Traffic

How To Guest Blog Your Way To Massive Traffic

March 16, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Guest blogging is a marketing tactic where you publish your content on other blogs. While appearing on podcasts seems to be the preferred method lately, guest blogging still packs a powerful punch.

If you get your content on the right guest blogs, you can get massive traffic back to your content. However, not all opportunities are created equal. Some guest blogging opportunities pack more of a punch than others.

In this blog post, you’ll learn exactly how you can guest blog your way to massive traffic.

Find The Best Opportunities

As mentioned before, not all opportunities are created equal. But just like any saying or piece of knowledge, it’s only useful if we take action based on that knowledge.

Search for different opportunities, but understand that some are more challenging and/or more rewarding.

You don’t want to write a 2,000 word guest post if it will only be seen by five people. However, if another opportunity can put you in front of 5,000 people within the first week of publication, that’s a better opportunity.

Put your guest posts on the most successful blogs.

In the short-term, you may have to settle with blogs that aren’t on the top because the top guest blogging opportunities tend to request past work. While you can provide your own blog posts as past work, some opportunities will require that you submit past guest posts.

In the beginning, take any opportunity that comes your way. As you get exposed to more opportunities, get more selective.

Look At The Past Content

The biggest mistake most people make is trying to solely craft content for the guest blog’s audience. Before you can even reach the audience, you must win approval from the gatekeeper.

Therefore, you need to write a guest post not just with the reader in mind, but also the gatekeeper.

For some set-ups, the gatekeeper is the blog owner. For other set-ups, an editor is the gatekeeper.

To write for the gatekeeper, you must first look at some of the past content that got published. Notice what worked and what topics haven’t been discussed in a while.

The gatekeeper doesn’t want another blog post on the same topic that has been continuously covered. They either want a completely new topic or a fresh perspective on a topic that hasn’t been covered in a while.

Before I submit any pitch, I will always look at the past content to capture these trends. That will help me craft a better topic for my pitches.

Make Your Pitches

Discovering the right topic idea is the first step towards crafting a great pitch. The rest of the pitch focuses on what you’ll provide.

Write a list of the tactics you will discuss within the guest post. What are some of the highlights? You don’t need to go deep at all with this. You aren’t providing the entire blog post. In most cases, you don’t even need an introduction. Only a few guest blogs ask you for a blog post introduction in your pitch.

When making a pitch, you should list three potential topics and brief outlines of each. That way, the gatekeeper has more potential topics to choose from. Three is the ideal number of topics to provide enough variety without overwhelming the gatekeeper.

For each of those three blog post topics, here’s what my pitch looks like:

Title of Blog Post
Tactic #1
Tactic #2
Tactic #N

I’ll continue with that approach until I cover all of the tactics or points I’ll discuss within the guest post.

As you make more pitches, you’ll get better at getting approved. If you find it difficult to get a yes, make up for it by sending more pitches to more guest blogs. The people who craft the best pitches have also sent more pitches than most people would ever dare to do.

Delegate The Writing

Guest blogging is a lot of work. Once you get approval for a topic, the real work begins. Now you have to write a guest post that fulfills the guest blog’s standards.

To cut down on your workload, you can delegate the writing process. There’s nothing wrong with hiring a freelancer or employee to write guest posts for you.

If you choose the right person for the job, you’ll save hours of time. Not only will you save all of this time, but you will also produce higher value content. That’s because you get to be the first editor.

While we favor the work we created from scratch, we can be more critical and fair with other people’s work…especially when that work will represent our brands.

Scale By Pursuing New Opportunities While Leveraging Current Relationships

As you get more of your guest posts published, you’ll make more connections. Some of the gatekeepers for one guest blog may be gatekeepers for other guest blogs.

Whenever your guest post gets published, ask the gatekeeper if they know anyone else who offers guest blogging opportunities. If you want to write for a certain guest blog over the long-term, make that clear and submit more topic ideas.

It’s great to continue expanding your horizon. Make more pitches and get your content on even more blogs. However, you shouldn’t forget about the relationships you already have. Leveraging your existing relationships is one of the best ways to grow your brand and grow healthier relationships with others.

In Conclusion

Guest blogging is a massive traffic opportunity. In some guest posts, you can mention one of your blog posts within the content. However, everyone gets an About The Author section.

