Get More Blog Followers

You’ve started a blog, made a Facebook fan page and queued up enough tweets for the whole week. You’ve mailed your friends and put the PR machinery in motion. You rub your hands excitedly and wait for the traffic to roll in.
1. Blogging

• Blog Frequently: Higher blog frequency correlates to higher traffic. Think of each blog post as a separate door to your business. The more blog posts you have, the more doors you will spread across the internet, exponentially increasing your chances of being found by prospective customers.

• Blog Consistently: Ten blog posts a week followed by two weeks of silence is hardly a recipe for online success. Readers visit your blog with some expectations. If they see older pages without no recent updates, they will eventually give up on your blog and take their business elsewhere. Consistency is one of the fundamental values taught in this crash course on online marketing.

• Engage with Readers: The primary objective of the blog is to initiate conversations and create connections. Putting out content isn’t enough; you also need to engage your audience in a meaningful conversation. Reply to comments,

• Promote Proactively: “Build it and they will come” is hardly the recipe for online success. You have to be proactive about promoting your blog. The best way to do this is to engage with leading bloggers in your niche. Contextual blogging where you create content in response to posts published on other blogs, is the best way to go about this. Once you create your post, offer them a gentle reminder – through a tweet or site comment – about your response.

• Think Thick,  not Thin: Ask yourself – why should anyone spend fifteen minutes going through your blog every day? If you don’t have a good answer to this question, you need to upgrade your content quality pronto. Don’t litter your site with fluff; readers can smell thin content from a mile off. Give them something substantial to chew on, solve real problems, and you will find them coming back, again and again.

• Be Interesting: Boring is the bane of blogging. It doesn’t matter if you are working in logistics management for B2B companies with an expertise in paper manufacture, you must always strive to be interesting. This doesn’t mean indulging in gimmicks or pretending to be something you are not. Being interesting means being genuine and sharing things that people really care about, not just cryptic fluff littered with industry jargon.

2. Social Media

• Be Conversational: Far too many companies forget the ‘social’ part of social media. It’s not meant to be a platform to broadcast; it is meant to be a platform to share and engage in conversations. Learn to listen, not just talk to your followers and you will see some extraordinary results.

• It’s Not a Numbers Game: You may have 100,000 Twitter followers, but that counts for nothing if they aren’t really interested in your brand. Social media can often degrade into a game of chasing numbers, even if the numbers are meaningless. You will see much better results with 1,000 genuine followers than 10,000 fake profiles and ‘mass-follow’ users. This course on Facebook marketing will teach you how to get real, genuine followers.

• It Pays to be Extraordinary: Social media is like an echo chamber. Every story – good or bad – can echo a thousand fold through social sharing. Consider the example of Morton’s Steakhouse, which went out of its way to please a customer – social media blogger Peter Shankman – following a Twitter tip-off, and found its following grow by thousands.

• Be Helpful: Social media isn’t just Twitter and Facebook. It also includes websites like Quora, for example. Quora is a wonderful place to share your expertise by answering domain specific questions. Answers that go out of their way to help readers out can expose you to a massive audience. The same applies for any other form of social media.

• Engage in Real Time: Social media can’t be a ‘set it-forget it’ proposition. You can’t simply queue a set of tweets in the morning and be done for the day. Getting real results requires engaging with your audience in real time. If a new story breaks out, your readers will want your opinion now, not 12 hours later when the story is no longer relevant.

• Discover New Platforms: Are you a social media follower or a social media pioneer? Every year, some new web app becomes the darling of the crowds. A couple of years ago, it was Tumblr. Last year, it was Pinterest. This year, it appears to be Vine. The problem is that popular platforms tend to get crowded very quickly, making it that much harder to gain airtime. Instead of being late to the party, keep looking for new, yet undiscovered platforms that could help propel your brand. This will require you to be proactive, but you’ll have a huge first-mover advantage if the platform actually hits prime time.

Except Google Analytics registers barely a handful of new users and your follower count grows at the pace of the Soviet economy. You scratch your head and wonder: what am I doing wrong?

