SEO

7 Proven Methods To Keep Visitors On Your Blog Longer

July 11, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

blog traffic growth

The longer you keep a visitor on your blog, the more likely that visitor is to do the following:

Become a returning visitor
Subscribe to your blog
Tell their friends about you
Buy one of your products

There are several benefits associated with getting more visitors, but few people know how to keep visitors on their blog for a longer period of time let alone how much time the typical visitor is spending on their blog. As your blog becomes more popular, you will be able to find out how much time your average visitor spends on your blog on Alexa. Whether you know how long your visitors stay on your blog or not, it is very important to make sure your visitors stay on your blog for as long as possible. Here are 7 proven methods to make people stay on your blog for a longer period of time.

Make your blog load faster. People will not stick around if it takes too long for your blog to load. People have things to do, places to see, and other blogs to visit. The world moves super fast which means your blog needs to load super fast. People will not wait for a few seconds to go by to access your blog.
Include videos in some of your blog posts and on your sidebar. If your visitor watches a 5 minute video on your blog, that means that person was on your blog for an extra 5 minute. Imagine what would happen if half of your blog’s visitors watched a 5 minute video. They would stay on your blog for a very long time.
Include links to your older posts. By including links to your older posts, you will reduce your blog’s bounce rate. In addition, linking to your older blog posts provides your visitor with more content. The more links to have to your own blog posts, the lower your bounce rate will be. You should make it a goal to include at least 1 link to another blog post on your blog in all of the blog posts that you write.
Have a good theme and background for your blog. Your blog’s design is one of the initial deciding factor of whether people stick around or not. Before visitors read your blog posts, they see the theme and background. If your blog’s theme and background look bland, too complex, or unbearable (this can go from only having a bright yellow color as the background to something that shouldn’t be there), visitors will leave your blog before reading the post.
Write longer blog posts. If your visitors have more content to read, then they will stay on your blog longer. It takes longer for someone to read a 1,000 word blog post than it takes for someone to read a 500 word blog post. Writing longer blog posts will also have an impact on your blog’s SEO.
Include eye-catching pictures in your blog posts. Pictures make the entire reading process much easier. Instead of just seeing a giant slab of text, show your visitors a picture. This picture can strengthen the idea of what your blog post is about, provide insights, be humorous, or do something else. Ultimately, the picture engages the visitor and keeps that visitor on your blog for a longer period of time.
Write valuable content. In order to get your visitors to click on the links to your older blog posts and watch the 5 minute video, the content you provide on your blog needs to be valuable. You can write quality content and not make a single spelling or Grammar error. However, you need to write valuable content that people remember you for. You won’t remember every word in this blog post, and I’m not expecting you to (I don’t remember all of the words to my own blog posts, so it’s okay). The only thing your visitors will remember is the value that your blog post provided.

It is important to write quality content, but it is also important to keep people on your blog for a long period of time. That’s how a visitor gets value from your content and becomes a returning visitor for your blog. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional advice? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

5 Tactics To Improve Your SEO In 5 Minutes

July 10, 2014 by Marc Guberti 12 Comments

SEO Stats Rising

There are many ways to improve your blog’s SEO. While numerous SEO tactics take several months before you see an effect, there are other SEO tactics that can lead to a noticeable improvement in your blog’s traffic. The best part about these SEO tactics is that they all take a grand total of just five minutes to implement. You don’t have to spend hours, days, weeks, and months implementing SEO tactics and waiting for the results to come in. These are the five quick ways to boost your SEO and see the results come in faster at the same time!

