Social network marketing is a gold mine when it comes to building traffic, revenue and sales.
It is not undeniable that if you are not doing social media, you are losing out; big time. And like it or not, we are already halfway through 2014.
Some says that 2015 will be a huge year for digital marketing trend which is wonderfully compiled by Lee Odden of Top Rank Blog (read more about it here).
The social media pace is getting fast and the ‘slow and steady’ don’t win the race anymore.
If you have yet to start any social media campaign, you need to start right now. Yes, drop whatever you are doing and start creating a social media account on Facebook, Twitter or a zillion other accounts.
But wait! You have already done that.
Good job, you have just started your first step in any social media campaign.
The moral of the story is not many of us realized we had already started some sort of social media marketing, regardless we are aware or not.
While creating an account is easy, you need more than that.
For starters, you need followers. Tons of them.
There are several fundamentals when it comes to building more followers such as:
Luck
Timing
Funnel
Luck is rather challenging as we have no control over them. Lucky for you, it is much opposite when it comes to ‘timing’ and ‘funnel’.
Tip #1: Timing matters for any social network marketing
Timing is everything. According to the Fast Company, you only need:
Around 5 tweets a day
5 to 10 Facebook updates in a week
Approx. 20 times on LinkedIn in a month
Take a moment to think about this. What’s your first thought?
Mine is simple; “Are you freaking joking me?! I post around 15 times on Twitter and Facebook plus 5 times on LinkedIn daily!”
Let’s talk about ROI myth and it is broken down into two parts:
Higher number of shares will contribute to higher traffic but higher bounce rate
Lower number of shares will contribute to lower traffic but a lower bounce rate
This can be concluded that while there is absolutely no wrong-doing choosing either one of them, the method of reaching out to the prospective readers is important.
What’s work for me is around 10 tweets, 5 Facebook shares and 3 LinkedIn updates close to a daily basis. How about yours?
There is no ‘absolute timing’ when it comes to social media scheduling. Yes, there are guides to help you with it but at the end of the day, it is totally dependable to your visitors (time of action).
Tip #2: Creating a funnel that drives traffic from social network marketing
Are you using social media for marketing? If you are, you need good funnels to drive traffic and sales.
Social network marketing basically means reaching thousands and thousands of readers with just a few clicks of the button.
In social media, the easiest way to create funnel is by creating quality posts with the proper Call To Action (CTA).
And when it comes to social media marketing techniques, there is no one else better than Rebekah Radice. Check out her latest article on 5 Ways To Create A Social Media Call To Action That Converts.
In short, a funnel can be done using:
Knowing your (company) value
Be exactly clear what you want your readers to do (read, click, buy etc)
Understanding the market
Speak your audience language
Simply by asking for a kind retweet, reshare or a +1
My social network marketing method is rather simple. I would share the same post using various CTA’s in a period of one week (or a couple of days). Judging from the response, it would provide us with a huge understanding on what readers love and what is driving those clicks.
Tip #3: Social network marketing done right
The right social network marketing strategy will drive traffic to blogs and websites
I’m a huge fan of social media automation. Running a hectic life with various projects from my start-up agency and as well as my lucrative day job is a no joke.
After all, it’s our job to ensure that we put food on the plate right?
Social media is business for me. Believe it or not, most of my business traffic comes from social media.
If you want to rank well on Google, you need search engine optimization. In social media, you need social media optimization.
To kick start social media, all you need is the right technique. Allow me to share mine (you can share yours using the comment form below):
There are more than a dozen social media platforms out there and you need to choose the most lucrative one for your social media campaign.
Using Google Analytics, determine which platform provides you the best traffic and clicks.
If you are starting up a social media marketing and time is a huge factor for you, you can simply choose the top 3 most productive platform to work with.
Social media is always a two way traffic. This means that you need to be active and as well as utilizing the power of automation.
And my go-to tool would be HootSuite Pro. Honestly speaking, having the ability to sync 50 social accounts at the same time is godly.
Bonus tip: Setting up HootSuite Pro for maximum social network power
HootSuite Pro offers up to 50 social accounts (free one offer 5 accounts) and this means that you need tons of planning.
There are two things you have to decide:
What you want to view on the timeline?
Which account you want to sync with HootSuite?
The below is an example my timeline. I separate them into platform based and even client’s tab (not visible for obvious purpose).
Each tab can holds up to 10 timelines and this includes mentions, private messages, scheduling etc.
Segmenting the timeline is important to ensure that you have enough visibility and contribution to avoid being labelled as spam or self promotion. This is where the segmentation in the image come into play.
HootSuite offers scheduled posts and you can schedule up to 5 accounts at one time.
The trick here is simple. Schedule posts which are highly attractive and relevant to the group or audience. Do that and you’ll get a winner!
