By Steve Shaw|2017-09-22T11:12:16+00:00September 22nd, 2017|
So you’re starting a blog for your business? Or perhaps have a fledgling one with a few posts, but not much to show for it yet?
Firstly, congratulations. You’ve made a big step in the right direction.
Approached in the right way, your blog can end up becoming one of your business’s biggest assets.
One day you can look back and feel pretty—dare I say it—smug.
You’ll have incoming traffic, highly targeted for your business, arriving on auto-pilot and providing a constant supply of leads and new customers for your business.
(Plus you’ll have ready content to use to keep in touch with existing customers, build your relationship with them, and keep them coming back for more…)
By Steve Shaw|2018-08-02T16:36:44+00:00June 9th, 2017|
Are you struggling to produce enough content for your website, blog, or social media channels? Don’t worry, you’re not alone.
The not-so-secret key to a successful content marketing strategy is creating high-quality and in-depth content. However, this takes a good deal of time, effort, and often money, all of which can discourage many businesses from taking full advantage.
In fact, research shows that producing enough content is one of the top three challenges that businesses pursuing content marketing face.
However, there are strategies you can adopt to ease the process and make it a whole lot easier.
As I frequently cover on this blog, one such strategy is to repurpose your existing content as new content you can then publish, share and distribute. Repurposing content saves you time and money, while extending your reach.
Simply put, repurposing your content and sharing it in different ways via different channels allows you to reach (and attract) a much wider proportion of your marketplace. The larger the audience you develop across multiple content platforms, the more influence you have. This increases engagement, boosting your reach significantly through sharing and inbound linking.
In other words, the more content you repurpose and share, the greater the long-term benefits for your business.
In addition, it’s no longer enough to just publish content to your own site. As I advise frequently, you need to be where your marketplace is, not where you want them to be.
Repurposing existing content for other platforms allows you to achieve it relatively easily.
But how exactly do you go about repurposing content for social media?
We previously covered a broader set of 50+ killer ways to repurpose your content. However, in this post we go into more detail and dig down into the main social channels to help you determine:
Which content on your blog you should be repurposing
The strategy to use to repurpose it for each social platform
By Steve Shaw|2018-08-02T16:09:21+00:00October 4th, 2016|
Broken links, such as those leading to 404 errors, can damage your WordPress site in two main ways:
It degrades the experience for visitors.Ever click links within a blog post only to find they lead nowhere? If so, you’ll know it reduces the amount of time you’re likely to spend on the page and reduces the credibility of the site in question.
It negatively affects your SEO. Google and other search engines understand the impact of broken links on the visitor experience. They prefer to send visitors to pages with up-to-date and intact resources. So if you have broken links, it’s important to remove or fix them as soon as possible.
…a broken link is doing some serious damage to your website, your reputation, and your business. A single broken link can impact your search engine rankings, your site’s user experience, result in lost customers and revenue, or, in worst case, all of the above.
SiteImprove.com
As well as 404 Not Found errors, there are 410 Gone, 502 Bad Gateway, and various other errors indicating a problem with the link.
Fortunately, broken links are easy to fix and keep on top of.
This post shows you different options you can use. The easiest method, as I’ll show you, is to use a simple WordPress plugin designed for the purpose, accessible from directly within the WordPress Dashboard.
By Steve Shaw|2018-08-02T15:07:27+00:00July 30th, 2016|
I get it.
You’ve heard about blogging and decided to have a go yourself. All you have to do is post regularly, wait for some traffic, stick some ads on it along with the odd affiliate link, and then the money starts rolling in.
Right?
Sort of. It could work. Well, at least to some extent.
Let’s just say while you’ll probably earn something (eventually), the money won’t exactly be rolling in.
The truth is, this model only achieves a fraction of what your blog could earn if it was monetized more effectively.
Worse, with changes in the way we all access the web, any income you might achieve when using this model is only going down. (More on this below…)
But… if you want to know how to monetize a blog the right way, and maximize your earnings from it (rather than bring in just pocket change along with an unhealthy dose of disillusionment), read on.
By Steve Shaw|2018-09-28T04:33:57+00:00July 22nd, 2016|
I won’t beat around the bush. One of the essential keys for blogging effectively and profitably is to be able to convert the traffic your blog attracts into opt-in leads.
Get this wrong, and you’ll struggle to make blogging work.
But by converting as many visitors as possible into opt-in leads, you can:
Build trust and credibility through more content and continual follow-up.
Encourage them back to your site repeatedly, further building the relationship.
Convert them over time into customers for your business (presuming you’re monetizing your blog properly).