In this section, you can promote your landing page and boost your email subscribers in the process.

Similarly to any goal worth pursuing, you need to remain patient as you send pitches. Remember that guest blogs live on content. They need as much of it as possible.

If you provide valuable content and present your pitches to indicate that value, you’ll get more yeses over the long-term. In fact, some guest blog owners may even come directly to you. In my case, I was contacted by CrazyEgg and Rank Watch to write a guest post for them.

That’s what will happen in the long-term if you’re willing to put in the work now.

What are your thoughts on guest blogging? Do you have any tactics you want to share? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Drive More Traffic To Your Content Without Paying A Penny

March 7, 2018 by Marc Guberti 3 Comments

Content marketing changes every year. While the principles remain the same, tactics and mindsets continue to change.

One of the growing trends in content marketing is that paying to play helps. Paying to play isn’t as vital with content marketing in general as it is with getting traffic on Facebook, but it’s becoming more important.

Now, you may not want to spend any money for your content marketing strategy. That’s fine, and you can still grow a dominant content brand without spending a penny.

Content marketing today presents two major paths. Some choose one or the other while others choose both. Even if you choose both, you’ll end up focusing more on one than on the other.

The question is relationships or money. Do you spend more time building relationships or ensuring that the money you spend generates a better return?

I focus more of my time on building relationships. It also helps that I have a weekday podcast and have to interview at least five people per week to keep the show going at its current pace. However, I’ve treasured relationships even before I started the Breakthrough Success Podcast.

While it helps big time, you don’t need to start your own podcast to build relationships. There are plenty of other ways that will allow you to get the job done.

Appear On More Podcasts

One of my big goals is to appear on more podcasts. Think of podcast appearances as Guest Blogging 2.0. The lure to guest blogging is that your content gets published somewhere else and you get a backlink.

You still get the same backlink with a podcast interview, but instead of writing for hours (especially for a prominent blog), you only have to answer questions for 20-40 minutes. That’s why it’s very easy to land guests for your own podcast. It’s the most time effective way to get more backlinks.

Once you appear on some podcasts, more people will ask you to be guests on their shows. It’s good to build relationships with other podcasters. My favorite way of doing this is having them on my show and then going on their show.

If you don’t have a podcast, you can pitch your story and how you’ll provide value to the hosts’ listeners. Hosts care about the value you’ll provide to their listeners and why your interview will be different.

They don’t want to interview people with the same stories who talk about the same things. They want a variety of topics and backstories to create a higher value library of content for their listeners.

Grow Your Social Media Audience

Not all social networks are pay to play. Even the social networks that seem like pay to play aren’t pay to play in every aspect.

Take Facebook, the first social network that created a truly pay to play atmosphere. Even with this widely held notion you need money to get ahead on Facebook, you can still grow your Facebook audience without paying a penny.

However, instead of a page, create a group and focus on that. Facebook Groups can become vibrant communities if you continue posting valuable content within those groups, adding new people, and monitoring the groups.

I don’t go on Facebook to check on my feed. I go on Facebook to participate in groups I’m in and maintain some of the groups I’ve created.

On other social networks, the pay to play scene has less of a grip. Posting valuable content and interacting with more people in your niche is the surefire approach to growing your audience on any social network.

The more content you post and the more you engage, the larger your audience will become.

Cross Promotions

Lately I’ve been focusing on a old but new for me marketing tactic. That tactic is cross promotion. The way it works is that I promote someone’s landing page, and in exchange, they promote one of my landing pages.

Both of our email lists grow. If you repeat the same process with dozens of people, you can reap massive email list growth without spending a penny on Facebook ads.

That’s not a knock on Facebook ads. You can get ridiculously awesome leads at ridiculously low prices. However, it takes considerable time and money to learn Facebook ads, and if you don’t want to spend a penny right now, cross promotion is the way to go.

Simply find people in your niche who have similar sized audiences as yours. This gets easier as you hear about more people and then make it a point to know them.

Capture Trends

Most of the focus has been on promoting your exposure. However, you can also create sparkling content that attracts more people.

One way to do this is by capturing world trends and inserting them into your content as they happen. You can connect any championship game with your niche.

