Not everyone is interested in learning how to code or finding a web host and installing WordPress and messing about with plugins and scripts, some people would just prefer to create a website the easiest way possible. And not everyone can afford to pay for a web designer to create a professional looking website, which is why there are many companies offering website building tools at a reasonably affordable cost. So in this post I’m going to share with you 3 awesome and powerful simple to use website building tools you need to try out.

What are website building tools?

Companies provide individuals and businesses a complete all-in-one solution to creating a website without the technicalities involved, so that means you pay a monthly subscription fee and you get web hosting, domain hosting and website building tools with a host of premium features to create a professional website the way you want it to look, or by using a template, all under one umbrella.

Now let’s dive straight in and take a look at what there is available -

Moonfruit SiteMaker

OK, let’s kick off with the crème de la crème of website building tools provided by Moonfruit. Moonfruit started out during the dot-com bubble and has withstood the test of time. Moonfruit is a classic point drag and drop website building tool boasting with some amazing features which includes –

• Blogging tools
• Email subscription and list building tools
• Ecommerce tools with PayPal integration (Plus Facebook shop)
• Google Analytics and Webmaster tools
• Website optimized for wireless devices
• Plus tons of premium options such as domain name, more disk space and mobile checkout.

Moonfruit currently serves more than 6 million websites and over 100,000 ecommerce websites worldwide. For many years Moonfruit’s site builder has been running on flash, as you know creating a website using flash these days is becoming less and less popular, which is why the company is moving forward with launching their latest Moonfruit version 6 which will be running on HTML5 with a host of added new features.

Overall Moonfruit is both affordable and a good all round solution to building a professional looking website. Support is provided through FAQ’s, online guides, a forum and a ticket system.

Check out Moonfruit or watch the video below -

MrSite

MrSite is a company which started in 2004 by two entrepreneurs and has since become the UK’s favorite website building packages. Not remotely as popular as Moonfruit, nevertheless MrSite still offers some great features in 4 different website building packages.

• Starter Package - Which includes your own domain, 5 web pages, 250 MB hosting and 2GB bandwidth.
• Classic Package - This package offers everything above with a little more space, 50 pages and a host of design features.
• Pro Package - The pro package gives you even more space, 100 pages and unlimited bandwidth, along with SEO tools and a host of design features, plus more…
• Seller Package - Which includes domain, unlimited pages and bandwidth, 1 GB web hosting, SEO tools, design features, business tools and shops.

Support is provided through telephone, email, online chat and lots of easy to use guides. Find out more about MrSite.

1and1

Finally in our top three website building tools we get to 1and1. 1and1 is a website builder that combines web hosting, domains, email, web servers and eCommerce all in one place. The site provides easy-to-use web building tools with hundreds of nicely designed templates and design features to choose from. You can choose to build a business or a personal website.

Whilst 1and1 uses a similar point, drag and drop design system as Moonfruit, and is quite intuitive, your creative freedom is somewhat limited as to what you can do to make your website absolutely 100% unique to you (column layouts).

The layout remains the same and all you need to do is add or remove widgets, images, YouTube videos, text boxes, files etc to fixed columns on a page. As with Moonfruit on the other hand you can drag any object practically anywhere you want on the page, for example of you want something to appear in the middle and nothing else, you can drag it there and delete everything else.

Having said that 1and1 is perfect for anyone looking for a no fills solution to creating a reasonably good enough website for a business or personal use. Here are some of the features and benefits of using 1and1 website building tools.

• 30-day free trial, however if you don’t cancel, you’re then locked in a 12 month contract
• Choose business (Basic, Plus or Premium), or personal website
• Free domain name
• Hundreds of high quality design templates to choose from
• SEO tools
• Social media and YouTube integration and more.

Find out more about 1and1.

Conclusion

So there you have it, 3 great website building tools to choose from but which one would be the best option for you?

Personally I’ve only ever used Moonfruit properly to build an actual ‘live’ website. I’ve played a little bit with MrSite and the free trial version of 1and1 before, but personally I’d go for a Moonfruit powered website. You have complete control over the design aspect of your site, plus get tons of features and tools added at a real low cost. Anyways take a look at all three of them yourself and decide which one would suit your need, enjoy.

