Are your websites or blog posts not getting ranked by Google? It’s much easier when you give Google what Google wants to see. In this info graphic, you can see exactly what goes into a top ranked site or post.
If you’ve been looking for a blogging system that Google absolutely loves, that I’ve used for years, just go here.
Dedicated to your success because I believe in you!
Stuart Springfield
Effective use of Social Media is absolutely essential and is often used improperly or under utilized. In order to have effective social media campaigns, follow the advice of the experts, like Ian Lurie, who is the CEO and founder of Portent, a Seattle-based internet marketing company.
Here’s what he says are the top 5 ways to become a social media rock star, in this article from Entrepreneur.com.
“Social-media success is often a long list of little things done right. While there is no shortcut to success, the below tips will help get your social-media campaign on the right track.
1. Be a good communicator.
Social media is really a crowd of people talking — usually to each other. So, you’ll need to figure out how to cut through the noise and really engage with people. Here are a few pointers:
Write well. I’m not just talking about punctuation and grammar. Write in a comfortable voice, not a formal one. Don’t use four words when one will do. Unless your social-media post (Facebook update or tweet) is time sensitive, set it aside for 10 minutes. Come back to it, take a second look and edit if needed, before hitting publish.
Use images when it makes sense. At my internet-marketing agency Portent, we’ve found that posts with images get about two to three times more interaction. That being said, don’t put images into your posts for the sake of having an image. Use them only when relevant.
Utilize video. Use platforms like YouTube or Vimeo to attract an audience. Just like images, make sure you’re sharing videos that make sense.
Take advantage of all social networks. While most people spend their time communicating on Twitter and Facebook, there are other networks that deserve attention. One being Google+. Yes, it’s still a small network, but it is gaining steam, and it integrates with every other Google service. Also, there is SlideShare, a community focused on slide presentations. This site can show your content to thousands. If you have a great video or article, convert it to a SlideShare presentation.
Respond immediately. If someone asks a question or proposes an alternate viewpoint, answer them quickly. This gives people the impression you care about their needs and are responsive.
Don’t get emotional. Don’t feed the trolls. As your social-media strategy grows, you may see some angry or insensitive replies. Don’t react angrily. Reply politely or not at all.
2. Buy advertising.
Don’t be shy about paying to promote posts on networks like LinkedIn and Facebook. On Facebook, your posts won’t even appear in all of your followers’ newsfeeds without paid promotion, so promote if you can afford it.
Always use the targeting tools these platforms provide to avoid aimlessly issuing a single ad at the maximum audience size. After all, the practice won’t hit the right audience and it could end up costing you. Instead, create multiple ads targeted toward specific demographics that are a great fit for your product or service. Test and see who provides the highest-quality followers.
3. Avoid me, me, me.
Don’t have every post be about yourself or your company. Instead, I recommend posting 80 percent non-promotional, 20 percent promotional. So what else can you share? Here are some ideas:
Answer questions. Search Twitter for questions by typing in a topic, a space and then a question mark. For example, “bicycle tires?” Sift through the result for great questions. Answer them directly or on other networks.
Also, try Google. Start typing in a question, and Google will show you a list of related ones. For example, if you sell rhubarb, type in Google search, “is rhubarb.” You’ll immediately see the question “is rhubarb poisonous?” Answer them via social media.
Curate content. Point out great information from other sources. This will help readers view you as a reliable resource.
Comment. Voice your opinion on relevant breaking news and explain why it’s important.
Related: 4 Ways to Turn Social-Media Fans Into Raving, Loyal Customers
4. Expand beyond your customers.
In social media, you want to attract an audience beyond potential customers. Focus on people who are compelled to respond — the “weird,” as Seth Godin calls them. Even if they never buy from you, they’ll tell others about you.
5. Flattery will get you everywhere.
Using tools like Followerwonk or Topsy will help you find the top people in your industry and major influencers. Then find the people who follow them and follow those folks, rather than the industry celebrities. They’re far more likely to respond.
If people post something you enjoy, make sure they know it with a retweet, like, favorite or share. If it’s really fantastic, consider posting a response on your own blog and link back to it. Over time, they’ll get to know you and will be more likely to spread your content.
