Take Yahoo for example – they have banned all remote working for staff with claims that “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home“ even though working from home may in itself, promote a more positive work/life balance thus resulting in increased productivity. It is proven that happier staff are more productive & willing to go the extra mile than those where no flexibility is shown. So what if you choose to work in your pyjamas instead of a suit?

If we stand back and actually look at a few of these myths for a moment you will see that some of them don’t stand much ground!

Myth Vs Fact

Myth #1 :- Remote working suits all

Fact :- Not everyone is cut out for remote working and able to survive in solitary confinement, often needing the buzz of a busy office to feel ‘sane’ and part of a team.

Myth #2 :- People who work from home don’t often put in the hours or as productive as office based staff

Fact :- Believe it or not remote workers can be more productive as their day often starts earlier and finishes later without any time wasted on commuting. Improved concentration can also aid productivity without the distractions of a busy office.

Myth #3 :- Employees who work from home are often harder to reach than office based staff

Fact :- Technology is at its highest with smart-phones, tablets and laptops, so home workers can be available at all times – and we often are more accessible than if we were office based!

Myth #4 :- You have to accept low wages to be competitive in remote contract work

Fact :- Not necessarily, a lot of home workers make as much, if not more as contract workers than they did working as ‘traditional’ employees. If you have your own business (as I do) then more time and patience is often taken building up your clientele proving your worth so, no need to sell yourself short thus you’re able to set your own rates accordingly.

Myth #5 :- You’ll spend more time gaining new business than actually working

Fact :- Gone are the days where you knocked on doors or stuffed your resume into envelopes – The Internet is at your fingertips & can be interrogated without shame. Social networking allows you to be seen worldwide by potential clients and have enabled me to work with clients all over the world.

To be honest I love having the opportunity to run my own business from home. I don’t have to dress up every day, I eat healthier, get to spend quality time walking my dog and remain in contact with everyone on my team. For me it’s a Win-Win situation and the best of both worlds.

I’ve asked my good friend Paula to write this guest post about using Facebook for business, whatever your niche you can utilise it in the same ways the big brands do and get the same benefits.

Remember to check out Paula’s Facebook page to see how she does it!

What begins with F and ends with book? Seriously you’d have to be from a different planet if you didn’t say Facebook, even if you are one of the very few who doesn’t have a Facebook Account these days you would certainly know someone who does and pretty much understand what it’s all about.

But how many of you really know how to use this FREE tool for your Small Business? Or even have a Business Page? Do you even know the difference between a Profile and a Page? If like me (a few months ago) you felt a little daunted by this prospect but now is the time to really get that Facebook Page up and running, before you are left behind!

Do I have a Facebook Profile or a Facebook Page?

Ok so a Facebook Profile is where you add friends, use it on a personal basis and Facebook only allows you to have one of these. Whereas a Facebook Page where designed for businesses which means you can create as many of these as you like! And you’ll know if you have set this up as you will have a ‘like’ button!

Benefits of the Facebook Page

I love using a Facebook Page for my business because it can be used as a virtual shop front, displaying within seconds what you do with the added bonus of making it that little bit personal. 

The thing with your Facebook Page you have a willing audience who are already paying attention to you whether they know it or not.  It’s not like you are paying hundreds of pounds for an advertisement in a magazine, your ‘likers’ have already told you they are interested so it’s up to you to keep them tuned in.

You can also have as many ‘likers’ as you want too, there is no limit to this if that’s not an incentive to get one set up I don’t know what is! Everyone is on Facebook so your business should be there too!

What’s your Facebook Marketing Strategy?

Now this does sound very rigid, which I am not but you got to use and abuse your page (in a good way of course!) which means you’ve got to have some kind of strategy, it won’t promote you all by itself!

1. Invite people to your page, use your Hotmail account to search for contacts, LinkedIn and send emails to your friends on your profile inviting people to like your page.
2. Schedule posts, pictures, links about what you do or what you like to get people interested and engaged. Use programs like Hootsuite to schedule them or just use the schedule facility on Facebook! You don’t always have to be there to promote your page.
3. Interact! Talk to your ‘likers’, ask questions and really find out who they are. And above all don’t be afraid to show your personality and have fun!

