Blogging

How To Get More Traffic From Your Email List

October 26, 2015 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

When most people think about the success of their email lists, they think about the growth of those email lists. These people ask questions like “How do I gain twice as many subscribers?” and “How do all of these top marketers get thousands of subscribers every day?”

Yes, it is important to grow your email list. I ask myself questions related to email list growth all of the time.

However, the growth of your email list is not enough. The value of your email list is more vital. As an extreme example, if you want 100,000 subscribers tomorrow, I could more than easily give you those 100,000 subscribers. I simply hire someone to create 100,000 unique email addresses and then those email addresses get added to your list.

They are fake, and an email list with 1,000 targeted subscribers would perform better than the email list with the 100,000 fake subscribers.

This example is primarily designed to establish the difference between growth and value of an email list. The results you get from your email list (i.e. clicks, sales, relationships) determine the value of that email list.

Now for a more realistic example:

Marketer #1 has an email list of 10,000 people. Of those 10,000 people, 100 of them click on the link to the blog post. Marketer #2 has an email list of 3,000 people. Of those 3,000 people, 300 of them click on the link to the blog post.

In this scenario, I would rather be Marketer #2 than Marketer #1. Size is only part of the equation. The masters of email marketing are able to get results like Marketer #2 while growing an email list like Marketer #1. How is it possible to combine the two together? This blog post shows you how.

Note for the reader: Growing your email list is important, but this blog post will be more geared towards what you do once you have the email list. If you want a blog post more focused on growing your email list, go here.

#1: Send More Emails To The People On Your List

Sending an email blast lets your subscribers see you in their inboxes. If you consistently send awesome email blasts, two things happen:

Trust is built
People know when to check their inboxes for your content

I know exactly when to check my inbox for Seth Godin’s content because he always publishes his blog posts at the same time of day. I figured out when he publishes his blog posts after receiving numerous emails filled with value that always landed in my inbox at the same time of day.

Sending more emails to your subscribers also means more results. Let’s say your average email gets 50 clicks from your subscribers. If you send one email blast to your list per month, then you get 600 clicks from your email list per year. However, if you send one email blast per week, then you get 2,600 clicks per year. That’s a difference of 2,000 clicks.

For some marketers, sending one email blast per month versus sending one email blast per week can be the difference between hundreds of thousands of clicks. While you shouldn’t be excessive with your email blasts, sending at least one email blast per week builds recognition between you and your subscribers.

Once the recognition is built and you continue providing value, the trust comes naturally.

#2: Resend The Same Email To The People Who Didn’t Open Your Email The First Time

Some services such as iContact make it possible for you to segment the people in your list. You can segment the people within your list to provide them with content more specific to their needs.

You can also create a segment containing a list of people who did not open your email blasts. For my most recent email blast, I will create a segment of all of the people who did not open the email. Then, I change the subject line of the email and send the identical email to those people one day later.

On the surface, this strategy resembles excessive email marketing. Sending two emails in two days may sound like a lot. However, the only people who get the email are the people who did not read your first email blast.

This is an important distinction. It is possible that some people lost your email blast within their inbox. Maybe it went into spam mail. There are many different ways that even the most loyal subscribers can skip over one of your email blasts.

If they see your email the next day, the loyal subscribers will open the email and read your message. You can also get the attention of some of your other subscribers who have not been opening as many of your email blasts.

For some marketers, this one decision has led to a 10% increase in open rate for their email blasts. In the email marketing world, a 10% increase in open rate is very significant. The best part is that you don’t have to put in any additional work to make it happen.

All you do is change the email’s subject line and resend it to the people who didn’t open the email blast the first time.

#3: Promote Your Blog Posts Within Your Autoresponders

An autoresponder is the most important part of email marketing. When people subscribe to an email list, they get a series of emails delivered to their inboxes within a few days. These autoresponder messages are designed to strengthen the relationship between you and your subscriber. After you write the messages, they run on autopilot.

