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How The Huffington Post Thrived On Twitter And How Much Traffic They Get From It

November 12, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

I recently went from tweeting every 20 minutes to every 15 minutes. I thought tweeting once every five minutes would be absurd and annoy followers. However, the Huffington Post tweets every five minutes, and since the account boasts millions of followers and gains over 3,000 followers every day, tweeting every five minutes does not look like the problem.

I was fascinated that the Huffington Post has its big audience, tweets every five minutes, and gets dozens of favorites and retweets for each tweet. I looked at the account and concluded that Twitter must be a big part of the Huffington Post’s success.

I decided to do some digging.

Just like many big websites, the Huffington Post hides its traffic numbers. However, after I did my Twitter experiment with tweeting once every 15 minutes, I concluded I knew how to calculate the amount of traffic the Huffington Post gets from Twitter. I decided to use my own statistics as a guide and use that rate to calculate the Huffington Post’s traffic.

Tweeting once every 15 minutes with 126,000 Twitter followers at the time resulted in around 450 daily visitors. The Huffington Post tweets once every five minutes which is three times my rate. That means if the Huffington Post had 126,000 Twitter real, targeted followers, it would be getting 1,350 visitors from Twitter alone.

That is a big difference, but the bigger difference is the amount of followers the Huffington Post has. In September, when I first set off to tweeting once every 15 minutes, the Huffington Post had about 4,540,000 followers (let’s assume for the sake of the calculation that all of those followers are real). That’s 36 times more followers than me. That theoretically means the Huffington Post is getting visitors referred from Twitter 36 times more than I me if I tweeted once every five minutes.

Based on the statistics provided in this blog post, the Huffington Post gets close to 48,600 daily from Twitter alone. The Huffington Post probably gets an extra 5,000 to 10,000 daily visitors from Twitter because they tweet the news.

Here are the major ways that the Huffington Post gets tens of thousands of daily visitors from Twitter alone:

They have a big audience.
They tweet very frequently (once every five minutes).
They tweet new content throughout the day (over 100 new articles are added to the Huffington Post every day because it has numerous contributors).
They tweet about the news (many stories that make the news end up becoming trending topics. Creating and tweeting new content about news stories allows the Huffington Post to get more exposure during trending topics).
They tweet about celebrities (there are millions of people who care about everything the Kardashians do. Let’s not forget about all of the other big ones out there).
They use headlines that make us want to learn more. Take a look at this tweet. The headline automatically grabs your attention, and the tweet’s engagement prove that it got a lot of attention.

In Conclusion

That’s how the Huffington Post thrives on Twitter. They tweet very frequently, constantly post new content that people like to read, and continue to grow their audience. More people learn about the Huffington Post as friends retweet the Huffington Post’s tweets and share the online magazine with their friends. That is how they get tens of thousands of visitors from Twitter every day.What are your thoughts on the Huffington Post? What are your thoughts on their Twitter strategy? Please share your thoughts below.

The Five Things You Must Do On Twitter Immediately

November 10, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

Twitter is constantly growing, and it is getting noisier than ever. In addition, many people have been on Twitter for over a year. There are even people who have been on Twitter for almost an entire decade. That is impressive, but as Twitter continues to get older, and you continue to live your life, some of the things going on in your life will probably be completely different from what they were a year ago.

Few people follow the routine of checking their Twitter accounts to make sure everything is up to date. There are some people who entered their information but never bothered to check on it. Outdated information is a problem that plagues many Twitter users. To make sure your information is up to date, here are the five things that you need to do right now:

#1: Check your bio.

There may be information on your bio that no longer applies or has been changed significantly. Many people write their bios, but those bios do not get updated for weeks, months, and in some cases, years. Chances are many things have happened from the time you created your bio to now.

I like to promote my Twitter account on my other social networks, and in one of my social media accounts, I mentioned that I have 10,000 Twitter followers. I had to squeeze in that extra 0 to make the information accurate. In addition, I completely forgot to mention I was an author because when I created some of these social media accounts, I was not an author at the time. I had to change my bio to let people know that I an author so my bio would be more up to date and more people would buy my books.