HootSuite starts from $8.99 per month and you can it for 30-days free using this link: Free 30-days HootSuite Pro
Tell me your thought on social network marketing and if you are feeling generous, let’s discuss on social media strategies to increase traffic and sales revenue.
I have been a huge fan in the web development industry and my knowledge in coding is close to zero.
My only tools of trade are the various theme builders and I usually build my homemade themes around Genesis Framework. Usually, my only go-to tools will be like this one (as it offers excellent integration with Genesis).
With over 8 years of blogging under my belt, I was tired and a little bored with Genesis Framework. I wanted to move along a new path and many options come into my mind.
For starters, being spoil with over 40 professional themes is seriously bad for psychology and I took up the challenge to build my own theme.
I headed over to Theme Forest and began scouting for a new website build and it only took awhile for me to locate one that is extremely out standing.
X – The Ultimate WordPress Theme Builder
Let’s be completely honest here. When I first saw it, I was really attracted to the ‘X’ word. It reminds me a lot about X-men (huge fan here).
This is a complete review of X Theme and thus, that’s what you are getting here; Both the pros and cons as well.
And I thought the developers are definitely bold enough to name it with a single letter word.
Just like any other human being, my eye was attracted to the price … my eyes literally popped out.
A whopping $60 for Christ’s sake!
Okay, for those who have no idea about the themes at Theme Forest, you can get tons of website theme builders around $40 each.
This doesn’t stop me there but instead, I was curious on what the X theme has to offer. I mean, selling a theme for an extra $20 would either make or break the business … easily.
And to cut the story short, I bought the X theme in the next few minutes.
I toy-ed around with it for a couple of days and I am not sure if the word ‘impressive’ fits the case.
Have a look at my complete review below.
X Theme Review – Is It Worth Your $60?
Okay, so you roughly know what X theme is by now. If you have no idea, here is a list of what X theme offers:
Complete website builder
Interactive visual and building features
Close to WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
Crazy customization options
And X theme was created based on recommendations by 9 industry experts.
Disclaimer: This is one of the biggest buying factor for me. Having a theme recommended by 9 industry experts? Hell yes!
Installing and basic setting up of the X theme
A walk in the park.
Yes, that’s how easy it is to get the X theme working on your website. All you need are:
Upload to WordPress database > Select the theme > Activate
After activating, it will prompt you that you need to install several other plugins to make the X theme work properly such as:
Revolution Slider
WPBakery Visual Composer
X Shortcodes
Don’t worry, those are required to get the X theme running properly.
After installation, you will see the Customizer option in your WordPress dashboard.
X theme settings are instantly visible after installation
Building WordPress theme with The X
This is where everything become really juicy. You are (not really) required to build everything from scratch and all the options are very straight forward.
This is the general control panel for X theme
The above image is the main ‘control panel’ for your theme. You can literally build everything and anything with these custom options; from typography to button sizes and colours.
When using the X theme, the sky is really the only limit you have.
Before you even start customizing the X theme, you need to decide the basic structure of the X theme; integrity, renew and icon.
Integrity
Clean and professional outlook
Best fit for corporate websites and blogs as well
The real advantage of using Integrity is to highlight Call-To-Action (CTA) options
Renew
Flat design but with huge 3-D effect (if configured properly)
Excellent for blogs
Clear theme with one purpose; outline your contents
Icon
Modern but minimal designs
Unique layout which could make your blogs stand out
Best fit for blogs and extremely interactive (visual) with visitors
Personally, you won’t go wrong with any of the three options but at the moment, I don’t see any option to use all of them at the same time.
Once you have selected the above, the next step would be setting up the different layouts for your website.
There are several layout options to choose from for customization
X theme allows you to choose your preferred navigation options with ease
This means that you can decide whether to choose:
Sidebar position
Navigation position
And if you think that’s all about the X theme, you are absolutely wrong. There is also option to create floating bars and you don’t need a plugin for that!
Now tell me … how cool is that?
Create ‘one-of-the-kind’ homepage with the X Theme
X theme is pretty and it is a great WordPress theme.
Great … but, you can’t seem to be able to recreate the homepage as what you thought and it is challenging.
I been through this myself. For starters, that is insanely tough. You have no idea where to start and totally lost.
You thought the drag and drop feature was as easy as A, B and C but it wasn’t. And you feel like asking for a refund (if possible).
Before you even throw in the towel, allow me tell you that you are missing something out.
The X theme offers unlimited customization features but it has a little learning curve and logic is absolutely needed.
What you can do is head over to their demo page and check out the 30 website designs available. Choose one that fits your requirements and download the demo version.
Upload it to your website (create a new page) and modify from there. The below is an example of my modification page layout.
If you know some slight coding knowledge, you can easily modify your homepage without visual composer
This is what it looks like after creating a homepage with X theme visual composer
As you can see above, there are two ways to build a homepage using The X theme. You can either use the visual composer (highly recommended) or the shortcodes if you know what you are doing.
