The last Roundup was over two months ago.

These are the posts I ran into over this time that I thought were worth sharing.

If a post is here it’s because it’s either very good at solving some problem you have as a blogger or because I really like it.

If you think your post belongs in the next round up, shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to check it out. Here’s the second installment of the Random Roundup:

Random Roundup Two

1. Why I Love ZenSpill – GrowDude – When I read this post, it made my day. I don’t think I have to explain why. Guess this doesn’t really solve any of your blogging problems but..

2. The 6,528 Word Guide to Choosing Your Main Social Media Battleground – Blog Tyrant - Perhaps one of the most thorough posts on all things social media out there. Well worth a read whether you are a beginner or an expert. You are sure to learn something.

3. Learn How To Grow Your Email Subscribers- Adrienne Smith – Again, I don’t think I need to go into too much detail into why I like this post. Adrienne commented on my post about how she would love to have a header opt in box, but she doesn’t know how to code it so I thought I’d help her out. It was very awesome of her to thank me in a post.

4. 8 Unconventional Ways to Use Google Alerts for Better Blogging – Traffic generation Cafe – The main reason I like this post is because of how it ends. I have been a long time user of Google Alerts but as you may have noticed, Google Alerts has been becoming worse and worse as of late. Seems like Google is trying to wean people off the service. So Chitraparana ends this post with Google Alerts alternatives that are much better.

5. 100 Inbound Marketing Ideas – Marketing Chris – If you’re a blogger, chances are you more often than not run out of things to blog about. It’s pretty common to hit a writer’s block. Give this post a read and it will get your ideas flowing again.

6. How to Get Testimonials for Your Business or Blog Using Twitter for Social Proof – Kikolani – Probably one of the most useful posts I’ve ran into in a while. It can be pretty hard to get influential (and usually very busy) people to make a statement about your blog that you can use as a testimonial, even if they genuinely like your blog. So this would be a great way to show some social proof.

7. One Simple Method To Finding Influencers You Can Actually Connect With – ZenSpill – Getting traffic to your blog can be difficult and time consuming. Connecting with influencers who can send you hundreds of readers with a simple tweet makes this process much easier. Here’s how you do it.

What was your favorite post and why?

The post 7 Posts That Will Solve Your Blogging Problems appeared first on .

You are a blogger.

After a few months of blogging you probably realized something.

In order to succeed as a blogger,..

you need to build relationships with other bloggers in your niche.

Without the help of bloggers in your niche, it’s going to be very hard (unnecessarily hard) to get anywhere. But how can you connect with influencers in your niche when you are just starting out?

Why would they take the time to check out who you are and take the time to develop a relationship with you, if you’re not already a well known figure in your niche?

Well, they will. The trick is to find the right influencers and get in touch the right way.

So how do you find the right influencers?

Well, let’s first take a look at how influencers can help you in the first place.

And at the end, we’ll take a look at a bonus method that can help you find bloggers that a lot of influencers follow.

A Single Like By An Influencer Can Send You Over 200 Readers.

You can succeed without the help of other bloggers. Don’t get me wrong. It’s completely possible.

But why would you try to?

Sure you can get traffic solely through SEO, guest posting, or plenty of other ways, but having influencers that like what you write can make things a lot easier.

Here are a few heavy influencers from this niche that ZenSpill has been shared by:

Let’s take a look at what it means to your blog when one of these influencers share your content.

When Lisa Irby shared my post on 9 Ways To Get Traffic Without Social Media Or SEO. I received over 150 readers in the first day, from Facebook alone. Over the course of the next three days Lisa’s Facebook like sent over 200 readers from Facebook.

Sure, you can spend a year on SEO and completely ignoring other bloggers and you will probably start getting a few hundred visitors from Google a day. But wouldn’t you rather have your posts be shared to thousands of potential readers today? You by no means have to give up on SEO or any other methods, but having a few influencers like you as well will help you get a lot more visitors a lot faster.

Use Topsy To Find Influencers That You Can Connect With

Now, I’ve talked about Topsy before and that’s because it’s very good at helping you find any particular kind of people you are looking for. Right now you’re looking for other bloggers in your niche that have strong followings. This may not be as fun as the bonus method we’ll get into later, but it’s still very useful.

Topsy works like Google, except instead of searching through pages, it searches through Tweets. Because it directly searches Twitter, it can be very useful for finding people who have a lot of pull on Twitter.

Step 1. Go to Topsy and search for a generic term in your niche. For ex. “Content Marketing”.

Step 2. You want Topsy to show you results from this week or earlier. This way you will only find people who are still active and influential. Set this by choosing the time restraint in the bar on the left.

Step 3. With generic terms you will generally get a lot of results. Topsy will display a small orange number below each result next to a symbol of a chat box. This number shows the number of people who have tweeted the same post. Find a really big number and click on it. The higher the number the better.

This will take you to a page that will start with showing you similar tweets and if you scroll down, will show you all the people who have tweeted this link or have re-tweeted it. You will notice that some of the people have the words influential or highly influential next to their tweets.

Step 4. On the grey bar check the box next to show influential people only. This will help further narrow down your results.

Good job! You just got yourself a primitive list of some of the most influential people in you niche. As it is to be expected there will be a bit of noise and not everyone on this list will be that influential. You can stick to only the Highly Influential people to lower chance of running into someone who has no real pull.

Further Narrow Down The List To Real Influencers

Topsy saying that these people are influential and them being actually influential are not always the same thing. Lets first further narrow down the list to people who actually have a sway in your community and then approach the problem of getting in their line of sight.

