thrive.

That’s why it’s a great idea to work with your members to establish a code of conduct or some “policies” or “guiding principles” that govern the group.

How should members interact with each other? What are some guidelines for the types of posts that are allowed? Are there any “no go” zones? For example, if you have a weight loss blog and are building your Facebook group around that, are members allowed to post photos in their bathing suits to demonstrate their progress?

Working with your group members to establish these guidelines makes your group feel more inclusive – like a democracy rather than a dictatorship.

Crowdsource your group members’ suggestions on how they’d like to see the group unfold and let your guidelines evolve accordingly.

Here are the guidelines for my group:

Notice that these guidelines are short, simple, and friendly. You don’t want new members to feel browbeaten by a big list of rules the moment they come through the door.

How to Keep Your Community Running Like a Well-Oiled Machine

Once you’ve ignited your first community discussions and set the parameters for healthy interactions via your group guidelines, you’ll need to make sure that the community continues to grow and that interactions between members flourish.

Here are some of the best ways I’ve found to do just that.

SPEND TIME IN THE TRENCHES

The greatest communities enjoy participation from community leaders.

That’s why it’s so important to spend time in your Facebook group. Don’t just set it and forget it – make it a daily habit to go into your group and answer questions, interact with members, welcome new members, and give shout-outs to people.

For example, when a member of my group posted a survey to flesh out her idea for a new blog, I suggested a book to help her get more out of her survey questions:

Several members ended up buying the book and reported back that they found it helpful.

Spending time in your group can be time-consuming, especially as it grows, but you’ll find your participation will easily be worth the extra effort.

I spend around 30 minutes each day in my Facebook group and the time commitment pays dividends in the form of engagement and bonds with members.

Your Facebook group should break down the barriers between you and your readers, so it’s crucial that you’re an active member.

LET CONVERSATIONS UNFOLD ORGANICALLY

As a blogger you’re accustomed to setting the direction of your blog. And as the owner of a shiny new Facebook group you’ll probably have strong ideas about how you want the community to grow.

As a result, it can be difficult to let the conversation in your group happen organically.

However, effective communities aren’t run by dictators, so instead of trying to control everything, let the conversations unfold organically.

When I first started my Facebook group, a discussion arose around monetizing a blog and one member recommended advertising. I strongly disagree with blog ads as a monetization strategy for most blogs, so I linked to my post on BBT that explains why.

But looking back, I wish I hadn’t. I should have waited and let the conversation develop more naturally.

Established members of the community, if they agreed with me, would have likely stepped in and started a debate about it, which would have been healthier than my heavy-handed meddling.

Letting these conversations unfold organically is how your tribe will learn, grow, and evolve.

So let debates happen. Allow differing opinions and step back from those conversations you’re itching to steer in a direction that’s more comfortable for you.

ENCOURAGE LEADERSHIP AMONG THE RANKS

You may have noticed that in most communities, some members participate more than the rest.

In a physical community, they might be the more prominent members who go out of their way to connect others and act as informal leaders.

In your online community these people will be instantly recognizable – they’re the names that show up most often in your group. They regularly connect with other community members, share your articles on social media, leave comments, and even email you, too.

These informal leaders are crucial for maintaining a lively and engaged community. They’ll enable you to set fire to your group and ramp it up far faster than if you, the official leader, work in a vacuum.

They can welcome others into the group, spark new connections and conversations, and help advocate for your community.

So encourage these informal leaders. When you see somebody stepping up to the plate in your group, acknowledge them! Send them shout-outs, thank them, and even give them an “official” title. You don’t have to pay them, but you do have to encourage and acknowledge them.

You can also contact these informal leaders privately and thank them for what they’ve done so far within your group. Ask them if they’d be willing to be community leaders.

Chances are, they’ll be honored to help you lead your group.

LET YOUR COMMUNITY DICTATE YOUR BLOG’S DIRECTION

As you know, one huge benefit of building a community is that it’s a great way to research your target audience.

And nothing fosters engagement and community like making people feel they have an impact, so ask your group members for their input.

For example, if I’m starting a blog series, I ask the members of my Facebook group if they have anything they want me to address in it.

Then I tag them in a Facebook group post when the series is live letting them know that I addressed what they asked for.

They get a sense of pride and contribution, and I get to know more about how I can help them with the unique challenges they’re dealing with at the time.

Bonus Tactics to Keep Your Community Buzzing

With these pillars in place, and your community growing, try some of these tactics to keep engagement levels high:

Throw a Party. Over on Twitter, organized chats encourage participants to use a common hashtag at a specific time to talk about a given topic. This is a great method of generating some group buzz – and luckily it’s far easier to do in your Facebook group than it is on Twitter. Set the date and let members know the time and the topic. When everyone shows up at the same time to mingle with one another, it can do wonders for your community.
Create a Theme Day. Do you love #TBT too? There’s a reason why Throwback Thursday blew up on Instagram. It’s fun, personal, and takes the pressure off of posters to think of something original to post every single day. So create your own theme days for your group. Once a week, structure your updates around a specific theme. Not only do theme days like these encourage participation in your group, but they also relieve you from having to constantly think up new posting material.
Share Some Eye Candy. We’ve all seen the statistics – visual content gets far more engagement than text only. So catch your members’ attention by posting (and encouraging others to post) engaging, eye-catching images as a discussion point. Post quotes over images related to your topic to motivate members. Try posting funny memes – or even creating your own.
Ignite New Friendships. A Gallup survey shows that people who have a best friend at work feel more connected to their employers. Likewise, when members of your community make friends with each other, they’re likely to feel more bonded to you too. So become a “connector” and introduce members to each other who have something in common. If a new member introduces herself to your parenting community as a single mother of a two-year-old in Seattle, tag another single mother in the same area in your welcome post.
Post a Rallying Cry. You know when you read or watch or hear something that just amps you up? When you strongly agree or disagree with a cause or message, it provokes strong emotions – and it could do the same for your community. So if there’s a news story about your topic or something big happens in your niche, don’t ignore it. Post it, start conversations about it. Rally together around it.

Go Build a Community Readers Can’t Wait to Join

You know those people you want to reach…

Your target audience. Your tribe. Your “people.”

The ones who “get” you, who respond to your ideas, who grow with your help and support.

Well, they’re looking for you, too. They want to be part of what you’re doing. And when they find you, they want to stick around. -- Article by smartblogger

You just need to give them a compelling reason to do so. And you do that through community.

Because you know what? They want to connect with each other, too.

So get out there, start your Facebook group, and gather your tribe.

Because once you have a community of raving fans rooting you on?

8 Ways and Tips to Create Consistent Remakable Content

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 12:52:00 +0000

If you’re doing any type of content marketing, then you know how difficult it is to consistently produce great content.

I’ve faced this issue many times myself.

I often feel like there’s a certain amount of creativity in me, and when it‘s gone, then it’s gone.

It’s the brick-wall feeling.

Sometimes you’re faced with writer’s block while on other occasions you struggle with transforming a mundane subject into something extraordinary.

Add to that the fact that you’re faced with deadlines and competing priorities and the challenge becomes a stress point. One that you’d like to see disappear.

Fortunately, it’s not as difficult to produce outstanding content as you might think. Add a few basic principles of writing to your content marketing efforts and you’ll soon find that you can whip out great articles in a snap.

I won’t promise that you’ll never write a snoozer. We all have our days.

However, there are some ways to produce less snoozers and more awesomes.

Here’s how you can consistently create remarkable content.

1. Scan Other Blog Headlines for Ideas

One of the best ways to get ideas for great articles is by scanning the headlines of your favorite blogs and using the headlines for inspiration.

You can do this by visiting all the blogs that you have bookmarked and just reading through the headlines.

But there’s a better way.

Almost all blogs and news sites offer a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed. That’s an abbreviated round-up of the most recent articles posted on the site.

If you view the RSS feed for a site, you’ll probably see it in XML format and it won’t make a whole lot of sense. To read it properly, you’ll need the aid of an RSS reader.

There are several RSS readers available, but my favorite is Feedly. With Feedly, you can aggregate all of your favorite blogs into one place and even categorize them based on one or more subjects.

Source

To get the RSS feed for a site, just look for the “RSS” link (usually found at the bottom of the site) or the RSS icon.

Once you’ve found the link or icon, click on it. Again, you might not be able to understand the content of the page, but the link is what’s more important. Copy and paste that link into your RSS reader as a new feed.

If you don’t see a feed icon, just view the webpage’s source code and you’ll find it pretty easily. Here’s how:

Then do a search in the source code for the word “feed” or “rss”.

There should be a link to the feed nearby. You can grab that link and put it in your feed reader.

Once you’ve gone through that process with all of your favorite blogs, you’ll find that it’s much easier to browse around cyberspace looking for great content.

Go through your RSS reader regularly to gather ideas for new content. Remember: the idea isn’t necessarily to rewrite entire articles, but just to find headlines that might inspire you to come up with an idea.

Keep in mind: it’s best to go through your RSS reader even when you don’t have an immediate need for new material. That’s because you can use ideas that you come up with later on when you do need original content.

2. Remember Your Mobile Audience

This point is more logistical than anything else.

Remember: you’re not just developing content for people who will read your articles on a desktop or laptop device. Many people will access your site with a smartphone, tablet, or phablet.

As you might be aware, desktop users are on the decline, as mobile readership continues to dominate more of the digital population.

That’s why your content needs to look great on those devices. It should be easy to read so that visitors don’t have to do the pinch-and-expand thing just increase the text size.

This is an important point, because you probably think of remarkable content as shareable content. That’s certainly the case.

But you can be fairly certain that nobody is going to share your content if they can’t read it.

Likewise, if they have to turn their smartphone from portrait to landscape mode so that everything fits on the screen properly, you’re creating a user-hostile experience and making it less likely that people will share what you’ve written.

Make sure that your site is mobile-friendly by looking at how your content appears on the various types of mobile platforms.

Fortunately, you don’t need a bunch of mobile devices to run that experiment.

If you want to see how your site looks on a screen of any size, just view it in a standard browser on a laptop or desktop, and then shrink the screen down to the size of a mobile device. You’ll see exactly what mobile users will see.

If you don’t like the layout, sit down with your development team and look for alternatives. Modern technology makes it easy to adapt a website to various screen sizes.

3. Create Listicles

One of the easiest ways to create some great content is to curate a bunch of related posts from different blogs and use them to create a listicle.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of a listicle, it’s an article that’s a list. For example: “10 Ways You Can Get a Good Night’s Sleep Without the Aid of Medicine” is a listicle.

The concept of listicles, as you’ve probably noticed, was popularized by websites like BuzzFeed and Cracked.

To create your own listicle, just Google a search term related to a subject you’d like to write about. Then, use the results to form the basis of your list.

Obviously, you’ll want to put your own words into each point. Google will penalize your site if you just copy and paste text. That certainly won’t help you increase your reach.

When you do start putting content into your own words, you’ll find that it’s usually fairly easy to create longform content with listicles. Just add a couple of hundred words to each main point in a 10-point article and you’ve suddenly got 2,000 words.

4. Go Old School: Brainstorm

If you went to business school quite a while ago, you probably learned about the virtues of brainstorming. That’s a group session involving people sharing ideas about how to best solve a problem or reach a goal.

People still teach brainstorming in colleges, but it seems like it’s not practiced that much in the real business world any longer. Maybe modern-day professionals are under the impression that brainstorming is obsolete in a Google-drive information era.

Nothing could be further from the truth. There’s still value in sharing thoughts among your peers.

If you’re at your wit’s end when it comes to generating ideas for awesome content, sit down with a few partners and brainstorm up some great concepts. You could easily walk away from that meeting with countless ideas that will keep your blog full for the next six months.

5. Poll Your Readers

When it comes to creating remarkable content, take a lesson from Journalism 101: give the people what they want.

And what’s the best way to determine what people want? Ask them!

Get on one or more of your social media accounts and ask a very simple question: “What kind of subjects would you like me to cover in the blog?”

Then, read the answers. If you see a certain theme or subject repeated more than others, move that to the top of your priority list.

Now, you’ve got a list of great topic ideas. Start Googling around to get more insight into each of the subjects.

Then, begin writing.

6. Interview Somebody

Who are the key influencers in your industry? See if you can score an interview with a few of them and turn that interview into a blog post.

Interviews are great options for content because they don’t require a lot of time. Just spend about half an hour talking to someone, then transcribe the recorded conversation into a blog post with a brief introduction. It’s that easy.

Also: interviews are a great way to put you “on the map.” If you go around interviewing some heavy hitters in your space, people are eventually going to notice you.

7. Invite Guest Bloggers

If you’re strapped for time and ideas, one option you have to get great content on your site is to let a guest blogger write for you.

That’s a great idea because guest bloggers not only produce fantastic articles, but they’re also free.

Why, you might ask, would anyone want to post on your blog for free? The answer: because it gives the guest blogger more exposure.

Guest blogging works both ways. You get content, and the blogger gets publicity, links, and brand impressions.

If you find one or more particularly helpful guest bloggers, be sure to enlist their aid as often as possible. Sure, they might toot their own horn in the process of giving you much-needed content, but as long as they’re not competitors, that shouldn’t be a problem.

8. Write a Review

You might be in an industry that sees its share of new releases periodically. If that’s the case, then use your blog to write reviews.

Some of these review sites are insanely popular and with good reason. People love to get the DL on new stuff. Or, readers want to get an accurate read on others’ experience with a product or service.

Any time a new release comes out, reach out to the product manufacturer or service owner for a review copy. If you’re well-respected in the industry, your request should be granted.

Keep in mind: you might not need to have access to the product or service to review it yourself. Instead, you can just aggregate the reviews of others and include them in a blog post.

Conclusion

As a content marketer, you don’t have to deal with droughts of ideas every now and then.

Just use the ideas of others as inspiration and look for low-hanging fruit when it comes to producing posts that are in high demand.

What are some of the methods that you use to create great content all the time?

How to get Blog Traffic without Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 12:42:00 +0000

When it comes time to promote your blog post, I recommend doing everything in your power to do so. Share it, tweet it, promote it, like it, talk about it, comment about it, and put it on every social network you possibly can.At the same time, we can’t rely on social media as the primary distribution channel.

Why not?

First of all, not all of your target audience is on social media.
You may not connect with the right people using social media.
The effectiveness of social media comes and goes. Take Facebook’s Reachpocalypse, for example. We have no way of knowing for certain if a social media channel will continue to drive traffic to our blog.
There are vastly more potential users who are not on social media than those who are. You need to find them and connect with them.
If you are a content marketer, growth hacker, or blogger, it’s important to dominate every technique in your power to grow your blog traffic. Social media gurus can devise their plans to drive traffic, but you must know the techniques at your disposal.

To be clear, I highly recommend that you use social media to its maximum potential when promoting your blog post and increasing traffic to your content. However, I caution you against depending on your social media reach.

By using alternative forms of content promotion, you can gain a huge advantage over the competition. Instead of trying to gain clicks, views, conversions, and engagements from a narrow slice of the population, you’re able to maximize huge amounts of traffic from new sources.

I’m going to share only those techniques that will drive floods of traffic to your blog without ever logging into Facebook, Twitter, or other social media channels.

Start with the right content.
The kind of traffic you get depends on the content that you produce. Typically speaking, crappy content gets crappy traffic.

Why is this the case?
Google’s algorithm is a lot smarter than we realize. It can tell the difference between content that has been written with excellent grammar and voice and an article that was carelessly dashed off with little skill or expertise.

