traffic

How To Surge Your Blog Traffic

March 29, 2017 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Every blogger wants more blog traffic. It doesn’t matter how much traffic you currently enjoy. What does matter is that you want more of it.

A surge in my blog traffic has made the difference between being relatively unknown to having a successful content brand. Here’s the surge that I’m talking about:

I achieved this by changing the kind of effort I was putting into my blog. Anyone can get these results, and even better, with the right kind of effort.

If you want to surge your blog traffic, here’s what you need to do:

Publish More Content, More Often

The consistency and frequency of your content publishing schedule plays a big role in your blog’s success. To grow my own blog, I wrote as many as two blog posts per day. While these blog posts were much shorter than the ones I currently write, I still published two every day.

I then changed my strategy to write one long-form blog post per week. Apparently, Google likes long-form content, but ironically, that’s when my traffic started to dip. So I increased my frequency to two blog posts, and one podcast episode, each week.

And I’m beginning to see traffic gains now that I’m posting content more consistently and frequently. Eventually, with the help of guest posts, I plan on publishing one blog post per day on this blog.

Getting into the groove requires the formation of daily habits. Daily habits make it much easier for you to get into the flow. My daily habit is to write at least 1,500 words per day. This daily habit earns me a total of 10,500 words each week. That’s anywhere from 2-3 blog posts per week.

Some days I write more than 1,500 words, but I never write less than 1,500 words in a given day. This habit allows me to stay consistent with my blog while writing additional content for my Kindle books.

Another thing that works for me is to set a time and day each week to publish my blog posts. This way, I end up writing the posts well in advance so there’s no last-second cramming.

The less time you have to write a blog post within your deadline, the less value it will provide to readers.

Writing all of this content will help you rank better on search engines and give your readers a better experience. However, you can 1-up your efforts by optimizing your content for success.

On the SEO side, the Yoast plugin is the most valuable plugin in your arsenal. This plugin makes it easy to optimize your blog posts for search engines.

But you also need to optimize your blog posts with internal and external links. Internal links are links to your own blog posts. External links are links to blog posts and articles from outside sources.

Internal links help your SEO efforts by doing the following:

Decreasing your bounce rate
Increasing the average time a reader spends on your site

Both of those outcomes are great for SEO.

External links (to high authority sites) let search engines know that, because you’re linking out to authority sites, you must be an authority site, too.

That’s why I add at least three internal links and at least three external links to each of my posts. Setting small goals like these makes them easier to meet, or even surpass.

Assess Your Marketing Strategy

It’s great practice to assess your marketing strategy once every 1-3 months. By looking at your overall strategy, you’ll see what’s working and what missed the mark.

Look at which blog posts earned you the most visibility. These blog posts have high demand, and your audience will want to read more posts like them. The general rule of thumb is to write content of interest to your audience.

Writing more blog posts based on your high-performing posts will result in even more demand for your content. Assessing your marketing strategy allows you to discover what your audience wants and plan more ways to give it to them.

This also applies to writing books and creating training courses. You want to create a product on a proven topic that is in high demand among your audience. That’s why my first training course was about Twitter.

When I created that course, my audience’s demand for Twitter knowledge was higher than their demand for any other knowledge that I was providing.

The best place to analyze your marketing strategy is the WordPress stats dashboard. While Google Analytics offers more, it can become overwhelming. So I prefer to stick with WordPress stats, which clearly communicate everything I need to know.

One important feature I recently utilized is one that let me discover when most people are visiting your blog. I noticed that most people visit my blog on Wednesdays at 10 am.

Based on this information, I began publishing my podcast episodes on Wednesdays at 9 am. The episodes have just enough time to sit on my blog until 10 am when it’s populated with the bulk of my readers.

The week before, the same insights told me that Tuesday at 10 am is the best time to publish new blog posts based on my traffic stats. That’s why I always publish fresh content on Tuesdays at 10 am, in addition to my Saturday blog posts.

Always apply the 80/20 rule to your marketing assessment in order to leverage influencer marketing. These two methodologies can completely transform your brand’s presence.

How to Leverage Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has never been as easy as it is now. Not only does the web connect people from all over the world, but the influencers in the digital marketing niche are generally nice people.

I like to mention at least three influencers in my blog posts. The more influencers you mention, the better it is for your influencer marketing efforts. Here’s the idea:

Promote several influencers in your blog posts
Contact each one
Some will share your blog post

In some cases, getting a single influencer to share your content can yield great results. But more often, several influencers join forces to dramatically expand your reach. There are several great case studies about influencer marketing.

You may feel excited about the idea, but not sure how to implement it. What’s the best way to contact an influencer?