Step 5. Click on the name of a person who has the words Influential next to their name and this will take you to a page about them.

You can just click their name to be taken to their twitter page. This is where things get interesting. There’re a few things here to take note of. A large number of followers doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Here are a few signs that will show you that an article shared by this person will send a lot of traffic:

• A Large Followers to Following Ratio – This indicates that they didn’t get followers by following other people and waiting for them to follow back. This shows that people actually went out of their way to follow this user, which is always a good sign. I should just point out though that having a small ratio doesn’t necessarily mean that their following is inactive.
• Their Tweets – Click on a tweet box, not the link in the tweet, and this will show you the amount of re-tweets and favorites that particular tweet got. See the number of RTs and Favorites their last few ten or so tweets have gotten. If they get at least a couple of RTs in general, you can bet people are actually following them and they don’t just have a huge dead weight number of so called “followers”.
• Engagement – Are they talking to a lot of other users on Twitter? Having a lot of conversations? This is generally a good indicator that there is an active community around them.

Ok. So you narrowed down your list even more. What now?

We narrow down this list one more time. To people that you can actually connect with. This is what differentiates you from all the other bloggers who just spend a lot of time trying to get noticed by someone who is never going to connect with you.

How To Bring Influencers Back To Your Blog

Step 6. Most influencers have their blog in their Twitter bio. Click through to their blog.

Step 7. Take a look at the comment section of their posts. A good portion of bloggers like to reply to each and every single one of the comments on their blog. Look for bloggers that get a good amount of comments on their posts but still manage to reply thoughtfully them.

What’s the point of all this? Why bother finding bloggers that actually take the time to reply to your comments?

This shows that these bloggers actually take notice of their commentators. Which for you, is a good thing.

Step 8. So get noticed. Comment on their blog. I find that most of these bloggers will click through to find out who you are after they see you somewhere between 1 – 3 times in the comments. More than half of these kinds of bloggers will click through to find out more about you in your first comment alone, if its insightful enough.

What makes a good comment? Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Longer than a Tweet. Shorter than a post – I don’t remember where I read this (SeoMoz?) but it’s very true. You’re not going to compel the blogger to find out more about you from a simple “Great Post“. But he or she also doesn’t have the time to read an essay. Try to keep it around 100 to 200 words. Maybe 300 if you got really passionate about it.
• What did you think? – Simply writing a few sentences about the things that crossed your mind while reading the post is good enough. Write about your experiences relating to the post. Write about why you agree or why you disagree. Comment about a particular point that was brought up in the post.
• End with what you liked about the post – Don’t start with this. It seems less genuine, when you start off saying “Great Post“. It seems like you’re saying it just to say it. Save it till the end. End with what you liked most about the post. Did you enjoy how detailed the blogger was about a certain aspect of the post? Did you like the pictures used? Was something funny?

In the end it should look a little like this:

Hey Mark,

I’m pretty new to this niche and don’t know too many bloggers here so connecting with other bloggers is quite important to me. In my experience, connecting with people is much harder than actually finding them.

I like that you broke down how to write a comment into actionable parts, my biggest problem when writing a comment is that I usually have no idea what to say or talk about even if I really liked the post.

Great post. Really liked the break down.

- SomeGuy

When you write the comment use your real name, they are less likely to think of you as a spammer this way. Most commentators make the mistake of linking their name to the homepage of their blog. The problem with doing this is that you are asking them to take a few extra steps to actually read a whole post, and they might not even read one of your best posts.

There is nothing to gain from this. The more steps they have to take, the more likely they are to leave without ever reading your content. Your goal is to get them to read what you write and convince them that you are someone worth reaching out to.

So instead link directly to one of your posts. Whatever post you feel will be most liked by this particular blogger. If they like what they see, they will most likely comment on your blog and start a conversation there.

That’s it. Your done. You now have a way to find influential bloggers in your niche and a way to get them to your blog and start a conversation. Once you establish contact you can keep developing the relationship by continuing to comment on and sharing their posts. If they like what they read on your blog, most of them will at the very least tweet it out.

Bonus: How To find Bloggers Who Influence The Influencers.

Finally!

The bonus.

This is the process for finding influential bloggers that also happen to be followed by a lot of other influential bloggers. Getting shared or linked to by one of these bloggers will have the domino effect of potentially getting shared by a lot of other influential bloggers.

This part is for all the people who subscribed to get simple updates. You can get the bonus by entering your email below and clicking “Get Updates”.

The post One Simple Method To Finding Influencers You Can Actually Connect With appeared first on .

Ever wonder?

How you can increase your subscription rate by over 400% with a few quick changes?

Well, you probably didn’t in those exact words but..

At this point you probably know about the importance of subscribers.

It’s the one thing that matters to bloggers more than anything else, because it is the one thing that no one can take away from you. You can spend all your time gaining more Twitter followers or more engagement on Twitter but if Twitter shuts down your account, you’re in a bit of hot water. The same goes for Facebook, your search rankings or anything you don’t own.

But an email list belongs to you.

No matter what happens you will always have that list. It’s a list of people you’ve developed a relationship with. It’s your direct way of getting in touch with your loyal readers.

So, how do you increase your subscription rate by at least 400% (roughly)?

1. Let Your Comment Section Double As The Form Field

When people want to comment on your blog, they are already filling in their name and email address into the fields. Place a little check box underneath the submit button that asks them to subscribe to your blog. Here’s how it’d look like:

With WordPress you can do this with a simple plugin. If you’re using Aweber, install the Aweber Comment Optin plugin and you’re good to go. Mailchimp? Constant Contact? Sales Force? Use the Wp-Leads Plugin.

