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6 Methods To Promote Your Blog Posts

October 15, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

6 methods to promote your blog posts

Your blog is a powerful tool to get more traffic and allow people to see free content so they are enticed to subscribe and buy products. The main way to get blog traffic is by promoting your blog posts and getting more traffic for each individual blog posts. If 10 of your blog posts get 20 visitors, that’s 200 visitors total just from those 10 blog posts.

That means promoting your blog posts so they reach more people is essential to getting more traffic. In this article, I will share with you six different methods you can use to promote your blog posts.

Include pictures in your blog posts and pin them. It is a shame that many marketers are not putting pictures on their blogs and are forgetting about Pinterest. Not only is Pinterest popular (it has over 70 million users), but it is still growing. Pinterest may even exceed 100 million users by the end of the year. Better yet, content spreads rapidly. 80% of pins being repins is one statistic that indicates how far content on Pinterest can spread.
Tweet your blog posts more often. Tweeting your blog posts more often means increasing the frequency in which you tweet and the percentage of tweets that contain your blog posts. Tweeting about your blog often is entirely okay, and tweeting more frequently will not annoy your followers. In fact, tweeting more frequently will help you a lot.
Create a Facebook Page. Although not everyone gets to see your Facebook posts, Facebook is still the largest social network of them all with over 1 billion users. These Facebook users are very active on the site and like/share other people’s content often. Here are some additional reasons for why you need a Facebook Page.
Create SlideShare presentations. SlideShare is the social network to watch out for this year and the year after that. SlideShare has had great success with big businesses and companies who boast getting more traffic from SlideShare presentations than from audiences that range from hundreds of thousands of people to millions of people on other social networks.
Promote your blog posts within your blog posts. The three links you see above this text are examples of this method in action. Including links to your older blog posts allows those blog posts to get more views while reducing your blog’s bounce rate at the same time!
Email the people on your list about your blog posts. Every week, I send out one email containing all of the blog posts I wrote for the week. These emails have seen massive success and numerous clicks. Writing multiple blog posts every day and using RSS to send people emails did not work as well.

Promoting your blog posts will allow more people to see your content. Some of the people who see your content will decide to subscribe to your blog and buy some of your products. What were your thoughts on the list? Do you have a 7th method to promoting blog posts? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

7 Business Mistakes To Avoid

October 13, 2014 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

7 Business Mistakes To Avoid

Millions of startups are created all over the world every year. While each business has its different purpose, most of them are not sticking. In five years, about 90% of those new businesses will go out of business. It is disappointing to see an idea or business come and go. The worst part is that it happens often.

The reason businesses shut down often is not because it does not work. If creating a business did not work, then why are there the Apples and Googles of the world? Why are the 10% successful? The main reason why many businesses collapse is because many people behind the businesses are not business savvy. Many people who create a startup learn about how business works after the startup has already been created.

There are many people who also spend their money foolishly on their business. Just because someone grosses in $300,000 every year from a business does not mean that person is making $300,000 every year. Some people in this position only get the scraps.

Entrepreneurs have made many lessons available through their own trial-and-error experiences. By analyzing other entrepreneurs’ case studies as well as my own experiences, I have been able to come up with a list of seven business mistakes that you need to avoid so your business stays afloat and even makes a profit.

Putting all eggs in one basket. Squidoo’s decline amazed many people around the web. What once got millions of daily visitors now got absorbed by HubPages. At the time, I put all of my eggs into that basket. This forced me to experiment with other ways to make money on the web. Kindle book creation ended up becoming the big one. However, I never put all of my eggs into that basket. I am also utilizing training courses and other options to bring in revenue as well.
Thinking of profit in the wrong way. Sometimes a business is making a lot of money but the CEO is not. There are some businesses that make $1 million every year but have $2 million in expenses. Many people think of profit as the scraps after expenses take place. On the contrary, you should never spend your money if you know you won’t make a profit that way.
Using social media too often. We all use social media, and other people love to use it as much as they can. A big mistake is using social media too often to the point where you are not getting any of your projects done. Social media is a great way to build an audience but not as great of a way to make money.
Not having a vision. Having a vision allows you to identify where you want to be within a certain amount of time. Visions give us realities which may currently seem out of reach, but by striving to achieve your vision, you will take more steps of action to make that vision a reality compared to if you did not take the time to give yourself a vision.
Not analyzing your own statistics. I am analyzing my statistics every day to learn more about my business, visitors, and customers. I discovered that adding a subscription box at the end of all of my blog posts worked very effectively. In fact, it has more than doubled the amount of subscribers I get.
Never starting at all. Many people fear launching their business to the world because of criticism and the need to be perfect. In order to see how far your business will go, you need to start and launch that business first.
Giving up too early. There are plenty of people who were once comfortable with the status quo before they created their businesses. To these people, the status quo offers security. Although gruesome at times, the status quo offers a guaranteed payment for every hour at the end of the day. Businesses do not guarantee any type of revenue. However, if you take the time to create a business and make it work, you will make more money than anyone from the status quo could ever dream of making.