Building a following online isn’t a matter of creating a set number of blog posts or tweeting x number of times per day. It is about connecting with people and enriching their lives. It requires changing old perspectives and adopting new values, such as:

Your blog is the foundation of your online presence. This is what readers will turn to when they want to find out about your company. Poor grammar, sloppy copywriting, and thin content will make it that much harder to gain readers’ trust and grow influence online. Your first priority, therefore, should be to establish your blog as a paradigm of quality

Take account of the following when you start your blog:

Learn how to run a successful WordPress blog with this excellent course!

Three years ago, social media was just another buzzword marketers like to trumpet from time to time.

Today, it is the backbone of many a marketing departments.

Social media has matured in the last few years to become a legitimate marketing channel. The growth of mobile and the mainstream adoption of services like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest have pushed social media towards greater relevancy. This is the reason why Facebook had revenues of $1.46bn last year, and why Twitter projects revenues in excess of $1bn by next year.

Having a social media presence is more than tweeting from time to time. To grow real influence, you need to adopt certain strategies:

Running a startup? This course will teach you everything you need to know about social media marketing!

Building a following online is as much about values as it is about learning specific techniques and skills. Focusing on short-term results will never get you very far. Adopt values that give back something substantial to your users, and you will develop a following that won’t fade away like an itinerant monsoon.

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Writting A Better Content For Blog Post

One of the most key aspects of any successful blog is the ability to create content that keeps drawing people back to your blog. I’ve written so many posts on this topic and know that ‘excellent blog content’ means something different on every blog – as a result I won’t pretend that what I write in this post will be a definitive guide to writing great blog content.

However I can tell you five things that I wish I knew in my early days of blogging about writing content (with a few links for further reading).

5 Things I Wish I’d Known Earlier about Writing Content for a Blog

1. The Power of Titles – the title has the ability make or break a blog post. It impacts how (and if) it’s found in search engines and social bookmarking sites, it influences whether people visit your blog in News Readers, it affects whether people leave a comment and is vital in whether people actually read what you have to say. Read more about using Titles Effectively on Blogs.
2. The Viral Nature of Lists – a single well written list post can launch a blog to great heights in the blogosphere. While the prolific nature of lists in the blogosphere can also mean your lists get ignored, I find that when writing the same content as a list that you write as an essay like article the list will almost always get more attention. Read more about why lists are great for getting traffic to your blog.
3. The Importance of Being Original - perhaps the best lesson that I ever learned as a bloggers was that people are drawn to others who speak their mind, who have something unique to say and who say it in a creative and fresh way. Say what everyone else is saying in the same way that everyone else is saying it and you’re almost guaranteed of being largely ignored. Read more about how to avoid joining the echo chamber and saying something original.
4. The Value of Well Formated Content – people don’t read content on line in the same way that they read content in other mediums. Online readers tend to scan content. As a result if you place visual cues in your posts that draw the eye to important points you’ll find people stick with you longer into your posts. Read more on How to make your content Scannable
5. The Impact of a Good Image - another simple technique for providing an additional point of interest in your posts is to provide something visual. I don’t use images in every post on this blog but find that when I do that those clicking through on the post in my feed reader increases. Images have the power to communicate in ways that words cannot – use them. Read more on Using images to make your posts POP in RSS feeds.

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Get Images Related To Your Post Content

How to Get Images for Your Content

So now that you have some good ideas of what kind of images to include in your content, here are some tools and resources to get those images.

Eye Catching Photography

The following are great sources for eye-catching photography.

• Creative Commons Images – My favorite resource is Flickr’s Advanced Search to find eye-catching photography. Be sure to check the box to Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content and include a photo credit with the image you use.
• Royalty-Free Stock Photos – If you can’t find what you are looking for through Creative Commons, your next best bet is sites like iStockphoto that allows you to buy a photo for use in your website content and designs.

