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- How to Generate Massive Traffic, Excitement, and Even Jealousy with a Hollywood-Style Launch Trailer
This guest post is by Jon Morrow of boostblogtraffic.com.
You know that feeling you have when you’re onto something big?
Your heart is thump, thump, thumping, your mind races down the roads of future possibilities, and you drift through the day with strange grin plastered on your face, like someone shot you up with happy juice, and you’ve yet to come down. It’s a wonderful place to be, and if you’d come looking for me on October 7, 2011, it’s exactly where you would’ve found me.
Seven days into the launch for my new blog, I already had 1,740 email subscribers. I’d picked up over 1,000 new twitter followers, hundreds of whom were enthusiastically gabbing about me to all their friends. I also had 673 likes and dozens of comments on a new Facebook fan page.
Oh, and did I mention I didn’t write a single blog post?
It’s true. My blog consisted of two pages, a video, and over 200 comments from readers who were so excited they could barely sit still.
What’s more, a half-dozen A-list bloggers sent me the direct messages on Twitter, telling me how impressed they were. One of them even said he was jealous. I was shocked. My baby blog was only seven days old, and already people were envious.
Sounds impossible, right?
Normally, it is. For many bloggers, getting traffic and respect is an incremental process, built one blog post at a time over a period of months or years.
It takes patience. It takes perseverance. It takes lots and lots of hard work.
But what if it didn’t have to be that way?
What if you go from a nobody to the center of attention in your industry in a matter of weeks?
What if you could become an authority without writing a single word?
What if you could get hundreds or even thousands of people talking about you, generating a massive tidal wave of traffic that carries you for years to come?
In our world, it’s unheard of. Blogs just aren’t built that way.
So, to learn how, I had to visit another world, a world inhabited by the brilliant and the beautiful, a world where billions of dollars are won or lost based solely on the strength of an idea, a world where nobodies transforming into superstars isn’t just normal but routine.
What is this strange place?
Chances are, you’ve probably heard of it.
It’s called Hollywood.
The Hollywood guide to blog promotion
Have you ever really paid attention to the way Hollywood creates blockbuster movies?
Copyright itestro - Fotolia.com
Yes, they spend gazillions of dollars on advertising. Yes,
they have an opening night where the cast turns out in all their glitz and glamour for a showing of their film to the Who’s Who of the movie biz. Yes, they have an army of crackerjack marketers creating special promotions, building strategic alliances, and merchandising everything imaginable.But it all starts with a trailer. Editors chop two or three hours of film into a 30-150 second spot designed to leave you spellbound and begging for more.
And the stakes are high.
A good trailer gets millions of people excited about seeing the film, where a bad one confuses, or worse, bores viewers into believing the film will suck. A good trailer captures the attention of the media and creates a blitz of free publicity, where a bad one is ignored or even made fun of. A good trailer is the starting gun for a blockbuster movie that rakes in hundreds of millions of dollars, where a bad one is a bullet to the brain of a project doomed from the start.
Good or bad though, every movie has one, and that’s because people need them. Nobody wants to go into a movie having no idea what it’s about. They need you to condense it down for them. They need to make it easy to decide. And so they give you 30-150 seconds to do it.
In the movie business, it’s accepted, but I couldn’t help thinking…
What if it’s true for other media too?
If you’ve ever looked at the percentage of new visitors who subscribe to your blog, you’ve probably been shocked by how abysmal it is.
The average blogger only gets 1-2% of new users to subscribe, and even the rock stars who do everything perfectly only get about 5%. To improve the percentage, there are several things you can do, like creating landing pages, offering incentives, or installing pop-up reminders to subscribe, but there’s only so far you can go.
Here’s why:
You’re making it too difficult to decide.
Visitors have to figure out what your blog is about, they have to read your content, and they have to decide whether or not it’s interesting to them. The whole process takes ten minutes or more, and that’s too long. The truth is, Hollywood has figured it out: you only have 30-150 seconds, and after that, they’re gone.
So how can you make the whole process shorter?
Well, you can’t. The problem is, you’re asking people to watch the movie before they see the trailer, and most of them decide it’s not worth the trouble.
To make it work, you really need to reengineer the process from the ground up. And that’s exactly what I decided to do.
How I got 1,740 subscribers in seven days
When I launched Boost Blog Traffic, I built my whole strategy on an insane idea:
In the beginning, the best way to get subscribers is to publish nothing.
No blog posts. No podcasts. No content at all.
Instead, I would offer a short video trailer, very similar to what Hollywood releases for movies. I would give visitors the bare minimum they need to subscribe. I would spend several months promoting the trailer before writing a single blog post.
Pretty much the same way Hollywood does it.If you look at the trailer, you’ll see Hollywood’s fingerprints there too. It has dramatic music. It has slick animation. It has shamelessly over-the-top quotes from social media big shots.
And then it asks for a decision:
Will you subscribe, or will you leave?
A lot of people resist asking that question, because the answer is scary. What if they decide to leave? What if you end up with nothing? What if everybody thinks you’re an idiot?
I wish I had some comforting truism to offer in response, but the truth is, it happens. You could fail. But what’s worse: finding out your idea sucks after only a couple of weeks or waiting three years before you finally face the facts?
Personally, I’d rather do it fast. Rip off the Band-Aid, have a good cry, and then get back to business.
