Targeted Audience

7 Ways To Get More Followers On Vine Fast

July 13, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Although Vine is not as big as Twitter or Facebook, it has millions of members that generate a lot of engagement. When Instagram came out with its 15 second video loop, many people thought that Vine was dead. Remember when people tweeted out things like, “Vine (2013-2013)?” Those days are over, and people are now searching for ways to get more followers on Vine. Speaking of getting more followers on Vine, here are seven ways that you can do that.

Follow other people. I follow the people who are following those “I Follow Back” accounts. Vine is the only social network that I do this for, but it works. On a typical day, when I follow enough people, I am able to gain 300 followers every day. This even happened when I didn’t send a Vine for an entire month. I just continued to follow these people’s followers to grow my audience.
Post 1 Vine every day. Although the first method grows your following without requiring you to post on Vine, you will be able to spread faster on Vine by posting often. The people with millions of followers on Vine are the ones who post new vines consistently. Their audience shares their content and ultimately results in the vines spreading. If people who happen to see your vines think they are good, then those people will decide to follow you.
Tweet out your vines. Tweets with vines get more engagement than the tweets without vines. In addition, you get to tap into the audience that you already built on Twitter. If you continue tweeting your vines, your Vine audience will grow as your Twitter audience grows.
Tell your friends about your Vine account. Your friends may be the first ones to like and revine your vines (which allows your vines to spread). The likes and revines may not come right away, but if you tell enough of your friends about your vines, some of those friends will help your vines spread.
Get a group of friends together and do vines together. It seems as if there multiple groups of famous viners who happen to know each other and appear in each other’s vines. If you get a group of friends together to do the same thing, you will all have each other’s audiences. If you get five of your friends who have 1,000 followers each, that’s an audience of 5,000. As you tag each other in various vines, members of the audience will learn to enjoy your vines and your friends’ vines.
Use Instagram. Vine allows you to create 6 second videos that repeat in a loop, but they do not allow you to take pictures. Instagram is the solution. When you need to take a picture, take one with Instagram. Then, be sure to tell people on Vine to follow you on Instagram. The more social networks people follow you on, the less likely they will be to forget about you.
Comment on other people’s vines. Leaving comments on other people’s vines is an easy way to get noticed. When you comment on other people’s vines, don’t just ask for a shoutout or a follow back. Instead, leave a relevant comment. Leaving a relevant comment will also boost your chances of getting another follower.

Growing your audience on Vine does not have to be impossible. Most of the people on Vine with over 1 million followers are teenagers. Anyone has the ability to thrive on Vine if they know how. Implementing these methods will allow you to build a big audience on Vine fast.

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.

The Difference Between Crowds And Tribes

July 7, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

The Difference Between Crowds And Tribes

Esurance has a crowd. The $1.5 million brought together over 250,000 people. Those 250,000 people were a lot more interested in the giveaway than car insurance. Right when the giveaway ended, over 100,000 people gradually unfollowed Esurance, and Esurance continues to get unfollowed by the masses to this day. Esurance could have had a tribe, but they didn’t give anyone a good enough reason to stick around after the giveaway.

Twitter, Facebook, and any other social network is also a crowd. They happen to have millions of tribes connected together, but all of those tribes added up equal a crowd. You can’t engage the entire crowd so it is up to you to decide what types of people are the right ones for your tribe. Those are the targeted members of your audience.

Seth Godin has a tribe. In fact, he has a big one. He wrote a book called Tribes (go figure) as well as other international bestsellers (some have been translated in over 30 languages). Seth Godin is the #1 marketer in the entire niche, and hundreds of thousands of people buy his books and read his blog posts. These are targeted people who can easily communicate with each other and enjoy what Seth does. Some refer to him as the Superman of marketing.

Crowds and tribes are two very different groups of people. It is better to have a small tribe than it is to have the big crowd. A small tribe can grow overtime just like Seth’s tribe, but a crowd like Esurance’s crowd gets scattered.

Are you building a tribe that matters or a crowd to make yourself think that you are popular?

7 Reasons Why You Need To Be On Squidoo

July 5, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Squidoo is one of the most popular sites on the web, and it continues to grow as the days go by. A website that once got over 1 million daily visitors went down to 200,000 daily visitors once Google changed its search engine policy. However, Squidoo has proven to be a very resilient website. After consistently bringing in 200,000 U.S. daily visitors, Squidoo’s U.S. traffic increased by over 30% in one month. Squidoo’s traffic has seen anywhere from a 10-19% increase every week which means Squidoo is growing. Squidoo can end up getting to 1 million daily visitors again by the end of the year. It got there before, and there’s no saying Squidoo can’t get there again, but by joining Squidoo now, you get to become a part of the movement. While joining a movement is nice (who wouldn’t want to do that), these are seven reasons why you need to be on Squidoo.