Within your autoresponder messages, you can promote (almost) anything. In my autoresponder messages, I decide to promote my blog posts. The reason for my choice is that most of my email blasts promote my blog posts. The autoresponder is a way of making my subscribers more comfortable with my email blasts—high value blog posts.

If I only sent videos in my email blasts, then my autoresponder messages would only consist of videos. The autoresponder sets the tone for what type of content subscribers should expect and how the relationship will build.

For my blog, this also means consistent traffic to specific blog posts. Sometimes, I will choose to promote one of my blog posts that I know is good, but for some reason it isn’t getting as much traffic as expected. I sometimes put these blog posts within an autoresponder so they get consistent traffic.

That consistent traffic combined with social media traffic allows those blog posts to perform better on the search engines.

Your autoresponder messages are the most important messages for building a relationship between you and your subscribers. If you build the relationship right, sales will follow. Choose your autoresponder messages and the blog posts you promote within those autoresponders carefully.

#4: Write Irresistible Subject Lines

The subject line of your email blasts are just as important as the content within the email blasts themselves. The reality of email marketing is that there are only two reasons why people would open up an email:

The subscriber automatically recognizes your name and has admired your content for a long time
Irresistible subject line

For almost all of your new subscribers, #2 applies more often than #1. Your new subscribers learn who you are as they read more of your email blasts. Writing irresistible subject lines is an art that requires constant experimentation.

Some of the rules differ by niche but other rules are the same. The best way to discover what works is by observing what works for other people and seeing if that will work for you too. I noticed that the email marketers who used more lowercase letters got my attention.

The traditional email subject line looks like this: 5 Ways To Get More Followers

The format that gets more attention looks like this: 5 ways to get more followers

While it’s just a small difference, I gave it a try anyway. Sure enough, more people opened my email blast.

There are plenty of pull-words and other tips that you can use to write irresistible subject lines. Some of the best methods involve outside of the box thinking with this question, “How do I get their attention.”

Nowadays, including “Donald Trump” in the subject line gets massive attention. Imagine the whirlwind of attention someone would get if the subject line misspelled Trump’s name. If you want to go viral, that would work. Whether you’d want to go viral for that though is entirely up to you.

The moral of the story is that there are plenty of tips on the web for writing irresistible subject lines. However, don’t be afraid to experiment on your own and try to discover your own methods. Maybe the email blast with the subject line “Please don’t open this email” gets more opens and clickthroughs than any of your other email blasts.

Learn the tips and then expand upon them through trial and error.

In Conclusion

Growing your email list is important. The results you get from your current email list are more important. It is easy to get 100,000 fake people on your email list. It is far more difficult to get 1,000 targeted people on your email list.

How you engage with the people on your email list determines the results that you get. In the beginning, you may not get many results, but that is true with all entrepreneurial endeavors. While results don’t come often in the beginning, patient persistence brings forth the results beyond our wildest dreams.

How do you engage with your email list? Which of these tips was your favorite? What results do you want to see from your email list? Do you have any email marketing tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Make A Comeback With Your Blog

October 21, 2015 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

The main reason most people give up on blogging is because they don’t make money right away. These people look for a short-term way to make money, hope blogging will be the solution, and then get disappointed.

In the long-term, blogging can become very profitable, but in the short-term, blogging doesn’t make a lot of money. This realization results in many people leaving their blogs behind and leaving them in the back of the internet’s closet.

Some of these people come back to their blogs and ask themselves, “How do I start over again?”

These people want to become bloggers again and understand that although there isn’t much short-term profit, the long-term profit can be huge.

But blogging isn’t all about money. If you don’t enjoy writing blog posts, you won’t have fun and you won’t make money. The most successful bloggers also love what they write about. That shouldn’t be shocking.

If you find yourself returning to your blog for the first time in several months, or if you need to renew your blogging spirit, it’s time for you to make a comeback.

