Blogging

8 Reasons Why You Need A Blog

November 19, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

8 reasons why you need a blog pic

Creating a blog is one of the best experiences the web has to offer. In fact, over 152,000 blogs are created every day, and there are millions of blogs on the web already. Due to all of these blogs, the web has become a giant hub for information with billions of typed words for specific topics. It is amazing how much time bloggers have collectively spent typing over the years.

Yet, there are still people who do not have their own blogs. There are still people who are not taking advantage of all of the opportunities that blogging has to offer. There are still people who are not sharing their content to the world with a blog. If you are not a blogger, here are 8 reasons why you need a blog. If you are a blogger, these are the reasons why you need to continue blogging.

#1: You Have Full Control

When you have your own blog, you get to decide your own work hours. That means if you want to wake up in the morning to write blog posts, you can. If you want to take a three hour break, you can do that too. In fact, you can take the day off if you choose.

Blogging gives you the control and flexibility that a day job does not provide. If you have a kid, and your kid’s school bus arrives an hour late, blogging gives you the option of picking up your kid at school instead of having that kid wait for the bus. If you are at a day job from 9 to 5, then that opportunity to pick up that kid from school will not be available.

#2: You Get To Stay Home

One of the big benefits of blogging is that you can write blog posts in your pajamas. You do not need to get up, put on a blazer and tie, and get to work. There is no commute with blogging.

No commute allows you to save a lot of time. It takes some people an entire hour to get to work and then another hour to get back home. If you are in this scenario, blogging will give you two extra hours to do more work.

#3: You Get To Write About Anything You Want

It is a shame that most kinds of work as associated as activities we do to pay the bills. There are many people making money from jobs that they hate. With a blog, all of that changes. Instead of being given a set of instructions and working for someone else, you get to work for yourself. You get to create your own instructions and decide what you write about.

That means you can write about the topics that you are passionate about. If you enjoy golfing, then write blog posts about golfing. If you enjoy fashion, then go for it. You can write about anything you want as long as it is not inappropriate content.

#4: The Entire World Gets To See Your Content

There is a big difference between you and your English teacher seeing your content and literally allowing the entire world to see your content. Putting your content on the big stage gives you more responsibility for your content.

In addition to giving you more responsibility for your content, it is a great feeling to publish a blog post. Your content has the power to serve anyone on the planet. Imagine getting a comment from someone on one of your blog posts thanking you for writing that blog post. It is a great feeling, but the only way to experience that feeling is by clicking the publish button and grow your audience.

#5: You Can Make A Full-Time Income

Blogging is a great way to put your content in front of the world, but it is also a great way to generate a full-time income. A blogger can make money by using his/her blog to grow an email list, interact with those subscribers, and create products along the way.

There are some bloggers who have made lucrative incomes from their content. John Chow is a blogger who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. Imagine how much your life would change if you were making six figures every year from your house. Blogging gives you the power to do that.

#6: You Can Make Money In Your Sleep

The bloggers who have turned blogging into a full-time income make money in their sleep. These bloggers wake up to more sales, advertisement clicks, people who want to be consulted, and more activities that generate revenue.

It is a great feeling to wake up and start the day knowing you just made an extra $100 for sleeping in your bad. The only way to make money at a job is by being awake and active for as long as possible. At the same job, working for 40 hours every week brings in more revenue than working for 30 hours. If you turn blogging into a full-time income, you can make more money than someone working 40 hours every week in half the time!

#7: The Income You Make Is Dependent On The Work You Put In

In the status quo, wage is typically a constant. You get $10 every hour for performing a series of tasks. Not working long enough makes it more difficult to pay for the taxes. Blogging has no wage based income. That means the amount of work you put in will be a decisive factor in how much income you make.

The revenue that comes from blogging starts off very low for a long period of time, but then, after putting in the right work, that revenue will skyrocket upwards.

That’s what happened to the blogger who are now making a full-time income. At one point, they were not making any revenue from blogging, but now they are making six figures every year. Some bloggers even make seven figures every year.