2. Get All Your Commentators To Subscribe

I see this around all the time. Bloggers get commentators to subscribe to particular post for follow up comments. You have probably seen that little check box under the comment box that says something like this:

This is great and all but why stop there? Your goal isn’t to get them to subscribe to the comment so that they will come back, although that is much better than them not coming back at all, your goal is to get them to your subscribe to your blog.

When they check that box and sign up to receive an email about follow up comments, they probably already receive a thank you email. You should instead send them a simple thank you email that also asks them if they want to subscribe to blog. All they would have to do is click on the confirmation button and they would be subscribed. If you generally use an incentive to get subscribers, here’s what Pat Flynn says this email should look like:

“Thank you so much for your comment. I would like to offer you my eBook, (ebook name here) as a free gift. To receive your free eBook, simply subscribe to my newsletter by clicking the link below…”

The advantage of this method is that all they would have to do is click to subscribe. You already have their email address and this email just really serves as the confirmation. There is no need for anyone to fill out any form or take any extra steps. The simplicity makes this powerful.

My only issue is that the only way (that I know of how) to set this up is through subscribers magnet. I have no problem with this Plugin, but I don’t know how justifiable it is to buy the plugin for this one benefit.

3. Your Current Email Opt-In Placement Is Only Getting You 18% Of The Potential Subscribers.

The most common Opt-In form placement I see is the one in the sidebar. A look at the breakdown of subscriptions for Social Mouths showed that only 18% of the total Opt-Ins are coming from the sidebar.

This should give you a good idea of what you are missing out on depending on which placements you are or are not taking advantage of.

Your goal is to use as many of these sign up forms as possible without annoying the your reader (too much). Let’s take a look at the not so common placements in more detail:

Placement 1. The Feature Box - This is the subscription box that you see on top of the page as almost the first thing. Here’s how it looks like:

Ever since Derek Halpern made this famous, it’s been popping up all over the place, and rightfully so. For DIY Themes it increased their subscription rate by a solid 51.7% by just adding this one box. It’s a bit a hard to argue with results like that. Place the Feature Box in your homepage only. You can place it in all your pages, but it’ll get annoying really fast.

Placement 2. Slide In Optin Boxes – These forms are the ones that slide in at some point on a post. They look a little like this:

The advantage of these forms is that they draw almost as much attention to the Opt-In as popups do without being as annoying as the popups.These work best as reminders that it’s possible to sign up.

So, set them to slide in when your reader finishes reading the post, when they are fully appreciating the insightful-ness of your article and are looking for the next action to take. Set up your slide in Opt-In boxes so that they only show up to the reader once every month (maybe even two months). You don’t want to annoy your readers away.

Placement 3. Lightbox/Popup Form – You have all seen this around. It’s the annoying popup that asks for your email when you are trying to go read a post.

Popups can be very useful and every marketing guru swears on their effectiveness. I originally stayed away from using these using the popup Opt-Ins because I was afraid I would annoy my readers into leaving or reading less of my blog.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger tested this out. When he implemented the popup form his daily subscriber numbers changed for the better:

But surprisingly the page views stayed the same. No one seemed leave the blog after the popup:

My guess is that even though people are annoyed by the popup, they almost expect it because they have seen it around so much and don’t get offended enough to leave. So, what’s still keeping you from using the popup?

Here are a few rules to follow to make sure you keep that annoyance to a minimum.

• Frequency – Set up your popup so that it doesn’t show up every time someone visits your blog. This will annoy people into leaving. Set it up so it only shows up every once a month as a simple reminder, that they can sign up.
• Timing – Asking people to subscribe to your blog before they even get a chance to read your content doesn’t make too much sense. Set up your popup timer so that it shows up at least 60 seconds after they show up on your post. This way they get an idea of whether or not they want to sign up. You can also set it up so that it only shows up when they visit a second page on your blog.

Placement 4. The Usual Suspects – Here are the most common and effective placements for Opt-In Forms, that you should consider also using:

• Sidebar – Be sure that the Opt-In form is the first thing in your sidebar. Even placing it second is going to make sure you lose a few subscribers.
• End of the post – People who make it this far really like your content and are more likely to sign up.

The trick to making these effective is making sure they don’t look like the sidebar and end of the post Opt-In Forms of every other blog in your niche. Your readers develop banner blindness to these forms. When is the last time you even noticed a sidebar Opt-In form? Probably not in a while and even then you only noticed it because something about it stuck out, whether it’s the wording, design or call to action.

Spend a little research time looking at how these forms look on the rest of the sites in your niche and figuring out how yours can look different from the rest.

The How – Ok. So you know what you have to do. But how do you go about doing this? Well, I sat down for a few days and just coded everything the first week when I was started ZenSpill. But in hindsight, that is probably the most Ineffective way I could’ve accomplished this. Not only was this a huge time waster, in the end the code won’t be as good or fast as of one that is professionally made, like Hybrid Connect:

I am currently in the process of switching over to Hybrid Connect by Shane Melaugh. The building of the Opt-In forms is relatively intuitive and fast. For those of you who don’t want to code, no coding is required. This isn’t even an affiliate link. I just think it’s a great product and a huge time saver. (Although, I probably should make this an affiliate link at some point.)

The only problem I have with Hybrid Connect is that it seems to be messing with both Sharebar and Digg Digg plugins. But this is a more of a problem that WordPress plugins have in general in that they always seem to clash with each other. I’ll update this when I figure out a way around this problem.

