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The 5 Pillars Of Successful Blogging

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Pillars Of Successful Blogging

The only two things that separates a newbie blogger from an expert blogger is time and knowledge. Bloggers who have been keeping at it for a few years and have an abundance of knowledge about blogging have more successful blogs than the bloggers who just started. It is great for new bloggers to write blog post after blog post, but it is essential for new bloggers to learn as much as they can about blogging. That is why if you are a new blogger, you definitely need to continue reading through this blog post, and if you have been blogging for a while, it is possible for an old dog to learn new tricks. Here are the five pillars of successful blogging:

  1. Write one blog post every day. The more you write, the better you get, and writing every day will give you discipline you need to take blogging to the next level. Writing one blog post every day at the same time will also make more of your readers expect you to publish a blog post at a certain time. That means if you publish a blog post at 9 am Eastern, some of the people on the East coast will be refreshing their email at 8:59 am until your blog post shows up.
  2. Have your blog optimized for subscribers. It’s great to get more visitors, but it is critical to turn those visitors into subscribers. You need to be using the right mailing provider and have plugins on your blog that get attention and email addresses.
  3. Have a product. In order to be successful with a blog, you need to monetize it…and not with ads or affiliate marketing. Although those are two great ways to bring in some income, having your own product allows you to get a bigger chunk of the commission, and the more products you create, the more math stacks in your favor towards your goals. It is mathematically easier for 10 books to bring in $100,000 every year than it is for 1 book to bring in the same amount of revenue.
  4. Grow your social networks. The presence you have on your social networks is powerful. The bigger your audience is (assuming you did not buy followers), the more people you will be able to interact with. Social media is a great place to interact with your readers and engage with them.
  5. Love what you write about. Without this, you will not succeed as a blogger, and there are no questions about it. You need to love what you do to the point where you would continue to enjoy writing about the same topic for many years. Some bloggers have been at it for over 10 years without a loss in enthusiasm.

Those are the five pillars to a successful blog. What are your thoughts on the list, and how have these pillars impacted your blogging? Do you have a 6th pillar that you go by. Please share your thoughts below.

 

The 3 Steps To Accomplishing Any Goal

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Goals

One of the most important traits of successful people in the ability to accomplish goals. Unfortunately, goal accomplishment is also a trait that most people lack. For most people, expectations get created, but they never get reached. The reason many people do not accomplish their goals is because they never take the time to set themselves up for success.

Before doing anything else, these people need to identify their goals. That is the first step, and believe it or not, it is a step that many people do not think about, or they do it wrong. First off, your goals need to be clear. If you want to make more money online, you can make $0.05 and have a fulfilled goal. Instead, be specific. How much money do you want to make, and when do you want to achieve this goal?

After that, you need to create the framework you will use to accomplish the goal. This second step is all about planning. You need to identify what days you are going to work on your goals as well as what you will do on those days.

The third and final step, by far the most important, is implementation. Without applying the third step, then the other first two steps were in vain. If you create a plan but never implement it, then what really was the point?

By accomplishing goals with this three step formula, you will increase the likelihood of you accomplishing your goals. What are your thoughts on the list, and how do you do with accomplishing your own goals? Please share your thoughts below.

 

Unity Despite Chaos

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Today marks a sad day in American history that no blogger is happy to write about and no one is happy to talk about, especially New Yorkers like myself. The atrocities committed on this day 13 years ago will never be forgotten. Hours after the atrocity, the only two choices America had were to give up to terrorism or bounce back. Almost as expected, the second choice was chosen, but the only reason America was able to bounce back was because of its unity.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to undo the events that happened. The only thing we can do is live in a world affected by those events and react accordingly. America reacted by uniting together and waging war against the terrorists. This brought everyone in America together, and that helped out.

It is fair to say that the world is still filled with chaos. It is entirely predictable that bad things will continue to happen. This year has been filled with devastating news stories such as what is going on in Ukraine, Ferguson, and the other places in the world where conflict continues. The atrocity committed to James Foley does not make our world look any better either. I am sad to say that there have been too many dreaded events in 2014 for me to include in one blog post.

The kind of chaos that we experience in business and personal lives is absolutely minuscule compared to the dreaded event that happened 13 years ago and all of the dreaded events that are happening in the world right now. Regardless of what kind of chaos is involved, whether it be personal or continental, the only way to rise above the chaos is to be united.

There are some things we cannot do alone, and that is entirely okay. Always be willing to ask for help, for a shoulder to lean on, or for support. In addition, always be willing to do the same things when someone else is in need just like the first responders.

Americans leaned on each other and united together on this day to fight against terrorism. Instead of their views of the nation getting crippled, Americans became more proud of their country and what the country stands for.

United together, we will always remember this day and who it affected as well as who it continues to indirectly affect to this day.

 

Five Awesome Lessons You Can Learn From My Blog Traffic Case Study

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Blog Traffic Statistics

In February 2014, my blog got over 5,000 visitors which resulted in a little over 9,000 views. It was the first time my blog got fewer visitors in a particular month than it got the month before since March 2013. At the time, I was unsure of this blog’s future because a blog of mine that was getting hundreds of daily visitors also went through this trend and did not quite recover. I did more research so this blog could avoid the other blog’s fate, and this research led to me learning more about getting blog traffic.