Your primary goal in producing a blog article isn’t to “rank” as much as it is to create a well-written piece of content that will provide value and information to your target audience.
With that in mind, here are a few pointers for starting with the right content.

Write content for your target persona.
If you haven’t created a target persona, now is the time.
A standard persona includes a few demographic facts and figures, along with a fictional name and photo of the person you’re trying to reach.

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A good persona will help you to write content that is focused and targeted rather than general and shallow.

Know your topic.

Your personal reputation isn’t a ranking factor. But how well you know your topic willimpact your ranking.

Why is this the case?

It’s clear from various studies that Google prefers content that is long and in-depth. Content that exceeds 2,000 words is a top contender for Google’s page one results.

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Obviously, you can’t just throw a lot of words on the page and hope to rank.

The content itself should be deep and thorough. The type of words you use (relevancy to the topic) and the websites you link to (authoritative) also shape the credibility of your content in Google’s eyes.

The better you know your topic, the greater you will be able to achieve the kind of deep and masterful content that gets ranked.

It can be tempting to skip over this preliminary stuff. Where are the cool, traffic-boosting tips?

They’re coming. But the right foundation is critical. If you miss this step, nothing else in this article will matter.

Focus on the longtail.

The single most important technique for gaining traffic apart from social media is the longtail keyword.

Longtail keywords are queries that consist of several words rather than a short phrase.

For example:

iphone = a short-tail keyword, also called a head term.
best waterproof iphone 6+case for extreme sports = a longtail keyword.

Why is it important to use longtail keywords?

Use longtail keywords because it’s difficult to rank for head terms.

If you wanted to rank for the term “paint” or “apple” or “phone,” you would have to do some remarkable things — like be Wikipedia, for instance.

Besides, there’s basically no value in ranking for such a term. Even though a lot of people may search on head terms, the quality of traffic that it drives is usually pretty low.

Use longtail keywords because they will drive targeted traffic to your site.

You don’t simply want traffic. You want targeted traffic.

That’s the power of the longtail keyword.

Longtail keywords actively weed out passive users. It takes thought and effort to search for a longtail query.

Furthermore, longtail keywords have a higher demand. Over 70% of all queries are longtail keywords.

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Identifying the right longtail keywords for your website will produce enormous results — namely, the right kind of traffic.

Use longtail keywords because visitors are more likely to convert.

The fact that the competition is low and the traffic is targeted can only mean one thing: Visitors are more likely to convert.

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People who are directed to your website through typing in longtail queries will find your site to be very helpful.

After all, they found your article by typing in a very specific and long query. If your website ranked for that term, then it must be relevant in some way.

Visitors love it. And they convert.

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At the heart of your traffic-generating strategy should be an effort to gain longtail traffic. The competition is low and the probability of conversions is high.

Gain referral traffic from high-traffic niche websites.

One of the best ways to boost your website’s referral traffic is by getting links from otherniche websites.

How do you do this?

Let me share with you a strategy that I’ve taught to others. Believe me, this technique works, especially if you’re in a blog-savvy and online-active niche.

Referral traffic refers visitors to your websites from users on other websites.

For example, if someone is reading an article on XYZ blog, and they see a hyperlink to “this great article,” they may click on “this great article.” This takes them to a different website.

Voilà. Referral traffic.

If you’re dialed into your Google Analytics, you’ve probably taken some time to analyze your own referral traffic.

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The majority of referral traffic comes through social media sources, as indicated by recent studies.

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Even though social media dominates referral traffic, other websites still serve as valuable sources of referrals. In some cases, leads from these websites can be morevaluable than social media referral traffic.

How do you gain this referral traffic? Here’s a process.

Determine the best niche websites with high traffic and qualified leads. Focus on websites that produce great content.
Link to these websites as you normally would when you’re writing a blog post.
Send an email to the authors or publishers of the website to let them know that you’ve linked to them.

That’s it.

What happens next?

There are several possibilities:

You get on their radar. If they aren’t aware of you or your content, they are now. You’ve found a polite and professionally appropriate way to say, “Hi. I’m here. Notice me.”
They appreciate you. Hey, you’ve fostered some good will. Can’t be that bad, right?
They share your content on their platforms. If they have an audience on social or other networks, they may share your content as well.
They link to your blog. This is where the referral traffic comes from. Although it’s certainly not expected, a tit-for-tat link courtesy is a method of acknowledging another blog and the content they produce.

Simply linking to others and not reaching out will get you on their radar. I recommend that you follow up your links with a quick note, but if you forget to do it or don’t have time, you’ll still get on their radar and may earn a link back.

Some of the most successful content marketers I know have built their platforms making heavy use of this technique.

The cumulative effect of this kind of outreach is huge. You can gain invitations to guest post, snag speaking engagements, get on top influencer lists, and earn some referral traffic, too.

Guest blogging.

Guest blogging has been my number one source of traffic. I love guest blogging, probably because I love writing. But I also appreciate the fact that I get to contribute to a wider audience.

When I produce content for a site like Forbes, Inc., or Search Engine Journal, I’m able to deliver value to a different group of readers.

Guest blogging is another source of referral traffic. Often, guest bloggers have a small bio at the bottom of their article in which they include a link to their website.

Besides, guest blogging helps to establish brand presence and knowledge. As you gain recognition in your niche, people become familiar with your name and your brand. This leads, in turn, to branded organic queries or direct traffic.

Ramit Sethi, himself a successful author, makes the unscientific observation that referral traffic from other relevant blogs is a huge source of traffic.

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How do you get started with guest blogging?

Make sure you’re actively blogging. Sites that accept guest authors want to make sure that you’re a capable writer, and will probably want to see samples of your work.
Search for sites that accept guest posts. You can do a simple query, such as “[your industry keyword] + guest post,” or “[your industry keyword] + write for us.” Some of the niche sites that you already visit and read may accept guest posts, too.
Contact the site administrator or owner and ask for an opportunity to guest post. You can improve your chances of getting accepted by being an active reader of the blog, engaging in blog comments, and sharing the content.
Pitch topics or an article. If you have an article or topic ready, you’ve improved your game. You shouldn’t submit a pitch unsolicited, but if you have one ready, you can mention it.

Guest blogging has a snowball effect. The more you do it, the more you’ll be able to do.

As you write more content, more and more people will recognize your name and the value of the articles that you produce. Instead of looking for sites to post on, they may come looking for you.

Conclusion

Are there are other ways to gain traffic without using social media?

Absolutely. Yes!

I recommend using every method at your disposal to drive traffic to your website. There are dozens of ways to gain interested target users from every corner of the Internet and beyond.

Understanding these people — how they search, what they want, where they look, what they spend their time on — is critical to your success as a high-traffic blogger.

The audience is there, social media or not. You might just find that your best and most valuable source of traffic comes from somewhere other than social media. -- Article by blog.crazyegg.com

How important is non-social media traffic to you? How do you gain it?

8 Effective Ways to Boost your Traffic from Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 12:30:00 +0000

There used to be one way to grow your blog traffic:

Start blogging every day.
Build an audience through consistency and capturing people’s attention via email and RSS subscriptions.
Increase the “stickiness” of your posts by optimizing for search engines.
Wait.
The hardest part for me, admittedly, was #4. The hard truth is that the age of a blog determines a lot about its credibility and worth to the Internet. But that was before social media.

That was before millions of people were connecting with new people everyday to exchange information — before social networks dominated online news distribution.

Now, you have an advantage…

Now, you can start a blog today, and tomorrow it could be a success. Now, you’re no longer constrained by the “older is better” rule. Now, you can utilize the social web to your advantage, by creating remarkable content and unleashing it to the masses who will share it for you.

This is, essentially, what I’ve been doing with my blog.

I had another blog that I had been posting to regularly for over four years, incrementally growing my audience by making small promises and delivering on them. But over the course of a couple months, this blog has caught up with and surpassed the traffic and impact of that old blog.

How did I do it?

It was simple. I wrote some posts I knew would resonate with people who would share them. Then, I joined the conversation, shared relevant stuff, and watched the content spread.

It’s not always that easy, but then again, it’s not exactly rocket science either. If you share meaningful, worthwhile content focused on a particular niche topic, you’ll see good results.

How to use social media to boost your traffic

If you’re wanting to use social media to boost your blog traffic, here are eight ways to do that:

Get on Twitter. Start following my Twitter tips for beginners. And if it’s not already on your blog, add the “tweet” button to all of your blog posts.
Start a Facebook page for your blog. This is a great, additional subscription option for heavy Facebook users, and it can be a means of expanding your platform. I’ve met several new people who “liked” my page and weren’t previously friends with me on Facebook.
Regularly share your content on Facebook. There are some great tools to help make this easier for you. Encourage your readers to do the same by adding a Facebook “like” or “share” button.
Ask others to promote your blog via social bookmarking sites, such as DIGG, Stumbleupon, Reddit, and others. You may occasionally do this yourself, but be careful of doing it repeatedly, as some sites penalize sites with multiple submissions from the same user.
Implement social sharing tools on your website. An excellent tool is Flare, which allows you to combine sharing options via Twitter, Facebook, email, and social bookmarking sites into one tool.
Use a social-powered commenting tool like Disqus or IntenseDebate.
Write catchy headlines that people will want to share. Most people neglect this by posting well-written articles with crappy, nondescript titles. Don’t do that.
Write compelling content. You might be thinking, “Duh,” but I mean that. It has to be really good. Like, better than your average blog.

When in doubt, be awesome

That last point is worth emphasizing again: create compelling content. If you want your blog to compete on social media sites, you need to say something worth listening to. In other words, be awesome.

This is the downside of social media. Everyone now has a voice. Which ups the ante for those wanting to communicate and be heard in this space. You either have to be really specific or really radical. Maybe both.

Personally, I like this new rule. It means that playing it safe is no longer an option. If you don’t break some rules, you can do all of the above and still fail. This means that the great writers and communicators will start rising to the top.

So what will you do? I hope you’ll break a rule. I hope you’ll be different. I hope you create something worth our attention, something epic.

Have you seen how social media can boost your blog traffic? How? Share in the comments.

12 Best Tips to use Facebook to drive Traffic to your Blog

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 12:18:00 +0000

Everyone wants traffic for their blog, right? But how, you have tried so many things but nothing works. Well! I guess this article by blog.wishpond will help you figure out a few tips about how to get it done the easy way.
Driving traffic to your blog is essential. Regardless of the quality of articles you write, without readers, your efforts as a marketer fail. Facebook provides incredible opportunities to increase your blog article readership.

Here are 12 actionable, effective, creative methods on Facebook to drive traffic to your blog.

1. Make Your Images Big

Facebook posts that include images get around 120% more engagement than posts with no photos. Make your images prominent, and you’re going to get lots more Facebook likes, shares, comments - and click throughs.

Use full sized images in some of your Facebook blog post updates. Check your Facebook Insights, and your blog site metrics to assess your successes with full sized images (and any of the methods in this article). Use the best methods to keep generating the most blog traffic for you.

To create a full sized image Facebook post, upload the image directly.

Link to your blog post in your text update. Use a shortened link such as a bit.ly to keep your post text looking cleaner.

Example:

Here’s a great example of a full sized blog post image from HubSpot.

The image is cute, relatable, and generally follows the rule of thirds to make it visually appealing.

Tips for Making your Images Big:

Upload a visually appealing, related image to increase click throughs to your blog.
Check your Facebook and blog site metrics to analyze the success of your full sized images. Repeat the types of posts that work best for you.
Use a shortened link in your full sized image posts, to keep your text cleaner.

2. Make your Updates Short

Yes, you’re driving traffic to your blog article, and your blog article will have lots of text. On Facebook, though, short, witty updates generate the most engagement, and click throughs. Ideally, keep your update one sentence, and under the 140 Twitter character count.

Remember that lots of your Fans are using Facebook on mobile, too. Keep this in mind when you’re creating your text. Make your blog updates a short, clear and intriguing teaser for your blog article.

Example:

Here’s a great example of a short, teaser update from the Huffington Post.

The Facebook update gives you a good idea of what the blog article is about. It’s funny, enticing, and short. The article headline in the link “11 Commonly Used Made-Up Words That Drive Us Insane” further tells the gist of the article.

Tips for Making Short Facebook Updates:

Follow the rule of thumb to keep your Facebook updates under 140 characters. This will force you to condense your text.
Make your update a teaser of your blog. Write out 4 or 5 short one-sentence summaries of your article, and choose the most intriguing to post on Facebook.
Keep your mobile readers in mind.

3. Ask Questions

Questions naturally invoke a response, don’t they?

Use questions to generate click through actions from your Fans. Make your questions witty, short and intriguing. Keep your readership in mind, and always keep your question related back to your blog article.

There are many types of questions you can ask, from fill-in-the-blank, trivia, personal views, etc.

Example:

The Next Web uses a short, intriguing question for its readership.

The question “What will happen to the Like button?”, coupled with Mark Zuckerberg’s photo clearly summarizes the gist of the blog article. It leaves Fans wanting to learn more by asking them for their knowledge or views on what’s going to happen. Making a question for the update generates more curiosity than if the update was just the title of the blog, for example.

Tips for Asking Questions:

Keep your questions short, easy to read, and relatable to your Fan Page. Use the word “you”, for example.
Questions naturally invoke a response. Use succinct, curiosity-invoking questions to get clicking through, sharing, Liking or commenting actions.
Mix up your question types, from opinion getting, trivia (from your article), or even problem solving.

4. Use a Short Quote From Your Blog

Give your Fans a taste of your blog post. Include an intriguing quote from your article. Quotes in general are some of the most shared content on Facebook. If a Fan shares your update, they’re more likely to have clicked through to your site, too.

Find a quote in your article that’s concise and gives a flavour of its contents. You can even make it more personalized, by including a photo of the person or writer making the quote.

Example:

Mashable uses this tactic to personalize their article.

The quote they chose tells Fans who the article is about, by showcasing the interviewee, and what the article is about.

Tips for Using Quotes:

Choose a quote from your blog article that clearly summarizes a main point.
Use a quote that invokes controversy to generate more engagement on your Facebook Page, and get more clicks to your blog.
Personalize your quote by including a face of the author or interviewee.

5. Skip the Link

There’s no need to keep the link in the text of your post (unless you are posting a full sized image).

Make your update clean. Delete the link in your text before you post it. The image and summary of your article is clickable directly to your blog article.

Example:

Here’s what I mean:

Make your Facebook Status update, with the link to your blog article:

Delete the link:

Your update will have a clickable image, without the cluttered link:

Tips for Skipping the Link:

Keep your Facebook update more readable, without the link.
You only need the actual link if you are using a full sized image.
Delete your article link before you post it to your Fans.

6. Share Lifestyle or How-To Blog Articles

Generally speaking, your Fans on Facebook don’t just want your product or service. They want you to enhance their life, and their sense of community on Facebook. Let’s face it, Facebook is a place where people go to catch up with their friends. As a business, you need to be posting tips to enrich the lives of your market too.

When you write a lifestyle or how-to blog article, share it on your Facebook Page.

Example

Whole Foods uses the lifestyle strategy very successfully.

In this update, they share a link to their recipe blog. They use a full sized image in the post and link to the article with a shortened link. They use a friendly question in their text, and include the word “we”, to invoke that sense of community.

Tips for Sharing Lifestyle and How-To Articles:

Use Lifestyle and How-To articles to share more than just your products or services with your Facebook Fans.
Include questions - such as asking for your Fans for their tips - when you post the article links.
Use pronouns like “you” and “us” to further create a sense of community.

