Essential Blogging Tips for a Great Start

To start blogging, you will have to think beyond content and design. The daily effort that you put in maintaining, promoting and improving your project will be essential for its success. Most blogging tips focus on the basics but several additional techniques are just as important.

Offer Value to Your Readers

Offer your readers some value and you will keep them coming back. Blogging tips usually tell you to write unique content. Even if you have the most original of articles, your blog will fail if readers fail discovering something valuable and useful.

Think about the niche you have a lot of knowledge in and try to figure out what kind of information people will be looking for inside the particular topic.

Communicate with Your Readers

When you start blogging, you will quickly find out that readers affect the content of the blog as much, as you do. Interact with your readers on a daily basis and create a friendly place where people are encouraged to share their thoughts and ideas. Respond promptly to inquiries, be polite and remove spam or insulting content.

Promote Your Blogs

Your blog will be successful solely if you do enough online marketing. You have to tell the world that you exist in order to increase your popularity. Search engine optimization is one of the most effective promotional techniques. Optimizing your blog for particular keywords of interest will help you get targeted traffic. If you lack SEO knowledge or if you want to learn more about it, you should give our blog starter kit a try.

Our blog starter kit will give you a search engine optimized blog, keyword analysis and social media marketing tools. For a limited time, you can benefit from the special offer that will give you access to great professional tools.

Monitor Results

Good blogging means learning from your mistakes. The final part of the blogging tips focuses on monitoring results and doing adjustments needed for success. The blog starter kit special offer will give you access to website analytics, where you can find out more about reader demographics, preferences and online behavior. Seeing what content is popular and which blog posts are incapable of exciting the audience will give you a chance to tweak your blog and to increase its success in the future.

The social media life-cycle

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is almost the same as like having a conversation with your friends at a coffee shop.  It is also like getting that unexpected phone call from an old friend and just talking to each other.  It is conversational and laid back.  There are hundreds of companies jumping in on the social media band wagon that really just don’t get it and they are usually trying to hard. Take a look at this infographic from Mediabistro.com.

Use your website to showcase the credibility of your business

Online it’s all about building trust and credibility. Show that your business is the logical and credible one to do business with online. You can build your business story directly into your owned online media such as your website and blog to differentiate your business and brand from your competition.

One easy way to do this that you can start immediately is by educating your readers on what exactly you are doing and to let them know that you are the leader in your niche. This is called education based marketing where you educate your visitors and targeted audience. How do you get started? Find below a couple of tips to help you with this.

Education based marketing

Message: Position your business as the leader and expert in your niche that protects your visitors from all the hidden dangers in your industry. You can educate them on all the problems and hidden trends in making purchased regarding your niche. What are the problems associated with your products and services? Offer them a solution that they cannot refuse.

Home page: Use the home page of your website to explain all the advantages of using your organization instead of your competition for business. Build a company story to explain all the differences with your business and how you can help them.

Business story: You can also use your business story in the about page of your website. How is your approach innovative, different, and helping your clients navigate all the hidden dangers that others ignore?

Incentives: Provide your visitors with incentives such as a free report that can be used with a list building campaign. This report should be interesting and attention grabbing.

Email marketing: With your email marketing campaign, if you get a new subscriber, follow up with a couple of emails related to “educational marketing” together with auto responders. Depending on your campaign, this could be every week.

Video marketing: Create a couple of short videos that educate and inform your website visitors. When presented by a key employee within your organization, it can put a friendly face on your business. People like to do business with people that they trust and like. Video is a great way to achieve this.

Measuring the success of your website

How are you going to measure the success of your website? This is a very common question I get asked often by my customers and the answer is always YES! How do you measure this? If it really can be measured, how do you measure it? This is really a very common question that gets asked often by people that want to know if their website is actually making their business grow.

Find below a couple of tips that can help you get started with measuring the success of your website.

Measure success with your website

Defining your goals: What do you want to accomplish with your website? This is one of the most important steps of this process and it cannot be ignored. By defining your website business goals is a key purpose of attracting new customers, showcase what you have achieved, and to provide information to your existing client base.

Install website analytics: Having analytics on your website is very essential as it helps providing valuable information regarding your website visitors. The easiest to get this started is by installing Google Analytics for free on your website. When installed, you will be able to view how many visitors you are getting and how they came to your website.

Unique visitors: Unique visitors are the people that visit your website once, but they can return many times. If they return for another time they will then be labelled as a returning visitor. Ideally, your unique visitors rate should be more than returning visitors.

Bounce rate: This is the percentage of visits when people leave your website after only viewing a single page. If you have a high bounce rate, this is viewed as negative.

Time on site: Evaluating the time on site with Google Analytics is a very good indicator of how long your visitors are staying on your website.

