Marc Guberti

How Grammarly Helped Me Write Better Content

July 27, 2016 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Are you on Grammarly?

My mom was the first person to tell me about Grammarly. At that first instance, this tool was pitched as a way to get better grades on my school essays. Before I could blink, I was suddenly a Grammarly customer.

My mom created an account, and Grammarly went to work revealing all of the mistakes in my school essays. As I aced more of my school essays, I stopped using Grammarly because I no longer needed it for that purpose.

That experience with Grammarly helped me get better grades, but that experience limited my view of the online tool. I viewed Grammarly as an academic tool. Nothing more and nothing less. I never thought of using it to strengthen my blog posts.

It wasn’t until I started listening to the EOFire podcast more often that I considered Grammarly as a force to be reckoned with. After hearing several advertisement of the tool on the EOFire podcast I knew I had to give it some consideration.

I was suddenly off to the races. I created my account and put in my blog posts. Here’s what happened…

I Got My Grade

My blog post got a B+ on Grammarly. While that’s not a bad grade, I need the A for the blog posts I write on this blog. I take this blog far more seriously now than I did a few years ago.

I take my content so seriously that I recently decided to hire an editor. Now I’m using Grammarly to make my content even better. My mistakes on Grammarly weren’t the obvious mistakes that everyone finds. Going in, I knew I wouldn’t spell any of the words wrong because I always spell check my content in advance.

Spelling errors don’t exist in my blog posts. Word repetition, the incorrect words, and other errors do exist in my content. Grammarly allows me to identify and find these errors before I publish my blog posts (and then my readers find the errors. Ouch).

In a paragraph that seemed solid, Grammarly identified five mistakes within the content. While the on Facebook correction doesn’t seem accurate, the others are spot on. Within the dashboard, I can see when I end sentences with a preposition.

grammarly tutorial

While it’s necessary to end certain sentences with prepositions, I always wonder how I can improve these sentences to evade the preposition as the final word in a sentence. The dashboard also pointed out certain mistakes I didn’t even know about such as six-second requiring the hyphen in the middle.

What’s The Big Deal About Getting The A?

Blog posts are written more loosely than school essays. Sometimes when I write school essays, I have to remind themselves that they aren’t blog posts.

Or else I’ll write a short paragraph like the one above. Or else I’ll actually start two sentences with conjunctions in succession.

When Grammarly puts that grade for my content, I take it very seriously. I do what it takes to get that grade up to an A. Why does an A matter to me so much?

Because that’s what Neil Patel gets for his blog posts.

Upon one of my recent visits to the QuickSprout blog, I decided to copy and paste Neil’s five most recent blog posts into Grammarly. The plagiarism percentage was in the high 90s, so I promptly turned it off.

Only one of those five blog posts was under 90%. That particular blog post scored an 86%. All of his other blog posts I checked were in the 90-91% threshold. If I could automatically write content like a single blogger, I would choose Neil.

With that said, I don’t compare myself to Neil every single day because comparing yourself to others is a great way to bring yourself down. I wouldn’t go from an 80% to a 95% because I want to email Neil and let him know Grammarly likes my content a little better than his.

I want to make that change in my content because I know I’ll come out with better content.

Polish Up Your Writing

Grammarly is NOT just a way for you to spot careless mistakes. Grammarly can help you write better content. One cool feature about Grammarly is that by highlighting a word, you get synonym options.

In one of my blog posts, I was overusing the word “writing.” Here’s an example of how someone can overuse the word:

Writing guest posts helps you improve your writing. If you begin writing every day, your guest posts will get better and people will notice your better writing.

I use the same word four times in two sentences. It’s very hard to read, but Grammarly comes to the rescue. If you highlight the word as I did in this instance, you will see some synonyms.

grammarly tip

Not all of those words could replace “writing” based on the context it’s used. But composing sounds sweet. Now you’re not just writing, but you are composing a piece in which many elements must come together in a symphony.

I would have never considered thinking of myself composing blog posts if I didn’t see that synonym.

Do I Still Need An Editor?

Grammarly does what the name suggests. It helps you find all of the grammatical mistakes within your content. So with that said, can it replace my editor?

Nope. My editor doesn’t just find mistakes Grammarly finds, but she also strengthens my content by conducting research and rewording certain parts to make the content more appealing.

With that said, Grammarly and an editor go hand-in-hand. You don’t want an editor correcting your spelling mistakes and your misuse of the English language. Grammarly does that for you, and your editor will have a much easier time correcting those mistakes if he/she uses Grammarly.

That way, your editor can focus on content research and content development instead of searching for mistakes that Grammarly can find in a few seconds.