Business is an awesome and dangerous world to be in. By avoiding these mistakes, you will be taking more of the danger out of business, and you will be able to focus on the awesome parts about having a business: you work at your own hours, you love what you do, and you make money too.

What were your thoughts on the list? Do you have an 8th business mistake that people should know about? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

5 Ways To Get More SlideShare Followers

October 10, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Although SlideShare is a powerful social network, few people take advantage of it. There are plenty of reasons to use SlideShare, but in order for you to utilize SlideShare properly, you need to grow a big audience. Some big businesses and companies get more traffic from SlideShare with 10,000 followers than on other social networks where they have millions of followers. That means if you really want to grow your blog traffic, get more subscribers, and boost sales, you need more followers on SlideShare. Here are five ways to get those followers.

Have a lot of SlideShare presentations. The more presentations people can go through, the more likely that person is to follow you. You do not need hundreds of presentations to grab people’s attention. You only need a few dozen.
Create great SlideShare presentations. No matter how many SlideShare presentations you have, they need to be good. One amazing presentation is better than 100 crummy presentations any day of the week.
Follow other people. There are many people on SlideShare who will follow back if you follow them. Following other people will also allow you to develop strong connections with more people.
Embed SlideShare presentations on your blog. You want as many people to see your presentations as possible. Embedding a SlideShare presentation on your blog’s sidebar is a great way to introduce something that will grab a visitor’s attention.
Use your other social networks to tell people about your SlideShare account. Whether you have a big following or a small following, anyone in your audience can end up following you on SlideShare. While you’re at it, tell your friends about your account and get them to take a look at your SlideShare presentations.

You do not need hundreds of thousands of SlideShare followers to bring in massive traffic. Based on statistics provided by big companies like Mashable, you only need a few thousand followers to get massive traffic from the site. What were your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips on getting more SlideShare followers? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

How To Create An Effective SlideShare Presentation And Make It Popular

October 8, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

SlideShare one of the most underrated social networks for getting more visitors and subscribers. I was inspired by successful Kindle author Steve Scott who mentioned how he was able to get over 1,000 extra subscribers from SlideShare in just three months. After hearing that, I decided to do some searching. Besides, wouldn’t you want an extra 1,000 subscribers?

That’s why I gave SlideShare a try, and since then, I have been amazed at its potential. These were the three things that amazed me the most:

#1: The number of followers you have is not as important on SlideShare.

You do not need to have 1,000 SlideShare followers to get 1,000 extra visitors from your SlideShare presentations. SlideShare presentations are shared all over the web on different social networks and get embedded on blogs.

Just to give you an idea, Mashable gets more traffic from SlideShare (a little under 10,000 followers and 32 total presentations) than from Google Plus (over 3 million followers and 10 daily posts) and YouTube (over 130,000 subscribers and 2,300 videos). All of the numbers are true. There is also a SlideShare expert who gets more traffic with 100 SlideShare followers than 4,000 people on Twitter and Facebook combined!

#2: The average blog visitor from SlideShare will stay longer than the average blog visitor from somewhere else.

This means the people who see your SlideShare presentations stick around longer. Although that is definitely long enough to read through some of your articles, it may also be long enough for someone to enter their email and subscribe to your blog.

#3: SlideShare is popular and only growing.

SlideShare has a global Alexa rank under 150, and it shows no signs of plummeting. Big organizations and people such as The White House and Guy Kawasaki are using the social network. I came aboard when I heard about SlideShare’s great potential for marketers, and I expect other marketers to come on board too.