There are tons of other resources – simply search for creative commons images or stock photography on Google to find them, but the above are a great place to start. Also, if you find a photo you want to use but it isn’t creative commons licensed, all hope is not lost. Just email the owner of the photo / photographer and let them know what you had in mind. You might get a great response!

People Photos

Whenever I need to grab a photo of a person, I tend to go with their Twitter profile photo as it is one they have chosen to represent themselves online. Other places to grab a photo include:

• A person’s Gravatar (if they have commented on your blog).
• The author bio page on their blog.
• The photo on their corporate bio page.

Or, if you prefer, you can contact the person and ask them to send you a photo of their choosing for an upcoming piece of content you are working on. Generally, if you let them know you are including them on a list or a positive review, they will be happy to oblige!

Screenshots

If you don’t have a program like Snagit or similar to get screen captures, then you have some free options to work with.

• Screenshots on Windows Based PCs – I tend to rely on the Print Screen (Prt Scr) button on my keyboard to do a screen capture, then resize and crop it in Gimp, a free image editor.
• Screenshots on Mac OS Machines – If you’re running a Mac, you can use shortcuts such as Command-Shift-3 to take a screenshot and save it on your desktop, Command-Control-Shift-3 to take a screenshot and save it to your clipboard, or use other shortcuts listed here. Gimp also works on Mac for editing your screenshots.
• Website Previews – If you use Safari and need an image of a website, then you’ll be happy to know that Safari actually takes screenshots of websites in .png and .jpg format. In Windows 7, you can find these previews underC:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Local\Apple Computer\Safari\Webpage Previews. You can then edit the website’s capture in Gimp to fit your post.

Windows 7 also has a Snipping Tool that allows you to grab screenshots easily, but I have found those captures are very low quality, so depending on your needs, you might want to use one of the above options instead.

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Importance Of Images And Content In Blog Posts

Remember how much you would have rather read a book with lots of pictures versus one with only text when you were a kid? The same applies, even now.

A picture speaks a thousand words, and when it comes to your content, that cannot be truer if your image is relevant. Images add richness to your content, and make readers more willing to read a long article. And they have great SEO value too!

Best Images for Content

The following are the types of images you can use to add an extra bit of pizazz to any blog post, article, or other piece of online content.

Eye Catching Photography

That photo grabbed your attention, right? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been lured into reading a post simply because it had an eye-catching photo attached to it. The key is to find something that either relates to your content or proves your point. In this case, my point was to catch your eye. Some examples include:

• An article on how to calm the mind including photos of peaceful gardens or open meadows.
• An article on how to build a treehouse including photos of awesome treehouse designs.
• An article on the perfect cupcake recipe including photos of the ingredients and the finished product.

Relevant photos can help the audience really feel the point you are trying to make with your content as well as breaking up the text making the story seem like less of a daunting read.

People Photos

Have you ever noticed that you tend to trust a Twitter user or Facebook friend more if they have a photo of themselves as opposed to a cartoon, logo, or other non-personal bio image?

The same goes with content. Readers love to see the face behind whatever topic is being covered in a piece of content. This includes:

• Author bio photos for blog posts and articles.
• Photos of a person who authored a book or an eBook that you are reviewing.
• Photos of people included in a list, such as the top designer bloggers on Twitter.

Including people photos will increase the reader’s engagement and trust with your content as it lets them know that there is a real person on the other side of the screen creating the content.

Screenshots

Screenshots, in my opinion, are essential when it comes to two particular types of content – how to articles and lists.

How-To Screenshots

You can write the greatest tutorial on how to use a piece of software, but if it doesn’t include screenshots, it will make the reader still feel that the software may be to complicated for them to understand. For example, I could say that, when editing photos in Gimp, you should scale the image to the appropriate size to fit the article, such as I did with the above photo in this post to make it 570px wide. Or I could say that and then include the following:

Including the screenshot directs readers to the right menu option to correspond with my instructions, helping readers get to know the software before they get to it and give them a reference point if they get stuck.

