Steve Shaw

About Steve Shaw

Do you have your copy of Steve Shaw's Content Authority Formula yet? It gives you the proven 1-2-3 formula for building your authority, influence and visibility, at the same time as helping your SEO. Download your copy now - click here.

Build Your List With Content Upgrades: On Your Blog… And Beyond!

By |February 29th, 2016|

Want a more powerful way to convert visitors to your blog into leads for your business? How about a 300% to 785% improvement in conversion rates?

Welcome to the world of content upgrades…

In brief, it means offering more value to the visitor  – say in the form of a relevant download – in exchange for their email address.

But content upgrades aren’t just for your blog…

Content upgrades also work when integrated into content published on other platforms across the web.

In fact, thanks to the often higher engagement levels you get on these other content platforms, this can be even more effective. Yet few if any are really doing this right now…

I’ll share more on this below!

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How To Blog On Medium (And Why Your Business Should!)

By |February 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.

(Yes, your business now needs to “Be Everywhere“!)

Such content platforms include LinkedIn Pulse, SlideShare and YouTube, not to mention all the main social networks.

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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How I Grew My Traffic From Organic Search By 1,465% In 12 Months

By |February 12th, 2016|

Today you’ll learn how I grew the amount of traffic I attract from organic search from just 52 visitors 12 months ago, to 814 visitors clicking through from the SERPs last month. That’s an increase of 1,465% within the space of a year – or nearly 16 times the amount of traffic.

I didn’t do anything particularly spectacular or out of the ordinary. I just created content on a regular basis, and the results are exactly what should happen. As I’ll show you, this growth was based on publishing a new blog post just once a week. (Mostly, anyway!)

If anything, the traffic growth could have been a lot more. As I’ll show you, for the first three months my publishing schedule was in fact just one post a month!

And even once I moved to once a week, the odd week was missed here and there. In the end, we’re actually talking just 35 new posts over the 12 month period. But the result is that the blog now attracts hundreds of new visitors every month through the search engines, and that will only continue to climb.

Had I published the full 52 posts for a year’s worth of weekly publishing – a full third more posts – my traffic may have been a third higher too, nearly 1,100 a month from search.

So in this post I’ll show you:

  • The exact stats, how they’ve grown over the course of the past 12 months, and how that relates to the growing number of posts I’ve published. I also show you what they looked like for around a year and a half before that, along with some analysis of each stage, so you get the full picture.
  • How to harness that traffic, as it grows, for business purposes. There’s little point attracting traffic for traffic’s sake.
  • How the content created for your blog isn’t just for your blog. Find out how you can leverage it for a wide range of marketing activities.

And I wrap up up with five key takeaways you can apply to your own business.

Don’t Want To Read? View As A SlideShare Or Video

But first, a quick proviso…

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Ultimate Guide To Social Meta Tags: Open Graph And Twitter Cards

By |February 1st, 2016|

By adding some simple social meta tags to your website or blog, you can improve how your content is displayed on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. This improves your visibility and increases your traffic by making your updates more appealing for both clicks and shares.

After all, when you use the right image, descriptive text, and so on for a sponsored update on social, you can improve engagement (including click-throughs) by often 100s of percent.

The same principle applies for organic updates – normal, every day, run-of-the-mill updates on social – and social meta tags are how you control exactly what’s shown, including:

  • The title
  • The description
  • The image

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The 3-Step Way To Repurpose Your Blog Post As A Quality YouTube Video (And Get Your Business On The World’s Top 3 Websites!)

By |January 22nd, 2016|

If you could do just one thing to get your business more visibility on the web’s top 3 websites, would you do it?

I’m talking of course about video, the growth of which is just exploding due to factors such as easier and faster mobile video access, widespread tablet usage, and videos playing directly within Facebook and Twitter feeds.

Creating a single video allows you to build more visibility for your business not just on YouTube, but also Google, Facebook, Twitter, and numerous other sites.

Most business owners consider getting rankings on Google as vitally important for their businesses.

But what about the second largest search engine, YouTube, processing more than 3 billion searches a month, and bigger than Bing, Yahoo, Ask and AOL combined (see the infographic)?

Unless you’re creating videos on a regular basis so you can be found on YouTube, you’re otherwise invisible on the third biggest site in the world. That’s a significant marketing black hole.