Here’s How You Create Effective SlideShare Presentations That Become Popular

Now that you know why SlideShare is a powerful social network for getting more traffic and subscribers, it is important to create an effective SlideShare presentation that gets a massive amount of traffic.

The quality of your SlideShare is one of the decisive factors that determines how far it spreads. There is marketing involved with any product, but you can’t be polishing junk either. In order to create a quality SlideShare presentation, it needs to have these four components:

More pictures. SlideShare is ideal for sharing pictures, but you want to make sure you have permission to use your pictures. PhotoPin and Pixabay are two free picture services with a variety of options available.
Better looking pictures. The look of your pictures and the overall design of your presentation have a big impact on how far people go in the presentation as well as how many people share it.
Call to action. Make sure you have a link that allows the people viewing your SlideShare presentation to visit your blog and/or subscribe to it.
Compelling topic to your target audience. That means you are not using SlideShare to show everyone what you ate last night. For me, that means using SlideShare to offer digital marketing advice.
In Conclusion

Now, before you start abandoning all of the other social networks for SlideShare, there are a few important things to note. The first thing is that you need to bring in some views to your SlideShare so it can become more popular. This is where the audience you have already built on your social networks and blog is very valuable. After you SlideShare gets enough views, it will be promoted in SlideShare’s different sections, and that extra exposure will also get Google’s attention.Effective SlideShares spread on the web. Chances are you have seen one of them well before you saw mine about getting more Twitter followers. Some people have gotten hundreds of thousands of views on their blog just from SlideShare. What are your thoughts on SlideShare? Have you used it in the past? Please share your thoughts below.

5 Social Media Tips For Success

October 6, 2014 by Marc Guberti 10 Comments

There are billions of people using social media to interact with their friends, grow a big audience, see what celebrities are up to, make connections, or for various other reasons. If you are one of the people who wants to grow a big social media audience and make connections, here are five tips that will help you out with that.

#1: Be on multiple social networks.

The more social networks you have, the more places people can find you. Out of all of the social networks, Twitter brings in the most traffic, but Pinterest also brings in numerous visitors on a daily basis. Some people have interviewed me because they found me on Pinterest.

When you are utilizing numerous social networks, it is also important to focus most of your time on one of those social networks. If you master one social network, you will be able to grow a large audience on that social network. After you master one social network, you should then aspire to master another social network that you are using.

The great thing about taking this approach is that each time you master a social network and know how to grow a big audience on them, it gets easier to repeat the process on the other social networks. Some of the knowledge needed to get 100,000 Facebook likes is identical to the knowledge needed to get 100,000 Pinterest followers.

Being on multiple social networks gives you an advantage, but it is important to focus most of your time on one social network: your most successful one.

#2: Post more often throughout the day

One of the things that so many people forget about is that there are different time zones for different places in the world. That means some people will be awake at different times than you. Here is a typical scenario of why this knowledge is important.

Let’s say you live in Florida, and it’s five o’clock in the morning. You may be wondering who could possibly be looking at your social media posts at that time. Here are the people who could be looking at your social media posts:

People in the United Kingdom. At the same time it is 5 am in Florida, it is 9 am in the United Kingdom.
People in Germany. At the same time it is 5 am in Florida, it is 10:05 am in Germany.
People in Japan. At the same time it is 5 am in Florida, it is 6 pm in Japan.

I can go on, but this is enough information for me to make my point. Posting more content throughout the day will give more people a chance to see your content regardless of their timezone. When you put your content in front of a large amount of people, your content can spread farther.

#3: Post specific content

One of the most important things to do on social media is to post specific content. Posting specific content will make it easier for people to know what you specialize in. If you talk about a plethora of unrelated topics, your audience will be confused. Your message and what you talk about needs to be as clear as possible to your audience.

I am known for posting content related to digital marketing, productivity, and motivation. All three of these topics are connected because you need motivation to be productive, and you need to be productive in order to be a good digital marketer. Then, you need to know about digital marketing so you can optimize your presence on the web.

Many people who want to learn more about digital marketing also want to learn about productivity, motivation, or both. That way, the content you post on your social networks is the same content that your audience is looking for. If you send out some social media posts about baseball, other social media posts about fashion, and a few other social media posts about food, you are going to confuse your followers. Posting specific content eliminates this problem and allows people to know what niche you are in.