Include links to your older blog posts. Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of people who view 1 page or post on your blog without sticking around and viewing another page or post on your blog. Including links to your older blog posts in your newer ones will reduce your blog’s bounce rate and have an impact on its SEO.
Use long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are just the way they sound. They are long keywords that get searched less on Google but are more specific and easier to end up on page one for. For this blog post, I could have used the hashtag “SEO,” but I did not. The problem with that keyword is that there are over 200 million articles on Google with that keyword. That’s where new articles get swallowed up by the popular articles. However, using a search term like “How to enhance your seo” has only 4.8 million articles. It is much easier to end up on page one for the long tail keywords than it is to end up on page one for short keywords. All you need to do for this one is enter your keywords carefully. If you don’t know what to enter in, go to Google and type in a short keyword. Then, before you click enter, Google will give you suggestions. Use the long tail keyword suggestions as the keywords for your blog post.
Write longer blog posts. Using this tactic too often may result in less people reading your entire blog posts which is why this tactic should be used sparingly. Writing longer blog posts does matter for SEO, and it can help you rank higher on Google’s search engine. This will allow you to see a noticeable short-term increase in traffic, but the long-term increase in traffic will be more dramatic.
Interact with your followers on your social networks. For most people, it will take 1-5 minutes to interact with some of their followers on their social networks. Interacting with these followers will encourage them to visit your blog. Getting more visitors on your blog will boost its SEO, but the social media interaction you get will also boost your blog’s SEO. It’s a win-win!
Look at the keywords that already get people to your blog. As your blog grows, you will be able to identify more of the keywords that people use to find your blog. Write blog posts relating to the keywords that people use to find your blog. To make the process go faster and see a short-term impact, you can add these keywords to some of the blog posts you have already published. In order to see the long-term effect of these keywords, write blog posts related to these keywords.

While it takes a long time to reap the benefits of SEO, you can use these methods to boost your SEO and see an immediate short-term increase in traffic. Continuing to implement these tactics over a long period of time is what will allow you to get those long-term results. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional quick tips to implement to boost your SEO? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

10 Ways To Get More People To Share Your Facebook Posts

July 6, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Facebook is the largest social network and the second most popular website on the web. If you can optimize your Facebook posts so more people share them, you can potentially reach hundreds of thousands of people. The great news is that in terms of getting people to share your Facebook posts, you have the advantage. Facebook is a social network that encourages oversharing. Clicking like or share is all someone needs to do to get 20% of their friends on Facebook to see your post. Since more people will be encouraged to share your post, this will create a strong ripple effect. In order to get the ripple started and get people to share your Facebook posts, follow these 10 tips.

Grow your Facebook Page. The more people you have on your Facebook Page, the more people will be able to like your posts and share them on Facebook.
Post on your Facebook Page every day. People like consistency. If you post on your Facebook Page every day, people will know to look on your Facebook Page for new posts that they can like and share with their friends.
Include pictures in your Facebook posts. Facebook posts with pictures get more engagement than the Facebook posts without pictures. Find a way to incorporate a picture into all of your Facebook posts.
Tweet your Facebook posts. If you have a targeted following on Twitter, those people would be very happy to share your Facebook posts. You can engage with an audience you have already build to grow your audience on Facebook.
Promote your Facebook posts on your blog. A blog is a great place to promote any of your social media posts. Embed your Facebook posts on your blog so people can like, comment, and share your Facebook posts on your blog.
Get more Facebook likes. If you have a Facebook post with a powerful message, then sure, people will share it. However, people tend to share what is popular. Having thousands of likes for your Facebook Page will tell people that your Facebook Page is popular. The more popular a Facebook Page is, the more comfortable someone on Facebook will feel to like and share your posts.
Promote your Facebook post using Facebook Advertising. It may be better to promote your Facebook Page instead of a post, but regardless, more people will be able to see your post which means more people will share that post.
Post something that people would want to share. Whether your post is comical or motivational, you need to post something with a central message that your target audience would like and want to share.
Offer a giveaway. Anyone who shares any of your Facebook posts for an entire week can be eligible to win a free prize. This giveaway will encourage more people to share your Facebook posts, and the word will spread. Soon enough, you will have hundreds of people sharing your Facebook posts just to be eligible for the free prize.
Get more friends. Whether you have a Facebook Page, a personal account, or both, getting more friends on Facebook is a pivotal way to get more people to share your content. In most cases (for the people who don’t have famous businesses or aren’t famous…yet), the success of a Facebook Page starts with a group of friends. Those friends like and share your posts, and that shows interaction is going on. Then, more people see your Facebook Page and decide to share your posts. Soon enough, your posts are averaging hundreds of likes and shares every day. It all starts with a group of friends.