Anytime you approach an influencer, NEVER explicitly ask him or her to share your content. The more influential someone is, the more emails they’re receive of this nature. I can see a share request coming a mile away, and they’re annoying.

Share requests can make you feel like your audience is the only thing this blogger cares about, so it doesn’t feel like the blogger is genuine. On the other hand, if you don’t ask for a share, the outreach email feels more genuine.

When you don’t ask for a share and show your appreciation, you usually get the share! At the end of my podcast interviews, I never ask for a share; I simply say that I’ll provide the link.

And I honestly don’t care if guests share it or not. The knowledge I get from each podcast episode is far more valuable than a social share. Show your appreciation, not your desire to get more reach.

Here’s an email I recently received:

Hey Marc,

My Name is Daniel from The Experiment (www.iaexperiment.com).

I know you’re a fan of creating and growing an amazing blog and website. At least that’s the impression I got from this post:How To Build A Successful Blog From Scratch.

When I published this combination case study and guide about generating a consistent stream of traffic from Quora, I thought you’d appreciate it.

You can pop on over to check it out here:

http://www.iaexperiment.com/blog/quora-traffic

Stay Awesome,

Daniel

This is exactly how you should communicate with influencers.

I know this was influencer marketing in action, but emails like these feel so genuine. Here’s why:

He introduced himself in the first line
He’d done some research on me to illustrate that he actually reads my blog
He wrote content and thought I would appreciate it
Then he provides a link to his post

You can tell from the email that he knew a little about me. In influencer marketing, some people just discover someone with a big number of social media followers and act as if they were a big fan all along.

This was respectful and enjoyable to read as compared to some of the other influencer emails.

My best tip for influencers is to talk to them as if they are people, friends, not as if they are influencers. Influencers are people too, but we forget that far too often.

Get More Subscribers With Your Blog Posts

Out of all of your marketing assets, your email list is the most valuable. The email list is the main reason why many bloggers can make a full-time income by writing content.

It’s no wonder that getting more subscribers is critical. Time and time again, people continue talking about why the email list is your most valuable asset and how their biggest mistake was not starting an email list sooner.

Once people realize that their email list is their most valuable asset, they want to grow that email list as much as possible. There are plenty of methods to choose from. In fact, I compiled a list of 50 tactics that you can use to grow your email list.

My favorite approach is to promote my landing pages to my social media audience and optimize my blog to increase my site-wide conversion rate. I promote my landing page on Twitter at least once every hour and have a pinned tweet which also promotes my landing page.

That pinned tweet has stayed there for a while which allowed it to generate some strong social proof over the years.

On my blog, I provide a variety of options for people to sign up:

Welcome mat
Sidebar picture
Pop-up on the side (HelloBar)
Opt-in form at the bottom of every blog post
Occasional promotion within a blog post

To me, this is a great start, but by no means a finishing point. Buffer released an extensive list on different places to promote your free offer, and there’s no reason to halt your expansion efforts.

Increasing the number of opportunities people have to subscribe (without being spammy) will result in a higher site-wide conversion rate.

ThriveLeads and Optimize Press give me a variety of ways to promote my free offers. These are my two preferred tools for lead generation. Both of these tools respectively feel like 100-tools-in-one type of deals.

Follow The 80/20 Rule

With the 80/20 Rule, you focus most of your time on your top priority, such as your branding efforts. The rest of your time goes towards a secondary priority. In a successful blogging strategy, the two main ingredients for success are content creation and content marketing.

Most people spend 80% of their time creating content (or more) and 20% of their time marketing the content (or less). While it takes time to create your content, marketing is how you get your content seen by more people.

You’ll soon discover that it’s better to spend 80% of your time marketing your content. This idea is repeated by people like Neil Patel, who said that in the beginning he’d individually contact 400-500 unique people about every new post he wrote.

Brand marketing is an integral part of blog growth.

You need marketing to achieve the traffic surge you’re looking for. Finding a few hours to commit to your marketing each week seems like a daunting challenge, but there are some ways to make it work.

You can start by boosting your productivity. The smarter you work, the more time you will have to market your business. You can also outsource some of the marketing to someone else. Why do it all yourself when someone else can help you?

I personally prefer a mix of outsourced marketing and doing some of it on my own. That way, I don’t get overwhelmed by the workload but I’m still in the game. I use Upwork to find freelancers, and outsourcing has worked wonders for my business.

I truly believe that without outsourcing, I couldn’t do most of the things that I’m currently doing.

In Conclusion

Any blog can experience a traffic surge. That traffic surge and its impact on your brand are both dependent on how much effort you exert towards content creation and content marketing. Out of the two, more of your attention should go towards content marketing.

Make the connections now that will expand your reach in the future. Don’t be fearful of sending hundreds of emails to people you don’t know. It’s all part of content marketing.

