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how to get more blog traffic

Why You Need To Make It Easier For People To Share Your Blog Posts

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Not all quality content gets shared on social networks. One of the reasons is that the content is hidden. The blog with the quality content is not popular yet. Another big reason why quality content does not get shared on a blog because sharing that content is a challenge. The person who wants to share the link has to write up their own tweet, copy the link, and paste it into the tweet without running out of characters.

In order to prevent that from happening, you need to make it easier for people to share your content. The best way to do this is have social sharing buttons at the bottom of all of your blog posts. You can see sharing buttons at the bottom of any one of my blog posts.

Another option is to have a sidebar widget on your blog. I do not use the sidebar option for the social sharing of my blog posts because that is not my preference. However, there are some bloggers who get their content shared more often because of it. As long as your social sharing buttons are easy to see, your blog posts will be shared more often.

People are looking to save as much time as possible. I was listening to an Optimize Press video recently, and the person talking told people to be patient because the Optimize Press plugin takes 1-5 minutes to complete the download. That’s what it has come down to. Waiting 1-5 minutes requires a lot of patience in a world that loads super fast. Waiting for the 5 second ads on YouTube is even worse. By making the process of sharing a blog post go by faster, more people will share your content. The less time it takes to do something, the more inclined someone is to perform that task.

 

5 Reasons Why You Need To Use Yahoo And Wiki Answers

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answer question

Many entrepreneurs strive to get more visibility and become experts of their respective niches. Getting the visibility will create an audience that pays attention to and respects that entrepreneur. What if there was a way to do both at the same time. Here’s when Yahoo and Wiki Answers come into play. Yahoo and Wiki Answers are two powerful sources of finding people with questions. In case you are not using Yahoo or Wiki Answers, here are 5 reasons why you need to get started:

  1. You can search for questions involving your niche. Instead of waiting for people to come to you with questions, you can see what the questions are. By seeing what the questions are, you will be able to answer them quicker.
  2. You will be able to connect with your target audience. If you do a good job at answering the question, the person who asked the question will decide to visit your blog. This can lead to someone buying your product or subscribing to your blog.
  3. You will be able to establish yourself as an expert of your niche. By answering people’s questions in your niche, people will notice your good answers. As more people notice your good answers, they too will go on your blog, subscribe to your blog, and eventually buy some of your products.
  4. Yahoo and Wiki Answers dominate Google. Answers to some people’s questions usually end up on Page 1 on Google’s search engine. This will allow you to get big increase in traffic for your blog.
  5. Yahoo and Wiki Answers will give your blog quality backlinks. Using Yahoo and Wiki Answers will easily give you access to two quality backlinks. These backlinks help out in your blog’s SEO, and as a result, more people will be able to find your blog by using the search engines.

Answering questions will allow more people to see you as an expert of your niche. Being able to answer questions on popular question sites such as Yahoo and Wiki Answers will give you a boost in Google’s search engines, and plenty of people will be able to see your answers.

 

The Secret Formula To Creating Quality How-To Blog Posts

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golden egg

What is a quality blog post? There are a lot of definitions of the term. Regardless of the definition you have of writing a quality blog post, it has become more known than ever that writing quality content helps in the process of standing out from the crowd. There is a secret formula that some bloggers use to create quality blog posts, and I am going to share that formula with you. Here’s the secret formula:

  1. Tell people what you are writing about in a clear manner. What is your blog post about? The headline of your blog post tells people exactly what you are going to be talking about. If the headline’s topic is clear, then people will already know the topic of your blog post as they read it.
  2. Have a strong intro. There are millions of blogs to choose from, but your visitors chose your blog. Once they know what your blog post is going to be about, you need a strong introduction. A list of different tactics is not as good as a paragraph or two making the visitor want to continue reading your blog post. Don’t rush into the tactics and the how-to part of your blog post. Give your visitors a quick intro that encourages them to read on.
  3. The first sentence is critical. The first sentence is the difference between having someone read your entire blog post or having someone read another blog. The first sentence needs to grab the visitor’s attention. Common ways to do this are to ask a question, offer a really cool statistic, talk about a big change, or use a testimonial. There are other ways to create a really good first sentence, but it is important to know that the first sentence sets the tone for the entire blog post.
  4. Have good tactics that are organized well. The better your tactics are, the better your blog post can become. Choose your two favorite tactics. Put one of those tactics as the first tactic and put the other tactic as the last one. This is just like the concept of having a dynamic opening sentence and a dynamic closing sentence.
  5. Support your tactics. This is where a lot of people get it wrong. Some people only support their tactics with a short sentence while other people add every word possible to support their tactic so the blog post looks better. A longer blog post does not necessarily equate to a better blog post, but a blog post in which the tactics are poorly supported is not a good one either. I usually support my tactics with a paragraph at most. It is better to support your tactic well with a paragraph than it is to support a tactic well with three paragraphs.
  6. It’s not about the length of the blog post. Seth Godin’s blog post, Polishing Junk, is less than 50 words. Despite that, his blog post was shared over 1,500 times on different social networks. I’m sure there are people reading this blog post saying, “You’re talking about Seth Godin. His blog posts always get shared that many times.” The reason his short blog post got shared many times is because he was able to make his point quickly. He could have added a bunch of statistics and testimonials to his blog post, but he didn’t need to. He already made his point. I’m sure the people who visited that blog post read every word of it. That does not always happen with longer blog posts.
  7. Have a strong conclusion that sums up why the visitors needs to implement the tactics. End your blog post on a good note by telling your visitors what they will be able to accomplish by implementing the tactics you talked about. The conclusion needs to grab their attention just as much as the introduction so you leave the visitor wanting more.

