Today is traffic Tuesday and I’m going to give you a tip that you can use to get 78% more traffic from guest blogging.
This is a really nice twist.
The Problem with Guest Blogging
Now the problem with guest blogging is that because you will typically have a whole heap of really useful content on the article, the link to your website is at the bottom.
In most cases you’ll be given and author box and that’s where you have a link to your website.
The issue is that fewer people click on that link because it’s e fewer people will make it to the bottom of the article and even the ones that do might be less inclined to click.
If your article is transformational in nature, or it provides actionable tips, then your audience will go and take action and implement your advice.
So these kind of links aren’t very effective for generating traffic.
And also according to some patents, Google considers links that are higher on the page a lot more valuable than links that are lower.
What’s the solution?
Obviously you gotta move the link to the top of the page, or even the middle of the page will do.
You gotta get in front of people and Google will view that as a more valuable link, too.
But of course when you do that there’s always going to be a danger that a link to your website is just going to look out of place.
There’s also a risk that it’s going to look spammy.
To avoid that you have to make sure that the link is contextual, there has some editorial merit for it being there.
So instead of linking directly to your home page, you might want to link to an individual blog post on your website instead.
If you’re guest posting on other people’s blogs then there’s a high probability that you have covered that topic on your own site as well, so you shouldn’t be short on content to promote.
A good way to do this could be; add a new ‘resource’ section underneath each subheading.
The new section might contain two three links to high quality resources for that specific topic.
For example, if you’re writing a guest post about mobile phones then one of your subheadings is about the latest iPhone, and another subheading might be about Android.
You deliver value in each paragraph and then include a short list of helpful resources in each section, one list for iPhone and the other for Android.
If you still need another example, take a look at this very post.
It’s important that you don’t overdo it – only link to your site once, and then in the author bio you might want to link to your social media profile.
You can also improve on this strategy a little bit too.
Instead of just linking to random sites that you might find during your research, you could also link to other guest articles that you’ve written.
This is a white-hat tiered link building strategy.
It’s completely ethical, it’s all good with Google and the chances of that becoming a black-hat strategy is pretty slim. Everything on the page, all the links have solid editorial merit.
Ultimately this is how you can add more value to the niche, how you can get more traffic to your website, and get more link juice to your website so you increase your position in the SERPs.
You’re creating content in a way that benefits you, it benefits the websites that you guest post on – so you become a valuable asset to them, and it also helps the people who consume your content.
TodayI’m going to give you a checklist that you can use to drive more traffic to your website.
There are about 8 or 9 key points that I want to cover, so let’s go through them.
Email Your List
The first tip, and we will cycle back to this at the very end, once you have created a piece of content send it to your email list.
Do this first because email lists have, on average, a 30% open rate.
Now compare that to social media which gets just 3%, it’s a no-brainer, so email your list before you post on social media.
And that 3% engagement rate from social media is dropping each year thanks to algorithm changes.
Which brings us to the second point.
Share on Social Media
Obviously it’s important to post on social media, but here’s the thing; make sure that you’re sharing each piece of content not only once, but multiple times across multiple networks.
This is vital for social media success.
You have to decide on a schedule and a frequency for each piece of content and make sure that it’s being shared over and over again.
I’m not talking about sharing your piece of content once, and then a few minutes later posting it again, and again, on the same network. Otherwise it’s just spam.
You gotta spread it out over the course of a few days and make sure that each piece of your content gets promoted multiple times on multiple platforms.
Outreach
And then next we have outreach and I’m not talking about just emailing random webmasters, or influencers.
For example, you might mention people in your posts.
Or you might have the top 10 best software.
I which case, you might want to reach out to the people or companies that you’ve mentioned in your posts.
Drop them a quick email to say how much you enjoy the product, or what they contribute to your niche and include the link to where you featured them.
It’s important that you don’t ask them for anything in return at this point.
I know how tempting it is to ask them to share it with their followers, but I urge you to not do that.
Instead just tell them what you’ve done for them and then let them make up their own mind.
This will allow you to establish a good foundation that a relationship that can be built up upon over time.
Remember to only promote people and businesses that share same values as you and your audience,
That way, you’re not just approaching people because they have a big following, and instead you’re approaching people that share the same values and ethics as you.
So should any cross-promotion occur from that, you’ll almost be guaranteed to reach the right kind of audience.
Community Contributions
Then the next thing that I’d like you to do is make community contributions where you’re allowed to.
So post on forums, Facebook groups, and other communities that allow promotion.
I’m actually going to give you a guide in the next week or two about using Facebook groups for traffic and go into detail.
Again don’t go around spamming – and I’m sure you wouldn’t do that.
So instead of just emailing a bunch of websites with a generic pitch, you have find areas where you can add value.
Try to find what’s missing and then tailor your pitch to that individual website.
Make sure that you can fill in those gaps and become an asset to that website and that community.
Content Syndication
The next one that I’ve got for you is content syndication.
This is where you republish your content on other websites.