7. Host Contests on Your Blog

Generate traffic to your blog by publishing interactive content, like contests. Then promote your contest by posting it on your Facebook Page.

Your Fans want to engage with you, and many businesses cater to this by hosting Facebook contests. Switch up your marketing strategy to drive more views to website. Host contests on your blog, too. Make your contests more shareable to posting about it on Facebook.

Example:

Telus hosts contests directly on their website.

They promote them on their Facebook Page, to generate interest and shares with their Fans. This post shows the prize, and includes a shortened link back to the contest page.

Tips for Sharing Contests on Your Blog:

Use interactive content on your blog to drive traffic to it.
Promote your blog contests on your Facebook Page to generate click throughs, and more shares.
Use images of your contest prize when you post it on Facebook.

8. Make a ‘Weekly Wrap Up’:

Every Friday, make a blog post compiling your best articles of the week. Share it on Facebook. This gives your Fans a chance to see your blog articles at a glance. It’s also a great way to get more click throughs, as you’re offering your Fans article options.

When you post a “Weekly Wrap Up”, make a lookbook of your article images. This creates a very pretty and enticing update to your Facebook Fans.

Example:

Williams Sonoma uses the blog article compilation tactic.

They post the article on Friday, which likely supports an increase in weekend shopping. They use a lookbook to show all their gorgeous images from their blog articles.

Tips for Making a “Weekly Wrap-Up”:

Generate more click throughs to your blog from Facebook by compiling a list of your articles from the week.
Post the “weekly wrap-up” on a day that works best for your business sales.
Use a lookbook to show all the images from your blog articles.

9. Embed Short Blog Video

Get creative with your blog images. Make a short Vine or Instagram video to show your readers the essence of your blog article. Then embed the video on your Facebook Page.

By embedding the video, your Fans can get a taste of what your article is about without leaving the site. If your video is enticing enough, your Fans will engage with your post, and click through to your blog article.

Example:

At Mushread, we’ve used this tactic to link to articles.

The videos we’ve made are 6 second Vine videos, and they show a summary of the article. In this post, the video shows the title of the article, the topic, and three methods to market your Facebook contest (email, social media and Facebook ads).

Tips for Embedding Short Blog Video:

Make a short video that shows what your article is about.
Embed the video directly on to your Facebook post, to entice your Fans to interact with it.
Include faces, or products to make it more personalized and cool.

10. Share Other People’s Blog Content

While it may seem counterintuitive, sharing other people’s content is actually a brilliant strategy in driving more traffic to your blog site.

Social media is all about sharing. So, share blog content from industry leaders, your Fans, and other reputable sources. Use articles that are relevant to your market, and that relate to your business too.

This strategy makes your business look more willing to share (and thus gain reciprocal Fan shares), your customers will appreciate your informative content (which can gain customer loyalty), and the businesses you’ve shared will be more likely to share your content to their Fans too (which can bring new traffic to your blog).

Example:

Facebook Marketing often posts blog articles from other sources.

They do this to provide quality information to their Fans. This example is from a blog article I wrote, that was posted on Business 2 Community. The topic relates to how small business can use Facebook.

Tips on Sharing Other People’s Content:

Share other people’s content when it is from a trustworthy source, and the article benefits your consumer.
Include the link to their Facebook Page - when the article is from another business.
Generate potential sharing opportunities by extending your network with industry leaders and Fans.

11. Include a Blog Tab

A Blog tab on your Facebook Page is another valuable - and fairly simple - way to share and get people clicking through to your blog site.

I’d say the easiest way to add a Blog Facebook tab is to use an app, such as NetworkedBlogs. The site walks you through how to register your blog, and their basic plan includes a Facebook tab. Or if you’ve got developers handy, you can make your own tab in iFrame.

Once you’ve added a tab, your articles are automatically streamed to your tab page, so your Fans can click to view them.

WARNING: DO NOT just syndicate your blog articles to Facebook and Twitter. Go through the process to build a tab. Syndicating your articles will not get you the click throughs that the above mentioned tactics will.

Example:

Mari Smith, a leading social media influencer, uses this tactic brilliantly.

She has a Facebook tab for her blog.

When one of her many Fans clicks on her Blog tab, they see her Blog landing page, which streams her blog articles. The articles link directly back to her blog site.

Tips on Including a Blog Tab:

Share your blog articles through a tab on Facebook.
Use an app, such as NetworkedBlogs to simplify your tab developement.
Don’t syndicate your blog articles to your Page updates.

12. Use Facebook Ads

Facebook ads boost your reach to Fans and targeted audiences. Use them to get your blog updates seen, and drive traffic directly to your blog site.

You can use what Facebook used to call promoted posts to target your blog updates to Fans and their friends. You can use more targeted Facebook ads to reach Facebookers with your niche demographics and interests.

Ads on Facebook don’t have to be expensive for the ROI you get. You can choose the pay-per-click option, so you only pay when someone clicks through to your site. Target your ads to reach your specific, interested people on a very granular level. Your ads are going to get clicked by your exact niche. (Yeah, very cool, right?)

Use best practices for your ad image, A/B test your text and targets, and link directly to your blog or blog post.

And hey, if Facebook ads seem a bit confusing check out how easy we make them for you: Facebook ads tool.

Example:

Here’s and example of a Facebook ad from TD Bank. They use targeted ads to drive traffic back to their blog site.

Tips for Using Facebook Ads:

Use targeted Facebook ads to drive traffic to your blog.
Facebook ads enable you to reach extremely specific, interested markets.
If you’re confused with the intricacies of developing a great Facebook ad campaign, use a Facebook ad tool.

Conclusion

Facebook is an amazingly social site on which to share your blog, get it shared, and ultimately get you more readers for your blog articles.

14 Tips: How do Bloggers make Money?

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 18:00:00 +0000

They want to know how writing articles and posting them on a webpage can turn into cash. It is a fair question for sure. After all, if you are not familiar with the concept at all, then you wonder if it is a legitimate way to earn an online income.

Before I dive into the types of income streams that bloggers can create, it is important to know that there are basically two types of blogging income.

How Do You Make Money Blogging?

The 2 Types of Blogging Income

1. Low Maintenance Passive Income – This is really the most ideal type of income because it can provide you and your family with freedom. This is most often recurring passive income streams that you can enjoy. This type of money happens without your personal involvement. It is scale-able.

Meaning that you can earn money without exchanging time for money in the moment. Some examples would include Google Adsense (or any paid for clicks campaign), membership sites, selling advertisement space, affiliate marketing sales, and even ebook sales.

If you can get paid for something while you are sleeping and it does not require you to exchange future time for money, then you have a low maintenance passive income stream.

The individual transactions are smaller but they happen more often and don’t require your time. Every morning when I wake up I can log into my Google Adsense account and see that I made money while I was sleeping.

2. Personal Involvement High Income – The idea with this strategy is that if something involves your personal time, it should cost more. After all, your time should be valuable to you, right?

If you offer personal consulting for your niche you should charge what your personal time is worth to you. It also matters the type of reach that you are able to get as well.

For example, you do not have to charge as much for a webinar with 100 participants as you might with a personal consultation. You would charge even more for live speaking events as well.

The ideal strategy would be to set up low maintenance passive income streams that meet your household budget, so that you can spend your time in higher income events that require personal involvement. To be honest each have their benefits.

Passive income streams allow you to enjoy the freedom to use your time how you choose. Personal involvement income ideas allow you to interact with others and make a difference in other people.

14 Ways to Replace Your Day Job Income with Blogging

Here are some ways that bloggers make money. I won’t be able to go into great detail on how each of these work, nor have I used every one of these to make money.

Some bloggers only focus on how to do 2 or 3 of these really well, while others try to add as many of these as possible to their income buckets. I like to try and master one and then move to the next once I get a handle on one.

Our goal is to make this page the ultimate resource for bloggers who want to earn income.

1. Pay Per Click Ads

How does this work? Anytime someone clicks on your ads, you earn money. The most popular is Google Adsense. On average clicks earn between .15-.50 cents per click, but I have personally seen as much as $5.00 for a click.

2. Affiliate Marketing

How does this work? There are many, many services and products online that you can partner up with at no cost to you. When people click on your personalized link and buy something, that company credits you with the sale.

Average commissions can range from 15-75% of the sale price. There are even recurring affiliate commission programs that you can get involved in that will pay you over and over again for making just one sale.

3. CPM Advertising Networks

How Does This Work? You earn income just from the traffic that you receive and the exposure that advertisers receive. In other words, your traffic does not have to click on anything for you to earn money. You earn money by just displaying your ads. You need a lot of traffic to really see the benefit here but you can typically expect to receive between 20 cents to a few dollars for every 1000 pageviews.

4. Job Boards

How does this work? You can earn income a few different ways using job boards on your blog. You can sell your own job advertisements if you want. You can earn between $100-300 a month by listing jobs. You can also earn income per click as people use your job board to apply for jobs that are listed on the world wide web. These jobs come from employer job boards and larger sites like CareerBuilder and Monster.

5. Kindle Book Publishing

It’s never been easier for you to write and publish a book. Amazon makes this process extremely easy. You don’t have to wait for permission. You don’t have to submit a book proposal and wait for acceptance. You simply write your passion and publish it for the world to see and buy.

6. Self-Published Print Book

While there are certain advantages to going with a traditional publisher, you can self publish a great looking physical book. With a service like CreateSpace, you can convert your Amazon Kindle book into a physical book. Amazon will even sell your physical book for you without you having to carry the inventory yourself.

7. Audio Book

It is also very easy today to take a book you’ve written and convert it into an audio book. With a service like Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) you can either hire a voice talent to read your audio book or you can do it yourself. Once completed, your audio book can be for sale right next to your book on Amazon.

8. Online Course

Compiling your knowledge into an online course is a smart strategy most bloggers are not taking advantage of today. After creating over ten online courses to date, it’s my number one strategy for passive, recurring income.

9. Membership Site

When done correctly, membership sites can be a great source of recurring income. It can bring financial stability to your online business as customers pay you monthly. You’ll need to think through a content creation strategy as most members of a membership site expect new content monthly. But once you have a realistic plan, you’ll be glad you created a membership site.

10. Coaching/Mentoring

If you are new to blogging or building a platform, opening up mentoring spots is incredibly easy. Your audience would love to be able to learn from you directly. You will need to keep in mind that you are trading time for dollars. To be effective with this income stream, you will need to charge what your worth.

11. Physical Products

With a service like Kunaki, you can easily convert any digital product into a physical product, like a CD or DVD. They will even drop ship your product directly to your customer so you do not need to worry about carrying physical inventory yourself. It’s as simple as uploading your artwork cover along with your audio or video file. You can then tie it into your website and allow your audience to purchase physical products from you.

12. Paid Webinar Series

While free webinars are an important strategy for me, when done right paid webinars can be a great source of income as well. This allows you to receive up-front payment before you create the content. You’ll then jump into an online teaching environment with your students and teach them. It’s similar to hosting a live workshop without the required travel.

13. Keynote Speaker

Another great source of revenue is speaking before live audiences. As a blogger, you have plenty of helpful blog posts, podcasts, and webinars that can be easily converted into keynote talks.

All you need to do to get started is to create a speaking page on your blog and have a way for event planners to reach out to you. If you’ll go through the process of creating a framework that I’ll share with you later, you’ll have plenty of great talks that will lead to many ancillary sales.

14. Workshop leader

Why should I waste my effort in planning in-person events if I can do most of this stuff online? That used to be my thinking for a long time, but my mind is changing. You will find that there will always be a segment of your audience that are “event goers.”

Instead of buying online courses or even paid webinars, they much more value learning from you in-person along with the added bonus of connecting with others and the chance to just get away.

Let me be clear. You don’t have to do all fourteen of the above strategies to be successful. In fact, I’ve made the majority of my income in the past with just online courses. However, if you want to scale your business to reach more people, you’ll need to repurpose your message into many different formats. -- article by bloggingyourpassion.com

10 Tips to Get Paid to Blog

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 17:42:00 +0000

If you want to get paid to blog, read on.Sure, you want your blog to attract a huge audience and earn bazillions while you sleep.Lots of people are blogging their hearts out trying to achieve this dream.But while you’re waiting to hit it big, you don’t have to starve.There’s another way to earn from blogging. It doesn’t have the same strike-it-rich potential, but it’ll pay your bills right now.You can use your blogging skills and blog for pay, for publications and corporations.No, not for $5 a post. Ignore those ads.

There are blogging gigs out there that pay a very good hourly wage. Taking freelance paid-blogging jobs can let you earn while still leaving time to work on your own site. As a bonus, you get more practice writing blogs, which may improve your own blog’s chances of success.

How to get paid to blog

10 Ways to find good-paying blogging clients and get them to hire you

1. Make your blog posts awesome and engaging. Even if there are only a few posts on there, make them great — concise and focused on your niche. Think of your blog as a rolling audition for paying gigs. In my experience, paying blog clients want to see three things: that you know how to get comments, stick to a niche topic, and use common blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger.

2. Select your targets. Consider where you might likely blog for pay, based on your own interests and work experience. For instance, I was once a legal secretary, so I’ve done some paid blogs for lawyers. Develop a list of publications, companies, or Web portals that might hire you and pay well. Don’t ignore trade publications, as they are often good payers. Once you’ve got some possible prospects, take a look at their websites to see if they lack a blog, or perhaps have a blog that’s short on visitors and infrequently updated.

3. Research your targets. Next, do some sleuthing to discover who might pay well. In general, I find more sophisticated topics and target audiences command better pay and have less writer competition. So blogging about parenting or your dog will not pay well, but writing about acupuncture or business finance likely will. Next, find out if the publication is growing or the company is well-funded. Writers’ groups on LinkedIn are a great place to ask around about a prospective employer. In general, bigger companies will offer better pay.

4. Promote your blog posts in social media. Start spreading your content around. Connect with popular users of social media in the niche where you want to blog for pay.

5. Target prospects with your posts. When you have a post that makes a good audition piece, send it to your prospects (or top social-media influencers) with a note: “I thought you’d enjoy this post.” You can use Twitter, LinkedIn, or just plain email — whatever you think that prospect would respond to best. Even better: Write a post for your blog specifically tailored to appeal to your prospects, then send it to them.

6. Leave comments on key blogs. Another way to connect with well-paying blogs is to leave articulate comments on that blog. Become a regular participant and link to your own blog posts. You may get read, discovered and offered a paying gig.

7. Call on prospects and ask for the job. If the steps above haven’t gotten you asked to blog for pay, it’s time to get proactive. You might call editors and marketing managers on the phone and ask if they need a blogger, send postcards, or perhaps use InMail on LinkedIn (that last boasts an impressive 30% response rate). Experiment and see what works for you. In your pitch, be sure to mention specifics you observed about their Web site, and offer suggestions for how you could improve it with well-written, regular blog posts.

8. Gain visibility. Once you land a paid blogging gig, be sure to get your byline as a live link to your blog, so prospects can easily find you. As your paid blog gets rolling, begin the above steps over again. Make the paid blog great and immediately begin promoting it to better-paying prospects in that niche. Always be aware of how much traffic your paid-blog sites receive, and look to move up to busier — and better-paying — sites.

