Marc's Blog

Why Social Media Is Not Overrated

June 5, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

In an earlier blog post, I mentioned that 100 subscribers will get you much further than 100 followers. I also went into detail about why social media buttons on a blog are overrated. Does that mean social media is overrated? Not at all. I’ve written too many blog posts about social media, and the last thing I want to hear is that it’s overrated 🙂

Social Media is the most powerful tool out there to allow more people to know about your presence on the web. Most of my blog’s traffic comes from social networks (Twitter in particular), and most of my blog’s success is because of my social networks. As my social media traffic rose, my search engine traffic rose as well. It’s not a coincidence.

Here’s the point where some people will wonder why they can’t make their social media buttons as big as they want on their blogs. If you are optimizing your social networks properly, chances are that most of the people who are visiting your blog are already following you on one of your social networks. Instead of telling people about your other social networks, you can create a page that displays all of your social networks. When someone is on your home page, you need them to subscribe to your blog.

The entire point of social media is to allow you to get more traffic. When you get that traffic, you need to design your blog in a way that gives you an extra connection with your visitor. Buttons that allow people to follow you without leaving your blog or opening up a new tab is a great start. Having a big subscription box that pushes everything else to the bottom of your sidebar is another great way to get subscribers.

Once someone visits your blog from a social networks, what happens next? That is what will allow you to see the best impact on your blog’s numbers because of social media.

Are You Throwing Away Your Blog Traffic?

June 4, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

There are many bloggers who dream of getting hundreds of visitors on their blog every day. These people believe that getting these extra visitors will translate to more sales, more shares, and more subscribers. However, there are some people with hundreds of visitors who are not satisfied with their results. Even though these people took the time to grow their presence on the web, they are only getting 5 extra sales.

I noticed this problem for my books. I used to show all of my books on my blog’s sidebar, and when I did this, the links generated over 200 clicks every month. Alas, I only made two sales from those clicks. Having those pictures on my blog also made it slower (and hurt SEO). The people who clicked on the links left my blog, and I lost a visitor who could have possibly subscribed to my blog.

If people leave your blog to click on a link to one of your products or a link to one of your social networks, that traffic is being thrown away. Even if someone follows you on a social network, who knows when that person will see one of your social media posts. I do my best to make sure all of my followers see one of my tweets. However, if someone does not log in for an entire day, then there’s nothing I can do about it. The better option is to have people subscribe to your blog. It is better to have 1,000 subscribers than it is to have 1,000 followers. Subscribers get emailed every time a new blog post gets published, and who doesn’t check their email? Followers may not see all of your posts.

If you are getting someone to subscribe to your blog, you are not throwing away your traffic. If anything else occurs, traffic is being thrown away.

The big question you may have right now is how it is possible to still gain followers even though it is bad to have links that lead to your social media accounts. The solution is to have a button on your blog that will allow someone to follow you without leaving your blog. The button for my Twitter account allows anyone reading my blog to follow me without going on Twitter. All a reader has to do is click the button and that’s it. Not only do you make it easier for people to follow you on Twitter, but you also allow them to stay on your blog. Even if you have to make your social media buttons smaller to get the desired effect, it is more important to keep someone on your blog (and possibly get that person to subscribe) than it is to get another follower. 100 followers are not going to be the difference between your book becoming a bestseller, but 100 people on your email list (in some cases, big fans) who can get notified the moment your book comes out will be very likely to buy that book.

Getting someone to stay on your blog for an extra minute can be the difference between someone who subscribes to your blog and someone who walks away. Over the long-term, it can be the difference between getting a lot of sales and getting no sales at all.

11 Ways To Boost Your Klout Score

June 4, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Your Klout Score allows other people to know how influential you are on social networks. Since raising a Klout Score seems impossible, it is very easy to appreciate the people who have high Klout Scores. In addition, the people with higher Klout scores get more opportunities. The people who have a Klout Score of 80 get more public speaking opportunities than the people who have a Klout Score of 60. If they both wrote social media books, chances are the customer will buy the book from the person with the Klout Score of 80. Some jobs use Klout Score as a deciding factor of whether someone gets hired or not. Basically, your Klout Score is super important, and if you want to raise that Klout Score (highly recommended for anyone), here are 11 tips.