#4: Include pictures in your posts

Some social networks such as Instagram and Pinterest require a picture in every post. There are other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook that do not require pictures. The only problem is that because it’s not a requirement, many people miss out on adding pictures to their social media posts.

Posts with pictures get more engagement than posts without pictures. The most retweeted tweet of all-time has a picture, and that’s not a coincidence. If you look at the tweets I send out without pictures compared to the tweets with pictures, you will see an incredible difference. Some of my pictures with tweets have been retweeted over 100 times. Most of my tweets without pictures get 1-5 retweets (I only get this many retweets per tweet because of my tweeting frequency. It all adds up though). Pictures have the power to boost the engagement for any post on any social network.

#5: Be consistent

You need to post at a consistent and frequent basis. Posting less times than expected will result in fewer people seeing your content and following you. In addition, when you are implementing your social media strategy, you need to implement it consistently.

There are many people who learn about a new social media strategy that works wonders for other people, give that strategy a try, and then never go back to that strategy again. The reason is that the people who became successful by implementing a certain strategy became successful by implementing that strategy over a long period of time.

Let’s say your goal is to get 10,000 Twitter followers, and you encounter a strategy that results in 100 Twitter followers every day. You can implement it in one day and get another 100 Twitter followers, but you need to implement the same strategy for 99 more days in order to get 10,000 Twitter followers. If you implement the strategy on one day and then forget about it for the rest of the week, the strategy will not have a big impact on your presence.

In Conclusion

Social media success is something that takes time, but it is not nearly as hard as many experts say. It is possible for anyone to be successful on any social network, and these five tips will be very helpful in your quest to dominate social media.

Which tip was your favorite? Do you have a 6th tip for social media success? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

6 Ways To Make Your Tweets Shorter

October 3, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

If you are just like the masses, there have been some days when you thought you were going to send out a tweet but realized it was over 140 characters. Although there are over 500 million tweets being sent out every day, Twitter’s 140 character limitation has resulted in millions of tweets never being sent.

The reason why many of these tweets are not sent out is because shortening tweets is something that proves to be too daunting without the right knowledge. Even if your tweet is 140 characters, you should definitely make your tweets shorter. On average, tweets with 70-100 characters get more retweets than any other tweets of any other character length. That means making your tweets shorter is very important, and here are six ways to get it done.

Use a link shortener. I have seen many people using TinyUrl to shorten their links, and I used to use TinyUrl as well. While they get the job done of shortening the link, there are better options available. Bitly is by far the best link shortener because it saves all of the links you shortened so you can easily tweet the same link, and you get statistics that show you how many times your links got clicked and when they got clicked.
Use text message language. When you are running out of characters or have too many characters, use text messaging language. You becomes “U,” before comes “B4,” and the word and becomes “&.” You will be able to save numerous characters this way, but only use text message language if it’s the only way to get under 140 characters. Do not use text message language just to get to the 70-100 character range.
Drop the punctuation. No one on Twitter is going to accuse you of bad Grammar if you forget the comma in 1,000 or forget the period at the end of the sentence. This may sound like a silly way to save up on characters, but when you have a tweet that is 142 characters, this method is a very useful way to get under 140 characters.
Look for shorter synonyms. It is entirely possible that the reason your tweet is over 140 characters is because you are using big words. If your tweet is 143 characters, and one of the words in your tweet is “awesome,” you can replace the word “awesome” with “cool” to bring the tweet down to 140 characters. All you have to do at that point is send it out.
One sentence rule. You should have a one sentence rule for a majority of your tweets in which you only write one sentence. Granted, there will be some instances when you will have to write more than one sentence for a tweet, but by practicing this rule, you will catch yourself going above 140 characters less often.
Tweet an image with the words. If you find no way to shorten your tweets, put the words in an image and tweet that out in typical meme style. This allows you to send out a tweet with well over 140 characters (in the picture) without worrying about Twitter’s limitation.

Twitter’s 140 character limit is a way to make it easy for people to read a variety of posts. It is easier to read 100 tweets than it is to read 100 Facebook posts that are 500 characters each. One of the unintended consequences of Twitter’s limitations is that some users are prevented from sending out tweets. These five methods to shorten your tweets are designed to reduce the amount of times that problem occurs.

What were your thoughts on the list? Do you have a 7th way to reduce the amount of characters in a tweet? Please share your thoughts and advice below.