9. Your paying blog finds you clients. Once you are blogging on a popular site, you often will be approached by other companies in that niche with job offers. At this point, paid blogging markets itself, and you have your pick of additional gigs. I’ve found that one of my paid blogs brings a steady stream of paid-blogging offers. As a bonus, readers of your paid blog may click your byline link and discover your blog as well, giving you possible new readers.

10. Keep raising your rates. As you move up, your rates should increase. Gradually drop lower-paying blog clients in favor of better-paying ones. Think in terms of how long it takes you to create a post, and aim for a rate of $50-$100 an hour. Don’t forget to charge by the hour if the client also wants you to do social-media promotion of your posts, or needs advice on blog-marketing strategy. I’ve seen rates as high as $300 a blog post, and $100 a post is fairly common. Don’t settle for peanuts — keep looking until you find clients who understand how a powerful blog will help build their business. - Article by writetodone.com

Follow these 10 tips and you’ll soon get paid to blog.

10 Blogging Mistakes you can Fix Checklist

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 16:59:00 +0000

Congratulations! You’ve decided to join the ranks of bloggers. You’re going to love it! Before you get too far into it, though, I’d like to help you avoid some common beginning blogging mistakes. These mistakes are almost a rite of passage, but why waste that time with mistakes you can easily avoid?

1. Auto-loading music.

Please. I beg you, your readers beg you: ditch the auto-loading music! Auto-loading music is not only annoying and surprising, but it’s a bandwidth hog. It makes your blog load slowly. Do you really want to lose a reader because she couldn’t wait for your site to load? And if she waits for your site to load, will she be annoyed because she didn’t know there would be music, accidentally had her speakers on high, and a sleeping husband (or child) right beside her? I can tell you this: She won’t be back.

2. Using a design with a dark background & light text.

This issue is less about your aesthetic (though that is part of it) and more about usability and readability. Reading online is harder on our eyes than reading traditional paper. Using a dark background with light text makes it even harder on your readers’ eyes.

3. Too much sidebar clutter.

A sleek, uncluttered design goes a long way with readers. The less clutter, the more white space you have. You can use this white space to help lead your readers’ eye toward specific content. Your images and headlines will stand out more.

Are you proud of your awards, badges, and various trinkets and show them off on your sidebar? That’s OK, those things are a rite of passage too. You don’t have to get rid of them, but why not put awards on their own page and link to it from your main page? You’ll trade 20 links for just one link and de-clutter the sidebar. De-cluttering your sidebar eases navigation for your reader. When there are fewer items competing for your reader’s attention, they’ll be drawn to what’s important.

TIP: Want to learn more about how light backgrounds & clearing clutter affect how your audience uses your site? Blog Design For Dummies is a great resource. I highly recommend it.

4. Accidental plagiarism (even with photos).

Very few legitimate bloggers plagiarize on purpose. Most likely a new blogger won’t realize what they’re doing (but that doesn’t make it OK). Plagiarism applies to using any content that isn’t originally yours, whether it’s words, photography, music, pictures, or anything else.

Many new bloggers will Google a picture, then save it and use it in a blog post. That’s plagiarism — even if you cite where you found the picture — because you haven’t asked the owner if you can use it.

TheU.S. Copyright Office bluntly says: “Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted material does not substitute for obtaining permission.”

So take a minute to find out about and understand the issues of plagiarism and copyright.

What about your words being used without your permission? You can check to see if anyone has copied your content with Copyscape. And if you find that someone has used your content without your permission, click over to What to Do When Someone Steals Your Blog Post.

5. Using “click here” instead of keyword phrases for links.

Choose your link words carefully. When you are writing a post and need to insert a link, consider how you are going to write that sentence and where you will include the link. For example, which of these is more effective (potential links in bold)?

We can help you find information on the most popular blog hosts.

For information on blog hostsÂ click here.

The top sentence is more effective because it has a keyword phrase that helps with SEO and is more descriptive for readers. The words “click here” or even just the word “here” linked to other files or pages are everywhere on the web. When was the last time you did a search for “click here”?

5 MORE Mistakes to Avoid

1. Choosing an uninteresting or redundant blog name.

If you are starting a blog, whether you think you might be in it for the long haul or not, please consider your title seriously. Try to avoid words like musings, ramblings, thoughts, mommy, etc. Trust me when I tell you it’s been done. Your goal should be to set yourself apart from the crowd. Choose something reflective of your personality and niche, but be creative.

Some things to think about when naming your blog:

Is the title flexible? Does it allow you to grow your niche if you decide to? For instance, if you are starting a mommy blog and your title is My Pregnant Belly, what happens when you’re still blogging in 18 months and you’re no longer pregnant? The entire focus of your blog has changed, but your title hasn’t and it no longer reflects your topic.
Does the title reflect the blog’s topic? Your title is a great way to increase your SEO if you choose your words carefully to reflect your blogging niche.
Does the title match your domain name? Your URL should match your blog’s name. It’s terribly confusing and hard to remember if your blog is called The Nelson Three but the URL is maxlovespie.blogspot.com. They are totally unrelated.

2. Not owning your domain name.

Your domain name is the URL, or address, of your blog. For example, yourblogname.comor yourblogname.net. There are several reasons to own your domain:

It’s less than $10/year to own your domain and it’s an incredibly easy process.
It’s easy for your readers or new contacts to remember your blog’s name & how to find it.
As you build your blog, you build your brand. Your URL is an important part of that branding.
Like it or lump it, people take you more seriously if you own your own domain name and use a .com or .net URL.

When you buy your domain name, it’s best to buy the .com and the .net. Most people are used to typing in the .com, but the .net is a close second. If, for some reason, you can’t secure the .com, go with the .net.

3. Your header is huge.

Digital scrapbooking is wildly popular and I understand that. However, blogging is not digital scrapbooking. I see so many blogs (particularly mommy blogs) that have a header that takes up most of the homepage. The reader has to scroll down several times just to get to the content. In a book you have a title page; on a blog you have a title bar. The title bar should be visible and eye-catching, but it is not the thrust of your blog. Keep it simple and small. Focus on your content.

4 Not considering privacy issues.

It’s important to consider how transparent you want to be online. It’s impossible to tell whether your blog will take off or not. If you’re insanely popular in a year, do you want people to know your child’s real name or where you live? For some people out there, it’s a game to see if they can figure out specific, private things about your family or your life. It’s creepy and it can be dangerous. I say this not to scare you, but to make you aware of the problems that can occur when you give too much to your audience.

On a lighter note, if you write about your family or personal life, you may wish to use pseudonyms. As you choose these names be aware that your baby is going to grow up. Calling them SweetPumpkin on your blog isn’t going to go over well when they’re old enough to know you’re writing about them and have a pet name for them. I called my children Max and Wild Thing (after characters in my favorite children’s book). As my second child grew older, she took exception to being called Wild Thing and insisted I change her name. You’ve been warned.

5. Allowing blogging to become a chore.

When you begin your blog, you have the energy and the ideas for fifty posts. You have a shiny new toy and you’re ready to jump in with both feet. I say harness that energy and write those posts. Then put those posts on auto-publish and give yourself a break. As you write more posts, add them to the queue. If you only write your posts the day before, you may end up (as so many of us have) resenting the fact that you have to write a post or you’ll lose your readership (which isn’t really true). Finally, remember that blogging isn’t life. Many a blogger has found that she’s so wrapped up in blogging her life that she forgets to focus on the people in her life. Step back every once in a while and take stock of how things are going. Adjust as necessary. If you’re hitting a wall and can’t think of anything to write, allow yourself to take a break (just don’t apologize for it when you come back). - Article by bloggingbasics101

How to choose a Great Blog Niche

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 16:48:00 +0000

Are you considering starting a blog? Great! You have the first step down.

Now you have to decide what your blog will be about. Of course, you can always start a blog talking about anything and everything. However, these types of blogs aren’t often as successful.

That’s because people search the Internet for one reason only: to solve a problem. That problem may be to find entertainment, or it may be to answer a question. It could be any number of imaginable problems. But when readers are looking to solve a problem and your blog is nothing but ramblings on random topics, how is your blog going to solve their problem?

That’s why niche blogs are popular. For instance, if you want to stay up-to-date on fashion trends, you’ll follow fashion blogs because you trust that they’ll continuously solve your problem. If you want to alleviate boredom, you might hit up Buzzfeed or any number of entertainment blogs that continuously deliver a solution to your boredom.

A niche blog narrows your target audience, but it also keeps them coming back.

How exactly do you “find your niche?” Check out these tips below.

Choose Something You Know and Love

Experts will constantly tell you to blog about what you’re passionate about. It may sound cliche and a little unrealistic on the surface, but there’s a reason for it.

Stacey Roberts on ProBlogger says, “Something that seems present and that shines through in the blogs that I read and love is passion.”

When you blog about what you’re passionate about, several things happen:

You’re more likely to put the time and effort into your blog to make it shine.
You’re less likely to abandon your blog in the future.
You’re less likely to run out of ideas.
It shows through in your writing, and your readers can feel that. This, in turn, will lead to a larger following.

If you go the other route and choose a niche solely because you think it’s profitable, you’re bound to run into burnout and dissatisfaction. Another disadvantage of going the profitability route is that you probably don’t have as much knowledge in those subjects as you do in what you are passionate about. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, why would anyone read your blog?

How to Find Your Passion

Okay, so following your passion would be fine and dandy if you had any idea what your passion was. Just a few questions to get you started include:

What are your hobbies?
How do you spend your free time?
What is the one topic you could go on about for hours if your friends or family let you?
What types of classes did you enjoy in high school or college?
What do you enjoy reading and learning about?
If you could do one thing the rest of your life regardless of salary, what would you do?

Still not sure? Try this exercise: Start with your first instinct. Create a list of 10 separate blog post headlines/ideas. If you can’t come up with 10, then this probably isn’t the niche for you. If you do have 10 but aren’t thrilled about actually drafting the blog posts, then it’s worth considering a different industry.

If those 10 ideas sound good to you, consider writing up those blog posts on your computer before you get into developing your site. If you find it difficult to finish those first 10 posts and are already cringing at the topic, then it’s probably not right for you. The good news is that you didn’t waste time and money setting up a blog that you would only abandon later.

Do you find yourself excitingly coming up with more ideas after writing those first 10 posts? Then you could be on the right track! The good news? Now you have content to put up on your site once you’ve set up your blog.

Find a Hole in the Market

The truth is that no matter what topic you choose to write about, there is already a blog or million out there in that niche. However, not everyone has explored every nick and cranny of every niche. That’s where the profitability can come in.

For instance, MushRead started because there were plenty of blogs about blogging, but there was nowhere for beginners to get their answers.

You can narrow your niche in the same way by adjusting your target audience to those who rarely get attention, such as novice versus advanced individuals in your industry. Another option is to focus on a certain geographical area.

Remember, however, that there must be a need in that end of the market.

Keep in mind that you don’t have to stick with your first blog and its niche if you’re feeling burnt out. However, taking the time to explore which niche you want to start in can save you a lot of time and money in the future instead of jumping from niche to niche.

The biggest thing that will help you choose the right niche is to really think about it instead of jumping in head-first with no idea.

Still not sure? Tell us where you’re getting stuck in your decision-making.

Finding Your Niche

What if you have many passions and no focus? What if you’re not sure how to find your niche? In Finding Your Niche Online and Succeeding In It Amandalyn advises making a list:

If you have a hard time finding your niche, then ask yourself a few questions and write down all of your answers to make a list.

What are your hobbies?

What things do you like and enjoy doing?

How do you spend your free time?

What are your favorite topics to talk about?

When you were young, what was fun for you?

What topics do you know more than most about?

Are there certain classes that you have taken extensively?

Finding your niche can be daunting at first because, truly, there are blogs in every niche. You are not going to be the first. However, if you look, you will see that there are holes to be filled. Find a need and fill that need. I started Mushread because there are many intermediate and advanced tech sites for bloggers, but there wasn’t a place for beginners. Blogging about blogging wasn’t my first niche, either; it evolved from my first blog (a personal blog where I certainly didn’t even consider a niche as part of my blogging plan) where I was receiving a lot of questions about how to do specific things with a blog (like crossing out words or adding things to a sidebar).

Let that last part be a lesson too: You may start out with one thing and move to another. Sometimes the best-laid plans are just a stepping stone.

Dominating Your Niche

Now you have your niche, but you want to do even more. What’s the next step? In How to Dominate Your Niche, Brian Clark suggests

What you’re looking to do is intensify the niche by doing something more, or differently (or maybe even better) than the existing players. You do this by first evaluating and understanding where the niche is currently, and position your content in a way that pushes the envelope.

You can evaluate your niche simply by being part of the community of that niche. (Is it me, or do I always come back to community in my articles?) As you read and comment at other blogs in your niche you’ll have a sense of what is being covered and what is not. You can start to fill the holes in the niche or take a new approach to an old issue.

This, I believe, is where you’ll start to position yourself to make some money from your passion. As it is written in this article Advice for Making Money with Your Blog, if you have a product (via your blog) or are representing a business niche, it is easier to sell that product or specific niche to advertisers. Advertisers know who they want to reach and if your product or business is complementary, then they see the value of advertising with you more readily than they would if you were just a blogger without focus. - Article by bloggingbasics101

You Niche & Your Network

How does being in a particular niche translate to being part of a network (something many bloggers are doing these days)? Deb Ng cautions you to be careful. In Earning Money as a Blogger: Are You Too Nichey for Your Network? Deb writes

[S]ometimes being nichey in a network isn’t always the best career move. . .If you do want to touch upon a niche, my recommendation is that it will probably be just as profitable, if not more, to start your own niche blog. This way you can post on your own schedule and keep all the profits for yourself. Yes, it’s slower getting started, but if you rock the promotion and know what you’re doing, you'll do well.

How to make Money from your Blog without using Ads

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 16:09:00 +0000

The Value of Monetizing Your Blog Through Nonadvertising Opportunities:
Displaying ads on your blog is certainly a simple way to try to generate an income from it. However, ads are not a guaranteed money-maker. For one reason, they are often dependent on the actions of your blog's readers. For another reason, generating a significant amount of money through advertising on your blog is unlikely (possible but unlikely) unless your blog receives a very large amount of traffic each day.

By diversifying your income-generating opportunities, you'll have a greater chance of successfully monetizing your blog. Following are a variety of nonadvertising methods to earn money from your blog.

Sell Merchandise:
Many bloggers have success selling branded and non-branded merchandise on their blogs through CafePress.

Ask for Donations:
It can't hurt to ask your readers to donate to your blog. Some of them just might do it. You can add a donation button to your blog through PayPal.

Sell Your Guest Posting Services:
Most bloggers write guest posts for other blogs for free as a way to promote their own blogs. However, you can also offer your guest posting services for a fee.

Write and Sell an Ebook:
If your blog has loyal readers then they must like what you have to say. Similarly, if you've established yourself as an expert in your blog's topic, then there is a good chance people will want to read more from you outside of your blog.

Leverage that position by writing an ebook and offering it for sale on your blog.

Write a Book:
If you've established yourself as an expert in your blog's topic and developed a strong following, you could write a book and either try to have it published or self-publish.

Become a Professional Blogger:
Many blogs and blog networks look for talented and knowledgeable writers to author blogs, and many of those blogging jobs are paying.

Apply to blogging jobs to boost your blogging income.

Apply for Other Writing Jobs:
Blogging can help you polish your writing skills, which can help you land other freelance writing jobs online and offline. Transitioning into freelance writing from blogging is not unusual and can be very lucrative.
Become a Public Speaker:
If you've successfully established yourself as an expert in your blog's topic and generated a decent amount of traffic to your blog, you could offer your services as a public speaker at events related to your area of expertise.