#8: You Get To Connect With Like-Minded People

One of the many things every person enjoys doing is talking to someone with the same interests. If two cross country runners are talking to each other, they always go on and on about intense practices and funny moments in their running careers. There’s no question about it (I should know).

A blog gives you the power to connect with like-minded people. When these people leave a comment on your blog, you have the power to continue the conversation with that person. As the conversation develops, you and that person will develop a strong connection. It may not be like a best friend connection, but it is a connection. Some of these people may buy your products later on.

In Conclusion

Blogging is one of the best experiences that the web has to offer. The potential for blogging transcends the status quo, and some people have been able to make full-time incomes from their blogs.

Do you have a blog? If not, do you plan on starting one?

How The Huffington Post Thrived On Twitter And How Much Traffic They Get From It

November 12, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

I recently went from tweeting every 20 minutes to every 15 minutes. I thought tweeting once every five minutes would be absurd and annoy followers. However, the Huffington Post tweets every five minutes, and since the account boasts millions of followers and gains over 3,000 followers every day, tweeting every five minutes does not look like the problem.

I was fascinated that the Huffington Post has its big audience, tweets every five minutes, and gets dozens of favorites and retweets for each tweet. I looked at the account and concluded that Twitter must be a big part of the Huffington Post’s success.

I decided to do some digging.

Just like many big websites, the Huffington Post hides its traffic numbers. However, after I did my Twitter experiment with tweeting once every 15 minutes, I concluded I knew how to calculate the amount of traffic the Huffington Post gets from Twitter. I decided to use my own statistics as a guide and use that rate to calculate the Huffington Post’s traffic.

Tweeting once every 15 minutes with 126,000 Twitter followers at the time resulted in around 450 daily visitors. The Huffington Post tweets once every five minutes which is three times my rate. That means if the Huffington Post had 126,000 Twitter real, targeted followers, it would be getting 1,350 visitors from Twitter alone.

That is a big difference, but the bigger difference is the amount of followers the Huffington Post has. In September, when I first set off to tweeting once every 15 minutes, the Huffington Post had about 4,540,000 followers (let’s assume for the sake of the calculation that all of those followers are real). That’s 36 times more followers than me. That theoretically means the Huffington Post is getting visitors referred from Twitter 36 times more than I me if I tweeted once every five minutes.

Based on the statistics provided in this blog post, the Huffington Post gets close to 48,600 daily from Twitter alone. The Huffington Post probably gets an extra 5,000 to 10,000 daily visitors from Twitter because they tweet the news.

Here are the major ways that the Huffington Post gets tens of thousands of daily visitors from Twitter alone:

They have a big audience.
They tweet very frequently (once every five minutes).
They tweet new content throughout the day (over 100 new articles are added to the Huffington Post every day because it has numerous contributors).
They tweet about the news (many stories that make the news end up becoming trending topics. Creating and tweeting new content about news stories allows the Huffington Post to get more exposure during trending topics).
They tweet about celebrities (there are millions of people who care about everything the Kardashians do. Let’s not forget about all of the other big ones out there).
They use headlines that make us want to learn more. Take a look at this tweet. The headline automatically grabs your attention, and the tweet’s engagement prove that it got a lot of attention.

In Conclusion

That’s how the Huffington Post thrives on Twitter. They tweet very frequently, constantly post new content that people like to read, and continue to grow their audience. More people learn about the Huffington Post as friends retweet the Huffington Post’s tweets and share the online magazine with their friends. That is how they get tens of thousands of visitors from Twitter every day.What are your thoughts on the Huffington Post? What are your thoughts on their Twitter strategy? Please share your thoughts below.

Why I Started Blogging

November 7, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

After writing over 1,000 blog posts, I finally set aside some time to recall how this journey began. There are millions of people embarked on their own journeys, but few people take the time to go back to the roots. Few people ask questions like, “Why did I start?” or “Why did I create my own team?”

