Content Writing and Marketing Services
Pokemon GO surged Nintendo’s business, and it has the potential to grow your local business too. Local business owners are already using the app in interesting ways to attract new customers.
As an outsider looking in, I analyze how businesses can use Pokemon GO to increase their revenue.
If you enjoy the video, please don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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Backlinks are NOT dead!
After reading this post by head of Google’s webspam team Matt Cutts, I (along with most of the internet) believed that guest blogging was a worthless endeavor.
But after Cutts’ post was widely misinterpreted, he amended it, adding:
I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. ..I just want to highlight that a bunch of low-quality or spam sites have latched on to ‘guest blogging’ as their link-building strategy, and we see a lot more spammy attempts to do guest blogging. Because of that, I’d recommend skepticism (or at least caution) when someone reaches out and offers you a guest blog article.
I got it wrong. That hurt because I stopped focusing on backlinks for a while.
The truth is that buying backlinks from low-authority sites is dead: if you want to see your SEO traffic drop to zero, buy backlinks. At the same time, backlinks from high authority and relevant websites couldn’t be more important.
More than 100 blog posts will be published by the time you reach the end of this sentence. Indeed, millions of blog posts are written each day, and the competition is mounting. But most of that content is irrelevant because it attracts few visitors, subscribers or commenters. Some of these posts won’t even attract a single visitor.
Other posts, however, go viral, and these are the ones we talk about. Most of these posts are published on high authority blogs and receive coveted backlinks from thousands of other blogs; they enjoy numerous advantages from the moment they are published.
Every so often a blog post from an emerging blog goes viral. How does that happen? And, more importantly, how can that emerging blog be your blog?
Backlinks affect a post’s virality. The more places you get mentioned, the more people hear about you. If you write an epic blog post that gets seen and shared by the masses, it likely began with backlinks.
Let’s looks at how you can build your backlinking strategy:
#1: Write Guest Posts
Although writing guest posts can take up a lot of your time, the benefits include high-value backlinks and more traffic.
I’ve written guest posts for high-authority sites like Business2Community, Jeff Bullas’ Blog and ProBlogger, which have sent thousands of people to my blog and increased my search engine traffic.
To find guest posting opportunities like these, type “[your niche] guest blogs” into Google. You can also Google your competitors to discover which blogs feature their guest posts, and pitch similar content to the same blogs.
#2: Write Valuable Content
Everyone says this, so I’ll say it the cool way: write for Bill Gates.
People are looking for valuable content, and you must try to provide it. But there are two things you don’t know:
While writing this post, I went back to my stats to verify the visitors I’m getting from my guest blog posts, and I noticed that some of them came from QuickSprout. At first I assumed that someone simply linked to my blog in a comment, but soon I discovered that Neil Patel had linked to one of my blog posts.
You can read the QuickSprout post here.
Another one of my blog posts was mentioned on Susan Solovic’s blog. Solovic was a speaker at one of the first business events I had ever attended, so her mention was particularly meaningful.
I wouldn’t have known that Susan and Neil read my blog if I hadn’t noticed their links to my blog posts. While it’s easy to see how many people are visiting your blog, it’s more difficult to pinpoint individual readers.
While backlinks and social media metrics can point you to specific individuals, it’s harder to identify every single visitor. This realization forever impacted my approach to content creation.
Enter the Bill Gates Rule.
The idea behind this rule is to assume that Bill Gates will read your blog post. If he likes it, he will give you a shout out and a backlink to your post. Ideally, Gates becomes a guest on your podcast and invites you to help him create a piece of his own content.
But if Gates doesn’t like your post, you’ve lost him forever.
Of course, Gates isn’t obligated to do anything, even if he likes your post. However, you should write each post assuming that he will.
If you admire someone more than Bill Gates, write your post for him or her. The point is to write your blog post with that person in mind.
By following this rule, you’ll naturally write better content.
#3: Connect With Influencers
Connecting with influencers offers a host of benefits, particularly if one or more decide to share your content or provide you with a backlink.
Every connection with an influencer starts off with a relationship imbalance: you admire the influencer but the influencer knows little about you. So you have to do a bunch of things in order to capture their attention and influence them to share your content or link to it in one of their posts.
So how do you get the relationship started? Here are some ideas:
Remember that influencers get a lot of emails; some of them receive hundreds of emails in a given day. Imagine having to read through hundreds of emails in a single day! The lengthy ones are likely to be skipped.
That’s why your emails need to be super short. My advice is to write an email that contains five sentences or less. Each time you write an email to an influencer, ask yourself how you can make it shorter and still get your message across.