The easiest way to make any type of change is to approach it gradually. For content creation, Jeff Goins recommends writing at least 500 words per day. While I write at least 1,500 words per day, the 500 word per day goal is much easier to attain for a blogger who wants to become more consistent.

The easiest way to get started is by getting your feet wet. You can’t get the traffic surge without even starting. And you must always start what you finish.

Now Here’s What I Want From You

What tips do you have for acquiring a surge of blog traffic? What’s working for your blog? What isn’t working?

Have a question for me? Leave a comment now. I read them all 🙂

And if you know anyone who may appreciate these tips, please be sure to pass this on.

[Tweet “How To Surge Your #Blog Traffic.”]

If you’re new here, join our mailing list! The form is below. You’ll get a ton of free content just like this.

-marc

*image credit: Pixabay.com

3 Juicy Email List Building Methods You’re Probably Not Using

April 29, 2016 by Marc Guberti 3 Comments

The money is in your email list. It’s a well-known fact that gets mentioned again and again on blogs like this one.

The importance of an email list has led to marketers all around the world trying to grow their email lists as quickly as possible. The thinking is that the more people on the email list, the better.

If you know how to promote your content and products to your email list, then yes, more is better.

So most marketers grow their email list by using some of the same tactics. Create a landing page and promote that on each social network. Have a subscription box on the blog’s sidebar. Maybe some Facebook advertising if you’re serious about getting leads.

Those methods work, but there are certain methods for getting subscribers that remain untouched by most marketers. These methods can result in a significant increase in subscribers because of the logic behind the methods combined with how your audience would react to these methods.

#1: Content Upgrades

I only write one blog post per week now. Every other blog post I put up is a video. This decision allowed me to save a massive amount of time. The extra time allowed me to pursue a new email list building idea.

Content upgrades!

Content upgrades are additions to the current blog post that your visitors can get access to in exchange for an email address. I first learned about content upgrades through Jeff Bullas’ Blog.

Content upgrade example

I remember reading the article a while ago thinking that it sounded like a great idea, but in the end, I didn’t have enough time. I was also in the middle of my junior year of high school.

Outsourcing and video blogging reintroduced me to a lot of extra time. That’s why all of my future blog posts will now include content upgrades.

In other words, EVERY blog post I write from here on is also a LANDING PAGE.

I am also working towards adding content upgrades to my most popular blog posts. And the conversion rates for content upgrades are amazing.

According to the article from Jeff Bullas’ Blog, you can expect a 20% conversion rate from a content upgrade. Some content upgrades have over 50% conversion rates.

The reason content upgrades work so well is because they are hyper-targeted to the specific blog post that is being read at the time.

I recently started using content upgrades for my blog. Here’s what I did for my blog post about avoiding the top five distractions.

Content Upgrade Marc Guberti

It’s targeted and directly below the blog post. People don’t have to click on a link and get redirected to a landing page.

Imagine what would happen if 20% of your blog visitors became subscribers. If you wanted to gain 100 subscribers per day, you would only have to get 500 visitors per day in order to get that many subscribers per day—assuming all of your blog posts came with content upgrades. And that doesn’t even include subscribers from landing pages.

#2: Live Streaming

I am still exploring the possibilities of live streaming, but it is very exciting to think about the possibilities.

Live streaming apps like Periscope, Meerkat, and Blab give you the opportunity to interact with your audience live. You can answer their questions in real-time, and your audience will hear how you answer the questions.

One thing you can do with live streaming is promote your landing page. As you wrap up a live recording, you can mention a landing page related to what the live stream was all about.

This is where Blab outshines the competition. Blab comes with an interactive chat section that allows viewers to ask questions and engage with one another.

Within this chat section, you can insert the link to your landing page for everyone to click on. If you want to use something like Periscope or Meerkat, then you must state what the link is.

To make it easier for everyone to remember the link, you need to come up with a custom link.

For instance, https://marcguberti.com/2016/01/twitter-audience-remember-and-trust-you is a link that would be very difficult for me to say and very difficult for my audience to remember (where do the dashes go).

Having a link like marcguberti.com/twitter makes it a lot easier for people to access the same URL. It’s much easier to remember that “Twitter” goes after the slash line instead of all of the mumbo jumbo after the slash line for the first link.

#3: Webinars

Promote your landing page in a webinar? No, no. You promote products in webinars.

You use webinar landing pages to collect email addresses.

There are some notable differences between a webinar and a landing page.

First off, the webinar is set at a specific time and date. The landing page you use to promote the webinar won’t be good forever, so you have a stronger incentive to promote that webinar’s landing page to as many people as possible.

The incentive will force you to get more creative with how you promote your landing page. However, the creativity and extra work with promoting a webinar isn’t the only advantage to having a webinar.