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Tips to Make your Blog Perform Better on Search Engines

Getting high search engine rankings for your blog takes work. A lot of work. While we all know the benefits of SEO, sometimes there just isn’t enough time to focus on both SEO and developing a quality product or      business.

What can you do? You could hire a SEO consulting firm like Outspoken Media, but if you lack a budget, this article is perfect for you.

Everyone knows that creating fresh, engaging content helps build a loyal following and attract links. However, if you’re looking to improve your SEO with no budget, you can tweak your existing articles to prime it for high search engine rankings.

Now I’m not saying that your website will shoot up into Google’s top 3. I’m also not going to tell you to stuff as many keywords into your post as possible. If I did, that would be cheesy and I would be lying.

Instead, I will say this: if you focus on these 7 key areas of on-page SEO, you can improve your search engine rankings. How do I know this? Because it worked for me.

Conduct Keyword Research

You could try and guess what what people type when they use a search engine, but with free Keyword Research tools available, it’s wasted effort.

What are some of the best, free keyword tools? You could use the Google tool, or one that I like is Wordtracker. In addition, you can use this tool from Google to research trends in search phrases.

If you’re looking for a premium keyword research tool, look no further thanSEObook.com, SEOmoz.org, or Raven Tools.

Focus on Low-Competition Keyphrases

Don’t waste your time going after highly competitive keywords with on-site optimization because you won’t be able to nab them.

So, how do you know if a keyword or keyphrase is competitive?

Take one of the phrases you found while conducting keyword research, type it into Google search using quotations (ex. “how to install Thesis Theme Framework”), and then look at the number that appears below the search box.

If the number is large (over 75,000), I’d avoid it because it’s highly competitive. If it’s small, I’d focus on it because it should be much easier to score a top ranking.

Note, just because a keyword or phrase isn’t competitive doesn’t mean it won’t send traffic. And if it doesn’t send much traffic, that doesn’t matter either because the traffic it does send is highly targeted. For example, I once optimized a post that landed the #1 position in Google and it helped me make a $1500 sale.

Choose One Keyword or Phrase, and then Write or Tweak Your Article

While you want a keyphrase with little competition, you’ll also want it to have some search traffic (greater than zero). Then, either write a post that targets that keyphrase or go back through some of your older articles and tweak them for a specific phrase.

I’m not saying that you should let that keyphrases dictate what you write about. Instead, find a phrase that relates to your topic, and craft a helpful article around it. Remember, quality content matters. The higher the quality, the better chance it will garner links and then rank in search engines.

For example, if you run a blog about Kangaroos, and one of your researched keyphrases is “what do kangaroos eat”, then you might want to write a blog post about that.

Use Your Keyphrase In Your Post Title and Title Tags

Yep, simple as that. Use the keyphrase in the title of your post and in your title tags.

Repeat the Keyphrase in Your Article.

You want to build a loyal following, so don’t go crazy with this. Instead, what I mean is, if you want to rank for your keyphrase, you must use it. Avoid creating nicknames or trying to be clever. In the end, clear and concise wins. As a rule of thumb, try to include your keyphrase early on in your article or in a H2 tag. While this may have little impact on your rankings, it will help show your readers that they’re reading the right piece of content.

Use the Keyphrase in your Meta Description tags

Using keywords in your meta description tags does not help you rank higher. However, when you include them, when people search on Google for a specific keyword, Google bolds the keyphrase in the search results. So, while it may not help you rank higher, it will encourage people to click on your search results.

Find Images Related to Your Keyphrase

Think about it. If you were looking for information on Kangaroos, when you visited a website, would it make sense to have a picture of a Kanagaroo on it? Absolutely.

So, when you publish your articles, ensure that you find related images and use your keyphrase in the alt description of your image. This is beneficial for two reasons: first, it helps search engines see that you’re trying to create a complete piece of content, and second, it’s great for accessibility.

Other SEO Factors

There are, of course, other factors that influence your search engine rankings that I don’t talk about here. However, if you want to focus on building your business and creating great content, these 7 areas can help kick-start your SEO without becoming a full-time job. If you have any other quick hints that you think people will find useful, feel free to leave a comment.