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Currently new customers are able to take advantage of Bluehost web hosting discount by getting 36 months of hosting for just $4.95 per month (Their regular price is $6.95 per month), or you can have 24 months hosting at just $5.95 per month and 12 months hosting at just $6.95 per month. Hosting your WordPress blog with Bluehost is really easy as they only offer a single professional shared hosting package, each package boasts the following features and benefits to you -

• Unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space
• Host unlimited domains
• Get one free domain name for a whole year
• Unlimited email accounts and free website builder tool
• Money back guarantee
• 24 hours a day, 7-days a week US based Support (Chat, Email and Phone)
• 99.99% Up-time guaranteed
• $100 Google AdWords credit
• One-Click WordPress Installation service (Making it really simple to start a WordPress Blog, check out my video tutorial below)
• Get free setup

If you’re starting a WordPress blog for the very first time, or you are simply thinking of migrating your old blog from another platform over to a hosted WordPress blog, this is the perfect opportunity.

For those of you starting a new blog don’t forget that you get a free domain name which will usually set you back around $13. In addition to all these features you also get access to a solid customer support through online chat, email and telephone, and I can tell you from my own experience, Bluehost chat support is very good.

Installing WordPress is easy, as with most other reliable web hosts Bluehost offers a one-click installation feature using Simple Scripts. (Check out my video tutorial below)

If you’d like to find out more about my own personal experience with using Bluehost please check out my  Bluehost Review over on my personal blog at Online Income Journal.

How to Get Bluehost Web Hosting Discount For Your WordPress Blog!

The great thing about taking full advantage of this Bluehost web hosting discount is that you don’t need to enter any kind of promotional coupon code to get started. All that is required from you is that you hit the link below, and it will take you direct to the Bluehost web hosting discount homepage. (see image above)

Once you’re there, simply hit the green signup now button to get started… Best of luck and enjoy.

In addition to getting Bluehost web hosting discount, I’ve also included a useful video tutorial taking you from start to finish in purchasing web hosting and installing WordPress.

Happy blogging and enjoy.

Go to BlueHost and Start Your Blog for just $4.95 Per month

Please note that this page contains affiliate links: If you choose to use my affiliate link to access and purchase Bluehost web hosting, I will be paid a small commission for recommending you, this of course comes at no additional cost to you. You can read my full disclosure here.

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However amongst the many mistakes to avoid when doing email marketing, today I want to share with you 4 of them, which I strongly believe if not avoided can have costly consequences for your company. Let’s take a look.

4 Deadly Mistakes Of Email Marketing

1. Avoid using misleading headline titles and deceptive subject lines

Nothing comes across spammier than receiving a marketing message through email that uses this unethical tactic.

Using misleading headline titles and deceptive subject lines, in hope to increase your open rate should be avoided at all costs. If anything this tactic will cause an immense amount of confusion with your recipients and increase opt-out rate.

Also using this tactic won’t only give your organization a really shady spammy appearance, but your company could also face some hefty penalties for spamming. Always check the CAN-SPAM compliance guide if in doubt.

2. Avoid coming across too sales-like and not providing ‘value’

Email marketing enables businesses to advertise their marketing message, offers etc to their recipients broadly and effectively. However as a business you should make every effort to make your recipients fully aware of exactly what your marketing message is about.

Whilst it’s good to recommend products and services you should always strive to provide, or combine adding ‘value’ and a ‘solution to a problem’.

3. Avoid not telling your recipients where you’re located

Ask yourself this, would you purchase products or services, or even put trust into a company, where you didn’t know their location? No would be the answer I’m betting. Always ensure that your email marketing message includes a valid postal address to where you or your business is located.

4. Avoid not giving the option to opt-out

My final tip is to ensure that what ever message you send out to your recipients, always provide them with the option to opt-out, and when they do, honor their decision regardless of their reasons. You’re more likely to keep your recipient on your list if they know they can opt out should they wish to.

So let’s recap -

1. Don’t use misleading headline titles or deceptive subject lines
2. Think about providing value and how your content will help your readers, customers solve problems
3. Add a postal address, let your recipients know where you’re based
4. Always give the option of opting out!

Conclusion

So there you have it folks, my top 4 deadly mistakes to avoid when doing ethical email marketing. My advice would be to avoid using any email marketing software’s that you are unsure about, but instead try and use a more reputable online email service provider such as AWeber or Mailchimp.

OK, let me know your thoughts and whether you have any additional tips and suggestions you want to add to the list above.

As usual, have an awesome week what ever you’re doing

Recommended reading

• Integrating Effective Email Marketing into Social Media
• 7 Ways How Not To Do Email Marketing
• 3 Common Email Marketing Questions Answered

Image courtest of Photobucket user: jhaworth

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Yep it’s fair to say that we love to rant on about how to build more backlinks to our web properties, after all it is one of the most ‘essential building blocks’ for getting more traffic and improving search engine rankings right?