4. Thank Those Who Comment And Get More Subscriptions

When people comment on your blog, chances are you are redirecting them to a thank you page. Aside, from a sentence thanking them for their comment, this page should really be a landing page for commentators trying to convert them into subscribers.

You can accomplish this on WordPress in a few simple steps:

• Step 1 - First create a landing page where you thank them with a simple “Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment.” Then place your general pitch and your Optin form.
• Step 2 - Install the Comment Redirect Plugin By Yoast. Set the redirect page to the one you just created in step one.

That’s it. You’re done. If you need a more in depth look at this process, I suggest you take a look at this awesome post by Ehsan at Guide and News.

5. Take Advantage Of Your Most Viewed Pages.

• About Me Page - When people land on your blog for the first time, chances are they are going to your About page to find out more about you and why they should bother listening to you. This is the page where you are doing everything you can to convince them that you are worth following. If you do a good job of that most of those people will probably want to follow you. Why not give them a way to do that right then and there? Place at least one optin form in your About page.
• Resources or Tools Page - Who doesn’t like free tools? Like the About Me page, your resources page gets a lot of traffic. Convert these readers into subscribers. A good way to do this is to place an Opt-In at the end of the page that will give them access to your favorite 3 tools. If they liked the rest of the tools on the page, chances are they will want know what your 3 favorite tools are.

6. Increase Subscription Rate By 50% By Just Removing One Field

Research by Dan Zarrella at Hubspot with over 40,000 contact forms (not email Opt-In forms) showed that the conversion rate improved by 50% when just one of the fields were removed.

Think about it. What are you more likely to fill out? A form asking for 5 things or a form just asking for your email?

Ask yourself if every single piece of information you are asking them is necessary. If you have a separate field for last name and first name, don’t. Make that just one field. Simply looking at a form that has one more field to fill out even if it is asking for the exact same information is going to make sure you lose quite a few subscribers.

7. Give Your Readers Social Proof

We are social creatures by nature. No one wants to feel like they are the only subscriber of your blog. Having some social proof in your optin form or near it will give your readers the feeling that they are making the right choice by subscribing. Here are the most effective ways to create social proof.

• Authority figures – This includes both people and companies. Pretty much anything that people trust or think of as an authority in your niche. Derek Halpern has a simple quote from Chris Brogan in or near his Opt-Ins that says “I’m totally loving Social Triggers”. You can also have logos of companies that you’ve worked with.
• Subscriber count – Simply stating “Join over 10,000 subscribers” goes a long way. Just don’t broadcast how many subscribers you have if you only have a few. This will end up hurting you by giving your readers a reason not to follow your blog.
• Social Media – Over 10,000 people follow you on Twitter? Let them know about it. I’d do this more subtly by simply placing the follow buttons nearby and allowing them to show how many followers you have.

Going to have to give credit where credit is due – This is from Neil’s post at Kissmetrics.

8. Let Your Guest Posts Do More For You

You write guest posts for a few reasons. You are either doing it for SEO, to become a recognizable and influential person in your niche, or so people will click on your links and follow through to your website. Either way the end goal is to get more subscribers. Why not make this easier for the people who click through?

According to Neil Patel at Kiss Metrics, your byline on guest posts should say exactly three things.

• Who you are 
• What you do
• Call to action

This would look a little something like this:

This guest post is by Mark Trueman, who blogs about effective marketing for bloggers at ZenSpill.com Click here to get his free E-book on blah blah.

When they click on your call to action, send them directly to a landing page. This way they can skip the step of going to your blog and choosing to sign up.

9. Create An Incentive

Giving your reader a solid and immediate benefit can be powerful. This is why so many bloggers out there offer you something in return for subscribing. It’s because it works so well.

Giving your readers something immediate takes advantage of a psychological principle called temporal discounting. This the tendency of people to overestimate the importance of something when it’s immediate and underestimate the value of something when it is far away. Here’s how ASAP Science explains it (52 sec video) :

So maybe signing up for your newsletter is the smart choice for your reader in the long term, but they won’t feel the importance of it because it’s benefit is somewhere off in the far future. But giving them the possibility of gaining something in the next few seconds greatly increases its value, and gives them a compelling reason to sign up.

The trick is to find something that your readers actually want. If they don’t care at all about what you are offering them then temporal discounting isn’t going to help you out much.

Have you ever done anything that increased your blog’s subscription rate? Oh and are there any other ways to set up #2 without the subscribers magnet?

The post How To Grow Your Email Subscription By 400% appeared first on .

But I can’t now.

Because someone else already did.

But I need to get you this useful info one way or another.

So what can I do?..

Enter Link Round Up

I’m going to be doing my link round ups a little differently. I realize most bloggers do them once a week on a certain day, but I’m going to be doing a round up whenever I feel that I’ve run into enough exceptional posts to make a round up out of. This will most likely be twice a month. Sometimes even less.

So naturally, because I won’t be posting these round ups weekly, not all the links will be from this week. But I will try and keep them recent.

If you think your post belongs in the next round up, shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to check it out.

Random Roundup One

1.How To Build Your Presence With Reverse Guest Posting – An insightful look into traffic generation on the flip side of guest posting by Peter Attia at Cucumber Nebula. Sure, you should still guest post whenever you can but allowing bloggers to guest post for your blog that can also raise a lot traffic. But doing this efficiently is a process that involves using tools from Followerwonk to BuzzStream.

2.150,000 Monthly Page Views and No Backlink Building – Pretty ridiculous achievement by Lisa Irby at 2CreateWebsite. 150,000 page views from Google with absolutely no backlink building.  Most people who hate SEO, hate it because they need to constantly build backlinks. Turns out that this not the case.