If you want to build a homepage fast using The X theme, use the visual composer as it is much easier. Here are the various options you can choose from when using the visual composer for building a website theme (from scratch).
Building a page is easy using visual composer
Additional features of The X theme
The X theme is not only a great WordPress theme builder but as well as an excellent ecommerce theme.
It is fully integrated with the popular WooCommerce platform and you can easily put the visual advantage available to blow your customers away.
While many other themes would just leave you with one layout options, each stack (Integrity, Renew and Icon) will offer an absolutely different layout and theme design for your ecommerce website.
Not only that, there are many smaller features which you could use such as the delay of visual features. This is an absolute replicate to the popular WordPress plugin, Lazy Load.
If you are worried about website loading speed, you are in good hands when you use The X theme.
So, goodbye slow website!
The X theme also comes with over 400 icon fonts. This means that there is no longer the need to hunt for the suitable icons for your website.
Need to find an thumbs up, star or people icons? Don’t worry, X theme has them all!
Last but not least, the support on the forum is great.
On average, I get a reply within 60 minutes of posting a question during working hours and that is insane. The community at there are also very helpful and you are definitely in good hands since most of them are website developers.
Review: Is The X Theme worth it?
While $60 would probably half the crowd away, I would say that it is one hell of a website builder.
With all the juicy features it can offer, I would absolutely be amazed if anyone would actually turn down this offer (unless you are nuts or plain stingy 🙂 ).
Being a WordPress junkie and a homemade website theme developer, I would say this is probably the best $60 I ever spend on a WordPress theme.
Don’t allow my review to mess with your decision but with over 829 sales and 4.5/5 star ratings since the release of it, I bet the data speaks for itself.
The sales and rating stats speak for itself
I hope you enjoy this X theme review and if you are using the X theme, you are obligated (literally) to tell me what you think using the comment form below. If you have any questions about the X theme, fire your questions and I will try to answer them all.
If you want to see what X theme is all about, you can check it out for free here! The X theme by Theme.co.
I am in love with the GetResponse email marketing provider and my experience with them since day one was mostly sweet. Having an email marketing provider that work hand in hand with you is like having a salesman that takes care of all the marketing and reaching out for you.
Don’t worry about it as I will be going through (in detail) on how to setup GetResponse email from the scratch, and no skill needed!
What you will learn in this article are:
How to signup for GetResponse?
Setting up your first campaign
Setting up an autoresponder
How to create email messages
How to use the RSS to Email feature for email marketing
As you can see, this is a superb long article and thus, I recommend you to bookmark this for future reference.
For those visual lovers, you can also check out the slides below:
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How good is GetResponse?
I have used quite a few email marketing services in the past and to be utterly honest, nothing really come close to GetResponse (both service level and cost).
GetResponse offer pretty much everything out-of-the-box when it comes to email marketing and features such as:
Responsive designs
A/B testing
Auto responders
Email creator
Landing pages creator
Social sharing features
Email intelligence (analytics)
List boosters (ease of importing contacts)
Form builders
Inbox preview
RSS to email
Time travel (more on this later on)
Online surveys
And we are not done yet! There are more than a dozen more features on GetResponse.
From features to email marketing prices, GetResponse (in my personal opinion) is probably one of the best bang for your bucks service.
The lowest package starts at $12.30 per month for 1,000 subscribers and you can upgrade or downgrade at anytime. What makes it even juicier is that you can easily try GetResponse email marketing for 30 days free of charge.
Setting up your first email campaign with GetResponse
An email campaign is considered a list. Every time a reader signs up for your newsletter, he or she gets ‘imported’ into the email list.
If you are setting up an email campaign, I would suggest you to create several campaigns instead of one. For example, you can create:
Optin for case studies
Optin for promotions
Optin for general newsletters
The above are segmentation and this makes email marketing much easier. In other words, you would want to avoid sending all types of emails to everyone in your list. Instead, you want the right followers to receive the right emails.
Having proper email segments could easily boost open rates, conversion and reduce subscriptions.
1. Click on the Create Campaign tab as seen on the top right (or center) of the page.
2. Select a campaign name and press Create New Campaign.
3. Once done, click on Edit Campaign Settings. There are two very important options here to set which are Campaign Email Address and Notifications.
This is what you see after setting up a campaign
These are the two custom settings you may decide to opt-in.
If Campaign Email Address is setup accordingly, readers could easily sign up for your mailing list by sending a blank email to campaign-name@getresponse.com. I personally leave this option out.
Notifications feature is pretty clear cut. You get notified for everyone who subscribed to your mailing list and enable this option if you are interested to get instant notification on new signups.
4. You are all set!
By now, you have completed setting up your first email marketing campaign. Give yourself a pat on the back or a cold beer (you may send one over for me too).