Connect more social networks to your Klout account. The more social networks you connect to Klout, the higher your score goes up. Your influence is not an average of your social networks. It is an accumulation of your social networks.
Interact with your followers. If you do not have a lot of conversations with your followers, don’t wait for someone to start the conversation. You need to start the conversations you have with your followers. That way, more of these people will interact with you and possibly favorite/retweet your tweets.
Post content that people would want to share. The amount of times your content gets shared has a big impact on how high your Klout score goes. Instead of posting random content that few people would want to share, only post the type of content that you know your targeted followers would share.
Post content more frequently. If you send out a tweet at 3 pm, and your followers go on Twitter at 3:05 pm, then you’re out of luck. By posting content more frequently, more of your followers will be able to see your tweets. This will also boost your chances of getting a retweet.
Post more pictures. Pictures have been proven to increase interaction on social networks. Some of the pictures you post may get shared five times more than your posts without pictures.
Use Twitter’s new design to pin one of your tweets to the top of your profile page. Have you ever had the tweet that got retweeted 20 times, but as you tweet more often, the tweet that once got 20 retweets was then forgotten? Twitter’s new design allows you to pin one of your tweets at the top of your profile. Even if you sent out a tweet a few years ago that got over 20 retweets, you can bring that tweet back to the top of your profile to keep it current.
Interact with your friends on Facebook. Not only will your friends like to talk with you on Facebook, but that also boosts your Klout Score. Friends will also be very likely to like your pictures.
Be omnipresent on all social networks. Remember that Klout calculates your score as an accumulation of your social networks. The more active you are on them, the more impact each of your social networks has on your Klout Score.
Share other people’s content. When you share someone else’s content, your followers will realize that the content you shared is really good (since it’s not your own and you were willing to share it).
Retweet, favorite, like, and share other people’s posts. These people will either return the favor or interact with you.
Look at your Klout Score statistics. Your Klout Score statistics will allow you to see when your score went up and when it went down. By looking at these statistics and remembering how you got the big increase or decrease, you will be able to identify what you need to do to boost your Klout Score and what you need to avoid so your Klout Score does not decrease.

Those are the 11 ways to boost your Klout Score. Although it may take a while before your Klout Score goes up by 20 or so, implementing these tactics will eventually allow you to get there. I used these tactics to become one of the Top 10% of all social media influencers. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips? Please share your thoughts and advice below and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

3 Overlooked Blogging Tips

June 3, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

overlooked

I have learned about and implemented a fair share of blogging tips. I wrote a blog post with 100 blogging tips. There are several blog posts on the web that also have their fair share of blogging tips. However, there are three particular tips that get overlooked. While implementing these tips has allowed several bloggers to get over 100,000 visitors every month, most people forget about, under appreciate, or don’t even know about these tips. These three tips get overlooked often, and now you have the opportunity to give them your undivided attention.

Write in a conversational tone. If you want to write better blog posts that get shared more often, you need to write in a conversational tone. You need to include “I” and “You” in your blog posts. The conversational tone will make the visitor feel good because you remembered that the visitor is also a human. In addition, but using “I” more often, your visitor will realize that a human wrote the blog post instead of a robot. Look at a blog post on this blog (like this one) that uses “I” and “You” often. Then imagine what would be different if those words were removed from that blog post.
Write more blog posts. While quality content is important, it is just as important to provide an abundance of content (another way of saying quantity). Writing more blog posts allows your blog to appear for more keywords. If you write a blog post about blogging tips and a blog post about social media tips, those are two different keywords that you blog can appear for. The more keywords your blog appears for, the more traffic your blog will get from search engines.
Use categories to organize your blog’s content. Out of all of these tips, this was the tip that I overlooked the most. You may be on this blog just for blogging tips and have no interest in the social media tips on this blog (for now). If you only wanted to read blog posts on blogging tips, you can go to the Blogging Tips Category and then read all of the blog posts that I put in that category. Categories allow you to specialize your content and give readers more of the information that they are looking for. By giving your visitor what he/she is looking for straight from the get-go, that visitor will stick around which reduces your blog’s bounce rate and moves your blog up on the search engines.

Those are the three blogging tips that often get overlooked. If you have been overlooking these blogging tips for a while, you need to implement them as soon as possible. Implementing these tips will definitely result in a very noticeable increase in traffic. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional suggestions? Please share your thoughts and tips below.