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Tips for increasing pageviews

Engaging your readers is nothing but how many pages a single user visits on your blog at a time. The more page views you get, the better will be your search engine rankings. But unfortunately many bloggers fail to achieve this, which results in a higher bounce rate. In this post i will share some of the best tips that will help you to keep your readers engaged and kick you blog page views like a sky rocket…

1. Quality Content
This is the most simple and important thing to remember if you want to increase your page views. If the reader likes your article, he will obviously stay on your blog for more than 5 minutes browsing digging your blog. Useful, original and interesting will always leave your readers hungry for more. So it time that you should work out on your blog, writing quality content for your readers. Its simple, you give the readers, and the readers will give what you want.

2. Excerpts on Homepage.
You might have seen many blogs which shows full post on the homepage. I really don’t like these blogs because I have to scroll all way down to find whats more ahead. This will gradually decrease your page views. Showing excerpts are the best way to increase page views and manage post on the home page highlighting multiple posts.

3. Create Catchy Titles.
Make sure you create a catchy article which grabs your reader attention and force them to read the whole article. Its also important if you are showing excerpts on your homepage or front page. Eye grabbing titles are more viewed both on site and of site if shared them on twitter, facebook and others

4. Create Series Posts
Series posts is just like a list of articles related to a single topic. The idea of series post is to keep your readers more engaged with your blog for a certain topic. The reader might come back to your blog to complete the series where he left out or he might also subscribe to your blog for the series update. This is a great way to keep your reader engaged. But be careful to list all the post in the series.

5. Improve Load Time.
You might not wanna overlook this section. Because loading time plays an important role for page views. The less loading time your blog takes, the more page views you get. And the more load time it takes, the higher will be your bounce rate. A reader will quickly bounce of the page if the page doesn’t loads in no more than 7 secs. So its important that should also work out on your blog HTML and CSS for more page views.

6. Interlinking.
Interlinking means to link you previous articles with the current one. Now there are two advantage of interlinking. First it would help you to rank your articles higher in search engines, as interlinking works like a vote to the article. And second one would keep your readers engaged with your blog. If you are writing something that relates to the previously written article, just link to them. For example, you can see above how I linked to my previous article.

7. Easy Navigation
Make sure your blog is easy to navigate. Don’t confused your readers with confused links all over the blog. Some of your readers might be interested to dig your blog and look for other interesting articles. Display your blog categories in the navbar, add tags cloud, display blog archives as hierarchy. Make sure you do create an optimized sitemap or a archive page where you show all your A-Z post.

8. Display Related Post
You might have read this many times, but this is the most common practice to keep the reader engaged to your blog. If the reader reads your full post from start to end and finds your article more interesting, he/she will surely click on one of the related post below the post. As you can see below I have added the related post widget which shows 4 related articles to this topic. Don’t display more than 5 articles, this might irritate the reader seeing a huge list of related links.

9. Categorize your Article.
This is the most important aspect if you are a blogger user and displaying related post below your article. As you know blogger allows you to categorize your post by using labels only. You would mess up your article and blog if you use more than 2 or 3 unrelated labels.
For instance if you have written an article on Health and Fitness and you have labelled it with “health” and “astrology“, this would display articles related to health and astrology too. Now why a reader would be interested to read an article on astrology if he wants to read more health related articles.
So its important that you categorize your post with a single label or a two at most, related to the first one. This might not be a problem with WordPress users. You can automatically generate related post with the plugin.

10. Featured Post.
Readers are most likely to visit those pages which are most popular or the most commented on a blog. You can show your popular articles or the most commented articles in your sidebar, or as a jquery slideron the homepage. Its also important that you should keep these post optimize for more page views.

11. Search Box.
This is an important element for any bloggers blog. The search box should be placed where its easily viewable to the readers like at the top navbar or at the sidebar. The Search box helps your readers to find and locate your previous articles on your blog in turn increasing your page views.

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