And the Piece de resistance you can have the best of both worlds and have your Facebook Profile and Page using the same log in details so you can switch in-between them as often as you can!

Really work your page and above all listen to what your audience loves about your page and use it!

Enjoy my fellow Facebook users!

Author Bio:

I’m Paula and this is my dog Tommy. I run my own small business designing and making accessories from recycled materials, check out my Facebook Page https://www.facebook.com/SewReVamped

You can also follow Paula on twitter @SewReVamped.

Following Part 1 of my series of articles about Working with a Virtual Assistant, I have been very lucky to start working with a couple of new clients. After working with them for a few weeks it’s given me some interesting material for my articles.

Working to Deadlines

Until recently many of my clients have been very laid back about deadlines. The tasks they have given me have popped up in my inbox but with no set deadlines for me to get the work completed by.

Only in the last few weeks have I realised how detrimental this is to my working practices. I can of course set my own deadlines, but then in the back of my mind I think that if I don’t manage to get the work done by then the client won’t necessarily chase me up for it.

I started working with a new client a couple of weeks ago and he has been very thorough in providing me with set deadlines for tasks, and this has improved my productivity in bucket loads.

When you work with a Virtual Assistant deadlines are very important because VA’s work with many clients at the same time. Say your new virtual assistant has 10 clients, all sending tasks on a daily basis, she will need to have some idea when the tasks need to be completed so she can prioritise her working day.

Task Management Tools

In the last few months as my client base has grown I have started using a Task Management Tool again. You may or may not remember a post I wrote last year about a free task management tool called Asana. 

Asana is a task management tool for teams. It can be a team of 10, or a team of 1! I use Asana as a CRM, I can keep track of my clients and enquiries as well as the tasks I need to do for them. The good thing about Asana is you can set-up different workspaces and invite others to join. My new client is now set-up on Asana and assigns tasks to me directly through the tool. I receive a notification of the task as well as the deadline and we can communicate through the individual tasks to keep emails to the bare minimum. Asana saves you time!

When you’re working with a Virtual Assistant, being organised with the tasks you set them will benefit both you and your VA, it will help your working relationship and tasks will be completed on time and with the minimum of fuss.

As well as communication (as discussed in Part 1), setting deadlines and finding a way of organising tasks are really important when you work with a Virtual Assistant, or any Freelancer!

Do you work with a virtual assistant? Are you setting deadlines? 

If you don’t currently work with a virtual assistant, then why not sign-up to my mailing list to receive my free eBook ‘3 Key Benefits of Using a Virtual Assistant‘ and then get in touch for a no obligation phone call (or email) about how I can help you in your business.

Limit Login Attempts

I installed this plugin very recently due to the attacks on WordPress websites which are going on at the moment. As well as changing all my passwords, deleting the admin user on my website I installed this plugin. What it does is limit the number of times someone can try to login to your website. 

Limit the number of login attempts possible both through normal login as well as using auth cookies.

By default WordPress allows unlimited login attempts either through the login page or by sending special cookies. This allows passwords (or hashes) to be brute-force cracked with relative ease.

Limit Login Attempts blocks an Internet address from making further attempts after a specified limit on retries is reached, making a brute-force attack difficult or impossible.

Since I installed this a couple of weeks ago I have had an awful lot of activity showing within this plugin, bots are trying to login, usually using the username ‘admin’ or ‘username’. After they get the password wrong 3 times the plugin locks them out, you can customise the amount of time they are locked out for.

Here is a screenshot of the stats for this website:

I would highly recommend installing this plugin or something similar, especially because of the brute force attack on WordPress websites going on right now.

WangGuard

WangGuard I came across by mistake really, I’d never heard of it before. On one of my other websites I have a forum, and I was getting lots of spam registrations. I thought there must be a way to stop these, so I started the search. This plugin is great, and all spam registrations have now stopped completely! If you allow people to register on your WordPress website then this plugin is great. I have recently installed it on a client site and her spam registrations have vanished.

What is WangGuard?

WangGuard is a service born out of the need to control Sploggers or spam users.

What are Sploggers or spam users?