Setting up GetResponse autoresponder
An autoresponder is like having a customer service agent on steroids. Yes, autoresponder is used to say “hi” and “thank you” to all your new signups.
Basically my GetResponse autoresponder settings are:
Welcome email & free gift reminder on next email
Email containing free gift
A follow up email to check if they had received the free gift
Doing this manually to everyone of your signup would be tedious but with an autoresponder, you can basically set once and forget. Period.
GetResponse allows us to set the number of days interval, goals succeed etc before it triggers the next email. My trigger method is rather simple:
Welcome email (immediate)
Email containing free gift (1-7 days later)
Email follow up (1-7 days later)
1. Select Messages > Create Autoresponder
2. Choose the goals you wish to have for your autoresponder (some call this triggers). To set this demo, I selected the welcome email to have the settings below:
Time based – 0 day
Send message – Immediately
Days – Every day
Autoresponder name – Select a name for reference (example, welcome email)
3. Select Create New Email and key in the relevant details. There are two options to track your emails; Click-through and Google Analytics. I recommend to turn them on.
4. The next part is relatively easy. This is where you can build your own template or use a predefined one by GetResponse. Once you have chosen the right template, press Use Template.
5. The image below is your standard GetResponse visual editor.
Does this email template look pretty?
On the right side of the screen, you will have options to build your email template.
There are options to save the template as Draft or for future usage.
Once you have completed the template, you can select Test message by sending a sample email to yourself or test with over a dozen different displays and as well as selecting Mobile preview only.
6. Now, all you have to do is to click on the Next Step and you will have the option to Publish the autoresponder.
Building additional autoresponder is easy by repeating the same steps above. The only thing you need to do is to change the goals or triggers to put everything in place.
How to send email using GetResponse?
It is extremely to build a newsletter with GetResponse. There are two ways you can do so which are Message > Create Newsletter or by clicking the huge green button on the dashboard.
1. Once you click on either one of the links, it will bring you to the page as seen below. Remember to choose the right campaign or else, you will be building a newsletter for a different audience or recipients.
By default, you would have two options; using New Email Creator or HTML Source Editor. Personally, I would go with the first option as it is a drag and drop feature by GetResponse.
2. The next page would be pretty similar with the autoresponder setting page. The only difference would be the ability to have social share and A/B testing.
You can integrate multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts with GetResponse. This means that whenever you send out an email newsletter, it goes live on social media too.
With A/B testing, you can do various case studies on the types of colour, fonts and even words which could affect the open and conversion rate of the email.
3. After you have configured your newsletter, it is time to head over to the sending option (visible after you press Next step). The below will be the display you will be seeing.
On this page, you will be able to choose who will be receiving the newsletters. Generally, the options would consist of:
Campaign selection
Saved searches (if you have search anything previously)
Excluding option
You would also have the option to choose the contacts you want manually and this feature will automatically be enabled if you have selected to exclude at least one of your available campaigns.
Important note: A campaign will only be shown or visible if there is at least one subscriber in it.
4. The next screen will show you a summary of the newsletter you had just created. Here, you would have the option to either send the newsletter out immediately (choose Send Now) or schedule it at some other time (choose Schedule).
GetResponse Time Travel feature would mean that you have the ability to send out the particular newsletter accordingly to the recipient’s time.
The below is the example of the screen done on my demo campaign.
As you can see above, the map shows the number of of recipients according to their location. Anything in blue would means that it is possible to send and anything in orange colour would mean that the time had past the current time at that specific location.
All you need to do is to select the time and press Send.
How to setup RSS to Email on GetResponse?
For Internet Marketers, RSS to email is probably the best thing that ever happened to them. This feature enables you to send newsletters according to:
Time of publish
Number of posts
RSS to email would only work if you have a working RSS feed for your website. If you don’t have one, you can get one using FeedBurner.
1. Setting up RSS to email on GetResponse is rather easy. All you need to do is to fill up the following columns in the image below.
How do you setup RSS to email on GetResponse?
2. There are two frequency settings you can choose from:
Every time a new RSS article is posted
Send regular digest
The first option is pretty clear cut but the second one, would require a little setting. It means that you can select the exact time and date the newsletter is sent out.
Pay extra attention to the red arrows
There are filters which you can use such as:
Recent
Engaged
Shared
Commented
Those simply means that a newsletter would be send out at the given time when either one of the goals above is triggered. By default, it would be Recent and thus, this means that GetResponse will send newsletter containing your latest blog post.
3. The tricky part about setting up RSS to email on GetResponse (or any email marketing provider in this case) is the fact that the information in the newsletter are actioned according to codes.