But as well as looking at offsite link building and SEO, we cannot lose focus on the importance of onsite link building, (interlinking posts and pages in your blog or website).

So today’s post is an appropriate one, as I want to share with you 5 smart ways to optimize your internal anchor text links that will help you greatly lower your bounce rate, improve user experience on your site and equally share valuable search engine link juice amongst the awesome pages of your site, and overall improve your on page SEO.

How to Optimize your Internal Anchor Tex Links

1. Combine short and long tail keywords

OK so my first tip is to use a combination of both ‘single keywords’ and ‘long tail phrases’ to link out to other content on your website. Here are a couple of examples of single and long tail keywords –

Example A) Create a WordPress blog in Bluehost in under 10 minutes! (Uses single hyper-linked keyword).

Example B) Check out my awesome email list building workbook, and increase your opt-in conversion rate now! (Uses long tail phrase).

2. Variate your anchor text links and make them flow naturally

When interlinking to other content on your website, ensure that it appears and flows naturally. This is both important for your users and for the search engines. Avoid using too many exact match keyword anchor texts, always add variety to your anchor texts. There is an amazing post by SEOmoz about exact match anchor texts worth reading here. OK below I’m giving some examples of making anchor texts appear natural -

Example A) If you want to learn how to promote your YouTube channel effectively, we have over 50 tips and suggestions for you, click here to find out more. (This example shows a NON-optimized anchor text link with no keyword relevance. Although it might seem to appear natural, ‘Click here’ happens to be just a generic phrase. It would have been better if I had anchor linked ‘promote your YouTube channel’).

Example B) Learn the strategies that I used to increase Facebook traffic to my blog by 446%. (As you can see from this second example I’ve used the relevant keywords ‘increase Facebook traffic’ to anchor text link to the related post. This also appears more natural, but I would also variate keyword anchor text and not just use ‘increase Facebook traffic’).

3. Link to ‘relevant content’

You might laugh but I’ve lost count to the number of times I’ve visited a website and clicked on a link that’s taken me to a page that was totally unrelated and irrelevant. Linking to ‘relevant content’ is so important, especially if you want to improve and maintain good user experience for your visitors and better your search rankings.

4. Use keyword link descriptions

Link descriptions are those ‘hover texts’ you see appear when you run your mouse pointer over a link, as if you needed to be reminded. It’s good practice to ensure that you always add a description with keyword when interlinking, because as well as the SEO benefits it also helps your visitors know exactly what a particular link is about, and where it will take them when they click on it, again thinking about your user experience.

5. Don’t go crazy and link to everything

My final tip is whilst it’s good to have a healthy balance of well optimized anchor text links, both for your site users and for getting better search engine rankings, don’t go crazy and link to absolutely everything, A) it looks spammy and B) it will absolutely look unnatural.

So let’s round up this weeks’ tips -

• Combine short and long tail keywords
• Variate your anchor text and avoid exact match keywords
• Link to relevant content
• Use link descriptions with keyword
• Don’t go mad and link to everything, keep it clean

So there you have it folks, my top 5 tips for improving and optimizing your internal links, of course for all the right reasons.

Over to you audience…

OK it’s your turn to add your say. Do you have any tips, ideas and suggestions you’d like to add? If so I’d love to hear them, so get conversing in the comment section below as always troops Enjoy the rest of your week.

P.S – I’ll leave you with a worthwhile video by SEOmoz about exact match anchor text links.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Zeeweez

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If you’re just starting out or you’re completely new to all this, here’s the short lowdown on Error 404 Pages.

A Error 404 Page Not Found is what a web user sees when they click on a redundant link (internal or external) that takes them to a page that no longer exists. Generally a 404 Page Not Found execution is usually created when the following things occurs –

• You remove content, posts, pages, tags and categories
• You change domain names
• An external link is misspelled
• You make changes to the permalink structure

So in this week’s post we’re going to look at some effective yet simple ways to find and fix the dreaded Error 404 Page Not Found in your WordPress blog, so let’s get started.

Fixing Error 404 Page Not Found in WordPress

First of all log into your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, if you don’t have a webmaster tools account you should seriously consider signing up for one. In your Google Webmaster Tools account find the domain for the WordPress blog that you want to analyze and fix 404′s and head over to Health > Crawl Errors > Not Found. See image below.

