Marc's Blog

Content Writing and Marketing Services

3 Ways To Obtain People’s Email Addresses

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emailing

A key component towards getting more traffic and just maybe going viral is to have as many email addresses as you can. By obtaining those email addresses, you will be able to put them on a list of subscribers who get notified via email each time you come out with a new blog post or new video. This will allow many of those people to remember who you are. There are numerous ways to get a person’s email address:

  1. Host a contest that requires someone to subscribe to your blog for entry. Who wouldn’t want to get something for free? Whether you are giving away a training course or an iPad, people will want to get in on the contest. As a result, you get their email address.
  2. Tell visitors to enter their email in order to get a free report or video. This will encourage more subscribers. The free incentive will encourage more people to subscribe, and when you notify your subscribers about new blog posts, they will be eager to read them since they already got access to your free report or video.
  3. Have a Q&A on your blog that requires someone to email you to ask their question. Not only does this allow you to get the person’s email address, but you will also be able to have a conversation with this person. By effectively answering that person’s question, you will be seen as an expert.

Gathering email addresses is very important. With those email addresses, you will be able to interact with people at a level that creates stronger connections.

 

The Best Get The Most Attention

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team building

There are millions of people in your niche (stampede). However, some people in the stampede decide to settle before they run off with the lead pack. There are many options to choose from, but some options are better than others.

That’s where best comes in. When there are so many options, people look towards the best in order to get the job done. I started the process of looking at colleges and universities, and I am well aware that the process is going to intensify as junior year comes closer. When it comes to choosing a college or university, students look for the best option. When it comes to choosing a coder, people look for the best coder, not the person who learned how to code a few weeks ago. When people look for the best social media expert, they look at the expert with over 100,000 followers, not the one with only 10,000 followers.

Everyone is trying to become the best which is why there is not a lot of room at the front of the stampede. In a marathon, there are a few top runners, and then a giant mass of runners tend to stick together. Everyone wants the gold medal, but there are not enough gold medals for everyone. Becoming the best will make you the go-to person of your niche.

There are too many people settling with where they are. Are you settled with where you are, or are you striving to become the best of your niche?

 

10 Blogging Tips For Beginners

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new blog

At first, the entire thought of having a blog, maintaining it, and getting traffic will scare a lot of beginners. The reason beginners are scared is because they have no personal success to go by with their blog. A new blog has never raked in hundreds of daily visitors, does not have a powerful presence on the web, and does not have a lot of content. To make matters worse, when some new bloggers look at other people’s blogs, some of them adopt the “I wish that was me” attitude and end up more confused than ever. Here are 10 things about blogging you need to know right away:

  1. Have a picture of you on your blog. If your blog is for a business, have a picture of your business’ logo instead. My picture is on the top right sidebar of my blog which is where a lot of people will be able to see it.
  2. Directly under your picture should be your subscribe button. It is essential for any blogger, new or well-known, to give readers an easy-to-find option to subscribe to the blog. Having a subscription box that takes up space and is directly beneath the picture of you will help out towards getting more subscribers. These are other ways to get more subscribers to your blog.
  3. Focus on quality content before you focus on the traffic. This is a concept that many bloggers forget about. If you focus on the traffic, you will quickly be disappointed when you realize you are only getting 1 visitor (or none) every day. This blog started out very slow, and while it was growing slowly, I was getting more practice at writing quality content. Many of my first blog posts had typos (if you look at them now, you won’t see the typos, but many of my first blog posts are not close to the best I can do). After months of practice and daily blog posts, I had quality content to stand behind. Then, I focused on increasing my traffic since I had quality content. Earlier, I wrote a blog post about quality content not being enough. Some people think that getting big traffic numbers is better than writing quality content. In the end, quality content keeps your visitors on your blog and makes it more likely for that visitor to buy one of your products.
  4. Traffic can suddenly spike at any given notice. Although this will probably not happen for a few months, blog traffic does get sudden spikes. This inspirational picture is one example of a big spike in blog traffic. My blog was consistently getting 100 visitors a day, and then it jumped to 243 visitors one day, and then I was consistently getting 200 visitors every day. Furthermore, my blog was consistently getting 300 daily visitors, and then on one day, it got over 500 visitors. After that, my blog was consistently getting 350 daily visitors. The spikes do happen, and you never know when it is going to happen to you. Giving up on the blogging journey will never allow you to see the spike in traffic that catapults you to the next level.
  5. Start off by writing blog posts at a comfortable pace, but at least once a week. This will allow you to get the hang of blogging for the first time. As more time becomes available and you are able to write high quality blog posts faster, you should bump up the rate to 1 blog post every 3 days and work your way to publishing a blog post every day.
  6. Schedule your blog posts so they all get published at the same time. All of my blog posts are published at 9 am EST or 9 pm EST. The one time I tried to schedule a blog post at 6:30 am, my traffic for that day got cut in half. On the very next day, I scheduled a blog post at 9 am just like I had been, and then the traffic came back. If you schedule blog posts to be published at the same time of day spread throughout weeks, months, and years, your visitors will know exactly when you will publish another blog post. I’m sure there are people who visit my blog at 9:05 am EST because they know that there is new content up on my blog.
  7. Schedule a blog post for the early morning (6-10 am) or late night (9pm-12 am). Those are the times of day that most people are visiting blogs. Do not schedule blog posts in the afternoon because that’s when most people are at work. Scheduling your blog posts in the early morning or late at night are the two best times to publish blog posts in order to get more traffic.
  8. Build a stronger presence on social networks. Your social networks are a key component towards getting more blog traffic. By building a presence on your social networks, you will be able to build more connections, and get more visitors, subscribers, and customers. There are numerous blog posts right here on this blog that show you exactly how to grow a big following on various social networks. Here are some of those blog posts.
  9. Tell your friends about your blog. That traffic has to start from somewhere. Telling friends about your blog and having them subscribe also helps out towards staying motivated.
  10. Have an About Me page on your blog. After people go on your blog and read some of your blog posts, they will want to know more about you. This is where having an About Me page is very useful. When you create your About Me page, use it to create a powerful (but true) story about yourself. Tell people as much as you can about who you are, what you do on the web, and what you do off the web. Here is my About Me Page.