The other advantage is that you can get a lot of sales with a good webinar. If you want to get high conversions for sales, host a great webinar with a call-to-action.

As an affiliate who has promoted many people’s products, I generate most of my total commission on the day I promote someone’s webinar with my affiliate link.

Webinars grab people’s attention, and the audience can ask questions. At the end of the webinar, people can take immediate action and buy your product—if you provide the call-to-action.

Then, you can invest some of that money into growing your email list even more (i.e. Facebook advertising).

In Conclusion

Building your email list should be your top priority regardless of what niche you are in. Email marketing is the most successful type of marketing on the web.

Email marketing allows you to build the strongest relationships and generate the most sales at the same time.

Literally everything you do online should have the primary aim of getting you more subscribers.

What are your thoughts about growing your email list? Do you have any tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

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How To Get More Traffic From Your Email List

October 26, 2015 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

When most people think about the success of their email lists, they think about the growth of those email lists. These people ask questions like “How do I gain twice as many subscribers?” and “How do all of these top marketers get thousands of subscribers every day?”

Yes, it is important to grow your email list. I ask myself questions related to email list growth all of the time.

However, the growth of your email list is not enough. The value of your email list is more vital. As an extreme example, if you want 100,000 subscribers tomorrow, I could more than easily give you those 100,000 subscribers. I simply hire someone to create 100,000 unique email addresses and then those email addresses get added to your list.

They are fake, and an email list with 1,000 targeted subscribers would perform better than the email list with the 100,000 fake subscribers.

This example is primarily designed to establish the difference between growth and value of an email list. The results you get from your email list (i.e. clicks, sales, relationships) determine the value of that email list.

Now for a more realistic example:

Marketer #1 has an email list of 10,000 people. Of those 10,000 people, 100 of them click on the link to the blog post. Marketer #2 has an email list of 3,000 people. Of those 3,000 people, 300 of them click on the link to the blog post.

In this scenario, I would rather be Marketer #2 than Marketer #1. Size is only part of the equation. The masters of email marketing are able to get results like Marketer #2 while growing an email list like Marketer #1. How is it possible to combine the two together? This blog post shows you how.

Note for the reader: Growing your email list is important, but this blog post will be more geared towards what you do once you have the email list. If you want a blog post more focused on growing your email list, go here.

#1: Send More Emails To The People On Your List

Sending an email blast lets your subscribers see you in their inboxes. If you consistently send awesome email blasts, two things happen:

Trust is built
People know when to check their inboxes for your content

I know exactly when to check my inbox for Seth Godin’s content because he always publishes his blog posts at the same time of day. I figured out when he publishes his blog posts after receiving numerous emails filled with value that always landed in my inbox at the same time of day.

Sending more emails to your subscribers also means more results. Let’s say your average email gets 50 clicks from your subscribers. If you send one email blast to your list per month, then you get 600 clicks from your email list per year. However, if you send one email blast per week, then you get 2,600 clicks per year. That’s a difference of 2,000 clicks.

For some marketers, sending one email blast per month versus sending one email blast per week can be the difference between hundreds of thousands of clicks. While you shouldn’t be excessive with your email blasts, sending at least one email blast per week builds recognition between you and your subscribers.

Once the recognition is built and you continue providing value, the trust comes naturally.

#2: Resend The Same Email To The People Who Didn’t Open Your Email The First Time

Some services such as iContact make it possible for you to segment the people in your list. You can segment the people within your list to provide them with content more specific to their needs.

You can also create a segment containing a list of people who did not open your email blasts. For my most recent email blast, I will create a segment of all of the people who did not open the email. Then, I change the subject line of the email and send the identical email to those people one day later.

On the surface, this strategy resembles excessive email marketing. Sending two emails in two days may sound like a lot. However, the only people who get the email are the people who did not read your first email blast.

This is an important distinction. It is possible that some people lost your email blast within their inbox. Maybe it went into spam mail. There are many different ways that even the most loyal subscribers can skip over one of your email blasts.

If they see your email the next day, the loyal subscribers will open the email and read your message. You can also get the attention of some of your other subscribers who have not been opening as many of your email blasts.

For some marketers, this one decision has led to a 10% increase in open rate for their email blasts. In the email marketing world, a 10% increase in open rate is very significant. The best part is that you don’t have to put in any additional work to make it happen.

All you do is change the email’s subject line and resend it to the people who didn’t open the email blast the first time.

#3: Promote Your Blog Posts Within Your Autoresponders

An autoresponder is the most important part of email marketing. When people subscribe to an email list, they get a series of emails delivered to their inboxes within a few days. These autoresponder messages are designed to strengthen the relationship between you and your subscriber. After you write the messages, they run on autopilot.