Any trend that’s grabbing the world’s attention is an opportunity to grow. What’s the Bitcoin of content marketing—something that has so far brought in insane returns.

You may think Bitcoin is a bubble, and by the time you read this blog post, Bitcoin may be priced very differently than when I wrote it. However, people understand that Bitcoin brought massive returns. The Bitcoin of content marketing allows you to ride the Bitcoin wave while attracting more people to your content who want to learn more about content marketing.

This tactic doesn’t just apply to cryptocurrencies or championship games. It can apply to anything that’s hot right now.

Of course, you have a limited window to promote these pieces of content because just because something’s hot now doesn’t always mean it will be hot forever.

You need to mix trendy content with evergreen content to ensure you have useful content for your readers years after today’s trends are tomorrow’s fads.

In Conclusion

Content marketing is becoming more expensive. Some brands spend millions of dollars just on content creation and marketing. However, content marketing doesn’t have to be expensive for you.

Some people do just fine by not spending a penny on content marketing. You’ll still need to invest in your business. Some people invest for different reasons, but you’ll need to invest in your business to make it sustainable over the long-term.

However, you can be creative with your content marketing so you save money and get a better result than if you bought ads.

These are just some of the free tactics that work. Others exist, but the best way to find the best tactics is to be as creative as possible. I only started to utilize more cross promotion because I tapped into my creativity and saw a gap in affiliate marketing promotions within my schedule.

What are your thoughts on content marketing without spending a penny? Do you have any tactics for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Get More Blog Traffic With Less Work

February 9, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

If you ask a blogger about his/her goals, it won’t take long before you hear “get more blog traffic” as one of those goals.

It takes a considerable amount of work to boost your blog traffic, especially in the beginning. The work is worth it in the long-term, but you can take some shortcuts along the way. These shortcuts will cut down on your workload so you can commit more time towards other priorities.

Even then, you may still find yourself committing a significant amount of time towards promotion. However, certain tasks can be reduced or even eliminated.

Create Evergreen Posting Cycles

If you’re the person continuously scheduling your social media posts, put this as Priority #1. Scheduling your social media posts seems like a priority, but with so much automation available, it’s more harm than good to continue scheduling your content.

Instead, you need to create an evergreen posting cycle. That way, all of your social media posts sequentially get posted over and over again in an infinite loop. I only create new tweets 2-3 times per year when I want to incorporate more of my new content into my current evergreen posting cycle.

I don’t have to constantly copy, paste, and write social media posts over and over again. This is the beauty of automation.

For a while, I used HootSuite’s bulk uploader which allowed me to schedule over 100 tweets in just six clicks. Since then, I now use ViralTag which may be more expensive, but it has evergreen posting cycles for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and many others.

I set up these evergreen cycles once and forget about them. The rest takes care of itself.

Republish Your Old Content

It’s great to publish new content. In fact, I write a new blog post every day. However, you can republish your older content to save time.

The idea behind this tactic is that instead of writing a 1,000 word blog post (or more depending on your preference) you update an existing piece of content. Preferably, update one of your top pieces of content.

By updating your top content, you’ll get search engines to notice and point more traffic to that content. You can also use successful content to drive more traffic to your new and emerging content.

Some bloggers have such massive libraries of content that all they do is republish and hone their existing content. You may not be at that point yet, nor may you want to implement that approach, but it’s worth considering.

These same bloggers that only update their new content frequently write guest posts to drive more traffic to their content. These bloggers often publish their best content on other people’s blogs while still providing immense value on their blogs.

Delegate Tasks

I always look for more ways to delegate tasks within my business. The more tasks you can delegate, the more of your time you can commit towards other areas.

And not all tasks are created equal.

You only perform certain tasks because they are necessary for your business. These tasks generate no revenue but help keep everything in place. Scheduling new content, editing the content, growing your social media audience, and other tasks fit the list.

You need to delegate these types of tasks and focus on what only you can do (i.e. creating videos for a training course).

Some of these tasks may be difficult to hand over. I know it was difficult for me to hand over my Twitter growth to someone else. However, that decision was well worth it and allowed me to pursue other ventures.

If I had to continue growing my Twitter audience on my own, there’s no way I would have hosted the Breakthrough Success Podcast or any virtual summits.