Once you’ve hit Not Found, you’ll get a list displaying all the URL’s on your WordPress blog that are effectively generating Error 404 Page Not Found (See image below). Now you can begin by clicking on each of these URL’s to get a deeper insight, and to see what pages are linking back to the 404 error pages. As I mentioned I’m assuming that you’re totally new to all of this, so let’s take a walk through for fixing a 404 Error Page Not Found in WordPress using Google Webmaster Tools to assist us.

So I want to fix a range of Error 404 Page Not Found on my blog (this blog), so first I’ll find a URL I want to fix, I’ve underlined one in the image above. Clicking on a URL will launch a small pop-up window like the one shown below, with a detailed insight of the error page in question, along with two optional tabs; to view links In Sitemaps and Linked From.

As you will see this page also tells me when this particular error URL was last crawled and first detected. Now to fix the links pointing to this error page I’ll need to click on Linked From. See image above and below.

So the next thing I’ll need to do is find all the URL’s in my WordPress blog that contains a dead link pointing back to this particular error page (internal links). I’ve highlighted some of them in the image above. So now all I have to do is log into my WordPress dashboard, head over to posts or pages, and find these pages and fix the links. To fix redundant link I have the choice of doing the following -

1. I can remove the link entirely
2. Or I can link to another relevant and active page on my blog (recommended)

I don’t want to loose any search engine juice so I’ll usually link to another relevant page on my blog.

External URL’s

So what about external URL’s, that is links from other web properties that are pointing back to Error 404 pages on your blog? As you will see in the list in the image above these URL’s are also shown. To fix these I have the following options -

1. If I can’t access the URL myself, I can attempt to contact the site owner to ask if the link can be removed or altered.

Now there will also probably be some URL’s that  I won’t be able to fix, but myself once I’m sure that I’ve done as much as I can to fix a particular error URL I’ll hit the Mark as fix button and move onto the next URL in the Not Found list. To ‘improve user experience‘ and stop visitors landing on a useless Error 404 Page Not Found page on my site, I’ll take some additional action, so I have installed the redirection plugin (recommended).

This nifty plugin will allow you to find, review and is desired redirect any broken URL’s or 404′s using 301 redirect. In simple terms it means that you can redirect visitors to another closely related page on your blog instead of an Error 404 page, thus improving user experience.

OK folks so I hope that this little tutorial has been somewhat helpful for you. 404 Error pages are not a major threat to SEO, but if you have quite a few of them on your blog it might be worth spending some time to fix them as you may well be losing a lot of visitors exiting your blog because they couldn’t find the page they were looking for. Additionally if you want to learn how to create custom 404 pages, check out the following useful post that I found.

Have a great week troops

Recommended and Related Posts

• Top 5 WordPress SEO Plugins For Big Rewards in SEO
• On-Page SEO Tips for Newbie Bloggers
• Negative SEO and it’s Tactics
• How to Recover from and Prevent Negative SEO

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If you’re serious about building a great list, you will do more than just paste an opt-in form in your blog’s sidebar or your website just like everybody else! Serious list builders go beyond the call of duty…

Instead, you will embed your opt-in form just about everywhere that is physically possible on your blog or website; from your about page, to adding a call-to-action below post content, to putting your opt-in form in a pop-up (if that’s your kind of thing) and of course to having a well designed and well optimized landing page for your email opt-in, especially if you’re trading email addresses for something valuable such as an eBook.

Talking of your opt-in landing page, in this post I want to share with you 7 powerful and actionable tips for creating strategies to help you generate leads to your email opt-in landing page, so let’s get cracking.

How to Generate Traffic and leads to your Opt-in Landing Page

1. Offer something totally irresistible

First and foremost ask yourself, why would anybody want to opt-in to your email newsletter?

Is it because you put out such irresistible content therefore they feel compelled to signing up to your email updates? Quite possibly and hopefully too, but as well as this you should also offer something more in return, something like an eBook or an eCourse, exclusive videos, webinars etc… any content that is useful, valuable and exclusive to them.

Read: Learn how to create your own eBook using content from your blog

People love useful and valuable content that they can take away, digest, implement and get results from straight away, well reasonably straight away. If you can figure out what that could be in your niche, you’re onto a winner already, so to help you convert more leads into opt-ins, consider providing an incentive.

2. Use Calls-to-action

OK let’s talk about calls-to-action.

