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17 Ways To Grow Your Pinterest Audience

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Pinterest growth

There have been many blog posts about Pinterest that go into detail about why you need to be on Pinterest and how Pinterest totally kicks butt in the social media world. However, there are many people who do not know how to successfully optimize Pinterest into a platform that increases sales, traffic, and subscribers. In order to increase your traffic, you need to build an audience around your content. In addition, the audience you build needs to be a targeted one. If your audience has no interest in the things you pin about, then it won’t work. In order to grow your audience on Pinterest, follow these 17 tips.

  1. Follow people who are likely to follow back. The better the ratio of followers to following is, the more likely that person is to follow you back. Don’t follow the people with 100,000 followers who are only following 100 people. Instead, follow the people with 500 followers who are following 500 people.
  2. Pin more content. As you pin more content, you will be able to create an audience that can decide for themselves whether you are the right fit for them or not. If you pin content based on your targeted following, then your followers will stick around, and some of them will repin your pins.
  3. Have a variety of boards. As you create more boards, your targeted audience grows. You can have multiple targeted audiences since you are able to pin about multiple interests.
  4. Have a lot of pins. More people will follow you on Pinterest if they see that your account is active. Most of the people with over 100,000 followers have 5,000 pins, and some of those people also have over 10,000 pins. Quality and quantity are king.
  5. Pin content worth sharing. The more you spread across Pinterest, the more followers you are going to get. Pinning content worth sharing is a very simple way to grow your following.
  6. Verify your website in your bio. Verifying your website in your bio makes you look more authentic. In addition, when people preview your account, they see the giant checkmark. It’s not as effective as Twitter’s blue checkmark, but having the checkmark will be effective enough to get more followers.
  7. Write an attractive bio. The bio is one of the first things most people look at before they click the follow button. In order to write an attractive bio, follow these tips.
  8. Create group boards. Group boards allow more people to know about you on Pinterest because those group boards get featured on other people’s accounts. Having group boards is a great way to systematize Pinterest by having other people update them for you. If you do not have group boards, then you need to create some now.
  9. Comment on other people’s pins. Commenting on other people’s pins allows you to engage with other people. These people will be likely to follow you back so you leave more comments on their pins.
  10. Repin and like other people’s pins. The more you repin and like someone’s pins, the more inclined that person will feel to return the favor by following you. Repinning and liking other people’s pins will also allow you to share more quality content with your followers.
  11. Use hashtags. Hashtags are the SEO for Pinterest, and using hashtags will increase the amount of likes and repins your pin gets at the same time.
  12. Pin infographics. People love infographics, and if you choose a really good infographic, you have a better chance of going viral. One of the infographics I tweeted out to 60,000 followers at the time got over 100 retweets and favorites.
  13. Pin videos. Videos get more engagement because they provide value or humor with the click of a button without leaving Pinterest. The better the videos are, the more likely people will share your pin. All you need to do to find good videos in your niche is by looking around on YouTube. They’ll come up.
  14. Add a Pinterest follow button to your blog. My Pinterest follow button is strategically placed at the sidebar of my blog where it gets a lot of attention. Some of the people who visit my blog also follow me on Pinterest. The great thing about that is if someone follows me after visiting my blog, that person liked my content enough to click the button and then proceed to follow me. That’s a high quality follower.
  15. Run contests. The easiest way to get more followers is to run a contest. Offering a $25 Amazon Gift Card to one of your random followers is an easy and reliable way to run a contest. Your pin will also have a really good chance of going viral on Pinterest. Then, you’ll gain hundreds of extra followers in one day.
  16. Schedule your pins. Once you get followers, it is important to keep them all happy. Once your boards and audience are large enough, you should not share too many pins at the same time. Scheduling your pins will show all of your followers that you are active on Pinterest (people who log in 1 hour after you posted your pins don’t know if you are active or not). In addition, scheduling your pins will prevent you from clogging up someone else’s feed (which often results in unfollows).
  17. Promote your Pinterest pins on your other social networks. Use the audiences that you have already build in order to grow your audience on Pinterest. Many people forget to tap into their existing audiences, but nevertheless, it is a great way to get more followers on Pinterest.

By growing your audience on Pinterest, your content will spread faster on Pinterest and reach more people. Growing your audience will lead to more engagement which will result in your audience growing even larger. By implementing these 17 tips, you will be able to see your Pinterest audience dramatically grow. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

 

3 Ways To Promote Your Blog On Facebook

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facebook traffic

Facebook is the biggest social network around with billions of users, and people in the United States spend a combined total of 114 billion minutes every month on Facebook. Despite the size and popularity of this social network, many people do not know how to promote their blogs on Facebook. Promoting your blog on Facebook will allow you to get more traffic and stronger connections. Promoting your blog on Facebook is important, and these are three ways that you can get started.

  1. Share it on your personal account’s newsfeed. The easiest way to get more traffic on Facebook is telling your friends about your blog. Implementing this strategy generally results in a steady flow of traffic that increases over time as more search engines pay attention.
  2. Create a Facebook Page. Creating a Facebook Page and building a presence for that page will take longer than your personal account. However, you will be able to build more connections and get more visitors with a successful Facebook Page than you would be able to get with a personal account. It’s always good to have both.
  3. Post at the right time. As you get more people to visit your Facebook Page, you will get access to better analytics. Facebook provides all of its analytics for free, but when your page has over 100 likes, then it is easier to see when a majority of your fans are on Facebook. Post your content when most people are going to see it.

