Don’t Just Blog, Build an Online Presence
To add more readers to your blog, you’re going to have to show your face in a few other places besides your blog. You’ll want to comment on other blogs, guest post, Tweet and follow other tweeters and drive traffic back through whatever means possible. When people find you through other sites, there is a process of discovery that can help build them into long-term fans.
You’ve Got to Be Patient
When working on a new blog, you have to remember that it is hard to get started and readers will come in trickles and droves at the same time. On one day you might have a few 100 visitors, but then not have any traffic to speak of for a few more days. Hopefully, using the traffic strategies we teach you that won’t happen.
You don’t want to just read the current events within your industry, you also need to look at these people as competitors. If people are reading other sites, then they aren’t reading yours.
If you have a killer article that is trending across the net, you might want to consider running a press release through PRWeb or one of the other press release organizations.
Also try to team up with other guest bloggers, who are basically just other authors in your niche.
There are two models that are successful in blogging.
1. On your blog you want to post one amazing piece of content every week. Make it a fairly long post with a really really good content.
2. Post several times today, but cover things from multiple angles with multiple writers. This is where guest bloggers and hired guns come in.
Those are the two models that you want.
Prices that you would want to pay someone for a guest blog on your site would be… $100 for 1500 words from a great author. You also want to ask them to publicize your article to their list, blogs etc.
Why is this so good? Because, you couldn’t pay this person $100 for a banner ad on their site for more than a week. But here they are writing a ton of content and also telling people about it on their blog.
Where you could probably get $100 article written for five dollars on fivver, you wouldn’t get the traffic. What you’re really paying for is the traffic in addition to the quality content.
Then if you’re going to get content from non-professional bloggers, that don’t have a following, you don’t want to pay more than $20 for a 500 word article.
- Redirect people from the Blog to your landing pages and/or direct to a sales page.
- Entice guest bloggers to submit content on your blog
- Stay on top of the comments
Syndicate your blog content to Facebook and Twitter, as well as notifiy subscribers when a new post is avail via email broadcast. Aweber can do this for you.
RSS feed your latest blog posts and comments into the footer of your main company website, if that main site isn’t your blog.
Photos On Your Blog
Everyone of your blog posts needs to have a picture associated with it. Perry Belcher is known for saying, you really are being paid to show people pictures.
Make sure that all of your pictures have alt text attached that is relevant to the post. So for example, if your post is about universal remote controls, then your picture should be of a remote control and also have the alt text “universal remote control”.
A lot of times people do image searches when they’re looking for various terms. Google tracks how many times a picture is clicked on an image search and more importantly how many times it’s not clicked on.
You can steal photos to put inside of your posts, but I don’t recommend you do that. Google has an advanced algorithm that can tell if the photo you are using is copyrighted, protected, watermarked or otherwise belonging to someone else.
So while you can grab other photos and simply put them on your site, the better way would be to change them up by at least 20% and then resave them before posting.
Normally we would list all of these in additional resources, but they are so important going to go ahead and go through them now.
Photo and Image Editors
Pixlr – Pixlr is an online photo-editing platform that allows you to change photos in multiple different ways. You can do this by making them black-and-white, stretching, skewing or adding light, shadows, etc.
Ipiccy – http://ipiccy.com/ is an online retouching tool that lets you make changes to photos like a professional photo editor, with an extremely easy to use interface
Screenshot Apps
LightShot App – http://app.prntscr.com/ Screenshot software for PC and Mac. You can make your own photos by taking screenshots from your monitor.
Glui – http://glui.me/ Screenshot software for Mac…saves to Dropbox
Puush.me – http://puush.me/ Screenshot software for PC
Royalty Free Stock Photos
Dreamstime – http://dreamstime.com/ royalty free stock photos for a fraction of the price of iStockPhoto.
Every Stock Photo – http://www.everystockphoto.com is a mix of paid and free to use photos for your website. Just make sure to credit the source when using them.