#4: Write On Big Media Outlets
If you are lucky enough to write a guest post for a big media outlet like Inc. or Forbes, you will enjoy valuable backlinks.
Each backlink will be accompanied by numerous visitors and additional backlinks from bloggers who found you on those sites.
#5: Hire An Agency
Some reputable agencies specialize in providing you with quality backlinks.
Agencies like AudienceBloom work with writers who have already established relationships with big online publishers. These agencies make it easier to get mentioned on sites like Inc. Magazine, Forbes and more.
Some of these agencies can cost thousands of dollars. Most of them are better for more established bloggers looking to extend their reach even more.
#6: Get Interviewed On Podcasts
When you are interviewed on podcasts, you get more exposure and an easy quality backlink.
In any podcast episode with a guest, the guest always gets built up before the show. This way, people who previously didn’t know anything about the guest now have a reason to listen to the episode.
These introductions include a link to the guest’s website. And you will be no exception! Reaching out to podcasts in your niche and asking to be interviewed will ensure you receive high-quality backlinks.
#7: Interview People On Your Podcast
The role reversal here is that you interview people for your own podcast. While this doesn’t guarantee quality backlinks, the hope is that some of your guests will link to the episode in which they were interviewed.
While all of these backlinks add up, starting your own podcast means much more than trying to acquire backlinks. The knowledge you obtain, and the connections you make, will be far greater than the actual backlinks, regardless of how useful.
#8: Create Multiple Blogs
If you can manage multiple blogs in your niche, go for it! Each of your blogs can link to the others, and as one gains more authority, it will be easier to rank up your next fledgling blog.
Creating multiple blogs, however, requires a lot of work to do well, so if you decide to take it on, be sure to feature guest contributors and/or ghostwriters help you out with the content.
#9: Use HARO
The HARO website lets you see what content big media outlets are looking for right now.
If you see a pitch for something you can write about, respond to it. I have used HARO to get featured on sites like US News & World Report.
#10: Interact With Your Audience
This is another method that creates more value from relationship building than backlinks (but you’ll still get backlinks).
Interacting with your audience builds trust. And trust will lead to more subscribers to your blog, more sales of your products and, yes, more backlinks.
Interacting with your audience isn’t the best way to increase your backlinks, but you’ll know your audience better. Knowing your audience better will help you write better blog posts and products.
In Conclusion
Backlinks are not dead. But if you’re buying backlinks from irrelevant websites, your Google ranking will suffer.
Relevant backlinks, on the other hand, will help your search engine rankings, even if you’re paying a credible agency to help you get there.
What are your thoughts on backlinks for SEO? How do you build backlinks? Have any stories for us? Sound off in the comments section below.
Want to create YouTube thumbnails that grab people’s attention? If so, this is the right video for you. I’ll reveal how I create attention-grabbing thumbnails that result in more views, engagement, and subscribers.
Thumbnails are important because that’s how people see most YouTube videos before watching them. The better the thumbnail looks, the more people will click on the thumbnail to discover what you offer in your video.
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Writing blog posts of at least 700 words helps out with SEO for a variety of reasons.
First, people will spend more time on your blog. And the more time people spend on your blog, they more likely they are to subscribe.
The second benefit is that your post’s text-to-HTML ratio will be solid. If you don’t know much about this ratio, it means you’ll want the amount of text within your blog post to exceed the amount of code running in the background.
Not only are longer blog posts important for Google search rankings, they are also important for your readers. The theory behind a long blog post is that the longer it is, the more value it contains.
I recently wrote a blog post of exactly 6,000 words, and another post with a little over 5,000 words. These two blog posts could be turned into e-books, and there are blog posts on the web that exceed 10,000 words.
To write a ridiculously long blog post, you need to say A LOT within a single post. So how do you get started?
Write Up A Massive Outline
Anytime I want to write a ridiculously long blog post, I write a ridiculously long outline. For my recent blog post 50 Tactics To Grow Your Email List, I listed the 50 tactics I would discuss within the post before I started to write it.
If you want to discuss 50 tactics but start writing as soon as you come up with the first 25, it’s more difficult to come up with the remaining 25 tactics. Struggling through a comprehensive outline without writing a single word will ensure that you have a solid foundation with which to work.
It’s possible, but very unlikely, to write a ridiculously long quality post without a massive outline. If you are able to make it work without an outline, please share your secret!
I’ve found that once you have an outline, the actual content flows much easier.
Mention People Within The Post
This tactic is mentioned in the email list post referenced above. Mentioning other people in your blog posts works wonders for marketing and content creation.
