7 Editing Tips to Improve your Blog-Writing Skills

You can have hundreds of websites on the internet, but if nobody knows about you, you are invisible. A well-planned, creative online marketing campaign can put you out there for the world to see and instantly increase your sales. Now with that said, you will at one point need a blog in order to improve your online visibility. Take a look at these tips below fromsocialmediatoday.com.

Developing your blog-writing skills is a slow process. Work on your technique continuously and your work will attract readers. Take in readers critiques for they know best how well you are passing on your thoughts. Neglecting the editing aspect of blog-writing will deter your readers from your blog.  Here are the reasons why writers need to edit and how to edit your blog articles.

Let’s start at the basis of why writers need to edit.

• Inspirational chaos. Say you came across an amazing idea for a blog article that you know and feel will bring in traffic from the web. Then you start typing away with no end in sight. I like to call this ‘verbal/written diarrhea’ where your words just flow in every direction. Editing will help your thoughts come together in the end.
• Diverse ideas. Writers tend to get lost in their sentences or words and don’t take the time to double-check if their sentences would make sense to a reader. People may capture your writing differently than you had thought. In the creative process ideas get intertwined which can cause for messiness and a blog article that isn’t easy to read.
• Grammar and all that other stuff. Editing as you write never works out!  Take your time to edit your blog article after you have finished. We all miss one or two words when editing – sometimes we don’t even notice when we press the wrong key so spell-checking and revising each article afterwards is a must.
• Oh, you speak English, too? Even if you consider yourself an English-native speaker – edit your articles. Just because you were born into the English language and learned about it all your life doesn’t mean you won’t make any errors (it’s very naïve to think so).  

Follow these 8 simple tips to when editing your work that promise great writing skills for future blogs:

1. Take a breather after writing. The first mistake writers make is editing their post right when it’s done. Writer’s thoughts are fresh in their heads and when re-reading their article they might not pick up on the errors right away. Giving yourself time will put you in the reader’s seat without prejudice to your own work.  You won’t remember why you chose that exact word over another. This is the only time I recommend distractions: TV, music, Facebook, what have you. The key is to focus on unrelated things then come back to your article.

1. Divide and Conquer. Divide your editing into three processes: content editing, structure editing, and grammar editing. Being more specific while editing will help you focus on specific grammatical errors. Again, take your time.
   -Edit content. Review your article keeping an eye out for sections that don’t make sense. Look for unfinished paragraphs and fragments. After identifying them, work towards fixing the errors.
   -Edit structure. Write your articles in a way that the reader will be able to follow your content. Structure your content using bullets or bold headers.
   -Edit grammar. Lastly, edit grammatical errors. This shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes for a 800-900 word article.
2. Less is more. When it comes to words – less really is more. Don’t use complicated jargon unless your blog’s audience understands the lingo. Readers know when you have used the same words and are saying the same thing again. Remember the reader is smart – don’t underestimate their ability to understand your words. Adjectives and adverbs can confuse and distract readers. Keep overused words such as “definitely,” certainly,” “really,” etc. out of your article.
3. Don’t trust Spell-check. Trust your spell-check software lightly. These tools don’t “understand” your writing and don’t grasp variations of sentences or word usage.
4. Read at random. Choose a random paragraph from your article and edit it. Then choose anotherrandom paragraph and edit that one. Do so until you have finished editing them all. I know you’re asking yourself why? This tactic stops you from reading in “autopilot.” You wrote this article so you know what’s coming next and you may miss obvious mistakes.
5. Don’t overdo it. What’s harder than actually starting the editing process? Knowing when you’ve had enough. No sense beating a dead horse. If you find yourself rewriting the same sentence over and over then you should call it a night. Reaching the publishing stage is stressful, but don’t let your indecisive editing keep your article in the drafts folder.
6. Learn from your mistakes. After following the steps above, you will be closer to a perfectly written masterpiece. Learn from the mistakes you picked up in the editing stage. Analyze what you’ve done wrong and practice to get to your goal writing style. When you write your next article make a list of your mistakes along with your corrections. This will help you remember your mistakes and hopefully not repeat them.

I hope you find the above tips as useful as I have. There are free online tools such as After the Deadline to help with editing. This tool has helped me shift from writing in a passive tone to a more active tone. What actions to you take when editing a blog article?

How to start with a link building campaign

With internet marketing, internal links are worth gold for your website, but unfortunately internal link building is really not a guaranteed success. Building links does come with risks. One of the most common risks with link building is using excessive keyword based anchor links. If you are using a sidebar that is stuffed/spammed with internal links promoting all the pages of your website to help you increase your organic rankings rather than focusing on usability, then you are in for a tough ride.

So how can you start with a link building campaign that is safe? Find below a couple of tips to help you increase your organic SEO rankings that are quite easy to implement. As a general rule of thumb, don’t overdo it. Too much of a good thing is bad.

Link building

Blog posts: This is very easy where you can write a blog post and reference a previous blog post that you have published. Link to the blog post you are mentioning.

Link to similar pages: With your anchor text, link to similar pages on your website that covers related topics. If the topics covered are similar, point your readers to those pages. This can also help with the navigation of your website.

Use titles in your links: In the a href of your link, use title tags. These are great for non keyword links that serves for a user to take an action.

Limit navigation links: Never try to go overboard with your navigational links. Include a sidebar or a navmenu at the top of your website, but don’t use all the links in both.

Interlinking: You can add a link “find more” or something similar on the website pages that overlap each other. If you focus this on your visitors rather than the search engines, you most likely will get away with it.

When starting with internal linking your website always focus on your visitors. If you only focus on getting good rankings on Google, you will most likely do it wrong.

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.

Starting out with mobile social media marketing

We are all part of the continuous mobile buzz and it doesn't look like it will be stopping anytime soon. Everyday you find people sitting at their favourite coffee shop with their tablets and smartphones working. The new on the go office space is 100% mobile and it's no longer necessary to sit in a cramped office to get work done. It is now easy to get things done on the go.

People are slowly shifting away from reading traditional newspapers as all the latest news can now be accessed from mobile devices. E-books are changing the way booksellers are selling books like Amazon. When last did you go to a bank to do a bank transfer? Why am I asking this? It's simple - the times are changing and you should get your business on board.

Online you will find many digital marketing articles explaining that Social Media is the best route to take for Internet marketing. Even though I agree with that, I believe you should take your social media campaign further and integrate mobile marketing into your strategy. This will help boost your business to be visible in the ever changing digital business world. With a mobile marketing strategy, your customers will be able to have access to your business on the go, virtually from anywhere in their own comfort zone.

If you already have a social media marketing strategy and it is geared for traditional online users, I guarantee you that you are missing out on lots of valuable business. To start integrating mobile marketing with your social media campaign, find below a couple of tips that can help you with this.

Mobile social media marketing tips

Use mobile platforms: Create profiles on social media platforms such as Foursquare, Google Places, and other related local networks. Having an active presence on these mobile platforms will help your customers find you online.

Mobile website: By creating a website for your business that is mobile friendly with mobile friendly graphics, guick loading times, your business will be ready to tap into the mobile market.

Mobile app: This is very different from a mobile website. A mobile app for your business can help your users interact with your business. You can create a mobile app to allow users view your latest news and blog posts, schedule appointments, contact customer service or even place orders. The possibilities with a mobile app is endless.

QR codes: Create a QR code that you can use in your internet marketing strategy. One of the easiest ways to create a QR code is to use Google's URL shortner Goog.gl.

As more people are starting to use smartphones for business, make buying decisions, and to find information, it is important for your business to tap into this medium in order to reach customers.

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.