Sploggers or spam users are those individuals that through manual or automated means, register in all sorts of communities, blog networks, forums, etc… in an attempt to create links to their own sites and advertise their own products.

Here is a screenshot of the dashboard stats for one of my websites:

Jetpack for WordPress.com

It’s taken me a long time to install this plugin, the reason is I didn’t feel that it could improve what I already have on my website, supposedly giving you lots of features which blogs hosted on WordPress.com already have. Well how wrong was I? I think Jetpack is fab and still haven’t explored all the extra things I can now do on my websites/blogs. The main one I have been using is the stats, it’s very clear and I can easily see what pages/posts are being viewed most, and also what keywords people are using to get to my websites.

Jetpack isn’t just about stats though, look at all these features:

Acurax Social Media Widget

I found this recently when a client asked if I could create some fancy social media icons for her. There are many plugins around which let you add your social media networks as buttons on your website, usually in the sidebar.

With the free version you get 20 themes to choose from, plenty of choice if you ask me.

I am using this plugin on this website, I’ve not yet installed it on my other websites but plan to in the future because there is a good choice. There are plenty of extra features if you purchase the premium plugin for a one-off price of $24.49. 

Digg Digg

Digg Digg is now owned by the guys at Buffer, but this isn’t why I’ve installed it. I like the look of the sharing buttons down the side of the websites I have seen it on. It moves as you move down the page, which means it’s always there ready for someone to click on to share your article. It’s fully customisable, which means you can have a couple of buttons or as many as you like. I have chosen the social networks I use the most, but also did some research on what social networks were referring a lot of traffic to my website.

Digg Digg is free and offers much more sharing possibilities than some of the other sharing widgets I have used in the past.

So that’s my five fantastic WordPress plugins I am loving at the moment… Do you use any of these plugins, what do you think?

I offer a very reasonable WordPress website or blog design and set-up using the fab Genesis framework which has a huge choice of themes. For a free no obligation chat about what I can offer, please get in touch now!

Some of my recent work:
Karon Grieve
Lorraine Charcuterie Distribution
Lamsdorf Remembered

Communication

One of the most important things to consider when working with a virtual assistant is Communication. In fact when working with anyone, communication is key, if you don’t get this right then your working relationships will certainly not work!

When you hire a virtual assistant for the first time it’s important to discuss your needs and how you will work together. Many people miss this vital step when hiring a VA, if neither you or the VA knows what you want out of the relationship then it’s doomed to fail.

Ok, so what sort of communication am I talking about?

© andrewgenn – Fotolia.com

How will you work together?

When you first hire your VA you need to at least have a phone call or a lengthy discussion on email discussing what sort of work you will be delegating and how you expect the relationship to work. You must also remember that you will not be the only client your VA is working with, so you will need to discuss when your VA is available to you, check their working hours and how they like to communicate on a day to day basis.

Finding out all this sort of information at the very start will get your relationship off to a great start as long as you both stick by the agreement. Many VA’s will put much of this sort of information in their contracts or terms of service. Be sure to read these so you get a good grasp of how they like to work. Your VA doesn’t need to be micro-managed, remember they are not your employee, they are a member of your team, your right hand person, your assistant.

Once you have had your initial conversation about how you will work together, you then need to agree on the ways you would like to communicate on a day to day basis, with tasks and questions.

Here are some ways this can be done:

Telephone

Making a telephone call to your VA about a task is perfectly acceptable. As long as you agree with your VA in advance that you wish to speak on the phone, say a couple of times a week about tasks then that’s ok. Ringing your VA every time you have a new task for them is not an effective or productive way of working. Not only will you interrupt your VA at times they might be working on another client’s project but in itself it isn’t a productive way of doing things. Writing down your list of tasks and then calling your VA at an agreed time to go through the list is a much more effective use of time for both of you.

Urgent tasks sometimes need a quick phone call, but try and keep these to a minimum and schedule all other calls in advance.

Email

Email is used more and more now to communicate, in fact in my own business 99% of my clients email me. The same applies to emails though, keep them to a minimum. It’s very easy to fire off lots of emails one after the other because you forgot something in the first one you sent. Many a time I have been having two different conversations with the same person on different email threads, and sometimes even on two different email accounts – it’s exhausting trying to keep up with this, for both me and my client!

