Free Traffic

How to Turn Your Website into a Social Media Hub

By / Social Media, Social Media

Who is not on social media these days? It’s become a rhetorical question. From 80 year old Grandmas to 8 year old pre-teens, everyone’s a part of the social media circus that makes marketers jump through hoops to control the reputation and engagement of our brands. Pew Research reports that about 73% of all online American adults are active on some social media or another. 41% of these use multiple social media platforms.

Social Media is Stealing Your Visitors

Even after being around for over a decade, social media shows no signs of a real slowdown. The time that people used to spend on other things like browsing through the web, visiting websites of brands they like, they now spend on social media.

Americans already devote the largest proportion of the time they expend online by networking with each other and brands they like on social media.

1

As Jeff Bullas points out, this social media frenzy seems to be coming at the expense of visits to corporate websites. Coca-Cola which has over 22 million Facebook fans, saw traffic to its site drop by 40% in under 12 months.

Your website is your own little piece of real estate on the web!

On your site, you have 100% control over what is said about your brand. It is your digital spokesperson who does exactly what you say and does not charge a dime. So why would you want to drive precious traffic to ‘rented’ properties like social media whose rules you have no control over? Why not drive these eyeballs to your own site where you can convert these visitors into actual customers?

Bring Social Media to your Website – Turn it into a Social Hub

No one can deny the pull of social media. However, you need to combine the attractiveness of social media with the flexibility of your own website by turning social media’s strengths into traffic for your own site. Here’s how you do it:

1. Host your blog on your website

A blog is step one in content marketing. Companies that have blogs also have 97% more inbound links than those that do not. If you are serious about reclaiming your content and making your website a social media hub in its own right, create a blog and post on it regularly.

A blog builds its own readership which is beneficial to your website and its conversions. It can also be the destination that hosts other content used on your social networks, so that you maintain an archive of all your content on your own web property, as against leaving it solely on social networks where you just rent space without owning the property.

2. Publish regular content on your website or blog

Create content that is shareable and publish it first on your blog. You can either put a teaser of this content or in some cases the entire content itself as a link on your social networks. The idea is to give away only enough to arouse curiosity, so your fans and followers head to your site or blog to access the real meat of your content.

3. Social sharing buttons on the site and your blog

Allow readers to share their favorite posts from your blog to their network on social media with social sharing buttons. Selling handcrafted jewelry on your website? Add a Pinterest button on the image and other social sharing buttons on the product listing to allow your trinket aficionado to share their find with the rest of their friends. Who would complain about some free publicity on social media after all!

4. Show popularity index of each post on your post previews

Once you start posting regularly on your blog, readers will have a plethora of posts to pick from. In your post previews, show the popularity index of each post in the form of ‘number of likes’ or ‘number of shares’ or ‘number of retweets’.

2

When readers see that a certain piece has been recommended highly by other readers they are more likely to read it, out of a fear of missing out on important information. They are similarly also more motivated to share it with their friends on social media. This simple action can give you a viral post with no extra hard work on your part.

5. “Come here for more!”

Great content can make people go to great lengths to access it. Once you have a repository of exciting, interesting content, use this as a hook to drive traffic from your social networks to your blog or website.

With every piece of content you publish, ask them to head over to your blog to get their hands on more such delightful content. The content you share on your site can be created by you; it could also be relevant content created by others that you share after receiving their permission to use it and attributing it properly.

6. Bring social to your login process

When you ask customers to leave a social network and head to your site or blog for more, it could be seen as an irritant. This is especially true if the user has to login to your site to access your premium content or share and comment on it. Avoid the hassle of filling up long winded registration forms that most customers balk at, by instead using social login solutions like LoginRadius that create a seamless transition between social media and third party websites.

3

Social sign-on allows your users to log into your website using any of their social media IDs and with the correct implementation, it gives you access to targeted data that the customer shares on their social networks. This has the potential to become a win-win situation!

7. Create a vibrant community on your blog

Encourage interaction between your readers on your blog. Invite comments and respond to opinions of readers on your posts. Give back constructive feedback to your readers that will make them come back over and over again to your blog in times to come. Share valuable insights relevant to your readers exclusively on your blog, making it a sought-after destination for users in your industry.