Delegating more tasks opens the doors to more opportunities, and more importantly, time to think. You can think about how you’ll expand instead of just doing.

Taking 10-15 minutes to do nothing but think of ways to expand is one of the most powerful ways to grow your business. It’s similar to creating an outline for each blog post you write. You know that the initial time it takes to create the outline will save you massive time and result in a higher value blog post.

Think of the 10-15 minute daily “Thinking Time” as writing a blog post outline for the longest piece of content you’ll ever write. It’ll definitely come out better with the initial Thinking Time.

Craft Email Rubrics

Most people spend an extraordinary amount of time in their inboxes. It seems like for every email we reply to, three new emails come to replace it.

Your inbox is a crowdsourced to-do list which, without moderation, will pull you away from what you’re actually supposed to do.

You may also send emails to reach out to more people. While this can be delegated, many people prefer to do the outreach themselves or at least in the beginning.

Eventually you’ll find yourself writing the same kinds of emails and answering the same questions over and over again. Understanding this principle is essential for getting out of your inbox quicker.

Instead of writing a different email each time, begin crafting email rubrics. Keep those emails in an easy to access folder on your computer.

The next time you respond to the same question here’s what you should do:

Head over to the email rubrics folder

Copy the appropriate email rubric

Paste the rubric into the email

Include the person’s name

Send

This will save you a lot of time. Instead of writing the email word-for-word over and over again, you can click a few buttons and then the exact email shows up. You can also apply this for outreach emails and any emails you find yourself sending often.

As bloggers, we will get the same types of emails. Developing rubrics for our responses will streamline the process so we can respond to and send more emails in a shorter period of time.

In Conclusion

Blogging take a lot of work. You have to create, promote, and monetize your content. None of those three key factors can be missing.

However, there are ways to streamline the process and cut through the noise. Delegation will help you streamline any process, but you should consider automation first. There is no reason to delegate a task that can be easily automated.

Regardless of how much time you shave off from your process, commit to implementing at least one tactic from this blog post. Whether it’s contacting potential employees on a site like UpWork or getting started with ViralTag, get in the habit of taking action based on what you read.

What were your thoughts on these tactics for getting more blog traffic with less work? Do you have any additional tactics for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

Are You Ready For A Surge In Blog Traffic?

February 3, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Every content creator’s goal is to drive more traffic to their content. We see fellow bloggers getting hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors, and we want in on the action.

But are you actually ready for that surge? Are you prepared?

It’s something most content creators don’t think about. Many people think that their brands will reach the upper echelons of success if they get a massive surge in blog traffic.

Did you ever think of what would happen if you got a surge in blog traffic? Let’s say Gary Vaynerchuk did everything in his power to promote your content to his community. You’d get a massive surge of traffic for sure.

But what happens if that traffic fades away? Do you still have a way to communicate with your audience? Or have you lost all of that traffic?

Most people only think about getting more traffic. If only they had more traffic, they’d be more successful.

That’s not real success, especially from the content brand side of things. All of the top content creators know that you need two things to become successful.

Traffic and conversions.

You can get millions of visitors every day, but if you convert none of them, then you’ll be out of business in no time.

It’s natural for us to want to boost our traffic. More people see our content, and that creates more possibilities with word of mouth.

However, you also need to convert your visitors into subscribers. As you communicate with your subscribers through email, you will significantly strengthen the bond you have with your audience. Your subscribers are the people most likely to spread the word about your brand and buy your products.

Traffic comes and goes, but subscribers continue paying attention to what you offer. And getting an email subscriber is different from getting a social media follower.

On social media follower, millions of people (billions in Facebook’s case) are competing for a single user’s attention. On Twitter in particular, logging in a minute later versus a minute earlier will determine which tweets you see and which tweets you miss.

Inboxes may get filled with about 100 emails per day, but that definitely beats competing with the billions of social media posts that come out every day.

And we love checking our inboxes. The instant gratification is too tempting to resist. We are addicted to our inboxes because we remember the best things that happened to us in the inbox.

My mind subconsciously thinks of moments like when Seth Godin said he’d like to be a guest on my podcast. I don’t open my inbox and consciously think, “When I opened my inbox a while back, Seth said he’d be a guest on my show. This email must be just as good or even better.”