Here are the common RSS to email codes used by GetResponse:
[[rss_title]] – inserts title of your RSS
[[rssitem_title]] – inserts title of your post
[[rssitem_author]] – inserts author’s name
[[rssitem_content]] – inserts content of the blog post
[[rssitem_image]] – inserts link to image added to the post
[[rss_url]] – inserts url address of your post
[[rss_description]] – inserts RSS description
[[rssitem_comments]] – inserts amount of comments
Codes to personalize GetResponse newsletters:
[[firstname]] – displays contact’s firstname
[[name]] – displays contact’s name
[[lastname]] – displays contact’s lastname
[[email]] – displays contact’s email address
[[responder]] – displays the campaign name
[[ip_address]] – displays contact’s IP address
[[my_name]] – displays your from field name
[[my_email]] – displays your from field email address
[[remove]] or [[change]]- display the link for unsubscribing and updating details
[[view]] – displays the link to on-line version of your message
[[forward]] – displays link to forward the message to a friend
[[facebook]] [[twitter]] [[linkedin]] [[pinterest]] [[googleplus]]- insert social sharing links that make it easy for your subscribers to share the email with their friends
[[geo country]] [[geo country code]] [[geo region]] [[geo postal]] and [[geo postal code]] – insert geo-location data based on your subscriber’s IP address. Please note that this may not always be accurate due to how some ISPs are configured.
[[favoritecolor]] – prints the value of the ‘favoritecolor’ custom field.
[[shoesize]] – inserts the value of the ‘shoesize’ custom field.
Don’t freak out!
When I first discovered them, I nearly fainted (to be honest). Basically, there are only 3 codes you ever need to create a successful RSS to email newsletter as below:
[[rss_start]]
[[rssitem_url]]
[[rss_stop]]
Amazingly short right?
Let’s say you are feeling a little adventurous and want to customize your GetResponse RSS to Email feature, here are the common RSS tags you can/should be using:
[[rss_title]] – Title of the RSS Feed
[[rss_url]] – URL of RSS Feed
[[rss_description]] – Description of Feed, if provided
[[rss_date]] – Publish date of Feed
[[rss_start]] – Begin RSS block
[[rssitem_title]] – Title of RSS Item
[[rssitem_url]] – URL of RSS Item
[[rssitem_content]] – Content of RSS Item
[[rssitem_description]] – Description of RSS Item
[[rssitem_image]] – First image found in Description
[[rssitem_date]] – Publish date of RSS Item
[[rssitem_author]] – Author of RSS item, if provided
[[rssitem_tweets]] – Number of Tweets
[[rssitem_likes]] – Number of Facebook likes
[[rssitem_comments]] – Comments on the RSS Item
[[rssitem_comments_url]] – URL for comments, if provided
[[rss_stop]] – End of RSS block
And if you are a visual type of person, here’s an example taken directly from GetResponse.
And yes, you are done!
Yup, breath in a sign of relief and you are 100% done. You have successfully created a complete email marketing campaign using GetResponse.
Now, I hope you find this email marketing tutorial useful and feel free to drop me any questions (if you have any) using the comment form below.
Before we end this, enjoy a quick video done by the GetResponse team:
Recommended tools of trade:
GetResponse (first 30 days free & as low as $12.30 per month)
Or at least, that’s one of the top three goals for many bloggers.
I started a simple survey that comes in my newsletter. The goal was simple; Drop your request to me and I will blog it up for you. And if you have yet to participate in the survey, you can do it here – Content Survey.
The request was made by one of my readers in Kerala, India with the question, “Anything along the lines of content marketing.”
I hope you are reading this and here are some useful content marketing strategies which can potentially double your website traffic in a very short period of time.
Want to save the article for later? Download the PDF copy here.
Content Marketing Strategies
How do you do content marketing for 2014?
Content marketing is never easy. If it is hard last year, expect a bomb this year instead.
If you think that content marketing is just for businesses, you are dead wrong. You need it even if you are a small time blogger.
Want to rank on the first page of Google? You need content marketing. Period.
While that literally answered the question on how important content marketing is in today’s world, the biggest question I am going to touch today is as below.
How do you do content marketing with just 5 steps?
Content marketing #1 – Strategies
In my latest blog post on professional blogging tutorial, I outlined one very important factor; having a bulletproof strategy.
Even before you purchase a domain or pick one up for free on Blogspot, you need to consider:
What your blog is all about? (single vs multiple niche)
Who would be your readers?
What makes others come to your blog?
How to make readers come back for more?
What makes the blog different from the rest?
And the list continues.
In content marketing, you need to be absolutely sure on the path you are heading to. The goals set have to be:
Achievable
Logical
Within a specific time frame
When it comes to content marketing strategy, putting a high bars in the beginning of the ‘race’ would easily lead to many failures.
Content marketing #2 – Headlines
Article headlines are the first thing your readers read and therefore, it is a no brainer to put all your effort into constructing a great one.
Headlines should be craved accordingly to:
Reader’s interest
Latest headlines
Mysterious
Delivering promises
Let’s take for example, both of these headlines:
5 Simple Content Marketing Strategies To Double Your Traffic
5 Content Marketing Strategies To Build Traffic
For starters, both the above are very close to each other but by just adding a few words, you could easily skyrocket your conversion rate; getting more readers to read your article.