Even with the above suggestions, there is no magic solution. For every story of a meteoric rise to the top, you’ll find 1,000 stories of slow, steady growth. Plan for that, manage expectations and capitalize.”
Ian Lurie
Ian Lurie is the CEO and founder of Portent, a Seattle-based internet marketing company.
Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/229301#ixzz2pfe7b63h
Social Media can direct traffic to your blog, turning your blog posts into profit. Here’s the blog I use successfully and highly recommend.
Stuart Springfield
How Can I Drive Traffic To My Website?
This is some information I found in Aweber’s Knowledge Base that I thought could help fellow marketers drive traffic to your website.
Nick Moore posted this on July 23, 2012 02:45 pm
Of course, you should be sure that you have worthwhile content on your site so that once you have visitors, they have something to see. But did you know that publishing quality content can also help to attract traffic to your site in the first place?
Search Engines Can Send Traffic
Search engines continually crawl web pages and index what they find. So, whatever you have published on your site becomes part of the directory people get results from when they search (e.g. “email marketing”, “restaurant in philadelphia area”, “homeowner tips”, etc.).
Think of search engines as catalogs of most of the information on the web. As long as you’re publishing a unique perspective on a topic, new people should find your website this way.
Blogging an easy way to get content onto your site in a highly readable way, and in a way that search engines can easily index the information. There are also blog search engines, such as Technorati, out there that will index your articles and could potentially drive a significant amount of traffic to it.
[Don’t have a blog? You can’t find a better blogging platform than this one.]
Advertise
This one may be obvious, but sometimes the obvious is overlooked. There are many opportunities out there to advertise the content of your website. Before you begin to gain momentum through the other suggestions offered here, spending within your business’ budget for some advertising may be the key to early success.
Search Engine Advertising
Pay Per Click
Examples include: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter. Companies like Google have massively grown as a result of search advertising, and for the most part, this would not be true if it wasn’t effective in driving traffic to websites.
By advertising on search engines, you can bid on the advertising space people see when performing searches on what they’re interested in.
Advertising on Websites & Newsletters
Referral / Sponsorship Advertising
Some website owners will install an advertisement block, such as Google AdSense to allow advertisements relevant to the content on their site. By exploring this option, a link to your website will appear on pages the agency you use deems worthwhile, and you’ll pay based either on the number of clicks or impressions (views).
Banner & Skyscraper Ads
These ads are graphical in nature (as opposed to the often plain-text search ads) and appear directly on someone’s website, often via a third-party service like DoubleClick.com.
You can also contact website owners who advertise on their sites to discuss a paid agreement for an exclusive ad on their site.
Offline
There are always the old standby, traditional means of print advertising. At one point, this may have been only marginally effective. But as the online experience continues to become more ubiquitous in the lives of people, your efforts to advertise offline in meaningful ways should translate to the benefit of your website.
Consider advertising on whatever print materials you use, both at your physical location and at materials you use for business promotion (business cards, advertisements, etc.)
Build a Reputation
Some traffic building techniques are highly visible and easily measured. But there’s another that is less so but very important — your reputation. The type of word of mouth advertising that holds true in the realm of offline may even be amplified online.
The main way to build a reputation that helps to drive traffic to your site is as simple as providing a product or service that people find useful. But you can further the cause by putting your name out there where people interested in your industry tend to interact:
Publish blog articles that are easy to link to and share with others, and link to other blogs in your articles whenever possible.
Post highly relevant comments on others’ blogs and in related forums.
Encourage your email subscribers to forward your messages, which should contain a link to a page where the recipients can sign up easily.”
See Full Article From Aweber Here:
https://help.aweber.com/entries/21730741-How-Can-I-Drive-Traffic-To-My-Website-
Subscribe and Share my blog with any of your associates who need to learn how to drive traffic to your website.
Dedicated to your success because I believe in you!
Stuart Springfield
It’s easy to build a blog, but hard to build a successful blog with significant traffic. There’s an art to increasing a blog’s traffic, and given that we seem to have stumbled on some of that knowledge, I felt it compulsory to give back by sharing what we’ve observed. Keep reading to find out how to get traffic to your blog the easy way.