Getting more people to share your Facebook posts will allow your content to spread. Think of what would happen if people shared your blog posts hundreds of times on Facebook. That would equate to thousands of visitors that you would have never had. Although there are people leaving Facebook, it is still currently the largest social network out there. Getting hundreds and eventually thousands of people to share your Facebook posts would allow you to build a powerful presence on the web.

What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips to get more visibility and shares for a Facebook post? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

10 Ways To Get More Blog Traffic

June 27, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Your blog is your home on the web that allows people to know about your products and content. There are millions of blogs on the web, and a new blog gets created every half second. However, most of these blogs do not get enough visitors to generate revenue and connections. The key to being successful as a blogger is to be able to get a lot of traffic. After you consistently get hundreds of visitors every day, your methods of making money with your blog will generate more revenue. Then, as you test other options, you will be able to identify the methods that lead to the biggest income. However, in order to get to that point, people need to know about you, and you need to increase your blog’s traffic. Here are 10 ways to do that.

Utilize your social networks. The best way to get more traffic than your blog is to use your social networks. As you grow your audience on your social networks, you will get more engagement and clicks. Suddenly, you will go from getting 10 extra visitors every day from your social networks to getting hundreds of extra visitors every day from the same social networks–but with larger audiences.
Make it harder for people to leave your blog. By making it harder for people to leave your blog, your blog will have a lower bounce rate. In order to make it harder for people to leave your blog, include links to older but related blog posts in your new ones. If you make it harder for someone to leave your blog, and that person likes the content on your blog, then that person is more than likely going to be a returning visitor and a subscriber later on.
Become a guest blogger. Guest blogging no longer has a strong impact on SEO, but it is still a great way to get more people to know about you. As a guest blogger, you have the ability to put your content in front of a larger audience. Some people in that audience who like your guest post will decide to visit your blog.
Interview other people on your blog. When you interview someone on your blog, that person will be very likely to send out a tweet about your blog. As a result, you get more of that person’s audience to visit your blog. When you interview other people, be sure to choose the top people in your niche who have the largest audiences.
Get interviewed by other people. Have a page on your blog with contact information that allows your visitors to schedule an interview with you. This interview will get posted on someone else’s blog which allows you to reach a larger audience. These interviews will also give you a way to get more backlinks for your blog.
Become a public speaker. One of the easiest ways to get everyone to pay attention to you is by being an effective public speaker. Speaking at events will allow you to build stronger connections, and get more visitors. Almost everyone in attendance will visit your blog at least once, but if you do a good job, some of the people who attended will want to subscribe to your blog and buy your products.
Engage with your targeted followers. An easy way to get more visitors is to engage with targeted people who would enjoy your blog. As a conversation develops, these people will become curious and take a look at your bio. Then, these people will notice the link to your blog and click on it. You just got another visitor!
Use Squidoo. Squidoo is a fun platform to use to get more traffic for your blog. The community there is very kind, and I learn a lot from them (before the Squidoo community, I didn’t even know what SEO stood for). Squidoo will allow you to get more backlinks for your blog, and you can even include a widget on a lens (that’s what they call their webpages) that promotes your blog.
Keep your content focused. One common mistake that prevents blogs from becoming popular is that the blogger writes about a variety of things. Instead of writing about everything you like from A to Z, only write about something that you know the most about and can share valuable information about that topic.
Write content that people would want to share. If you are able to get your content to spread all across the social networks on the web, your content will be able to reach more audiences–big or small. In addition, the people who shared your content will be very likely to share more of your content in the future.