You don’t have to get carried away with embedding your email opt-in form everywhere on your blog if you don’t wish to do that, if you want to restrict your opt-in form exclusively for your about page, sidebar and landing page, consider using calls-to-action to create leads to your opt-in landing page instead.

If you’re new to all this and don’t know what a call-to-action is, it’s simply a type of message or graphic element designed to actively entice and convert a user into a lead. You can find out more about calls-to-action in marketing here.

So going back to creating calls-to-action; for example, consider adding some kind of message or graphic element at the end of your posts perhaps in your most popular pages, (example: if you scroll down past the author bio of this post you will see a banner about my list building eBook, that is a call-to-action for a landing page promoting this eBook.

HelloBar for WordPress or something similar is an awesome little tool for displaying a call-to-action message and a link to your opt-in landing page, and grabbing the attention of your visitors, because it is located at the very top of your site at eye-level on every single page of your blog. Check out the one above this blog.

3. Use optimized internal linking

You should also use suitable optimized anchor text links in your blog posts to link to your opt-in landing page. Especially if the content is heavily related, not only will this help you drive targeted visitors to your opt-in page but also improve search engine rankings a little. Don’t forget to diversify your anchor text links too.

Here are some tips for optimizing internal linking:

• Anchor text relevant keywords, phrases
• Use link descriptions (let your visitors know where they’re going if they click on a link)
• Open link in new window (If you want to retain visitors on an existing page)

Read: 6 Powerful Ways To Improve Your Internal Linking

4. Guest Blogging

One of the many benefits of guest blogging on high authority and high traffic blogs is to increase targeted referral traffic to your own blog, or in this case how about your opt-in landing page. But don’t just guest blog to drop links, if you’re looking to add a link to your opt-in landing page in the body of content itself, just make sure it’s OK with the blog administrator first, some blog owners despise self-promotional links just be aware of that. If not you can always add your link in the author bio area as you know.

Check out the following post for more guest blogging tips:

Read: Guest Blogging Tips To Rock Your Socks Off

5. Promote using Social Media

Social media is off course a powerful and must-use medium for getting people to flock to your landing page without a doubt. What more could I possibly tell you that you don’t already know about the importance of social media.

A) Facebook Landing Page

Let’s start with Facebook. You might want to consider creating an irresistible offer in your Facebook page to help you create leads to your opt-in landing page, or use Facebook targeted ads, or how about using a Facebook landing page.

Using a Facebook landing is one of my favorite methods of driving people onto my list. There are two options for using a Facebook landing page effectively, you can either paste your email opt-in HTML entirely into the page with your marketing blurb, or generate leads by referring visitors back to your ‘original landing page’ on your blog, by adding some kind of promo ad and a call to action.

My advice would be to experiment to see what gives you the best leads and converts the most, and then optimize your ROI. Check out the following post on how to drive Facebook traffic to your blog pages.

Read: 6 Simple But Effective Tips for Driving Facebook Traffic to your Blog

B) Scheduling Tweets on Twitter

Twitter is a great tool for promoting and driving people to your opt-in landing page. HootSuite is the perfect marketing-tool for scheduling actionable calls-to-action tweets throughout the day or week.

Again experiment by sending different messages out at different times of the day to see what works best for you, and keep track of your campaigns using HootSuite.

Don’t forget to enable sharing buttons on your landing page too, to allow your visitors to further promote your page.

6. Use Forum Signatures

Do forum signatures still work? Yes, if you’re an active community member, and have built up a good reputation on a forum site and always regularly strive to provide value and a solution to peoples problems, then a forum signature can certainly help you get trusted visitors back to your landing page.

7. Mention your opt-in to your Podcasts and Video audiences

Finally if you are using other content marketing platforms such as video, slide presentations and podcasting to communicate with your audience, consider adding a verbal call-to-action at the end of your broadcast.

If you’re creating videos to upload to YouTube regardless of the subject matter, consider adding a link in the description box back to your email opt-in page.

Quick Recap

Let’s take a quick glance of what we’ve covered here for increasing leads to your email opt-in landing page:

1. Offer something irresistible
2. Use effective calls-to-action
3. Use an optimized internal linking strategy
4. Guest blog with consideration
5. Promote using social media
6. Use forum signatures
7. Promote your email opt-in on other content marketing platforms

So there you have it, these are just some of the things you can do to effectively help you promote your email opt-in page. I Hope that this helps and that you can implement a few of them into your list building campaign.

Don’t forget if you haven’t started to think about building an email list for your blog, check out my 10 Smart Steps To Building a Better Email List eBook.

