how to be a successful blogger

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.

The 5 Pillars Of Successful Blogging

September 13, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

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:

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.

How My Blog Got Over 100 Views From Twitter Alone In Less Than An Hour

August 20, 2014 by Marc Guberti 10 Comments

For the statistic crunchers out there, that adds up to over 2,400 daily views. At the time, my blog normally got around 32 views every hour which resulted 750 daily views. However, July 21st would be the day that I would call everyone together to help my blog get 1,000 views in one day. This was definitely a nail bitter. It was 11 pm and I had a little over 900 views. At the time, 900 daily views was rare, so I took the opportunity to bring it up to 1,000 views.

I started off by pinning my latest blog posts, but that only got me a few visitors. Most of the visitors I got from Pinterest ended up coming the next day. That helped me have back to back days of over 1,000 views, but for this particular day, Pinterest was not the strong point. When in doubt, I always resort to Twitter where my audience is the biggest.

I started off by increasing my tweeting frequency. From 11 pm to midnight, I sent out one tweet every five minutes. I really wanted this one and was willing to manually schedule tweets to get the job done. Sure enough, I was plugging away with Google’s calculator option, and as the minutes went by, I realized that my goal was less likely to happen. This was not the scenario where I wanted to make the mistake and learn from it. This was a scenario where I put everything on pause, still had work to do after midnight, and wanted to get 1,000 views in one day.

Then at 11:35 pm, I sent out the tweet.

https://twitter.com/MarcGuberti/status/491426440848482305

It got a few favorites, and now the tweets that were getting sent out got more attention. I was able to send out four more tweets with links to my blog posts. Throughout those 25 minutes, I kept everyone updated about my blog’s status.

https://twitter.com/MarcGuberti/status/491428754019717120

After I sent out this tweet, I realized that my goal was going to be realized. I kept on refreshing my blog’s statistics page until the blog passed 1,000 views.

https://twitter.com/MarcGuberti/status/491430155445735425

When my blog got its 1,000th view for the day, I sent out the celebration tweet. It got more attention than any of the other tweets.

https://twitter.com/MarcGuberti/status/491432102101913601

My blog ended up getting 1,030 views that day. That means in 25 minutes, this blog got 77 views. That’s 3 views every minute which adds up to over 4,000 views in one day.

Of course, this rate slowed down after I reached the milestone, but now this same milestone that once seemed impossible happens every day. I can now say that I get over 1,000 daily visitors.

This taught me three valuable lessons. The first lesson reminded me of how important it is to tweet at the moment. The second lesson taught me that the urgency of the matter encouraged myself and my audience to act. The third lesson is that if you build an audience of people who care about what you do, you will be able to go far and spread.

5 Secrets About Blogging That Others Don’t Want You To Know

August 12, 2014 by Marc Guberti 12 Comments

Blogging has become a complex art. What started as an online diary has turned into a way for people to build powerful presences on the web. Now over 150,000 blogs get created every day, and there are millions of blogs on the web. Some of these blogs have Alexa ranks under 100,000 while other blogs have no Alexa ranks at all. What’s the difference between the blogs getting thousands of daily visitors and the blogs that struggle to get one thousand visitors every year? The answer is these five secrets about blogging that others don’t want you to know.

The subscriber list is everything. Even if your blog is getting hundreds of daily visitors, you need to grow your subscriber list. Your subscribers are the ones who get emailed each time you come out with a new blog post, share your blog posts, and buy your products. Optimize your blog for subscriptions by offering free prizes and having a pop up show up on your blog.
SEO is overrated. I relied on SEO for over a year and saw small increases. These increases allowed me to go from 170 monthly views to 200 monthly views. When I focused more of my time on social media, I got the exponential traffic that continues to grow to this day.
You need to have your own product. Affiliate marketing is a great way to make extra income, but if you do not have your own product, you are not establishing yourself as an expert in your niche. In order to make revenue from your blog, you must have your own product in place. On a successful blog, the blogger’s products bring in far more revenue than advertisements. Some of these successful bloggers don’t have advertisements at all.
All social networks are important. You want to offer as many sharing options for your blog posts as possible. The only reason I now include pictures in my blog posts is so other people could share my blog posts with Pinterest. Make it as easy as possible for others to share your blog posts on as many powerful social networks as possible.
Big social media audiences look really good. We have a natural tendency to believe that the person with the bigger audience is more credible than the person with the smaller audience. The power bloggers also happen to have big audiences on social networks, and those big audiences allow their content to spread while boosting their credibility.

The beans have been spilled, and the methods to grow your blog are right here. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you know any additional secrets about blogging? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

Why Bloggers Give Out Oodles Of Information For Free

August 6, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Free Content

At this point, I have written over 300,000 words for this blog. I know there will be a certain point when this blog reaches 1 million words. Many people wonder why I have given away this much information for free, and better yet, why I actually plan on continuing. Other bloggers have also given away oodles of free information, and people continue to wonder why these bloggers give so much content away from free.

The goal of free valuable content is to build a connection with the person. The more valuable content you provide for free, the better your paid products must be. Customers have a belief that a paid product is better than a free product. When bloggers provide oodles of free content, visitors believe that the paid products contain more valuable content than what they are already getting. This does raise the bar quite high for bloggers, but it also results in more sales.

Bloggers want their visitors to subscribe and receive blog posts through email. Then, this leads to a sale. If you want to boost your sales and get more subscribers, you need to provide more free content and make sure that free content is also valuable. That’s how giving away oodles of free information yourself can grow your business.