Within your autoresponder messages, you can promote (almost) anything. In my autoresponder messages, I decide to promote my blog posts. The reason for my choice is that most of my email blasts promote my blog posts. The autoresponder is a way of making my subscribers more comfortable with my email blasts—high value blog posts.

If I only sent videos in my email blasts, then my autoresponder messages would only consist of videos. The autoresponder sets the tone for what type of content subscribers should expect and how the relationship will build.

For my blog, this also means consistent traffic to specific blog posts. Sometimes, I will choose to promote one of my blog posts that I know is good, but for some reason it isn’t getting as much traffic as expected. I sometimes put these blog posts within an autoresponder so they get consistent traffic.

That consistent traffic combined with social media traffic allows those blog posts to perform better on the search engines.

Your autoresponder messages are the most important messages for building a relationship between you and your subscribers. If you build the relationship right, sales will follow. Choose your autoresponder messages and the blog posts you promote within those autoresponders carefully.

#4: Write Irresistible Subject Lines

The subject line of your email blasts are just as important as the content within the email blasts themselves. The reality of email marketing is that there are only two reasons why people would open up an email:

The subscriber automatically recognizes your name and has admired your content for a long time
Irresistible subject line

For almost all of your new subscribers, #2 applies more often than #1. Your new subscribers learn who you are as they read more of your email blasts. Writing irresistible subject lines is an art that requires constant experimentation.

Some of the rules differ by niche but other rules are the same. The best way to discover what works is by observing what works for other people and seeing if that will work for you too. I noticed that the email marketers who used more lowercase letters got my attention.

The traditional email subject line looks like this: 5 Ways To Get More Followers

The format that gets more attention looks like this: 5 ways to get more followers

While it’s just a small difference, I gave it a try anyway. Sure enough, more people opened my email blast.

There are plenty of pull-words and other tips that you can use to write irresistible subject lines. Some of the best methods involve outside of the box thinking with this question, “How do I get their attention.”

Nowadays, including “Donald Trump” in the subject line gets massive attention. Imagine the whirlwind of attention someone would get if the subject line misspelled Trump’s name. If you want to go viral, that would work. Whether you’d want to go viral for that though is entirely up to you.

The moral of the story is that there are plenty of tips on the web for writing irresistible subject lines. However, don’t be afraid to experiment on your own and try to discover your own methods. Maybe the email blast with the subject line “Please don’t open this email” gets more opens and clickthroughs than any of your other email blasts.

Learn the tips and then expand upon them through trial and error.

In Conclusion

Growing your email list is important. The results you get from your current email list are more important. It is easy to get 100,000 fake people on your email list. It is far more difficult to get 1,000 targeted people on your email list.

How you engage with the people on your email list determines the results that you get. In the beginning, you may not get many results, but that is true with all entrepreneurial endeavors. While results don’t come often in the beginning, patient persistence brings forth the results beyond our wildest dreams.

How do you engage with your email list? Which of these tips was your favorite? What results do you want to see from your email list? Do you have any email marketing tips for us? Sound off in the comments section below.

4 Ways That Anyone Can Use Social Media To Drive Leads

June 24, 2015 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

Social media is the most effective tool to make connections, grow an audience, and give a greater meaning to what you do. Experts have used social media over the years to completely transform their businesses and spread their messages. Despite so many people using social media to level up their businesses, other people find themselves stuck. They don’t know how to leverage social media as a lead generation tool.

If you fit into the category, then the first step towards generating leads is to know how to generate leads. If you want to know how to generate leads, then you are at the right place. This article will discuss four of the methods that you can use to generate more social media leads right now.

#1: Create And Promote A Landing Page

One of the most effective ways to generate leads is to have your own landing page. Upon creating your own landing page (I use Optimize Press for mine), you will quickly discover that creating a landing page does not guarantee more leads. The only way to get more leads from a landing page is to get people to see the landing page. I get people to see my landing pages by promoting them across my social networks.

Most of the subscribers I get from my blog come directly from landing page traffic that I get from my social networks. Before I created a landing page, I only had 300 subscribers. 150,000 visitors only led to 300 subscribers. In short, my blog was poorly optimized for getting subscribers. Then, I created multiple landing pages and started to promote them across my social networks. The result was a massive increase in subscribers. I quickly went from only having 300 subscribers to gaining well over 300 subscribers every month.

After you create your landing page, the next step is to promote that landing page. As mentioned before, promoting the landing page on Twitter alone led to a massive increase in subscribers. However, the way I promoted the landing page is another story. Twitter is the type of social network that people go on for a short period of time to see what’s new, and since so many people tweet on Twitter, it is easy for the timeline to get filled up. As a result, most of your followers will miss your tweets and not engage with them.

