4 Solid Ways of Promoting Your Content

Content is, without a shadow of a doubt, the absolute undisputed king! Quality content is the cornerstone of any good blog, regardless of its niche; produce enough amounts of it and you’ll have what is referred to as a successful blog.

But producing quality content is only half the story; the other half entails actually promoting your content, reaching your potential audience, getting the word out, and getting targeted traffic to your blog.

This involves a fair bit of marketing, as well as finding ways that bloggers and internet marketers can promote their content online on the internet to get more visibility, get backlinks, get more targeted visitors, get more direct as well as organic (search engine) traffic, and build brand authority.

Without marketing your content, you cannot expect anyone to know about your content, or read it for that matter.

Which is why bloggers and internet marketers are often forced to spend time on promoting their content.

So what are the best ways to promote your blog’s content on the internet? Lets have a look at few of these, shall we.

1. Guest Blogging

For me, guest blogging remains one of the best content-promotion techniques on the internet, and despite the fact that Google has warned against abusing this particular method of building back – something which has become more common in recent times – it still remains one of the best ways of marketing and promoting your content on the internet. Choose an authority or high-PR blog to promote in your niche, and write an excellent blog post for it – something that will engage its readers, and help establish your authority in your niche. Put a link to your own blog in the author box, or in the article itself (according to the blog’s link policies). Not only will these backlinks allow you to promote your own blog and bring traffic to your blog, they will also do a world of good to your blog’s PR.

2. Social Media

Social media is perhaps web 2.0’s greatest gifts, one of its biggest achievements. As a blogger and/or a marketer, it would be absolutely criminal not to harness social media’s power. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn provide marketers and bloggers with a fantastic opportunity to promote their content… for free! All it takes is creating a Facebook fanpage, a Twitter or Google+ profile or any page/profile for your blog, set it up by putting all your information on it, and start posting updates, news and valuable information on it. It takes time building up a sizable following, and for people to start ‘liking’ or sharing your updates – and you could also look into paid methods of promoting your page and your updates (such as Sponsored Posts on Facebook). In addition, I recommend following the 80-20 rule on social media: 20% of the links you share should be links from your blog, while 80% should be valuable and interesting information from your industry/niche. PRO TIP: Use HootSuite to manage all your social media profiles from a single window!

3. Social Bookmarking Websites

Like social media, social bookmarking websites are (still) an excellent way to spread the word about your blog and its content. Unlike social media though, its effectiveness has waned in recent times. Nonetheless, bookmarking websites still get millions of page views on a daily basis, which means there’s a good chance that your link will be seen by a large group of people! Start off with bookmarking websites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and Delicious. Get yourself acquainted and accustomed with how these websites work, and where you could post your links. DO NOT spam these websites incessantly with links to your blog, only share a link if you think its worthy, appropriate and worth sharing. Reddit, for instance, has ‘sub-reddits’ or sections for different interests; so if, for example, you run a photography blog, you could share one of your latest posts on this sub-reddit with the people who have subscribed to that sub-reddit – allowing you to promote your content and bring targeted traffic to your blog.

4. Leverage Blogging Networks

Get in touch with other authority and high-PR bloggers in your niche in order to come up with mutually-beneficial ways to promote your content. One of this involves the aforementioned guest posting. You could also ask these bloggers to link to your content, in return for a review of one of their products. Or submit one of your older posts to another similar blog that it might be extremely relevant to. Or perhaps you could even look into joining a community and exchange links with other authority bloggers and blogs (a word of caution: don’t participate in spammy link-exchange schemes or pay-for-link programs, they could land you in hot water with Google!).

Your Turn

What are some of the ways that you use in order to promote your content? Looking forward to your comments in the comments section below!

Tips, Tricks and Ways to Maximize your Social Media Effectiveness

I’ve made my case for the importance of social media in numerous posts on this blog. In short, it’s safe to say that having a strong social media presence is of the utmost importance to bloggers, SEOs, internet marketers and search engine marketers.