#2: Ask yourself if you need a new avatar.

Some people look completely different from they did a year ago. Although that mostly applies to kids growing up, it is possible you now go by a new haircut style.

What is more likely of the two scenarios is that a better picture of you or your company’s logo was taken this year than the one you have in your avatar. If you change your avatar on Twitter, be sure to change the avatar for all of your social networks, blogs, and guest blog pages.

If your avatar is of a cartoon character, nature, or anything similar, put a picture of yourself as the avatar instead. We know who the cartoon characters are. We want to know who you are.

#3: Check the link in your bio.

There are many people who create multiple blogs before they ended up creating the main blog that they continuously update for many years to come. The people who took this approach may have a link in their bio that does not reflect their main blog.

That was the case for me, and as a result, I had to repeatedly change the link in my Twitter bio. I went from a Red Sox blog to a Yugioh blog to a Lego blog to this one. Now that I finally have this blog, I have been able to keep the link in my bio.

Another thing you want to do with your link is to make sure it still works. There are many reasons why a link would not work such as…

You may have accidentally misspelled it
There may be a problem on Twitter’s end
You may have recently changed the URL

These three reasons may sound silly, but it is always good to double-check your link just to make sure it works. It is better to be safe than sorry.

#4: Check your header picture.

Your header picture needs to emphasize your expertise, an event, or a product. It is important to avoid using a default header that Twitter provides or to get a picture from the internet just for the sake of having a header.

There needs to be a reason behind the picture, and that reason should match up with expertise, an event, a product, or a combination of the three. You may have a better header picture to choose from than the one you are currently using.

#5: Make all of your social media bios as close to identical as possible.

I use the same avatar and nearly identical bios for all of my social media profiles. The reason I do this is because you’ll know it is me when you see my profile on Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and any other social network as well. I always mention my main credentials as well as my hobbies.

You should check your bios and avatars on your other social networks to make sure they match up with your Twitter bio and avatar. See what you can do to make all of your social media profiles match so people know it’s you when they see you on a different social network.

In Conclusion

Those are the five things you need to do on Twitter before doing anything else. It is amazing how quickly certain information becomes outdated on the web, but by double checking your information, you will prevent your information from staying outdated for long.

What were your thoughts on double checking your information on Twitter? Do you have a 6th thing that you believe people need to do on Twitter as soon as possible? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

Why I Started Blogging

November 7, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

After writing over 1,000 blog posts, I finally set aside some time to recall how this journey began. There are millions of people embarked on their own journeys, but few people take the time to go back to the roots. Few people ask questions like, “Why did I start?” or “Why did I create my own team?”

Starting blogging was one of the best experiences I have ever had. Blogging has allowed me to write about what I want to write about and reach out to countless people. The big perk of blogging that initially attracted me was the ability to do what you love at home while making a profit. I never had plans at any point in my life of what job or career I would pursue. The only thing I knew is that it was going to be a lot of fun, and blogging has definitely fulfilled that goal.

It is very important to do something that you enjoy because this will make you put in as much of your time and effort as possible. Working at a job you do not enjoy will result in you avoiding the extra mile and not seeking to improve in your work.

That is why I pursued blogging. I enjoyed it, and it brought in some extra money. Over the years, I have been able to create a blogging empire that results in more revenue and more enjoyment than a summer job. I can’t even imagine being an employee for someone else.

Surprisingly, I never thought of my blog posts as more essays to write or anything like that. Blogging gives me flexibility. I was able to talk about the Red Sox, Yugioh Cards, and Legos, and people came. All of those blogs ended up getting a few thousand visitors. This particular blog has been the gem of them all, but I got to this stage years after I started blogging.

Blogging is one of the best journeys anyone can take. Blogging gives you the power to put your content in front of the world and build an influence. I am a proud blogger, and I do not see myself stopping anytime soon. In fact, I will most likely never stop.

What was the hook that got you into blogging?