But our subconsciouses think that all of the time. They want that instant gratification. Even if you don’t find something as good as one of the best email you received, you still feel good about marking the message as read.

People don’t have the time to mark every social media post as read. That’s why you need to turn as many of your social media followers, readers, listeners, and viewers into subscribers as possible.

To hone in on this mindset, the big step is to determine your landing page and site wide conversion rates. If you get 100 people to visit your landing page, how many of them do you expect to convert? If you get 1,000 people to visit your website, how many of them become subscribers?

When you’re thinking about these questions and optimizing for higher conversion rates, you’re almost ready for traffic.

Even at this moment, you’re not 100% ready for a surge in traffic.

The final step to ensure you’re ready for a surge in traffic is setting up an autoresponder that leads to product sales.

Yes, the money is in the email list, but if you don’t have an autoresponder, you’re not making money. Sure, there is always the possibility of you promoting an affiliate offer or one of your products later on.

But you need to make money with your autoresponder…especially if you want to earn the right to use Facebook ads.

I’m always testing different approaches with my autoresponders. My favorite approach is to send three emails containing free content and then 3-4 emails promoting the product. In those free content emails, the content is related to the product I’ll sell shortly, and I do some soft sells in the postscripts of some of those free content emails.

Once you get some sales, you’re in business. At that point, you’re ready for a surge in blog traffic.

But even when you’re ready, you’re still not done.

You can run A/B Split Tests to boost your landing page and site wide conversion rates. Once tweak to copy can boost your conversion rate by 10%. To put that into perspective, if you attract 1,000 people to this new and improved landing page, you’ll get an extra 100 subscribers.

You can then optimize your autoresponder. See which messages perform better than others. Tweak the messages which are under performing.

Finally, we have the sales page, the one thing I didn’t talk about. If you get product sales, you have a sales page that converts. However, is it converting at 1%, 2%, or something much higher?

Track the number of people who visit your sales page and see how many visitors buy your product. It’s easier to do this on some sales pages than others, but it’s well worth the effort.

Try changing one thing. Whether it’s the copy or the promotional video you use, make something different. See how that affects sales.

If you can double your sales page’s conversion rate, then you’ll double your income. You also double your income if you do just one of the following:

Double your blog traffic

Double your conversion rates

Double your autoresponder’s effectiveness (sometimes an effective follow-up is all you need, but look at all of the messages in yours)

In Conclusion

If you take action based on this blog post, you’ll be ready for that surge of traffic. Until you are ready for the traffic, stop reading those “How To Get More Traffic” blog posts.

You need to be ready for the surge in traffic. Now’s the perfect time to prepare.

What are your thoughts on the prep work for a successful content brand? Do you have any tips for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Get Massive Blog Traffic From Twitter

February 1, 2018 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Twitter is one of the best social network for driving traffic to your blog. Hundreds of people visit my blog from Twitter every single day.

It’s the social network that allowed me to establish my presence and expand from there. I believe Twitter is the easiest social network to dominate. And it’s not pay-to-play like Facebook (the list will grow as the years go by).

Plus, Twitter has momentum. Twitter’s slow growth is a thing of the past, and it’s change to 280 characters is already having a big impact.

If you want to get massive blog traffic from Twitter, follow these steps.

#1: Optimize The Pinned Tweet

You can pin one tweet to the top of your profile for maximum exposure. While most tweets have a lifespan of 20 minutes, the pinned tweet is immortal. Anyone who views your profile sees that tweet before seeing anything else.

With exposure like that, you must use that power wisely.

The best tweet to pin is one that promotes your landing page. That will result in more people joining your email list. As the landing page sits on the top of your profile and racks up more engagement, the social proof will be staggering.

#2: Tweet Often

I send out a tweet every 5 minutes. At some point in 2018, I may experiment with sending one tweet every two minutes.

Some people don’t like that I tweet often, but most people don’t mind. In fact, many people enjoy getting a constant stream of value from me.

The reason I can tweet that many times is because of the user experience. A tweet that I sent out at 4 pm is in the infinite bottom pile of tweets by 4:02 pm. If people log in at 4:02 pm, they missed my tweet from 4 pm.

That’s why I have a tweet scheduled to go out at 4:05 pm so this individual has a chance to see one of my tweets.