By implementing these tactics, you will be able to write how-to blog posts that grab the attention of more people. When you grab more attention for your blog posts, more people will share your blog posts. Sooner or later, you may end up like Seth Godin and get over a thousand people sharing all of your blog posts. That only becomes possible when you write quality blog posts. After you master writing quality blog posts, the only thing left to do is get more traffic. As you share your blog posts on your social networks, and your traffic numbers go up, people will read as many of your blog posts and sharing as many of them as they can.

 

10 Easy Ways To Enhance Your Blog’s SEO

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In order to get your blog to rank well on search engines, you need to pay special attention to your blog’s SEO. Search engine optimization is something that some bloggers know very well while others find it very confusing. When I first heard of SEO, I was completely confused. I had no idea how SEO would help my blog or how to apply SEO. You may be confused about SEO as well, but in this article, I am going to make SEO easier to understand. In addition, I will be showing you 10 easy ways to enhance your blog’s SEO.

  1. Blog consistently. Consistency is one of the keys to success. It is better to blog once a week than it is to blog inconsistently.
  2. Link to your older blog posts in your new blog posts. This helps out with your blog’s bounce rate which plays a role in SEO. It’s as easy as inserting a link to another blog post.
  3. Share your blog on social networks. Getting traffic from social networks helps out with a blog’s SEO.
  4. Verify your blog on Pinterest. This way, people know it’s you, and in addition, you get a backlink from Pinterest. Backlinks are important towards SEO, but if you can get a backlink from Pinterest (one of the highest ranked websites on the web), that is a quality backlink. The more quality backlinks you have, the more traffic your blog will get.
  5. Be a guest blogger. This also contributes towards backlinks if you put a link to your blog in your bio. People will see your name on more places in the web, and that will make people to trust you more.
  6. Have a Top Posts & Pages widget on your blog. This is another easy addition that helps out with bounce rate. When someone clicks on the link to one of your popular posts (which many people believe are your best posts), that will lower your blog’s bounce rate.
  7. Use keywords in your title. What are going to be the words and phrases people search to find you? Use some of these keywords in your title so it is easier for people to find you.
  8. Include tags for all of your blog posts. I recommend having 5-10 tags per blog posts because having too many tags is not good for SEO. Tags are the keywords people use to find you. If you want someone to find you for “Twitter tips,” have “Twitter tips” as a tag.
  9. Choose your tags and keywords carefully. Let’s say you wrote an article about getting more retweets on Twitter. A big mistake people make with tagging is that they decide to tag “Twitter” for their articles. If you tag that way, you will be competing with millions (or maybe even billions) of different blog posts and web pages. If one of your tags is “Twitter tips,” you reduce the competition size. If one of your tags is “how to get more retweets on Twitter,” you have reduced the competition even more. Choose the keywords
  10. Write a series of blog posts. I wrote a blog post called 5 Pinterest Mistakes to avoid. Then I wrote a Part 2. By writing a series, all you need to do is get your visitor to enjoy reading one of those blog posts. Then, the visitor will automatically look at the other one as well.

By implementing these 10 easy tactics, you will be able to see an increase in your search engine traffic. I can’t guarantee immediate results, but over the long-term, you will see an increase in traffic from Google and other search engines as well.