Type Away

If you consistently write over 1,000 words per day, it will quickly become a habit. Habits are easier to stick with since they eventually become encoded into our work ethic without second thought. For me, writing thousands of words per day is a habitual process because that’s how many words I write every day.

So how does typing thousands of words per day become a second-nature habit? The first step is to understand how habits are formed in the first place. If you do the same activity every day for a little over two months, that activity suddenly becomes a habit.

For two months, it was difficult for me to keep the commitment of writing 1,000 words each day. Now keeping that commitment is just as easy as keeping my commitment of eating food and drinking water. Writing thousands of words per day has become an essential part of my day.

The other step is to give yourself an incentive to continue. Give yourself a reward for staying commitment and a reason to avoid stopping. No technique works better than the Jerry Seinfeld technique. Here’s the technique in a nutshell:

Get a calendar
Put a red “X” on each day you stay true to your commitment (i.e. writing 1,000 words in a day)
Make that streak go as long as possible

Soon enough, you will be riding on a hot streak. Once you are on a hot streak, you will never want it to end. It’s one of the reasons I still play on the piano, write over 1,000 words, and do something for my Udemy courses every single day.

I have hot streaks in multiple areas. It would be a shame for me to let any of those hot streaks go back to zero.

Figure Out Why You Left Or Lost Your Enthusiasm For Blogging In The First Place

We’ve all heard of the phrase, “Don’t make the same mistakes again.” If you make a mistake the first time, it is still possible to make the same mistake a second time. Some people make the same mistakes dozens of times.

Identifying why you took a course of action that led to a mistake is one solution to not making the same mistake again. Knowing why you stopped blogging or lost your enthusiasm for it will let you know how to avoid making the same mistake.

Once you know what happened, you can then create adjustments that prevent you from making the same mistake again. Build habits that prevent you from making the mistake(s) that resulted in you losing your enthusiasm or stop blogging all together.

The Best Is Yet To Come

Each time I felt down about my business, I would always think of this saying. I’ll never forget the impact it had on me the first time I heard it. Depending on how seriously you take this advice and how you combine it with your work, these six words may become your prophecy.

When you write your blog posts and look at your stats, understand that the best is yet to come. Just because you may not be getting many visitors now does not mean that will always be the case. This saying doesn’t guarantee success, but it will inspire you to put in more work than you have ever put in before.

This was the piece of advice that made me realize I had to outsource most of my business now so I could repurpose my time towards more important goals. The more work you put in the more luck you get. Believe that the best is yet to come, and you will always have something to head towards.

In Conclusion

On some days, blogging gets challenging. For some reason, our goals seem to become the most challenging as we approach the accomplishment of those goals. During one stretch, I felt incredibly challenged with trying to grow my Twitter audience. In five years, I wanted to have 100,000 Twitter followers. It felt impossible.

Then, I hit a breakthrough and now have over 250,000 Twitter followers. In my original plan, I still wouldn’t be past 100,000 Twitter followers.

Maybe the reason why you feel uncomfortably challenged is because you are about to hit a breakthrough.

My Stance On Blogging and Social Media

October 12, 2015 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Social media and blogging are my jam. I have over 300,000 social media followers and get hundreds of thousands of annual blog visitors. I’m also getting a lot better with Facebook ads. In less than a month, my Facebook Page went from 300 likes to over 10,000 likes. And I average $0.01 per like.

But social media and blogging are just two slices of a much larger pie. They are critical pieces of the pie, but if you exclusively rely on blogging and social media, you will be disappointed.

Two years ago, I aspired to surpass 100,000 Twitter followers. I eventually surpassed that milestone, but my income didn’t skyrocket in the same sense. I quickly went from 1,667 Twitter followers to over 100,000, but the changes in my income were minuscule at best.

Getting all of those Twitter followers resulted in a big increase in my blog’s traffic. Social media is the main reason this blog became successful, and seeing that social proof every day boosted my confidence.

So I was successful on social media and getting a ton of blog traffic. Why was my income at the same level?

I didn’t look at the rest of the pie. I was missing out on some great opportunities. And yes, I’ll say it. Many others already have.