Analyzing your goals: You can use your analytics to determine whether you are actually reaching your targets and goals or not at all. If your main goal is to get more visitors on your website then you can make sure that all the steps are taken to estimate how you are going to calculate this.

Conversions: The conversions are calculated as a percentage of your website visitors that physically converts into product enquiries, sales, and newsletter signups to name but a few. This is a very important metric to measure as it is an indication of customer involvement and satisfaction.

6 Ways to Use Reddit to Grow Your Business

Have you used Reddit?

The popular website Reddit goes by the slogan, “The front page to the Internet.”

It has earned this name by creating a platform that allows users with similar interests to discuss and curate the best content on the web.

Brands are starting to discover the value of creating, facilitating and leveraging Reddit communities to better connect and engage customers.

Reddit is a popular social news platform where users submit and comment on content.

What Is Reddit?

Reddit is a social news platform that allows users to discuss and vote on content that other users have submitted. To help police the site and prevent spammers from bombarding readers, Reddit came up with “karma” points.

Users get karma by their comments and links being up-voted by others in the community. If you spam post your unrelated content to Reddit, you are sure to get down-voted consistently by other users. This in turn means Reddit begins to limit how often you are able to submit content to the site.

The great thing about Reddit is there are small communities called sub-Reddits that bring people and their interests together. These sub-Reddits range in topics from how to teach English to juggling.

The following is a list of strategies used by popular brands on Reddit to help build customer advocates and manage relationships with their fans.

#1: Encourage User Submissions

Reddit is not a platform to shout your message at your fans, but rather a place to interact with them.

Along with calling their followers “petrol heads,” the popular car show Top Gear drives engagement with their Reddit followers by encouraging them to submit their favorite car pictures.

Each week, Top Gear selects the best picture and features it along with the name of the person who submitted it in the sidebar of their sub-Reddit.

Allowing users to submit content to a brand on a topic that they are passionate about will give followers a sense of ownership in the community. Giving followers this voice increases the interaction in the community and is more likely to create brand advocates.

The Top Gear sub-Reddit showing how to encourage user engagement by having customers submit photos.

#2: Customer Service

When you have a popular brand or product, you are going to have lots of customers who need help.

Microsoft has done a great job with their Xbox 360 page, providing a place for people to discuss the popular product. Microsoft already developed other channels to resolve customer problems, so they use their sub-Reddit to funnel customers with questions into the right channels to get resolved.

By redirecting users with product issues to the proper channels, Xbox increases its customer service and allows its Redditors to discuss and share photos, videos and experiences they had with the Xbox product.

Microsoft uses its sub-Reddit for customer service by doing the following:

• Clearly identify the purpose of the sub-Reddit.
• Create sections of helpful links.
• Outline directions on the best ways to get fast customer service.

It costs less to maintain a customer than to acquire one through other marketing channels. A big benefit of improving customer service is that it helps keep customers happy and wanting to stay with your brand.

Increasing the lifetime value of your customers can greatly contribute to the bottom line of a brand. Even if your company has other channels to handle customer service like Microsoft does, Reddit can be used to help make sure that your followers get to those proper channels.

The Xbox sub-Reddit shows how to use Reddit for customer service.

#3: Create a Network

Anyone can create a sub-Reddit, and with the right strategy you can easily build a network (several interlinking sub-Reddits) around an idea.

This is what the SFW Porn Network has done. They created a network of interests like nature, cars and cities for people who are “addicted” (hence the “porn” in the name—it’s not actually explicit material) to discussing these types of images and posts.

The following helped them create this strong network:

• Have a common naming convention (subject + porn).
• Have a common navigation that links all of the sub-Reddits.
• Monitor to make sure the images and content are high-quality.

If you have one popular sub-Reddit, it’s easier to get those followers to go to another sub-Reddit on a similar topic. The benefit of creating a network is to amass a large following inside the growing and active Reddit community.

The Water Porn sub-Reddit showing how to create a network on Reddit.

#4: News and Calendar

It’s simple. Brand advocates and followers always want to know the latest news and upcoming events.

For example, fans of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team want to know the game schedule, the team’s standing in the NL East and other vital information. The Phillies sub-Reddit does this by having an updated calendar and league ranking board in the sidebar.

Depending on your brand, consider using some of the following in your sub-Reddit sidebar to ensure your followers stay in the loop.

• Have a calendar of events.
• Display your company news.
• Increase the percentage of a brand goal reached.

The benefit of displaying your news and events to your followers is that when they visit, they are immediately updated with the most important facts and status of your brand. Displaying this information increases the reach of your news and can helpcontribute to increased attendance at your events.

The Philadelphia Phillies sub-Reddit showing how to display news and events on Reddit.

#5: Perform Interviews

The wildly popular show Breaking Bad got its fans involved with the brand by holding interviews with the cast of the show. The actors themselves answered the most popular questions that Redditors wanted to ask.