#3: Promote Yourself 90% Of The Time

Some experts recommend promoting other people more often than you promote yourself. I disagree with that advice, and you can see it in the way I tweet.

Almost all of my tweets promote one of my blog posts, videos, or podcast episodes. It’s not by accident. People don’t care about the source as long as the information is valuable and true.

As long as I promote valuable content, it’s okay. The moment I create bad content and promote that content often, that’s when more people will tell me to share other people’s stuff.

#4: Grow A Targeted Audience

Audience size is just a number. It’s the people within your audience that determine your success on Twitter or any social network. If you just focus on growing an audience, you risk growing an audience that is indifferent towards your content.

Growing a targeted audience means finding people who have a predetermined interest in your niche.

That means following the followers of influential people and brands in your niche. Then, you schedule a steam of tweets towards your content that is related to the same niche.

If you remember that small paragraph, you know the secret. All you need to do at that point is implement.

I currently use ManageFlitter to follow targeted people who are likely to follow back. ManageFlitter provides plenty of filtering options. They even provide a Remote Account Management option if you don’t feel like doing all of the clicking.

#5: Analyze The Data

As you grow your targeted audience and send more tweets, your Twitter Analytics will become a treasure trove of valuable info. You can see which of your tweets received the most engagement and which ones aren’t as popular.

You can use this data to determine patterns…and then act.

When I first used Twitter Analytics, I realized that my audience wanted more Twitter based articles. You can make determinations like this by looking at the engagement of your most popular tweets.

Twitter related articles topped out all of my other tweets.

With that new knowledge, I wrote more articles about Twitter and saw my Twitter traffic grow even more.

Be sure to routinely analyze your data, because it will change. Now my audience wants more articles about content marketing, and that’s exactly what I have been providing them.

I don’t write as many Twitter articles for that reason, but since I saw a significant gap since my last Twitter article, I wrote this one.

At one point, Twitter was my most popular topic. Even though it’s not the top dog for this blog anymore, I still need to write about it since my audience is interested.

To provide value to the people focused on content marketing, I connected these Twitter tips with getting more blog traffic.

You won’t make those types of decisions or know anything about your audience unless you analyze the data. Twitter Analytics is free and provides you with all of the data that matters, so there’s no reason not to use it.

In Conclusion

Twitter is on the rebound towards further greatness, and now is a great time to expand your presence on the blue bird.

You’ll get maximum blog traffic by knowing and caring about your audience. You’ll provide them with the content they want instead of what you feel like tweeting out.

What are your thoughts about using Twitter to grow your blog? Do you have any tips for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

How To Surge Your Blog Traffic

March 29, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Every blogger wants more blog traffic. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you currently enjoy. What does matter is that you want more of it.

A surge in my blog traffic has made the difference between being relatively unknown to having a successful content brand. Here’s the surge that I’m talking about:

I achieved this by changing the kind of effort I was putting into my blog. Anyone can get these results, and even better, with the right kind of effort.

If you want to surge your blog traffic, here’s what you need to do:

Publish More Content, More Often

The consistency and frequency of your content publishing schedule plays a big role in your blog’s success. To grow my own blog, I wrote as many as two blog posts per day. While these blog posts were much shorter than the ones I currently write, I still published two every day.

I then changed my strategy to write one long-form blog post per week. Apparently, Google likes long-form content, but ironically, that’s when my traffic started to dip. So I increased my frequency to two blog posts, and one podcast episode, each week.

And I’m beginning to see traffic gains now that I’m posting content more consistently and frequently. Eventually, with the help of guest posts, I plan on publishing one blog post per day on this blog.

Getting into the groove requires the formation of daily habits. Daily habits make it much easier for you to get into the flow. My daily habit is to write at least 1,500 words per day. This daily habit earns me a total of 10,500 words each week. That’s anywhere from 2-3 blog posts per week.

Some days I write more than 1,500 words, but I never write less than 1,500 words in a given day. This habit allows me to stay consistent with my blog while writing additional content for my Kindle books.

Another thing that works for me is to set a time and day each week to publish my blog posts. This way, I end up writing the posts well in advance so there’s no last-second cramming.

The less time you have to write a blog post within your deadline, the less value it will provide to readers.