Become a Consultant:
If you've established yourself as an expert in your blog's topic, you can offer consulting services to other people or business' who could use the help of your expertise. Alternatively, you could offer consulting services related to developing and writing a successful blog.

8 Tips to Earn money from Google Adsense

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 15:59:00 +0000

Setting Up a Google AdSense Account
Starting a new account with Google AdSense is one of the easiest ways to start monetizing your blog. While Google AdSense might not make you rich, it's a simple and useful tool. In fact, it's usually the first step bloggers typically take to earn an income from their blogs because it is so easy to get started.

Here's How:

Read the Google AdSense program policies.

Familiarize yourself with what you can and cannot do as part of the Google AdSense program to ensure you're prepared to start your new account.
- Visit the Google AdSense home page.

Click on the 'Sign Up Now' button in the upper righthand corner of your screen.

- Complete the online application.

You will need to provide your blog's URL and primary language as well as answer some questions related to the rules of the Google AdSense program. You'll also need to provide your payment information to receive the money you generate on your blog from Google.

- Access your new account and review the ads available to you.

Google AdSense provides a wide variety of advertising options to bloggers from text ads to image ads and more. Take some time to research everything that's available to determine what will work best for your blog.

- Select your ad design choices.

Once you've decided which ad opportunities are best for your blog, select them. Google will provide a snippet of HTML code to you after you make your selection.

- Insert your Google AdSense HTML code into your blog.

Copy and paste the HTML code provided by Google into your blog's template. One of the easiest ways for a beginner blogger to do this is by inserting a text widget into his or her blog's template and pasting the code in the widget.

- Let Google do the rest.

It may take a few hours or a few days for Google to start serving ads on your blog. Google will search your blog to determine the predominant subjects of each page. When readers visit your blog, the HTML code you pasted into your blog from Google will activate and relevant ads will be displayed based on each page's content.

- Collect your money.

Remember, Google AdSense typically pays based on click-throughs (the number of times people click on an ad). Therefore, Google AdSense is unlikely to generate a large income for you, but every bit helps!

- Tips When Setting Up Your Account:
Read and adhere to the Google AdSense policies in full before you sign up for a Google AdSense account. If you violate any of the policies, your account will be cancelled.
Take some time to perfect your Google AdSense program once you get started by learning the steps you need to take to increase your Google AdSense earning potential.

What You Need:

Your blog's active URL.

12 Online Tools to Boost your Blog Content Engagement

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 15:50:00 +0000

Will writing many blog articles bring you immediate success?

No. Then what really will? The below article will guide you with the best tools

You may write the best content on the web, but it won’t bring you any solid results if it doesn’t encourage readers’ engagement. Nowadays blogging is not solely about expressing opinions – it’s also about discussions.

You may call yourself a successful blogger only if the comment section under your posts is busy and you get tons of shares and likes on social media websites. So, how can you engage your readers and make your content more exciting?

Fortunately, the Internet and technology are developing fast and today you may find many tips and tools on content marketing.

The 12 online tools listed in this article will help you make content more engaging and save your time. In case you’ve decided to boost your blogging success and try new approaches, you need to start exploring these websites without any delays!

Google Analytics

Every content marketing strategy starts and ends with data analysis. With Google Analytics, you can understand the visitors’ behavior at your site, you can find the perfect keywords, and you can study real-time statistics.

When you learn how to implement these insights into practice, your blog will become more visible on the search engine and you’ll learn how to intrigue your readers to be more engaged.

Disqus

Most people who like reading blogs have created profiles on this service. Disqus enables them to post comments across different websites while staying part of a single online community that covers any topic imaginable.

If you implement the feature-rich comment system into your blog, you’ll instantly become part of this network that will attract plenty of visitors to your posts. The comment system drives greater participation and engagement, so you’ll never regret making this step.

Scoop.it

This content marketing tool enables you to build effective links and increase your blog’s visibility with minimal effort.

Scoop.it also enables you to find influencers. Follow their pages and suggest your content. Most authors will be willing to share your post with their followers, so you’ll gain new readers thanks to the collaboration.

Placeit

Unfortunately, most of the visitors at your site don’t make it to the end of a blog post. The least you can do is add some relevant images that will grab their attention.

You don’t have to waste time on creating an awesome design; everything is much simpler with Placeit – a service that enables you to upload your own image into a real-world environment. For example, you can add a screenshot of your blog (or any image related to your topic) on an image of a person working on a laptop.

Digg Digg

You can measure your readers’ engagement according to the number of shares you get. Readers don’t want to copy the link and then paste it on a Facebook status. They prefer social sharing buttons that make the process much more convenient.

Essay Writer

Bloggers usually have troubles to understand what their audience wants to read before they gain enough experience. Unfortunately, most of them give up on their blogs before they reach that point.

If you have troubles creating the type of content that blog readers expect, you should try getting consultation or assistance from a professional copywriter at this website.

Snip.ly

When you’re sharing different posts and articles, you can use this tool to attach a message to the page itself. This content can be a simple link to your own website, or anything else that comes to your mind.

Think about it: you share viral content with your own call-to-action attached to it!

Growth Hackers

You might think that content creation and curation is enough to get your marketing campaign going. It’s not! Once you publish your blog posts, you should discover the best way to get the attention of as many readers as possible.

Growth Hackers is a community that’s specifically focused on increasing the awareness about ethical online marketing techniques. You don’t need to attend a marketing course to learn how to promote your blog; just become a member of this community and you’ll bring your blog to success.

AddThis

With this tool, you’ll deliver interest-based advertising to social influencers. Plus, you’ll be able to look at custom audiences with the purpose of revealing the interests of the visitors, as well as their content engagement habits.

AddThis also provides great social tools, which will get you more shares, fans, and follows.

Socedo

Socedo is one of the best tools that enable you to target the right readers and engage them with a single click. The software will take your custom criteria to discover social prospects.

First, you need to scan Twitter for people who are having relevant conversation (use keywords related to your blog’s niche). You need to review and approve each suggested prospect, and then Socedo will favorite the latest tweet that contain the specified keyword (from your account, of course).

After one hour, you start following them; and two hours later it sends a LinkedIn invite. Sounds complicated, but this tool makes everything work. It’s a certain way of getting plenty of follow backs and accepted LinkedIn invites.

Canva

The visual impression your blog makes is a key aspect in the engagement you attract. Canva is an awesome tool that enables you to create infographics, flyers and posters in few simple steps. You don’t need any experience in design to make your own creations; you only need a sense of color combinations and a little time on your hands. You can choose one of the custom layouts, but you can also start pouring your creativity on a blank page.

Canva also enables you to create blog graphics that will grab the attention of your visitors. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they will read the content, but at least they will be intrigued to hang out at the site a bit longer.

Filament Flare

Although there are plenty of sharing bars you can install on your blog, not many of them work for mobile browsers. Since many people read your blog on their smartphones, you have to make things easy for them.

Flare looks great on mobile devices! It’s optimized for Android and iOS, and it offers a simple sharing experience that will inspire your audience to get engaged.

Content + Tools + Commitment = Success

You need to understand that promoting alone cannot make a blog top-notch and blog posts require being more engaging so that the visitors automatically desire to interact with you.

Once you learn how to do that, you can use the right tools that will help you attract more readers and save your time and efforts. -- Article by successfulblogging

Have you tried any other tools for your blog and blog promotion?

7 ways to boost the success of your blog

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 15:41:00 +0000

All bloggers have one thing in common: they want their blog to succeed. For most bloggers, success means converting loyal followers.

No matter when or why you started your blog, a few tweaks here and there to your blog and your attitude can change things for the better. Check out our list of seven tips to help you succeed as a blogger.

1. Find a Niche

This little bit of advice has been bouncing around the Internet since the dawn of the first successful blog. Still, a lot of newbie bloggers don’t take this advice to heart, partially because a lot of new bloggers aren’t sure what to blog about and partially because others don’t know what a niche is. Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered.

Niche is defined as, “a specialized but profitable corner of the market.”

What we really mean when we say “find your niche” is to narrow your blog’s focus. Talking about anything and everything that comes to mind is great if you’re writing for yourself, but readers may find that chaotic and difficult to follow. What readers really want is a collection of related and helpful articles on the same topic to help solve a problem or question.

Examples of niches include:

Parenting
Finance
Beauty
DIY Home DÃ©cor
Fitness
Web Design

While it’s true that there are blogs on practically every niche, the key to really being successful and hitting your target audience is to narrow your topic even further. Find a hole in the market and focus on that. This will reduce your competition while making you a go-to expert in your niche.

For example, Blogging Basics 101 started because there were tons of sites with blogging advice for intermediate and advanced bloggers, but there wasn’t a lot of good advice for novice bloggers.

Another example would be if you wanted to start a travel blog. Instead of focusing on travel in general, you might narrow your focus to a single country or city. That way, you become the number one go-to blog for people looking to visit that area.

2. Don’t Be Afraid to Self-Promote

Promoting your own project on social media or within your group of friends is intimidating for a lot of people. You don’t want to sound like you are bragging, and you definitely don’t want to come across looking like spam.

If you want to succeed, however, you have to get the word out there, and who better to do that than you? It’s all part of the marketing process, and bloggers have to learn how to use social media and blog commenting functions to market themselves.

Sometimes tooting your own horn isn’t all that bad. The key is to find a balance between self-promotion and humility. Many bloggers and social media enthusiasts suggest using 80 percent of your social comments and shares to promote other people’s works and 20 percent of it promoting your own products and services.

3. Build on What Works

Experimenting is all a part of the process, so don’t be afraid to try something new. Start a new weekly blogging series, try placing ads, or start guest posting.

Use your website statistics and commenting functions to see how readers react to these new ideas. If you’re not seeing any indication of a reaction in your stats, poll your readers to see what they think.

Testing one thing here or there isn’t likely to hurt your blogging practice. Some of these experiments can lead to a huge increase in traffic. The good news is that you can always ditch the ones that don’t work.

4. Perform an “Above the Fold” Test

Above the fold includes the content you see when you first view your blog. It’s anything that you see without scrolling.

Since you only have a few seconds to make a good first impression and help readers find what they’re looking for, you want the most important information above the fold. For instance, people should be able to tell who you are and what you do without scrolling. If it’s not evident in your blogs title, it’s worth adding a tagline. If you want to draw attention to your call-to-action, that should appear above the fold as well.

Not sure how your website performs in this regard? Use the Clue App to set up a free 5-second test. Send the test out to your friends or followers to see which information readers see as most important. Don’t like the results? It’s worth rethinking your website layout.

5. Make Your Blog Sticky

Sticky is a term that means you’re encouraging people to return to or stay on your blog. For example, you might link to a relevant article from your blog’s archives. You can do this within the content, or you can list additional resources at the end of each blog post. The idea is that these links point to your own content and offer readers more in-depth information on the topic or a related subject.

As you do this, people are more likely to stick around and subscribe to your blog. You can also make your blog sticky by inviting readers to subscribe to your blog or by making your RSS feed available with the click of a button.

6. Look for Ways to Extend Your Blog

To get people to stick around and keep coming back, it’s worth extending your reach outside of simple blog posts. This helps you reach more people who enjoy other forms of content and contact, and it keeps your blog from getting boring.

Examples of ways to extend your reach include:

Hanging around industry forums or social media
Sending out newsletters
Starting a podcast series
Releasing videos

7. Create Quality Content

People have been saying it for years, and the saying still holds true. Content is king.

Without well-written and engaging content, your blog isn’t going to go anywhere. Yes, your blog design and your marketing tactics are important, but they’re practically useless if you don’t have quality content. People may come because of the marketing, but they’ll stay when you deliver content they need.

Pro tip: Creating content users “need” can encompass anything from teaching them something to providing entertainment. While blogging about yourself can have its benefits, you should always be focusing on solving the readers problems first (whether they want a good laugh or are looking for advice). Satisfying their needs is what will drive readers to subscribe to your blog.

Have you seen success with other techniques? Let us know what you’ve done with your blog that your readers love. -- Article by bloggingbasics101

14 Tips for Guest Posting

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Sat, 03 Dec 2016 14:59:00 +0000

Like so many things in blogging, I don’t think guest posting has quite the benefits it once did, but it can still be a fantastic way to build your brand, increase traffic and get inbound links. (Inbound links are simply links to your site from another site which can be great for SEO. The more well-established & high-ranking the site that links to you, the better.)

Many years ago, I was a virtual assistant for Money Saving Mom. I was Gatekeeper of Guest Posts (I made that up). The first section includes the things I looked for and tips I would offer if you want to get your guest post accepted. The second section includes tips after your guest post is accepted. At the end is a suggestion if you want to do something other than guest posting.

Guest post submission tips:

1. Guest post on sites where your potential readers hang out

One might think this goes without saying, but not all traffic is the best traffic.

You want traffic that sticks. You want people to be so intrigued by your guest post that they click over to your blog (via your link in the bio) and find even more great info they love.

Writing a guest post takes time and energy (it should anyway), so don’t waste them by submitting your content to a site whose readers aren’t your target audience. If you do, you might see a spike in traffic temporarily, but it won’t last long.

2. Submit only original content; avoid duplicate content

In other words, your guest post submission should not be a post you have already published on your blog or elsewhere. I have rejected submissions for this reason alone. Some of them would otherwise have been good fits.

Others feel differently, but in my opinion, unless there is an explicit understanding between you and the blog owner, I feel it’s respectful to write something original. To me, it demonstrates care and concern for them and their readers, not just getting traffic for yourself.

There’s also this thing called duplicate content. Spend any length of time building a website or writing a blog and you’re sure to hear about duplicate content. There are a lot of confusing, insufficient and inaccurate explanations of the concept. I am not an expert on duplicate content myself, so I take my cues from those who are. Duplicate content involves search engines so perhaps the most notable “expert” on the subject of duplicate content is Google. Another resource is Yoast’s post Duplicate Content: causes and solutions.

In a nutshell, duplicate content is identical (or nearly identical) content living on different websites. When a search engine like Google for example, finds the same content on different sites, it doesn’t know which site to point to when someone is searching for it. Google will do its best to direct people to the original site where it was created, but in the confusion, it sometimes directs people to the non-original site. This causes the original (and deserving) site to lose traffic which is unfortunate.

3. Write well, really well

Again, it’s a no-brainer, but it’s worth a mention. A guest post submission should be your best work.

It’s pretty easy to tell when someone has “thrown together a little something” or when someone has really taken the time and care to produce something of high quality.

Also, take extra care to use correct, grammar, spelling and punctuation. Edit, edit, edit. If you aren’t particularly confident in your writing ability, have someone else proof your post for you.

Site owners and Gatekeepers of Guest Posts don’t have a lot of time. The less your guest post has to be edited and reformatted, the more likely it will be published.

4. Follow the guidelines

If the site for which you would like to guest post has guest posting guidelines, follow them.

The guidelines are there to make the submission process easier for all involved. Conversely, a submission that ignores or breaks the guidelines screams three things:

I’m only in it for my own gain.
I don’t read your blog.
I didn’t even take a few moments to do some easy research to find out what you’re looking for.
If the guest posting guidelines are not immediately obvious, do a little hunting before you shoot off an email asking for them. Bloggers and site owners (big & small) are busy people, so do your best to find what you need.