Social recognition is a universal desire and a key factor for motivation in the digital age. People enjoy being publicly acknowledged in others’ work. And oftentimes they will share the blog posts they were mentioned in. If you mention some key influencers within your blog post, reach out and let them know, and don’t be afraid to ask them to share the post if they like it.
Plus, writing about influencers also leads to better and stronger ideas for the post itself. The most important thing to do when writing longer pieces is to both let your mind wander into new ideas while maintaining your focus on the topic and outline.
Integrating influencers within your writing will enhance your content and enable you to lengthen your post without fluff. And when influencers share your content, you earn backlinks, which lead to more exposure and increased traffic for your blog.
One of the best ways to reach out to influencers is to follow Brian Dean’s famed skyscraper technique.
Use Visuals
You want to create a blog post that is optimized for your visitors as well as search engines. Many people are visual learners. A text-heavy post with no images makes the reading experience less effective. While images won’t increase the word count of your blog posts, they’ll keep your readers engaged.
It’s easier to learn something with pictures or video tutorials. The human mind registers an image 60,000 times faster than text, and our eyes are naturally directed downward immediately afterwards. Think about that for a moment.
This is why captions are so powerful. The more pictures you use, the more your visitors will be look towards the next block of text. Engaging images grab our attention and make us more inclined to finish reading the post.
Nearly every ridiculously long blog post I write (with the exception of Social Media DOs and DON’Ts) is packed to the gills with images. Using pictures to break up lines of text helps capture a reader’s attention, and maintain it throughout a longer post.
Focus Only on the Post
When you are writing a ridiculously long blog post, you mustn’t get distracted. If I plan to work on a long post, I block out any other work for that day.
I don’t do anything (video creation, podcasts, begin writing another blog post, etc.) until I have completed that one blog post. While I try to do it all in one sitting, some posts might take two days to complete.
The less friction between you and your ridiculously long blog post, the more fluid the final result. The most I’ve written in a single day was 13,000 words. I wrote all day and did no other work.
The outline will make it easier and faster for you to write a ridiculously long blog post, but it may still take several hours to pull it off.
In Conclusion
Ironically, this blog post about writing ridiculously long blog posts isn’t long at all. But when it’s time for me to write my next ridiculously long blog post, I will utilize the methods I discussed in this post.
These are the same methods I used to write a blog post of 6,000 words and a book, Lead The Stampede, which contains 60,000+ words.
This post is just over 1,000 words. Why? Because if you start fluffing up your posts simply to add to your word count, your efforts will backfire. Only take on longer pieces when you have something useful to say. Otherwise, cut it short.
Ranking #1 for keywords but providing a bad experience for your visitors will hurt your quality score and, ultimately, you’re credibility. Never risk losing your audience for SEO purposes.
Also remember that the moment you lose passion for the topic you are writing about, the quality of the piece will tank. Either recover that passion before continuing, or move on.
What are your thoughts on content length? Have you tried the skyscraper technique? What is the longest blog post you have ever written? Sound off in the comments section below!
I write a Kindle book every month. My ability to write a Kindle book every month does not affect the rest of my business. I am still able to write blog posts, create YouTube videos, and promote my business. Why does it all seem to work out?
That’s what I will answer in this video. You’ll discover how you can write Kindle books on the side and build a Kindle Empire without sacrificing any of the parts of your business.
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No matter what your profession, you want to accomplish more goals. And you want to accomplish your goals twice as fast. If you are still working for an employer, you want to get twice as much done for your startup so you can achieve better results.
Everyone wants to be more productive . But the problem is that most people aren’t very productive. We often find ourselves busy with all of the tasks we must complete in a given day, but being busy doesn’t mean being productive.
What we get done in relation to our ambitions actually determines how productive we truly are. Some days I may work for only an hour and feel very productive. Yet on other days I may work for six hours and feel like I accomplished nothing.
Getting more stuff done requires shifting your mindset and examining all of the work that you do in a given day. These five power tips will guide you.
#1: Focus On A Few Big Tasks
Most of my weekly scorecards are filled up with goals from the top to bottom. On some weeks, I’ll give myself 15 big goals to complete. I keep all of these scorecards in a single folder. This allows me to take a walk down memory lane to see what I was working on that is now complete.
Those memory lane walks are sweet, but they also reveal a lot.
I didn’t know it when I started, but keeping all of these scorecards allowed me to have a file containing the secrets to my productivity. I have scorecards in which I accomplished every goal (very rare) and scorecards in which I accomplished very few.
It turns out I have a higher chance of getting all of my goals accomplished if I give myself fewer things to do! Even when the fewer goals are more challenging than all 15 combined.