By getting more people to see your content on Facebook, you will be able to build a strong presence on a social network that grabs people’s attention throughout the day and has a format that encourages people to overshare content. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips for promoting a blog on Facebook? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

 

Blogging Tip: Talk About A Problem That Your Targeted Readers Face

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Chances are you have wondered for a long time which blog posts get the most traffic. While some blog posts get hundreds of daily visitors (which add up to several thousand daily visitors for the main blog), other blog posts are getting visited once in a blue moon. There are certain types of blog posts that give you an edge, but a majority of popular blog posts are all related by one thing: they discuss a problem that their targeted readers face.

For this blog, my targeted readers are social media users, bloggers, and people who want to be more productive. I write blog posts that discuss problems that these people face such as finding more time in a given day, increasing a blog’s SEO, and getting more targeted followers on Twitter. These are the types of problems my targeted readers have, and I provide the answers to these problems with my blog posts.

The more popular and helpful a blog post is, the more times it is going to get shared across the social networks. It may take several months of writing helpful blog posts before they become popular, but when they become popular, you will see the big increase in traffic that you have always dreamed of.

This is one simple way to write better blog posts and get more people to share those blog posts at the same time. What are your thoughts on this blogging tips? Do you have any additional tips on optimizing this part of writing a blog post? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

 

10 Ways To Improve Your Facebook Page

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Facebook Logo

The two components that decide how many likes and engagement your Facebook Page gets is the way it looks and the content you post on that Facebook Page. However, many people are not optimizing these two components well enough in order to see better results. The better you implement these two components, the more likely you are to be successful on Facebook. In order to make your Facebook Page better, follow these 10 tips.

  1. Facebook prefers that you use 180×180 pictures but then converts your picture to 160×160. That means the avatar picture you choose for Facebook needs to look good even if it is 160×160. Make sure your entire company’s logo or the picture of you shows up on the entire avatar. If part of your company’s logo or your headshot gets cut out of the picture, then you need to fix that. There’s nothing worse than having a sloppy appearance prevent you from getting more engagement on Facebook.
  2. Make sure your background picture further emphasizes what your Facebook Page is about. A picture of your company’s logo or a headshot does not necessarily tell people what your Facebook Page is about. If you put a headshot of yourself on your Facebook Page, then your background picture needs to show people what your posts are all about. If you only write Facebook posts about Facebook marketing, you can have a picture on the background related to Facebook marketing. If you write Facebook posts about motivational quotes, you can have a background picture of the sun rising with your favorite quote in the same picture. No matter what you post about on Facebook, your background picture needs to give everyone a good idea about what you post. As a side note, the ideal dimensions of your Facebook Page’s background image are 851 pixel width by 315 pixel height.
  3. Make sure your Facebook posts are only 80 characters. The longer your Facebook post is, the less likely someone is to read the entire post. If you want to get more likes and engagement on Facebook, you need to create short and sweet posts that are easy to read and have a clear message.
  4. Include pictures in your Facebook posts. Facebook posts with pictures get more engagement than the Facebook posts without pictures. Although pictures are optional for Facebook posts, you should make it a point to have at least one picture in a Facebook post.
  5. Experiment with your posts. When you first start to see more engagement and likes coming in every day, it is important to identify what kind of content your fans like the most. There are a variety of factors that decide how much engagement your Facebook posts get such as the character count, topic of choice, way you worded what you said, the color of the picture, and other factors as well. You will be able to identify which factors work for you by posting a lot of content and seeing which Facebook posts get the most attention.
  6. Have an effective short bio. People get to see your short bio directly under your picture. They don’t have to click an About Me Page on the menu like you have to do with a blog. Instead, it’s right there. Your short bio can give people an idea of who you are and what you do. Since a short bio does not take a lot of time to read, most people will read your short bio before reading any of your posts.
  7. Post videos on Facebook. Videos grab our attention differently from the way a typical post grabs our attention. Posting videos will keep someone on your Facebook Page for a longer period of time. That’s long enough for someone to like that Facebook post, leave a comment, possibly share it with their friends, and repeat the process for some of your other Facebook posts as well.
  8. Get more likes for your Facebook Page. These are a bunch of ways that you can get more likes on your Facebook Page. Getting these likes makes your Facebook Page look more popular. Whether it is actually very popular or not, potential fans will see your Facebook Page and believe that it is very popular. These people will then engage with your posts and like your page because they see that so many other people have done the same.
  9. Post every day. New visitors are more likely to like your Facebook Page if you post every day. Posting every day shows that your Facebook Page is active, and if visitors like what you have posted in the past, then they know they need to like your Page in order to get your future posts in their news feed. The average dormant Facebook Page does not get as many likes as the average active Facebook Page. Facebook also does a really good job at telling people when they have not posted on their Facebook Pages in a while. If you ever get that kind of email, you need to stop what you are doing and immediately post something on Facebook and then schedule posts for the days to come.
  10. Time your posts based on what your audience is on Facebook. In order to get the best engagement from your Facebook posts, you need to send these posts out when most of your audience is on Facebook. Facebook provides analytics that contain the number of people who visit your Facebook Page for every hour of every day of every week. That is a powerful statistic that Facebook gives you for free. If it’s free, it doesn’t hurt, and in this case, the statistics can be the difference between your Facebook post getting 25 likes or 50 likes.