If it works, it’s worth it. If it doesn’t, it’s still worth it, because you learned some valuable lessons without paying too high a price.
But this whole idea of starting slow and waiting for things to snowball?
It’s silly. You’ll wait months or even years to find out if your idea is going to work.
A far better approach is to put up a simple website, release a snazzy trailer, promote the hell out of it for a few weeks, and see if you can talk anyone into signing up. If you can, you’ve got a winner, and if you can’t, cut your losses as quick as you can.
Here’s why:
You either go big or go home
Some people are going to get pissed at me for saying this, but I believe the blogosphere is changing.
Gone are the days where anybody can build a successful blog. Gone are the days where you can start writing and expect anyone to pay attention. Gone are the days where you can tinker around with it on your lunch hour and expect it to become a full-time career.
The new rule is, “Go big, or go home.”
To be successful, you need big talent. To be successful, you need big connections. To be successful, you need a big launch event that makes everyone sit up and pay attention.
You can be releasing a movie, a blog, a book, or whatever. It doesn’t matter. Regardless of the media, the rules are the same.
If you want to be big, start big.
Launching your blog with a trailer is one way to do that. It creates buzz, excitement, maybe even a little jealousy, because let’s face it, putting together a Hollywood-style trailer is hard.
If you’re wondering about the technicalities of how to do it, I’ll tell you everything you need to know next week. In the meantime, go watch the trailer, study how the subscription process works, and then copy it.
Nobody gets bonus points for originality. Success is about doing what works, period, full stop.
And by getting 1,740 subscribers in seven days, I’d say it works pretty well. So give it a shot.
We’ll talk more next week.
Jon Morrow is also on a mission to help good writers get traffic they deserve. If you're one of them, check out his upcoming blog about (surprise!) blogging.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
How to Generate Massive Traffic, Excitement, and Even Jealousy with a Hollywood-Style Launch Trailer
Переслать - How to Grow Gracefully
This guest post is by Courtney Carver of bemorewithless.com.
If anyone tells you that launching a blog doesn’t take blood, sweat, and tears, get your money back. There is no doubt that launching and growing a successful blog takes time, energy, and dedication. There are so many recommendations about how to grow your readership that you might find yourself focusing on the wrong things to start.
When you start your blog, you will spend time …
- Comparing: Not only will you spend time comparing your stats from day to day and sometimes hour to hour, you’ll also compare your progress to other bloggers that are just starting out. Even worse, you’ll compare your stats to the stats of seasoned bloggers.
- Tweaking: Your blog will never look just right. Adding widgets and plugins and researching fonts and headers can become a full-time job.
- Wishing: Every time you tweet a post or publish something new, you’ll wish and hope for new readers. Lots of them.
Image is author's own, copyright onemillionforgood.com
You can easily make better use of your time by writing great content. I know that seems simple, maybe boring, and a little vague, but that is what it takes. Every post should be your very best post. If you are guest posting give them your very best post. If you only have five subscribers, give them your very best post.
While you may think you will run out of your best, that you’ll have nothing left to say, the opposite happens. Every time you write your heart out, better words appear. Each time you commit to creativity through writing, another idea materializes. If you’ve thought about saving your best work until you have more subscribers or are writing for a bigger blog, rethink and release your very best work.
Instead of spending your time doing meaningless tasks to force success, grow gracefully.
- Say thank you. If a reader emails feedback, thank them. When someone gives you unsolicited advice, say thank you.
- Support others. Get to know a group of bloggers who write about something similar. Comment on their blogs, share their posts and grow together.
- Forget your stats. It’s important to know about your readers and traffic, but not at the beginning. Try a stat sabbatical and see how your mood changes and your writing improves.
- Report accurate numbers. Social proof can help the growth of your blog but understand the difference between pageviews, readers and subscribers. Readers stop by. Subscribers engage. If you have 10,000 pageviews, you do not have 10,000 readers or subscribers. Explain your numbers clearly and accurately.
- Solve problems. Write about what you know, but use reader comments and feedback to solve problems. Combine the readers’ need and your experience to create a useful post that readers want to talk about.
- Let viral happen. You can spend time trying to figure out how to write a post that will go viral, but then you aren’t writing for your readers. The best way to go viral is to write for them. They will spread your message.
- Connect. Guest post, collaborate, and ask for help and offer help.
- Enjoy. Love what you write about and enjoy the process instead of measuring your success by the results.
- Engage. Use social media to talk with people, not at people.
- Don’t apologize. If you miss a scheduled post, or a few, don’t apologize for your absence.
- Monetize thoughtfully. Instead of becoming an affiliate for every product available, choose items that you love and genuinely recommend for your reader. When you create products, think about the end user. What will they gain? What do they need? How will this help them?
- Be humble. You didn’t do this alone. Your hard work is the cornerstone of your success, but without readers that support you and share your work, you will not grow.
Understanding social media and SEO may contribute to your growth. A beautiful design and pretty font will enhance the user experience. But nothing will give you a solid foundation and opportunity for growth like writing for your reader and being graceful and grateful.
What do you think? Does grace have a place in growing a successful blog?
Courtney Carver is an artist & consultant specializing in simplicity for life and business. Subscribe to her business blog and connect with her on Twitter.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Переслать - Warning: Are You Doing the Bare Minimum?