3.WordPress Security: How To Get Your WordPress Blog Hacked – Brilliant post by Ehsan Ullah at Guide and News. Your WordPress site isn’t as safe as you think. Simply using your default Admin account can make you vulnerable. Save yourself a lot of headache by taking a few simple precautionary steps.

4.How To Use Twitter To Your Advantage – A post by Adrienne Smith that you just can’t stop reading once you start. This post is about her journey from being able to barely get anyone from Twitter to her blog to getting a Twitter reach of over 5,000,000. An incredible journey to say the least.

5.How I Went From ZERO to 19,828 Visitors In 3 Months Flat! – A case study by Ti Roberts that’s been all over the internet. If you haven’t read this already, then you have missed out on an epic post.  Perhaps one of the most detailed posts I’ve seen so far. This post is a real world, step by step break down of how get from point A to point B. It doesn’t get any easier to follow advice than this.

6.6 Simple Farming Concepts That Apply To Blogging – A very interesting read by D. Dixon at 1 Singular Sensation. Solid concepts to follow and keep in mind when you are blogging. Some of these are all too often forgotten by bloggers.

7.Infographic: 2012 Social Media Statistics and Facts – An interesting compilation of data put into an infographic by Terrance Charles. How often do links about sex get shared? How many blogs does a professional blogger manage on average? How many people suffer from Facebook Addiction Syndrome? Who doesn’t like infographics?

8.How To Get Back On Track – Procrastinate much? Theodore Nwangene at Top Blogging Coach breaks down how to get yourself to work and get stuff done. Get work done even when you don’t feel like it. It’s much better than the one I wrote on procrastination and motivation way back in the day.

9.A Link Building Strategy That Will Benefit You – The title says it all. This is post is by Kevin Ocasio at KOmarketer. You don’t have to be a huge SEO fan to benefit from this post.

What’d you think of these posts?  

The post 9 Posts On Blogging You Really Should Read Immediately appeared first on .

Many years ago when I was only a college Freshman..

I accidentally stumbled onto a dangerous idea.

I got it into my head that if I can build an awesome site I could make some money and maybe get a head start on my college debt. I mean, how hard could it be? All I had to do was make an awesome site right?

yeah..

no.

Though my first site was a gaming site, the lessons learned and mistakes made still apply to blogs. I made the same mistake that most Entrepreneurs and Bloggers make when they are just starting out. I thought that the hardest part of creating a successful website or blog is building it.. This is not even remotely the case.

Creating the website is by far the easiest part of process. Whether you succeed as a blogger or not depends heavily on your ability to get your blog in front of the right audience. The most brilliant, insightful, and beautiful blog on chocolate written by the world’s leading chocolate expert means absolutely nothing if no chocolate lovers ever find out about it.

Luckily, like anything, marketing is a learn-able skill set. If you ever learned anything (coding, basketball, walking, making noises with your face, etc. ) then you are more than capable of learning how to get your blog in front of the right people.

I eventually did learn to get that site of mine to about a 1 – 2k unique people a day. But it was a frustrating process, that took many months. A very frustrating process that a lot of bloggers face. If you are the kind of person that believes in making this process a little less painful by learning to market your blog as effectively as possible, then this post is for you. 

Now, there are many ways to get that traffic without doing SEO or getting into Social Media. It just so happens that one of the best ways to get traffic so is through guest blogging. But whenever I mention this, I always get a few people emailing me and asking me how they can do this if they are just starting out.

“But Mark, I have no connections to bloggers in this niche..”

“How can I do this if I haven’t built up my credibility?”

“No one in my niche even knows who I am yet, why would they let me guest post?”

The truth is you don’t need fame, recognition, or have any connections to be able to land guest posts on popular blogs. You just need to know what you are doing.

1.Google The Social World To Find Rare Opportunities.

The most difficult part of guest blogging is finding the right bloggers. If you find someone who wants a guest post, you really don’t need to be an authority figure to be able to write for them. All you need to do is prove that you’ve written good content before, even if it’s only on your own blog.

There are plenty of bloggers out there that’re looking for guest posts. Instead of spending your time trying to convince people who absolutely don’t want guest posts, go after people who have guest authors frequently.

This is where Topsy comes in.

Topsy is like the Google of the social media world. It looks through Twitter and Google Plus to find what you are looking for. Because fewer people use Topsy to find places to write for than Google, you can land some pretty rare opportunities this way. Use Topsy to look for bloggers in your niche who have tweeted their latest guest post or tweeting the latest guest post on their own blog.

Use it just like Google to search for guest posting opportunities. (I’ll explain this more next) After you search for something like: fitness “guest post”, you can then use the bar on the left to narrow down your results to as recent as you would like.

You can then go on to narrow down the results further to links only clicking on Links in the sidebar under search.

2.The Quickest Way To Get Guest Posts

To be honest I probably should’ve started with using Google to get guest posts before I mentioned Topsy because learning how to use Google to find guest posting opportunities will help you understand exactly what to search for in Topsy. But I really wanted to start out with something everyone doesn’t always talk about.

Using Google to find blogs to guest post for is straight forward. Google your “keyword” and “Submit a guest post” to look for bloggers who are actively looking to publish guest posts in your niche. The Submit a guest post part should be in quotes, because this makes sure that Google looks for an exact match. So if you are looking to make a guest post about fitness, then your query should look something like this:

Keep in mind that not everyone will use the exact words “Submit a guest post“. You can also look for things like “guest post by” Here are some variations of these to keep in mind:

• “Write For us”
• “Contribute to our site”
• “Add blog post”
• “Become an Author”
• “Submit a Guest Article”
• “Bloggers wanted”
• “Guest post guidelines”

Once you find blogs that have had guest posts in the past, send them an outreach email asking to write for them. These bloggers are much more likely to say yes to a guest post than the ones that have simply never had a guest post before.