5 Reasons To Use Bitly

November 5, 2014 by Marc Guberti 6 Comments

There are countless tools on the web, but Bitly is one of the best tools on the web for marketers. Chances are you may have heard of Bitly before or have seen the Bitly links in action. Someone you know may even use Bitly. It is a tool that many marketers cannot go without, and if you do not have a Bitly account, here are five reasons why you need to have one.

Bitly shortens your links. The main reason why most people run out of characters on Twitter is because they tweet the entire link. Bitly is the solution to this problem.
Bitly takes a link of any length and turn it into a 20-23 characters link that gives you more characters to play around with on Twitter.
Bitly saves those links. Unlike similar services such as TinyUrl, Bitly saves the links so you can constantly reuse them. If you recycle your social media posts, this is a great feature that will allow you to quickly relocate older articles.
Bitly gives you superior statistics on those links. This third reason is what truly separates Bitly from the other link shortening services. Bitly gives you incredible statistics on your links. You get to see how many clicks you got hour by hour for a whole day as well as how many clicks you got within the hour. You can check how many clicks your Bitly links got for as far as 30 days.
You can categorize your links so they are easier to find. Bitly allows you to put multiple links into one bundle. Creating numerous bundles will allow to categorize your links so you can find them with ease. You can categorize blog posts that you recycle in one bundle and the articles that you want to read in another bundle. There are countless ways to categorize your content on Bitly.
You get to see how popular a link is. Some links are very popular which indicates you should be tweeting them out. Chances are if you tweet a popular link, more followers than usual will click on the link and retweet it to everyone.

Those are the five reasons why you should be using Bitly. What are your thoughts on the list? For the Bitly users out there, do you have any additional reasons why you use Bitly? Please share your thoughts below.

14 Things You Must Do If You Are A Blogger

November 3, 2014 by Marc Guberti 6 Comments

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Blogging can potentially be a great experience that brings in a big profit and allows you to grow a list of email subscribers who you can easily communicate with. The only way to tap into this wonderful experience and turn your content into a stream of revenue is if you know what to do as a blogger.

The journey from new blogger to full-time income takes a few years, and there is no such thing as an overnight success. There are certain things that all bloggers must do in order to make it big. Here are 14 of them.

#1: Utilize social media

Growing a social media audience will allow your blog posts to reach out to more people. It is important to choose one social network and excel at it instead of being bad with multiple social networks. Once you master a social network, continue mastering it while trying to master another social network.

As your audience grows, you will be able to use social proof to entice people to stick around and come back. Many people like to go back to the things that are popular. If you have thousands of followers on one social network, you will be able to use this large number to indicate that you are popular. Indicating that you are popular will result in your visitors coming back for more.

#2: Use an email service like iContact to communicate with subscribers

The money is not just in the list. The money is also in your ability to properly communicate with that list. A service like iContact makes it dramatically easier for bloggers to interact with their subscribers.

Interacting with subscribers is not the same thing as having them subscribed to an RSS feed. By interacting with your subscribers, you are able to develop a deeper connection. You can ask your subscribers how their day was before you mention your article. You can even promote your products to the people on your list so you get more sales. They say the money is in the list for a reason.

#3: Grow your email list

The larger your email list is, the more people there are who get your emails. No matter which emailing service you use, you need to get people on that list to communicate with in the first place.

There are plenty of ways to grow your email list. One of the most successful methods of growing an email list is something that many marketers refer to as the bribe. A bribe is a free prize that you give to the people who subscribe to your blog. PDFs, reports, videos, and digital books are popular bribes that result in more subscribers.

Another great way to get more subscribers is by including a call-to-action at the end of all of your blog posts. I use the Optin Forms plugin by Codeleon to easily create an effective call-to-action at the bottom of my blog posts. The plugin gives you different themes to choose from and allows you to change the colors of the optin form.

#4: Create Your Own Products

Creating your own products definitely beats relying on affiliate marketing. I know that there are some people who are bringing in a full-time income from affiliate marketing, but the problem with affiliate marketing is that you are dependent on another seller. You never want your income strategy to be dependent on affiliate marketing because it is an inconsistent income stream. Even for the best affiliate marketers, there are some really good months, but there are also really bad months.