I SHOULD HAVE FOCUSED ON MY EMAIL LIST EARLIER!!

I was getting traffic, but I wasn’t getting sticky traffic. I wasn’t building strong enough relationships with my audience. Creating an email list is the best way to strengthen the relationship between you and your visitors. Some email lists are also highly profitable.

When I focused on my email list, I started getting better results. Each of my product launches was more successful than the last because my audience continued to grow. So far, my most profitable months on Udemy were because of email blasts.

But I’m about to turn the tables and flip the world upside down.

Your email list isn’t enough either!

You need to make money. More specifically, you need to make money by creating your own products. Affiliate marketing is an option, but if you rely on affiliate marketing, then your income depends on other people creating products and giving you good rates.

Most of the money I make comes from my books and training courses. The best part is that this is passive income. I create the product, market it, and then people buy it. I make money in my sleep.

Blogging and social media get the ball rolling—you can grow a large audience. Your email list and products allow the ball to roll in the right direction—you build the relationship and promote your products.

The best part with this strategy is that you can scale up. That’s why each of my product launches has been more successful than the last. My audience continues growing each day. Across all of my social networks, I gain over 1,000 new followers per day. This growth leads to more subscribers and more revenue for each of my product launches.

Since we are on the topic of product launches, I want to discuss one important thing about product creation. It is tempting to look at the most recognized entrepreneurs in the world promoting one product for a long period of time. They may go on numerous podcasts promoting this one product for many months before finally launching it.

For these entrepreneurs, it’s a great strategy for getting a massive amount of sales. Some of these entrepreneurs are also authors who use this strategy to turn their books into bestsellers.

However, I don’t recommend that approach (unless you are one of those entrepreneurs with millions of subscribers. Then go for it). The reason is that if you only create one product and focus on it, it either makes or breaks you.

I focused on one product for six months. I didn’t spend any of my time creating other products. That one product broke me. Luckily I didn’t lose money, but I lost a lot of time.

Now I create four Udemy courses each month. Not all of my Udemy courses become successful, but some of them bring in a bulk of my income. I get to learn what works and what doesn’t work.

Creating more products also makes it mathematically easier to reach income goals. Let’s say you want to make $1,000 per month from Udemy training courses. If you have 10 courses, then each course needs to make $100. If you only have one course, then that one course must make the entire $1,000 per month.

I’m not saying to trade quality for quantity. However, you don’t want to gamble your success on one product launch.

In Conclusion

Social media and blogging allow you to grow a large audience. It takes a lot of time and effort to accumulate that large audience. That’s why you want to make sure you pay attention to the other slices of the pie. While having hundreds of thousands of social media followers and blog visitors helps, you must also build your email list and create products.

What is your stance on blogging and social media? What other slices of the pie do you take seriously? Sound off in the comments section below.

What To Do When You Lose Faith In Your Blog

October 5, 2015 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Blogging is along, drawn out marathon. Some people question themselves right when the starting gun goes off. Others question themselves on the last mile. While in a marathon you know the finish line’s location, the location of the finish line for blogging (for this analogy, the finish line represents a blogging empire) is unknown. You won’t know where that finish line is until you step on it.

During the journey to a blogging empire, you will encounter some bumps along the way. You may quickly get over some bumps and question yourself on some of the other bumps. When you lose faith in your blog, you need two things:

Inspiration
Clarity

The inspiration is easy to get. Just read some case studies about blogs that suddenly started growing like crazy. This picture is the most inspirational picture I saw throughout my journey.

The only problem with inspiration is that inspiration alone is only a temporary solution. You feel inspired in the moment, but are you ready for the next bump? To be ready for the next bump, you must build upon your clarity.

For your blogging strategy, building your clarity means devising a step by step plan. What are you going to do today to get more blog traffic? What are you going to do tomorrow? What are you going to do throughout the month?