This post is intended to be useful to all forms of bloggers – independent folks, those seeking to monetize, and marketing professionals working an in-house blog from tiny startups to huge companies. Not all of the tactics will work for everyone, but at least some of these should be applicable and useful. There are several steps which explain how to get traffic to your blog. This was such a long post, I’ve broken it up into 3 episodes. Read on and come back tomorrow for the next installment of How To Get Traffic To Your Blog.
The first step of how to get traffic to your blog: you need to target the right audience. When strategizing about who you’re writing for, consider that audience’s ability to help spread the word. Some readers will naturally be more or less active in evangelizing the work you do, but particular communities, topics, writing styles and content types regularly play better than others on the web. For example, great infographics that strike a chord , beautiful videos that tell a story and remarkable collections of facts that challenge common assumptions are all targeted at audiences likely to share (geeks with facial hair, those interested in weight loss and those with political thoughts about macroeconomics respectively). how to get traffic to your blog.
If you can identify groups that have high concentrations of the blue and orange circles in the diagram above, you dramatically improve the chances of reaching larger audiences and growing your traffic numbers. Targeting blog content at less-share-likely groups may not be a terrible decision (particularly if that’s where you passion or your target audience lies), but it will decrease the propensity for your blog’s work to spread like wildfire across the web. Proper targeting is only the first step in how to get traffic to your blog.
A savvy way to learn how to get traffic to your blog is to follow what the big advertisers are doing. Advertisers on Madison Avenue have spent billions researching and determining where consumers with various characteristics gather and what they spend their time doing so they can better target their messages. They do it because reaching a group of 65+ year old women with commercials for extreme sports equipment is known to be a waste of money, while reaching an 18-30 year old male demographic that attends rock-climbing gyms is likely to have a much higher ROI. how to get traffic to your blog
Thankfully, you don’t need to spend a dime to figure out where a large portion of your audience can be found on the web. In fact, you probably already know a few blogs, forums, websites and social media communities where discussions and content are being posted on your topic (and if you don’t a Google search will take you much of the way). From that list, you can do some easy expansion using a web-based tool like DoubleClick’s Ad Planner:
Once you’ve determined the communities where your soon-to-be-readers gather, you can start participating. Create an account, read what others have written and don’t jump in the conversation until you’ve got a good feel for what’s appropriate and what’s not. I’ve written a post here about rules for comment marketing, and all of them apply. Be a good web citizen and you’ll be rewarded with traffic, trust and fans. Link-drop, spam or troll and you’ll get a quick boot, or worse, a reputation as a blogger no one wants to associate with.
Search engines are a massive opportunity for traffic, yet many bloggers ignore this channel for a variety of reasons that usually have more to do with fear and misunderstanding than true problems. As I’ve written before, “SEO, when done right, should never interfere with great writing.” In 2011, Google received over 3 billion daily searches from around the world, and that number is only growing: how to get traffic to your blog
sources: Comscore + Google
Taking advantage of this massive traffic opportunity is of tremendous value to bloggers, who often find that much of the business side of blogging, from inquiries for advertising to guest posting opportunities to press and discovery by major media entities comes via search.
SEO for blogs is both simple and easy to set up, particularly if you’re using an SEO-friendly platform like WordPress, Drupal or Joomla. For more information on how to execute on great SEO for blogs, check out the following resources:
Don’t let bad press or poor experiences with spammers (spam is not SEO) taint the amazing power and valuable contributions SEO can make to your blog’s traffic and overall success. 20% of the effort and tactics to make your content optimized for search engines will yield 80% of the value possible; embrace it and thousands of visitors seeking exactly what you’ve posted will be the reward. how to get traffic to your blog?