Doing this consistently not only grew the size of the community but also brought it closer together by eliminating the wall between actor and fan.

The benefit of this approach is again to allow your followers the opportunity to be heard and interact with your brand in a memorable way. Facilitating the opportunity for fans and celebrities to communicate is a great way to create a strong memory for those fans of the brand.

These experiences and memories strengthen your fan base and improve the likelihood that your followers will continue to support the brand.

The Breaking Bad sub-Reddit showing how to use Reddit to interview people.

#6: Creating a Community

Out of the many sub-Reddits I’ve searched through, none compares to the brand and community built by the Game of Thrones sub-Reddit. The group does not do just one thing right, but has taken several steps to create a strong, tight-knit community. It’s a great example of what a brand can and should do on Reddit.

Below are the different strategies they’ve used to really make their community stand out.

Get Everyone Into Character

The best part of joining a community is connecting and talking with others with the same interests. Beyond the amazing look and feel of Game of Thrones sub-Reddit, here are a few things they’ve done to make sure followers get into character:

• Give your followers a name.
• Make it easy for readers to add Game of Thrones flair to their name.
• Provide a link for users to download wallpapers in the background.

Game of Thrones sub-Reddit showing how to get followers into character.

Spoiler Control

There is nothing worse than finding out the final score of the big football game before you are able to watch it. Just like how co-workers can spoil things around the water cooler, someone can easily spoil the ending of a Game of Thrones episode on Reddit.

The Game of Thrones sub-Reddit has taken the following steps to ensure that their followers don’t get their favorite show spoiled.

• Have a posting policy.
• Create theme modes (Normal, Talk Only, Mute Talk, Show Spoilers).
• Create a spoiler guide and link to it often.

Game of Thrones sub-Reddit showing how to control spoilers on Reddit.

Conclusion

Creating a community on any platform takes a lot of time and hard work, and Reddit is no different. If you have a product or brand that thrives on interacting and gaining feedback from people, Reddit is a great place to do it.

What do you think? Fellow Redditors: What brands do you think are doing sub-Reddits right and why? For those of you who have never tried Reddit, what questions do you have? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Using your blog for search engine optimization

Using your blog as a Search Engine Optimization strategy for your website has many benefits on improving your organic website rankings and attracting targeted website traffic. Blog marketing  is a method of using optimized blog posts that provides value to your website.

When you publish a new blog post, Google sees this post as a new page to your website. By using keyword rich links in the content of your blog posts that links to the most relevant page on your website provides a powerful way to increase your links on the search engines.

How are you going to optimize your blog to have the best SEO benefit for your website?

SEO Optimization

Make sure that the structure of your blog is 100% optimized to support your website. To gain natural links from your blog, make sure to make it original and interesting. Other bloggers will link to your blog if they find it interesting or when they are referencing you on their own posts. Other ways you can optimize your blog is by submitting your blog feed to blog aggregators such as Technorati and adding an SEO pluging to your blog to help you with the optimization process.

Keywords

Create a blogging campaign by listing the keywords you will be targeting in your blog posts. These keywords can include all the phrases that are relevant to your business and that you want to use to be found for on the search engines. Usually this list can be anything between 30 and 300 keywords that you can use in the content of your blog posts. If you use a blogging keyword plan when writing your blog posts, it will be much easier to stay on topic when writing new blog posts.

When writing new blog posts, make sure to use a minimum of 300 words and posting new posts at least twice a week. If you don’t publish new blog posts on a regular basis, you will lose interest from the audience you are trying to reach.

The rules of search engine optimization

With all the latest updates on Google, search engine optimization (SEO) has a really bad reputation to many online marketers. Many people simply don’t trust SEO’s due mostly to bad advice these people often give. Some of those “internet marketers” are really shady characters that doesn’t have any ethics. You will find many people that are giving out advice based on articles they have read on blogs and they have outdated information regarding SEO.

One piece of advice that is often spoken about and that shouldn’t be is to change your search engine optimization tactics and strategy based on all the search engine algorithm updates such as the Penguin and Panda updates by Google. To be honest, if you are changing your SEO strategy all the time based on these updates, then you are most likely not doing SEO correctly to start with.

Good and solid SEO

Good and solid SEO has always relied on one good strategy; write good content for humans – not robots. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t focus on the search engines, you should, but just not first.

In plain English: The content that you use for your on page optimization should be written for human visitors and not the search engines. This simply means that you shouldn’t overdo any optimization part of your website to focus only on the search engines. Yes you should still optimize your websites, but don’t overdo it. Focus first on the people visiting your website before you are going to focus on the search engines.

Most website owners that saw their precious organic rankings drop was because their websites were over optimized and they listened to bad and negative SEO advice. Search engine optimization is exactly the same as it was five years ago with a few different options. It will be the same a few years from now. Practice good SEO methods and you will reap the rewards.