Every week, I take some time to look at my plan and identify different methods I could utilize to get more blog traffic. I now invest in Facebook advertising because it’s having an impact on my blog’s traffic. Spending an hour going through my tweets and analyzing the results for each of those tweets lets me know what I should continue tweeting and what I should stop tweeting.

How did I reach the conclusion of focusing on Twitter and Facebook? The answer is that Twitter is my blog’s main source of traffic, and Facebook has some on and off days. Putting more time towards Facebook now allows me to see more “on days” than “off days.”

Look at what you are doing for your blog right now. See where you are getting your best and worst results. Focus on amplifying the platforms you use to get your best results, and don’t spend as much time on the platforms that yield poor results.

Combine that with some research to discover more ways to get traffic and sales, and you’ll have a strong plan.

At this point, inspiration and clarity are both working for you. These two ingredients are enough to get you through a few days feeling the blogger’s high. However, there is one more piece to the puzzle. Let me give you a hint:

Any plan that looks good is just theoretically good.

You can’t say a plan is good until it brings in the results. A plan to bring in money isn’t the same as actually bringing in money. Implementing the plan lets you see how good that plan actually is.

I created a plan for profiting from Facebook ads and growing my audience with Page like ads. For an entire week, I was anxious about the plan. Even though I knew the plan was good, I had no idea what would happen. Plans are theoretical, not reality. However, plans let you tackle reality more effectively.

After you create your step by step action plan, act upon it. Don’t wait for next week to get started. Get started now. If you get started now and keep at it every day, it doesn’t take long for a plan to turn into a habit. An effective plan that gets implemented habitually spells out success.

So how do you go about implementing your own plan? The answer is to start small and build your way up. If you consider Facebook ads for your business, it doesn’t take long to understand how confusing it could get. There are more than a dozen different ads you can create and advanced audience targeting tools.

So I decided to only create a Facebook ad for getting more Page Likes. I knew that to make a profit on Facebook, I would need more than that one ad, but I needed to get started. Focusing on that ad for a few days allowed me to learn a lot about Facebook advertising. I quickly got the cost down to $0.01 per like and got over 10,000 likes in my first month. I aspire to surpass 100,000 Facebook likes by the end of the year.

Only after I understood the Facebook Page Like ad did I start utilizing other Facebook ads. You can’t have a blogging plan that takes you from zero visitors to 100,000 visitors in one year. However, you can have a plan for getting 1,000 visitors in your first month. You can create a plan that allows you to scale your growth month by month so you eventually get 100,00 visitors in one year.

In Conclusion

The blogging journey has its triumphs and bumps along the way. It is how you get through the bumps that determines how likely you are to become successful. Starting with accomplishing a small goal gives you the small win. Putting a string of small wins together results in long-term success.

Successful blogging requires inspiration, clarity, and taking action. Until a plan gets implemented, that plan is theoretical. No matter how good a plan seems on paper, the power of that plan is determined by the implementation.

How do you stay strong through challenging times with your blog? Which of these tips was your favorite? Sound off in the comments section below.

6 Ways To Grow Your Audience Without Paying A Penny

September 14, 2015 by Marc Guberti 6 Comments

Grow Audience On Shoestring Budget — These resources aren’t just for people on shoestring budgets.

We all want to grow our audiences. Before the web, growing an audience was a big concern for startups because of all of the money it would cost. Those startups had to promote their products and services without social media.

The only two possible options were putting in an enormous amount of time to reach some people or spending an enormous amount of money on advertising.

The online web has changed all of that. Now we can grow our audiences without paying a single penny. However, those changes don’t mean anything for you if you are not utilizing them. The only tools and strategies that currently provide you with results are the ones that you use.

There are several ways to grow your audience for free. While each method involves a time commitment on your part, these methods are all great for startups and entrepreneurs with audiences of all sizes.

Even the most successful entrepreneurs continue utilizing these five methods. Even though they are free, the methods are that good. Here they are:

#1: Use Social Media

Social media is the most powerful tool on the web. It allows you to grow your audience in a way like never before.