In light of that, here is your guide to social media success for 2013. The following set of tips will allow you to enhance and maximize your social media effectiveness and ROI, enabling you to become more successful on these social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, to name a few.

Tip # 1. In order to engage your human customers, you need to bring out the human side of your brand. This will allow you to truly connect with your audience, and bring in more customers, maximizing your ROI in the process.

Try being more appealing to your customers; engage and interact with them, respond to their messages or tweets or wall-posts, figure out what your customers like and post your updates accordingly. Figure out what time most of your fans and followers are online, and use this time to post important updates and the most valuable information.

Try connecting with your fans on a more personal level. Use terms and words that they can relate to. Post updates, images, videos that they will be able to relate with, stuff that they will find ‘cool’ – it could be anything, from funny videos, to stats, to memes, or infographics, for instance.

Share other people’s status updates, hold contests and reward your super-customers from time to time, and interact and engage with other communities (similar Facebook pages) as well (more on engagement below).

Tip # 2. An important aspect of humanizing and personalizing your social media presence is engagement.

Communication, in any form whatsoever, is a two-way street, and social media is certainly no exception. If you want to be successful and effective on social media, you need to engage with your audience, it is as simple as that.

The great thing about social networking websites such as Facebook is that they allow you to engage with your audience through various different ways.

Do not use social media to just share your blog’s links. Instead, try finding different ways of engaging your audience, such as through posting and sharing other valuable information. Facebook, for instance, allows page owners to post pictures, embed Youtube videos, put on intriguing cover photos, put up ‘special offers’ and post polls as well.

In addition, as mentioned in the first point above, you could also maximize your engagement through contests as well. A page that I’m part of does this ‘Fan of the Week’ contest, which is essentially a giveaway of sorts, where they give a free license key to their products to one lucky winner. Another page on Facebook asks current members to ‘like’ and share their posts, and then pick a random winner for the giveaway from a group of people who’ve done that. This maximizes their reach and visibility in the process as well.  

Google+ also allows you to do ‘Hangouts’, which are essentially virtual video meetings with just about anyone in the world. The Lifehacker team recently did a G+ Hangout, where their whole editorial team sat down to do a video conference of sorts, taking questions from the audience through their website, or through the comments system on G+.

Tip # 3. Optimize your social media presence for mobile and cellular devices. With a massive increase in the number of smartphones and tablets – iPhone, the iPad, and other Android-based devices by Samsung and HTC in particular, not to mention the recent increase in use of Windows Phone devices .

The fact is that more and more people are using social networks such as Facebook and Twitter in particular through cellular devices. It is therefore essential for your brand to be mobile-friendly as well. For this purpose, start off with making your landing page mobile-friendly, so whenever someone goes to your website from Facebook for iPhone, for instance, your website is optimized for it.

Optimize all your social profiles for mobile devices – if you have presence on Facebook, G+, Twitter or LinkedIn, make sure that your profiles look good on these platforms.

Look into ads, and sponsored/promoted posts on Facebook, as these usually have a pretty high success rate on cellphones (a high CTR).

Also do a bit of marketing into how you can maximize your engagement and ROI on the cellular format by doing a bit of research on user patterns.

Tip # 4. Be honest, and straightforward with your fans and followers. It is very easy to hide the facts online, especially since you might have limited (or no) direct interaction with your customers and followers. However being transparent and honest will allow you to build trust very quickly.

Avoid spreading misinformation, and follow social media etiquette best-practices in order to come across as trustworthy and reliable: avoid spamming your fans, avoid sales pitches at all costs, don’t make fake profiles, do not invade the privacy of your fans, keep things civil, refrain from using  crass, abusive or insensitive language (or posting something that is these things), never indulge in quarrels or fights with your fans or followers and deal with a bit of criticism, disapproval and/or flaming in an appropriate manner.

Remember that anything you put up on any social networking profile comes with consequences. It is essential to think about the repercussions or the implications of whatever you post online.

If you make a mistake, own up to it and apologize to your fans, they will remember you in a much more positive manner because of it.  

