Archive for: blog
Maybe you were told the lie that if you just set up a blog people would flock to it. But owning a blog is not even half the battle. It is just the beginning. If you own a blog and you are getting traffic but it is still not enough, it is time to take things to the next level. You don’t have to be satisfied with dismal traffic numbers on your blog. Here are some ways you can give your site the boost it needs to go beyond mediocre.
- Start networking with other bloggers. So you think you can do everything yourself, hah? Well if you don’t try to network and build relationships with other bloggers in your niche you are missing out on a huge opportunity. And I don’t just mean that you should spam a bunch of bloggers with your email begging for a link. Just write them like you would a friend and ask if you can submit an article to their site. If it is well written and it fits their niche, I’m sure they will accept it. And then you have “an in” to be able to contact that site owner in the future to ask about other networking opportunities. I have seen boat loads of traffic simply by networking with other bloggers, and it’s the single best advice I could ever give on taking your blog to the next level.
- Focus on interacting with your social media fans. Whether it’s Twitter followers or Facebook fans, you should be making it a point to interact with them. If you just use your Twitter account to let people know about a new post on your blog they will hardly pay attention to it. Social media is much more powerful when it is much more personal. When you take the time to ask them a question, when you answer their questions, and when you take the time to comment on a photo, you are making your entire blog more personal to them. And the more your readers feel like they know you, the more they will trust you and come back to your site more often.
- Try something new and completely different. Most bloggers are just trying to copy someone. But this only helps the person you are copying. Why not try a technique that no one has even though of it. This can involve using video on your blog in a different way, creating unique infographics that your readers will love, or it can be as simple as having a contest now and then. Anything to break the monotony of blogging will help give you that much needed boost. Dukeo.com did something creative by having silly caricatures drawn of some of the top bloggers in the world and it generated a huge buzz in the internet marketing community. That idea has been taken, but find another one and run with it.
- Tap into new traffic sources. So your traffic levels aren’t changing much? Well where are you getting that traffic from? The internet is huge and only getting more users on a daily basis. Find out where they are and build roads to your site. You can get these traffic sources through other blogs, traffic exchanges, email lists, PPV and PPC marketing efforts, article marketing, and many other places. This game is always changing and there is always a new source of traffic out there. But don’t forget the old ones either.
Phillip is a writer for a how to tips website at www.EZhowtotips.com where you can find all kinds of answers to how to questions.
There is no doubt about the fact that blogs help to further the cause of businesses. Blogging also needs some planning, organization and clarity about the aim and purpose of the blog. The most important thing is that the blog must be just right and fit into the business perspective and appear to be an extension of it.
Points to remember while planning the blog
- How visitors will navigate the site for content- The internet visitor has a short attention span and little patience for fluff-he wants to get straight to the point, and get to the content he needs. Visitors either scroll down for the relevant title, or search from the newest. Therefore blog posts can be placed in excerpts on the home page, or titles listed, or assigned to categories which can then be searched.
- Include the search option-this simplifies things for visitors who can use keywords in their search and get straight to the relevant post.
- First timers who browse- A first time visitor would like to browse through every part of the blog. It would make things easier if internal links and references could be placed as options.
- Active posts that invite comments- Visitors seem to like their opinion being solicited and like to post their comments. The blog can decide to be an active one and also post these comments for others to see.
- Main website menu in blog- this will help visitors reach the main website straight from the blog, and will help to improve website traffic.
- Easily spotted menu- visitors should not have to search for the main menu and therefore it is better to place it on top so that it is clearly visible.
With these clarifications, the blog will take a shape and design that will help to push the blog in the preferred direction and visitors will find it easily accessible.
Blog content-when and what
The next crucial decision is about the blog content.
Frequency- Should blog posts be added every day, or alternate days, weekly or monthly? This is a tricky question, again linked to the perspective of the business owner. Experts believe that if regular posts are not seen, blogs die out and are ignored by search engines. If the blog has regular visitors then thrice a week makes sense, since they would like to read new material each time. If however, the blog just expresses expert opinions and is informative about topics then it need not be so frequent, and posts may be added as and when a new topic is introduced. Infrequent posts must not mention dates since dates may reveal that the post is old, and the reader will lose interest.