Use the Google blog search to narrow down your search results to blogs only. This will reduce the amount of noise and useless links that appear in the search results. Click on more on the Google search and choose blogs.

But what do you do if you are OK with finding guest posting opportunities related more to than one keyword? Do you just do a separate search for each one? No. If they’re related, you can easily condense all those searches into one search and still get relevant results. You do this by using the OR operator.

The OR operator tells Google that you are OK with results containing either keyword. So if your search query is: “submit a guest post” fitness OR fatloss. Google will look for results with either keyword. You can attach a string of keywords to make it look something like this:

If you’re simply looking for any blog that’s in your niche use the ~ operator. This will tell Google to look for all synonyms of the keyword. Just place the operator in front of a general keyword in your niche. Your search query should be: “submit a guest post” ~fitness.

Ann Smarty of ViralContentBuzz has a much more detailed post on how to combine these operators with even more operators to get exactly what you are looking for from Google.

3.Use Services That Actively Match Guest Bloggers With Blogs

There are a few services out there that match you up with bloggers looking for guest posts. The people here are actually going out of their way to sign up for a service in hopes of getting someone to guest post for their blog..

It doesn’t get any easier than this.

If you can write a decent post, most people here will accept it in a heartbeat. Let’s take a look at few of my favorites.

1.Blogger LinkUp – Blogger LinkUp is one such service. If you sign up for Blogger LinkUp, you will get an email every Monday, Wednessday, and Friday that has a list of bloggers that are looking for guest posts in different niches. The email will have requests from bloggers that look a little like this:

When you find a blog you would like to guest post for, send them a simple email saying that you saw their offer for a guest post BloggerLinkUp, and you would like to write a guest post on this particular topic. The email should be just 2 – 3 sentences. Most of the time you will get a reply almost immediately.

2. Post Runner – Post Runner is a little different. A case study by Court Tuttle posted on SeoMoz showed that using only 13 posts from post runner, a brand new domain name ranked 2nd for the relatively difficult keyword “650 credit score”. Here’s how Post Runner explains itself:

3. MyBlogGuest – MyBlogGuest is owned by Ann Smarty herself. MyBlogGuest is one of the most well known guest blogging communities out there. Once you sign up, you can either look for blogs to guest post on or try and find bloggers to guest post for you. MyBlogGuest has a large database of bloggers that are looking to do both. You can sort through this database to find exactly what you are looking for. Narrow it down by niche, country and even blog power. It even has a job board where you can get paid to blog for other bloggers.

4.How Not To Get Rejected By The Big Dogs.

Make a list of sites that you’d love to be featured on. What would your ideal places to guest blog be? Once you get a list of 10 – 20 places you would love to write for, you should immediately check to see if any of them are actively looking for guest posts, because if they are then you should approach them first.

A simple way to check this is by Googling site:example.com “guest post”. This will cause Google to search for any mention of “guest post” in the given site.

And for the ones that aren’t accepting guest posts (or just happen to be picky)? This is where the Ladder Method comes in.

The Ladder Method

You know what really gives you credibility? Where you have guest posted before. Say you have written for The Huffington Post or Forbes, chances are most bloggers wouldn’t say no to your request to write for their blog. Ok, that’s great and all but you don’t haven’t written for The Huffington Post, so what do you do? Use the Ladder method to work your way up.

• Step 1. Write a post for a B list blog using one of the other methods. Guest posting on this blog gives you some credibility.
• Step 2. Email a few blogs about guest posting that are a little more popular than this one and add a link to your previous B list guest post in the email. (Just say something simple like here is one of my previous guest posts and add the link.) This will drastically increase your chances of getting a guest post on this blog.
• Step 3. Now take this new link and do the same thing by emailing a blog that is even more popular.
• Step 4. Repeat step three until you are writing for the top blogs in your niche (The list of 10 -20 you made in the beginning).

If bloggers aren’t responding to your emails the way you want them to, it’s probably because you are skipping blogs in between. You most likely wrote for a small blog and now you’re trying to directly guest post for the biggest blogs in your niche. Don’t skip blogs. Work your way up. Write for a blog that is only slightly bigger than your previous one.

5.Use Ethan Lyon’s Twitter Tool To Find Guest Posting Opportunities

When people tweet out a post by a guest author they sometimes like to say so in the tweet. People also like to promote their own guest posts on Twitter with a simple “my guest post @”. This means you can use Twitter search to find guest posting opportunities much like you can use Google.

Use this awesome tool created by Ethan Lyon to help you automate the process. Here’s how it works:

You can get the tool here: http://ow.ly/8x9gF. You’ll notice that when you click on this link, the Google doc will be in view only. You need to make a copy by going to File > Make A Copy in order to use it for yourself.

How do you get guest posts?

The post How To Write Guest Posts With No Connections or Authority appeared first on .

What do I mean by this?

Well, there are plenty of things you can do on Twitter to get more tweets..

But there are also a ton of little things you can do without ever going to Twitter that will help you get more tweets and followers.

Here are 7 ways you can get more tweets and followers without ever leaving your website.