Your turn: Feel free to add something to this article, and I look forward to your suggestion on how brands and individuals can maximize their social media effectiveness as well!

Blogging Mistakes to Avoid at all Costs

They say that experience is the best teacher… and I certainly agree!

From the looks of it, blogging seems simple enough, right? You buy a domain, hosting, install Wordpress and you’re pretty much all set and ready to start posting on your favorite topics or subjects, and dive right into the world of blogging.

Or are you?

The truth is that there are a lot of potential pitfalls associated with blogging, which should be avoided at all costs! Many beginner and newbie bloggers tend to make these mistakes without actually realizing what they’re doing.

Building a successful blog from the ground-up is tough work! Building a loyal and dedicated readership is tougher, and actually making money from your blogging efforts is perhaps the toughest of them all!

However many bloggers have built extremely successful blogs themselves, and so can you! Here is a list of blogging mistakes/pitfalls to avoid:

Not being original/copying stuff from other sources

Not only is writing original an essential part of being a good blogger and having a good blog, it is also a strict requirement from an SEO perspective as well. Unique content is a prerequisite, as far as blogging goes. No one wants to read rehashed or copied content, because there are tons of other better blogs out there who have better posts on the same thing, and people have probably read about it there as well. Why would they then come to your blog to read the same thing? Avoid putting up copied or borrowed material on your blog, as doing so will land you in trouble with Google, and you’ll struggle to build a reader-base this way as well.  

Not choosing a specific niche

This is one of the biggest mistakes beginner bloggers tend to make. If you’re planning on running the blog alone, and producing the content yourself, make sure the niche that you choose is specific, focused and one that you will be able to write about. Choose too big a niche, and you’ll struggle to cover all topics and create content for it. Narrow down your area of interest to something specific, something that you’ll easily be able to produce content on.

Not knowing WHO you’re writing for

One of the first rules of being successful at what you do is to know who falls in your target market (or in business terms, ‘target demographic’ is). Without knowing this vital piece of information, you cannot expect to be able to bring in targeted traffic, or the readers who might be interested in what you’re writing about. Ask yourself this: who are your writing for? Who are the people who might be interested in what you’re writing about? It also helps if you choose a specific niche (refer to the previous point), as it helps you with determining who your audience is.

Picking the wrong niche

This is perhaps as bad as not choosing a specific niche. Before choosing a topic, it is essential to determine whether it’s the right one for you or not. In order to choose the ‘right’ topic, you need to have a substantial amount of knowledge in that area, and a drive to write about it as well. Conversely, don’t avoid topics simply because they’re too competitive. There’s a lot of competition because there are a lot of people interested in reading about those topics. What you could do, in order to be successful in a competitive niche, is find a unique selling proposition and try standing out from the crowd. Which brings us to…

Not having a Unique Selling Proposition

It is essential to have a USP – a unique selling proposition – that sets you apart from the rest of the pack. Something that defines you, becomes your strength and identity. Something that fascinates potential readers and attracts readers from your niche. If you continue to do what a million-and-one other bloggers in your niche are already doing, how will you ever be able to build a loyal readership and make a name for yourself on the blogosphere?

Not thinking about the layout and design of your blog

Looks matter! The sheer number of websites on the internet that have bad website designs never ceases to amaze me! If you want to build a readership, attract viewers and be taken seriously, you need to have your website designed in a certain way, so that it looks professional. Too many websites litter their pages with ads, use over-the-top color combinations, and tacky and unprofessional design elements. It is therefore essential to choose a design that reflects the kind of blog that you have, as well as its content in a proper and appropriate manner.

Not working on list-building

List-building is an essential and important part of your blogging responsibilities – well, it should be. It is one of the biggest and best sources of traffic – targeted traffic rather – for a large majority of blogs on the internet. Many bloggers make the mistake of not spending enough time and energy into collecting their readers’ emails. It is vital to build a list of subscribers, and send them an email every time a new post goes up on your website, or you want to get in touch with them in order to make an announcement, for instance. Trust me on this, with the passage of time, your email list will become a very big and an extremely precious marketing asset for you!