Creating products is the better approach towards building a strong income with a blog. By creating products, you are able to bring in a more reliable income. Creating your own products makes you closer to bringing in consistent revenue.

#5: Enhance your blog’s SEO

Although having good SEO is not a do or die stage for a blog, enhancing your blog’s SEO has the potential to bring in thousands of extra visitors.

Getting people to share your blog posts more often and growing your social media audience are two great ways to boost your SEO. In order to get more people to share your blog posts, you want to either go in depth in a certain area or be concise. My suggestion would be to have a mix of both of those kinds of blog posts so you are able to identify which ones get shared more often.

Growing your social media presence and constantly posting links to your blog posts will also boost the amount of shares your blog posts get (as long as the blog posts are valuable to your targeted audience). Writing longer blog posts also helps out in the process. Here are some more tips to help you enhance your blog’s SEO.

#6: Know your market

#5 kind of led into knowing your market. In order to be a successful blogger, it is important to know who the desired visitor is. This desired visitor needs to be interested in your blog’s topic before visiting your blog in the first place. Just ask yourself what kind of content you write and what kind of person would be interested in reading it.

For this blog, I pursue people who are interested in growing their online presence and making a strong income on the web. If you have been reading this blog post word for word, I know you are definitely a part of my target market.

#7: Write 1 blog post every day

Writing 1 blog post every day is essential to getting more traffic. Writing 1 blog post every day gives you more of your blog content to share on your social networks so you are able to generate more traffic.

In addition, the math supports writing numerous blog posts. If you have 1,000 blog posts, then each of those articles only needs to get 1 daily visitor for your blog to get 1,000 daily visitors. If your blog only has 10 blog posts, then each of those articles needs to get 100 daily visitors in order to bring in 1,000 daily visitors.

Although that is a big difference, the quality of your content is a decisive factor towards how much traffic it will get. Just because something is up on the web does not mean people will automatically come.

Writing 1 blog post every day is especially valuable to newbie bloggers. The best way to get better at writing is by writing every day. The best sports athletes in the game got to where they currently are by practicing every day. Writing is no exception, and you need to be a skilled writer to attract a large following of people who easily remember you.

#8: Write down blog post ideas

One of the biggest challenges that stops bloggers dead in their tracks is writer’s block. This occurs when a blogger runs out of ideas. Writing new content becomes more challenging when a blogger encounters writer’s block.

This is why it is important to write down your blog post ideas so you do not forget them. I write down blog post ideas the moment I think of them, and in most cases, I end up writing a blog post around that idea many days later. Relying on your memory to remember all of the blog post ideas is a mistake.

#9: Look at articles on the web about blogging

Most of my knowledge of blogging has come by looking at other people’s articles and experimenting with my own methods along the way. Since you are reading this article about blogging, then you are already ahead of the game!

Problogger and Copyblogger are two great blogs (other than this one) that provide tons of valuable information about blogging.

#10: Read books

The only reason I do not sound like your English teacher right now is because I’m not asking you to read Shakespeare books. Reading books as a blogger serves two major benefits:

You get to see other writers’ styles.
You get to learn new things (core values, things about your niche, etc).

Since you are a blogger who should be writing about what you enjoy, you should also be choosing books that you enjoy to read. The reason why people see reading as dull is because few people get to pick and choose the books they read. As a result, you should only choose to read the books that you would enjoy reading.

If you want to read Shakespeare, then go for it. If you want to read something more modern, that’s also great. Your decision should be based on what you want to read.

#11: Improve your blog’s speed

Google loves a fast blog which means if your blog is slow, it’s not getting as much search engine traffic. There are plenty of simple ways to make your blog load faster. One method is to show an excerpt for your blog posts. If a headline catches a visitor’s attention, that visitor can click on the headline to read the entire blog post.

Another great way to make your blog load faster is to upload smaller images. In many cases, it is the images that make a blog take forever to load. I use Smush.it which is a free plugin that has the power to shrink images.

