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Why You Need To Include Videos In Some Of Your Blog Posts

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Video

There are going to be some instances when your visitors will not feel like reading a blog post. Even if you make your paragraphs bite-sized, there will be some instances when your visitors will prefer to watch a video. Going from reading to watching allows the reader (now a viewer) to absorb more information just by listening.

If you are occasionally sharing your own videos in your blog posts, there are other benefits that occur. The first one is that you get more views for your videos. Getting more views will make your videos look more popular, and if those are YouTube videos, you will also be able to get more subscribers.

Imagine what would happen if your YouTube channel got 100 views every day. Then, imagine if it was more than that. Your YouTube presence would probably grow dramatically. Embedding your YouTube videos on your blog is a powerful way to grow your YouTube presence and get more engagement on your blog at the same time. This is a simple blogging and YouTube tip that few people implement, but implementing this tip will lead to better results for your blog and YouTube channel.

What are your thoughts on including YouTube videos in your blog posts? Please share your thoughts below.

 

The Five Worst Blogging Tips You Will Ever Hear

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Blogging

If used properly, a blog can allow the people in your tribe to easily connect with you and each other. In an attempt to learn about using a blog properly, bloggers come across multiple blog posts that contain tips and tricks about being successful with a blog. You may have stumbled across this blog post in your epic search to discover more blogging tips. However, there are some methods claimed as effective that do not work as well. These are the tips that bloggers believe to be effective but are really big mistakes. These are the five notorious tips that stood out from the rest.

  1. Focus on SEO. This must be the biggest. lie. ever. Sure, there are bloggers who get thousands of daily visitors from search engines, but these bloggers reached that point by creating a large social media audience. It was easy for me as a new blogger to believe that SEO was the key to success. SEO is still the key to success, but getting social media traffic is what provides the flare for SEO traffic. When I started to bring in over 300 daily visitors from Twitter, I immediately saw a rise in my SEO traffic. It was not one of those rises that is hard to detect. It was one of those rises that allowed me to get 50 extra visitors from SEO overnight (which at the time was a ginormous increase). Do not focus on SEO. Focus on creating a big social media presence.
  2. Never recycle your old content. Not only is it okay to do so, but it is also beneficial. It benefits you because you have one extra blog post scheduled without writing any new content, and your readers get to read valuable content they may have forgotten. It is also important to remember that none of your readers read your blog in the order that the blog posts are published in. Many of your visitors never read the blog post you wrote two years ago, and there will be some visitors who did not read the blog post you wrote two months ago. Here is more information about recycling your blog’s content.
  3. Your blog’s loading time is not important. Few people recognize the significance of a fast blog. If your blog takes a few seconds to load, then that’s too long. Even if the pictures on your blog take a while to load, it is essential that your readers are able to see the content of your blog post. These are some ways to make your blog load faster.
  4. Valuable content is all you need to write a great blog post. There’s so much more than that. Having a bad headline, putting all of your content in one big block of text, and grammatical errors all decrease the value of your blog post. It may contain valuable information, but people must have a desire to read it in order for your blog post to be worth anything.
  5. The longer they are, the better they are. Longer blog posts have better rankings on the search engines, but that’s the only reason you would want to write a long blog post. The truth is that your readers are very busy people. They have other blogs to read, work to do, places to see, and places to be. They are not going to read a blog post that is as long as a novel. For this blog post, I could have bored you with three examples for each of these five bad tips. I’m sure this blog post could have easily been 3,000 words long if I did that, but who would read through that? Getting subscribers and returning visitors is not just about getting them to come by and read your valuable content. It’s also about getting these people to read through your entire blog posts. A 3,000 word valuable blog post that gets skimmed over typically does not provide the same value as a 1,000 word blog post on the same topic with the same methods that gets read from start to finish.

Now that you know the five worst blogging tips, you know some of the things that you as a blogger need to avoid. Which mistakes were you making?