Starting blogging was one of the best experiences I have ever had. Blogging has allowed me to write about what I want to write about and reach out to countless people. The big perk of blogging that initially attracted me was the ability to do what you love at home while making a profit. I never had plans at any point in my life of what job or career I would pursue. The only thing I knew is that it was going to be a lot of fun, and blogging has definitely fulfilled that goal.

It is very important to do something that you enjoy because this will make you put in as much of your time and effort as possible. Working at a job you do not enjoy will result in you avoiding the extra mile and not seeking to improve in your work.

That is why I pursued blogging. I enjoyed it, and it brought in some extra money. Over the years, I have been able to create a blogging empire that results in more revenue and more enjoyment than a summer job. I can’t even imagine being an employee for someone else.

Surprisingly, I never thought of my blog posts as more essays to write or anything like that. Blogging gives me flexibility. I was able to talk about the Red Sox, Yugioh Cards, and Legos, and people came. All of those blogs ended up getting a few thousand visitors. This particular blog has been the gem of them all, but I got to this stage years after I started blogging.

Blogging is one of the best journeys anyone can take. Blogging gives you the power to put your content in front of the world and build an influence. I am a proud blogger, and I do not see myself stopping anytime soon. In fact, I will most likely never stop.

What was the hook that got you into blogging?

5 Reasons To Use Bitly

November 5, 2014 by Marc Guberti 6 Comments

There are countless tools on the web, but Bitly is one of the best tools on the web for marketers. Chances are you may have heard of Bitly before or have seen the Bitly links in action. Someone you know may even use Bitly. It is a tool that many marketers cannot go without, and if you do not have a Bitly account, here are five reasons why you need to have one.

Bitly shortens your links. The main reason why most people run out of characters on Twitter is because they tweet the entire link. Bitly is the solution to this problem.
Bitly takes a link of any length and turn it into a 20-23 characters link that gives you more characters to play around with on Twitter.
Bitly saves those links. Unlike similar services such as TinyUrl, Bitly saves the links so you can constantly reuse them. If you recycle your social media posts, this is a great feature that will allow you to quickly relocate older articles.
Bitly gives you superior statistics on those links. This third reason is what truly separates Bitly from the other link shortening services. Bitly gives you incredible statistics on your links. You get to see how many clicks you got hour by hour for a whole day as well as how many clicks you got within the hour. You can check how many clicks your Bitly links got for as far as 30 days.
You can categorize your links so they are easier to find. Bitly allows you to put multiple links into one bundle. Creating numerous bundles will allow to categorize your links so you can find them with ease. You can categorize blog posts that you recycle in one bundle and the articles that you want to read in another bundle. There are countless ways to categorize your content on Bitly.
You get to see how popular a link is. Some links are very popular which indicates you should be tweeting them out. Chances are if you tweet a popular link, more followers than usual will click on the link and retweet it to everyone.

Those are the five reasons why you should be using Bitly. What are your thoughts on the list? For the Bitly users out there, do you have any additional reasons why you use Bitly? Please share your thoughts below.

14 Things You Must Do If You Are A Blogger

November 3, 2014 by Marc Guberti 6 Comments

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Blogging can potentially be a great experience that brings in a big profit and allows you to grow a list of email subscribers who you can easily communicate with. The only way to tap into this wonderful experience and turn your content into a stream of revenue is if you know what to do as a blogger.

The journey from new blogger to full-time income takes a few years, and there is no such thing as an overnight success. There are certain things that all bloggers must do in order to make it big. Here are 14 of them.

#1: Utilize social media

Growing a social media audience will allow your blog posts to reach out to more people. It is important to choose one social network and excel at it instead of being bad with multiple social networks. Once you master a social network, continue mastering it while trying to master another social network.

As your audience grows, you will be able to use social proof to entice people to stick around and come back. Many people like to go back to the things that are popular. If you have thousands of followers on one social network, you will be able to use this large number to indicate that you are popular. Indicating that you are popular will result in your visitors coming back for more.