This guest post is by Paul of http://junhax.com.
Bachelor’s degree . . . bare minimum.
A Master’s degree is becoming, well . . . the bare minimum.
Posting on your blog once a day, tweeting a few times, responding to a few people, responding to a few emails . . . bare minimum.
The truth is it always seems like we are never doing enough—and it’s true, some of us aren’t.
We have huge hopes and dreams of becoming the best in our field, with a determination that is immutable and highly focused.
The problem: how do we know if we’re doing the bare minimum, and what can we do to surpass it?
Let’s talk about it in blogging terms, although this way of thinking applies to all fields.
Blueprint for great content
When I started to blog I had a firm belief that writing amazing content, connecting to social media and tweeting posts, and frequently publishing would get my name out there. It’s true to an extent, because that is just bare minimum.
In order to prove to your readers that you’re writing with heart and patience you must keep these points in mind:
- Take time your time when writing. The way you’re reading it now will be completely different tomorrow morning—until you fully perfect and construct what you want to say.
- Make sure your headline is as powerful as your content.
- Writers are prodigious notetakers. Use your notes, round up some ideas that you came up in the past, and put them to use.
- Have others read your posts. Listen to their feedback, and write it down to compare what others are saying.
- Open the door and write. Close the door and write.
- Read it out loud over and over, as if you were in front of thousands of students who have no clue what the subject is about.
- Avoid the traditional steps of writing, editing, then publishing. Publish it the next day to be positive that what you created is valuable.
- The more time spent scrutinizing your posts, the more effort you are putting into it to make sure that it appeals to your audience, contains no errors, and delivers a powerful message.
- Don’t just supply the reader with paragraph after paragraph. Be unique in your content delivery and design.
- Break up your paragraphs. Use bullet points, numbers, separate important ideas and sentences to guide the readers’ eyes.
- Link to other blogs or posts that are relevant to what you’re saying. Supply the reader with various options on the subject to expand their knowledge.
- Most importantly: put your heart, blood, sweat and tears into it. Do want you your posts to last forever, or just today?
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."—Robert FrostBeing part of the conversation
When you comment other peoples’ blogs, are you leaving a message where people can follow up, and maybe even learn something, or relate?
“Oh, I love this post. Thanks for sharing!”
Lame. Yawn. Tell them why you love it, how it affected your life or work, and possible tips and ideas that were not included that you can add and recommend to fellow readers.
Draw attention to yourself. If you took your comment and compared it to the other 100 comments, does it look exactly the same? Are you sure blending in is what you want to do? Appear as an intellectual, not some robot.
Networking with purpose
Are you networking with purpose? Is your heart in it? Are they just some face online, or a potential subscriber . . . or a friend?
You’re a writer, and you know just as well as I do the satisfaction that comes with feedback. It’s the ultimate reward and sensation knowing that someone read your post and was moved. You did your job as a writer: to communicate ideas.
Find a network of fellow bloggers and writers that you enjoy reading and going back to. You will not become popular all alone, in the corner of your room.
If your focus is finance, money, and business, go out and look for all the top bloggers and people in your niche who speak that language.
Relate with them, learn from them, and most importantly: speak to them.
I went for six months of blogging without connecting or speaking to one person. After a while the mold was broken, and I was talking to a few bloggers here and there via Twitter or website; but I was slowly building a relationship.
Soon, it wasn’t weird to ask for advice or some thoughts, or just simply say hello.
The simple truth
"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."—Oscar Wilde
It’s so true it hurts. If the results you’ve been getting are steady, and nothing has changed for you in a long time, then it’s time to see if what you’re doing is the bare minimum.
You need to exceed, lower your shoulder, and smash through the wall that is preventing you from being great. You need to be hungry for it, though. You cannot have dreams to be the best at something, and not lose sleep over that goal.
If you truly believe that you can be the best and greatest, and your work shows that you put your heart and soul into it, eventually you will earn that success; but you have to keep clawing and fighting for new ways to be above average.
You have to create a mindset that many people lack. It’s not the simplest thing to do, but it is absolutely necessary in the world we live in today to become remarkable.
Paul is a writer/blogger on http://junhax.com. He focuses on sharing insightful stories and advice for writing, blogging, and personal development. You can also follow him at @junhax.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Warning: Are You Doing the Bare Minimum?
Переслать - 10 Writing Mistakes that Will Guarantee Your Blog's Failure
This is a guest post by Gregory Ciotti of SparringMind.com.
You have the ideas.
You have the expertise.
You have the ability to project them well on your blog, and you are quite confident in your writing ability.
Yet, unknowingly, you could be building a sinking ship, punctured by these ten writing mistakes that will doom any blog to failure.
You needn’t be disheartened, however, as any blogger can avoid them. It just takes awareness of their existence, and a keen focus on giving the reader what they want, at all costs.
Do you make any of these ten fatal writing mistakes on your blog?
1. You have nothing to say
When blogging, you have to understand that in order to succeed, you need to give your readers what they want.
So then, what is it that readers really want?
They want you to provide them a solution to what they are seeking, even if what they are seeking is nothing but entertainment.
They also want to hear what you have to say. This doesn’t mean that they are intrigued about what you had for lunch. But they do want a personality behind the words they are reading. Otherwise, there is no connection that they can make to the words, and what they are reading becomes empty.