 

How To Get 200,000 Blog Visitors Every Year

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blog traffic increase

Reaching this stage of the game means your blog is very popular and that you are a credible in your niche. However, few people are able to reach this milestone. I am writing about this topic because this blog currently gets an average of over 200,000 visitors every year. In other words, that’s 548 daily visitors. I am going to share with you the methods I used to get this far and ultimately make my blog become popular.

The first thing that helped me is valuable content. Valuable content encourages people to share your blog posts and revisit your blog. I recognize when certain blog posts on this blog are valuable while others are not valuable. Anything from 2012 is not nearly as good as the content that I write for this blog now. I was not providing a lot of value in 2012 because I was just focusing on survival and being able to write one blog post every day just for the sake of staying consistent. It is better to provide valuable content at the cost of losing your consistency because the more valuable content you have, the more content you can share on social networks.

Another reason I was able to reach this milestone was because I stuck with it. I won’t go into the details about my blog before it was popular. This picture does a fine job with that. Sticking with it allowed me to get better at writing valuable content and learn new methods of gaining traffic a long the way. Many people give up because they are not getting enough traffic. I almost gave up on this blog similar to how I gave up on others as well. However, I knew the growing your presence on the web niche was a niche that I wanted to be a part of. I decided to stick with it hoping my statistics would one day look like the statistics from that picture (and now, they do).

By far the biggest reason towards my blog’s success that was more powerful than anything else was social media, and Twitter in particular. Twitter has been the driving force for this blog’s growth and success. Twitter alone generates an average of over 100,000 visitors every year. In addition, when Twitter traffic picked up, my search engine traffic also picked up. That taught me a very important lesson: SEO traffic and social media traffic are correlated.

Those are the reasons why my blog now gets over 200,000 visitors every year. However, that has been rising at a phenomenal rate. My goal by the end of the year is to be able to get 500,000 visitors every year and have an Alexa rank under 100,000. Basically, I am trying to more than double the number of visitors I get within a few months, but it would not be the first time something like that happened.

 

The Five Worst Social Media Tips You Will Ever Hear

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Oops Sign

In the big, complex world of social media, there are now thousands of social media experts. Some social media experts are very popular while others are finding their way. With thousands of people sharing advice on the same topic, there will be perspectives and methods that contradict each other. As a result, some people hear poor advice and end up implementing the wrong methods, or they implement the right methods in the wrong way.

This results in frustration because people are not getting the results they expected to get. Instead of having to guess whether certain methods are good or bad, I am going to provide for you a list of five of the worst social media tips you will ever hear. By knowing the mistakes now, you won’t make them later.

  1. Only be on one social network. If you are only on one social network, then you are not able to utilize the advantages of the other social networks. 80% of pins on Pinterest are repins which means you can take advantage of how easy it is to spread on Pinterest. You can use Twitter to take advantage of concise conversations that allow you to build stronger connections with your followers every day. Then there’s YouTube which allow you to take the advantage of being able to upload your own videos. Relying on one social network to grow your social media audience is no longer an option. You can have your best social network (for me, that would be Twitter), but do not just rely on one social network.
  2. Be omnipresent on all of the social networks. I plead guilty to using this tip. Omnipresent means being active on every social network including Kik, Yelp, and all of the other ones. Instead, that should be rephrased to be omnipresent on all of the big players. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, and GooglePlus are some of the big players.
  3. Don’t post too much. I used to reluctantly tweet every hour because I thought people would not like that I post too much. I thought I was going to get more unfollows and see my follower count spiral downward. However, after trying it out, I ended up gaining followers. On Twitter, I now tweet once every 20 minutes. Not only do I get more followers, but I also get more engagement.
  4. Respond to everyone. No matter how valuable your content is or how remarkable your story is, you will get two kinds of people: the haters and the spammers. Some people will be jealous of your success and be quick to shoot you down. These people will say things like “Your blog post was the worst thing I have ever read!” In addition, spammers are very common on any social network. Here is the typical example of a spammer on Twitter, “CLICK here to learn how I gain 550 FOLLOWERS every day,” and most people who tweet that have well under 1,000 followers. There is no reason to respond to these people because you will not be able to build the type of conversation with these people that evolves into a strong connection and potential sales.
  5. Do not follow many people. People do not know about you unless they hear about you. Clicking the follow button and following other people is a way for them to hear about you. If you want to be one of those people with 1 million followers who is only following a few of your best friends, the chances of that happening are unlikely. I’m not saying it’s impossible (some people have already done this), but you need to be famous in order to get that kind of attention without having to follow a lot of people. There was a point when I was following 12 people and had 1,667 followers. The problem with that was I did not get past 1,700 followers for about three months. Think about that. It took me 3 months to get 33 new followers. That’s horrible, and that primarily happens because I did not follow anyone within that span of time.