Poorly-written content

Apart from blogs with bad designs, I’ve also come across many blog posts that are, to put it simply, poorly-written. Content, as you may very well know, is the cornerstone of any good blog, and it is therefore very important to adhere to certain content-writing ‘best-practices’, in order to ensure that actual human being read it! These best-practices include breaking content down into digestible paragraphs, using proper headers (H1, 2, 3, etc) and titles, using numbered or bulleted lists wherever applicable, giving preference to quality over quantity (which essentially refers to writing short but writing well), and keeping your language simple, in order to appeal to as many people in your niche as possible.

Not encouraging comments

Think of comments as the lifeline of any active blog. Ideally, you want to make your blog as interactive as possible, and promote comments and feedback on your blog. Comments are great because the provide you with valuable feedback, intel on what your readers think about your content or want from your blog, and they take the conversation ahead. Readers often tend to add stuff which you might have missed out on in your post. I recommend asking people for their comments and feedback at the end of your posts, and making it as easy and simple to post comments as possible. At the end of the day, you want a blog that encourages readers to post their comments.

The Complete To-Do List for Bloggers

Without a shadow of a doubt, one of the most important tasks for any blogger is the creation of quality content. Quality content remains priority number 1, numero uno!

But here’s the thing about blogging: there’s a lot more involved in blogging than just creating quality content! Yes, content creation is priority-one, it is by far the biggest responsibility of any blogger. And quality content is the hallmark of a good blog, what will eventually make or break it. However the simple fact is that it doesn’t stop there, and there’s a whole lot more involved in creating and having a successful blog!

So what is that makes a blog successful? What is it that defines a successful blog? What do you need to do, apart from creating excellent content in order to ensure that your blog stand out?

Create Quality Content

Let’s start off with the basics: Creating quality content remains your priority, and should be your primary focus as well. Your content is the single-biggest reason why people come to your blog, and in order to be able to get direct and organic traffic to your blog on a continuous basis, you need to be able to produce and put up content that is: (a) valuable, (b) of extremely high-quality, (c) well-researched, (d) well-thought-out, (e) informational, (f) relevant to your niche, and (g) unique.

Marketing your Posts

The thing about content is that it creating quality content (as defined using the parameters listed above) is only half the story. The other half entails actually getting the word out, and marketing the content! What you’re looking for is organic (search engine traffic), traffic from campaigns (such as email subscription), traffic from backlinks, and of course, direct traffic. Getting traffic from different sources involves marketing your posts, creating backlinks on different sources, working on increasing your exposure as well as building your authority. This will be an essential part of your ‘to-do’ list!

Working on Blog Design

One of the things that you’ll need to look at from time to time, is how you can improve and enhance the design of your blog, and tweak some of its design elements in order to improve things. Most bloggers, from what I’ve seen, get a basic design up when they create a new blog, and continue to tweak certain elements of the blog and improve certain design-related elements – without making any big changes too frequently. Try finding a good theme or design layout for your blog, and stick with it. It doesn’t need to be flashy; in fact, minimalist is often the best way to go! As a photography enthusiast, I often frequent the popular website Ken Rockwell, and this website is the best-possible example of what a good ‘minimalist’ website looks like!

Establish a Strong Social Media Profile

When you’re not working on writing posts or producing excellent content for your blog, you should consider establishing a strong social media presence for yourself, or strengthening your social media authority. Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest and LinkedIn, to name a few, are proven to bring massive amounts of traffic to blogs and websites, and especially targeted traffic. Social media provides you with a fantastic opportunity to build backlinks to your blog, and it can be very productive if you can harness the power of this platform!

Update and Republish Old Posts with New Info

Look at some of your old posts from time to time. See if some of them can be updated or not. Chances are that new information can probably be added to the old post, and you could probably add that update and republish that post. Or perhaps you could build upon that post by writing a ‘Part II’ for it. Or maybe you did an old post that suddenly became relevant again (such as a Christmas post, for instance) which could be republished for your new viewers and readers.