In Conclusion

For a long time, I viewed Grammarly as an academic tool and never gave much thought about using it for my blog posts. When I first used the online tool, it helped me go from a low 70 to a high 90 (based on its grading system).

Now I use it for my blog posts because I’m not satisfied with a B+. I want all of my future blog posts in the 90-95% threshold. The only reason I don’t want my blog posts to be in the 100% threshold is because there are some mistakes that I disagree with.

Writing better content isn’t just a matter of practicing each day and finishing your blog posts. Great content starts off good and becomes great with proofreading and editing.

If you are interested in using Grammarly to improve your content, I urge you to give it a try.

4 Ways To Get FREE Blog Traffic

July 26, 2016 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Blog traffic and website traffic are a top priority for many marketers. Getting more traffic means more subscribers which means more product sales.

When looking at Facebook ads, AdWords, and other advertising options, getting more blog or website traffic can seem like an intimidating endeavor. However, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Last year, I got over 275,000 people to visit my blog. All of that traffic came from the free sources that I will share with you in this video. I did not pay a single penny to get those visitors, and for the most part, I continue to get most of my traffic without paying a single penny.

If you enjoy the video, please don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

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3 Ways To Fit Something Into Your Budget

July 22, 2016 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

budget management

Let me know if this has happened to you:

You discover a tool that can help you grow your business. You do some research and decide it’s an awesome tool that can increase your productivity. You’re all in.

But when you go to purchase the tool and see the price, your jaw drops. It will cost you at least $200/month.

You REALLY want this tool, but you simply don’t have room in your budget. Your only hope is to create a void in your budget so you can afford the $200 expenditure.

But how? Here are three ways to make it happen:

#1: Side Hustle

When your income increases, so does your budget. Once way to increase your budget on your own is to side hustle.

Continue to do what you’re already doing: working at your current job or building your online business. But start side hustling for the extra money to buy that $200 tool.

Side hustling lets you make quick revenue from part-time work. Some side hustlers soon find their hustles can even offer a full-time income.

If you discover your side hustle is earning you more revenue than your current job, by all means, consider switching over. But for our purposes, we only need to make enough cash to buy that $200/mo tool.

Freelance work, affiliate marketing, and consultation sessions are three side hustling ventures you can easily pursue. And here are 99 more ways your can side hustle for extra cash.

UPDATE: Are those 99 side hustle ideas not enough. Here are 25 additional side hustle ideas.

Choose an activity that won’t require too much of your time and lets you turn over a quick revenue. The best part of side hustling is the fact that it’s all done on the side.

Many people think they don’t have enough time to side hustle. But that’s a limiting belief. The reality is that we all have far more time than we realize. The way we utilize our time determines how much we actually get done and how we view our capabilities.

#2: Reduce Your Business Costs

If your budget is maxed but you still want to squeeze in an extra $200/mo, start reducing your business expenses.

The more business tools you invest in, the less often each gets used. Make a list of all of the add-ons you’ve bought for your business and analyze the utility of each. You may have completely forgotten about some of the things you’re spending on each month.

I hire several freelancers to help me out with my business. Even with all of their help (which does add up to a lot), I still find myself busy. So busy, in fact, that I often keep paying my freelancers without stopping to determine whether their projects are still in line with my current goals.

As my goals change, so too does the freelance activity I need to meet them. I had made the mistake of paying for work that was no longer relevant, and it took me some time to figure out what, and who, I should cut.

Money down the drain. Just because a freelancer is doing a great job does not mean he/she is helping you meet your objectives.

Pausing contracts with freelancers whose services no longer align with your current activity cuts recurring fees and lowers your expenses.

To optimize the use of your available resources, set performance parameters that reflect your efficiency goals and offer incentives when those goals are met.

Track the ways you’re spending your money and ask yourself if every dollar in your budget is actually moving your business forward in relation to your current goals. More ways to reduce business costs include:

Renting unused physical space in your office.
Consolidating your bank accounts.
Comparing insurance providers for the most competitive rate and asking your current provider to match it.
Don’t take on unnecessary debt.
Cut marketing costs by doing more in-house.
Increase social media use and reduce traditional marketing.
Use efficient time strategies with free productivity apps and software.
Focus on quality (the best way to please customers and increase your bottom line).
Maximize your current employees’ skills.

#3: Get Better Results With What You Already Have

Let’s assume your blog gets 50 visitors a day and earns about $300 per month. You make the money because out of those 50 monthly visitors, six of them will buy your $50 training course (and you make 100% of the profit).