It’s actually easier, and more productive, to focus on accomplishing fewer, challenging goals than it is to accomplish numerous, simpler goals.
Numerous goals requires that you to spread your energy across a larger playing field. But the more you spread your energy, the less focus you have to concentrate on each individual goal.
Productivity is not measured by how many checkmarks end up on your scorecard. Rather, it’s measured by the impact on the work you are trying to accomplish.
#2: Outsource The Smaller Tasks
With that said, we must complete numerous tasks for the survival of our businesses. If we focus on fewer things, the rest of the business will fall apart.
For a long time, my focus was on completing the numerous tasks that called for my attention. I was always busy, but I wasn’t always productive.
For example, one task was growing my Twitter audience and providing them with content. But the tasks associated with my Twitter account eventually became busy work and detracted me from accomplishing other, equally important goals
At the same time, my income wasn’t increasing and my blog subscribers weren’t growing. While that , I simply didn’t have any time to address those issues.
Then I learned of the magical “O” word: outsourcing.
Outsourcing is the act of paying money to buy back some of your time. I no longer schedule my tweets myself or try to grow my Twitter audience. My freelancers do that for me. And they help me with my podcast, Pinterest account, picture creation, and spreading the word about what I do.
If I have to devote a lot of my time to accomplish these smaller, yet important, tasks, I can’t imagine my business moving forward. Outsourcing saves me a lot of time by taking tasks off my hands. But it also saves me time in other ways.
For instance, if you want to create an app but don’t know how to code, hire a developer and have that person create the app for you. Not only will you save time on creating the app, but you will also save time on learning to code.
#3: Give Yourself A Deadline
Deadlines create a sense of urgency. Urgency leads to action. Without specific deadlines to meet, procrastination will dominate your life. The problem with a “soon and later” mentality is that neither soon nor later ever happen.
That’s why I create a weekly scorecard filled with deadline specific goals. The scorecard creates that sense of urgency I need to get my work done. The goals are challenging, but not impossible. And each is marked according to priority.
The deadlines boost my focus because of the time constraints. I force myself to focus on higher priority goals and get those done before starting on the less important tasks.
Each deadline should be accompanied by a plan. What must you do each day in order to achieve a specific goal? Is it possible for you to take time off in the middle of working, or is this an all-in type of goal?
The more detailed your plan is, the easier it will be for you to implement it and accomplish your goal.
#4: Add A Deadline Motivator Into The Mix
Deadlines are as potent as you make them. Some deadlines will carry no weight whatsoever, while others will loom over your shoulders. The potency of a deadline motivator determines the potency of the deadline itself.
For most people, the biggest deadline motivator is accountability. Share your objective with a few people whom you can rely on to help you reach it. Now you’re accountable. Don’t tell people who will try to discourage you. Why even talk to them in the first place?
Accountability is a strong and easily accessible deadline motivator.
I am in the midst of working with a big deadline motivator. Towards the end of August, my first season of NCAA cross-country begins. Practices begin at 7:30 a.m., so I want to schedule as much content in advance as possible.
That is why I set these three goals for myself to complete before the end of August:
These tasks are in line with my overall content plan and will get me through 2016. Chances are I can run and grow my business as easily as I did in high school, but I want to be prepared. Thus, my view of the deadline motivator has made the deadline very potent.
I’m still doing a lot of exploration in my niche to discover new opportunities and stay up to date. Nothing will change but I want to have my content finished and ready to go.
What potent deadline motivator can you think of so that your desire to meet the deadline is just as strong? Make it as potent as you can.
#5: Less Talking, More Doing
Most thoughts pertaining to my business rattle through my head. I don’t spend a lot of time talking about them.
I spend most of my business hours putting in the work. The only business activity I engage in when I am not actually carrying out the work is formulating a plan to carry it out more effectively.
The more time you spend working on your business with the right plan in place, the more you will get accomplished. Productivity involves working efficiently, but no matter how efficient you become, you always have to put in the work.
In Conclusion
Goals pile up. And multiple goals require spreading your time and energy across multiple tasks. That’s the story of most entrepreneurs.
The most successful entrepreneurs are experts at prioritizing and knowing when to say no. Not all objectives are created equal, and certain tasks are simply not worth the time.
Outsourcing eliminates unworthy tasks. Saying no to certain tasks allows a stronger concentration of focus on the opportunities that will yield the strongest results.
What are your tips for accomplishing more goals? Did any one of these tips resonate with you the most? What goals do you want to accomplish this year? Sound off in the comments section below.