One way to solve the problem is by pinning a social media post to the top of your feed. That way, that post promoting your landing page will automatically show up on the top, even if you post something new. Facebook and Twitter have this option enabled on their platforms. Here is an example of a pinned tweet:

The tweet was sent before 2015, and yet it still appears before the tweet I sent a few minutes ago. This tweet has significantly more engagement that most of my other tweets because of the added exposure of being a pinned tweet. Most tweets and Facebook posts have short half-lives (when that half-life is over, the tweet or Facebook post basically gets little to no impressions for the rest of its existence), but when you pin a tweet or Facebook post to the top of your feed, that tweet or Facebook post has an infinite half-life which means people will always see it.

The tweet also has more engagement than most of my tweets. While most of my tweets get a few thousand impressions, this tweet has over 20,000 impressions. That means over 20,000 people saw that one tweet. Of course, the engagement isn’t where I want it (only 3% of those people engaged and only 1% clicked on the link), but those are the percentages that many tweets on Twitter generate.

How could I possibly get 300 subscribers every month on Twitter when the pinned tweet only has 275 clicks? The answer is that I constantly tweet about my landing pages. I send one tweet every hour about one of my landing pages. This is how I get numerous people to visit my landing page every day, and this is how I get my subscribers from Twitter. While the pinned tweet gets the most engagement for my landing page, the other tweets I send on a daily basis are just as important.

#2: Interact With Your Individual Followers

Have you ever heard of the saying, “Ask and you shall receive”? It seems as if the more we ask for, the more we get (don’t abuse this power). When I interact with my followers, I will occasionally ask if the follower got a chance to download my free eBook 27 Ways To Get More Retweets On Twitter. I may also ask about the Productivity Rubric or another free eBook I offer called 27 Simple Ways To Get More Blog Subscribers (I like the number 27).

I started implementing this tactic in March 2015 and saw great results from it. Some people said they received the book and went on to say how much they enjoyed it. I asked these people what they liked about the book the most and if the conversation allowed, I asked if a particular follower had the chance to grab another one of my free eBooks. I would become a part of dozens of these types of interactions every day, and the numbers show for it. I got over 110% more subscribers in March than I got in January.

How many interactions does it take? Well, take a look at how many interactions I had in January compared to the number of interactions I had in March:

Here are the statistics from January:

Now you will see the significant increase in interactions in March:

The trend is an increase in interactions that gained momentum as I asked more people whether they got a chance to download my free eBook or not. When people said they never heard about it and expressed interest in the eBook, I included the link to the landing page in the next tweet I sent to those people. Many of them ended up subscribing.

Interacting with your followers is not just important for generating leads, but interacting with your followers is also important for your overall success as a brand. Your audience buys your products, reads your blog posts, and spreads the word about you. Taking the minute or two to interact with several people in your audience will strengthen the relationship between you and the people in your audience. This relationship is important for your success.

#3: Promote Your Landing Pages On Social Media Group Pages and Forums

Social media group pages and forums about your niche are great places to promote your landing pages because both of these platforms consist of numerous people in your targeted audience. Not only do you get to promote your landing pages to your targeted audience, but the platform is already built for you. If you become a member of a Facebook group page with over 10,000 members, then that’s over 10,000 people who can potentially become leads. If you post on a forum with 100,000 members, then that’s 100,000 potential leads.

Social media group pages and forums work well because members constantly come back to interact with other members. Just as an audience keeps your brand alive, the members of a social media group page or forum keep that social media group page or forum alive by building a community on the platform. This means many people will see what you post in the social media group page or forum, and that can lead to massive traffic.

Before you take the plunge and post a link to your landing page, see how the community interacts and responds to certain posts. You want to make sure describing your landing page and then posting a link to that landing page would go well amongst the people in the community, but you also want to make sure you are not violating any rules. Some social media group pages and forums will suspend users who over-promote themselves or promote themselves in any possible manner. The rules and consequences vary by social media group pages and forums.

#4: Use Reddit

Reddit is a hit-or-miss tool in which promoting yourself can work wonders, but you don’t want to over-promote yourself. A typically Reddit post can get anywhere from no engagement to thousands of upvotes. One of the posts I put on Reddit resulted in no leads. Another post I put on Reddit got me over 500 leads in just 24 hours. The leads I gained that day did not carry over far. Within a week, I was back at my normal lead generation rate. You can think of Reddit as the spike in traffic that doesn’t last very long but allows more people to know about you. I wouldn’t rely on Reddit for lead generation, but it is an underrated tool that can either lead to zero results or wonders.

In Conclusion

If you want to generate more leads, then you must create a landing page and promote that landing page as often as you can on your social networks. Tell one follower about the landing page. Then tell another follower. Post a link to your landing page multiple times per day on your social networks.