But if you need room in your budget for extra $200/mo, you’ll need to increase your conversions rates. Your blog in this example gets a total of 1,500 monthly visitors, and with six customers, your conversion rate is 0.4%.

But if you optimize your blog to increase your conversion rate to 2%, your monthly customers will also increase — you now have 30 people paying for your training course.

Suddenly you’re making an additional $1200/mo, more than enough to start investing in that $200/mo tool!

You can also add another $50 course to diversify your products. People who wouldn’t have bought your first training course may find the second course is more in line with their needs.

People often focus so much on growth that they forget to monetize their current offerings.

In Conclusion

Always keep track of how much you are spending. Putting money into your business can lead to numerous results. But it’s easy to get so caught up in day-to-day operations that you don’t even realize you are no longer making a return on certain investments.

When you do make the realization, it can create miscommunications and misunderstandings. Set goals and expectations for each expenditure. And frequently check back to see if they are being met.

Many times you’ll get exactly what you wanted and more. But your expenditures should always reflect your goals. And as your goals change, so will the areas in which you spend.

The lag time between changing a goal and acknowledging how that change affects your spending is one of the main reasons why people continue to make unnecessary expenditures. My own lag time has decreased over the years, but it still exists.

The greater that lag, the more money you lose.

Recurring fees are the most damaging. They may be paid automatically and are easy to forget about, especially when each is fairly low. But those minimal fees add up, and your budget will soon be screaming for mercy.

So if you want to buy that awesome $200/mo tool, make room for it by eliminating unnecessary spending. Even better? Review your spending patterns frequently, even before you want to invest in something new and find yourself scrambling to make room for it in your budget.

How do you maintain your budget? Have any tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Use Pokemon GO For Your Business

July 18, 2016 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Pokemon GO surged Nintendo’s business, and it has the potential to grow your local business too. Local business owners are already using the app in interesting ways to attract new customers.

As an outsider looking in, I analyze how businesses can use Pokemon GO to increase their revenue.

If you enjoy the video, please don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

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10 Tactics To Get High Quality Backlinks

July 15, 2016 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

backlinks

Backlinks are NOT dead!

After reading this post by head of Google’s webspam team Matt Cutts, I (along with most of the internet) believed that guest blogging was a worthless endeavor.

But after Cutts’ post was widely misinterpreted, he amended it, adding:

I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. ..I just want to highlight that a bunch of low-quality or spam sites have latched on to ‘guest blogging’ as their link-building strategy, and we see a lot more spammy attempts to do guest blogging. Because of that, I’d recommend skepticism (or at least caution) when someone reaches out and offers you a guest blog article.

I got it wrong. That hurt because I stopped focusing on backlinks for a while.

The truth is that buying backlinks from low-authority sites is dead: if you want to see your SEO traffic drop to zero, buy backlinks. At the same time, backlinks from high authority and relevant websites couldn’t be more important.

More than 100 blog posts will be published by the time you reach the end of this sentence. Indeed, millions of blog posts are written each day, and the competition is mounting. But most of that content is irrelevant because it attracts few visitors, subscribers or commenters. Some of these posts won’t even attract a single visitor.

Other posts, however, go viral, and these are the ones we talk about. Most of these posts are published on high authority blogs and receive coveted backlinks from thousands of other blogs; they enjoy numerous advantages from the moment they are published.

Every so often a blog post from an emerging blog goes viral. How does that happen? And, more importantly, how can that emerging blog be your blog?

Backlinks affect a post’s virality. The more places you get mentioned, the more people hear about you. If you write an epic blog post that gets seen and shared by the masses, it likely began with backlinks.

Let’s looks at how you can build your backlinking strategy:

#1: Write Guest Posts

Although writing guest posts can take up a lot of your time, the benefits include high-value backlinks and more traffic.

I’ve written guest posts for high-authority sites like Business2Community, Jeff Bullas’ Blog and ProBlogger, which have sent thousands of people to my blog and increased my search engine traffic.

To find guest posting opportunities like these, type “[your niche] guest blogs” into Google. You can also Google your competitors to discover which blogs feature their guest posts, and pitch similar content to the same blogs.

#2: Write Valuable Content

Everyone says this, so I’ll say it the cool way: write for Bill Gates.

People are looking for valuable content, and you must try to provide it. But there are two things you don’t know:

Who’s reading your blog?
Which of those readers will link to your content within their blog posts?

While writing this post, I went back to my stats to verify the visitors I’m getting from my guest blog posts, and I noticed that some of them came from QuickSprout. At first I assumed that someone simply linked to my blog in a comment, but soon I discovered that Neil Patel had linked to one of my blog posts.

quicksprout

You can read the QuickSprout post here.