The beginning is always the most challenging process. The best form of motivation that I can give you to keep going is that I was a beginner too. Seth Godin was new to blogging at one point. So was Jeff Bullas. We can easily go even further and say that at one point, Mark Zuckerberg was new to the concept of social media. All of the successful people of our world started out as newbies. You may have just started to blog, and by doing so, you are following the footsteps of other people who are successful.

How To Increase Productivity By Keeping Score

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More Productive

In a competition outside of business, whether that be a sporting event or the speech and debate team, keeping score gives people something to be competitive about. A football team has the ball, they are at the 10 yard line of the opposing team, they are down by four points, and there is only a minute left in the game. The football players probably try a little harder during that play versus a play on the 50 yard line with a minute to go.

The reason both football teams try a little harder when the football is at the 10 yard line is because the game is too close to call. We always want to be on top. We want to be a player on the winning football team. A 24-22 win and a 60-0 win are both wins. We like the ability to have a high score, or at least a score higher than the opponent.

Keeping score is a motivational factor that makes you push at the end. The runner in 6th place picks it up on the final lap to catch up to the person in 5th place. The 6th place finisher does not get to score a point for the team, but the 5th place finisher gets to score a point for their team. The need to get that extra point (and in numerous cases, the medal), will give the person in 6th place more motivation to catch up to and outrun the person in 5th place. The need for 1 point increase productivity, and in this example, leads to a much better time for the race.

Football players try a little harder when the game is at stake. Runners push it on the last lap in order to get more points for their teams. A great way for entrepreneurs, business people, and anyone else to be productive is by keeping score. Although you may not have a runner in front of you who is currently in 5th place, you have your goals. What are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to follow a certain amount of people on Pinterest, get a certain number of followers on Twitter, or do something else?

I decided to start off February by keeping score. The results have been incredible. Here’s what was on my scorecard:

  1. Write 20 blog posts

  2. Schedule 10 days of tweets

  3. Write KeyNotes for 12 videos

  4. Complete and finalize 8 videos

  5. Schedule 10 days of posts on Google+

  6. Write down ideas for 20 Vines

  7. Post 5 Vines

That’s a length scorecard, but I was able to accomplish everything there…in just a week.  I tallied my way from 1 to 20 blog posts, and I tallied my way through all of my other goals as well. Keeping score gave me a sense of urgency. Since I started this particular scorecard on a Thursday, the following Wednesday was like my 4th quarter. I had to get everything left on the scorecard accomplished in two days. I did a lot of work prior to those final two days, but I also did a lot of additional work prior to that 4th quarter. We know from sporting events how challenging it is to pull off the comeback from 28-0 in the 4th quarter. Instead of getting in that hole, I decided to do my work consistently. Then, I kicked it in on the last two days just like runners do on the final lap.

There are two lessons we need to learn from this. The first one is that keeping score has the potential to dramatically increase your productivity and giving you the sense of urgency you need to succeed. Success does not happen if you stay in the comfort zone forever. The second lesson we can learn from this is that there are a lot of things we can learn from sports.

 

Why Your Blog Needs Good SEO

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seo

For an entire year, I had no idea why SEO was so helpful towards a blog’s success. I just saw SEO and knew it was the abbreviation for search engine optimization. I read articles about improving a blog’s SEO without knowing why it is important to improve a blog’s SEO. The only thing I knew was that a better SEO meant more blog traffic.

For the average newbie, SEO looks very scary. Search engine optimization looks even scarier. I’m sure there are some people reading this blog post knowing exactly what SEO is, but when I first jumped into the blogging world (head first), I had no idea why SEO would result in more blog traffic.

The reason SEO results in more traffic is because search engines like Google look for blogs with good SEO. The blog posts with good SEO appear on the first page of Google. As a result, these blog posts get viewed thousands of times while some blog posts are even getting hundreds of thousands of views. Better SEO allows your blog posts to get closer to Page 1 on Google for their keywords.

Now that you know exactly why SEO is important towards getting more traffic, here are some ways to improve your blog’s SEO.

 

How To Create A Product Review Board On Pinterest

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pinterest board

A popular board category is products where pinners show people the products that they like. Some of these boards generate plenty of likes, repins, and they lead to more followers as well. Having a board with a lot of products on it is a great strategy to tell your followers which products are effective and which products are not effectively.

While having the board with all of the products, you can also create boards to review individual products. Some of my boards review the books I have read such as Purple Cow. This board does a good job at reviewing an individual product versus having a giant list of products with brief summaries. Having both the giant list of products and reviews for those products will give your followers the information that they want.

In order to create a successful product review board on Pinterest, follow these steps:

  1. Have a picture of the product. On Pinterest, people need as many pictures as they can get. Have a picture of the product, and if it has certain functions, have pictures of the product doing those functions as well.
  2. Use Pinstamatic to add details about the product. For my board about Purple Cow, I used Pinstamatic to get giant blocks of text. The advantage of Pinstamatic is that you can use different colors based on the color of the product or a color that changes buying behaviors.
  3. Have a picture of the person who made the product. After the picture, briefly explain who that person is, your opinion about that person, and that person’s credentials.

That’s all it takes to create a quality board reviewing an individual product. This process will usually result in a board with 5-10 pins although some individual product reviews will need more than 10 pins to show all of the product’s features.