An FAQ, contact page or about page are good places to start, and often provide a link to guest posting guidelines. Or, use the search bar to search their site. If you don’t see a search bar, google “site:nameofsite.com guidelines” (no quotes) or something similar. Try several different keywords like “guest post,” “guest posting,” “guest,” “guest post guidelines,” etc. Also, check out other guest posts on that blog because blog owners often note guidelines, or links to them, there too.

If you truly can’t find the guidelines, a short and friendly email asking about them is appropriate. For example,

I have an idea for a guest post I think would benefit your readers. Would you mind forwarding your guest posting guidelines? Thanks!

5. Go easy on the links to your own site and don’t include your affiliate links

We all understand guest posting is a way to get your site noticed. However, a post loaded with links to your own blog is bad form.

You absolutely should include a link to your own website, blog or landing page in your bio, but include links to your own blog within the content of your post at your own risk.

Likewise, a submission with your own affiliate links is, in my opinion, inappropriate unless you’ve been given explicit permission.

6. Strive to benefit their readers, not just to get your own

A guest post submission is much more likely to be accepted if the blog owner feels it will truly benefit their readers.

Before submitting a guest post, hang out a while so you get a really good feel for the style of writing, topics covered and response of readers.

Provide really meaty content, not just fluffy stuff, obviously intended to get the reader to your bio where they can click through to your blog. Not only is a lame post unlikely to be accepted, it sends a bad message about your writing, brand or product.

Remember, this blog represents someone’s hard work and they have their own reputation to maintain. The last thing they want is to publish a post that doesn’t live up to the quality their readers are used to.

7. Be a blog reader first

Random, out-of-the blue, “Your readers are gonna love this!” submissions that obviously came from someone just trying to get the word out about their site / product get automatically rejected by yours truly.

Before you submit a guest post, comment and get involved in the community. Be genuinely helpful. Be an asset. That way, when your guest post submission comes through and has your name attached, it will have several points in its favor because you will have already proven yourself trustworthy and helpful.

8. Time your submission

If you’re a blogger, you know how hard it can be to keep a blog going. Life happens and it can be a challenge to keep up.

When life throws you curve balls or when other obligations take your attention, I think all blog owners appreciate some well-written posts they can plug into their queue in a pinch.

As you follow the blog for which you’d like to guest post, take note of any special events coming up for the blog owner. Are they speaking at a conference? Are they in the throes of writing a book? Are they about to go on maternity leave or take a vacation?

If you catch wind of a disruption to their normal schedule, it’s often a good time to send a friendly email asking them if you might be able to help by submitting a guest post.

9. Don’t be desperate or demanding

Provide content that fits well (yes!) but use your own voice and be yourself. “What do you want me to write about?” “How do you want me to say it?” “I can write whatever you want!” type of emails aren’t impressive. The last thing a blog owner wants to do is hold your hand through the process.

Conversely, “You need to publish this!” or “Your readers need to hear this!” type of emails are also turn-offs. Trust me, the blog owner has a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for and what they’re not.

10. Make accepting your guest post easy

Be kind at all times, especially if your post is rejected.
Eliminate as many emails back and forth as possible. Try to answer your own questions. Be thorough and succinct. Keep your emails short, sweet and to the point.
Provide well-written, useful, on-topic content the blog owner can use “out of the box.” Their readers will find it beneficial and you will feel proud to put out there.
Guest post acceptance tips

Once your guest post has been accepted, your job is far from over. Here are tips to make the most of the readers who will see your post.

11. Interact in the comments

Note when your post goes live and be available to interact in the comments. Not only does this help your host, it gives you more of an opportunity to share your expertise and build relationships.

12. Write a strong bio

Keep your bio short and to the point with a clear call to action. You want the reader to get to know you better over at your own site.

Consider linking to a special landing page tailor-made for the new visitors coming from your guest post. Why? Because if you send them to your homepage, they’ll have to figure out for themselves what you’re all about. Here’s how to create one…

13. Create a guest post landing page

Unless your homepage is super clear and directive, you’re likely to lose ‘em. These visitors are a captive audience, but only for a moment. Don’t make them fend for themselves once they hit your site. Guide them.

Here’s how:

Create a new page (not a post because you don’t want it going out to everyone in your RSS feed).
Make it obvious in the title that you’re welcoming the readers from the blog on which you guest posted. For example, pretend you’re guest posting here. You could go with a title like “Welcome AmyLynnAndrews.com Readers!” or you could make it more clever.
Think about what those readers are looking for. Who are they? What type of information is important to them? If they clicked through your bio, the topic of the guest post you wrote is probably a good hint.
Pretend you’re a tour guide. Your new visitors just arrived. What content on your blog is most like the information you shared in your guest post? Highlight those posts at the top of your landing page and link to those similar posts / pages on your site.
The key here is to provide them ample opportunity to explore what you have to offer but not to overwhelm them. I’d choose 5-8 of my most relevant pieces of content they are most likely to appreciate. Don’t go crazy. This is a first date, not a marriage proposal.
Make sure you ask them to subscribe via email. Include your email signup form somewhere on your page.
an alternative to guest posting

14. Don’t want to guest post? Write a list post instead.

If guest posting doesn’t appeal to you, Pat Flynn recommends writing “A list post that features some of the top and up & coming players in your niche.” Why? Because these types of posts often garner a visit from the people you feature, sometimes resulting in a reciprocate mention. Plus, they are useful for your readers. -- Article by amylynnandrews

13 Best Reasons why Ads on Blogs are not good for monetizing your site

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 06:53:00 +0000

This is the dream, right?

You get out of bed, stretch, and make some coffee.

You settle in on the couch and start your work day – in your pajamas.

(You’re a professional blogger, so nobody gets to tell you what to wear).

You open your laptop, check your email, and see dozens of notifications: “You’ve Been Issued a Payment.”

Overnight, you’ve made hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars.

Money literally appears in your bank account while you sleep.

And what’s the secret to this coffee-swigging, pajama-wearing lifestyle?

Advertising, of course! Those little ads waiting patiently in your sidebar to earn you money while you whip up your next mochaccino.

Well, prepare yourself for a shock…

Why Advertising is a Foolish Strategy for Serious Bloggers

Want to know something surprising?

If you really want to live that dream, full-time blogger lifestyle, putting advertising on your blog is the last thing you should do.

Regardless, many bloggers believe they can install WordPress, throw up some ads in the sidebar, learn a few traffic tricks, and then sit back to watch the money flow in.

But in reality, it doesn’t work that way.

Too many bloggers are wasting their precious time with a strategy that’ll never pay off the way they hope.

The following reasons finally dismantle the myth that advertising is a smart way to monetize your blog.

1. Blog Ads Pay You Peanuts

You want to make money blogging, and you want to do it quickly.

But the funny thing is, advertising is actually a painfully slow path to monetization. Until you have serious traffic, the amounts involved are so small it’s almost embarrassing.

Let’s look at the typical case – most of the ads you see on blogs are generated by Google AdSense.

Many factors affect how much you can make through Google Adsense, including the topic you blog about, the specific ad displayed, how much traffic you have, and what percentage of that traffic clicks.

The average “click through rate” (CTR) varies by industry; however, the average is around 0.1%.

Let’s say the average cost-per-click (how much you earn when somebody clicks an ad) is $0.50.

That means you would need around 1,000 unique visitors each day to get even one ad click and earn $0.50 for the day.

If you enjoy 1,000 unique visitors each day to your blog, you can do a lot better than $0.50 per day in income.

The bottom line is that advertising requires a ton of traffic to be worthwhile, and when you have a lot of traffic, you have much better ways to monetize it than through advertising.

2. Blog Ads Are… Look – Squirrel!

As a blogger, you’re constantly trying to discover ways to hold your readers’ attention with your content.

And it’s not easy! You craft the perfect introductions to your posts to draw readers in. You hold their attention with crisp and clear writing packed with engaging and quotable snippets of information. You write closings that make them want to jump up and take action.

In other words, you work hard for every second of your readers’ attention.

But advertising competes for that attention by drawing their eyes away from your content and onto the ad.

Think about it. Advertising is designed to distract readers from the content you wantthem to see – the content you worked your ass off to create for them.

3. Blog Ads Are a Conversion Killer

Smart bloggers always know what they want readers to do next.

It might be to share the post they’ve just read, subscribe to an email list, or read another relevant post.

So they’ll prompt readers to take that next step by including a clear “call-to-action” like a button or a link.

But the problem is, blog ads are also a call-to-action.

And if a visitor is acting upon Google’s call-to-action, that means they aren’t acting upon yours.

Advertising affects conversion and retention because it gives readers another option – to click a tantalizingly worded ad – instead of doing what you want them to do.

4. Blog Ads Undermine Your Blog’s Goals

What is the goal of your blog?

Most bloggers want to build an audience. And the best way to do that is by providing value to their readers.

But blog ads undermine that goal because they don’t provide value to the audience at all.

In fact, many readers feel that ads are annoying and devalue a website.

Consider the other goals that advertising conflicts with on your website. For instance, the whole point of an ad is to have a reader click it, which takes them off of your site.

So if the ads are successful, they encourage your readers to leave your blog.

On the one hand, you want readers to stay on your site. On the other hand, you want to make money from ads.

Experience shows that the blogs that grow the fastest are those with every element perfectly in tune with every other element.

Just like a company needs to stay true to its vision and mission, bloggers need to stay true to their goals to build cohesive, successful brands.

5. Blog Ads Make You Look Sleazy

When a visitor lands on your blog and sees that you have ads, they feel you are immediately trying to sell them something.

Transfer that situation to the real world. What would you think of someone who tried to sell you something within a few moments of meeting you?

You probably wouldn’t trust them. You’d probably be suspicious of them. You’d certainly be wary of developing a relationship with them.

Like it or not, blog ads are a constant sales pitch living on your blog.

And when visitors see ads on your blog, they subconsciously trust you a little less. Which is unfortunate because trust is the cornerstone of a popular blog.

When you lose trust, you lose influence. Readers may see any recommendations you make in a different light.

You can find other ways to make an honest buck from blogging, but blog ads always look a little sleazy.

6. Blog Ads Force You to Work for “The Man”

Bloggers are entrepreneurs, right?

After all, you’re building something for yourself. You’re your own boss. You have the control. Right?

Well, not exactly, if you run ads on your blog.

When you run ads, the ad platform (e.g., Google Adsense) is your boss – and not the type of cool boss you’ve always hoped for.

Don’t like the per-click commission you’re getting? Too bad. You can’t ask for a raise.

Want to get paid regularly? Not so fast. Your earnings are withheld until you reach a minimum.

And if you don’t read the fine print? This horrible boss can wipe out your earnings if you accidentally infringe their terms and conditions.

Just when you thought you were on your own, blog ads put you at the mercy of somebody else.

7. Blog Ads Are a Dangerous Distraction for You Too

Hosting ads on your blog seems like the easiest form of monetization.

You just post the ads, wait for people to click them, and then count the cash, right?

And while that does sound easy, it is not the reality.

Advertising is a huge distraction for you, the blogger.

If you want to optimize your earnings, you must take time to test, monitor, and manage the ads.

So you end up effectively working as a part-time advertising manager instead of working on your blog.

However you look at it, blog ads pull you away from what is truly important: creating great content and providing value to readers.

8. Blog Ads Risk Your Reputation

You see a lot of different products and companies advertised online, and I’m guessing you wouldn’t personally vouch for every one of them. In fact, some of them you definitely wouldn’t recommend, or even want to be associated with.

So how would you feel if an ad for such a product or company popped up on your website without you knowing?

Now, how would you feel if, when the ad popped up, your readers thought you were actually recommending it? After all, it’s on your blog; you must have approved it, right?

As a blogger, you’re more Internet-savvy than the average reader. You know that blog ads are selected by Google’s algorithm not the blog’s owner, but many people won’t see that distinction.

And when you host ads on your blog, your face could appear next to a product or company you don’t endorse, or even like.

You could just be one rotation away from a negative juxtaposition that sends your reputation into a tailspin.

9. Blog Ads Make Your Blog Ugly

Studies show that when you go for a job interview, the interviewer decides within 10 seconds of meeting you whether you’re right for the job.

And that first impression is formed based on your appearance.

The same goes for your blog. Your visitors will know within seconds of visiting whether they want to stick around. And their first impression is based on your design.

So it’s important to have an attractive site. After all, 94% of people apparently say a bad design is a reason why they don’t trust certain sites.

But including ads on your blog taints your design.

It’s like showing up to that job interview wearing a nice suit but with a “Enjoy Coca-Cola” T-shirt underneath.

Sure, you could adjust the ads to better match your design, but do you really want people to think that other people’s products are an integral part of your site?

10. Blog Ads Put Your Blog in the Slow Lane

Did you know that if your website does not fully load within three seconds, most visitors will leave?

It’s true. Many factors can slow down your blog, from plugins, to hosting issues, to – you guessed it – ads.

Yes, ads slow down your website. A test done by Steve Souders, website speed expert, author, and Google employee, proved it.

Why give readers another reason to bounce from your site?

11. Blog Ads Sell Your Readers For Cents

Many bloggers who turn pro do so by transforming loyal readers into happy customers of their products or services.

But if you try to monetize your blog through ads, your readers are the products. And you’re selling them to Google for a few cents on the dollar.

What message does it send to your readers when you treat them as a commodity? That your blog is really just the front end of an operation to traffic readers to the highest bidder?

You’ll struggle to convince your readers that you truly care when your blog proves that you’d give them up in an instant.

A blog’s readers are its most precious asset. Don’t throw that away under the banner of “covering your hosting costs.”

12. Blog Ads Force You to Give Up Control of Your Content

Most successful bloggers are control freaks. At least when it comes to their blogs.

And you’re probably the same way.

After all, your blog is your baby. You’ve worked hard to build it to where it is today, and to do that, you need to have full control over it, right?

Well, advertising forces you to relinquish some of that editorial control.

Because when you place ads on your site, you don’t control the look of each ad, the copy on the ads, or where the click takes you.

It’s like giving a stranger your WordPress login and hoping they only post content you like.

Putting ads on your blog compromises your power. It puts responsibility for some of your content in the hands of someone else. Someone who couldn’t give a damn about your blog.

13. Blog Ads Make You Look Like an Amateur

A big part of growing a popular blog is building relationships with influencers.

Influencers give you reach far beyond your own audience and can help you grow your blog faster than you could by going it alone.

But influencers are smart people, and most recognize that blogs ads are a huge waste of time for all but the largest of blogs.

So when you reach out to those influencers, what happens when they visit your site and see it’s plastered with ads? Will they still view you as credible?

Not likely.

Approaching an influencer when your blog has ads is like attending a networking event and handing out business cards with a coupon for a local steak house on the back.

Chances are, any influencer will conclude one of two things:

You’re naive to think that advertising is a good strategy for a blogger.
Your blog can’t be successful if the few dollars you’ll make in a month from ads are so important that you’re willing to endure all the disadvantages.

Either way, if influencers don’t see you as credible, they won’t want to build a relationship with you. They won’t share your content or interact with you either.

Building a popular blog without influencer relationships is like trying to climb a steep hill wearing shackles. It’s possible, but it is far more difficult.

Ads make you look like an amateur. And influencers aren’t impressed by amateurs.

So Blog Ads Suck. How Can You Monetize Your Blog Instead?

So, you’re convinced that putting ads on your blog is a terrible idea.

Does that mean you have to absorb the costs of running your blog and continue working your tail off, never to earn a dime for your hard work?

Fortunately, no.