Agree to email once per day with a list of tasks, and if your VA has any questions then to respond to this email only. At the end of the day, maybe ask your VA to send you a summary of where they are at with the tasks. You don’t even have to email daily, it might be every few days. 

Send 1 email rather than 10 – effective and productive for you both!

Take a look at this article How to E-mail Virtual Assistants (or Any Assistants): Proven Templates for more information on emailing your VA, and some useful templates.

Instant Message

Instant messaging is useful when you have a very quick question to ask someone. I have some of my clients on Skype, and if they are online it’s usually much quicker to type a couple of words and get an instant response rather than send an email and wait for an answer. This may not work with everyone, but it’s a useful time saving way of communicating.

Anything important which needs to be recorded shouldn’t be sent via instant message, a task for instance could easily be missed if sent in this way. Keep instant messaging to quick questions.

Project Management Tools

There are some very good project management tools which include instant messaging, emails etc… within them. Using one of these tools with your VA can be useful because you can both see the progress of tasks. I use Asana with some of my clients, check out my article Get Organised with this Free Resource which goes into further detail about the way it can be used. There are many of these tools on the market, and if you would like to work in an organised way with your VA then I highly recommend using one of these. 

Assign, edit, set a due date and follow tasks are all part of most project management tools. By using one of these, you keep your phone calls and emails to a minimum and both you and your VA will work in a more productive way.

Even when you have mastered the communication between you and your VA, problems may still arise. Read another of my articles Don’t Leave Your Virtual Assistant Guessing for more tips on working with a virtual assistant.

Do you work with a virtual assistant? How do you communicate? 

If you don’t currently work with a virtual assistant, then why not sign-up to my mailing list to receive my free eBook ‘3 Key Benefits of Using a Virtual Assistant‘ and then get in touch for a no obligation phone call (or email) about how I can help you in your business.

Not only am I a freelancer myself, I also outsource to freelancers when the need arises. When I set-up my business I hired someone to design my logo, and also customise my website theme (I wasn’t a WordPress expert at that point!). 

I am quite particular what freelancer websites I use to hire freelancers and accept jobs from. I signed up to quite a few when I first started out, but it soon became clear that PeoplePerHour was one of the best. My very first client came from PeoplePerHour, and to this day I still get the odd job from this website even though I am not currently very active on there.

So how can a freelancer save you time and money?

Last week one of my clients asked me to perform a task that I just didn’t have time to complete myself. I decided that as the job was fairly simple, but would take probably 3 or 4 hours of my time, that I would likely find a freelancer who would be able to do the job for me. I popped over to PeoplePerHour and started looking for a freelancer who had the skills I was looking for. It didn’t take long to find quite a few freelancers who would be able to complete this task, so I spent some time looking at the feedback for my shortlist. I soon narrowed my shortlist down to one and dropped the freelancer a message asking if she’d be able to undertake the work for me. She came back to me within a few hours and agreed that she could take it on. I gave her further details, told her how long I wanted her to spend on the task and left her to it. 

The task itself took the freelancer 4 hours and 48 minutes to complete. Her rate was very reasonable, and a lot less than my own hourly rate which meant I not only saved time myself, but also saved my client money in the process. 

I appreciate that by hiring someone whose hourly rate is quite low is something many people have a problem with and in fact I used to have similar misconceptions about this. But everyone needs to earn a living, and if this freelancer can work for this rate and live comfortably then I am happy to pay them to get the job done. I never hire someone on rate alone, I look at their experience and the feedback from other clients.

Hourlies on PeoplePerHour

PeoplePerHour introduced Hourlies some time ago now, which have been extremely popular. I have a few of these hourlies set-up on my profile, I think they are useful for advertising single, one-off tasks you can complete quickly and easily.

Today I received an email from a member of PPH saying one of my hourlies had been included on the PPH blog and Facebook. I quickly clicked the link and found this great video showcasing some of his favourite hourlies of the week – I’m at 2.08!

Did you spot me? I like the fact he says “see how happy she is sorting out your inbox!”