Which of these tips was your favorite? Do you have any stories with using social media to generate leads? What tips would you recommend? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

10 SEO Mistakes That Will Hurt Your Blog’s Search Ranking

January 5, 2015 by Marc Guberti 4 Comments

10 SEO Mistakes That Will Hurt Your Blog’s Search Ranking

Millions of blog posts are being written every day for various blogs across the web. One of the obvious facts that new bloggers learn quickly is that not all blogs and blog posts get equal attention. On a particular blog, some blog posts get more attention than others. There are some blog posts on this blog that always get more traffic than others. There are also some blogs that get more traffic than other ones. Out of all of the blogs I have, this one is by far the most successful.

The amount of traffic your blog gets is dependent on social media and SEO. Social media covers the sharing aspect and growing an audience on the networks you use. However, SEO is a much deeper concept that a select few understand. To everyone else, it looks like the extensive math problem that takes up the entire chalkboard.

Understanding SEO is important because it is a big avenue for traffic. Some people get thousands of daily visitors from SEO which means it is valuable. Although SEO is not exactly the do or die stage of a blog, it is important, and here are 11 mistakes you need to avoid so your blog can have better SEO.

#1: Not submitting your blog’s sitemap to Google.

One of the reasons why blog posts do not get SEO traffic is because they are not even indexed by Google. A sitemap presents all of the contents of your blog in a way that makes it easier for Google to read them. Submitting your blog’s sitemap to Google will allow them to properly index your blog posts. Indexing your blog posts on Google makes it possible for anyone to find any one of your blog posts with a particular search phrase.

There are many options for creating your own sitemap, but out of all of the options, the Google XML Sitemaps WP plugin is the easiest to use. This plugin makes it easy to create an XML sitemap to submit to Google so all of your blog posts can be properly indexed. Once you get your sitemap, head over to Google Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap.

#2: Not knowing the difference between http and https

Actually, there is no difference, and that’s the problem. Search engines see http://www.example.com and https://www.example.com as two different websites with identical content. This is duplicate content that search engines associate with plagiarism. As a result, your SEO ranking will go down for both the http and https versions of your website.

In order for you to identify whether your blog has this problem or not, simply enter http:// before your blog’s URL. Then, do the same thing but with https:// in the front. When you do this, check your URL for spelling because you do not want a misspelled URL to give you the wrong webpage.

Your SEO is doing just fine if one of the two options worked. If both options work, then your blog’s SEO is getting hurt. For a WordPress blog, you can change your blog’s URL by going into settings–>general. Then, you can change your blog’s URL to your preference so people can either use http or https to access your blog. Visitors should not be able to use both http and https to access your blog.

#3: Not having meta tags for your blog posts

Search engines have a big responsibility in organizing billions of blog posts based on popularity, keywords, and value. Although search engines have this big responsibility, they struggle to understand a majority of blog posts. The reason why some valuable blog posts are not getting any search engine traffic is because they do not have meta tags.

I got introduced to meta tags more than a year and a half after I created this blog. I had to go through every blog post I ever wrote and add meta tags to them all. It was painstaking work that took several months of my time, but it was all worth it. My search engine traffic jumped up significantly after making the change. Any of my blog posts that were already doing good traffic from the search engines got a big jump in traffic.

I use the Add Meta Tags WP Plugin to add meta tags to all of my blog posts. I include keywords in these meta tags so search engines can pick up on them and promote my content. Meta tags, especially the meta tags with the right keywords, make it easier for the search engines to understand what your content is.

#4: Not understanding how Google sees your blog

Google sees your blog completely differently from you. It does not see the colors and pictures that may be on your blog posts. In order to make it easier for Google to see the way your blog looks, use the data highlighter in Google’s webmaster tools. Once you verify your blog, the data highlighter will allow you to let Google know how your blog looks (pictures, text, author name, etc). Using the data highlighter only takes 10-15 minutes, and it can have a big impact on your search engine traffic.

#5: Not improving your blog’s bounce rate

Your blog’s bounce rate allows search engines to identify how interesting your blog is. If your bounce rate is 100%, that means people are visiting your blog and then leaving without reading another article. A high bounce rate is bad for SEO and results in fewer conversions.

In order to see where your bounce rate is at, verify your blog with Alexa and then see their stats. Your blog’s bounce rate should be under 70%. A bounce rate under 70% means that at least 30% of your visitors are reading multiple articles on your blog. The lower you can get that bounce rate, the better your SEO and conversions will be.