Have a great productive week folks, or if you fancy leaving me a comment and talking about any of these tips and strategies further please do so below.

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Although Pinterest began as a personal interest social site, it is now considered to be a valuable tool for businesses as well.

There are three little-known ways to use Pinterest to promote your business that you may not be utilizing right now, and in this post we’re going to dive straight in to find out more about these little-know ways.

3 Ways To Use Pinterest to Promote Your Business

1. Switch over to a Business Account

The first way, even though it may seem so obvious, is to set up a Pinterest business account or convert your personal account to a business account.

This is kind of a new development from Pinterest, and it is a great way to drive your business forward on the site. You don’t need a special invitation and what makes it more appealing is that it is free to use.

Simply go to Pinterest.com and set up your business account, or click the image below to get started – if you’re new to Pinterest don’t worry, the site is very user friendly and it will take you less than 15 minutes to do. If you already have a personal account, Pinterest allows you to convert it to a business account. You can find out more about how to do that by following the link below.

2. Link to your other social sites

Another way to promote your business is to link your Pinterest account to your professional Facebook page and your Twitter profile. Every time you post or re-pin on your Pinterest board, your Facebook and Twitter followers will be notified.

This might sound like a generic piece of advice, but here is a little-known fact to make use of: don’t make the mistake of total self-promotion; it’s a technique that tends to turn most people off. Try to post and cross-promote products that are not directly competitive with yours, but that would complement your product or product line. For example, if you make dining tables and chairs, post assorted decorating hints that complement dining furniture, such as floral centerpieces or ambient lighting.

3. Pay close attention

My final tip for using Pinterest to promote your business is; pay attention to your followers and work on creating new followers. You need to spend some time on the site and work on building your “customer base”. Look at the people who are following your boards and who is pinning your product. Follow them back—they’ll be more inclined to re-pin from your boards in the future.

Take some time to prowl around the site and find people who would be most likely to be interested in your product and follow them. Take it a step further and find interesting and complementary items to re-pin to your Pinterest account. The act of re-pinning will almost always spark a user’s interest and they will check out who did the re-pinning.

Keep in mind that not everyone utilizes the Pinterest button on their browser bar, make it easy for people to pin your products by installing the Pinterest button on your website or blog. There are dozens of websites that allow you to download the button logo free. It is very easy to do and will make your website that much more “Pinterest” friendly to your potential customers.

Now go and make the most of Pinterest to promote your business more effectively.

Recommended reading related to Pinterest

• How to Use Pinterest to Promote Content on your Blog
• 4 Ways to Use Pinterest for Effective B2B Marketing
• Pinterest Business: How Pinterest Stays Alive
• 5 Reasons You Should Be On Pinterest

Additional resource video

If you’re looking for effective tips and ideas for using Pinterest as a marketing and promotional strategy for your products, check out the following video by Megan Auman.

image courtesy of mkhmarketing via Flickr

Author Bio

This post was written and contributed by Hayley Granton and Michael Myles. Follow Michael on Google+. Interested in learning more about how Pinterest can help your business? Find out more here. If you’d like to submit a guest post to Magnet4Marketing for consideration, please see our submission guidelines.

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I share with you 3 other powerful and essential media formats your content should be making use of. When it comes to content marketing you simply can’t just be a ‘one trick pony’ in this competitive world. You need to make use of other plentiful media platforms to help you reach out to new audiences, get more traffic and put more eyes in front of your brand, your products and services.

In addition to creating conventional ‘written and image based content’ we look at the following media formats your content should make use of -

1. Video media (YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr)
2. Slides and presentations
3. Podcasting and audio media

Make use of these powerful media formats and incorporate them into your content marketing strategy today and you’ll simply win! YouTube is the second biggest search engine on the web, so video marketing is a must. iTunes is also a massive search engine, so hosting your own podcast show means you’re putting your content in front of a greater audience. And then there’s the growing popularity of SlideShare, with more than 130,000,000 views per month!

Tune in to the show for more information… If you wish to download the show you can here.

Magnet4Marketing Podcast Session Number 5

Important links to resources mentioned in Episode 5

1. Video

Below is a list of the top video marketing tools and resources that I mentioned in the show. My favorite ones definitely Screencast ‘O’ Matic, and GoAnimate which I’m sure if you’re not already using you’ll find extremely useful.

YouTube Editor – An exceptional tool on YouTube for editing and finalizing your YouTube videos.