Look at your blog and make sure there are conversion points that will in essence turn every post into a landing page. SocialMediaExaminer
The good news is there are lots of different approaches you can use to capture the email address of your visitors and convert them into opt-in subscribers. They’re relatively easy to implement too, thanks to the various powerful plugins available.
The trick is to find the right mix for your blog that maximizes your opt-in conversion rate.
This post runs through the top ten most effective opt-in approaches for blogs, and shows you how to put them into action today.
By Steve Shaw|2018-08-02T14:43:18+00:00July 8th, 2016|
Displaying an author bio at the end of your WordPress blog posts is one way in which you can:
Build credibility and authority. Mentioning career achievements, general background and anything that builds your authority with your visitors can boost shares and opt-in levels.
Help build your list. Use the space to link to a suitable lead magnet that visitors can download in exchange for their email address.
Boost social followers. Author bio boxes can include social icons with links to your social profiles, encouraging visitors to connect with you. This is more useful where for example you have different authors contributing to the content on your blog.
Some WordPress themes have built-in support for author bio boxes. But not all.
So what do you do if you want to show the author’s bio box at the end of every blog post, but your theme doesn’t support it by default?
By Steve Shaw|2018-08-02T14:29:10+00:00May 16th, 2016|
This blog is currently experiencing rapid growth in traffic from search. Last month, search traffic more than doubled from what it was just a couple months previously. This month looks on track to continue that rapid upward trend.
In fact, last month had over 11 times the amount of traffic from search for the same month last year.
Of course, there are multiple factors involved, but they mostly boil down to three main strategies, the last of which I focus on here:
Regularly creating and publishing valuable content. The more content you have, the more search traffic you can start to claim a piece of across an ever-widening array of keywords. Each new piece of content is an asset that fuels your future traffic growth.
Continually building online authority through the repurposing of that content through various online channels. This includes social media and building up our social audiences (for example, we’re now past the 10k milestone on Twitter). As content gets repurposed, republished and shared, you build natural inbound links that reflect a growing level of authority, and helps determine how your content is ranked. In other words, your content assets grow in value for your business.
Optimizing the blog for search. As well as optimizing posts individually for search, and effectively linking between posts to help search engines determine what content is about, it also means getting the right SEO foundations in place for the blog. While there are a plethora of SEO plugins available, there are just three such plugins I consider essential and that this post focuses on.
So in this post, I cover:
The 3 best SEO plugins for WordPress.
Why you need them. In other words, how they help your site rank and attract increasing amounts of search traffic.
How to use them. I’ll cover how to set them up for best results.
By Steve Shaw|2018-08-02T13:56:42+00:00May 2nd, 2016|
Should you be using Tumblr for your business? Perhaps.
It’s not a platform many businesses are familiar with. They struggle to understand it. At first glance, it’s all a bit overwhelming.
Some even dip a toe in the water, only to give up far too early.
Many others, still believing cheap shortcuts work for online visibility, post content on Tumblr as just somewhere-else-to-publish-confortent, with little real understanding or appreciation of the platform or its users. They consequently fail to get much if any benefit from it.
Is Tumblr just yet another social site?
Or is using Tumblr for business worth investigating further? What are the benefits?
That’s what this post aims to help you determine, as well as show you what Tumblr really is, and exactly how to use it for business purposes. I’ll even show you examples of real businesses successfully using the platform. […]
By Steve Shaw|2018-09-28T04:42:43+00:00March 17th, 2016|
I’ll admit it. I’m frustrated.
Frustrated by the misleading and incorrect advice being given to people asking questions like, Is it really possible to make money from a blog?, Is blogging for money realistic?, yada, yada.
Here are a selection of just some of the replies I’ve seen. The following are taken at random from Quora – but there are multiple posts and other info out there giving similar ‘advice’:
You get the idea.
So this post helps to put the record straight, and shows what’s really possible with real examples and income data. And shows how you can do it too.
By Steve Shaw|2018-08-02T11:00:29+00:00February 22nd, 2016|
As any regular reader of this blog will know, I’m a big believer that you should be regularly publishing content across multiple platforms. It’s the most effective way to reach your marketplace, grow your traffic and build your online visibility for all sorts of reasons.
There’s another biggie to add to the list, and that’s the Medium blogging platform. It’s one of the most popular online sites, attracting millions of visitors, and has hundreds of thousands of users.
For your business, it’s another key content portal from where you can start to attract increasing amounts of traffic and leads over time. As I’ll show you, it’s an interesting mix between an intuitive, easy to use blogging platform and some of the viral power of social media.
In this ultimate guide to using Medium for your business, you’ll learn:
What Medium is and how it works.
How to publish content on the platform.
15 top tips for using Medium effectively for business purposes.
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