My traffic consistently increased month by month, and the statistics show no signs of decline. In July 2014, this blog got over 17,500 visitors which resulted in over 26,500 views. In the short span of five months, I was successfully able to triple my traffic. Now, I no longer do research to see how my blog can survive. I do research do see how I can make my blog thrive more than it already is. Throughout the journey, I have learned five core lessons that you need to takeaway from this blog post.

  1. If you want it, you can get it. Although I had no plans on tripling my blog’s traffic in five months, I wanted to get 20,000 views in one month. That evolved into getting 26,500 views in one month. Right when I saw the potential at the end of July, I gave myself the goal of tripling my traffic yet again in the next five months. That means my goal for December 2014 would be get over 52,500 visitors resulting in 79,500 views for the month. I want it, and I know I can get it. I’m going to need help though. *Pauses and gives a wink*
  2. Social media is everything. If you are not using social media to promote your blog, then you are not using it properly. Social media has attributed to an overwhelming majority of this blog’s success. Social media traffic even resulted in this blog’s search engine traffic rising dramatically. In July 2014, traffic from social media and the search engines contributed to about 70% of this blog’s traffic. A large portion of the other 30% came as a result of people writing about me or sharing my blog posts because they heard about me through social media.
  3. Be patient. Blogging takes a very long time before you start to see the traffic. There are some experts who say that if you are not seeing a lot of blog traffic in 6-12 months, then blogging is not for you. It took over six months for me to get over 200 views in a month and over a year to get over 4,000 views in a month. It takes time to grow a strong presence on the web.
  4. Make sure you do something that you love. The only reason I was able to reach this point, and the only reason I will continue to excel is because I love what I do. There are other components such as me knowing some things about how social media works and the 100,000 Twitter followers I have, but I started off with zero knowledge on social media and 0 Twitter followers.
  5. Always look for more ways to grow. Right when I optimized my social media presence, my SEO traffic also went up. Since my success on Twitter, I still invest a majority of my time on Twitter, but now I am starting to give more attention to Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube.

I take #5 deep into heart because it forces me to never settle. I always look for more avenues of growth for traffic, revenue, and other things as well. Pinterest and YouTube have really been picking it up lately. I just passed 14,000 Pinterest followers, and I’m aiming for over 20,000 Pinterest followers before the end of the year which now seems much easier than it was before. My YouTube channel is approaching 20,000 channel views, and my goal is to bump it up to 30,000 views and exceed 400 channel subscribers before the end of 2014. I am also paying more attention to my Facebook Page, and my goal for that is to have over 1,000 likes before the end of 2014.

That’s the social media side, but there is also another side of blog traffic that I have not paid equal attention to, until now. I did not take growing an email list seriously. I offer the free prize and make the subscription box easy to see, but with only 0.3% of my visitors subscribing, I am taking further action to dramatically boost the number. Now I am finding more ways to grow my email list, and my goal is to be at 5,000 subscribers before the end of the year. With the amount of traffic my blog gets, it can be done. I would just need 5% of all of my blog visitors to subscribe to my blog from now until the end of the year to make it happen. With the new plugins I have added to me blog bringing in numerous subscribers, I have been getting much closer to this goal as the days pass by.

What are some of the lessons you have learned from your own blogging experiences?

 

One Simple Way Grow Your Pinterest Audience

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Pinterest Logo

There are numerous tips to get more followers as well as 100 Amazing Pinterest Tips that will show you how to really optimize Pinterest. If you do not have the time to read those two articles, you can do one simple thing to get more followers on Pinterest (you can tell it’s simple by how long this blog post is)

Being active is a big way to get more followers on Pinterest. When you are active on Pinterest, you need to be pinning the kinds of pins on Pinterest that would get more repins.

Being active is a very simple way to get more Pinterest followers. If you want to learn how to optimize your Pinterest pins and get more repins, you can subscribe to this blog (if you have not done so already) and receive the free How To Master Pinterest Video Tutorial.

 

Five Reasons Why Social Proof Is Massively Important

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Using Social Proof

When people say they went somewhere or something spectacular, some of those people will feel obligated to prove to their friends that something happened by showing a picture. Proving our point has become one of the major desires for any human being. When it comes to buying products from the experts, potential customers have a stronger desire to see social proof. They want to see how big your social media profile became before buying your products. The proof of a successful product that people want is no longer just in the pudding. It’s also in the social proof. Here are five reasons why social proof is so important.

  1. Social proof can prove that your methods work. The person who has 10 million YouTube channel views is more qualified to teach people about going viral on YouTube than the person who has 1,000 YouTube channel views.
  2. Big numbers help out in decision making. You need to grow a bigger presence on your social networks so you are able to grow bigger numbers. Most people are more likely to follow the social media expert with 100,000 followers than the social media expert with 1,000 followers. Most people are more likely to view the YouTube videos with tens of thousands of views than the ones with a few hundred views.
  3. You become more credible. The experts in their niches who have hundreds of thousands of followers look more credible than the people who have a few hundred followers.
  4. You look popular. Big social media presences are associated with popularity. This is one of the reasons why we believe (correctly) that celebrities are popular. They have millions of followers to show for it. However, many people buy fake followers to make themselves look popular. This does not result in popularity, and it’s easy to get caught.
  5. You look successful. Think about #3 and #4. A bigger social media presence would make someone look more credible and popular. Those are two of the many essential components of a successful person crushing their niche. Many people have great respect for those who are successful in society.

Social proof is not just an ego exercise. Instead, it is a way to tell people that you know how to master the system, become successful, and then your knowledge will become more valuable. Do you have Reason #6 for why social proof is valuable?