Making sure you have something to say makes writing easier and faster. When you have nothing to say, you are forced to write sentences that sound meaningful but deliver nothing.
2. You’re not specific
Consider the following two headlines:
- How I Got A Lot Of Facebook Fans
- How I Grew My Facebook Fan Page To 6,683 Fans In 4 Months
Which one of those do you think is going to offer the most in-depth information? The second one, as it called to our innate desire to hear the specifics.
The reason readers love to see details and examples is because they value their time, and they are not interested in hearing another cookie cutter “how-to” that provides no examples to show whether or not it works.
In your writing, your examples can sell your whole post. If you can back up the claims of your headline with a detailed example, you will have your readers reading from top to bottom, and then anxiously awaiting your next post.
How can you lead your readers if you don’t lead by example?
3. Your word choice is too complex
Almost any time I encourage people to write simply on blogs, they always disagree by saying that simple writing is boring. But they fail to see my point.
Articulate and meticulously crafted writing very much has its place, but sometimes bloggers fail to realize their medium and their audience.
It’s not that the web is only suited for simple writing, but it definitely benefits from it.
Getting your point across can be much more effective if you cut out the fluff, and will guarantee more people will read your posts from beginning to end—a critical part of being a successful blogger that people await updates from.
Why not put this to the test yourself? In your next post, keep it simple, using longer words only when other more direct options will not do. I guarantee you will find writing on your topic more enjoyable, and you will get to the point of each post far more quickly.
4. Your paragraphs are too wordy
This point is very closely related to the one above. Again, I feel a disclaimer is needed here. I’m not saying a long, comprehensive post is not suited for the blogospohere—in fact these types of posts add a lot of value and are often a great way to show your talent.
What I’m talking about is the dreaded fluff. In the same way fluff causes you to write with unnecessary adjectives and words you had to use a dictionary to look up, it can also wreak havoc on your writing structure.
In blogging, you should keep your paragraphs short for the same reason you should keep your wording simple: they are easier for people to read and understand.
The last thing you want to create on your posts is confusion. Your writing style needs to give people what they want, and people do not want to be confused—they want information. Give it to them.
5. You keep using the passive voice
Speaking of what readers want, did you know that in English, readers prefer the Subject, Verb, Object sentence structure? This is called the “active voice.”
“Long sentences annoy readers.” English readers like that.
“Readers are annoyed by long sentences.” That..? Not so much.
Did you also notice how the second option there—the passive voice—makes simple statements use a couple of unnecessary words? This can add up over a long blog post.
Although you cannot always use the active voice, as a blogger, you should try to as often as possible.
6. Your descriptions are empty
Worse than lacking details, is trying to force descriptions onto examples that don’t need them.
In writing these are known as “qualifying words,” and they include the likes of: very, little, rather. They add nothing to the meaning of your sentences, and take away their impact by lengthening them for no reason.
For instance, you could say this style of writing “is basically a little annoying, rather, there is very little reason you should be writing like this.”
Yikes! As Mark Twain once said:
“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
8. You often ramble in your writing
Let me tell you about rambling, it’s like this one time I was trying to come up with a post for problogger.net about huge writing mistakes bloggers make, and the power ended up going out before I could save my post, and I thought maybe I should write an entire post about saving your writing, because it’s really important for bloggers to make sure that there best thoughts aren’t erased by some sort of haphazard…
Okay, I’ll stop.
Notice a trend in these writing problems? You aren’t giving readers what they want. Maybe, maybe, you run a blog where readers come around just for your rants. Most likely, however, you don’t—your readers come for information, and they come for examples, as always.
Don’t ramble: give them what they want.
9. Your blog is repetitive
Bloggers with specific niches everywhere just did a double-take.
No my fellow blogger, you can keep writing about tech, food, fitness, or naked skydiving until the end of your days for all I care. The danger in repetitiveness is not the subject matter, but the presentation.
How-to posts, all day, every day, may be what you want to do, but it can become a drag for readers who come back often. As you progress and continue writing for your blog, you may find yourself sick of writing these posts as well.
Instead, mix up the type of posts you put out. Text interviews, critiques, a huge resource list—the types of post that you can write are endless. Even better, change the entire medium in which you present your writing. I’m talking about writing for podcasts and videos, specifically.
Writing a script for a podcast or a video session can be a totally unique take on your writing.Not only that, it gets your blog out on different media, allowing people to discover your site through your external videos and podcasts, and gives long time readers another way to “hear your voice,” quite literally in this instance!
So don’ be boring, mix up writing style, and mix up presentation media. Your writing, and your blog, will be better for it.
10. You don’t edit
Have I driven the point home that you need to be thoughtful of your reader? Maybe I should re-read my section on repetitiveness!
Honestly, it may feel good to simply “crank out” a successful post, but you are placing too much faith in your talents and not enough importance on your reader if you don’t go back and edit even your best “one-shot” works.
This goes beyond simple grammar and spelling edits as well. No reader of yours will ever expect for you to be the perfect writer, and it’s okay to add a touch of personality into your blog. In fact it is quite welcome.
You should, however, not be afraid to edit your own thoughts. Re-read posts and cut out anything that doesn’t add to the post in a meaningful way.
Read the post as best as you can from the perspective of a reader: “Would I care about this section?” is a question that should come into your mind often.