Hiring a Freelancer

• Find a reputable freelancer website such as PeoplePerHour
• Create a shortlist of freelancers who you think can perform the job for you
• Look through each profile and the feedback from past clients
• Send an initial message to the freelancer and ask if they are able to complete the task and the timeframe
• Make a decision and hire the freelancer, if you’re purchasing an hourlie pay for it immediately so the freelancer can get going straight away
• Don’t forget to provide feedback following completion of the task, this is so important for freelancers!

Have you outsourced to a freelancer in the past? What have been the benefits for you?

Check out my PeoplePerHour profile and hourlies to see if there is something I can help you with.

So what is Slideshare?

“SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. With 60 million monthly visitors and 130 million pageviews, it is amongst the most visited 200 websites in the world. Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.”

What would be your number one task that you’d love a virtual assistant
to do for you if money were no object?

Please let me know in the comments so I can align my articles to those who would benefit from them most. Thank you in advance!

LinkedIn is the Social Media Network for professionals and businesses. Facebook is for keeping up to date with your friends and family, but LinkedIn is to keep up to date with your colleagues (past, present and future!).

I signed up to LinkedIn while in my previous job, but didn’t have a profile. I often received invitations to connect but I didn’t have a clue what I should use LinkedIn for. That is until I started my own business and found that LinkedIn was a great way of showcasing your CV online and connecting with people you wouldn’t necessarily meet in real life.

LinkedIn for me is one of the ways I network with potential clients. Being based in France and not speaking the language means I don’t get out and network in a traditional sense. For me in particular I can work with people all over the world, why limit myself to network with just those in the UK (or France if I could speak French well enough)?

To understand LinkedIn you need to get involved… the same rules of interaction for other social networks apply for LinkedIn. Here are a few ways you can get involved and connect with people:

• Join groups you’re interested in, as a business or personally
• Connect with your colleagues, past and present
• Ask for recommendations and endorsements
• Create a company page for your business and include your services
• Share articles in the same way you share on other networks, but more business related
• Sign-up to LinkedIn Ads and run an advert (I have had great success with these)

With any social network you need to get involved, LinkedIn has evolved a lot since I first started my profile nearly two years ago. I find I interact more on there now than I did in the past. I have connection requests on a regular basis and enquiries about my business.

One of the most important things you need to do on LinkedIn is have a super profile, it’s your online CV/Resume. You need to ensure your profile is SEO optimised with the correct keywords, put the effort in as much as you would you’re own website. Above this though is to make sure you have the perfect headline so people can easily search for you, make sure the skills you are selling are included, for example my headline reads: 

☆ Professional Virtual Assistant ☆ eBook Formatting ☆ Social Media ☆ WordPress Web Design ☆

Why not connect with me on LinkedIn?

I have chosen some great articles about LinkedIn, check some of these out for some more tips:

To be productive in this fast paced land of notifications and distractions isn’t easy, even for those of us who like to write about it sometimes. I can often be found in a heap at my desk thinking I may as well give up work for the day because there have been so many distractions and interruptions.

There are many productiveness killers, especially when you work from home, and I like to break them down into these categories:

Interruptions

• The telephone (whether business or personal), it can interrupt you at anytime during the day and whatever you’re working on at the time will have to be put to one side. 
• The doorbell, family/friends, the postman, cold callers, people spreading the word of the Lord… it happens, although not to me now I have moved to rural France.
• Lunchtime, I put this as an interruption because for me I would happily go on working through the whole day without stopping for lunch if I could, but I need to eat. The same applies to tea/coffee breaks.

Distractions

• Email notifications, if you have these set-up they can take you off task by dragging you over to your email to respond.
• Social media notifications, the same applies here, they distract you from what you’re supposed to be working on.
• The dog coming over and nose butting your hand because he wants to go out/wants to play/just wants some love! This happens to me every day… poor dog feels neglected!
• The radio (if you have it on while you’re working), I tend to have the radio on during the day, music I can work quite well too but when there’s a lot of speaking it distracts me quite a bit.