Allow comments on your blog via social networks – this makes it easier for the reader to comment without creating an account with your site first. The comment will be flashed on the timelines of the readers’ friends on their social networks, giving your original post more visibility in the process.

8. Send email alerts whenever you create new content

Remember to touch base with your newsletter subscribers whenever you have something informative or interesting. The idea is to draw traffic to your website by all means possible. If you have been capturing and nurturing an email database, put it to good use by informing customers via email whenever you have new content for them on your blog.

Make sure you include a teaser or preview of your content in the email to pique their interest and make them click through to your website. My friend Tracy Vides has put up some excellent examples of email marketing on Steamfeed that will help you get started.

Over to You

Your corporate website allows you to showcase the best side of your brand, without any outside filters or negative inputs that may color the opinion of a visitor. It is your brand’s face on the web and is something that you probably have invested a lot of money building and driving traffic to via SEO, Content Marketing, PPC, email marketing and more.

Add social media to this list of tools that you use to grow your website’s online reputation. Engaging with fans on social media is great. But getting them to land on your site and actually buy from you is even better. A social media hub is an idea whose time has come.

Don’t wait for your competition to beat you to it. Go ahead and do build your website into a social magnet!

 

7 Strategies I Use To Increase My Blog Traffic (I Bet You Can Too!)

By / Free Traffic

Today, I decided to share with you some of the effective methods and strategies I am using in my blog. The strategies that I’m sharing with you require patience and hard work for implementation. Of course, they are easy. It’s not what the common bloggers commonly suggests to do. Let me put some effective sure-fire strategies to get real-time success in blogging.

Methods for Rankings and Traffic

1 – Long blog posts works for everyone, believe me.

Length of the blog post matters a lot in blog posts, Google is ranking long, insightful posts higher than those blog posts with a shorter length. As with the introduction of Google knowledge graph, the importance of the length of the content has become important.

Other advantages of lengthy content are:

1. It is easy to target, multiple keywords throughout the post and thus rank for multiple keywords.
2. We can include more internal links throughout the content.
3. Possibility of being indexed in Google in-depth articles, and thus getting loyal readers, who love more content.
4. Rank higher, and double your chances of ranking in the first page of SERPs.

There is no doubt that blog posts with great insightful content increases your blog’s search visibility in SERPs. The results may not be observed if yours is a new blog, it may take some time. However, once the blog post ranks for the keyword, there is no chance of a drop in rankings.

We can say that long form content is beneficial for long time. Content length is the sure-fire formula for getting high exposure and rankings.

 

2 – Quality blog posts

I think I need not stress the importance of quality content. I know all of you ABT readers are already tired of blog posts that stress the importance of quality. However, no blog post is complete without stressing the importance of quality content.

A site with optimized quality content is given more credit than other sites, it is better if you made your site content interesting for human traffic. Google algorithm will find out if a site is beneficial to the human user. Google algorithm will determine how much time a user spends while visiting a site based on different search queries. If a site is visited often and user likes to visit it again, its ranking stays better due to decrease in bounce rate and increase in click through rate.

 

3 – Include LSI keywords instead of keyword stuffing

Victim of keyword stuffing? No worries, it happens to the best of us. So use LSI keywords. So, what are LSI keywords? Keywords related to the main keyword is called LSI keywords. Let me make myself clear to you now.

Take an example, you are writing a post on “Google Plus and its benefits”.  For this topic, LSI keywords may be hashtags, G+, communities, just all terms related to it.

Instead of including the main keyword throughout the post and be a victim of keyword stuffing, include LSI keywords throughout the post, which may look natural.

Chaitanya wrote a nice guide on using LSI keywords you can read here.

4 – Diversify anchor texts

Anchor texts are the texts that come in links. For example, in subscription button “Subscribe now” may be an anchor text, which leads you to the subscription page.