Write for your reader
The running theme through all of these mistakes is the lack of attention being paid to the reader.
While writing may be an expression of your†thoughts, you won’t be the only one reading them (if you aspire for your blog to be read by more than you and your cat, that is!).
Sit back after each post, after each line, and ask yourself: does this benefit my reader? Do they get something out of this line? Is it needed for the post as a whole to be a success?
You can’t make your blogging style flawless, but you can darn well try to make your reader happy!
Are you a WordPress user like Darren Rowse? Then you definitely need to check out Sparring Mind, the WordPress content marketing blog, which shows you that you don’t need to be a tech geek to create amazing content on a superb WordPress site.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
10 Writing Mistakes that Will Guarantee Your Blog’s Failure
Переслать - The Blogger's Guide to Meaningful Engagement on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter
This guest post is by Neil Patel of KISSmetrics.
When it comes to social media, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter are the big three. If you're not on these social sites, then you are missing out on great business opportunities.
If you are on these sites, however, you probably know that getting meaningful engagement with your followers isn't easy. You can easily drown in the noise, so you need tips and tools to help you break through that noise. The following ideas will help you do just that.
Better Engagement on Facebook
Image copyright Darren Baker - Fotolia.com
You more than likely have a Facebook fan page if you are in business. The engagement probably isn’t great, however. See, about 90% of people who like your Facebook fan page never return. They will come back if you can effectively convince them… but you have to have good content.
What is good content on Facebook? We don't know exactly how Facebook judges content, but we know they look at three scores using their EdgeRank indicator:
- Affinity: This is a measure of how much a user's fans like his page. Unfortunately, this is a one-way street, so to boost your Affinity score you need to convince people to Like your posts, click your links and interact with you.
- Weight: How people interact with your content matters. A comment is given more weight than a Like since it takes more effort.
- Time decay: The newer the content, the more likely it will show up in your news feed.
Like I pointed out above, if your content gets a low score, it may not even show up in the Recent News feed. And if it's not showing up in Recent News, then people aren't going to interact with it. So what you need to do is optimize your news feed. Here's how to do that.
- Less is more: You are more likely to get a fan to comment or Like a post if you limit your posts to two to five a day. If you send a barrage of posts, people may even hide you.
- Shorter updates: Another important rule is to keep your posts under 100 characters. If you have to make people read a whole lot of copy, they are less likely to interact.
- Use links: Posts with links will get more interaction than posts without links, but make sure you use the full link and not a shortened link.
- Questions: Posts with a question will always beat a post without a question. Try and come up with at least one good question a day.
- Share photos and videos: These are the best ways to get engagement from people. If it's an enticing video, people will watch it. And lots of people will Like it.
- Time your posts: The best time to post to Facebook is between 10am and 4pm. Interestingly enough, if you post outside of business hours, you'll get 20% more engagement.
- Post on Thursday and Friday: Because of the "happiness index," these two days get 18% more engagement!
If you want to find out what your EdgeRank score is, you can connect with the EdgeRank Checker here.
Deeper Engagement on Google+
Google+ is the new kid on the block, so ways to encourage engagement are constantly emerging. Here are some traditional and new ways to do that.
- Post to the public stream: If you want to interact with all of your friends no matter what circle they are in, then you need to get into the habit of posting to the public stream. This will expose you to a lot more people.
- Share other posts: When you’re surfing your Google+ stream, take the time to engage your friends by clicking the Share button for their posts. This will load their post in your stream, effectively sharing their content with your audience.
- Create smart custom Circles: It's possible to run into "Circle fatigue," where you might just throw up your hands and say "What's the use?" but there is a very good argument for creating custom circles. Chris Voss, for example, creates a Commenter circle, which is a list of people who have commented on his posts in Google+ but are not connected with him. He then reciprocates with this group by commenting on their posts. It's a great way to engage the power users!
- Hangouts: This feature of Google+ is for that person who is truly social. It's for the person who not only wants to see you, but hear your voice as well. It's great for company meetings, conference calls, mastermind groups, ad hoc brainstorm sessions, or just simply hanging out. Hangouts are meant to be loose, so bring your own drink, and remember that you can also start a hangout on YouTube.
- Add Google+ to your website: Google+ can improve social engagement but it can also help your SEO efforts, too, which is why I recommend putting the Google+ button on your content. This will encourage people to share it on the social network and interact with it, and it boost your rankings as well.
Stronger Engagement on Twitter
At the 2011 Web 2.0 Summit, former Facebook President Sean Parker said that power users are leaving Facebook for Google+ and Twitter. The reason is because Facebook is not giving these users the tools they need to handle the glut of information on Facebook.
It's interesting that these users would go to Twitter, because you could argue that Twitter sends you a glut of information, too. But Twitter is different because around it, there are lots of tools to help you manage that information.
Here are two that I highly recommend.
Buffer is a tool that allows you to spread out your tweets throughout the day during optimal viewing times. If you're like me, it's usually in the early morning or late evenings that I really get a chance to engage on Twitter. So if I send out a whole bunch of tweets at that time, they're wasted because not very many people see them. With Buffer my tweets are shown at more optimal time, which results in more clicks and more retweets.
The other tool is HootSuite. The free version gives you free social analytics and supports up to five profiles. The paid version gives you enhanced social analytics, unlimited social profiles, and integration with Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.