Being on Squidoo boosts your SEO. Creating Squidoo webpages (they call their webpages lenses) and adding a link to your blog on those webpages will boost your SEO and make it easier for people to find your blog. In addition, some Squidoo webpages get hundreds of daily visitors which are hundreds of daily visitors that you would have never had…and those visitors can also visit your blog.
You can make revenue with Squidoo. Not only do you get more visitors on your blog, but you also make revenue based on Squidoo’s tiered system. There are many people who make over $100 every month on Squidoo while others are making thousands of dollars every month while growing their blog traffic.
You can write about (almost) anything. No matter what your niche is, you can write about it on Squidoo. I decided to create some Squidoo webpages about getting a targeted Twitter following, a targeted Pinterest following, getting more eBook sales, and reducing bounce rate.
Squidoo has a great community. Remember how frustrated you were when you were struggling to find a way to contact Google, Amazon, PayPal or any of the other big sites? That does not happen on Squidoo. All of the members interact with each other, and the people in charge (yes, the people in charge) actually respond in under 24 hours. If you have a question, it is okay to ask, and you will get an answer.
You can use their Amazon and eBay links to make a commission. If you are not an Amazon Associate or eBay Affiliate, you can use Squidoo’s Amazon and eBay links to promote products and make a commission. You get a little more than 4% of each Amazon sale while the eBay Affiliate links range between 2-4% (that depends on the product that gets sold on eBay).
Squidoo was founded by Seth Godin. Seth Godin happens to be the #1 marketer in the world, so if you were wondering if Squidoo can really make a comeback (and get 1 million daily visitors again), just know that Seth Godin is the man with the steering wheel. He also does some interaction in the Squidoo community.
You get to donate your earnings to charities. Unlike other websites similar to Squidoo, you can donate your earnings to charity. Whether you feel like donating all of your earnings to charities or 7% (basically, you can choose any number), donating to charities will further strengthen the thinking process that you are making a difference. Imagine being able to make money for yourself and then have Squidoo donate some of that money to the ASPCA (that’s what I do).

Squidoo is going to be back to getting over 1 million U.S. daily visitors (and over 2 million globally) by the end of the year, and you can be a part of that movement while helping out in a charity’s movement. If you want to be on Squidoo and be a part of the movement, join now.

7 Things That Social Media Can Do For You

July 1, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

We all enjoy using our social networks. Some people use those social networks to talk with their friends, others use their social networks to keep in touch with famous peoples’ updates, and others use social networks to promote their blogs. Regardless of how you use social media, it is a powerful tool that can be used to build awareness for you and your brand. Here are 7 of the things that social media can do for you:

Boost your credibility. There are a lot of benefits to boosting your credibility. Growing your presence on your social networks is a great way to grow your credibility. The average person would rather go to the consultation session with the person who has 10,000 followers than the consultation session with the person who has 1,000 followers.
Gives you more opportunities. As you interact with more people, you will interact with more people who have opportunities. Some of the people you interact with may be organizing business summits that you can take a part in as a public speaker. As you grow your audience, you will eventually encounter people who will offer you opportunities.
More sales. Having a big audience on social media means more potential customers. Having your blog optimized is not enough to get more sales. People need to be visiting your blog in order for the optimized look to have any effect, and growing your presence on your social networks is a great way to build that audience who will want to buy your products.
Word of mouth marketing increases. The only way for word of mouth marketing to work is by people knowing about you. If you have a big audience on your social networks, more word of mouth takes place. Then, your audience grows because some of the people who heard about you will decide to follow you too.
You get to interact with customers anytime. In brick and mortar stores, the customer buys a product, leaves, and the people in the store can’t interact with that customer until he/she comes back. Social media is different. You can interact with your customers at anytime to ask how they like your product, if they would like to leave a review, and if you can help them utilize your product along the way. Social media allows you to have efficient customer service, and having a big audience of customers who are asking questions will further establish that you are great at customer service (potential customers will love this).
Boost your blog’s traffic. If you are looking for a way to get more traffic, then look no further than building your social media audience. Although it is necessary for long-term success, SEO is overrated. It is your social networks that will generate a bulk of your audience, and as your social media traffic grows, your search engine traffic will also grow.
Bragging rights. Don’t take bragging rights the wrong way. Most people think of the bad version of bragging rights that goes along these lines, “I have 100,000 followers on Pinterest. I’m super cool, and you’re not.” That is a bad way to brag about a big accomplishment. The ideal way to use bragging rights is just to mention them. Just saying that you have 100,000 Pinterest followers will get some gasps from the audience. Bragging rights can be powerful, if used responsibly.

Social media is the most powerful tool on the web to build an audience and your presence on the web. As you grow your presence, you will gain all seven things on this list. What are your thoughts about the list? Does social media do something for you that was not mentioned on this list? Please share your thoughts below.