Why? Since so many people use social media, millions of people are bound to be people who would fit well into your targeted audience.

Not only do so many people use social media, but they use it daily. Millions of people log into their social networks every day.

All you have to do is post valuable content every day. Tweet, pin, schedule on Facebook, and constantly post on your other social media platforms. If you can’t do it, hire someone to schedule your social media posts for you. I’m actually doing that with Pinterest.

The way you use social media for your business depends on what your business is and which social network you use. Each social network presents a different ideal posting frequency.

On Facebook, many experts like myself believe that you shouldn’t send more than four Facebook posts on your page every day. On Twitter, you gotta tweet over 100 times per day (get this automated with HootSuite’s bulk scheduler. Don’t manually schedule that many tweets every day because then it’s not worth it).

To find an ideal posting frequency on a social network, you must constantly experiment with the content you send out. Some of the ways you can experiment are by sending out different content, using different pictures, using different hashtags, and changing your content frequency.

Social media allowed me to get over 60,000 people in my audience free of charge. At that point, I started paying because once you reach 60,000 Twitter followers, you must start paying tools like Tweepi to continue using them (this is because of the way Twitter’s API works).

At that point, I was more than breaking even so a small cost was easily manageable. By paying the same amount of money every year (under $100), I saw my social media audience grow from 60,000 people to over 275,000 people.

All of that for less than $100 per year.

Social media is the best place for getting more people to know about you. It gives you a platform where you can promote stuff. But what are you actually promoting on social media? Your free content!

#2: Start Your Own Blog

While I would recommend that every serious blogger gets his/her own domain and hosting—two very small fees—you can create a free blog using WordPress. Getting your own domain and hosting looks more professional, but all blogs have a special quality about them.

You get to provide free content which allows you to deepen the relationship with you and your audience. As people come to your blog more often—and they appreciate what they see—these people will come to respect you and your content more.

This respect is what results in people following you on social media and sharing your content with others. Some people who visit your blog enough times may decide to buy one of your products.

A blog has two main functions. Strengthen the relationship between you and the people in your audience and grow your email list. Out of all of the resources you can utilize, the email list is by far the most important resource for online success.

Your social networks, blog, and everything else you do should all point back to your email list. Having 100,000 email subscribers is very different and more significant than having 100,000 Twitter followers. However, having the 100,000 Twitter followers does help out with growing an email list.

And having a blog to build the relationship with your audience helps too.

#3: Build An Email List

I mentioned it when I discussed starting your own blog. It would be unfair if I didn’t discuss it in its own section.

The money is in the email list. While having a large social media audience helps you get more subscribers, don’t think that the money is in social media. Social media is a means of indirectly generating revenue by building relationships and getting people to subscribe.

While using WordPress.org opens you up to plugins that help get more subscribers, any blog can get more subscribers with a sidebar opt-in. They don’t convert very well, but it’s a start.

When you build your email list, you must commit to using a paid service like iContact or Aweber. However, many businesses are running on a shoestring budget. They don’t have much money to spend and aren’t sure about paying for an emailing service every month.

If you find yourself on a shoestring budget or are just beginning, use MailChimp. You get to gain up to 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month—free of charge. To communicate with more than 2,000 people, it costs $30 per month.

However, once you have 2,000 people on your list, you can easily break even. While you can utilize these tools for free, why not pay for them if you know you can break even and grow your audience at the same time?

If you send out an email blast of a $400/hr consultation session, and one person of your 2,000 pays the $300, then you just made enough money to pay $30/month for more than a year. You can easily make more money from your email list and grow it in a year.

#4: Write Guest Posts

Guest posts present an opportunity to put your content in front of someone else’s audience. Even though some have declared that guest blogging is dead, it is alive and well.

When your content is put in front of someone else’s audience, and that audience is a targeted one, more people will read your content and visit your blog. After I started reposting my past blog posts on Business2Community, this blog got dozens of daily visitors from my reposts alone.

