A Much Wanted Impact: Best Social Media Practices for Blog Growth

Blogging has become a profession of its own, replacing “traditional” careers such as law.

Blogging isn’t a demanding career because it is flexible and it is easy to adapt it to your needs. You just need to create your own spot for writing (at home, the office, a café, etc.). Then prepare your mind to unleash your inner world. But you may ask: how can I live from something so personal?

The bright side of this challenge is that many people worldwide share the same interests as you. People are looking for inspiring stories that will make them get out of their chairs and start doing what they have always dreamed about. And if you can add a monetary value to that, that’s even better, right?

Today we are going to review the best practices you can apply to help your blog to develop. By doing so, you are also securing your path to success.

1 – Create your own niche

Even if you want to express every single idea that comes to your mind, that doesn’t mean your blog has to host posts ranging from gardening to photography or cover both motorsports and ballet. That’s madness and will certainly drive visitors away from your site.

Take two to three days and think carefully about what your very own passion is. After that, you can start writing about it, as well as topics related to your passion. You can even write about out-of-niche topics as long as you relate them to your blog’s theme.

If you find creative ways to gain an audience, then you certainly are going to secure loyal visitors.

2 – Engage your audience

Now that you started building your audience, it’s time to invite them to interact and to keep them anticipating what are you going to do next. In my personal opinion, there’s no better platform for this goal than Instagram.

Instagram allows us to communicate through images, which are immensely appealing and valuable. But also, given its latest updates, Instagram also helps us to dialogue with our so-called “followers.” And yes, people are following what you have to say, so keeping the one-post-a-day recipe is the first step to success.

By keeping an eye in your personal stats (follower count, post count, likes), you can determine the best strategy for maintaining and growing your fan base. Tools like Gramblast are indispensable for having an accurate knowledge of your follower count because Instagram doesn’t show the exact number after 10k followers.

Keep an eye on your image quality: avoid any kind of pixelated images! Nothing expresses the term “unprofessional” more than that.

3 – Get some extra help

Guest posting is a practice well-known by many bloggers. The idea behind guest posting is to use the reach of authority websites in your own niche to help you grow your visitor count.

How do you do that? First, you need to reach the authority site’s admin/editor and do a proper proposal. Many websites ask for a fee in exchange for sponsored posts or visual advertisements (some of them on a monthly basis!). Others require you to include advertisements from their sites or to give them a product you sell—in case you happen to host a store as well—in exchange for a spot on their site.

This is where you need to play your cards well: refrain from doing self-promoted posts. Both admins and users hate that. But do tell your story through the article you’re giving to the host site. Any links you include in your post should be natural and be educational to your readers.

You can learn more vital practices on how to pitch your guest blog post from this infographic by Infobrandz.

Infographic Courtesy Of Infobrandz.com

4 – Don’t post too often

As bad as it is to neglect a social media profile, doing the opposite is just as bad, if not worse. Those who post around four to five times per day on a platform such as Instagram or Facebook are only scaring off their audiences. Posting so often looks like an information bomb that has no unique content.

Keep an editorial schedule where you organize your blog posts, but also sort the blogs you post on places like Instagram and Facebook. Twitter works differently. You literally need to tweet your way through the ranks, and the more the merrier as long as your tweets are relevant and not spammy.

5 – Keep healthy SEO practices

From well-written titles and metas to adding tags to your images and posts, giving SEO the attention it deserves is crucial. SEO is the fastest way to grow your website’s authority. There are several guides around the net that summarize the essential elements of SEO, but overall follow these points:

• Naturally add keywords throughout the text
• Do interlinking (adding links in your blog to internal pages of the site on which you’re posting)
• Remove plugins that slow down your website and don’t upload large images—page load time is crucial
• Always fill in alt-tags for your images
• Link to authority sites

By following these tips, you are taking the first step towards becoming a blogging star. However, keep in mind that this is a step-by-step job, and you can’t expect success overnight. With time and dedication, your efforts will pay off. Good luck!