Which websites? Well, you can approach news websites, you can approach other blogs, and one tactic that I found really effective is approaching podcasts and radio shows.
Every day I send some of my content to radio shows and podcasts. They report on my content and they will often recommend my websites as sources.
Press Releases
What you got to do is take something that is newsworthy, something that’s relevant and then put your unique spin on it.
Write why it’s an important development for your industry, and submit that as a press release.
Avoid the temptation to become overtly promotional or make it as an obvious attempt to drive traffic to your website.
Instead see it as an opportunity to increase the awareness of your brand.
One tactic could be; take a piece of relevant news and report about it in a way that makes it important to your industry, and then quote yourself in the article, with a little mention of your website.
Content Repurposing
Next on the list is content repurposing.
This is different to content syndication because you’re changing the format of the content.
This is something that I am doing at the moment and I am seeing pretty good results from it.
You will typically have at least three columns in your content marketing strategy.
The first one could be a blog post, then you take that content you turn it into a video, and then you take the audio from the video and turn it into a podcast.
You can also throw in other things like ‘click to Tweet’ quotes and infographics.
Repurposing your content into other formats will give you a much wider reach as it becomes available on more platforms.
Retargeting
And then the last one I’ve got for you ties directly into the first tip.
This is a specific type of advertising called retargeting.
You create a retargeting campaign designed specifically for the people who have already viewed your website.
Because they’ve already become aware of your brand in some way, they are easier to follow-up with and it’s easier to pull them deeper into your sales funnel through your email list.
So you might want to advertise your lead magnet at this stage, build your email list, and then that allows you to mail every piece of content to your subscribers.
I’m going to leave it there for today, if you’ve found this useful then share it with others who might benefit.
Today I’m gonna give you a really easy way to increase your sales by talking to your website visitors, in real time, so you can have a conversation with them and hopefully convert them into customers.
This is called conversational marketing and it’s when you have a live conversation with your prospect through your website to help them in finding the best solution for their problems.
Why do we need conversational marketing?
Conversational marketing is a method that’s particularly effective if you’re dealing with Millennials.
A recent survey that asked almost 3,000 UK consumers how they preferred to contact brands.
It found that one in three millennials prefer speaking to brands via a live chat as opposed to using email.
Email is still the highest of all preferred communication.
But thinking about the future and thinking about our prospects needs we have to meet them on their own terms.
While only 16% of older customers prefer using online chat, one in three millennials is still a substantial figure that can’t be ignored.
And it’s a number that is going to increase over time, so now is the perfect time to start using this technology – or at least get a good feel for it and understand what it’s capable of.
In the right hands this can do a great deal of good for your businesses.
How do you start conversational marketing?
A place to start with conversational marketing could be with a platform called Drift – I’m not an affiliate, and I’m not being paid for this recommendation – I am only suggesting this because I have used it myself and I like what it can do.
It’s free to use for free up to 100 contacts, which is plenty. And it takes a minute to get up and running on your website.
The software lets us create chat bots, it lets us capture email addresses, and it integrates with third party platforms like Slack, Zapier, HubSpot and a whole heap of other platforms.
The future of conversational marketing
I can really see potential here and believe that conversational marketing is going to become a cornerstone of digital marketing.
And that’s why I’m talking about it today; because along with the ability automate communication and send leads into your funnel or pipeline, the best feature is the ability to have live chat sessions with prospects.
Now we have a way to ask specific questions and deal with a prospects specific needs, so we can deliver the best possible sales experience.
Right now I can’t think of any better technology to use than conversational marketing to really connect and treat prospects as individuals, make them feel special by giving them the attention and significance they deserve.
Conversational marketing is going to be vital and knowing how to communicate through this technology in a persuasive way is going to play a big role in the future of online marketing.
Today I’m going to give you a really easy way to monetize your blog and it’s a method that I’ve used to generate hundreds of dollars in the last week alone.
I’m going to show you how you can make a lot of money from sponsored posts. This is a highly lucrative strategy, when you do it right.
Big brands have got involved with sponsored posts – I’m talking about brands like the New York Times and BuzzFeed.
Personally I’ve made hundreds of dollars from sponsored posts this week.
But listen, I don’t publish sponsored posts on Profit Copilot or any site that I have an emotional attachment to.
I only do it on the small niche sites that I don’t really care about but that’s just my own personal preference.
When you accept sponsored posts on your website you will want to be absolutely make sure that you are dealing with a trustworthy company, for the sake of your readers.
How do sponsored posts work?
A company will pay you to publish their article on your website.
They do this for a couple of reasons; the first one is that they want access to your audience, and the second one is they want a backlink to their website.
They see you and your website as influential and they’re also interested in receiving a backlink
on a site that has good Domain Authority.
I’ll tell you a little bit more about that in a second because it’s something that you want to be cautious about.
Generally speaking the higher your Domain Authority is, the more money you can charge for each sponsored post.
It’s easy money; I’m talking like minutes worth of work, for literally hundreds of dollars.