If you have the money to get a landing page, then promote that landing page in your short bio. As you can see for Business2Community, I make it a point to promote my landing page within the short bio. It appears at the bottom of every blog posts.

Business2Community Bio

Writing guest posts also presents an opportunity to strengthen your relationships with other experts in your niche. You get to learn from them because they will share their best practices. They want you to write a superb guest post so their audiences get wowed.

When I wrote a guest post for Jeff Bullas, he gave me several tips that I use to this day. Write short sentences. Include more pictures in your blog posts. I applied those tips to the guest post and now apply those tips to my own blog.

#5: Interview Other Experts

Interviewing other experts lets you build relationships with those experts, boost your credibility, and grow your audience. If you interview a highly regarded expert in your niche, this will be the translation to your audience:

You are good and valuable enough to get this expert to take an interview with you.

There is a difference between interviewing the average person and interviewing Bill Gates. You may not have the power to interview Bill Gates, but you can interview the people who the people in your targeted audience admire.

Some people live by this tip. They interview other experts on podcasts and have become millionaires from their work. Pat Flynn and John Lee Dumas are two examples of people who interview successful experts and make a living out of it.

They make six figures. Every month.

#6: Get Interviewed By Other Experts

The other methods help you gain credibility and an audience. You can leverage your credibility and expertise so other experts start interviewing you. Each time you get an expert to interview you, your credibility grows.

One of the most important lessons for getting interviewed by other experts is to start small. Don’t start by asking the person who has 100,000 email subscribers.

Start by asking the people with smaller audiences. These people are more likely to say yes to you, and you get experience. If I had to redo my first interview and choose where I did that interview, I would never choose a blogger with over 100,000 email subscribers.

Getting interviewed by a blogger with over 100,000 email subscribers ensures that a lot of people will see the interview. Getting this much exposure for your first interview is a curse in disguise because chances are your first interview will show some inexperience.

When I got interviewed the first few times, I was nervous and not sure. I’d rather be nervous and not sure to an audience of 10 people than an audience of 100,000 people.

When I get on the podcast with the person who has over 100,000 email subscribers, I want to sound confident and feel comfortable with the process. After doing interview after interview, I now feel comfortable and confident with the process.

I am ready for the person with 100,000 email subscribers, but it takes time to reach that level of confidence and comfort in the process.

In Conclusion

The web has provided us with many tools to grow our audiences. While some of these tools have pay to play systems set up, other tools are free and very helpful. You can easily grow your audience to consist of tens of thousands of people without paying a penny.

You can also use temporarily free services like MailChimp and then promote products and services to those audiences so you can break even when you must pay for these tools.

You can’t grow a meaningful audience by going free forever, but starting off by not paying a single cent is a great way to start and build momentum.

How do you view growing an audience for free? Which methods do you use to grow your audience without paying a penny? Sound off in the comments section now!

Three Great Places To Republish Your Blog Posts

September 7, 2015 by Marc Guberti 6 Comments

Republishing Blog Posts

A while ago, Google made a change to their algorithms. Google makes many changes such as the notorious panda updates that put half of the web out of whack. While Google makes panda updates that change the entire landscape, Google occasionally makes necessary changes that address different issues with content creation.

One problem with the web is that copying, pasting, and putting someone else’s blog post on your own blog is too easy. Some people decided to plagiarise content on other people’s blogs. Then, both websites would suffer because Google couldn’t distinguish the difference.

Now, Google can recognize the difference. If a blog post is published on your blog first, Google knows that your blog is the original source of the content. To be sure, give Google two weeks to index the blog post as your content.

What does that mean for us? First off, original content wins more than ever before. Even when people copy and paste your content onto their blogs, you still get the search engine traffic.

It also means you can copy and paste your own blog posts to different places on the web—and not get a search engine penalty. It’s your content. You can put it anywhere you want.

With this in mind, I look at my older blog posts that once got traffic but now get a small amount of visitors. While keeping those blog posts on my blog, I can also breath new life into those blog posts by publishing them elsewhere.