Camtasia – A professional screen recording and video editing tool that comes at a premium price. The software available is available for PC and Mac.

Animoto – A video creation and editing service for online and mobile use…

Stroome – Collaborating video editing community where you can polish, publish and promote your video content online.

GoAnimate Video Maker – A place where you can make your content marketing a little more creative by creating effective and interactive animated videos for your business, brand etc.

Screencast ‘O’ Matic – An awesome affordable screen recording, video editing, webcam recording software. There is a free version and a premium version too with lots of additional features.

2. Slide Presentations

Two of the slide presentations that I mentioned in the show are, Prezi which is real fun to use and quite interactive, whilst SlideShare is quite popular and a great content marketing tool for all kinds of business and entrepreneurial use.

Prezi – A powerful 3 dimensional slide presentation tool that can help you organize your media content like no other. It’s a powerful stand alone content marketing tool, and a whole of lot of fun to use, do check it out.

SlideShare – Create cool and powerful slide presentations with one of the most popular content marketing tool on the web! Ideal for bloggers and internet marketers.

3. Podcasting

Podcasting is nothing new but more people are making use of this marketing media and getting behind the mic to give their content a voice. Here are a few links to some of the sites I mention in the show.

Spreaker.com – Community for podcasters, broadcasters and musicians. Record your own podcast and build an audience of listeners, upload your own shows, music and other media.

Audacity – Free cross platform audio and recording  software (open source), one that I’m currently using for the Magnet4Marketing Podcast that I use to record, edit and cleanup before adding it to the iTunes library.

Read: Expand Your Blog Horizons by Adding a Podcast

Other links and resources mentioned in the show

1. Free eBook ’8Cornerstones Of Blogging’.

2. 10 Steps to Build a Better Email List

Hope you enjoy the show folks, please leave me a comment below as always, have a great week what ever you’re doing

Fabrizio

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As of late Facebook has become a more prominent place for getting targeted traffic and readers to my own blog, and in the past few weeks I’ve seen a steady increase in traffic from Facebook through experimenting with different ideas and strategies, which I’m going to share with you in this post shortly.

Now before I make a start and talk to you about the 6 strategies that I use, I want to tell you that to make any real impact on Facebook as far as traffic generation is concerned, you need to work at it. Just by being on Facebook alone isn’t good enough. You need to have more than just a personal profile with a few scattered friends.

Ideally you need to have an active Facebook page with a good strategy for increasing fans, and also be an active member of as many Facebook groups that are related to your niche as possible.

In addition, find as many Facebook pages from your blogging friends and colleagues and other related pages in your niche as possible and like those pages, then engage on those pages ensuring that you’re adding value to the conversations, you’ll find that people that may end up following you back on your Facebook page.

For more tips on increasing fans check out the following post -

56 Ways To Increase Your Facebook Likes

OK so now allow me to share with you 6 simple tips and ideas for increasing Facebook traffic to your blog, so grab yourself a coffee or what ever you enjoy drinking these days and let’s get started, leave the whiskey for later mind you…

Facebook traffic increase by 446% in last 14 days

6 Ways I Increased Facebook Traffic To My Blog by 446%

Tip #1. Post frequently

First of all you can’t expect to get any traffic from Facebook if you post once per month, forget it. You need to be posting at least 3 or 4 times per week, and try not to mention too much about YOU, YOU, YOU in what you share. Also share your content during peak times, which according to Mashable is between 11am to 3pm on weekdays.

Tip #2. Screen capture your latest post and share

If you’ve been pasting your blog post links to your Facebook page and groups and have been wondering why you’re not getting many people viewing your post let alone clicking on the links, then here’s a good tip.

I started doing this a few weeks ago after seeing it being done on Social Media Examiner’s Facebook page, and it’s been really effective and largely responsible for the increase in Facebook traffic to my blog in the last few weeks (though early days yet), so give it a try.

Screen capture your latest blog post, trim the excess out and upload it to your Facebook page timeline as an image. Add a unique description and of course the link to the respectful post, you really will get more people viewing your shared post, more people liking it and more people clicking on the link to your blog. Check out the contrast image below comparing one of my standard Facebook link shares to a post screen capture and link share.

Do this with your Facebook page and if possible on any Facebook group pages that you might be a member of.

Tip #3. Post shareable content

OK tip number two is a simple enough tip, but ask yourself, are you really posting the kind of stuff that your fans want to read about and share?