All you do is copy and paste their article on to your blog you hit publish, and then you receive payment.
But there are a few things you need to be cautious of – just like I mentioned a second ago, about the linking to other sites from sponsored posts.
You want to make sure that every link in those articles have got a ‘no follow’ tag, and that is to make sure that Google knows the link is paid for and therefore it shouldn’t pass any link juice, or credit that link in any way.
How much to charge for sponsored posts?
Let’s imagine that you have a website with a Domain Authority of 30.
You would expect to receive around $100 per post.
Not bad, right?
And when you think about how much work is actually involved (copying, pasting, and adding a nofollow tag to the links), it’s not much work.
How do you attract client?
At the very least you’re going to need a contact page on your website.
I would recommend having a media kit – now I’m going to talk about media kits in another post in the near future, and I’m going to go through some awesome examples that I’ve seen.
But if you want to be a bit more proactive about attracting clients to you there’s a wide range of services you can use.
You can use sites like Tomoson, RevContent, She Speaks, FameBit – there’s absolutely loads out there I will probably compile a list for you at some point.
So that’s how you get started with sponsored posts, and as you can see it’s a really easy and lucrative way to monetize your blog.
And before you go I’ve got some extra tips for you, that you might want to think about before you get started.
It’s really important to have a professionally designed website.
You have to make sure that your blog is well maintained and make sure that it’s updated frequently.
Make sure that you don’t have any spam in the comments.
Secondly I would make sure that you label any posts that are sponsored as such.
This is ethically the right thing to do and it also tells others other companies and other bloggers in your space that they can buy sponsored posts on your website.
How do you protect yourself?
And finally how do you protect yourself from being ripped off?
It’s no secret that trust is in short supply and there are always going to be people will try to take advantage of you.
So here’s how you protect yourself.
In WordPress, when you publish the post you have the option to set a password on it.
Send a link to the article, along with the password to your client, so they can verify that it’s online.
Tell them that the password will be removed and the article will go public as soon as you receive payment.
This is a smart way to protect yourself while keeping your clients happy.
Right, I’m gonna leave it there for today. If you’ve found this useful then share it with other bloggers.
Its like virtually sitting behind your visitors and watching over their shoulder as they surf your website.
You can see every single action that they take and then use that information to increase your conversion rate.
When you install this on your website you’re going to be able to clearly see all user behaviour.
You’ll be able to record visitor all actions, and it lets you run feedback polls and surveys.
It also lets you create sales funnels, so you can see where the weaknesses and the drop-off points are.
And its super easy to install. I had my account up and running in literally about 30 seconds.
The best bit is that it’s completely free to use, but if you get more than 10,000 page views a day then there’s a pro version that you can upgrade to.
But even at the free level you’re going to get an astonishing amount of useful tools.
What does it do?
You’ll get three heat maps, three sales funnels and three surveys, three forms and three polls.
Plus a massive 300 hours of recording time, and that will tell you exactly what actions your website visitors are taking.
You’re gonna know where they’re clicking, you’re going to know how they’re moving through your website and you’re going to know where they’re leaving.
This is amazing information to have because if you are sending traffic through a sales funnel you will find the points that are causing people to drop out.
This gives you an opportunity to fix it and increase your conversion rates.
So all this sounds pretty incredible, right?
Well, there are another ways to use this tool.
How I’m using it
This is really beneficial to me because I’m running a Profit Copilot podcast and at the top of the website I have subscribe buttons to different podcast services.
And here’s another, potentially lucrative way to use that info.
When you can clearly see where people are clicking on your webpages, if you are running an offer (or an advert), it could be a good idea to move that into the position where people are clicking the most.
That’s a really quick and easy way to increase your click-through rate on adverts and offers.
Another cool feature of HotJar is the ability to play recordings and see the precise actions that people are taking on your website.
Your Visitors Privacy
Although we can see which pages someone visits and their country of origin the rest of the information remains anonymous.
We can’t find someone’s exact location and we don’t know their name, or anything like that.
So this doesn’t invade anyone’s privacy because we’re just looking at the actions that they take during a session.
We can see what type of browser they’re using and which operating system they’re using, and that’s about it.
When you watch a session can see all the visitors actions on your website; you can see them scroll on pages, you can see which areas catch their attention and you can see which buttons they click.
This is vital information because it tells us what is working on your website and what stuff you need to improve on.
Sales Funnel Conversion Rate Optimization
Another feature of HubJar is we can use funnels.
We can add all the pages of a funnel and monitor how effective they are as people navigate through them.
And more importantly, we can see which stages have caused them to dropped out.
There you have it, I just had to share this tool with you because I’ve just started using it in the last few
hours.
I discovered this last night and played around with it. In the first few minutes it started collecting data for me to look at and I was really impressed.
So I’m going to let this run for a few months and then I’m going to have a look at the trends and the big picture stuff.
Then I’ll be able to see what areas of the website people are really working, and which ones aren’t.
Hopefully this will help me to create a better user experience for my website visitors and increase my conversion rates as a result.