Twitter just topped 465 million registered accounts. Facebook has over 850 million active users. Google+ has nearly 100 million. LinkedIn is over 130 million. Together, these networks are attracting vast amounts of time and interest from Internet users around the world, and those that participate on these services fit into the “content distributors” description above, meaning they’re likely to help spread the word about your blog. This method is an easy and free way how to get traffic to your blog. How to get traffic to your blog
Leveraging these networks to attract traffic requires patience, study, attention to changes by the social sites and consideration in what content to share and how to do it. My advice is to use the following process:
If you consistently employ a strategy of participation, share great stuff and make a positive, memorable impression on those who see your interactions on these sites, your followers and fans will grow and your ability to drive traffic back to your blog by sharing content will be tremendous. For many bloggers, social media is the single largest source of traffic, particularly in the early months after launch, when SEO is a less consistent driver. how to get traffic to your blog: how to get traffic to your blog
At the very least, I’d recommend most bloggers install Google Analytics (which is free), and watch to see where visits originate, which sources drive quality traffic and what others might be saying about you and your content when they link over.
As you can see, there’s all sorts of great insights to be gleaned by looking at where visits originate, analyzing how they were earned and trying to repeat the successes, focus on the high quality and high traffic sources and put less effort into marketing paths that may not be effective. In this example, it’s pretty clear that Facebook and Twitter are both excellent channels. StumbleUpon sends a lot of traffic, but they don’t stay very long (averaging only 36 seconds vs. the general average of 4 minutes!).
Employing analytics is critical to knowing where you’re succeeding, and where you have more opportunity. Don’t ignore it, or you’ll be doomed to never learn from mistakes or execute on potential. how to get traffic to your blog
If you’re someone who can produce graphics, take photos, illustrate or even just create funny doodles in MS Paint, you should leverage that talent on your blog. By uploading and hosting images (or using a third-party service like Flickr to embed your images with licensing requirements on that site), you create another traffic source for yourself via Image Search, and often massively improve the engagement and enjoyment of your visitors.
When using images, I highly recommend creating a way for others to use them on their own sites legally and with permission, but in such a way that benefits you as the content creator. For example, you could have a consistent notice under your images indicating that re-using is fine, but that those who do should link back to this post. You can also post that as a sidebar link, include it in your terms of use, or note it however you think will get the most adoption.
Some people will use your images without linking back, which sucks. However, you can find them by employing the Image Search function of “similar images,” shown below:
Clicking the “similar” link on any given image will show you other images that Google thinks look alike, which can often uncover new sources of traffic. Just reach out and ask if you can get a link, nicely. Much of the time, you’ll not only get your link, but make a valuable contact or new friend, too! how to get traffic to your blog
Not surprisingly, a big part of showing up in search engines is targeting the terms and phrases your audience are actually typing into a search engine. It’s hard to know what these words will be unless you do some research, and luckily, there’s a free tool from Google to help called the AdWords Keyword Tool.
Type some words at the top, hit search and AdWords will show you phrases that match the intent and/or terms you’ve employed. There’s lots to play around with here, but watch out in particular for the “match types” options I’ve highlighted below: how to get traffic to your blog
When you choose “exact match” AdWords will show you only the quantity of searches estimated for that precise phrase. If you use broad match, they’ll include any search phrases that use related/similar words in a pattern they think could have overlap with your keyword intent (which can get pretty darn broad). “Phrase match” will give you only those phrases that include the word or words in your search – still fairly wide-ranging, but between “exact” and “broad.” “how to get traffic to your blog”
When you’re writing a blog post, keyword research is best utilized for the title and headline of the post. For example, if I wanted to write a post here on Moz about how to generate good ideas for bloggers, I might craft something that uses the phrase “blog post ideas” or “blogging ideas” near the front of my title and headline, as in “Blog Post Ideas for When You’re Truly Stuck,” or “Blogging Ideas that Will Help You Clear Writer’s Block.”
Optimizing a post to target a specific keyword isn’t nearly as hard as it sounds. 80% of the value comes from merely using the phrase effectively in the title of the blog post, and writing high quality content about the subject. If you’re interested in more, read Perfecting Keyword Targeting and On-Page Optimization (a slightly older resource, but just as relevant today as when it was written). Original Article
The next post for “How To Get Traffic To Your Blog” will cover guest blogging, doing Q&A’s, Commenting on other blogs, social sharing and much more. I’ve got lots of ideas to show you how to get traffic to your blog. (how to get traffic to your blog)
Stuart Springfield
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