Well-being

• If you’re feeling under the weather it’s going to cause you to be less productive, I know that some days I feel like I’d rather be laying on the sofa with a good book or watching a film.
• Stress, this is a big killer of productiveness, if you’re stressed you’re not going to achieve anything.
• Not getting enough fresh air, if you’re stuck at your desk for up to 12 hours a day it’s not doing anything for your health or your productivity.

Clutter

• An untidy office is going to create a messy mind, if you have paperwork everywhere, can never find anything then you’re not going to be working efficiently.
• If you work from home then having a messy home the other side of your office is probably going to cause you some stress – it does me!
• No filing system on your computer is just as bad as having a messy office, it causes inefficiency.

Can you think of any other categories?

I had originally planned to give you some of my favourite iPhone apps for this article, but it’s turned out to be a much more in-depth post, so I’m still going to give you some apps to check out after my relevant tips.

How to deal with interruptions…

1. You could ignore the telephone and put voicemail on when you are busy working on a project, I think it’s perfectly acceptable not to answer every single telephone call, you don’t answer emails instantly (well most people don’t).
2. You may like to install CCTV at your front door so you can see who is calling and then choose to ignore them or not… that’s a bit of a joke, but seriously, if you’re working on something ignore the door too, or just check out the window first to check it’s not anything urgent.
3. Lunch is difficult to miss, and you shouldn’t skip it, you probably could do with the break anyway, so why not take half an hour to do something else even if it’s just to hang the washing outside.

How to deal with disruptions…

1. Any notification can be turned off, so if you’re working on something, turn it off. I find that this is great for productiveness, I can work for much longer if I don’t see the emails appearing in my inbox and all the social media stuff appearing on my computer and iPhone.
2. Give the dog something to chew on which will keep him entertained while you’re working, or if it’s walk time, then take him out.
3. I have found that when there’s lots of speaking on the radio and it’s distracting me from my work (usually if I’m writing something I need to concentrate on) I mute it (in fact I have just done that so I can get this post finished). Mute is a handy tool, use it more!

How to improve your well-being…

1. If you’re not feeling 100% then take a break, if you have deadlines then prioritise these and then set a time where you can take a break. If you set aside some time to relax you’ll get on with your work more efficiently as you’ll be looking forward to relaxing.
2. Stress over a long period of time can really inhibit your working day, so you need to stop and look at what is causing the stress. Money worries? Workload? Personal problems? Try to write down what is causing your stress and find ways of dealing with it, the stress won’t go away overnight but just by acknowledging the problems on paper will commit you to taking the first steps.
3. Take a break – You must get outside in the fresh air everyday, I used to be really bad at this. I used to sit at my desk all day, and then I got a dog. He forces me to get outside at least twice a day and I feel much better for it. Sometimes having to take the dog for his walk isn’t good for getting things done, but once you’re in a routine it does get better. Even if you go out for a 5 minute walk around the block at lunchtime, it will give you enough energy to get the rest of your work done.

Here are some apps that I feel help my well-being.

Take a Break! – Guided Meditations for Stress Relief

iSleep Easy – Meditations for Restful Sleep

How to deal with clutter…

1. This is such an easy thing to achieve but I am my own worse enemy sometimes. Just spend 10 minutes each morning or evening tidying your office, making sure things have been filed away, clearing your desk. Before I worked from home I used to be great at this, things have slipped a bit now, but I think that’s because I know it’s only me that has to look at the mess. But it only takes 10 minutes… 
2. Housework causes me stress, I hate it… if I could afford one I would hire a cleaner! But recently I have managed to get it under some kind of control. Having pets with a lot of hair is the worst thing ever. I think you have to accept it, you’re going to spend the rest of your life clearing and cleaning. The best thing you can do is the same as with your office, spend 10-15 minutes each day (maybe at lunchtime) having a tidy up. If you do this each day, even if things are not spotless at least you’ll be less stressed.
3. With the amount of things you can download onto your computer these days it soon ends up being very cluttered. If you start as you mean to go on, again this won’t be a long job. Every week check through your files and make sure they are in the relevant folders so you can easily find them again. Many people believe that it’s not necessary now because you can easily run a search of your whole computer, but what if you can’t remember what you named it? Better to have specific folders for specific files.