Some people think TweetDeck is better than HootSuite, but I disagree. TweetDeck may have its advantages with a clean interface and URL shortener, but when it comes down to it, HootSuite delivers more value in these areas:
- Speed: TweetDeck's Adobe Air is a massive resource hog. HootSuite is much faster.
- Statistics: You only get the data bit.ly will give you for TweetDeck. With HootSuite you can integrate with Google Analytics.
- Multiple social networks: With HootSuite, you can also connect to Facebook fan pages, Ping.fm, WordPress, FourSquare, Mixi, and MySpace—not just Facebook and LinkedIn.
In the end, this is an essential tool to help you or your team track conversations and measure campaign results.
Other engagement options
Even though there are a lot more social media sites out there, like LinkedIn, these ideas can work equally well on those sites, too. You just have to use common sense.
What other methods do you use to increase engagement on social sites?
Neil Patel is the co-founder of KISSmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
The Blogger’s Guide to Meaningful Engagement on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter
Переслать - What Google Search's SSL Change Means for Your Blog
This guest post is by Oz of OzSoapbox.
Secure Sockets Layer (or SSL to you and me) is an encryption standard most of us are familiar with using whenever we do something over the Internet that needs enhanced security.
Image copyright Evgeniya Ponomareva - Fotolia.com
Whether it be banking, email, signing into a personal account, purchasing something, or any one of the dozens of things we do online daily with the potential to have our private data compromised, most Internet users are familiar with that little padlock symbol that appears every time we use SSL.
How SSL affects blog owners
In a recent update on their official search blog, Google has outlined plans to apply SSL to user search queries. Under the guise of privacy, Google claims that the addition of SSL will:
recognize the growing importance of protecting the personalized search results we deliver.
Increased privacy is all very well, but what will that mean for your blog?
Previously an opt-in option, it’s important to note that Google’s implementation of SSL in performed searches at this stage will only affect logged in users. That is, people with a Google Account who are logged intot hat account while searching.
So what kind of affected traffic are we talking about here?
Google’s Matt Cuts (head of web spam) told Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief at Search Engine Land, that he “estimated even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com.”
Less than 10% of Google search users have a Google Account? I can’t help but seriously question that.
Between Gmail, iGoogle, YouTube, and more recently Google+ (over 40 million at last count and climbing), pretty much anyone who uses a Google product has an account and, more than likely, will be signed in. Is this SSL implementation really only going to affect less than 10% of internet searches?
Leaving that doubt aside for a second, let’s get back to the question at hand: again, what does all of this mean for your blog?
The one thing you, the problogger, needs to take away from all this is that if you’re tracking your users via keywords (that is, seeing which keywords bring in the most traffic), the accuracy of your stats is going to take a massive hit.
Once Google flip the switch on SSL searches, logged in Google Account users who wind up your site via Google will no longer be passing on any keyword referral information.
In an industry where even a few percentage points can result in massive changes to SEO campaigns and blog content strategies, losing up to 10% of your keyword referral data is huge!
And you don’t need me to tell you how important traffic monitoring tools like Google Analytics are in managing and analysing your blog.
What can you do?
As a blog owner, what can you do about these upcoming SSL changes?
Unfortunately for now, not much.
Google seem to have made a final decision on this and will implement SSL searches for logged in Google Accounts over the coming weeks. Interestingly enough, despite Google citing increased privacy reasons as the backbone of their decision, keyword referral data will still be available to advertisers.
It appears that while your privacy is seemingly important to Google, it’s not important enough to cut off your search queries from advertisers’ prying eyes.
As a blog owners, all we can do for now is sit back and take the hit. A monthly report (30 days) of the top search queries that brought traffic to your site will be made available via Google Webmaster tools, but it’s a far cry from the level of data analysis most blog owners are used to.
That’s even more of an issue when you consider there’s only so much you can do with WebMaster Tools when compared to proper traffic analysis tools like Google Analytics.
Looking at the long-term effects here, if SSL encryption doesn’t cause any hiccups for logged-in users, I imagine it’s only a matter of time before it’s implemented permanently for every search Google processes.
Google themselves are clearly hinting at this on their own blog;
We hope that today’s move to increase the privacy and security of your web searches is only the next step in a broader industry effort to employ SSL encryption more widely and effectively.
What appears to be shaping up is a future divide between the needs of blog owners and the financial relationship between advertisers and search engines. And we all know who’s going to win that battle.
As blog owners, do we have a right to demand keyword referral information from the visitors browsing our blogs? Or, as the value of this referral information is slowly quantified and sold to advertisers, is it only a matter of time before we too will have to start paying for the stats we need to run our blogs as best we can?
Updated daily, OzSoapbox is a blog cataloguing life in Taiwan, the good times and the bad. Interrupted only by social commentary on current events facing Taiwan, feel free to drop on by and join Oz on his journey through this beautiful island.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
What Google Search’s SSL Change Means for Your Blog
Переслать - The Most Important Take-Home Advice from BlogWorld Expo LA [#BWELA]
Yesterday I returned from a trip to the US to attend Blog World Expo. This year was my fourth BWE and as usual it was a great event—well worth the 14-hour commute each way!
Of course when I return home, everyone always asks, “What was the best thing” or “What did you learn this year?”
Here’s what I learned
The thing that I always learn when I go to Blog World (or almost any other conference, for that matter) is simple: DO IT!
