website content strategy

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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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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Blog Content Ideas: 57 Ways to Effortlessly Generate Engaging Ideas For New Content

By |October 30th, 2015|

While a regularly updated blog is a key part of an effective online marketing strategy, a lot of businesses fall at the first hurdle. They struggle to come up with new ideas for blog content, and because of that never really get going and consequently miss out on all that blogging has to offer for their business.

Why should you blog?

In terms of measurable results from blogging, three of the main benefits are:

  • Enhanced search engine visibility – in other words, increasing levels of traffic from organic search
  • Support for social media activities and other forms of content distribution – you have regular content to share or repurpose into other forms and distribute elsewhere. You build links and traffic, as well as build visibility, authority and credibility.
  • Improved sales and lead generation – your blog content attracts your market to you through different channels, which you can convert into leads for your business and monetize. Did you know content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as other types of marketing, while costing 62% less (DemandMetric)?

(Want three more? Here are 6 big benefits you get from blogging as a business).

However, without the regular supply of blog content ideas, none of the above is achievable. The good news is that generating new ideas for your blog is a skill like any other, and is easy when you know how.

So here are 57 different ways to generate engaging ideas for new content for your blog — or indeed any other type of content to attract your marketplace to your business.

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25 Top Places To Publish Your Content And Market Your Business

By |September 25th, 2015|

Please note the information in this post is now out of date—click here to see a brand new and updated version for 2021, over on Takanomi’s new blog.


One of the biggest content marketing mistakes people make is only publishing their content in one place or on a single website. Minimal exposure, minimal visibility, minimal results.

If you’re going to create content in the first place, the next job is to give it the widest audience and greatest exposure possible. That means publishing and promoting it in as many places as possible where it’s going to be of benefit to you as a business.

It also involves repurposing content as and where required.

For example:

  • Create a new version of a post on your blog for publication as a guest post elsewhere.
  • Summarize the main points of a post to provide an answer on Quora. Link back to your post for those who want more in-depth information. (Caution: You might run into problems if you do this the wrong way. See the section on Quora below for more information).

Not all these of the places listed here will be suitable for all businesses – but many of them will be. And it’s far from an exhaustive list. As you ramp up your own content marketing activities, develop your own list of places that work for you.

(Note: These are not listed in any kind of order of importance… except perhaps the first).

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[Blog Title Secrets] How to Create Blog Titles That Bring You Traffic

By |September 11th, 2015|

Effective blog titles make all the difference between content that attracts traffic to your website (and business) on an ongoing basis for years to come, and content that barely gets noticed and has little benefit for you.

Even more significantly, when you repurpose your blog posts into say articles, videos, presentations, podcasts, and more, that difference in results is magnified many times over.

So spending time over your blog post titles is worth doing, and worth doing right.

Here are 10 sure-fire tips to help you create effective blog titles that increase your engagement and traffic.

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How A Mobile-Compatible Website Helps You ‘Be Everywhere’

By |July 30th, 2015|

As you’ll no doubt be aware, in April 2015, Google began rolling out their ‘mobile-friendly update‘. Effectively this removed websites from their mobile search results that weren’t mobile-friendly.

While significant in itself, the event probably represents the point at which webmasters and businesses owners finally had to take mobile seriously. It was a turning point. […]

How To Use Twitter Cards For More Sales And Traffic

By |July 2nd, 2015|

By using Twitter Cards, Tweets linking back to your site no longer contain just text and an optional image or two.

They allow you to create a ‘rich media’ experience for readers. That means additional visual, audio and textual content, with the ability to play video and audio from directly within the timeline.

These enriched Tweets can help them stand out from the pack, build your authority and credibility, and encourage deeper engagement including click-throughs from followers.

In addition, you can use Twitter Cards to capture new leads from directly within the Twitter timeline, and encourage users to visit your website with a special call to action button. Plus, when you choose to promote Tweets that use such cards via Twitter Ads, you can reach whole new audiences.

Presuming you are using a blog to publish the majority of your content and drive the rest of your marketing – as recommended in the “Be Everywhere” Online Marketing Blueprint – implementing Twitter Cards for your business is straightforward and only takes a few minutes. This post shows you how.

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Blog Content Ideas: 10 Easy Ways To Generate Laser-Focused Ideas For Blog Content

By |May 28th, 2015|

Content is of course one of your most important marketing assets. It works 24/7 to attract people to your business. But many business owners struggle to know what to create content about. Or they create content that fails to properly attract their target market.

This post aims to solve both those issues. Here are 10 top ways to come up with new ideas for content that are laser-focused for your target market. You should never be stuck for content ideas again!

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Google Plus: Is It Time To Take This New Kid In The Playground Seriously?

By |February 18th, 2014|

Google+ is the new kid in the playground - is it time to take it seriously?

You might be forgiven for shrugging your shoulders, sighing, and ignoring Google+ as “yet another social network”.

Facebook and Twitter are the big boys in town, and you’re already part of that crowd – who needs that new kid skulking in the corner, Google+?

After all, you’ve heard it’s “like a ghost town” over there. (But look deeper, and you realize the only people saying that are usually those no actual experience of using Google Plus themselves.)

So what are the actual figures? In truth, there are now a billion Google+-enabled accounts with 360 million active users, the +1 button is pressed 5 billion times a day, and they’re growing at over 30% per annum. Hardly ‘ghost town’ figures for a network less than three years old.

Yet, it’s still in infancy, and the best rewards in social networks are nearly always reserved for the early adopters. For business, and with Google Plus gaining momentum on an upward trajectory, it’s a wide open opportunity available right now for you to gain a strong foothold before your competitors even realize they were left behind looking the wrong way.

By ignoring Google+, or seeing it as an annoying sidekick not worthy of attention …

Could You Be In Danger of Making a Catastrophic Misjudgement?

Wait until you’re one of the last out the starting gates, and you may find your competitors in virtually unassailable positions, and find you missed the boat in terms of maximizing the advantages for your own business. And, unless you’re in any doubt, there are significant advantages available …

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