1. The Power of Language And How To Get A 270% Increase In Subscription Rate.

Here’s an incredibly interesting Twitter experiment done by Dustin Curtis. Like most webmasters he linked to his twitter account from his blog. In particular he said “I’m on Twitter” and linked “Twitter” to his account. This phrase had a CTR of 4.70%. He then went ahead and started testing different wordings of this phrase to try and increase the CTR. Here is what he found:

• 1st Change. Switching to a command “Follow me on twitter.” yielded a CTR of 7.31%.
• 2nd Change. A stronger personal command “You should follow me on twitter.” yielded a CTR of 10.09%.
• 3rd Change. Finally, changing it to “You should follow me on twitter here.” changed the CTR to 12.81%.

Take away? For starters, you should really read the full post on this Twitter Experiment. He highlights the reasoning behind making each change and why it worked. But also, use a command and give a physical location to take action at by using “here” and improve your CTR rate rather dramatically.

2. The Most Effective Button Locations.

There is a really great post at Ms.Ileane Smith’s blog, basicblogtips.com that talks about all the reasons why someone wouldn’t share your post on Twitter. One of the points the post makes is that no one would bother sharing a post if the sharing buttons are even a little hard to find. But it works the other way around too. The easier it is to find the tweet button, the more likely people are to actually tweet it. So here’s the breakdown of the best locations for the tweet button in order of most effective.

• The Moving Sidebar Buttons – You’ve definitely seen this around. It’s on a ton of blogs including this one. This is the bar with social media buttons on the left side of your post that follows you as you read and scroll down. The advantage of this is that no matter when the reader gets the impulse to share the post, they can do so immediately before they lose interest or forget. If you use WordPress, set this up easily by using the Sharebar plugin or the Digg Digg plugin.
• End of The Post – Most people who made it to the end of your post probably enjoyed it. Placing a twitter button there reminds them that they can tweet it if they liked it. Take advantage of Dustin Curtis’s experiment here for tweets as well by writing “you should tweet this post ” in front of the button.
• Beginning of The Post – This will increase your total number of tweets slightly, however I personally don’t use it because to me having all three seems a little spammy. But if you do want that extra little bit of a push for a particular post, you can place a small twitter button right after the title in the beginning of the post.

3. Take Advantage Of Pay With A Tweet

Pay With A Tweet is a service that allows you to set up a system where your audience can pay for something with a Tweet (kind of like it says). The only way they are able to see that page or download that E-book is by tweeting about it. It allows users to pay with the commodity of social capital. Here is how they explain it:

How can you use this to get more tweets?

• Make Freebees - You can take advantage of Pay With a Tweet by creating freebees you know your audience will like and sell them for a tweet. Even if you have a small but loyal following, it is relatively easy to go semi-viral with this method.
• Resources Page - Create a stellar recommended resources page that has a list of rare and unique tools and services you know your audience will appreciate. Keep your top 5 recommended tools off the list and on a separate page and ask them to pay with a tweet to get access to that page. If people liked the rest of your recommendations and found them to be helpful, most of them will tweet to see the top 5.

4. Get Your Readers Emotional

Here is something that applies to all social media and not just Twitter. If your post triggers some kind of emotion in the reader it is much more likely to get shared. Humans are emotional creatures, not logical creatures. Sure, we may be able to use logic like no other, but most of the time the reasons why we take actions are emotional. We aren’t nearly as logical as we like to think.

Get your readers to feel one or more of these emotions and they will go out of their way to share the post.

• Awe – Anything that you would think is amazing. A post that you simply can’t help but share.
• Anger - Anger works better than anything else when it comes to creating viral-ity. When people feel angry they feel the need to tell people about and get it off their chest. The only problem is that you really don’t want to make your loyal readers angry all the time.
• Anxiety – You can easily create anxiety by making your audience feel that they might lose something in the future. If you were a blogger and you read about how blogs will become a thing of the past by next year, wouldn’t you get a little anxious? Wouldn’t you want to share that post?
• Fear – Fear is probably the easiest to create. Scare your readers and they will share your content. Will they like you enough to come back and read your other posts? That depends.
• Joy - If you can make your readers happy, they will be happy to share. It doesn’t even have to be something huge. A simple joke can be enough to get people to tweet. Or an awesome post on How To Use Gmail Like A Marketing Machine.
• Lust – Sex sells. But so does money, power and just about anything you can lust for.
• Surprise – Something unexpected.

Derek Halpern of Social Triggers has a much more detailed post on using emotion to create viral content. Also, did you notice that sadness isn’t on this list? 

5. Allow People To Subscribe To Twitter Without Leaving Your Page.

Instead of linking to your twitter page and then getting them to follow you, allow them to subscribe to you directly from your page. You can do this easily by using the official Twitter button. People can click this button and follow you without having to ever leave your site.

You can combine this with Dustin Curtis’s method. Place the button right after saying “you should follow me on twitter“. It can look a bit like this:

you should follow me on twitter  Follow @ZenSpill

6. Tweetable Quotes

People like to tweet quotes, it’s really just that simple. So, place small tweetable quotes in your post. What does that mean? Well, when you feel that you have said something particularly insightful or funny, make that sentence tweetable and place it at the end of the paragraph. Here is an example:

There are a few advantages to this, not only do you get tweeted a lot more, you will also start coming off as an authority in your niche because people are now quoting you in their tweets. If you were John Bingham and no one knew who you were, getting that quote tweeted would have made you that much more of an authority. Here is how you set it up:

You can do it easily by using clicktotweet.com, the only issue I have with this method is that if they ever have issues, your tweetable quotes will have issues as well. Why risk that? Luckily setting it up manually is just as easy.