This year I decided to take a different approach to taking notes at BWE. Whereas in the past I’ve tried to capture much more of the words and ideas of presenters, this year I decided only to write things down when I heard something I needed to implement.
So instead of page after page of notes to wade through, I ended up with a rather concise list of action items—things I knew would not only be nice ideas but which would help lift my blogs up a notch.
As I sat in LAX waiting to board my flight back to Melbourne, I gazed over the list of action items and realized that much of what I’d written were things that I already knew I should do, but were things that I’d either put off, been distracted from doing or had not yet done well.
Here’s the thing: blogging isn’t rocket science
While when you just start out, there’s certainly a learning curve and it can take a while to get your head around some of the more technical aspects of blogging, a lot of what it takes to build a blog is pretty much common sense (note: common sense doesn’t equate to it being easy … it’s also a lot of work).
However the problem with “common sense” is that things that are common sense are often the things we take for granted—they’re things that we get comfortable with, and don’t always actually do.
Not only that, but the common sense things are often overlooked in the pursuit of “secrets” or “advanced tips and techniques.”
I spoke with one blogger at BWE who told me that they were dissatisfied with the event because it was all too basic. They commented that they “knew it all” already and wanted speakers to reveal their “real secrets.”
When I unpacked this with him a little and we looked over his blog together, it became apparent that while he may have known a lot of what he’d heard at BWE already, he’d not done much of it. For example, he told me he was sick of people talking about setting up an email newsletter. However, when pressed, he admitted that doing it was still on his to-do list.
He knew he should do it, but he was so busy looking for the next new secret technique that he’d failed to implement one that was tested and proven.
What have you been putting off?
Of course, most of us have been overlooking or putting off something.
For me, there was a list of 20 or so things. For example, I sat in one session with Amy Porterfield who talked about Facebook, and I realized that while I’m using Facebook much more effectively than in the past, there are still five or six things that I need to do to take my Facebook strategies to the next level.
I also realized that I need to rework some key pages on my blogs, rethink some aspects of my blogs’ designs, and so on.
What about you? Most ProBlogger readers didn’t get to BWE this year, but that doesn’t stop you implementing what I learned. Take ten minutes to consider the action items do you have that perhaps you’ve been putting off, but which you really need to take action on.
If you’d like to share them in comments below to help make you a little more accountable to them, please do!
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
The Most Important Take-Home Advice from BlogWorld Expo LA [#BWELA]
Переслать - 2nd Edition of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog – Coming Next Week
Tens of thousands of ProBlogger readers have completed the popular 31 Days to Build a Better Blog challenge, and next week we’re taking it to a new level with the release of the second edition eBook.
31DBBB—the story so far…
- Back on 30 July 2005, I had a crazy idea: what if I ran a series of posts over the month of August that year that would give ProBlogger readers a little bit of teaching each day and a homework activity to go away and do, each one focused on helping them build a better blog?
- On the spur of the moment I decided to give it a go, and off the top of my head decided to call it
“31 Days to Build a Better Blog.” - That year, several thousand readers joined the challenge.
- The experience was so great that I ran it again in 2007, this time with around 5,000 participants.
- In 2009 we repeated it again with another series of posts. This time, 13,000 readers signed up and at the end of the month readers asked me if I could compile the teaching and exercises into an ebook.
- The 31 Days to Build a Better Blog ebook was released shortly after, and since that time, around 13,000 copies have sold.
31DBBB Second Edition
It’s been two years since the first edition was released, and while I still get daily feedback that its helping bloggers improve their blogs, I’ve been wanting to give it a refresh with some new tasks, a redesign. and some updating of a little information in the ebook that isn’t quite as relevant today in 2011.
I’m really pleased with this new edition. While there are quite a few days that are based upon those found in the first edition, we’ve included some completely new information this time around and added to what owners of the original have already got.
I’ll fill you in with full details of what’s new next week, and will email owners of the first edition with a discounted offer for those wanting to upgrade.
31DBBB First Edition now unavailable
As a result of the impending release of the second edition, today I’ve taken the first edition of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog off the market. Those of you who have your copy already now officially own a collector’s edition!
Again, I’ll release full details of the second edition, its price, upgrade options, and so on in the coming week, but I wanted to let you know what was going on.
Get notified of the release of the second edition
Want to be notified of when the second edition launches? Simply leave your email and name below and you’ll be notified the moment it becomes available.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
2nd Edition of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog – Coming Next Week
Переслать - The Rookie Mistake that's Holding You Back
This guest post is by Alexander Heyne of Milk the pigeon.
You're paralyzed. You started reading how to drive more traffic to your blog, write viral content, and make money online…
Three hours later you wake up and realize you haven't actually done anything.
You think you've had a productive day, and can visualize the influence and money in your future, but time passes and it never comes. You repeat many days like that, and wonder if there is something wrong with your strategy.
Meanwhile there are stories of success all around you—some random teenager built an online empire and raked in $5,000 a month easy; another guy built a company to six figures in two years using his blog; someone else landed a book deal via their blog.
Slowly, over time, you begin to lose interest because your success doesn't match that of others. You say you gave the blogging thing "a good run," and you quit.
You probably never realize the rookie mistake we all make blogging.
And you probably never consciously ponder the one oft-forgotten principle that all high achievers regularly make use of.