Like this while obtaining backlinks, do not include the large number of exact anchor texts, it may look unnatural. Some of the examples of diversified anchor texts are “Post title (exact match)”, “this post”, “click here”.

Keeping the same anchor texts for a single post gives an impression to Google that you are indulging in the bulk backlinks scheme or black hat practices. Writing blog posts focusing on SEO, link, rankings, rather than focusing on quality content leads to these problems. Be natural.

5 – Target a keyword

I know that with the ineffectiveness of the Google keyword planner and extinction of Google Adwords keywords tool, it has been never easy to find and implement effective keyword.

So it’s now the time to make use Google suggest. I don’t tell you to head over to Google search, type in and look for suggestions.

There is an awesome tool called UberSuggest that gives you never ending list of Google suggestions for a keyword. You can make use of this tool, make a list of surefire long tail keywords and put them in the Keyword planner for search volumes and competitions. This is one of the effective free ways. I am also using this to find worthy long-tail keywords.

If you want premium, WordTracker is the best of all.

6 – Regularly update your site

Loyal readers of your blog expect quality content from you very often. So in order to keep them from visiting and alerting Google about your blog, it is necessary to publish QUALITY posts more often. If you got a blog, keep it updated and post regularly, write quality content and do not forget to get customers or users’ feedback.

Keep the posting frequency between 3-4 times a week. Frequency is less important than quality. If you have extraordinary quality, unique content, then posting 2 times a week is enough. But you know…

7 – Make use of bold and italics

Typography matters a lot. Readers tend to love great content with great typography. The majority of readers are speed-readers, to stop them from doing so, use speed breakers, like bold and italic texts. Italize sentences like conversations and bold important points.

This also helps attract the readers and improve your blog’s typography.

Conclusion

So, above are the strategies I am using in my blog, and my blog is responding very well to these strategies. Implementing these strategies in your blog will surely lead to your blogging success, but it may take some time to get results. If you are a newbie and followed all these strategies, I can assure that you will stand out of the crowd within a year or 6 months. As with anything hard work and patience is important.

I’m sure you have liked this article. Please make those static share buttons, dynamic.

Which methods are you using to increase your blog traffic? I’d love to hear from you in comments!

Increase Blog Traffic! 8 Great Ways That Really Work

By / Blogging, Free Traffic

In this post you’re going to learn how to Increase Blog Traffic.

Managing a blog can be an exciting time for anyone, but most of us are going to have a hard time to increase blog traffic and maintaining it for a long period of time.

Once your blog is a little older and has established its authority within your niche, then it becomes much easier to have a steady stream of traffic. So what should you do first in order to increase blog traffic?

Well, we are going to go over 8 ways that will be able to increase blog traffic it needs to get a head start.

increase blog traffic

8 Great Ways To Increase Blog Traffic

Search Engine Optimized Content & Site

Search engine optimization is going to be one of the best ways to increase blog traffic. The higher you rank in search engines, the more traffic you will get, so it is important to optimize everything possible. There are plenty of different ways you can optimize your blog and the content that you post. This method of traffic will require you to learn a lot of techniques and doesn’t become effective overnight.

It requires you to invest a good amount of time before you start to see great results. Although it takes some time, once you start to see your rankings increase, your blog will be well on its way to becoming a success.

Target a Specific Audience

Before you start posting more content, you need to make sure you have a target audience that you are writing for. If you know who you are trying to attract, you will be able to create content that appeal to them the most. Different audiences don’t like the same type of content, so you need to make sure that the stuff you are creating will have them coming back for more.

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is an incredible way to increase blog traffic. It is especially effective if your blog is brand new and you need to give it a boost in traffic. There are many different paid advertising programs that are available to you. One of the most commonly used ways is a pay per click program. You get to set up and advertisement and then pay every time someone clicks on it. Depending on what keywords you choose to target, will determine how much each click will cost.

You can also use social media programs, pay per impression programs, and plenty more. If you don’t mind spending some money to advertise your blog, you will get some targeted traffic that will get your blog off the ground.

You can even advertise here to get more and more traffic at affordable price.