If you’ve found this useful then pay to forward and it share it with others who need to know about it.
Today I’m going to tell you about a tool that you can use to drive free traffic to your website, and help you build a following on social media.
I’m talking about a free tool called DrumUp it lets you post to your social media profiles automatically.
And it does a bit more than that too.
Easy Content Curation
I have no relationship with this platform and I’m not being paid to endorse this.
It’s a tool that I’ve recently discovered and I thought I would share it with you guys too because I think it’s going to benefit you.
It’s easy to set up, I just had to connect it to Facebook and to Twitter – and that was a one-click process.
Then I put in a few keywords like ‘digital marketing’ and ‘copywriting’ and now when I login it brings back a whole heap of content that I can share with my audience.
This is called content curation and it does it beautifully.
I can schedule posts on both Twitter on Facebook at the same time, in one click.
But it does something else too which is really cool.
Drive Traffic For Free
They have a feature that lets you compose a new post and share your own content – just like we would in any social media platform but on DrumUp we have something really interesting; it’s called Repeat Post.
You can make DrumUp re-post your content multiple times, as often as you like.
So for example, you could schedule the same post to be shared every seven days, or every two days, or how often you want and the posting will just run on autopilot and drive traffic to your websites.
And because you’re scheduling relevant information to be shared with your audience, along with your own unique content, it can help grow your audience across social media platforms.
A Word of Warning
I know that there’s a lot of people trying to build an audience on social media platforms, and drive traffic to their websites – and I’m one of them too.
But listen, when it comes to building an audience on social media I think it’s a double-edged sword.
Personally, I don’t really think that it’s a good long-term strategy.
I think if you’re building a following it’s got to be on a platform that you own and control, like email.
And that’s why I put so much into email marketing is because if Facebook changes the rules, like they did recently, or if Twitter changes algorithm like they did a couple of weeks ago, then I won’t be affected by the decisions of those companies.
So that’s why I strongly suggest that if you’re using a tool like DrumUp then make sure that you are driving that traffic to platforms that you own and you control, such as your blog and your email list.
Right, I’m gonna leave it there for today, if you’ve found this useful then share it with others who might benefit too.
What’s the best way to convert cold traffic into customers? It’s a sales funnel, so I’m going to give you a sales funnel template that you can use.
This post comes as a result of a comment I read on Facebook, which said:
“We don’t do sales funnels. When you start to look like everyone else – you start to look like everyone else.”
That kind of tickled me a little bit because I’ve seen the rejection of sales funnels a few times and I don’t understand the logic behind it.
The fact is whether you like it or not, if you’re communicating online then your visitors are already in a funnel.
Where does a sales funnel start?
Everything you do online is part of a funnel.
If you are promoting something, or asking someone to engage with your brand in any way, the people who’ll receive that message are in your funnel.
The thing is, most people who have a websites or an email lists don’t realise that the funnel exists whether they want it to or not.
So let’s say you have a blog and you’re churning out awesome content on a regular basis and you have a link where people can buy your ebook.
Now you might believe that because you’re not asking anyone to opt-in to an email list, it means that you’re not using a sales funnel.
The truth is; you are using a sales funnel even if that cold traffic hits your blog post and sees your offer and decline it.
All those visitors are still part of a funnel. It just means you’ve got a very poorly designed funnel.
So I’m going to show you how to fix that and I’m going to give you a sales funnel template that you can use to convert cold traffic into customers.
Sales Funnel Template
Let’s get down into it, I’ve drawn this is a diagram to describe what’s happening.
Awareness
The first square represents a blog post and that is the first stage of your sales funnel – this is actually called the
Awareness stage.
The names aren’t that important, and different people call different stages of a funnel by different names.
Don’t get too hung up on that stuff, just focus on the process.
Interest
Then the second stage is where you would ask them to opt-in to an email list – so that could be a squeeze
page or it could be a content upgrade, or even a form on the blog post itself.
This is the interest stage of the funnel, because people are now interested in what you have to say and they’ve taken the next
step forward.
Decision
The third stage would be trigged once they’ve subscribed to your mailing list.
In most cases you will make them an offer immediately after they opt-in, and this is called a one-time offer.
This is a special offer just for the people who have subscribed to your mailing list.
They’ve expressed interest in what you have got to say so then you make a very small pitch.
This one-time offer is going to be a very low priced product which makes purchasing from you low risk and it can be used as an ‘impulse buy’ to move them onto the next stage of your funnel.
This stage of the funnel is the decision stage.
The decision stage is where they decide if they’re going to buy from you or not.
Consideration
If they decide to accept your one-time offer then you will immediately pitch them a second product.
But if they decline the upsell we can take them to a down sell page.
The down sell page offers them a cheaper alternative to the upsell.
It’s a similar product but maybe it has fewer features or it doesn’t do the same thing in the same way as the upsell offer.
It’s tempting to just offer a discount on the upsell product but I would strongly urge you to avoid doing that. It’s unethical and you’ll only train your customers to distrust your initial offer.