And then there’s Google Video Search, videos shown in their main Web Search listings, and engaging audiences with autoplay videos on Facebook and Twitter.

In other words, video is now crucial for your overall online visibility, and building up an online presence for your business. It’s a large slice of the marketing pie.

The difficulty for most businesses of course is in creating those videos so they can get a piece of the action.

But what if there was a straightforward, relatively easy way to create videos for your business on a regular basis, based on your existing content?

This would allow you to start taking full advantage of YouTube, and start attracting a bigger slice of your marketplace to your business.

Sound good?…

This post shows you how…

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“My Customers Aren’t On Facebook And Twitter!” – Here’s Why Your Business Still Should Be…

By |January 15th, 2016|

An interesting email came in from a customer a few weeks back stating that Facebook and Twitter simply weren’t relevant to their business.

They were in a specific niche selling products and services B2B within a specific geographical location. Their client base, which they had an intimate knowledge of (of course, vitally important), certainly didn’t use either social platform either personally or professionally. It wouldn’t even be on their radar.

Unusual? With over one and a half billion monthly active users worldwide on Facebook alone, yes. But general stats are just that – general. It’s always smart to know your own market in fine-tuned, specific detail.

Instead, the best way for them to reach potential customers was through search (Google) and video (YouTube), backed up by a presence on LinkedIn because they were B2B.

Smart. They know their market. And as they saw it, Facebook and Twitter were completely irrelevant.

But, smart as they are, is that really the case?

Would Facebook and Twitter actually still hold value for them as a business?

In fact, this post shows that even if you’re not reaching your marketplace directly through Facebook and/or Twitter, there are still important benefits to be had.

Rather than ignoring these platforms (even if your customers do!), your business should still strive to build up a following and a presence on them. While you might not use them to reach clients directly, they can certainly help indirectly.

Here’s 3 main reasons why…
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How To Repurpose Your Blog Post As A SlideShare Presentation (And Get More Online Visibility, Authority and Traffic!)

By |January 8th, 2016|

According to ComScore, SlideShare is one of the top 100 most popular, most visited websites in the world. The best bit is you can siphon off some of this traffic – over 70 million visitors a month – and direct it to your own website.

Because of the nature of the content it hosts – presentations – and thanks to the fact it’s owned by LinkedIn, the traffic it sends is also some of the highest quality (a.k.a. easier to convert to leads and sales).

There’s also very little competition. Very few businesses are taking advantage of this. The door’s wide open.

Want some?

The good news is it’s easy to start taking advantage of SlideShare on a regular basis. Rather than starting from scratch each time and wondering what to create a presentation about, systemize it.

Each time you publish a blog post, repurpose it as a presentation for SlideShare. This post shows you how to do just that.

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6 New Year’s Resolutions For Content Marketing Success

By |December 29th, 2015|

At this time of year it is of course customary to think about the 12 months ahead of us, to set goals and to resolve to adopt new and positive habits to help achieve them.

That goes for business too (it’s not all weight loss and fitness!). So with content marketing now crucial to even stay in the game, I wanted to share 6 key New Year’s Resolutions to help you achieve success with your content marketing in the coming 12 months.

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How To Blog When You’re Not A Blogger (And Bring Big Benefits For Your Business)

By |December 18th, 2015|

A lot of small business owners shy away from blogging, despite all the benefits it brings.

Here are just some of the reasons – or excuses – provided:

  • “I don’t know what to create content about”
  • “I can’t write”
  • “It’s just not something I want to do”
  • “I don’t have time”
  • “My type of business is different”

Perhaps you can relate to one or more of those? Or maybe you have a different reason (let me know!)?

Either way, I wanted to show you how you can still blog as a business, and enjoy all the benefits of blogging and content creation in general, without needing to consider yourself as a blogger. In fact, you don’t even have to create any content yourself if you don’t want to.

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How To Use Facebook Notes To Market Your Business (And Why You Should Start Now!)

By |December 11th, 2015|

Facebook Notes is available on your Page (as well as Profiles) and means you can publish longer content directly on Facebook. This allows you to reach more people on Facebook, potentially by simply repurposing content you may already have published elsewhere.

Find out how to use Facebook Notes in this post… along with more info on why you should start incorporating it into your marketing now.

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