Ensure All of Your Pages are Being Indexed

Sometimes search engines won’t index your blog right away, so you should make sure that they are. Like I previously mentioned, search engine traffic is one of the best ways to get your blog successful. Each search engine allows you to submit your site to them so they can easily crawl your site and index it. You should make sure to do this with every major engine.

You can also use Google Webmaster Tools to send a spider to crawl your site and report back to you with any errors you may have.

Create the Best Content you Possibly Can

If you want to increase blog traffic to your site, then you are going to need to make sure that the content you are creating is worth it. People won’t come back or recommend your blog to their friend and family if your content is mediocre. Since there are so many bloggers out there, our readers are used to consuming excellent content.

If your content doesn’t keep them interested enough, then you can expect them to just leave for another blog that creates something better.

Don’t Post Irrelevant Content

A big mistake that will cut your traffic down would be to post content that has nothing to do with your current niche. Plenty of blogs have ruined their chances at success because they drove all of their loyal viewers away and never kept their blog about a specific niche.

If you start posting about random things, your loyal viewers will most likely not stay since they originally came to view content about your niche. The traffic that you attract with the random content won’t stay since the rest of your content isn’t relevant to what they want to see. Just keep all of your content relevant to your niche and you will see much more traffic. In this way you can easily Increase Blog Traffic Fast.

Keep Consistent With Your Posts

You should come up with a regular time that you post to your audience. If your readership know when to expect your next post, they will be more willing to read it as soon as possible.

You should never go a long period of time without posting something because people will eventually just forget your blog even exists, which will obviously reduce your traffic. Come up with a schedule and stick to it. You can Increase Your Blog Traffic in this way.

Use Social Media to Your Advantage

Social media can be used in so many different ways. You can use it to increase blog traffic, help brand your blog, increase authority, and much more. You should be using social media to enhance all aspects of your blog.

The only thing you should be aware of is that it can be just as bad for your blog if you don’t manage it correctly. Posting something offensive, not responding to comments, and plenty of thing things can give your blog a bad image and hurt your reputation. If you plan to use social media, make sure to properly manage it to get as many benefits as you can.

Increasing traffic to your blog  may take some time and hard work, but if you are determined enough, you will have no problem being successful with it.

Using these 8 tips will definitely get you headed in the right direction, and as time goes by you will figure out new ways that will be more beneficial to your specific blog.

Did I missed any? If you want more suggestion about how to increase blog traffic to your blog, Do let me know in comments.

6 Reasons Your Guest Posts Will Be Rejected For Sure

By / Blogger Tips, Guest Blogging

Probloggers and authority sites don’t hate guest posts like you may want to believe. But there are reasons your guest posts are sure to be rejected on their websites or blogs. These guys are human; they have catalogs of issues to attend – they need to attend to their teeming readers, customers, family, other businesses, and also attend social functions. So sometimes they are overworked and need time to rest.

Your guest post would go a long way at enabling these bloggers observe their siesta. They don’t have all the time in the world to do everything including writing daily posts for their blogs.

That is where you as a guest poster come in. They need rest, yet they also need to update their blogs. So who should update the blog at that time of need? It is you of course! So why think they don’t love your offer?

There are certainly some reasons your guest posts are sure to be rejected even at such time of intense need. We shall find that out later in this post.

guest posts

Why blogs accept guest posts

Blogs accepts guest posts for various reasons. They are not accepted just for the fun of it; they have a void to fill, they have a role to play, and they have needs to meet. Like I mentioned earlier, guest bloggers have workloads to take care of, hence there is need to accept guest posts on their sites. So the reasons include:

  1. Maintain regular update for their readers
  2. Provide their audience with new experience
  3. Give new bloggers opportunity to express themselves
  4. Have time to rest and attend to other pressing issues
  5. Get more traffic to their blogs

Now the question is, does it mean your post does not meet any of the afore-mentioned needs? There is certainly a reason why the blogger would gladly accept your offer because there are at least 5 needs I have identified, one of which your article should take care of.

Unfortunately, there are reasons your guest post are sure to be rejected even in the midst of problems begging to be taken care of by a guest blogger. Once we can identify these reasons, your dream of having your guest posts approved with speed on any website would come true.