5 Ways To Double Your Blog’s Traffic

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The one thing on every blogger’s mind is getting more traffic that will lead to more sales, subscribers, and visibility. Doubling traffic is the dream of many bloggers. Whether that means going from 10 daily visitors to 20 daily visitors or going from 500 daily visitors to 1,000 daily visitors, bloggers want to double their traffic. In this blog post, I will show you five different ways to double your traffic. That means you will be able to get 10 times more traffic than now by implementing these tactics. I decided to add links to some of my older blog posts in order to provide more information about certain topics.

  1. Use Twitter to promote your blog. When you use Twitter to promote your blog, you need to grow a targeted following and consistently tweet frequently. Be sure to start and respond to conversations. Conversations on Twitter have the potential to lead to friendships and powerful connections. I tweet as frequently as I can throughout the day so more people see my blog. Tweeting a link to your blog at 3 pm does no good if most of your followers happen to use Twitter at 6 pm.
  2. Improve your blog’s SEO. By improving your blog’s SEO, people will have an easier time finding your blog on Google’s search engines. These are some tactics that will help you improve your blog’s SEO, but one of the easiest ones to implement is bounce rate. All you have to do is have links to your older blog posts in your new blog posts in order to get a lower bounce rate. After improving my blog’s SEO, my visitors stuck around because of my blog’s low bounce rate, and I saw an immediate increase in search engine traffic.
  3. Use Pinterest to promote your blog too. When you use Pinterest to promote your blog, you need to include pictures on your blog. Adding pictures helped me get a lot of traffic, and adding a “Pin It” button at the bottom of my blog posts increased the amount of times people shared my blog posts. A great way to get more Pinterest followers is by following others with this strategy in mind. As your boards get more pins, it will be okay to pin the same blog post multiple times because people are not likely to scroll all the way down. By consistently pinning old and new blog posts, your blog will be able to get more traffic.
  4. Guest blog on other people’s blogs. Guest blogging puts your content in front of a larger audience. That means more people will tweet your blog posts, share them on Facebook, pin them, and use all of the other social networks to tell more people about you. While it is important to start guest blogging as soon as possible, it is also important to identify the best guest blogging opportunity for you. Although people do not always come directly to your blog from the guest post, they will see your name more often. As people see you more frequently, they will have more trust in you. With that trust, they will look at your blog posts, subscribe to your blog, and buy your products.
  5. Get more people to write about you. These are the methods I use to get more people to write about me. By getting more people to write about you, more people will notice you. Having a remarkable story always helps out when it comes to getting more people to write about you.    

Those are the 5 tactics I used to double my blog traffic. By implementing all five of these tactics, my blog went from 40 daily views to over 400 daily views in a few months. All of these tactics take time in order to see the results. However, after a few months, you will be able to see the big increase in traffic that all bloggers dream of.

5 Things You Blog’s Statistics Are Trying To Tell You

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One of the things that I do every day is look at my statistics. I look at my Twitter statistics, Pinterest statistics, and the statistics for this blog…every day. I also do calculations for these statistics. My statistics have told me a lot about my marketing strategies and following tactics. Here are the three things your statistics are trying to tell you.

  1. What days were really good. There is usually a spike in traffic. You can see what was working very well on that day and mimic it for your other days.
  2. The really bad days. We want to avoid having bad days for as long as we can. In order to avoid them, you have to look at your really bad days, identify what went wrong, and avoid doing those things for future days.
  3. Your best referrers. Where are you getting a majority of your traffic from? My statistics tell me every day that Twitter is a big source of my traffic. They also tell me that Pinterest and Search Engines go back and forth for second place.
  4. Your blog’s growth pattern. When I first started to blog, my blog experienced small growth. On some months when my blog grew, the next month my blog would go on the decline. Lately, my blog has been going in a good path lately. Here are my number of monthly views from November 2012 to December 2012 in order: 38, 81, 72, 75, 46, 172, 191, 220, 595, 586, 1268, 2070, 3862, 5128. These statistics are telling me that what I have been doing lately is working very well. They are also telling me that what I was doing in the beginning was not effective (the drops in monthly traffic). Right now, I’m on pace to getting 9,000 views for January 2014, but that could go up to 10,000.
  5. Views VS Visitors statistics. In order to understand these statistics, you need to understand the difference between views and visitors. A visitor comes to your blog from a referrer (Twitter, Google, etc), and if that person clicks on the links of 2 of your blog posts, that’s 2 views. You want to have a lot more views than you have visitors because that indicates your visitors are sticking around. Once they go on your blog, they are reading your other blog posts, clicking on your links to older blog posts, and this results in a really good bounce rate.

Your blog’s statistics are telling you a lot of things. I recommend listening to your blog’s statistics for 5-10 minutes every day and see what you can learn.