The truth is, the vast majority of truly successful bloggers have built careers from their blogs without resorting to blog ads. At least not ads in the usual sense.

How do they do it?

Well, instead of selling your readers through advertising, sell to your readers. Be involved in the transaction – don’t hand it off to a stranger.

Sell something you’ve built yourself. Use the bond with your readers for good not evil. Build something for them, not around them.

Luckily, you have plenty of ways to do just that.

IDEA #1: OFFER A SERVICE TO GET YOUR AUDIENCE UNSTUCK

The easiest way to help your audience and start monetizing your blog without ads is to offer a service.

Services are the fastest track to earning good money from your blog because they don’t take much to get up and running.

Two popular services offered by bloggers are:

Coaching: Jon Morrow has offered one-to-one coaching in the past, and this is how many bloggers choose to monetize their blogs initially (including myself).
Consulting: Naomi Dunford, the blogger behind IttyBiz, offers small business consulting to her base of loyal fans.

Offering a service to your audience is also a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of what your audience needs and wants while still earning money from your blog.

IDEA #2: CREATE A PRODUCT YOUR AUDIENCE WILL LOVE

Since you’ve spent so much time getting to know your audience, why not create your own products to meet their needs?

That may be an information product, such as:

E-books: The popular travel blogger “Nomadic Matt” from the blog of the same name has monetized his blog by delivering information to his readers through e-books.
Courses: His Royal Awesomeness Jon Morrow creates courses such as his popular guest blogging program, Guestblogging.com and Blog Launch Formula for his followers.
Membership Sites: Corbett Barr from the popular blog Think Traffic partnered with two other bloggers and rolled his blog into the popular membership site for entrepreneurs, Fizzle.co. Jon has Serious Bloggers Only.

Or maybe you could offer a physical product, such as:

Books: Many bloggers publish books as a form of monetization, like Jeff Goins has done with his new book, The Art of Work.
T-Shirts: Scott Dinsmore of Live Your Legend created a t-shirt line based on inspirational sayings voted on by his readers.
Accessories: The husband and wife bloggers behind the popular DIY blog Young House Love created a line of home goods which are sold at Target.

With the right research, you can create a product that sells like crazy from day one.

IDEA #3: SELL SOMEONE ELSE’S AWESOME PRODUCT

If you don’t want to offer a service or develop your own product, another popular form of monetization is acting as an affiliate for products and services you love.

Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income does this extremely well (as you’ll note when you see his income reports) by acting as an affiliate in an honest and trustworthy way by only promoting products he genuinely believes in.

IDEA #4: GET CREATIVE BY MONETIZING YOUR UNIQUE SKILLS

The best part about blogging is that you run the show. Many bloggers have unique skills beyond writing and blogging, so why not find a way to use those talents to monetize your blog?

There are hundreds of examples of creative ways people did just this. Consider:

Henneke from Enchanting Marketing who uses her blog as a means to promote her freelance writing services, thereby catapulting her into a booming online career.
The hilarious blogger behind Hyperbole and a Half who used her blog as a platform to promote her comical cartoons.
Nathan Barry who has used his aptitude for app design to monetize, a process which he outlines in his App Design Handbook.
Noah Kagan from the popular blog OK Dork who saw a need in the market and built a plugin for website owners called SumoMe.
Derek Halpern, the author of the popular blog Social Triggers, who developed software called Zippy Courses to help his audience create courses too.
Chris Guillebeau, from the Art of Non-Conformity, saw the need for a conference in his niche. The World Domination Summit is now celebrating the 5th anniversary.
Chris Ducker and Pat Flynn host one-day events called 1-Day Business Breakthrough.

These are examples of what other people have done with their skills. How can you use your unique skills to monetize your blog?

Abandon The Ads and Monetize Your Blog the Right Way

You’re a serious blogger.

You work hard on your blog and you deserve to be rewarded.

That’s why you’re looking for ways to monetize.

And nobody can blame you for thinking that advertising might be the answer – it’s a common belief.

But now you know the truth – advertising is a terrible way to make a living from your blog.

It’s distracting for you and your readers, it makes you look like a cheap amateur, and perhaps worst of all, the amount of money it pays is almost embarrassing.

So if your blog has ads for products and companies you don’t know and certainly don’t endorse, it’s time to strip them out.

Instead, offer something of your own. Partner with someone you trust.

Because if you’re going to use your valuable blog space for something other than content, it had better be something you’re proud of.

And it might just give you a shot at that lifestyle you’ve been dreaming about.--A great Article by smartblogger

5 Ethical tips to earn money online without selling anything

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 06:38:00 +0000

Don’t worry. You can admit it.

You secretly wish your blog was more than just a hobby.

But it’s costing you more than it earns. And that’s the hallmark of a hobby, not a serious endeavor.

Even if you have no desire to transform your blog into a business, you’d like it to at least pay its way, right?

Because blogging costs are many – web hosting, email lists, domain renewals, social media tools. They all cost money – and every month your blog comes up short.

Of course, you already know one popular option for monetizing your blog – you could create a product. But you just don’t feel ready yet. And besides, creating and promoting a product takes time.

What you need right now is a way to earn a little money from your blog without a ton of work.

Fortunately, a way exists that’s highly effective, requires little ramp-up time, and is used by some of the most respected names on the web.

Many bloggers have heard of it, but for a silly reason completely ignore it…

Why Most Bloggers Ignore the Easiest Way to Earn Money from Their Blogs

If you don’t have a product to sell, one of the best ways to earn money from your blog is to sell products that other people have created.

It’s usually referred to as affiliate marketing. Here’s how it works…

You introduce your readers to a product, and if they happen to make a purchase as a result of your introduction, you get a commission as a thank you.

It’s pretty simple, but you’d be hard pressed to find a topic that inspires as many strong opinions.

Some revere it; some despise it.

Some use it; some abuse it.

But you don’t consider it because hawking someone else’s products has always felt, well…

A little bit sleazy.

You see some other bloggers doing it, and you can’t help but feel they’re just in it to make some fast cash and couldn’t give a damn about their audiences.

But here’s the straight-up truth:

When done the right way, affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful ways to earn some money from your blog and actually help your audience.

The Living Proof That Affiliate Marketing Doesn’t Have to be Sleazy

Do some people abuse affiliate marketing for their own gain? People who will do – and say – anything for a quick sale? Sure.

But for as long as people having been selling things to other people, unscrupulous operators have always lurked on the fringes.

And you won’t have to look far to find such operators in the world of affiliate marketing.

That said, affiliate marketing is also used by some of the most ethical people you’ll find in blogging and online marketing.

People like Pat Flynn. John Lee Dumas. Even, yup, you already knew it – Jon Morrow, the man behind this very blog.

All three of these massively popular and respected bloggers promote affiliate products as a way of earning more revenue from their blogs.

How are they able to do so, while also maintaining an enviably close relationship with their audiences?

After interviewing both Pat Flynn and Jon Lee Dumas, and carefully dissecting one of Jon Morrow’s finely crafted promotional affiliate emails, I’ve put together five golden rules for earning money from affiliate marketing and staying squeaky clean.

Not only do these five rules give you an ethical blueprint for affiliate marketing, but they also provide a system for building long-term trust with your audience.

Rule #1: Start with the Right Question

Here’s the number one question most bloggers ask themselves when they start exploring affiliate marketing.

“What product should I promote?”

Unfortunately, it’s totally the wrong question. It will either:

Freeze you in your tracks, or
Lead you down a slow road to ruin.

The question you should ask instead is this: “What is my audience trying to accomplish?”

Answering that question will point you toward the products, tools, and resources that will help your audience accomplish what they desire.

If you don’t already know the answer, finding out is much simpler than it sounds. All you have to do is come right out and ask them.

The first time I ever built an email list, I added a simple P.S. to the auto-response email they received right after signing up:

P.S. I’d love to hear more about you and your business! What do you do, and how can I help? Hit “Reply” to this email and let’s chat. Your response will go to my personal inbox instead of a robot.

Simple, conversational – and a surprisingly large percentage of people took the time to write back and tell me exactly what they needed help with. You can incorporate this type of P.S. into any email you send to your list, or you can even send them a dedicated email.

Once you understand the needs your audience has, ask yourself: “What products will help them achieve that?”

Rule #2: Never Promote a Product You Don’t Use

One of the worst dinner parties I’ve ever been to centered around a pork belly dish the host had never tried making before.

Rather than going with a recipe he loved and had cooked before, he went with something brand new from a random blog he’d only just found.

The party itself wasn’t bad, but the food most definitely was. Fortunately, everyone was able to laugh about it.

Offering a product to your audience sight unseen, risks a similar catastrophe. And your readers might not be as forgiving as those dinner party guests.

Think about it – would you recommend to a friend a restaurant you’ve never visited? Would you put your in-laws up in a hotel in a strange part of town you don’t know? (Well, depending on your in-laws, maybe you would! But you get the picture.)

Just as you normally wouldn’t do those things, you should never promote a product you haven’t used.

As Pat Flynn says, “Before deciding to actually promote it as an affiliate, it’s always best to use that product first so you can understand the user experience that THEIR PRODUCT will provide for YOUR AUDIENCE. You have to understand what that’s like because the trust that you have with your audience is the most important thing in the world.”

Using a product that you recommend also opens the door for a better way to promote that product, according to John Lee Dumas:

The most effective way to promote affiliate products is to have genuine success USING the affiliate products. Recently, I was the number 2 affiliate for the launch of Easy Webinar. The reason I was able to have such a successful launch is because my audience saw me using their platform to run streaming webinars 7 days a week and report the results via our income reports. Fire Nation trusts us and the results we have, and it turned out to be a total win win!

The results you’ve personally achieved with a product speak louder than anything else and can save you from having to be too “salesy” with your audience.

At LeadPages, we’ve found that the best affiliates are always the ones who truly love using the product and believe in its value, which is one of the reasons why the affiliate program is exclusive to customers.

No sales pitch in the world can outperform a story of personal success from a person the audience trusts.

Rule #3: Pick a Product That Builds Their Trust

Many bloggers choose a product based on the commission structure – how much it pays, whether it’s recurring, etc.

It might sound like greed, but more likely whenever they ask their readers to buy something, they feel like they’re asking for a favor. And since you can’t ask favors too often, they figure they might as well make as much money as they can when they do.

But that’s totally the wrong way to look at it. Promoting a product is not a withdrawal from the “trust bank.” It’s a deposit – if you choose the right product.

According to Pat Flynn, commission levels shouldn’t factor into the decision you make to promote a product as an affiliate:

It’s not about the commission… it’s whether or not that product will completely help your target audience. You’ll have more click-throughs, more conversions, and more trust with your audience.

Pat’s answer hints at an often-overlooked benefit of making a successful affiliate sale – if your audience buys the product through you and has a great experience with the product, their purchasing trust in you increases.

To put it simply, they’ll more likely buy from you in the future, whether you’re recommending another affiliate product or launching your own.

And even if they don’t buy from you again, you’ll have strengthened the relationship by introducing them to a product they love.

So when analyzing affiliate opportunities, consider more than just the amount you’ll make off each sale. Consider how many outstanding experiences you can create and, ultimately, how much trust you can build.

If you get a sizeable commission – great. If the commissions are recurring – even better. But consider these details bonuses or cherries on top rather than key factors that guide your decision-making.

Rule #4: Promote Valuable Free Content, Not the Product

Even when a product is outstanding and you’ve achieved great results with it, directly asking your audience to purchase it can sometimes be daunting.

Luckily, many product creators also develop high-value free resources for you to promote instead – resources that ultimately tie into an offer to buy one of their products.

Usually, they work like this:

You send your audience (via a unique link) to a free resource created by a second party that will teach them something valuable (a free video course, for example).
After going through the free resource, they will be sent an offer to purchase a more expansive, related product.
If they purchase that product, you receive a commission.

Recently, John Lee Dumas made his affiliates very happy by offering exactly this type of free resource. As he said:

It may seem to go against the grain, but free is proving to be incredibly valuable for our affiliates in 2015. With the launch of FreePodcastCourse.com and TheWebinarCourse.com, our affilates are now able to offer their audience a completely free and very valuable product that doesn’t require an intial investment. Both of the courses are great funnels into our paid communities, but only after delivering massive value.

If you’ve been following Boost Blog Traffic for a while, you’ve even occasionally seen these offers for yourself.

Back in January 2015, Jon Morrow sent out an email recommending a new free video series from Danny Iny of Firepole Marketing about building online courses.

The video series had tons of value for anyone interested in building a product, but it also acted as an on-ramp for people to register an interest in Danny’s paid product.

Jon’s email to his list is an excellent example of how to promote this kind of offer in a way that is 100% transparent and keeps your audience’s best interests in mind.

So let’s take a look at a few of the finer points…

First, Jon introduced Danny as one of the best online course experts he knows:

Danny has made almost as much money as me from online courses. And to be frank, I’m intensely jealous of his Superman T-shirt (watch the videos, and you’ll see what I mean).

What’s more, he’s a smart dude, a great teacher, and a standup guy. I have absolutely zero problem recommending him.

In lieu of me, he’s the absolute best guy you can go to for this information. Maybe the only guy.

So, go watch the videos.

This segment of the email does something very important – it tells Jon’s audience, “I know Danny. I trust Danny. He will add value to what you do.”

Jon is letting us know that he follows and trusts Danny’s advice, and we can too. In a sense, Danny is the product, and Jon’s recommendation is based on his personal experience with Danny.

Next, and perhaps most importantly, Jon is 100% transparent in acting as an affiliate for the course that will be coming out:

To be totally transparent, I’m also partnering with Danny, so if you buy anything, it benefits me. That’s just another sign of how much I believe in him, though. I only partner with the best of the best.

This leaves no questions in the audience’s minds about Jon’s motivation for promoting the course. He takes control of the conversation and let’s them know that, yes, he will make some money if they buy, but that’s not his primary motivation for sharing the series with them.

Last but not least, Jon signs off with a sentence that takes any remaining pressure off:

If you’re interested, take a look at the free videos and then decide for yourself. And if not, I’ll be back with another great blog post for you shortly.

This leaves the decision entirely in the reader’s hands, with no pushiness. It’s the opposite of that word that makes so many bloggers cringe: salesy.

In fact, Jon’s subtly saying: “Whether you buy Danny’s product or not, it’s not going to affect your relationship with me.”

So if you’re looking for a way to ease into promoting affiliate offers, take a cue from Jon and find out if the product you’d like to sell as an affiliate has relevant free resources you can promote instead.

Rule #5: Create Your Own Collateral

Of course, promoting free resources isn’t the only way to promote affiliate products without being salesy.

Let’s take Pat Flynn as an example. He’s been wildly successful promoting paid products on his website, SmartPassiveIncome.com.

In fact, a quick look at his latest income report shows that Pat made just under $60,000 in affiliate earnings during February 2015. The month before that he made over $70,000.

If you didn’t know Pat, you’d probably think he’d have to be pushing other people’s products pretty damn hard to make that kind of money. Maybe even engaging in a few unscrupulous tactics to squeeze every last dollar.

And yet Pat is widely considered one of the most ethical bloggers out there – he’d be the last person to shove a sales pitch down your throat. So how in the world is he earning so much affiliate income month after month?

By providing his own content, not sales pitches. As he puts it:

Don’t just talk about [the product] a little bit, include a call to action, and then a link. Get into the insides of that product, and show people what it’s like. Like those popular unboxing videos on YouTube, share every part of it and how to use it, what’s cool about it, what’s not cool about it, and let these potential customers understand what they’re going to get when they get it.