Personal or business content- Small business owners prefer personalized content to get the visitors involved about every aspect of the business. Including personal details, pictures and photos gets the visitors interested and more involved. A bigger business will have a blogging team and these blogs will be more business oriented, and used for promoting public relations, sharing news, advertising an event and so on.
Active posts with visitor participation- Comments from visitors seems like an interesting prospect but this can also have an adverse impact for a business if negative comments are posted or some unpleasant remarks are made. Comments need to be constantly monitored, and if found harmful, they must be removed before they cause damage.
Blogs offer tremendous opportunity, but it is “to each, their own”. Businesses need to figure out what suits their business the best, in terms of blog content, design and all other intricate details.
This is a Guest post by Neil Jones, who Specializes in launching ecommerce sites, he is currently plying his trade as head of marketing for eMobileScan. With 18 websites based all around Europe they are on course to be one of Europe’s largest online retailers of Industrial handheld computers and label printers like the Motorola MC75 terminal or Symbol MC9090. Neil has been an online marketer for the past 6 years and in that time he has owned and run a range of sites all built around the ecommerce platform.
Every blog needs to have goals. Without goals you are just shooting in the dark, trying to succeed without knowing what success really is. The problem most bloggers have is that they have very general goals that cannot be quantified. They say their goals are to make money, to never have to work a 9-5 job again, or to go on a big vacation every year from the money they make on their blog.
But there are 2 problems with that mindset:
1. Those are not really goals but a result of reaching set goals.
2. There are no numbers associated with those goals.
In this article I will show you some goals you need to start setting with your blog. Anything worth doing is worth doing right, and you will never hit a target if you are not aiming at it. Having no target in your blogging is like using the lottery as a retirement plan. Yes, some may hit the jackpot, but most will just end up losing money.
So what are some quantitative goals you can start setting?
Remember your goals need to be real numbers– something subjective and not objective.
Your goals can be to reach a certain number of…
1. RSS feed subscribers
2. Email subscribers
3. Twitter followers
4. Unique visitors in one month
5. Rank in Google for a given keyword
6. Indexed backlinks
You will notice that none of these goals have anything to do with money– at least not yet. You see, when all of our goals have to do with making money we lose focus on how to actually DO it. But when we focus on getting more email subscribers on our list and getting more targeted traffic to our blog then we will most certainly see a rise in our income levels as well.
One trap bloggers fall into is worrying so much on monetizing their blogs that they forget about the people that will be coming to their sites with the money. These are the people that will allow you to quite your day job, so your focus needs to be on them. What content are they looking for? What questions do they have? What will make them want to buy a product that you recommend?
Once you have determined what your goals are in real numbers you can set up a game plan. How can you reach that level of email subscribers? What do you need to do in order to get more quality backlinks to your site?
Your goals also need to have time frames.
Without a dead line for your goal to be reached you might as well not have a goal at all. For instance, I can say I want to have 20,000 Twitter followers as my goal. Then 3 years go by and I am still sitting at 5,000. There is no urgency to reach that 20,000 goal if I have until the rest of my life to reach it. The whole point in having goals is to reach them, and to make them a priority. A dead line will put some fire to your feet to get things done.
You cannot succeed in reaching a goal if you make it impossible to fail. It’s the chance that you might fail that makes reaching a goal so rewarding. You may not reach every goal. You probably won’t. And if you find you are reaching every goal you set in a short period of time then you are probably not aiming high enough. Set the bar a little higher and give yourself a challenge.
Set that time frame for those 20,000 followers. Try to reach that goal in 3 months, 6 months, or a year. Allow yourself the opportunity for failure, and then work as hard as you can to avoid it.
So to sum it all up:
1. Set goals with numbers.
2. Have deadlines with your goals.
3. Setup yourself for failure.
4. Will yourself to succeed and avoid that failure.
Guest Post by: Jonathan Souza is owner of CashCoach.net where you can find daily tips on internet marketing, social media, blogging, SEO, and more creative marketing techniques to get more traffic to your website.
The #followfriday Spanish blog compiled a report, using FilterTweeps, about Twitter profiles and people’s URL: Facebook is the preferred URL taking the 28% of Twitter users.