You can lower your bounce rate through a variety of ways. Here are some of them:

Include links to your older blog posts in your new ones
Use Hello Bar to promote one of your articles, or better yet, a landing page
Show related articles at the bottom of every blog post
Show popular articles on your sidebar
Redirect people to another page on your blog after they subscribe. This page should contain links to the best content on your blog.
Show summaries of blog posts so people have to click (lowering bounce rate) to read the entire blog post

Most people do not see a sudden drop in their bounce rates. It takes a few weeks before seeing a significant drop in your bounce rate, and when I say significant drop, that usually means a 5-10% drop. Getting your bounce rate under 60% means you are moving in the right direction.

#6: Stuffing keywords

For a long time, keywords were the focal point of SEO. If your blog post had a lot of keywords, it would be on Page 1. If I decided to write the word “SEO” 100 times in all of my blog posts about SEO, those articles would have been #1 on Google. However, many people abused this rule, and Google sent their panda after those people. Many blogs suffered under the wrath of the panda, even the blogs that were getting millions of daily visitors.

If you try to stuff your blog post with keywords, then the search engines will make it more difficult for people to find your content. The worst part about keyword stuffing is that there are many offenders, but few people know that they are breaking the rule. My rule of thumb is to never use the same keyword twice in the same sentence. Synonyms are also very useful. If your keyword is “giraffe,” you can refer to the giraffe as an animal in one of your sentences instead of referring to it as a giraffe in every sentence of your blog post. Using synonyms to replace keywords will boost your blog’s SEO.

#7: Having too much anchor text

Anchor text is any clickable text in your blog post that leads to any webpage. In this sentence, “10 Easy Ways To Enhance Your Blog’s SEO” is anchor text. It is a clickable link that leads to another webpage. Anchor text is great for SEO and bounce rate, but having too much anchor text in one blog post can also be harmful.

The search engines won’t like it if you have dozens of anchor text links in the same blog post. However, there are worse consequences of having too much anchor text. The success of a blog all depends on how many visitors it gets and what those visitors do when they get on your blog.

If you have dozens of anchor text links in your blog post, it will be more difficult to read. I make my blog posts as easy to read as possible by writing short paragraphs and only having some anchor text. Imagine how different the reading experience of this blog post would be if every other sentence was anchor text. For the average person, it would be too much to bear, especially when there are other blogs on the web without that much anchor text.

#8: Letting spam comments infect your blog

Most of the comments you will get for your blog will be from spammers who are promoting their links without even bothering to read your content. New bloggers who want to boost their social proof often make the mistake of approving these comments. These bloggers reason that, based on the numbers, it is better to have 1,000 spammy comments than 10 real comments.

Having 1,000 comments indicates a popular blog, but the search engines know better. Not only are the links from most spammy comments bad (i.e. Get 5000 Twitter Followers For Just $3), but when engaged readers think of commenting on your blog, they get to see all of the spammy ones first. Would you want to comment on a forum group where all of the members were saying things like, “This is the magic pill that will make you lose 100 pounds in 10 days,” or, “Get a six-pack in six weeks”? You will lose the type of interaction that matters–the one between you and someone in your targeted audience.

#9: Not taking social media seriously

Social media is anything but a fad. It has completely transformed businesses and allowed blogs to suddenly become popular. The main reason this blog is popular is because of my Twitter presence. My SEO traffic has really been kicking in lately, but that is because I also get traffic from Twitter. Every day, I am getting hundreds of daily visitors from both Twitter and the search engines.

In addition to boosting your SEO traffic, social media allows you to interact with your targeted audience. I have made many wonderful connections on Twitter. Some of these people share my blog posts and buy my products. Social media is one of the most valuable traffic generating assets known to mankind.

#10: Not taking backlinks seriously

Backlinks are one of the most intriguing parts of SEO. When people think of backlinks, they think of the old and worn out practice of buying backlinks in bulk. Google caught on, and now the mighty search engine measures backlinks by quality instead of quantity.

When Google caught up to backlinks and declared quality over quantity, many people assumed that backlinks were simply dead. For a very long time, I assumed backlinks were dead just like many people who read contradicting advice on the web.

If you still believe backlinks are dead, take a look at the Alexa ranks for the most popular blogs on the web. Then, scroll down to see how many backlinks they have. Most of the popular blogs that are getting thousands of daily visitors also have thousands of backlinks. If you want to get more backlinks for your blog, implement these tips.

In Conclusion

SEO is a powerful way to get more traffic from your blog. Many of the mistakes people make are based on misconceptions and contradictory advice. I have tested various methods to boost SEO, and these are the good ones. However, SEO chances rapidly, and the methods to boost SEO are always subject to change.

You want to implement the methods that work now before Google changes the rules again with another panda attack. Implementing the methods now will allow you to get more visitors and allow more people to remember you. That way, if Google levels the SEO rules again, you’ll still get a lot of traffic from the people who remember you.