For this sequence, so far, you’re going to need three products – and they don’t have to be massive products, they can be short lead magnet type products.
As long as they’re cheap, low risk, and low investment.
This is the consideration stage of the funnel because they are now considering more of their options.
They are now asking themselves how much are they going to spend with you.
The conversation has changed in their mind.
It’s gone from deciding if they are going to spend money with you, to considering how much are they going to spend with you.
Retention
This leads them to your core offer.
This is your big ticket item or your medium priced offer.
Now they are at the retention stage of the sales funnel.
So now you have this a solid, highly lucrative sales funnel template.
If you structure your offers around this template you can use it to convert cold traffic into customers.
If you’ve found this useful share it with others who need to know.
I’m going to give you a 5-step process you can use to boost organic traffic to your website.
This works great if your blog is at least six months old, and the older your blog is the better this works.
But if you have a brand new blog or one that is less than six months old then I probably wouldn’t bother with this, but otherwise it’s definitely going to help you get more traffic.
This is something that I first learned from Glen from ViperChill, and in the last couple of days Darren from ProBlogger has also spoken about this strategy.
Darren says that 92% of his traffic goes to his the archive pages on his blog.
It’s really important to understand where traffic is going, because if 92% of his traffic is going to the older pages on his blog, that means that 92% of that blogs income also comes from those pages.
So for that reason he is now encouraging people to update their archives just like Glen did a few years ago.
If they’re both seeing the same results then we should listen.
What they are both encouraging bloggers to do is to go through their archives and update the older post.
And what happens? When we update the old pages on our blog, Google loves it.
And that increases your chance of getting a higher rank in the search engine result pages.
I’m going to give you a 5-step process that you can use to update your archives as a checklist.
Fix Errors
The first one is to fix any errors so grammatical errors and broken links.
Make the content relevant for today.
You might have written that article two or three years ago, and some of the content might be out of date.
So make sure that the information still matters today and it still speaks to people in current terms.
Flesh it out
And then the second thing that I’m going to tell you to do is to flesh it out.
Add more detail to your older blog posts.
So add quotes, and use the comments section as a resource.
Answer questions from the comments, or throw in more info and ideas from there.
Basically, make your older blog post a more substantial and valuable piece of content.
Make it More Visual
Then the third thing that I’d like you to do is to make it more visual.
Improve the images, add diagrams, and if you’re not using images then certainly add one at least one big image at the top of the article.
Optimize
And then the fourth thing that I’d like you to do is to optimize.
Optimize your content in a couple of different ways.
The first way is for search engines, so make sure your on-page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is up to date.
SEO changes over time, so make sure it’s still working.
Also, focus on conversion optimization and social sharing optimization.
When you optimise for conversions make sure that your call to actions are still relevant, and that they still work.
Maybe now is a great time to add lead magnets if you’re using them.
And make sure that people can subscribe to your email list or whatever easily see your main call to action.
Schedule Maintenance
Then the fifth one is to schedule ongoing maintenance for your archives.
What I would do is; every day that you’re not blogging could be a maintenance day.
So you could go through an article on those set days, every week.
To sum up; fix errors, then flesh out your blog posts and make them absolutely the best they can be.
If you do this then you will increase the amount of organic traffic to your website because Google loves these kind of updates.
And generally speaking, they will increase the search engine rank of that piece of content.
I’m going to leave it there for today, if you’ve found this useful then share it with others who might benefit too.
Which tools do you absolutely need to have to build a successful blog? I’m going to give you 7 free tools that you can use to dramatically improve your blog.
Today was inspired by someone called Peter Mercer, and he is from a website called One Arm Bandito, and he posted on a Facebook group called Blogging Newbs, which has around 18,000 members and it’s a fantastic resource that I spend a bit of time in and answer questions on there when I get the chance.
Peter asked this question:
As a new blogger I’m still working out if I can make a success of blogging. I’m wondering where you think it’s worth spending money for someone in my position? There’s no end of tools etc available. I just want to invest in the essentials for now to see if I get traction.
Now, I’ve been in that exact position myself when I first started blogging in 2004. I really didn’t want to invest anything beyond what I had to.
And on the Blogging Newbs group Peter received a wide range of answers – and a lot of them were fantastic.
I have permission from Albert Noah from Android Tipster to share his advice, which resonated with me.
He said:
Any article you might have read recommending certain tools are just wanting to make some affiliate sales off you.
Instead, read a lot on search engine optimization. That’s where the gold sits.
I agree with what Albert has said.
If you invest your time into learning the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and doing a little bit of keyword research (which we’ll touch on again in this post) then you will immediately put yourself in a better position.
Who can you Trust?
As Albert mentioned, a lot of bloggers only recommend tools as an opportunity profit from affiliate links.
But is that really true?
In my experience, yep, and it annoys me a little bit.
I don’t begrudge anybody from making a few bucks from a recommendation, I think that’s fair.