By constantly improving your Facebook Page, you will continue to see better results over time. Your engagement will go up, more people will hear about you, and by implementing circular viralocity, your blog and all of your social networks will be able to go viral. Having an effective Facebook Page is just one piece of the puzzle.

What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips? Please share your thoughts and advice about improving your Facebook Page below.

 

10 Things Every Blog Post Needs To Have Other Than Quality Content

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Do you know the criteria for writing a good blog post? If you are like most people, you probably think that all you need in a blog post is quality content. It seems as if the phrase “quality content” is on too many blogs to count. However, there are certain parts of a blog that most people forget about. While creating quality content is important, it is also important to create an optimized blog post that gets more attention and keeps people on your site longer. These are the 10 things that every blog post needs to have:

  1. A clear purpose. You can write about social media tips, how cavemen used fire 10,000 years ago, or the daffodils on your lawn. No matter what you write about, you need to have a clear purpose right from the start. Have a headline that tells your readers exactly what your blog post will be about and have content that supports the headline. If you find yourself going astray from the headline, then you either need to change the headline or break the content into two separate blog posts.
  2. Something to lower your blog’s bounce rate. Bounce rate represents how likely someone is to leave your blog without clicking on any of your blog’s internal links (ex: links to articles, a link to a page on the blog, etc). If you can keep someone on your blog for a longer period of time, that person will be more likely to subscribe to your blog. Having a lower bounce rate increases the chances of having someone subscribe to your blog.
  3. A final paragraph that encourages interaction. The best way to get more people to comment on your blog is by encouraging those people to comment on your blog. I include a final paragraph on all of my blog posts that asks for the reader’s thoughts and/or tips. Adding this final paragraph allows me to interact with more of my readers.
  4. An easy way for people to share that blog post on social networks. Placing social sharing buttons on your blog takes no more than 5 minutes. However, those 5 minutes can make a big difference between how many shares your blog posts get. In addition, if your blog posts get shared often, your blog will be (but more importantly, look) more popular. A blog that looks more popular becomes even more popular. Your readers will enjoy reading your blog post that got shared 1,000 times more than your blog post that only got shared 10 times. Even if the two blog posts were identical, the reader would enjoy reading the one that got shared 1,000 times more than the one that got shared 10 times. Popularity makes the entire experience more enjoyable for the reader.
  5. Bold sentences. Using bold sentences allows you to highlight the important information. Some of your readers will not have enough time to read your entire blog post. If you use bold sentences, these types of readers can learn the important stuff even when they skim your blog posts. Since they got some value from one of your blog posts, these readers will come back for more information when they have more time on their hands.
  6. A stunning picture. Pictures grab our attention, and it is a proven fact that social media posts with pictures get more engagement than social media posts without pictures. All of your blog posts need to have pictures. Pictures give your readers a better idea of what your blog post is about. Pictures act as an emphasis of the headline. A big advantage of having a picture is that you allow people to share your blog posts with Pinterest. If enough people pin your blog post, it could go viral and be seen by thousands of people on Pinterest.
  7. A call to action. You can include a call to action in almost any blog post. If your blog post contains tips, then your call to action is to have your readers implement the tips that you shared. A call to action makes the reader do something after they read your blog post, and by making that happen, the reader will come back for more things to do. If your calls to action work, then your readers will subscribe to your blog and eventually buy your products.
  8. Include keywords in your blog posts. Including keywords in your blog posts helps your SEO and ultimately allows you to get more blog traffic. While it is important to use keywords, it is also important to avoid stuffing keywords into your content. If you see yourself using a particular keyword in every sentence of your blog post, then you have used that keyword too often.
  9. Your personality. You need to display your personality in your blog posts. Writing blog posts and uploading videos gives you a unique voice on the web. However, every voice on the web is unique. You need your voice on the web to allow people to get an idea for who you are. Andy Nathan wrote a guest post on Jeff Bullas’ blog where he explained how he learned everything he needed to know about social media because of Star Trek. He could have called the blog post “7 Social Media Tips,” but by directly referencing Star Trek, Andy shares an aspect of his personal life with us.
  10. The right structure. One of the simplest ways to get people to stay on your blog is to write blog posts that are easy to read. You cannot have one giant wall of content. Instead, your content needs to be broken down into several paragraphs. Even if one of your paragraphs is only one sentence, it is better to break down the giant wall of content into bite-size pieces that are easier for people to read.

Those are the 10 things that all of your blog posts need to contain. Adding these 10 things to your blog does not take a lot of time, and as you become a better blogger, some of these methods will become automatic.

What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips on what needs to be in a blog post? Please share your thoughts and advice below.