The post A Much Wanted Impact: Best Social Media Practices for Blog Growth appeared first on Growmap.

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A Much Wanted Impact: Best Social Media Practices for Blog Growth

Do You Really Need To Blog Everyday To Get Results?

If you want to get your blog noticed by Google and the other search engines, do you really have to blog everyday? When I started my first blog a few years back I remember reading somewhere that if you wanted to get your blog ranked on the search engines, you only had to write and publish a blog once per week.

For whatever reason, the once-a-week schedule for writing new content to your blog was considered ideal. It would keep Google happy, and I would receive a lot of traffic.

Keeping The Search Engines Happy

So I figured that if I published once a week, 52 pieces of new content on my blog each year would keep the search engines happy, and I would be rewarded with lots of traffic. But it didn’t quite work out that way.

I soon learned that Google does reward and send traffic to blogs that regularly provide fresh and up to date content. “Yikes”, I thought, “That means more than once a week –  I’m going to have to blog everyday! I won’t have time for anything else”.

Quality Over Quantity

However, Big G wants quality over quantity. If you need proof, take a look at successful and well-known bloggers Neil Patel and Pat Flynn.

They both began blogging by posting regularly. They would send out posts of 400 to 600 words a couple of times each week. And they were reasonably successful. But then they began publishing blog posts of 1,500 to 2,000 or more words on an less regular basis and things really took off for them. They now each have very successful and profitable blogs in their niche.

Delivering Value

So does that mean that you don’t have to blog everyday? You can blog pretty much whenever you want just so long as your post has lots of words. No, not at all.

Successful bloggers like Neil Patel and Pat Flynn spend a lot of time producing a blog post. They may only post a few times a month but each post delivers so much quality content that their readers don’t need to go anywhere else for information about that particular blog post’s subject matter.

What’s The Secret For Blog Post Frequency?

There isn’t a secret formula for blog frequency. You don’t have to blog everyday. But you do need to publish quality content. One outstanding value-packed post published every month does much more for your business and your reputation than 4 or 5 weekly blog posts that are just full of fluff and filler.

Don’t stress out if you can’t blog everyday or get too concerned how often other bloggers are publishing content. Creating additional stress over something you have no control over is not going to help your business. Do keep an eye on your competitors, but remember that they may have more financial capital to spend on freelancers or out-sourced writers than you do. You can’t fight a budget that is bigger than yours. Always publish the best quality content you can, do what you can do, and do it consistently.

The post Do You Really Need To Blog Everyday To Get Results? appeared first on Blogtrepreneur — For Busy Entrepreneurs.

Blogtrepreneur – For Busy Entrepreneurs

Do You Really Need To Blog Everyday To Get Results?

How to Attract Relevant Blog Traffic with Content Promotion Strategies

Did you know that around 2 million blog posts get published every single day? That’s a huge volume of content for Internet users, but guess what: only few of those posts attract a great deal of traffic and convert the visitors to subscribers.

The huge activity in the blogosphere is an opportunity, but it’s also a challenge. You’re allowed to publish whatever you want on your blog, but you have to beat the competition if you want to get enough attention. You cannot sit back waiting for readers to find you, so you need content promotion strategies that will make you a successful blogger.

You’re already aware of the common advice for content promotion: share on social media, communicate with the audience, provide high quality, and so on. We will spare you from the same old things you read on a daily basis, and we’ll provide you with practical tips that help you attract relevant traffic to your blog.

1. Promote your blog through Facebook ads

You don’t have to try hard to find a way to attract relevant traffic to your blog; Facebook has already figured it out for you. There is a huge audience on this social network, and Facebook has all information about their interests. Thus, it can serve the ads to the right target audience. Facebook advertising will get you plenty of visits on a daily basis.

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As many other bloggers, you may have one question on your mind: how much will Facebook advertising cost? The good news is that you can control your budget, so Facebook will not charge any more than you have planned for your campaign. According to The Facebook Ads Benchmark Report, the average cost per page like in the USA is $ 0.84.