If not then try looking at your page timeline history or Analytics to see what kind of stuff they’re responding to. What kind of posts are getting more likes, shares and more views, then create more of those kind of shareable content and share it. Whether it’s images, videos, questions, resource links or what ever, give your fans what they really want.

A good tip for finding out what your readers enjoy the most about the things you share on your page is by posting a question poll.

Tip #4. Add your blog URL at the beginning of your about section

On your Facebook page you will see that you have an ‘about’ section. Now many people just add a description here and completely forget to add the link to their site too. Don’t be one of those people, and one more simple but essential tip is to add the URL of your blog at the beginning of your about description not at the end, let your blog URL be one of the first things your Facebook page visitors see.

Tip #5. Create your own Facebook group

I mentioned join as many Facebook groups as possible, in addition how about creating your own group on Facebook?

Yes, create your very own Facebook group, get as many people on your group as possible and allow everyone to share something useful and valuable to the community without spamming.

When you have a lot of members, share content from your own blog using the strategy I mentioned in point one, and pin your post to the top of the group for maximum exposure. Having my own Facebook group has been a good strategy that has allowed me to increase Facebook traffic to my blog. You can check out my group here and join.

Tip #6. Become an engaging leader

Finally probably the most important Facebook marketing tip that I could share with you right now, don’t just post and share your own stuff and forget about the rest, be resourceful and share other people’s useful content too. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, if you really want to impact your blog with targeted Facebook traffic, you need to be seen very much alive on the site and not dead!

That means being active every day on Facebook. Use your page to comment on other user statuses, join conversations and add value, respond to personal messages and comments on your page too, consistently promote more people to join in the shout, build relationships. Simply become an engaging leader on Facebook.

OK, that’s enough ranting from me this week, hope you’ve enjoyed the tips here once again, let me know what you think of my tips, I’ll be sharing a screen capture of the total traffic from Facebook for the month of April in a few weeks time at the end of my little case study.

If there is something that you’ve been doing for increasing Facebook traffic to your blog or website, I want to hear about it, leave me a comment below as always and share your ideas with our readers.

Have a super duper week troops, over and out for now.

Fabrizio

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You’re going to be responsible for making some tough decisions as a new internet entrepreneur. Some things will require you to say ‘yes’ I’m going to do that… whilst you’re also going to have to learn to say ‘no’, I’m not going to do that, from time to time.

On the subject of saying NO, here are 9 things to say ‘no’ to, when building a successful online business.

1. ‘No I’m not going to put it on hold any longer’ – Don’t hold back, make a start today, if you’ve been planning to start your business for some time, there will never be a better time than now.
2. ‘No I’m not going to put all my eggs in one basket’ - I’m sure you’ve heard that terminology before, in reflection to doing business online, don’t just rely one one single strategy, an example of this would be traffic generation. Most people think of doing SEO and getting traffic from Google, and somewhat neglecting other strategies. Then when an update like Panda or Penguin takes places what happens? Oh yes that traffic is demoted, ‘you placed all your eggs in one basket, the basket followed through and you’re back to zero’.
3. ‘No I’m not going to do it alone’ – Face it, you can’t do it alone and it’s not wise to either. Get as much moral support and help as possible from your family, friends and any business connections that you may have who can help you.
4. ‘No I’m not going to fail to plan ahead’ – Don’t keep your ideas stored in your head, have them on good old fashioned paper and filed away somewhere safe. Create an effective strategical plan of action for everything that you do, be organized.
5. ‘No I’m not going to blast every penny that I have on advertising alone’ – Easy mistake to do, don’t assume the only marketing tactic you need to know about is advertising, explore other more cost effective avenues, a little bit like the ‘eggs in one basket’ philosophy.
6. ‘No I’m not going to ignore social media’ – It’s too damn big to ignore for starters, your customers are on social media sites, and so should your business be.
7. ‘No I’m not going to fail to build my list’ – The money is in the list, so start building your list.
8. ‘No I’m not going to stop learning’ – Learn everything there is to possibly know about how to build, market and promote your business to your target audience and more. Just keep learning…
9. ‘No I’m not going to let the state of the economy dent my ambitions’ – Be aware of it but don’t let it drag you down. Create the most irresistible, the most compelling, the most resourceful product and promote the hell out of it.

Well that’s my ‘food for thought’ for you this week… Think you can add one more to make the list to 10? Leave your suggestions in the comment section below as always.

Enjoy the rest of your week folks and keep your head down, stay focused and move forward with your business.

- Fabrizio

Image courtesy of Flickr user: ThisParticularGreg

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