It is so intuitive and simple that we merely nod our heads and get on with our lives, never seeking to apply it. If it's obvious, I'm probably already doing it, right?
Rookie mistake 101
When I first began projects in college, I would spend days researching a topic before I even started doing any work. I had dozens of web pages saved, links in a word document, and books checked out from the library.
So imagine me starting a blog: hundreds of pages of word documents, dozens of websites saved, potential affiliate programs mapped out to buy, hours upon hours spent researching.
I later realized that this was a massive rookie mistake.
Ultimately, you have to build your project, right? Whether it's an essay, a proposal, a blog, or a house, it requires physical work.
And I realized that I (as well as many others) am prone to excessive information gathering, which hurts you in two main ways:
- It falsely makes you believe you are actually getting work done (you aren't).
- The amount of information you acquire tends to be inversely related to the work you get done.
This pattern is exactly the one most bloggers, business owners, and Internet users find themselves in—collecting, hoarding, and storing information without any application or usage.
The cause of this rookie mistake is simple—we are at a very specific disadvantage while working today. It’s Google. I suspect our conundrum is a 21st century one: 100 years ago people didn't have the option of researching themselves to death. There was just working, and learning from experience.
And if we get to the bottom line here, I bet you're probably trying to build influence and make a living in the process, right? So let me help you point out a big mistake I made for most of my life, and how I helped fix it.
After I realized I was wasting a ton of time on the Internet without actually setting my foundation set at all, I came up with a personal rule.
I would record the amount of time I spent researching, reading, and collecting information. And I would record the time I spent doing work. The amount of doing to researching had to be a 2:1 ratio. I had to be doing twice as much as researching.
If, for example, I did some research on making a niche website, and it took me four hours to accumulate the information, I would then have a "due" of eight hours of work to do. And in that time I would no longer permit myself to do research of any kind. It was purely work.
Maybe that involved thoroughly doing some keyword research to find a niche that has high traffic and low competition. Or maybe I spent time outsourcing and getting the initial, bare-bones website up. Or perhaps I decided to send emails to five people running niche websites to ask for help in avoiding beginner mistakes.
But the underlying principle remained the same, and that was the most important part: Get work done immediately.
Having rules or principles that guide and govern your work will largely determine your success, and make it many times easier and more efficient. Make or find a system, and stick with it.
Rookie Mistake: Collecting information excessively in place of actually getting work done.
Fix: Utilize the 2:1 ratio. Spend twice as much time working as you do researching and reading.Killing the overwhelming stress of choosing
I went on to apply this strategy when I started my blog and wasn't having a lot of success getting traffic. I was spending hours upon hours reading every blogging strategy, printing off notes, making lists, reading success stories—but never getting anywhere.
So I applied the 2:1 ratio in combination with Strategy #2: Having a master plan and minion plans.
This is one of the single most effective ways to mitigate the stress of having so many options and so much information to deal with.
Here's what I did when I first started my blog: I spent three days Googling "traffic strategies" or "getting more traffic" and made one huge word document. There was a list of about 100 tactics, including:
- posting in related forums
- other blog commenting
- guest posting
- SEO
- submission to blog directories
- social media
Next, I made two business plans for my blog: 1. A main plan (master plan) and 2. a set of monthly mini business plans (minion plans). I then took one strategy from my list to apply for the entire month to that month's minion plan.
Just one. That ensures you'll actually do it and won't be overwhelmed.
And finally, I got to work. As an example, check out my first four months of minion plans:
- Month 1: Establishing a Twitter account and adding ten related users a day. Also, being active for two ten-minute periods at different parts of the day to re-tweet content from others.
- Month 2: I focused on browsing my Twitter stream for people who wrote related content, or content I just liked. And then I read them every time they wrote a new post, wrote a well-thought out response and began establishing relationships with them.
- Month 3: I spent time researching SEO and compiling my own list of rules to remember when writing a blog post.
- Month 4: I created a definitive document of points to consider before I click the Publish button on any new post, such as emotional appeal, novelty, relation to theme, other posts I want to link it to, "feeling" of coherence, etc.
See where I'm going with this? The system makes your life a million times easier, keeps you focused, and helps you stay on track without needing Xanex for the option and information overload.
Best of all, it ensures you are getting actual work done. Because after all, everyone “knows” how to make money from their blog, right? Everyone "knows" SEO, right? And everyone "knows" affiliate marketing.
But if you ask the readers of some of the biggest blogs in the world how many of them are making (any) money, I bet 90% don't have an answer.
Make your master plan and minion plans tangible on paper, and you'll become serious. Once you're serious you'll see serious results.
Remember the oft-forgotten knowledge: only action breeds results. Do something, anything! Focus on one thing at a time only via a minion plan, and keep general direction with a master plan.
I can directly attribute my initial failures in university, business, and blogging to a lack of knowing Rookie Mistake #1 and lack of remembering the Oft-Forgotten Knowledge. And the closer I looked, the more I realized they are common among others too.
So the next time you realize you've spent several hours reading, researching, or pondering your blog or business, remember this statement: only action breeds results. And then get to work—sow your seeds, grow your army, and create your legacy.
Milk the pigeon is about killing that lost feeling, standing out in the crowd, and living a life of greatness.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
The Rookie Mistake that’s Holding You Back
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