But, you’ve probably seen this yourself, some affiliate marketers will promote the tool only because it puts money in their pocket and not the tool which is best for their readers.
So for that reason there is no affiliate links whatsoever on this post.
Even though all these tools are free, most of them do offer upgrades.
I’m refusing to put a single affiliate link on this post so you know that the advice I’m giving you is coming from the right place and is for your benefit instead of mine.
The Right Foundations
These 7 tools will only come into play once you have your domain name and hosting account sorted out.
I’m not talking about free here; stay away from free hosting.
The main tool that you absolutely need is an autoresponder or some way to collect email addresses.
Along with your domain name and hosting account, your email list is essential and it’s worth investing in.
There are free ways of doing it, but if you use a professional service like Aweber, ConvertKit or Active Campaign, then you are paying a company that specialises in email delivery.
Because you’re not relying on your own server or your own hosting account to deliver those emails, they are guaranteed to arrive in your subscribers inboxes.
I’ve tried building an email list for free, and I regret it.
A few years ago I built an email list of around 30,000 people, and only a fraction of the emails were ever landing inside inboxes. It was a massive mistake, so invest in professional email delivery.
I use Active Campaign and I can recommend using that unless you are going to promote a lot of affiliate offers.
If you’re going to promote affiliate offers then Aweber is the one to go with.
Take Control
But why do I recommend getting; your own domain name, your own hosting account, and your own email system?
These are all systems that you control.
You own everything, you’re not relying on platforms or third parties that can change algorithms, Terms of Service or just decide they don’t like what you’re doing, and shut you down.
So no matter what you’re doing with your blog, make sure that the core is owned and controlled exclusively by you.
Why do I recommend building an email list?
Here’s why your list is the most important tool you’ll ever buy – it’s a major source of traffic, that’s ever-growing.
Imagine this; every time you publish a new blog post you’re gonna need an influx of visitors to read it, right?
A large portion of that traffic comes from your email list, and the more you blog, the older your blog gets, the bigger your email list grows.
That means you can send to your blog whenever you publish a new article.
And that is how you build a successful blog – it starts with collecting email addresses.
7 Free Tools for Blogging
What are the seven 7 tools that I recommend you use?
If you’re starting a blog for the first time then WordPress this is a fantastic amazing platform for bloggers.
It comes in two flavours; WordPress.com and WordPress.org.
You absolutely really want to install WordPress on your own hosting account.
A lot of hosting accounts now come with WordPress already installed.
If yours doesn’t then watch this Profit Copilot video and it will walk you through installing WordPress. It literally takes two clicks so install on your own hosting account, and you can use it for free. This is called a self-hosted version.
Whatever you do: Don’t use the hosted version on WordPress.com.
This is simple to use and lets you keep track of other websites.
You just put in the RSS feeds of your favourite websites, as soon as they post new content it updates on Feedly and every day you have a fresh list of content to go through.
This helps to keeps you up to date with news in your industry, and it helps you to keep your finger on the pulse of what is happening in your niche.
I think that is an essential for every blogger.
Again, this is free to use but they have a more advanced version too.
It’s called UberSuggest and it’s an alternative to the Google Keyword Planner tool.
Just put in your keywords or search phrase and hit go.
Then it tells you the search volume for those keywords.
This is an essential for bloggers because, as I mentioned earlier its smart to consider the SEO aspect.
That way you have a better chance of succeeding, compared to someone who is not using any form of SEO.
It’s a good idea to let the search volume influence you to an extent – but don’t let it guide you into creating content you’re not qualified to cover, or allow it to prevent you from covering the topics you want to.
And then the last tool this one is really for the creatives out there. I first learned about this from Ike Paz, and I’ve been hooked ever since.
We all need images and banners for our blog posts, right?
But how do you make them if you’re not a Photoshop expert, or if you don’t want to pay someone to create images for every post?
Use Canva.
They have a free version and I have used this extensively.
I usually make my images in Photoshop, but when I’m in a rush or when I’m creating lead magnets (those ethical bribes that we use to get people to subscribe to email lists) I make them in Canva.
It’s an easy to use system and you can create all kinds of graphics quickly.
If you want to express your creativity that’s the tool to use.
So there you go, I’ve just given you 7 free tools that you can use to improve your blog.
If you’ve found just one of these useful then pay it forward and share this with your network.
Today I’m going to give you a strategy that will help you drive a lot more traffic to your website. I’m going to explain a cornerstone strategy that I’ve used to drive four million hits a month to one of my websites; its content syndication.
What is Content Syndication?
Content syndication is when you take content that you have already published on your website and repurpose it in new ways.
You publish that content elsewhere, either in the same format as the blog post, as text, or change the format, such as video or audio.
This strategy can drive a huge amount of organic traffic to your website, when you do it right.
I’m going to give you the strategy, because in addition to the traffic you can also use it to build high quality links to your website, and you can use it to increase awareness of your brand.