Writing all of this content will help you rank better on search engines and give your readers a better experience. However, you can 1-up your efforts by optimizing your content for success.

On the SEO side, the Yoast plugin is the most valuable plugin in your arsenal. This plugin makes it easy to optimize your blog posts for search engines.

But you also need to optimize your blog posts with internal and external links. Internal links are links to your own blog posts. External links are links to blog posts and articles from outside sources.

Internal links help your SEO efforts by doing the following:

Decreasing your bounce rate
Increasing the average time a reader spends on your site

Both of those outcomes are great for SEO.

External links (to high authority sites) let search engines know that, because you’re linking out to authority sites, you must be an authority site, too.

That’s why I add at least three internal links and at least three external links to each of my posts. Setting small goals like these makes them easier to meet, or even surpass.

Assess Your Marketing Strategy

It’s great practice to assess your marketing strategy once every 1-3 months. By looking at your overall strategy, you’ll see what’s working and what missed the mark.

Look at which blog posts earned you the most visibility. These blog posts have high demand, and your audience will want to read more posts like them. The general rule of thumb is to write content of interest to your audience.

Writing more blog posts based on your high-performing posts will result in even more demand for your content. Assessing your marketing strategy allows you to discover what your audience wants and plan more ways to give it to them.

This also applies to writing books and creating training courses. You want to create a product on a proven topic that is in high demand among your audience. That’s why my first training course was about Twitter.

When I created that course, my audience’s demand for Twitter knowledge was higher than their demand for any other knowledge that I was providing.

The best place to analyze your marketing strategy is the WordPress stats dashboard. While Google Analytics offers more, it can become overwhelming. So I prefer to stick with WordPress stats, which clearly communicate everything I need to know.

One important feature I recently utilized is one that let me discover when most people are visiting your blog. I noticed that most people visit my blog on Wednesdays at 10 am.

Based on this information, I began publishing my podcast episodes on Wednesdays at 9 am. The episodes have just enough time to sit on my blog until 10 am when it’s populated with the bulk of my readers.

The week before, the same insights told me that Tuesday at 10 am is the best time to publish new blog posts based on my traffic stats. That’s why I always publish fresh content on Tuesdays at 10 am, in addition to my Saturday blog posts.

Always apply the 80/20 rule to your marketing assessment in order to leverage influencer marketing. These two methodologies can completely transform your brand’s presence.

How to Leverage Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has never been as easy as it is now. Not only does the web connect people from all over the world, but the influencers in the digital marketing niche are generally nice people.

I like to mention at least three influencers in my blog posts. The more influencers you mention, the better it is for your influencer marketing efforts. Here’s the idea:

Promote several influencers in your blog posts
Contact each one
Some will share your blog post

In some cases, getting a single influencer to share your content can yield great results. But more often, several influencers join forces to dramatically expand your reach. There are several great case studies about influencer marketing.

You may feel excited about the idea, but not sure how to implement it. What’s the best way to contact an influencer?

Anytime you approach an influencer, NEVER explicitly ask him or her to share your content. The more influential someone is, the more emails they’re receive of this nature. I can see a share request coming a mile away, and they’re annoying.

Share requests can make you feel like your audience is the only thing this blogger cares about, so it doesn’t feel like the blogger is genuine. On the other hand, if you don’t ask for a share, the outreach email feels more genuine.

When you don’t ask for a share and show your appreciation, you usually get the share! At the end of my podcast interviews, I never ask for a share; I simply say that I’ll provide the link.

And I honestly don’t care if guests share it or not. The knowledge I get from each podcast episode is far more valuable than a social share. Show your appreciation, not your desire to get more reach.

Here’s an email I recently received:

Hey Marc,

My Name is Daniel from The Experiment (www.iaexperiment.com).

I know you’re a fan of creating and growing an amazing blog and website. At least that’s the impression I got from this post:How To Build A Successful Blog From Scratch.

When I published this combination case study and guide about generating a consistent stream of traffic from Quora, I thought you’d appreciate it.

You can pop on over to check it out here:

http://www.iaexperiment.com/blog/quora-traffic

Stay Awesome,

Daniel

This is exactly how you should communicate with influencers.