Now that you know the five worst social media tips, you know what you need to avoid. I did not make all five of these mistakes simultaneously, but I have made them all throughout my career. Identifying these mistakes allowed me to go on a better path and get better results for the time I put into social media. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional mistakes that you would like to mention? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

 

Why You Should Recycle Your Blog Posts

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Recycle Blog Posts

Recycling blog posts is a practice with no in between. Some people love it while others never want to recycle or think about recycling their blog posts. Just like numerous other people, I was skeptical about recycling blog posts. I did not want to write the same thing twice because I thought people would be disinterested in reading same blog post twice.

I had this view towards recycling blog posts until I learned that The New York Times recycles its content. Some stories on The New York Times get so much attention that the publisher publishes those same stories in future newspapers. Using the same story twice saves time (The New York Times already has one story written for the week) and allows The New York Times to get the same kind of attention they got when they published the story the first time.

Now, let’s go back to recycling blog posts. The practice looks much better knowing that The New York Times is one of the newspapers that recycles its content. As a blogger with many things to do, recycling content can save you time. As your blog gets older, there will be some blog posts that once got a lot of attention but are now long forgotten. You can bring these blog posts back to life by writing and publishing them again.

No matter how valuable any blog post is, most readers are going to gradually forget the tips and methods from the blog post. A blog post about 10 Twitter tips that was published two years ago will be long forgotten. If you are pressed for time to write a blog post, you can recycle that long forgotten blog post that provided people with value. When the recycled blog post gets published, it still provides value, but this time it gets more attention, and more people remember the value of that blog post (at least, for now).

Recycling blog posts allows you to save time while giving your readers valuable blog posts. It is still important to update your blog with new content, but recycling blog posts is a great method to remind people about valuable information they may have forgotten.

 

The Best Way To Think Of More Blog Posts To Write

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Blog Post Idea Box

Chances are if you are like me, you get the occasional writer’s block bug. There are some days when I wish I could take a day off from blogging, but then there would be an indelible gap in my consistency. Each time I feel writer’s block coming by, I know I have to get out of the trance as soon as possible. I decided to look back at how homework gets done in school for inspiration.

Some of us were (or are) really good at consistently doing their homework the night before. It has received its fair share of criticism, but people continued (or still continue) doing homework the night before anyway. Doing something the night before the due date has been highly criticized. Doing the work the night before is not the right option. Planning the night before is the good (and better) option.

Now, I write all of the ideas for my blog posts when I am too tired to write new ones. For me, that would time would be at midnight when I am just too tired to write a valuable blog post. Getting the ideas at night gives me a head start for tomorrow (unless I stay up past midnight. Then the head start rolls in within a few hours).

Writing a blog post the night before it is due will result in rushed content that does not provide as much value to the reader. These kinds of blog posts get poorly constructed just so the blogger stays consistent and can say that he/she has been consistent for years. Gathering your ideas the night before so you can prepare for tomorrow will help in the quest to eliminate writer’s block.