Are you looking for some ideas? Here are some places to publish your older content.

#1: LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the best place to publish your older content. Publishing an old blog post on LinkedIn only takes a few minutes, and you can get a good amount of engagement from this strategy.

One of my LinkedIn posts was viewed 19 times. I’ll admit the number isn’t big, but I was just starting out.

That same LinkedIn post—the one that only got 19 views—got seven likes and one comment. Let’s add some zeroes to show the impact of a highly successful LinkedIn post.

190 views —> 70 likes and 10 comments

1900 views —> 700 likes and 100 comments

It doesn’t take long to see the benefits associated with posting your content on LinkedIn. After my third LinkedIn post, I was getting more than a dozen daily visitors from LinkedIn. Not bad for a little over 500 connections—and a completely new part of my strategy.

#2: Tumblr

I won’t lie. Tumblr hasn’t brought in incredible results for me yet. The main reason that’s the case is because I have a little less than 10 Tumblr followers. Tumblr is on the list of social networks for me to optimize, but it’s deep down on the list.

If you have an audience on Tumblr, then Tumblr would be a good place for you to republish your content. More people would see it.

LinkedIn happened to work well for me because I already had over 500 connections. If Tumblr works well for you, then go for it.

#3: Guest Blogs That Let You Republish Content

Most guest blogs only want original, unpublished content. However, there are some guest blogs that make the exception and allow you to copy and paste published content.

One of the first blogs I started writing guest posts for was Business2Community. While the guest posts in the beginning were unique, I decided to use Business2Community as a platform to breath new life into my old content.

The idea sparked in my mind when I wrote a guest post for Jeff Bullas. For anyone interested, the guest post is called 5 Ways To Flood Your Blog Traffic Using Pinterest. A few days after Jeff Bullas published my guest post, I found it under my Business2Community author page.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out that people were using Business2Community to breath new life into their old content and also spread their new content.

Thus I began copying and pasting some of my blog posts into Business2Community. I published over a dozen blog posts on Business2Community in just three days. The best part is that I didn’t do any additional work.

When I got the first two guest posts published on Business2Community, I got four extra visitors to my blog. While all bloggers look for more traffic, four extra visitors isn’t exactly life changing. However, new life was breathed into those older posts. Take a look at this one:

Three days later, traffic to my blog from Business2Community tripled to 12 visitors for the day. Again, these numbers aren’t large…yet. The very next day, the amount of visitors I got from Business2Community more than doubled.

That number continues to grow as I put more content on Business2Community. Even if I never reach more than 100 daily visitors to my blog from Business2Community, the impact cannot be questioned.

The first 10 guest posts I put on Business2Community got a combined total of over 2,000 shares. That’s over 2,000 people promoting my content on their social networks. All I did was copy and paste 10 of my blog posts into Business2Community.

Ever since I started guest posting like this on Business2Community, my Twitter engagement has also skyrocketed. More people are sharing the blog posts and mentioning me.

All of that from one guest blog. If I find three guest blogs like Business2Community, these would be the numbers:

Over 6,000 shares for 10 guest posts

Over 100 daily visitors to my blog from those guest blogs

Hundreds of extra mentions on Twitter every day

Those are some big numbers. When I publish enough of my blog posts onto Business2Community—20 more—I’ll get those same numbers.

In Conclusion

Publishing your content elsewhere should form a core part of your content marketing strategy. By publishing your content elsewhere, you get to tap into a new audience while connecting with people in your current audience.

Publishing my blog posts on LinkedIn allows me to build stronger relationships with my LinkedIn connections. Publishing my blog posts on Business2Community allows me to tap into a larger audience.

Your blog is not the only place where your blog posts can go. They can be put on other sites, and that will result in more traffic and credibility for you.

Which guest blogs will you implement this strategy with? Do you see yourself publishing anything to LinkedIn or Tumblr? Sound off in the comments section below!