#2: Use an email service like iContact to communicate with subscribers

The money is not just in the list. The money is also in your ability to properly communicate with that list. A service like iContact makes it dramatically easier for bloggers to interact with their subscribers.

Interacting with subscribers is not the same thing as having them subscribed to an RSS feed. By interacting with your subscribers, you are able to develop a deeper connection. You can ask your subscribers how their day was before you mention your article. You can even promote your products to the people on your list so you get more sales. They say the money is in the list for a reason.

#3: Grow your email list

The larger your email list is, the more people there are who get your emails. No matter which emailing service you use, you need to get people on that list to communicate with in the first place.

There are plenty of ways to grow your email list. One of the most successful methods of growing an email list is something that many marketers refer to as the bribe. A bribe is a free prize that you give to the people who subscribe to your blog. PDFs, reports, videos, and digital books are popular bribes that result in more subscribers.

Another great way to get more subscribers is by including a call-to-action at the end of all of your blog posts. I use the Optin Forms plugin by Codeleon to easily create an effective call-to-action at the bottom of my blog posts. The plugin gives you different themes to choose from and allows you to change the colors of the optin form.

#4: Create Your Own Products

Creating your own products definitely beats relying on affiliate marketing. I know that there are some people who are bringing in a full-time income from affiliate marketing, but the problem with affiliate marketing is that you are dependent on another seller. You never want your income strategy to be dependent on affiliate marketing because it is an inconsistent income stream. Even for the best affiliate marketers, there are some really good months, but there are also really bad months.

Creating products is the better approach towards building a strong income with a blog. By creating products, you are able to bring in a more reliable income. Creating your own products makes you closer to bringing in consistent revenue.

#5: Enhance your blog’s SEO

Although having good SEO is not a do or die stage for a blog, enhancing your blog’s SEO has the potential to bring in thousands of extra visitors.

Getting people to share your blog posts more often and growing your social media audience are two great ways to boost your SEO. In order to get more people to share your blog posts, you want to either go in depth in a certain area or be concise. My suggestion would be to have a mix of both of those kinds of blog posts so you are able to identify which ones get shared more often.

Growing your social media presence and constantly posting links to your blog posts will also boost the amount of shares your blog posts get (as long as the blog posts are valuable to your targeted audience). Writing longer blog posts also helps out in the process. Here are some more tips to help you enhance your blog’s SEO.

#6: Know your market

#5 kind of led into knowing your market. In order to be a successful blogger, it is important to know who the desired visitor is. This desired visitor needs to be interested in your blog’s topic before visiting your blog in the first place. Just ask yourself what kind of content you write and what kind of person would be interested in reading it.

For this blog, I pursue people who are interested in growing their online presence and making a strong income on the web. If you have been reading this blog post word for word, I know you are definitely a part of my target market.

#7: Write 1 blog post every day

Writing 1 blog post every day is essential to getting more traffic. Writing 1 blog post every day gives you more of your blog content to share on your social networks so you are able to generate more traffic.

In addition, the math supports writing numerous blog posts. If you have 1,000 blog posts, then each of those articles only needs to get 1 daily visitor for your blog to get 1,000 daily visitors. If your blog only has 10 blog posts, then each of those articles needs to get 100 daily visitors in order to bring in 1,000 daily visitors.

Although that is a big difference, the quality of your content is a decisive factor towards how much traffic it will get. Just because something is up on the web does not mean people will automatically come.

Writing 1 blog post every day is especially valuable to newbie bloggers. The best way to get better at writing is by writing every day. The best sports athletes in the game got to where they currently are by practicing every day. Writing is no exception, and you need to be a skilled writer to attract a large following of people who easily remember you.

#8: Write down blog post ideas

One of the biggest challenges that stops bloggers dead in their tracks is writer’s block. This occurs when a blogger runs out of ideas. Writing new content becomes more challenging when a blogger encounters writer’s block.

This is why it is important to write down your blog post ideas so you do not forget them. I write down blog post ideas the moment I think of them, and in most cases, I end up writing a blog post around that idea many days later. Relying on your memory to remember all of the blog post ideas is a mistake.