There are some hugely popular web sites out that feature syndicated content, I’m talking about sites like CNN, The Huffington Post, the New York Times, and even my own content has been syndicated repeatedly by the BBC.
But where do you republish your content?
There are a few different things you can do.
How do you Syndicate Content?
The first one I’m gonna tell you about is repurposing your content.
You can take the contents of blog post, use that as a script for a video, and then upload that to YouTube.
You could also then extract the audio from that and turn it into a podcast.
Now have 3 pieces of content, made from 1.
And there’s a really smart way to repurpose your content because you now have 3 platforms that you can promote it on.
So you’re effectively reaching 3 times the audience – in theory, anyway.
Another way is to syndicate your content is to use a website like Medium.
You could just take your original article and paste it straight into Medium as a regular post on their website.
But I don’t recommend doing that. Medium has actually got an import tool that you can use.
Most importantly, when you use the import tool it will automatically set the canonical tag for you – and that is vital for good SEO.
Also another syndication tool that I have used extensively is called NewsNew.co.uk.
Submit your RSS feed to that website and every time you publish a new post it will appear there too.
NewsNow gets huge levels of traffic for practically every niche out there.
But if you’re going to use content syndication properly you have to scale it, right?
Scaling Content Syndication
It’s no good just having a few places that you can republish for a bit of traffic.
We need to scale this, but people often get confused between guest blogging and content syndication.
I’m going to tell you how to use both.
Good, longterm content syndication starts with guest posting.
Have your own blog is essential for this.
Post high quality content on a regular basis and let people see that you’re serious about your niche and you know what you’re talking about, and that you are of service to your audience.
Once you’ve been publishing for a while and you have a solid body of work that lets people see what you’re all about then approach other websites that accept guest posts.
How do you find blogs that accept guest post?
Finding Guest Posting Opportunities
This is really easy.
Go to Google.com and ype in your niche then hit the plus symbol, and then type in ‘write for us’. The boolean search will look like this: Niche + write for us.
Hit return and you’re going to get a load of websites that accept guest posts in your niche.
When you’ve been accepted by them and you write unique high-quality posts for them, you’ll begin to build a relationship with those blogs.
Then you can then pitch republishing ideas to them.
Publish on your own blog first and show the post to blog editors that you’ve been working with.
Because you’re a valuable asset to their business there is a high probability that they will let you republish articles from your own blog from time to time.
And that begins the journey into content syndication for the long term, and makes the strategy scalable.
The end result is a mix of content written specifically for the audiences of other blogs, and syndicated content from your own blog.
I know from experience how powerful this strategy is because I’ve done it for my own blogs.
So I’m going to leave it there for today, if you’ve found this useful then share it with others who will benefit.
Today I’m going to show you how to optimize your content for Google. You’ll learn how to find low-hanging fruit that you can use to rank high in the search engine.
And then I’m going to show you how to structure your content so it ranks fast.
You’ll see how to find the exact phrases that people are searching for, so you know what type of content to create for them that delivers maximum value.
And then I’m going to show you how to structure your content in the right way.
So let’s get down to it.
Keyword Tool
I’m going to go through the process with you in the video above, so for a step by step walk through just follow along with that.
The first thing that we got to use is a keyword tool – now you can use the Google Keyword Planner but it’s not as simple as it used to be.
So if you want to get the exact search volume you now have to create a campaign, it’s still free to do it’s just an extra step in the process.
For that reason I’ve actually found a better keyword tool, maybe.
You decide for yourself if its better, in the meantime let’s call it an alternative keyword tool.
I am kind of in love with this, it’s called KWFinder.
You get around 5 free searches a day, that’s more than enough to find the right keyword.
You’ll have to open up Notepad or have some way of making a list.
All set?
We use KWFinder to find out what the exact phrases people are searching for.
It sounds obvious but because we come from the marketing and content creation thing point of view, we only ever make guesses at what we think people are searching for.
The people that we want to reach might be using different words and phrases that we’re not aware of.
So we use the search tool first of all to tell us which phrases people use.
And secondly to also find keywords that have low difficulty but high search volume.
Keyword Phrases
For this example I’m going to use one that Eben Pagan uses.
This is one of those niches that combinations niches.
Eben likes to use ‘lose weight for a wedding’.
This works great because we take the weight loss industry and then the wedding industry and we combine them together to create an overlap.
For the purpose of this post I’m going to assume that you’re a personal trainer and you want to help brides fit into a wedding dress.
So in a keyword tool, I would type something like ‘lose weight wedding’, and then find relevant keywords.
That way you’ll get lots of ideas.
Search Volume
Use the keyword too to find easy to rank phrases, that have a relatively high search volume.
But remember, the niche that you’re in will determine what kind of search volume you receive.
Some niches will have a very low search volume in comparison to other niches which might receive higher search volumes.
But don’t let that deter you – every niche is profitable.
It’s not really about the search volume, it’s about the value that you can deliver – it’s about the problem that you can solve and the urgency of the people who need that solution.
Just make it as easy as possible.