This blog is in charge of analyzing the #FollowFriday (or #FF) recommendations to create this type of reports, in this case combining their Twitter users database (with over 11 million users) with FilterTweeps, a powerful web app for searching users in Twitter.
The results of the URL in Twitter profiles show a preference by users to insert their Facebook home pages, taking the 28% of the total users. The other sites in the list are: Blogspot, 20%; Myspace, 13%; Tumblr, 8.3%; Orkut, 8%; Twitter (why?!), 6%. You can find the entire list here.
Bubblicons created a very cool set of icons for social media, and of course as the name says it, the bubble design is present.
We can find the complete list of anything you would like to use in your site, blog or application. Including of course: Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Technorati, RSS Feeds, Stumbleupon, sharethis, etc.
Download the entire set from this link.
Enjoy!
Time magazine created a complete list about the most relevant blogs of 2010, not only the most valuable but also the “essentials”, and the “overrated” ones.
I’m pretty sure we can find a blog that was left out in any of these three lists, and some others that did not belong here; but definitely we can find here some of the references in the “blogosphere”.
In the essentials we can find some really cool examples like TechCrunch; but the interesting are the overrated ones, the mentions were for Perez Hilton (totally agree), Fail blog, and a surprisingly Mashable.
Here are the lists:
Best Blogs
- Zenhabits
- PostSecret
- Climate Progress
- HiLobrow
- Hipster Runoff
- Kottke.org
- Cake Wrecks
- The Oatmeal
- S___ My Kids Ruined
- Deadline Hollywood
- Everything Everywhere
- The Sartorialist
- Information Is Beautiful
- The Daily Kitten
- Shorpy
- Apartment Therapy
- Double X
- Strobist
- Roger Ebert’s Journal
- The Awl
- GeekDad
- Engadget
- The Washington Note
- The Consumerist
- Pitchfork
Essential Blogs
- The Daily Wh.at
- TechCrunch
- Gawker
- Politico’s Ben Smith
- Boing Boing
Overrated Blogs
- FAIL Blog
- The Big Lead
- Perez Hilton
- Mashable
- Daily Kos
Can you make your own Top 5?
WordPress dev team released just recently a new build version: 3.0.1; which does not include any changes in the functionalities but solves errors encountered in the 3.0 version.
We’ve discussed earlier about the big impact generated by WordPress 3.0 and the positive feedback around it; 54 bugs were found on the 3.0 version with only two critical. We can track the errors and tickets generated in WordPress with WordPress Trac.
Since version 2.7, WordPress includes the “Automatic Update” option, which works smoothly. But if you need a manual update you can always follow this guide.
In case you were wondering about the WordPress counter, the number is over 11 million downloads now.
The SpeckBoy crew created and published for free a very cool set of icons to use in our website for the payment options. These icons come in eight different sizes.
We all know if we want to build a company or just a profitable site one of the things we need is offering the payment options directly on our web sites. This set of icons includes all of normal possibilities: PayPal, credit cards, check, bank transfer.
This icon sets download package contains the six icons, and include a choice of eight different sizes: 12px, 16px, 24px, 32px, 64px, 128px, 256px and 512px.
Download link here.
WordPress.org is very proud about the latest stable release of the most famous blog engine: 3.0. That’s why they’ve created a simple counter to keep track all the download activity.
Today’s counter says over 6 million downloads, and increasing really fast.
But that’s not all; WordPress.org also announced a few days ago that the plugin directory already has over 100 million downloads. Can you top that?
VaultPress is a new web app tool (beta stage) that will shield and protect your WordPress blog, providing some interesting backup and restore features; and also maintaining the security of your site.
VaultPress offers a complete backup solution for your entire blog: articles, database, files, images and more. Giving you the chance whenever a disaster occurs, a fast and reliable restore can be executed. Also VaultPress will be in charge of monitoring the blog health against any possible security risks, applying the last updates.
Another remarkable point is that the people in charge of developing and maintaining VaultPress built it using the automatic grid from which over 10 million blogs from WordPress.com rely on.
VaultPress is only available as a private beta for now, and when the final version is released, this will be a paid service (around U$S15 or U$S20).
If you were wondering about a free possibility, we’ve already evaluated BlogBackupr.