The first title is obviously a better choice because it has the word ‘simple’ and ‘double’.
This give an impression for the readers that the 5 tips are easy to do (less time consuming) and a promise that it would increase blog traffic by at least once.
A few other headlines that you could use are:
Best 10 … To …
A versus B
How to make money while you are sleeping (example for mystery headlines)
While there are probably hundreds of discussions in regards to this matter, I ought to differ.
People says longer articles gets ranked better by Google and many of us are scratching our heads just to reach the 1,200 words mark.
True?
Honestly speaking, my case studies (unpublished yet) show that articles between 1,000 to 2,000 words would rank better but with heavy optimization; keyword density, title tags etc.
Not only that, I have a website ranking on page two of Google without any SEO done to it and the epic part? The articles published on the site are created by a robot, has around 600 words on average per article and articles created are around 60% readable.
Does longer articles get ranked better? Probably.
Do you really need lengthy articles to rank well on Google now? Not really (or until Google changes its algorithm again).
So, truth debunked? Go figure!
And our next discussion, article creation.
When it comes to content marketing, you need great content if you want to stand out from the crowd. If your blog posts are plain and simple, you are already losing half the battle.
I often consider content marketing (or writing articles in this sense) as an art; The art to captivates audience.
Take a read on what some of the professional and prominent figures in the blogging industry on their blogs and you will notice a huge difference between them. Some would simple start with a story while others, would give you bits of the story to drive you nuts.
Either way, those are real darn good content marketing techniques.
Moral of the story? Every single word that you use should be followed by another to make your reader NOT pressing the X button.
If you are wondering, the below is one of the oldest tricks in blogging.
Bribe your visitors with information they are looking for, not opposite.
Content marketing #4 – The effect of images in a blog post
Okay, so you had written a super lengthy post of 2,500 words.
Great ~ but why is your bounce rate so high? Why are readers not digging into your articles?
Chances are you are not using images.
A picture represents a thousand words. Same goes to blogging!
The concept here is fairly simple. Readers (including me) will not read your article from A to Z if it is over 1,000 words. Unless you are a great writer like Brian Clark, you are probably nowhere near success.
In content marketing, you need to make sure that you are using the power of images. You don’t need to use high resolution images for all your blog posts. Instead, choose the right one which represents the best meaning of the word/sentence.
Have you noticed that Pinterest is one of the prominent social media platform growing in the shadows of Facebook?
Images are getting more important and if you are losing if you are not using images.
Blogging or content marketing as what I call is a business. If you want to start growing your ‘business’, start utilizing images for Christ’s sake.
It probably cost you around 10 seconds to find one thanks to Google.
So seriously, use images, slides, videos or any visual related sources to drive your website visitors crazy. Yes, make them “wow”!
Content marketing #5 – Are you ‘marketing’?
Social media is apart of the content marketing strategy
You may have:
The best content
Fully optimized with on-page SEO
More than 2,000 words
Killer headlines
Epic images, slides and videos
And you are popped a beer and congratulate yourself for the job well done. Well, you are nearly there … but not there yet!
Traffic is not going to flow in just-like-that with the above optimization techniques.
Seriously!
If you want your content to go viral or being shared across the various social media platforms, you need to market the article to ready-listeners.
Yes, you’re right; Those followers you have in your mailing list.
If you do not have a mailing list yet, you can get one here for 30 days free and no credit card required.
While you can reach hundreds or thousands of followers with the right email marketing provider, the job doesn’t stop there.
You need to continue marketing the article as long as it is still published and this, my friend, is one of the biggest mistakes done by many content writers.
People tend to share new articles for the first 2 to 4 weeks from the date published and after that, everything goes flat; no more marketing after reaching the 5th week mark.
If you are writing evergreen articles, then make sure you schedule them for social media sharing at least once a month. You can easily promote these articles across various social media platforms using Buffer.
Matt Cutt’s said previously that we should be careful and not abusing guest blogging. While many took that seriously, there are still some who continue doing it.
But hey, they aren’t wrong and they are probably doing everything by the book.
As usual, Google is known for breaking things that works and penalized two sites from the face of search engine (literally). MyBlogGuest was nowhere to be found on Google front row pages and Portent Inc. who went from page 1 of Google to page 60.
Words from Ann Smarty on Twitter:
[Official] Even though #myblogguest has been against paying for links (unlike other platforms), @mattcutts team decided to penalize us…
At the moment, the only confirmed updates are MyBlogGuest is a huge guest blogging sphere while Portent Inc. is a popular marketing agency. And the only linking between both Portent Inc. and MyBlogGuest is that they (Portent Inc.) have several guest posts published on MyBlogGuest.
