5 Great Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog

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So, you’ve got a blog – which makes you just like every other company with a heartbeat. How do you turn that blog from a content receptacle into a valuable branch of your business? Instead of mindlessly reading articles about why blogging is important, you need something tangible – something you can grab onto and use. How can you maximize the value of your posts?

In essence, it all comes down to your distribution strategy and how effectively you’re able to attract traffic to your posts. [Read more…]

Pinterest Becomes No. 1 Traffic Driver For Several Top Retailers [Infographic]

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Pinterest LogoWhile social bookmarking site Pinterest might be two years old the sharing platform really came into it’s own during the second half of 2011 and now the company is the top traffic referrer for retail based websites.

If you’re unfamiliar with Pinterest the program essentially allows users to create “pinboards” which are the equivalent of an online bulletin board for popular categories such as food, wedding planning, home decorating, etc. As users find interesting information online they can use the “Pin It” bookmarklet or their iPhone app to save things both from online and offline solutions.

As more users create bulletin boards and share their findings with friends traffic is sent to retailers and suppliers such as Ajinomoto. That traffic according to Experian Hitwise is driven by 58% women which is of special interest to advertisers, brands and retailers.  [Read more…]

Does Google Really Know What’s Best for Your Blog?

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Some blog owners will read Google’s guidelines and take anything the company says as the rule of the internet.  And while many of the policies Google sets forth are good practices for any website, does it mean that we really have to follow every little thing the search engine company says we should do.  There are many cases in which something Google says is taboo is actually a very good idea for your particular blog and it might even be beneficial to your readers as well.

For instance, Google has stated that it is “evil” for you to run a blog contest in which you ask other blog owners to link back to your site as part of the entry of your contest.  They see this is a way of manipulating the search results, but it’s also just good practice to get other sites to link to you so people can find you through other blogs.  Getting backlinks is not just a good practice for getting a better ranking in the search engines.  It’s also a great source of traffic for your blog and you should be trying to get as many other blogs out there to link to your pages.

Since Google is the largest search engine on earth many people also assume that any guidelines the company lays down must be the law.  But no search engine is the police force of the internet.  So it really begs the question that if Google says something is wrong for you to do on your blog, but that same thing is really beneficial to your readers, what side do you take?  Should you just listen to Google and rob your readers of what they want just so you can stay in the good graces of Google? [Read more…]

3 Reasons Why You Can Build Site Traffic Through Multimedia Marketing

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Marketing is an essential component of any business.  This is why it has practically been made into a science. Without a great marketing strategy, chances are you will get left behind by the competition. With the popularity of the internet a new kind of marketing strategy has surfaced. This is called multimedia marketing.

Multimedia is basically media that “moves and talks”. There are two components in multimedia: audio and video. This is an extremely effective marketing element that you can use to drive traffic to your site. Why? Let me give you 3 reasons. [Read more…]

Five Tips for Creating Fresh Blog Content Fast. Every Day

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Blogs benefit immensely from being constantly updated, and yet it’s also one of the more difficult things to do with a fair amount of consistency.

If you are working on your own personal blog as a means of creative expression or just chronicling your own experiences, you’ll find yourself blogging on and off — depending on the ebbs and tides of your life.  That is perfectly fine and understandable because it is virtually impossible to have a life where things are happening all the time and still be able to write 35o words about it.

But if you are blogging professionally, clients will appreciate a fair amount of regularity and coherence within a framework of targeted results that lead to the achievement of  a goal or goals.   Clients will appreciate a well thought out plan and the accomplishment of work that is consistent with the plan.

Sure, it sounds like work and it IS work, but having a plan and working according to plan can actually minimize the time you spend working and maximize productive offline time — which is, really, everything that happens outside the frame of your computer screen.  Moreover, working according to a plan can enable you to have more fun while doing work.

[Read more…]

Writing Blog Posts and Web Pages for a Breakthrough to Meaningful Traffic

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Building up traffic for a new blog or website can be a slow and difficult process if you are doing it by yourself with little or no guidance from experts.

After attending all the seminar-workshops and reading all the books there are to read, it can still pretty much be a game where you either hit-or-miss.  However, staking your company’s reputation in a social media campaign can mean investing substantially in a hit that delivers marginal results or misses that diminish your reputation.  Either way, it could be a costly experience that makes some people turn their back on social media and never look back again.

But if you are an entrepreneur who has decided on  planning and implementing a social media campaign for your company without hiring experts, there are a number of ways of finding a shorter route to maximizing your hits while ensuring you don’t hammered by painful misses.

Carefully crafted blog posts or web pages promoted in the right way could shave off weeks or months from a promotion plan and enable you to reach a milestone much quicker.

[Read more…]

Are Humans Reading Your Blog?

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I was looking over some of my blog stats today and hit a hurdle that I have run face first into before. I have a lot of readers, but not a lot of commenters. So…how do I know the traffic I am looking at belongs to human beings?

I know that there are a bunch of ways you can identify spiders, crawlers, robots, ants, bots, worms, and other automated indexers. But truth be told, sometimes the only way to tell is by looking for IP address patterns, including high frequency and time of access.

I’m racking my brain for other ways to prove to myself that I am writing for human beings. Here’s what I have so far, and I need you help! [Read more…]

feedforward: New Blog Traffic Driver? Lucien Burm Believes So

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We caught up with Lucien Burm, founder of Kimengi, which has created an interesting new tool for bloggers called feedforward (see demo). Here’s the interview.

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1. How do you explain what feedforward and Kimengi do to people who have never heard of them before?

The first thing I say is that we create a more lateral web, but most of times I need to explain two things first: recommendations and widgets.

Everyone knows about recommendations that webshops provide, such as ‘people bought this, also bought…’. So at first I explain to people that this is the functionality we provide. Then I talk about our widget as a very smart website within a website that can create the same kind of recommendations on your blog/title and even better. It is better because all widgets on all participating sites can work together creating cross-site recommendations. And then, the recommendations are not only based on what other people liked, we look into context too. [Read more…]

5 Things That Change as You Blog

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Blogging is like any other business or activity, if you stay with it long enough, eventually things will begin to change for you. If you’ve been blogging for a while, you’ve likely already noticed that you don’t run your site the same way now that you did when you began. Likewise, if you just began, you’re probably already thinking of ways that you can improve or expand.

Your blog, nor you as a blogger, stay the same from month to month, year to year. Things change and, for the most part, it’s best to work with the tides rather than fight them. The change is rarely for the worst and, for the most part, it is inevitable.

Here are five areas that, over, the years I’ve been blogging, changed drastically for me. None are bad things. Some of these are signs of growth, some are signs of simply getting older as a blog/blogger. Either way, they are changes most bloggers can expect to face if they stick with it long enough. [Read more…]