Why your guest posts are always rejected?

Your offers are rejected not because the host blogger hates your face, or because you offended him sometime in the past. It is simply because they do not meet certain criteria. So note these points and fix them, and then see what happens next time you make an offer

write article

Not playing by the rules

Every blog has set rules for anybody who wishes to submit a guest article to it. The rules for blog A are different from the rules for blog B. Every guest author is expected to abide to the rules.

Why?

It is because they are the ones who are desperately in need of help. The host blogger owns the blog, pays the bills, drives traffic, built the blog reputation, etc. You are just looking for a ready-made place to help improve your blog reputation and increase traffic. So you are to play by the rules, not the other way round.

So what rules do you violate? You hardly have time to read the rules set on the blog; as such when you present your guest post, it flouts some sections of the blog’s rules. Why? You never read the rules, so there was no way to keep the rules you didn’t know of. Some bloggers don’t have the time to point this out to you. The best thing they think they should do is to dump your article in the recycle bin

Poor content

Remember the site you are approaching already has reputation. It has maintained a quality that kept its readers visiting on regular basis. The fact the site owner is busy doesn’t mean he should accept junk for his readers. It is better his site is not updated for weeks than to provide poor quality that would drive away his readers.

When you present a hastily assembled article that is laden with grammatical blunders, incoherent sentences, etc, what should you expect? That the site owner should accept it out of pity?

Of course, you should know better. To avoid this trouble, find time to write quality piece, with extensive research and reference links, and something highly informative. No blogger would ever reject quality content that should benefit his audience.

Duplicate content

There is nothing as embarrassing to a blogger than a situation where he discovers that the content submitted as a guest post on his blog has already been published elsewhere before it was submitted to him. One may find oneself hooked in this web if one doesn’t have the time to do a copyscape check on an article before publishing.

Some smart guest bloggers (so they thought) had submitted articles to me, only for me to later discover they had been published elsewhere. So one reason your guest posts are sure to be rejected is because they are duplicates. Google frowns at duplicate content; webmasters/blog owners frown at it, and even readers also frown at it.

Deception

Do you ever submit a sponsored post to a blog owner and tell him the post belongs to you? Somebody submitted one to me recently and told me to provide a link back in the body of the article to a particular website.

He said he was a content writer without a website. But I couldn’t just understand why the insistence of providing a link in the content when he said he didn’t have a website. He only tried to make me believe he was writing as a content writer on that site and that he needed exposure.

In that case, I felt a link in the Bio should do; but he insisted and I had no choice but to let him go with his article. It was obvious he was writing for an SEO site because I did a whois check on that.

If you try to lie to a blogger in order to get your sponsored post published, he would do his little research and discover the truth about the site owner and every other information he wants. The next thing is to throw away your article for trying to present a deceptive front. So try to be plain to the website owner if you are writing on behalf of a third party and leave him to make his decision. Chances are that he might publish your work if it is good enough.

Unacceptable links

Some people want to see guest post as a way of promoting their affiliate links. So, they just add links to their affiliate products or to affiliate sites they are promoting. I

f you were the blogger, what would you do?

Leave the links or bring this to his attention? Unfortunately, these are spelt out in the guest blogging rules on the “write for us” page of many of the sites. This automatically disqualifies your post.

Poor formatting

Like I mentioned at the beginning of this post, bloggers are very busy; so most of them don’t have the time to proof read your article over and over again. They don’t have the patience to begin to try to reformat the content you formatted poorly. To save their time, they just dump the article in the bin.

You can see it is not the fault of the blogger that your posts are not accepted; it is actually your fault. If you avoid those pitfalls, the blog owner would jump at your offer because it has something useful for him and his readers. But poor formatting is one of the reasons your guest posts are sure to be rejected.

  • Why You Can’t Achieve Success in Blogging Career?

Conclusion

Provide the quality a blogger wants in your content, follow the set rules, be sincere while presenting your offer and you are sure to get your guest posts published on even the best of blogs and websites.