Words on the street are that MyBlogGuest’s database is affected but until this get verified, it will remain as a mystery, shall we?
We all know MyBlogGuest and it is managed by the popular Ann Smarty. For me, MyBlogGuest is a great place for knowledge and for many, it is a huge filled with knowledge.
Another question that comes to this is that does link building is more important that content quality, length and another dozen reasons more we have always been doing?
Yes, go figure and tell me what you think using the comment form below.
What do you think about guest blogging?
So, what is guest blogging all about?
Guest blogging is a ‘feature’ where webmasters of certain domains would allow other bloggers to submit or publish their posts on the site. This is a win-win situation where webmasters would be able to maintain the freshness of the site while the guest bloggers would get at least one backlink to their own blogs.
Personally, this is one of the greatest link building technique where you are able to get quality links and building your authority at the same time.
While this is close to a completely white hat link building technique, many bloggers are (indirectly) abusing the link building cycle. This means that you can literally gain as many backlinks as possible even if your website is below par … as long as you are constantly submitting guest posts.
Therefore, excessive guest blogging would lead to many Google penalization and as well as manual web spam.
Ultimately, this leads to the next question.
Question: Should you continue to submit or accept guest blogging?
Do it if you wish ‘¦ but do it with moderation.
Guest bloggings are meant to be quality and probably one of your best article creations with hours of hard work put in it.
Don’t just submit your article to a dozen websites but instead, submit just a handful of articles to the right and related websites.
If you want to submit articles to websites, make sure you are providing quality articles. Most of the time, majority of the blogger would say that they are submitting top notch quality and a simple read through will know that those are really bad.
If you are putting a high bar and expectation on your own guest blogging, you need to raise it even higher now.
Search engine is changing and it is getting tougher!
2. Before accepting guest blogging
If you happen to accept guest blogging, don’t panic. Here are things you need to do in sequence:
Check each articles for dead links and low quality posts
Contact the guest blogger and ask if he or she would like to update the post(s)
Repeat and rinse these steps on a monthly basis
While this is extremely time consuming, the effort taken would benefit you in a long run; avoiding yourself from being penalized by Google.
What to do if you found manual web spam notification on Webmaster Tool?
If your blog is PageRank 2 and below … plus, guest blogging isn’t your main backlink method, then you should be just fine.
However, let’s say Google really hates you and you get a manual web spam notification. On average, it would take place immediately in terms of ranking effects but I usually see them in action between 3 to 7 days.
So, this means that you have 72 hours (minus the sleep) to rectify it immediately. It doesn’t take you long but here are the steps you need to do:
Check each link that is linking back to your website and do it with cautions (this means that even a single backlink to your site should be ‘˜flagged’)
Copy those domains into another excel tab and check for their PageRank, Domain Authority, Page Authority and anchor texts linking to those domains
Separate them into three lists such as Safe, Moderate and Dangerous (if you notice any domain is at risk of being penalized, place them in the Dangerous list)
Contact each of the webmasters in the Dangerous list and ask for amendment in guest post or remove the links
You should keep an eye on those domains in the Moderate list and if there any change in ranking (weekly basis), you can decide to move them to Safe or Dangerous list respectively
Help! I am lazy and I don’t have the time, but I don’t want Google to penalize my blog
Okay, the above 7 steps are not one-time jobs. Instead, those are your daily to-do lists to be honest.
Guess what? Among us, there would be those who have thought about going shortcut.
Example: How about I send the full list of Dangerous to Google Disavow directly. Would that be faster?
Honestly speaking, that would be not faster but lighting fast.
But wait! There’s a downside of this and a huge one to be honest.
Imagine you send the list of domains on a weekly or monthly basis to Google for disavowing. Have you ever wonder what Google will think about you?
You are plain lazy
You are doing black hat SEO and in a rush to clear all your bad links
Trying to come clean when you are not (or even if you are)
I would always go against using Google Disavow tool unless you have really tried to contact the webmaster of the site simply because it doesn’t matter how much white hat SEO you do, Google will still try to find your mistake (here’s my case study).
And in most cases, Google will consider you guilty until proven otherwise. Ouch!
Okay guys. We need a contingency plan to counter attack Google … NOW! ~ President Obama
So, what’s the new SEO strategy you should be using now? Some Q’s & A’s:
Should I be submitting my guest blogging? ~ If you are doing it heavily, cut it down or reduce the numbers.
As I have over 100 guest posts, do I need to be worried? ~ Yes if you are submitting to random sites. No if you are selecting guest posting sites like choosing your husband or wife.
What should I do if my blog has a lot of guest posts? ~ Start checking all your blog posts and the links in them. Remove which ever are low in quality.
What do you think the future of guest blogging?
While I would say this event has changed everything we know about guest blogging, there is still no reason why we should doubt the ability of guest blogging.