The Two Major Components Of Your Blog’s Success

June 3, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Blogging

There are many components that make a blog successful. Some of these components are getting more blog subscribers, content marketing, and so on. However, all of these small components are subcategories of the two most important components of any blog’s success. If there was a way to measure how successful your blog is, this would be as close as you can get.

The first major component of your blog’s success if how many visitors your blog is getting. A blog that is getting 10 visitors a day is not getting as much visibility as a blog that is getting 10,000 visitors every day. You need more people to know about you in order to have a big presence on the web. This first major component is the more obvious of the two. Content marketing, building a presence on social networks, and improving SEO among other things all contribute to this major component.

The second major component of your blog’s success is what happens when your visitors go on your blog. Traffic exchange sites will make your numbers look bigger than they really are. Although I am not proud of it, I admit to have used traffic exchange sites for one of my blogs (not this one). I was able to get hundreds of extra visitors every day, but those hundreds of extra visitors did not subscribe to that particular blog or buy any of the products being sold on that blog. In addition, using a traffic exchange site hurt that blog’s SEO because Google looks down on that kind of stuff. If you measure a blog’s success based on how much money it brings in, this major component comes into further play. If you get 10 visitors every day, and two of those 10 daily visitors buy your $50 training course, that’s $3,000 every month (this is being very optimistic). If a blog gets 10,000 visitors every day, then that’s 300,000 visitors every month. However, if only five of those 300,000 people buy the same training course, the person who is getting fewer visitors is more successful than the person with 300,000 monthly visitors.

Getting the results you want to see when someone goes on your blog is just as important as growing your traffic numbers. By focusing on these two major components in your blogging strategy, you will be able to get more visitors who will do what you want them to do (subscribe to your blog, buy your product, share your blog posts on their social networks, and so on).

Why Do Spam And Phishing Attempts Always Have To Be So Boring?

June 2, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

A few months ago, I would have been annoyed to receive spam or a phishing attempts in my inbox. At this time, I would simply come across the email, wonder if this person contemplated life, think about that for a few more minutes, and then delete the message. However, this method is such a boring process with no gain. When I started to get more spam and phishing attempts in my inbox, I decided to be creative.

One day, I got a message from the Facebook Award team saying that on behalf of the United Kingdom, they are giving me 1 million British pounds (hooray for me, right). All I needed to do to get the money was enter my name, address, phone number, age, country, and occupation (but Facebook already knows all of these things). Finally, I had to send this information to an email that had no relationship to Facebook whatsoever (the email address was daniel_moor@live.com. If spammers and phishers are going to try to see my private information and possibly share that private information with the world, then two can play at that game). Let’s not forget to mention that they left me their warmest regards.

The person hiding behind the email address made an earnest attempt to take away my personal information. Although I usually delete emails like this, I somewhat appreciated this person’s efforts. I decided to give this person all of my information:

Full name: Johnny Appleseed

Address: 123456789 Cedar Lane (that’s a lot of numbers)

Phone number: 777-7777-7777 (I am not responsible for anything that happens if anyone calls this number)

Age: 101 (not a teenager)

Country: Planet Earth (try to find me now!)

Occupation: I forgot my occupation (next time, I’ll say that I plant seeds all day)

Then, I simply had to end in style:

Thanks Facebook rewards team. You guys are the best!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Regards,

Johnny Appleseed

I have been doing this ever since. I got another email where Optimum (my email provider) was going to shut down my account in 48 hours unless I gave them my password. These people were a little smarter using the email address customerservices1@safe-mail.net, but I still knew it wasn’t Optimum. The password I sent to them was “NotGonnaHappen.”

Phishers try so hard to take people’s private information. That’s how people get hacked. I take the time of day to respond to these people’s emails, but then the phishers never bother to respond to my emails that I spend so much time on. I wonder why.

These are some of the things I am considering to do for the next person who sends me one of these emails:

Send over some interview questions about why this person spams other people.
If I get another message about some Facebook rewards team, I’ll tell the person that I work for Facebook.
I’ll send over the definitions of 10 words so the phisher can brush up on his/her vocabulary.

The possibilities are endless. Maybe this entire thinking process is the teenager part of me talking, but I have a lot of fun sending out these kinds of emails.