#12: Create a compelling About Me Page

For thousands of years, human beings have loved a good story, and this love for a story has not outgrown us. We enjoy hearing good stories, and we remember them very well. Stories like Old Yeller and Unbroken are unforgettable to the people who read them.

Although you do not have to turn your bio into a novel, you should be sure to create a compelling About Me Page. Tell your visitors your story, where you came from, how you struggled, how to progressed, and where you are today. Make your story one of those stories that people feel obligated to pay attention to.

#13: Show off your popular articles

All of the people who visit your blog for the first time will have no idea what to expect. The advantage you have with a new visitor is if that new visitor likes the headline and content of the first blog post they see, that visitor will become curious.

For those curious new visitors, showing off your popular articles on your blog’s sidebar is a great way to get more blog traffic while reducing your blog’s bounce rate. If your popular articles are really good, some people will browse through all of them. At that point, you can rest assured that this person will become a returning visitor.

Showing off your popular articles is also great for the visitors that you currently have. Showing this option will give your visitors more content to browse through, and popular articles are usually associated as the best articles on the entire blog.

That means all of your visitors, new or returning, will go into those blog posts thinking that they are extremely valuable. All you have to do at that point is live up to the promise and provide your readers with valuable content.

#14: Make your blog easy to navigate through

One of the most under looked ways to get more blog traffic and decrease bounce rate is by making your blog easy to navigate. You must make it easy for people to…

Access the pages on your blog
Access your content
See your popular posts
See your subscription form

By making it easy for people to navigate through your blog, they will stick around longer. The longer someone sticks around, the more likely that person is to become a customer.

In Conclusion

Blogging is an exciting journey that has allowed many people to work at home while making a full-time income. If you do not have a blog, I highly recommend starting one, and if you already have a blog, then you’re in good shape. Always enjoy every moment of the journey and strive to raise the bar higher for yourself.

And don’t forget to continue practice writing. The more you practice at it, the better you get.

Twitter Case Study: When I Decided To Tweet Once Every 15 Minutes

October 31, 2014 by Marc Guberti 42 Comments

This is my third case study about tweeting at a greater frequency. A very long time ago in a galaxy farther away than the Death Star, I tweeted once every hour and got a few blog visitors. Then, when I doubled my tweeting frequency to 30 minutes every day, I got double the number of visitors. After that, I decided to send out one tweet every 20 minutes and got more visitors.

Then, I decided to send out one tweet every 15 minutes, and as I expected, it has produced the best results out of all of the tweeting frequencies.

When I tweeted once every 20 minutes, over 300 visitors got referred by Twitter every day. Before going from tweeting every 20 minutes to tweeting every 15 minutes, I guessed that my traffic from Twitter would increase by 50-100 daily visitors and just miss 400 daily visitors from Twitter.

I ended up getting 454 visitors from Twitter on the first day I implemented the change. This was a 51% growth of Twitter traffic in just one day. In one month, that’s an extra 4,500 visitors and over 50,000 extra visitors every year! The best part is that since my Twitter audience continues to grow, I will continue to see gradual increases in traffic.

There is great potential in tweeting more often. However, I see tweeting once every 15 minutes as the fork in the road. The amount of people who unfollow my account on a daily basis slightly increased after I made the change. In the end, I always gain more followers than there are people who unfollow me (I almost always have a net gain of over 300 followers per day).

Tweeting frequently is definitely worth it because it results in more blog traffic. The two goals of my Twitter account are to interact with my audience and lead people to my blog. Tweeting more frequently makes those three goals happen more often. That’s why losing a few more followers per day does not bother me, especially when I gain more than I lose.

When I started this journey and created the case studies, one of my biggest fears was that I would annoy my followers with too many updates. A common practice on Twitter is to avoid sending so many updates in a short period of time (i.e. Sending out 10 tweets in two minutes, which is still something to avoid). Each time I increased the consistency and frequency of my tweets, my followers were still sharing the tweets and engaging with me more than usual.

Since I was tweeting more often, they were seeing me more often.

What are your thoughts on this Twitter case study? How frequently do you tweet? Please share your thoughts below.