In our example we’re going to target ‘lose weight before wedding’ related phrases, so you make a list of that and other related keywords.
BuzzSumo
Once you’ve got around 4 o5 key phrases to start, the next thing that we would do is take the one that receives the highest search volume and use BuzzSumo to examine what type of content is being shared.
Go through each of the articles it gives you to find out what kind of content is popular.
Then you’ll know what type of content to create. You’ll know if it should be how-to guides, interviews or listicles, etc.
We do this to make sure that the content we create is going to be share-worthy.
Add the URLs of the most popular pages to your list so you can go back and examine it when you need to.
Incognito Mode
Now we need to go to Chrome and use Incognito mode.
We do that because we’re going to search in Google – but we don’t want Google to reference any of the content that we may have previously seen.
When we normally use Google we always end up in a little bubble.
Google presents us with a personalized version of the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs) which we ought to avoid this time.
We want to see the SERPs other people see them.
So while in Incognito mode to Google.com and search for your main keyword.
Autofill Suggestions
Notice that you will have the search bar make autofill suggestions.
We want to take note of a few of the top suggestions because this will give us content ideas for later.
Go ahead and search for your main key phrase and take a look through the SERPs.
While you do that notice that we have some of your key phrases in bold.
LSI
We should also see some words in bold that are not included in the phrase.
Take note of those, they are important.
In the example, Google sees ‘wedding’ and ‘bridal’ as almost interchangeable.
This is called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI).
LSI was created to combat keyword stuffing.
Google creates a degree of relevancy between phrases, so in this instance it’s looking at ‘wedding’ and ‘bridal’ as being relevant to each other, or at the very least being in the same category.
Sometimes it screws up and it gives us weird results, but in this instance it’s got things spot on and it knows exactly what we’re looking for.
Use LSI to find other keywords to add to your content.
Related Searches
Also take a good look at the Related Searches at the bottom of the SERPs page.
In my example I saw lots of additional search phrases related to weddings and weight loss.
For your key phrases you’ll want to take all of the ones that are relevant and add them to your list.
You can use these for future blog post ideas or you can find ways to put them into your current blog post.
Keyword Density Check
One more step that I like to take is to check the density of keywords on the top pages in the SERPs.
Keyword density is debatable, like most aspects of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
There are plenty of other checkers online for free and they will tell us how many times a key phrase has been mentioned in any article.
This will tell you roughly how many times to include the keyword, in comparison to the other words in the page.
Deliver Value First
Now listen don’t get too hung up on the numbers.
I know it’s tempting to create a system or a formula for everything but it doesn’t really work like that.
There are well over 200 signals that Google uses to determine the position of a piece of content in the SERPs.
So don’t get too hung up on things like search volume, keyword density, LSI or any of the other host of things that we could be focusing on.
Really, our focus should be on serving the community that were involved with and delivering value to the niche that were in.
If we make that the priority we’ll naturally create content that absolutely delivers value to the people who will consume it.
The Structure
So now we have an idea of the keywords that we’re going to use, and we have an idea of what type of content to create, we can just go ahead and start work on the blog post.
Take the keyword with the highest search volume from your list and add that to your title.
Do spend the time to think about this because it’s the first thing that people will see.
If you can, write something with a real emotional hook in there.
Once you’ve chosen a title you can now structure the rest of your blog post.
Take a few of your other keywords and phrases then paste them in.
The H1 Tag
If you’re using WordPress then your title is going to be a H1 tag by default, and that’s exactly what we need it to be.
This is going to tell Google that of all the key phrases on your page this is the most important one.
Then you turn all the other keywords or phrases on the post into a H2, which tells Google these are the second most important words on the page.
This is exactly how I structure all my posts.
The very first paragraph should be the introduction.
Sometimes I will start with a story.
Before and after storylines are a great way to pull people into the content.
The H2 Tag
Then for every H2 section I would add 3 main points, with a paragraph for every point.
Typically, the first section, after the introduction, would be used to explain the benefits of your content.
The next section would be the ‘how-to’ part of the post. That’s where you teach your audience how to do something, or give them recommendations.
The final section might include why it’s important for them to take action.
Maybe a little bit of fear would be a good motivator. Explain why not doing what you propose could be a bad thing.
And then before you know it you will have a fairly comprehensive article done and dusted that you can submit to Google.
Submit to Google
To submit it to Google we can go to the Search Console and choose ‘Fetch as Google’.
You just put in the URL of your blog post there and that’s it, all done.
Make a Web
One bonus tip that would give you is if you are creating a lot of content you might want to link to it, from inside your other blog posts that are relevant to that topic.
If you link all of your relevant articles together you’ll create a web, or a network of content for Google to spider.
And good links are like food to search spiders.
So there you have it, I hope you found this useful and I hope you use it to rank your content higher in the SERPs.
Before you go, this stuff can have a positive impact on people’s lives when they do it right, so for that reason pay this forward and share it with the people who need to know about it.
They’ll probably be very thankful that you have and it also helps me out in a massive way too .