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These ads will appear like usual posts on the users’ timelines, so they won’t even notice the heavy advertising.

2. Make the posts engaging

You know you have to make the posts engaging, but how exactly are you supposed to do that? Engagement comes in the form of likes, replies, favorites, and shares. That’s determined through few factors:

• Visual appeal

You always make sure to choose the right images for your blog posts. Are you doing the same when you’re promoting them? You need to add images to Facebook posts, so your followers will notice them more easily. It’s even better if you complement the posts with videos. Thanks to Facebook’s autoplay function, many people will see those posts and they will click on them to visit your blog.

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• Hashtags

Some people mock hashtags, but even they can’t ignore the fact that the hashtag method is effective in content promotion. Use few 1-2 relevant hashtags when promoting posts on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. On Instagram, it’s okay to use more of them, but don’t get carried away with a huge block of hashtags.

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• The post length

There’s not much consideration about the length of a Tweet; you know you need to stick within the limited number of characters. However, you don’t have such limitations on Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and other social media networks, so the question is inevitable: how long should the posts be?

According to the information published by Buffer, the ideal character count is 71-100 for Twitter, 60 for Google+, and 40 for Facebook. Who would’ve guessed that Facebook users expect shorter updates than the ones they see on Twitter?

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It’s important to keep your social media updates to the desired length if you want to keep the audience engaged.

3. Mention and quote influencers

Bloggers who create a buzz with each new post they published are considered authorities in the online world. Everyone is recommending their content, but not all fellow bloggers do that the right way.

When you quote influencers, you have to make sure their words are relevant to your topic. Always include a link to the source of that quote, and make that part of your post tweetable. Why would you want to do that? – Because you’re not only trying to add value to your content through their words; you’re also trying to establish connections with influencers.

Once the blog post goes live, tweet those parts and tag the bloggers you’ve mentioned. You can expect their retweets and recommendations, so you’ll gain visibility in front of their target audience.

4. Be an active member of forums and communities

Forums are the perfect spot for attracting visitors who are interested in the content you have, so you need to make them an essential part in your content promotion strategy. If you don’t have time to write awesome blog content, promote it all over social media, and make valuable contributions in these online communities, then you use online services which offer great assistance in writing and editing, so you can rely on them regardless of the niche your blog is focused on.

Back to the forums and communities. These are the ones you can explore:

• Quora – that’s where everyone goes when they need an answer from an expert. You can target the questions related to your blog’s theme, provide awesome answers, and gain points that make you more visible.
• Reddit – you can find anything on this forum. Locate the relevant categories and become an active member of the community. Do not insult people and maintain a friendly, but authoritative approach that presents your blog in the best light.
• it – you only need to submit your content to 10-15 scoops to attract hundreds of visits to your blog.

5. Make the blog content easy to share

Content marketing involves more than promotional activities; it also includes the actual content you write. You need to develop share-worthy, easy-to-read content; otherwise you’ll be the only one sharing it on social media.

• The structure of the post is an important aspect of its ‘shareability’. How-to posts, listicles, and infographics are the types of posts the audience prefers.

• The headline has to be very appealing, since it’s the only thing most people will read before deciding whether or not to give the post a chance. Plus, the headline is the main point that attracts attention when the post is shared on social media.

• Write longer, elaborate posts. Although the attention span of the audience is not that great, SerpIQ found that the average length of posts that show up at the top of Google search results is 2000+. Longer posts also get more shares on social media.

Content Promotion Is a Process; Not an Activity

You need a precise strategy that will help you promote your content to the right target audience. Only a focused, well-planned approach will yield good results. This process will involve a lot of time and effort, but that investment will return with a greater number of visits to your blog, better engagement, and more conversions.

 

The post How to Attract Relevant Blog Traffic with Content Promotion Strategies appeared first on Blogtrepreneur — For Busy Entrepreneurs.

Blogtrepreneur – For Busy Entrepreneurs

How to Attract Relevant Blog Traffic with Content Promotion Strategies