#9: Look at articles on the web about blogging

Most of my knowledge of blogging has come by looking at other people’s articles and experimenting with my own methods along the way. Since you are reading this article about blogging, then you are already ahead of the game!

Problogger and Copyblogger are two great blogs (other than this one) that provide tons of valuable information about blogging.

#10: Read books

The only reason I do not sound like your English teacher right now is because I’m not asking you to read Shakespeare books. Reading books as a blogger serves two major benefits:

You get to see other writers’ styles.
You get to learn new things (core values, things about your niche, etc).

Since you are a blogger who should be writing about what you enjoy, you should also be choosing books that you enjoy to read. The reason why people see reading as dull is because few people get to pick and choose the books they read. As a result, you should only choose to read the books that you would enjoy reading.

If you want to read Shakespeare, then go for it. If you want to read something more modern, that’s also great. Your decision should be based on what you want to read.

#11: Improve your blog’s speed

Google loves a fast blog which means if your blog is slow, it’s not getting as much search engine traffic. There are plenty of simple ways to make your blog load faster. One method is to show an excerpt for your blog posts. If a headline catches a visitor’s attention, that visitor can click on the headline to read the entire blog post.

Another great way to make your blog load faster is to upload smaller images. In many cases, it is the images that make a blog take forever to load. I use Smush.it which is a free plugin that has the power to shrink images.

#12: Create a compelling About Me Page

For thousands of years, human beings have loved a good story, and this love for a story has not outgrown us. We enjoy hearing good stories, and we remember them very well. Stories like Old Yeller and Unbroken are unforgettable to the people who read them.

Although you do not have to turn your bio into a novel, you should be sure to create a compelling About Me Page. Tell your visitors your story, where you came from, how you struggled, how to progressed, and where you are today. Make your story one of those stories that people feel obligated to pay attention to.

#13: Show off your popular articles

All of the people who visit your blog for the first time will have no idea what to expect. The advantage you have with a new visitor is if that new visitor likes the headline and content of the first blog post they see, that visitor will become curious.

For those curious new visitors, showing off your popular articles on your blog’s sidebar is a great way to get more blog traffic while reducing your blog’s bounce rate. If your popular articles are really good, some people will browse through all of them. At that point, you can rest assured that this person will become a returning visitor.

Showing off your popular articles is also great for the visitors that you currently have. Showing this option will give your visitors more content to browse through, and popular articles are usually associated as the best articles on the entire blog.

That means all of your visitors, new or returning, will go into those blog posts thinking that they are extremely valuable. All you have to do at that point is live up to the promise and provide your readers with valuable content.

#14: Make your blog easy to navigate through

One of the most under looked ways to get more blog traffic and decrease bounce rate is by making your blog easy to navigate. You must make it easy for people to…

Access the pages on your blog
Access your content
See your popular posts
See your subscription form

By making it easy for people to navigate through your blog, they will stick around longer. The longer someone sticks around, the more likely that person is to become a customer.

In Conclusion

Blogging is an exciting journey that has allowed many people to work at home while making a full-time income. If you do not have a blog, I highly recommend starting one, and if you already have a blog, then you’re in good shape. Always enjoy every moment of the journey and strive to raise the bar higher for yourself.

And don’t forget to continue practice writing. The more you practice at it, the better you get.

The 5 Elements Of An Irresistible Blog

October 27, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

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One of the hardest things to do with a blog is make it an irresistible blog. Irresistible blogs are the types of blogs that people can browse through for a long period of time. We all have our favorite blogs that we browse through for many minutes at a time. You want people to be browsing through your blog for many minutes as well.

Including links to your older blog posts is a great strategy to lower your blog’s bounce rate. Including these links does help out, but your blog needs to be the type of blog that your targeted readers would want to visit countless times.

You want people to be visiting your blog for many months, and eventually many years to come. You want your blog to be so memorable that people come back for more. Here are the five elements that go into making your blog irresistible.

#1: Have eye-popping pictures.