7 Mistakes Which Makes You Dumb on Social Media

By / Social Media

In a very short space of time, we’ve come a long way with Social Media. Social Media is a now a part of our lives and has become necessary and easy to run your business successfully.

Every famous Company of World is now largely focusing on its Social Network, than TV or Print Advertisement. So that’s why it’s necessary to move with trend and get customers/audience.

Why Social Media?

  1. Facebook have more than a 1 billion active user and Twitter has more than 750 million users.
  2. Social Media is like Word to Mouth Marketing – the best one.
  3. Get better position in SERP’s and your blog gets better crawling by Search Engine bots.
  4. Free traffic to your blog and Niche Oriented.
  5. Easiest and best way to connect with your audience.
  6. Blog Branding

To make a good Social Media presence, we just not need create a Fan Page or account and promote your products or services but we should have a good impact on your fans. Many people make mistakes initial, almost everyone. But we have to learn from our every mistakes, rather than doing it again and again.

Social Media Mistakes

7 Mistakes You Make in Social Media

#1 Not being Authentic and Transparent

One should never show himself something he’s not. To get a trust from your audience you should not be afraid to add your personal voice to it. Transparency is what Public demand and should not be ignored.

Be transparent about yourself and your skills. Public loves you only till you’re true to them. The good thing about being the single moderator, you don’t have to approve content with your partners to post updates.

#2 No Aims and Objectives

Lots of times you might have heard “Fail to Plan and Plan to fail”. Well its truth, if you don’t spend a bit of time on planning your Online Marketing, its going to be fail and maybe fatal also.

Before you start your Social Media campaign, initially its must to have Aims and targets for it. Set an achievable target, target the audience you want and where will you find them. These three are the most important objectives for any type of Social Media campaigns.

#3 Doing Hard Selling

This is where mostly people lose their trust and loyalty from the target audience because they spam their Facebook Page/Twitter account with just links and nothing valuable for the people.

Start giving useful content to them like updating some facts related to your market, funny images, asking questions and sharing videos with them, this will definitely going to boost your Online presence and whenever you will share links, they’re surely going to take it seriously.

#4 Treating it as a One-Way Broadcast Medium

Never ever mess with someone, who wants to have a conversation with you. You can fully automate your Pages by sending your blog feed regularly and can forget that you ever had a Social Media accounts for promotion, but surely it has a negative effect.

Social Media seems interesting only when it’s a two-way conversation between you and the community. Remember, Reply to every comments, Messages and other queries from your community.

#5 About section empty or seems ugly

About section is made to show a small description. Everyone before hitting like or follow button will see your bio, definitely if it seems interesting then only he will initiate .

Write an awesome description of your page. A

good example of description is “Founder of @ProBlogger & @DigitalPS, Author, speaker and eBook publisher. Husband & Dad to 3 boys. Love lattes & Leicas. Personal Tweets at @DarrenRowse”, this is the bio of Darren Rowse.

In his short bio, he mentioned his Working Fields correctly and also a bit about his personal life. A bad description can be “I Love cheese!” This small description will be the first impression of how much active you’re on Social Media.

#6 No Patience

Using Social Media is a long-term approach. For a new blog, it takes about 4-6 months to establish a following for his blog. You have to wait to create good followers of your blog and spend quality time in it.

Once it has been established it will continue to build traffic to your blog and people will come looking for you.

#7 Being Traditional, not using advanced tools

You’re out of town so you couldn’t post updates and then tell your visitors “I’m sorry, I went for a small vacation, I will update my account from now”. No you’re doing it wrong way, eventually people never like these type of lame excuses and people may lose interest in you.

You should know how to schedule updates, when you’re out to vacation. Use tools such as BufferApp or HootSuite to manage your Work. If you want, take some pain and try to update and be in touch using a Smartphone for them, there’s no better solution for it.

So the list I’ve compiled is over, but I know the list will be endless if I start to list every problem we make. Let us know what mistakes you’ve made by commenting below and how you coped with it.

Share it with your friends, so that they also don’t make mistakes in the beginning :)

Image Credit