Improve your SEO

Search Engine Optimization – the practice of optimizing your blog/website for search engines such as Google – is an essential part of any blogger’s responsibilities. If you want more exposure, more traffic, more sales, better revenues, better visibility and a better blog, you need to invest time to learn SEO, implement some of the SEO best-practices to your blog, and strengthen certain elements of your blog on a continuous basis. Spend time to learn about what SEO is (if you don’t already know), how SEO affects blogs and websites, and look at some of the ‘SEO-best-practices’ which you could implement on your blog.

Guest Blogging

Have you looked at guest blogging opportunities in your niche? If you haven’t not only should you do so, but you should also schedule your time and set aside a certain amount of your blogging time for writing featured/guest posts on other authority and high-PR blogs. Personally, I’m a big proponent of guest blogging, and I’ve spoken about some of its advantages on numerous occasions on this blog. Guest blogging on authority blogs provides you with exposure, high-PR backlinks, and helps build your authority in your niche, to name just a few of its benefits.

Tips and Tricks for Writing Excellent Blog Headlines

According to certain statistics, it is said that as many as 5 times people read your headlines, as compared to your content or anything else on your page!

But even if the authenticity of that claim is arguable, it is still a well-known and a well-established fact that perhaps the first thing a potential visitor looks at, when he or she stumbles upon an article, a post or a page on your website or blog, or finds your website on Google, is your headline.

Another stat also speak about the average time it takes for a first-time visitor to decide whether or not to stay on your website, or close the page/go back to the search results – which is said to be not more than a few seconds.

All of which essentially boils down to this: your headline is THE most important thing to your website/blog, and it is what will ultimately convince potential readers, customers or clients to click on your link, stay on your website and buy from you.

Your headline will determine whether a visitor comes to your website or not.

Here are some tips and tricks for writing excellent blog headlines for your blog:

1. Your headlines should be to-the-point and precise. They should immediately tell a potential visitor what your article is about, and should accurately reflect upon the content, the subject-matter and everything about the article itself. It should not undersell or oversell the article, or inaccurately describe the contents of the article.

2. Headlines should be short. Stating the obvious here, but headlines need to be short – ideally not longer than 60 characters. Think of writing headlines as writing a Twitter Tweet: keep it short, and precise, so that readers quickly get an idea of what the article is all about, and are not forced to read through a whole paragraph of text in order to know what the article’s about.

3. Headlines should work on attracting potential readers to your blog. Headlines should immediately grab the attention of a reader, and should actually make him/her want to click the link and read your post/go on your blog. There are tons of articles on the internet on writing attractive headlines, as a quick Google Search will reveal.  

4. Try writing headlines as one of the last things that you do, before hitting the publish button. Write headlines after you’re done with writing the article. Often times, it makes it easier to write short, precise and accurate headlines after you’re done with the writing part!

5. Numbered headlines are known to be much more attractive, and grab the reader’s attention immediately. For instance a post such as ‘5 Ways to Get More Traffic on Your Blog Instantly’ communicates the benefit of the post to the reader immediately, and tells him or her the benefit that they will get by clicking the link or going into the post.

6. Look at how some of the other people in your niche craft their headlines. Don’t blatantly copy their headlines or their styles, but try getting an idea of how they do it, and see how you can apply some of those best practices with headlines on your own blog.

7. Be direct and straightforward with your headlines; don’t beat around the bush. Headlines should not be obscure, unclear, vague, or ambiguous. They should be direct and straightforward – ‘right in your face’ – so that your points comes across as effectively as possible.

8. Be sure to include your keywords in any and all headlines that you write. This means adding a single relevant keyword in your headline, which is relevant to the article or the page, as well as relevant to the blog. Doing so allows search engines to properly index your article, and provides human readers a clue on what the article is really about.

What are some of your tips for writing effective headlines for blogs and websites? How do you craft titles and headlines for your blog? What are some of the best practices for writing blog headlines? Leave me your comments in the comments section below!