Pictures have the ability to attract people to a blog post and identify what the blog post is about. Some people will unintentionally skip the headline and go straight into reading the blog post content. That is why I include pictures in my blog posts. If I write a blog post about Twitter, I make sure I include the Twitter logo. That way, if someone reads past the headline but sees the picture, the reader knows the article is about Twitter.

One of the big concerns with using pictures in your blog posts is that many people use images that they do not have permission to use. That is why it is important to create your own pictures that you do have permission to use.

Creating a picture is not as hard as many people think. You do not have to learn graphic design to create your own pictures. Instead, you can use an online tool such as Canva to create your own pictures. Canva has a variety of functions such as creating a picture for your blog posts, Twitter header, Facebook background, and other functions as well. The best part is that the pictures Canva allows you to generate can be eye-popping.

#2: Have good headlines.

Although some readers skip the headline, the people who are staying on your blog for a long time are reading through those headlines. Headlines allow your visitors to know what exactly your blog post will be about.

However, you do not want a simple headline that tells people what they are going to read. I could have called this blog post “5 Blogging Tips,” but “The 5 Elements Of An Irresistible Blog” is a more specific title with the pull-word “irrestible.”

There are many pull-words in a headline that fill people with a strong desire to read your content. Depending on the niche you are in, those pull-words will vary. In order for you to identify the pull-words of your niche, look at other blog post headlines in your niche. Then, ask yourself if the headline is attracting your attention and which words are pulling you in. Afterwards, experiment with your blog and see which pull-words, when used, grab the most attention.

The better your headlines are, the more clicks those headlines are going to get. One of the best strategies to making sure everyone reads your headline is by editing the picture and including the blog post’s headline in the picture. Canva allows you to do this.

#3: Make it easy for people to navigate through your blog.

It is mandatory as a blogger to make your blog easy to navigate. There are many blogs on the web related to yours, and if your visitor feels confused with your blog’s navigation, that visitor will not stick around for a while. When someone visits your blog, that person is choosing you over the countless other blogs out there. Make each visitor feel welcome.

Having good navigation means making it easy for people to access the pages on your blog and blog posts based on certain categories. If you write long blog posts, only include short summaries of those blog posts that require a click to see the whole blog post. Regardless of how well you write, there are going to be some topics that particular readers won’t care about.

Some of this blog’s readers are only concerned with the content about blogging. That means, scrolling through a bunch of 1,000 word blog posts about social media won’t be their cup of tea. Shortening these blog posts will only result in these people scrolling through 50-100 words of other content until they find the content they are actually looking for.

Making it easy for people to find what they are looking for and then delivering on the value will ensure that these people stick around for a long period of time.

#4: Have the right colors.

The colors you use for your blog have a big impact on how well it does. Color psychology is one of the most underrated areas of marketing, but it is a great way to make a blog look more attractive.

Women do not like gray, orange, and brown. They like blue, purple, and green. Men don’t like purple, orange, and brown. Men like blue, green, and black. From this data, you should make sure your blog post includes blue and green colors so both gender groups like the colors on your blog. Here is a detailed blog post on KISSmetrics that goes into color psychology.

#5: Include good social proof.

We have a natural tendency to come back to something that is popular. That means if you have good social proof and can show yourself as a popular expert in your niche, people will come back more often. All of the social media experts are quick to show their credentials and social proof.

The social media experts with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers make sure people can easily see the Twitter follow button with the exact number of followers. I display it on my blog’s sidebar, and the Twitter button happens to be larger than the rest of them.

In Conclusion

By combining these elements together, you will have an irresistible blog that grabs attention and makes visitors stick around for a long time. Getting people to stick around for a longer period of time boosts your chances of getting subscribers and sales.

In addition, Google loves it when people stay on your blog for a long period of time. That means your blogs will gradually get more search engine traffic. Not only does making your blog irresistible result in people staying on it longer, but it also results in more traffic in the long-term.

What were your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips for creating an irresistible blog? Please share your thoughts and advice below.