Creating walk-through YouTube videos which provide massive value on their own even without a hard sell at the end always perform best for me. You’re giving a tutorial on a hot topic, and you just happen to be using that product to either make things easier or faster, or become the solution they need.

For example, the $37,650 in commissions he earned from Bluehost.com (check out his income report) came from a video he put together called “How to Create a Blog in Less Than 4 Minutes.” In the video, he doesn’t just pitch Bluehost; he teaches viewers how to do something valuable (create a blog) and shows off a product that makes it easier (Bluehost).

Another effective strategy is to create a “Resources” page on your website so visitors can see the tools you personally use and recommend. As a matter of fact, Boost Blog Traffic implements this strategy in the form of a “Tools We Recommend” post.

To give another example, networking expert and BBT contributor John Corcoran wrote a post on his blog featuring this video showing how to use the relationship management tool Contactually to handle email follow-ups:

Not only is the video genuinely useful, but it subtly signposts the fact that this is a tool John personally uses. And under the video there’s a clearly marked affiliate link to use if readers do want to find out more.

Regardless of the content format you choose to go with, the formula is simple:

Determine something your audience wants to learn to accomplish.
If you don’t already know, learn how to successfully accomplish that thing.
Give your audience a piece of content that takes them step-by-step through accomplishing that thing, and show them the products you use to do it.

Additionally, if you really want to go above and beyond (and you should), Pat Flynn recommends offering support for the products you recommend:

Offer support. Ask for questions. Yes, you’d need to know the product well in order to do that (remember, I said treat it as if it were your own, so would you sell something of your own you didn’t know much about?), but those people who will take you up on that offer are the ones who are on the fence, and you and your reply could be the little nudge they need to feel secure and comfortable with their purchase. -- Article by smartblogger

It’s Time Your Blog Became More Than Just a Hobby

Let’s face it.

It’s about time your blog stopped freeloading and started paying its way.

And if you don’t have your own product to offer, affiliate products are the perfect solution.

But promoting them isn’t about pushy sales pitches and sky-high commissions.

It’s about understanding what your readers need.

It’s about finding products that can help them get it.

And it’s about supporting them so they can reach their goals.

When you do it right, you’ll further enhance the trust you’re building with your blog.

So let’s shift your blog from being just a hobby to something a little more serious.

Go out and find a product your readers will genuinely love. And they’ll love you a little more too.

How-To Tips to Earn Passive Income Online

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 06:11:00 +0000

It sounds so enticing, right?

Tinker around on the side, creating a few websites, and before you know it, you’re earning hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month, giving you the freedom to quit your job, travel the world, and live like a millionaire without anything tying you down.

It’s the dream lifestyle, and everywhere you turn online, someone is offering to sell you a course, showing you how to do it.

You have to wonder, though… is all this Internet stuff real, or is it just a scam?

And if it is real, why isn’t everyone doing it?

Today, I thought I would take a moment to answer those questions for you. Normally, we only talk about earning money online from a blogging perspective, but I thought it might be helpful to step back and address the topic of “passive income” in general.

The sad fact is, there’s a lot nobody tells you. I wouldn’t exactly call it a cover-up because I don’t think most “gurus” are deliberately hiding the truth about how it works, but I do think they have a vested interest in not giving you the whole story.

So, that’s what I’d like to give you. First, a few important details:

This Blog Makes about $60,000 per Month in “Passive Income”

The reason I put “passive income” in quotes is I think the term is a little misleading.

Almost nothing is totally passive. While you may not personally be doing any work to receive the money, someone is, and there’s usually at least a little bit of management overhead.

For instance, I’ve gone on record saying this blog averages over $100,000 per monthfrom selling online courses. From that total, about $60,000 of it is technically “passive income” because I don’t have to do anything to generate it. I could die, and the money would keep coming in month after month for years into the future.

But that doesn’t mean no one is working. It also doesn’t mean I’m personally receiving the entire $60,000.

The truth is, most of that money goes to paying my team. We have course instructors, customer support representatives, marketing specialists, and so on. All of them are working full-time to keep the “passive income” machine running, and they do it quite well.

But somebody still has to be the boss.

While I don’t technically do any of the work necessary to generate that income, I do spend about 10 hours every week on phone calls and meetings. I also spend at least another 10-20 hours a week thinking about how to improve the business and make things run more efficiently.

So, in reality, I’m working 20-30 hours per week for the “passive income.” In exchange, I receive a nice salary, plus the majority of the profits the business generates. If I wanted to, I could probably hire an outside CEO and cut it down to 5-10 hours per week, but that would also reduce the amount of profit I make.

And that’s how passive income really works.

Most of the people bragging about making millions of dollars per year online are being somewhat misleading. Yes, they might be grossing millions, but how much are they netting? In many cases, maybe 100-300K per year after paying for advertising, affiliate commissions, and salaries.

Granted, that’s still a pretty good living. It’s also work you can do from anywhere.

But is it “total freedom?”

Not really. For all practical purposes, you still have a job, you still have to do work, and you still spend at least a little time doing stuff you don’t really enjoy.

I’m not saying it’s a bad life. If you can make it through the learning phase (which I’ll talk about at length later), it’s still a hell of a lot better than having a regular day job, but I don’t know anyone getting paid tons of money to do absolutely nothing. While it’s theoretically possible, I don’t think it’s a realistic objective for most people.

You can earn a living online, but you will have to work for it. In time, you can also reduce the amount of work you have to do personally, but it’s almost impossible to eliminate it entirely, even if it’s only managing the people you delegate the work to. As any manager can attest, that in itself is a job, and it never really goes away.

That being said, how exactly does one generate this not-really-but-sort-of-passive income?

Well, let’s talk about that next.

5 Ways to Generate Passive Income Online

Technically, there are hundreds of ways, but I’ll give you the five most common ones I’ve seen work in the real world.

1. Selling advertising on your site

The idea here is to publish content that ranks for competitive search terms on Google, attracting a continuous stream of traffic, and then sell banner ads to businesses who would like to reach those people.

Of all the different strategies, this one is the most passive, but it also requires TONS of traffic to generating meaningful income. For example, a site getting 10,000 visitors per month might only earn $50-100 per month.

So, if you were planning to make enough money from advertising to quit your job, you can probably forget it. It takes too much traffic. In fact, one of the other methods below will almost always make you more money on a per visitor basis. Nevertheless, this is a legitimate model, so it deserves to be on the list.

2. Earning affiliate commissions

Similar to selling advertising, the goal is usually to rank for competitive search terms, but instead of selling advertising, you endorse different products your audience might be interested in, and whenever someone you refer buys, you get a commission. It’s kind of like the next generation of Amway, except instead of referring your friends and family to buy the products, you refer strangers who visit your website.

If you do it well, you can earn a lot of money. For instance, Pat Flynn is on record for earning over $100,000 per month in affiliate commissions. While that’s certainly unusual, I know quite a few people who make a few thousand dollars a month from it, and in my opinion, it’s the best model for a beginner.

Another variation of this model is to pay for advertising and then earn affiliate commissions from people who click on the ads. Years ago, when advertising on Google and Facebook was cheap, lots of people made a lot of money this way. Nowadays, it’s still possible, but it’s much more difficult, and you have to be much more sophisticated. Nevertheless, I thought I would mention it, because it’s still a viable approach, especially in certain niches.

3. Drop shipping

Here, you set up an online store, but instead of selling your own products, you sell products from other companies, you submit the order to them, and then they deliver the product to the customer. It’s called “drop shipping,” and it’s more common than most people realize. You’ve probably purchased items delivered via drop shipping and didn’t even know it.

While I don’t have any direct experience with it, I know it can be quite profitable, especially in niches where you have high profit margins and low shipping costs. Vitamins and cosmetics, for example, are two popular drop shipping industries. Anyone can theoretically start a “store” and have dozens or even hundreds of products to offer within a matter of days.

Needless to say, you have to find a way to differentiate yourself from everyone else, but if you can, the income can be relatively passive. Chances are, you’ll still have to deal with some questions and complaints from customers about other people’s products, which I’m guessing can be quite a headache, but you don’t have to deal with manufacturing, warehousing, shipping, or any of the other headaches of creating the product yourself.

4. Selling information products

Chances are, you’ve seen all the buzz about creating your own online courses, membership sites, e-books, online events, and whatnot. Collectively, these are known as “information products,” and selling them is one of the hottest online businesses to start right now.

Technically, the margin is close to 100%, because you have no product creation or distribution costs. You do everything online. You can also create the product once and then sell it to hundreds or even thousands of people, creating a stream of revenue that can last years or even decades.

The downside: it’s really difficult to get started. While information products are typically pitched as a “side project,” it’s really more like starting any business. You have to learn how to create products people want, promote them, support your customers, do your finances – everything businesses deal with.

It takes a special kind of person to wear that many hats, and in my opinion, the current positioning in the information marketing industry of “anyone can do this” is just nonsense. Everyone I know who has been successful creating information products is a driven, uber smart entrepreneur. If you’re one of those people, you might consider it. If not, I would look elsewhere.

5. Selling simple software (or apps)

In the past, most people wouldn’t have considered selling software to be a source of passive income, but I believe that’s changing. Thanks to tools like Bubble, creating simple web or mobile apps is easier than ever before. You can do a lot without knowing how to code or hiring a developer, and in the future, I think that’s only going to become more and more true.

Now, does that mean you’re going to develop the next Google in your spare time? Probably not, but you might create a simple app that makes you a few thousand dollars a month. I know quite a few people who have done it, and I even have a few friends who have become millionaires in the software business.

Once again, though, it’s like starting any company. While you might not necessarily need to know how to code, you do need an entrepreneurial mindset, work ethic, and personality type, and you’ll probably struggle for years, going through a string of failures before you finally get it right. If you’re successful, though, the passive income potential is enormous.

Now, you might be wondering how all of this relates to blogging

While you don’t technically need a blog to make these models work, it’s quite common to use one as both a traffic generation tool and a way of staying in touch with customers. In other words, the blog gets people “in the door,” and then you monetize that traffic through the above methods.

But here’s the thing…

None of this is easy. Some models are simpler than others, but all of them require extraordinary skill.

Here’s what I mean…

The Prerequisites for Passive Income

Let’s say I gave you a step-by-step guide to earning passive income by selling information products, breaking down everything you have to do with specific instructions, real-world examples, and everything you need to understand exactly how the model works.

You’d think you could become successful within a few months, right? Most people assume it’s just a matter of doing the work.

But it’s not.

It’s a matter of skill.

For example, here’s a list of skills that all the models require (assuming you are using search engines as a traffic source):

Creating better content than all of your competitors
Search engine optimization, including keyword analysis and link building
Copywriting to improve the click through rate on your headlines
Conversion rate optimization for your opt-in forms
Basic WordPress and hosting administration

And let me be clear…

Those are just the prerequisites for getting traffic. We haven’t even started on monetizing that traffic.

In other words, you need to be proficient in all of those areas before you earn your first dollar. All in all, I’d say it’s about the equivalent of a two-year degree in college.

And the monetization side of things? That’s another two years, assuming you’re only mastering one business model.

So, to learn everything you need to know to generate passive income online, you need to invest about four years, assuming you are studying full-time. If you’re only studying part-time, it’ll take you about eight years.

That’s just an estimate, of course. Some people will be faster; some will be slower.

The bottom line:

None of this is as easy as everyone makes it sound.

Don’t get me wrong, though. Despite the time required to learn everything, I still think it’s a fantastic trade.

The Trade of a Lifetime

If you’re willing to invest four years, 40 hours a week, into learning everything you need to know, you’ll have some extraordinarily valuable skill sets that will serve you for decades. The best case scenario? You never have to worry about money again until the day you die.

To me, that sounds like a better deal than most universities are offering.

Reading about how long it takes and how difficult it is, you might think I’m trying to discourage you, but I’m not. I’m actually trying to save you time.

Because what’s the alternative?

You tinker around on the Internet, reading articles, buying courses, trying this technique and that, running around in circles for years without getting anywhere. Four years later, you conclude it’s a lot harder than you thought it would be, and you’re forced to decide if you want to go further.

Wouldn’t you rather skip all of those years running around in circles and decide now?

If you read everything I said here and your response is, “Okay, that’s fair. I can give it four years,” then you’re already way ahead of most people. On the other hand, you might also say, “Jon, this is interesting, but I really don’t have that kind of time, so I’m going to bow out now.” In that case, congratulations, you just saved yourself a lot of wasted time.

Because listen…

Building a passive income machine that fuels the life of your dreams is only one path, and it’s not right for everybody. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with working for someone else. You can also become a freelancer, offering your services to businesses who need your skill set. Or you can start a more traditional company. -- Article by Smartblogger

There are lots of options out there. This is only one of them.

Is it the right one for you?

Only you can decide. Now, at least, you know what’s required, and you can make an informed choice.

10 Instagram Tips for your Blog and Business

noreply@blogger.com (YFR) — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 06:03:00 +0000

With over 500 million monthly active users, Instagram continues to grow in popularity. Brands have all scrambled to jump in and try to build an audience, but many have no strategy and do not take into consideration the fact that this platform is not like the others. Like Twitter, many are tempted to buy followers and likes instead of growing the audience organically which always leads to problems when you actually try and convert to sales. On any social media channel, it takes time, strategy, and consistency to build your audience, but there are some unique tips that can make using Instagram more effective.

Keep in mind that with any social channel, it is getting more important to create content that is interesting enough that it starts conversations and gets shared, versus you pushing it in front of people through advertising. (Read “The Content Marketing Genius of Angie Castalano” for a great example of this in action!)

10 Tips for Instagram Marketing

1. GET REAL– As often as possible, use real photos that you have taken. While this isn’t always possible, find images that share your brand’s story and look authentic.

2. NO STOCK IMAGES-No one likes stock images that look like…STOCK IMAGES! Corny staged corporate porn is definitely a NO-NO on Instagram.

3. ADD HASHTAGS– People use hashtags to find great content and people to follow. Click on any hashtag to see the top people or most recent people using that tag.

4. USE 10-20 HASHTAGS– Adding multiple hashtags will help your profile become more findable. You can place the hashtags in the caption or in a comment directly following. That’s a personal preference.

5. EXPLORE & DISCOVER– once a day click on the magnifying glass to find new people to connect with. The more people you follow the more people will follow you back.

6. COMMENT & LIKE– Make a point to show the love to those you follow. Comment and like photos on other people’s profiles and BE SOCIAL! Adding an emoji to your comment helps your comment stand out in the crowd.

7. WRITE MORE- This isn’t Twitter. You can write 2,200 character posts, but keep in mind it only shows the first 3 lines of text before showing the MORE link to read more. Be sure you are weaving your keywords into your posts like anywhere else.

8. CONSISTENCY & FREQUENCY– Posting regularly will pay off. Like any social site, being on there regularly will help more people find and connect with you.

9. LET US PEEK- Show us the behind the scenes for your business. Let us meet your team or see your product being made. Don’t always show perfection…let us peek behind the curtain of OZ!

10, STAY TRUE TO YOUR BRAND– I love brands like DRY BAR with their touch of yellow in most every image or those that just a look that you can identify immediately. When possible, use your brand colors and fonts, even if it’s just a touch here and there. Using tools like Canva will help you maintain your brand look and feel since you can load your brand’s fonts and exact HEX or RGB colors and use them in your image designs. -Article by socialknx.com