I know this was influencer marketing in action, but emails like these feel so genuine. Here’s why:

He introduced himself in the first line
He’d done some research on me to illustrate that he actually reads my blog
He wrote content and thought I would appreciate it
Then he provides a link to his post

You can tell from the email that he knew a little about me. In influencer marketing, some people just discover someone with a big number of social media followers and act as if they were a big fan all along.

This was respectful and enjoyable to read as compared to some of the other influencer emails.

My best tip for influencers is to talk to them as if they are people, friends, not as if they are influencers. Influencers are people too, but we forget that far too often.

Get More Subscribers With Your Blog Posts

Out of all of your marketing assets, your email list is the most valuable. The email list is the main reason why many bloggers can make a full-time income by writing content.

It’s no wonder that getting more subscribers is critical. Time and time again, people continue talking about why the email list is your most valuable asset and how their biggest mistake was not starting an email list sooner.

Once people realize that their email list is their most valuable asset, they want to grow that email list as much as possible. There are plenty of methods to choose from. In fact, I compiled a list of 50 tactics that you can use to grow your email list.

My favorite approach is to promote my landing pages to my social media audience and optimize my blog to increase my site-wide conversion rate. I promote my landing page on Twitter at least once every hour and have a pinned tweet which also promotes my landing page.

That pinned tweet has stayed there for a while which allowed it to generate some strong social proof over the years.

On my blog, I provide a variety of options for people to sign up:

Welcome mat
Sidebar picture
Pop-up on the side (HelloBar)
Opt-in form at the bottom of every blog post
Occasional promotion within a blog post

To me, this is a great start, but by no means a finishing point. Buffer released an extensive list on different places to promote your free offer, and there’s no reason to halt your expansion efforts.

Increasing the number of opportunities people have to subscribe (without being spammy) will result in a higher site-wide conversion rate.

ThriveLeads and Optimize Press give me a variety of ways to promote my free offers. These are my two preferred tools for lead generation. Both of these tools respectively feel like 100-tools-in-one type of deals.

Follow The 80/20 Rule

With the 80/20 Rule, you focus most of your time on your top priority, such as your branding efforts. The rest of your time goes towards a secondary priority. In a successful blogging strategy, the two main ingredients for success are content creation and content marketing.

Most people spend 80% of their time creating content (or more) and 20% of their time marketing the content (or less). While it takes time to create your content, marketing is how you get your content seen by more people.

You’ll soon discover that it’s better to spend 80% of your time marketing your content. This idea is repeated by people like Neil Patel, who said that in the beginning he’d individually contact 400-500 unique people about every new post he wrote.

Brand marketing is an integral part of blog growth.

You need marketing to achieve the traffic surge you’re looking for. Finding a few hours to commit to your marketing each week seems like a daunting challenge, but there are some ways to make it work.

You can start by boosting your productivity. The smarter you work, the more time you will have to market your business. You can also outsource some of the marketing to someone else. Why do it all yourself when someone else can help you?

I personally prefer a mix of outsourced marketing and doing some of it on my own. That way, I don’t get overwhelmed by the workload but I’m still in the game. I use Upwork to find freelancers, and outsourcing has worked wonders for my business.

I truly believe that without outsourcing, I couldn’t do most of the things that I’m currently doing.

In Conclusion

Any blog can experience a traffic surge. That traffic surge and its impact on your brand are both dependent on how much effort you exert towards content creation and content marketing. Out of the two, more of your attention should go towards content marketing.

Make the connections now that will expand your reach in the future. Don’t be fearful of sending hundreds of emails to people you don’t know. It’s all part of content marketing.

The easiest way to make any type of change is to approach it gradually. For content creation, Jeff Goins recommends writing at least 500 words per day. While I write at least 1,500 words per day, the 500 word per day goal is much easier to attain for a blogger who wants to become more consistent.

The easiest way to get started is by getting your feet wet. You can’t get the traffic surge without even starting. And you must always start what you finish.

Now Here’s What I Want From You

What tips do you have for acquiring a surge of blog traffic? What’s working for your blog? What isn’t working?

Have a question for me? Leave a comment now. I read them all 🙂

And if you know anyone who may appreciate these tips, please be sure to pass this on.

[Tweet “How To Surge Your #Blog Traffic.”]

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-marc

*image credit: Pixabay.com