Here are my favourite apps which help me control my clutter:

Mailbox- Put Email In It’s Place

feedly – feed your mind

Finish – Overcome the clutches of procrastination with Finish, a busy iPhone user’s best friend.

What are your top productivity tips, I love to find out what other people do to increase their efficiency while working so please add your tips in the comments. I hope some of my advice is helpful, and look forward to hearing about yours.

My best definition of ‘a pain in the neck’ is sitting down for hours to eventually craft great informative content, and ultimately get no one to read them. It sucks to see my ‘intellectual property’ go down the trenches of my blog without success – in terms of views and comments.

Anyone would readily agree that the most important thing to any expert is building an audience. Unfortunately, building an audience has also been identified as the major problem of ALL bloggers; even veterans still seek ways to get more traffic. I strongly believe that anyone that can come up with a solution to this general problem, even if only to an extent, will be worth the attention and respect.

The hairs behind my neck still rise when I remember the blogging.org infographic that says “An unbelievable upwards of 81% never makes $100 from blogging” out of “an estimated thirty-one million bloggers in the United States alone”. How much more third-world bloggers! The major reason for this failure is not far-fetched; they fail to get (and keep) sufficient traffic enough to be tagged ‘a successful blogger’.

Newbies in the blogosphere, like me, still see getting the deserved audience for our products as a myth, and a thing to yet be dreamt of. We try everything possible, from SEO to content marketing, and so on, still we seem not to get any traction in trying to push away from the ’81 percent’. If I get anyone to make the ‘traffic myth’ a reality for me, I’d take my hats off to such person – permanently.

Now let’s imagine the situations of internet marketers that have no blog to showcase their expertise or promote their products, or great writers that have no blog to exhibit their prolificacy or readers to enjoy and benefit from their resourcefulness.

The good news is that, with the advancement in internet technology and information distribution, all these problems are gradually coming to an end.

Introducing Blogs on Quora

Before going deep into ‘Blogs on Quora’, I think it would be a great idea to first do an introduction to Quora and dispel the feeling that almost anyone would know so much about Quora.

Quora is a questions and answers site (Q&A Site) – just as Yahoo! Answers – in which members can ask or answer any question which anyone visiting the site can also benefit from. The best answers get voted up or down as readers deem fit.

Quora can safely be regarded as the revolution of Q&A sites, as it makes things a lot easier for answer seekers and writers or professionals, who love to share their knowledge and show their expertise, alike.

Quora is being used by millions and has a reputation for ranking high on search engines for many keywords. Smart internet marketers take good advantage of this platform for exposure and traction-gaining purposes. A lot of traffic can be driven to a site through giving highly informative and resourceful answers on Quora, and it makes you easily perceived an expert in your niche. If you yet don’t have this great invention in your marketing arsenal, then you should consider it sooner.

Now let’s talk about blogging on Quora.

On 22nd January, in a good attempt to realize its mission of ….., Quora launched its latest invention; ‘Blogs on Quora‘, a platform on which Quora users can create as many blogs and posts, with rich text editors and images, either from the web or mobile.

This serves as a replacement for Quora boards on which non-Q&A posts were being posted.

Blogs on Quora serves to allow writers share their knowledge with the world where they do not have an established blog, and also great for bloggers who do not have an audience, or who have an audience but want to reach more people.

While, introducing Blogs on Quora, Kah Keng Tay writes that “Blogs on Quora are great for people who (1) don’t have a big, established online presence already and (2) don’t want to do the time-intensive, heavy lifting of marketing their blog and slowly building an audience. If you are a good writer but don’t have thousands of Twitter followers or a big audience for your blog, Quora is an ideal place to write. Your blog will be discovered quickly without you having to do any work besides writing. Writing one great post on Quora will attract a big audience, no matter how many people already know or follow you.“

She goes further to state that…

Personally, I use my Quora blog as a replica of my original blog, and I repost my best posts and guest posts on the Quora blog. To know what a Quora blog looks like, you can check out mine; it is called LucrativeWriter.

Quora’s distribution method is a great advantage of Blogs on Quora; it expands your readership beyond those who follow you personally. The power of Quora distribution is driven by the relationship between topics and feed.