The problem would lies in us where we tend to abuse the search engine ecosystem and indirectly, creating a huge loophole for unnatural link building.
Do you have any thoughts about guest blogging? Tell me what you think using the comment form below.
Some call it professional blogger while others call it problogger.
Out of every 10 bloggers I meet, 9 wish to be one. The chances of success you are asking?
I’ll give it a 5% chance of success.
There are tons of blogs out there but are there so less bloggers who really achieve success in this blogging industry? Is it really that tough to become a problogger?
Have you ever wonder why there are so many bloggers fail to achieve success in blogging?
It was lunch time and as usual, I was having my meal with the accompany of Feedly. I saw the notification bar and I had over 70 new posts to read and I thought “Okay, let’s choose 10 and that should be just nice for an hour break”.
I ended up reading only one.
Yes, you hear me right. Just one article.
It was an article written by Jay Baer from Convince And Convert. You can find the article here. Basically, it was about 6 steps to build a great content marketing strategy. And heck, he is really successful (off topic).
And this struck me like lightning bolt as I remembered a received a message on Facebook the day before from a friend asking about ‘being an problogger’.
While Jay outlined 6 steps, mine is much more simpler with just 4.
So, let’d dive in and get the ball rolling!
If you want to be a problogger, you need to constantly blogging … even Gandalf does that behind the scenes!
How do you become a problogger in just 4 steps?
Blogging is no longer the 90’s way where backlinks and normal blogging would lead to a successful blog. Now, you need to be different and by different I mean being bold.
Don’t just share the darn information you can find on the web but instead, share something others are not doing (at least for starters).
Putting aside all my rant (above), here are the 4 points:
Goals
Strategies
Marketing
Measurement
Step 1 – Setting actionable blogging goals
If you are expecting blogging once a day and traffic will pour in itself, then you are dead wrong, dear friend.
For Christ’s sake, blogging nowadays is not the same with years back. Everything is evolving!
Setting the right goals in blogging is always simple and allow me to share my goals with you:
What are you good in? – Consider blogging on things you know is highly recommended
Who do I target? – Questions such as male, female, age and location are great starts
Why would people come to my site? – Ask yourself what you can offer to your visitors
What do you consider as success? – Realistic is the key here
I got to admin the above has little or nothing to do with goals but those are great start to get your goals ‘moving in’.
One important thing I would like to stress is NEVER consider these as your goals:
I want lots of traffic
I want to get PageRank 6 (or any digit)
I want to make thousands of dollars like Mr You Know Who
Those hopes and dreams won’t bring you far. Sorry.
Be realistic or else, you will forever miles away from the big boys in blogging.
Step 2 – Strategies determine both success and failure in blogging
You want to be a problogger and I get it. Now, do you have an action plan to work with?
Today, everything in blogging is changing. For example, SEO in 2014 is different from 2013.
The keyword in blogging is balance. Make sure you have a balance strategy which involves SEO, social media, content marketing and link building.
Being good in one doesn’t guarantee you success in blogging.
If your content strategy is still ‘creating tons of articles and wait for traffic to flow in’, you are in for trouble.
A few sources to help you with blogging strategy could be:
Getting feedbacks from readers (I uses GetResponse for Q&A survey ~ Try it for 30 days free)
Social listening (check out the trending topics on Gogole, Facebook and Twitter)
Search engine analysis (I uses SEO PowerSuite for a comprehensive analysis ~ Free trial version)
Step 3 – The viral effect of marketing
You need to market your content. People will not magically find your content … unless you are as popular as Neil Patel, Pat Flynn or Darren Rowse.
You should treat your blog like a product and launch them the same way you would do for a product (Jay Baer).
One of the biggest mistake I often see on Facebook is sharing and article, tagging God knows how many people and hoping it goes viral.
Well my friend, that is only going to land in you the spam. *Most of us hate irrelevant tagging. So please cut it off.*
Instead, find the right group and tell them to read about it. Of course, a good way to start is by informing your mailing list and you can start one using this guide.
Why is it important to measure blog success?
Step 4 – Measuring your blogging success
If you want to be a problogger, make sure that you are measuring your success. You don’t have to do it on a daily basis but instead, you can opt for weekly or monthly measuring.
A few metrics that you could measure in blogging are:
Strategy vs Traffic
Conversion rate
New vs Returning visitors
So, why do you need measurements in blogging?
Measurements align you with your blogging goals (refer step #1). It gives you a complete outlook of what you come short of getting more blog traffic and of course, possible steps to start becoming a professional blogger.
When it comes to measuring blog success, ensure that you are giving yourself goals which are achievable as raising the bar sky high would lead to much failures and a drop in motivation.
Now, what do you think it takes to become a professional blogger?
I certainly hope this short article could give you a simple outlook on becoming a problogger. Do you have any plans to strategies you would want to share with all of us?
Use the comment form below and tell me your thoughts on this matter.