By getting more visitors, you have the potential to grow your email list and get more sales. The most successful blogs that bring in a lot of revenue also happen to be the most popular ones. Although there are several things you would need to do to optimize your blog, mastering traffic will allow you to get better results every month. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

52% Of This Blog’s Traffic Came From Social Media For Three Months

June 25, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Last May was a really good month for this blog. It surpassed 80,000 all-time views and just missed getting 20,000 views for the month (it was less than 500 views away). As I got closer to 100,000 all-time views, I decided to dig into the statistics for my blog to see my strengths and where I could improve. As I expected, Twitter was by far my biggest source of traffic for the past three months at 23,389 views from March 3, 2014 to May 3, 2014. Search engines were far behind at only 8,045 views in the same amount of time while nothing else even compared (none of the other methods of gaining traffic went over 1,000 views during this time). Pinterest was my third biggest source of traffic with 705 views during this time.

Since I had big numbers to play with, I decided to do number crunching calculations. Throughout the time frame, this blog generated 47,742 views. I added all of the traffic from different social networks and identified that this blog got 24,681 views which means for the past three months, 52% of this blog’s traffic came from social media. At this same time, only 17% of this blog’s traffic came from search engines.

This is another testimony that proves growing your presence on social networks is more important than SEO. While they are both important, some people focus most of their time on SEO without giving a thought about how social networks can result in more traffic. As my traffic numbers from social networks increased, I also noticed an increase in this blog’s search engine traffic.

In May, 20% of my blog’s traffic came from search engines. That does not mean my traffic from my social networks went down. That means the traffic I gained from search engines significantly increased. As a grew my presence on my social networks, the traffic I gained from search engines grew at a faster rate.

If you are wondering whether you should be using social networks to increase your blog traffic, the answer is that you must do so. Social media is one of the best ways to grow your presence, get more traffic, get more subscribers, and as connections become stronger, get more sales in the process. What are your thoughts on using social media to get more traffic? What are your thoughts on SEO? Please share your thoughts below.

Is Guest Blogging Still Worth It?

June 24, 2014 by Marc Guberti 3 Comments

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging used to be the ideal way to grow your presence and enhance your SEO at the same time. However, guest blogging started to become a spammy practice, and that was all it took for Google to pull the plug on guest blogging. Guest blogging is no longer a valuable way to get backlinks and increase your blog’s SEO. Since Google dramatically diminished the power of guest blogging, many people started to write less guest posts or stopped writing them all together. There are also some people on the cusp of making a decision, those who continue to stick with guest blogging, and others who have not written a single guest post.

The question that surrounds these people’s minds is whether guest blogging is still worth it. Even though Google pulled the plug on guest blogging, guest blogs like Business2Community and Social Media Today continue to get updated. My answer for this question is that guest blogging is still worth it. If you are trying to build links, then guest blogging will not work out for you, but if you want to build your presence on the web, then guest blogging is very effective.

There are numerous reasons to write guest posts that I highlighted in these posts. One of those reasons was for SEO. Just because one reason is eliminated does not mean the other reasons are obsolete. Writing guest posts on popular blogs still has a powerful effect. With guest blogging, you can still do the following:

Grow your following. These people will eventually visit your blog.
Get more people to know about you. Guest blogging allows you to put your content in front of a larger audience.
Get more people to know about your blog. Although SEO will no longer be a factor, people who look at your bio will still be able to see your blog’s link.
Become a better writer. If you want to become a very good writer, then there’s no such thing as writing too much.

Guest blogging is still worth it. Although search engines do not factor in guest blogging, writing guest posts still serves its main job–getting you more traffic and exposure. What are your thoughts about guest blogging? Do you think it is obsolete, or do you think there is still a good use for it? Please share your thoughts below.