Just as in questions and answers, each blog post on Quora is categorized by relevant topics. These topics are in form of people’s interests, and each topic is followed by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. This ultimately means that anyone who shares your topic interest may see your post, whether they follow you personally or not.

This is the most interesting part of it all as Quora knows who wants to read what via the topics people follow, and this goes a long way to help in getting targeted traffic.

I re-published one of my guest posts titled ‘How to Best Use Writing to Boost Your Traffic and Sales’ on my Quora blog as a test-run of the features of the blog, choosing related interests, but without a picture and any serious optimization – even with an incomplete Quora profile, and the post got about 40 views in less than a day.

I later added to the selected interests of the post and the views increased to 40+ in few hours. The views further increased to 85+ in just few minutes after wasting all my credits in promoting the post to 100 people. The post was published 4:19 pm on Friday, 25th January, and on Monday, 28th January, it had 170 views. This is just a minuscule sample of what blogging on the Quora platform can do for a blogger. Just one up-vote indicates my subsequent posts must far exceed the present one in quality and resourcefulness. And this also indicates that even if you write trash, you will still get the audience, though this might destroy your reputation fast.

More so, Blogs on Quora gives the prolific writer the chance to target different markets on one blog. A freelance writer in the writing/blogging niche like me can post about travelling and have it read by travelling fans, or use my Quora blog as a collection of writing samples on various unrelated topics to show that I can perform well in any niche I get hired.

Another advantage is that unlike in traditional blogs or other social media platforms where an old post might be gone forever, old Quora Blog posts that get up-votes (just as in Q&As) can suddenly appear back in the feed making them “evergreen and re-discoverable” – TechCrunch.

Quora Blogs Optimization

Even when Quora claims that you need not do anything other than the writing to enjoy the benefits of the blog, it’s still important to look for ways to enhance the effectiveness of the features of Blogs on Quora.

Best optimizing your Quora blog is mostly within the ambit of the features available to users of this platform; very few things can be done from outside the blog.

Within the Blog;

• When opening your Blogs on Quora account, make sure you are conscious of the details you enter, having your keywords in mind. Your brand name should be your URL followed by your target keyword or brand tag (65 characters max) – mistakenly engaged my original brand name, LucrativePen, in another way. Can’t even say how.
• Your ‘About’ message should be very compelling and keyword-rich.
• When selecting your topics of interest, do not forget your market targets. These are the people that ordinarily get to see your posts. Don’t worry; the interests of your individual posts can differ from that of the blog. One other good thing is that you can edit your posts and edit your interests long after publishing.
• Always write quality posts with on-page optimization in mind. Your keyword should be used as title (can be changed after publishing, but your permalink will remain the same), and your first 160 characters should contain your target keyword. Maintain a decent Keyword density throughout your post though.

Your description on search engines will be pulled from your latest post as Quora doesn’t use Meta description tag.

• Change your image name to your keyword before uploading it.
• Always share your posts to your social networks.
• Improve the authority of your blog by linking out to authority sites.
• You can invite people to follow your blog and you can also promote your blog to people with your Quora credits. When you promote your blog, it gets more attention, and possibly more followership or up-votes. *In a bid to understand how Quora credits work, I wasted my default 500 credits which I would have loved to keep for better purposes. Don’t waste yours!

Outside the Blog;

• Backlink to your Quora blog from an active blog, either through posts or commenting on do-follow blogs with your Quora blog URL;
• Get your Quora blog indexed on Google. Ping it with Ping-O-Matic or any other tools.

As earlier said, much optimization can only be done within the blog. The most important factor is writing great content; that’s what gets you the views and the follows – and upvotes.

Blogs on Quora is a relatively new concept, but a lot of people are already reaping the benefits, in form of audience and traffic. It’s the next big thing in the blogosphere. You should get on board now and improve your online presence via Quora blogs; you don’t wanna lose that URL you love.

Author Bio:

Yomi-Alliyu Oludami is a professional freelance writer and the founder of www.lucrativepen.com, a blog that teaches how to write for money and traffic. You can visit his website to learn more or hire him for your writing projects.

You can also follow him on twitter @oludami_LP.