Another one of my blog posts was mentioned on Susan Solovic’s blog. Solovic was a speaker at one of the first business events I had ever attended, so her mention was particularly meaningful.

susan solovic post

I wouldn’t have known that Susan and Neil read my blog if I hadn’t noticed their links to my blog posts. While it’s easy to see how many people are visiting your blog, it’s more difficult to pinpoint individual readers.

While backlinks and social media metrics can point you to specific individuals, it’s harder to identify every single visitor. This realization forever impacted my approach to content creation.

Enter the Bill Gates Rule.

The idea behind this rule is to assume that Bill Gates will read your blog post. If he likes it, he will give you a shout out and a backlink to your post. Ideally, Gates becomes a guest on your podcast and invites you to help him create a piece of his own content.

But if Gates doesn’t like your post, you’ve lost him forever.

Of course, Gates isn’t obligated to do anything, even if he likes your post. However, you should write each post assuming that he will.

If you admire someone more than Bill Gates, write your post for him or her. The point is to write your blog post with that person in mind.

By following this rule, you’ll naturally write better content.

#3: Connect With Influencers

Connecting with influencers offers a host of benefits, particularly if one or more decide to share your content or provide you with a backlink.

Every connection with an influencer starts off with a relationship imbalance: you admire the influencer but the influencer knows little about you. So you have to do a bunch of things in order to capture their attention and influence them to share your content or link to it in one of their posts.

So how do you get the relationship started? Here are some ideas:

Share their social media and blog posts.
Invite the influencer to be a guest on your podcast.
Ask to write a guest post for the influencer.
Ask questions (but not too many in the same email).

Remember that influencers get a lot of emails; some of them receive hundreds of emails in a given day. Imagine having to read through hundreds of emails in a single day! The lengthy ones are likely to be skipped.

That’s why your emails need to be super short. My advice is to write an email that contains five sentences or less. Each time you write an email to an influencer, ask yourself how you can make it shorter and still get your message across.

#4: Write On Big Media Outlets

If you are lucky enough to write a guest post for a big media outlet like Inc. or Forbes, you will enjoy valuable backlinks.

Each backlink will be accompanied by numerous visitors and additional backlinks from bloggers who found you on those sites.

#5: Hire An Agency

Some reputable agencies specialize in providing you with quality backlinks.

Agencies like AudienceBloom work with writers who have already established relationships with big online publishers. These agencies make it easier to get mentioned on sites like Inc. Magazine, Forbes and more.

Some of these agencies can cost thousands of dollars. Most of them are better for more established bloggers looking to extend their reach even more.

#6: Get Interviewed On Podcasts

When you are interviewed on podcasts, you get more exposure and an easy quality backlink.

In any podcast episode with a guest, the guest always gets built up before the show. This way, people who previously didn’t know anything about the guest now have a reason to listen to the episode.

These introductions include a link to the guest’s website. And you will be no exception! Reaching out to podcasts in your niche and asking to be interviewed will ensure you receive high-quality backlinks.

#7: Interview People On Your Podcast

The role reversal here is that you interview people for your own podcast. While this doesn’t guarantee quality backlinks, the hope is that some of your guests will link to the episode in which they were interviewed.

While all of these backlinks add up, starting your own podcast means much more than trying to acquire backlinks. The knowledge you obtain, and the connections you make, will be far greater than the actual backlinks, regardless of how useful.

#8: Create Multiple Blogs

If you can manage multiple blogs in your niche, go for it! Each of your blogs can link to the others, and as one gains more authority, it will be easier to rank up your next fledgling blog.

Creating multiple blogs, however, requires a lot of work to do well, so if you decide to take it on, be sure to feature guest contributors and/or ghostwriters help you out with the content.

#9: Use HARO

The HARO website lets you see what content big media outlets are looking for right now.

haro

If you see a pitch for something you can write about, respond to it. I have used HARO to get featured on sites like US News & World Report.

#10: Interact With Your Audience

This is another method that creates more value from relationship building than backlinks (but you’ll still get backlinks).

Interacting with your audience builds trust. And trust will lead to more subscribers to your blog, more sales of your products and, yes, more backlinks.

Interacting with your audience isn’t the best way to increase your backlinks, but you’ll know your audience better. Knowing your audience better will help you write better blog posts and products.

In Conclusion

Backlinks are not dead. But if you’re buying backlinks from irrelevant websites, your Google ranking will suffer.

Relevant backlinks, on the other hand, will help your search engine rankings, even if you’re paying a credible agency to help you get there.

What are your thoughts on backlinks for SEO? How do you build backlinks? Have any stories for us? Sound off in the comments section below.