Let’s say for example that this is what you are trying to accomplish:

This is what the url would look like when you click “click here to tweet”:

Your goal is to quite simply get the URL in that format and hyperlink it. Once you do that, the rest will take care of itself. Take the quote you are trying to get people to tweet and place it after “http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=” Except instead of spaces use “+”s.

Here is what “A goal is a dream with a deadline. – Napoleon Hill” would look like:

All you have left to do now is add the link to your blog after the quote. Take your URL and place it after the quote. For a colon use %3A and for a slash use %2F. Hyperlink this twitter url to the “click to tweet” part. Here is what it all looks like:

That’s it. It’s really that simple. You’ve made a tweet-able quote.

Place a quote or two that people can tweet in each of your new posts. This will increase total tweets and traffic. You don’t necessarily have to use this for quotes, they just happen to work best. You can make fun statistics, pictures or anything interesting that your audience might want to tweet, tweet-able.

Oh, and you should tweet one of these quotes (see what I did there?) :

or

7. Start using Twitter cards

Set up Twitter cards for your posts. Twitter cards allow you to add a visual element to your tweets. In the exact words of Twitter: “Twitter cards make it possible for you to attach media experiences to Tweets that link to your content.” So, what does this mean exactly?

Normally when you tweet something, it looks like this:

But when you tweet something that is twitter card enabled, it will end up looking like this:

This will benefit you in a few obvious ways. Whenever someone tweets your page and it shows up as a Twitter card, it will be much more noticeable in people’s Twitter feed and increase the amount of traffic it sends your way. It will also increase the chance that others re-tweet it, greatly increasing the viral-ity of your post.

Twitter makes setting this up easy. Add a few HTML meta tags to your post and you are done. Follow Aj Khon’s post at blindfiveyearold.com to set up Twitter Cards for your website if you are using WordPress.

Bonus: 8. Infographics Get 832% More In Retweets Than Normal Posts

Humans are visual creatures. So naturally infographics are more likely to be shared than boring plain text content. As a matter of fact All Twitter at Media Bistro did a case study of 500 of their published posts and found that infographics get tweeted 832% more than normal posts.

832% is a huge gain in tweets and visibility. Take advantage of this and start making infographic posts once in a while. Make one for free by using infogr.am or spend a little cash and get it professionally done.

How do you tweak your page to get more tweets and followers?

The post Can You Milk The Twitter Cow Directly From Your Blog? appeared first on .

You want traffic.

You want relevant, targeted traffic that will convert.

Yes, we all know you need to have great content, do SEO and share on Social Media.

But there other viable ways to get traffic.

Here are 9 killer ways you can get traffic without SEO or social media.

1. Find And Pull Method

This is perhaps one of the easiest ways to bring traffic to your blog. All you have to do is find popular blogs in your niche and bring the already existing traffic back to your blog. Sounds easy right? Well if you know how, it kind of is.

• For this method to work, you need to find out about relevant posts on high traffic blogs in your niche as soon as they are published. You can solve this problem using Google Alerts, which is a free Google service that sends you emails on new content across the web that may be of interest to you. Set up Google Alerts so that it sends you an email as soon as a popular blogger writes an article very closely related to a post you have previously published (We will get into how to set it up soon).
• For the second step go to the post as soon as it is published, actually read it, and write out a relevant and helpful comment after the post but instead of linking your name to your blog’s homepage, link to your post on related content. This way when they click through, they are immediately on a highly relevant page that they are interested in. And because they read your comment, which was useful and unique, they already think of you as an authority.

Here is how you set up Google Alerts. Where it says search query, type in a term related to one of your posts that you want to bring traffic to. 

Set results type to blogs. How often to once a day. How many to only the best results.

These settings will make sure that you only get relevant posts from popular blogs. If you don’t mind getting a lot of emails you can even set the How often setting to As-it-happens, which will give you a higher chance of getting there before anyone comments. You can go back and set up as many alerts as you want for as many of your posts as you like.

2. Viral Content Buzz Community

Viral Content Buzz is a place where you can earn points for sharing other people’s content and use those very points to get other people to share your content.

Yes, I realize this post isn’t supposed to have social media related methods for getting traffic, but Viral Content Buzz doesn’t really have to do as much with social media as it has to do with showing your content to a community. There is no crazy social media tool, strategy or trick involved. You simply have to submit your content to the site and it will send traffic your way.

On some level it’s nothing more than a place where competent people from different niches gather to share quality content. Now, if you happen to like something shared by someone, you can help them out and Tweet it or Like it on Facebook. The more you participate in the community and share other people’s content, the more exposure you can get for your content.

Viral Content Buzz thoroughly checks your social media profiles to makes sure that your Facebook and Twitter profiles that you are using to promote other people’s content are real profiles with real followers and plenty of activity. This makes sure that none of the people joining the community are looking to take advantage of it. Because these are real people with real followings that are genuinely sharing your content, you get a lot of visibility and traffic.

Join Viral Content Buzz and submit your best content. Your content will be shared by people that would not have seen your articles otherwise and you will get traffic that is genuinely interested in reading what you have to say.

3. Derek Halpern’s Drafting Technique

This is a technique popularized Derek Halpern of Social Triggers. The drafting technique takes advantage of your competitors slip stream much like Nascar drivers do. What does that mean? Well, in Nascar (as well as bicycling and other racing sports) each competitor tends to stay right behind the one in front so that they have to deal with less air friction. As the first car spends more energy pushing through the air, it creates a slip stream right behind where there is less air density for the next car to push through. This means that the second car has to spend a lot less energy to achieve the same results.

Here is how you use the slip stream to your advantage. The idea is simple. You see your competitors somehow land an article on big sites and get huge coverage. Instead of feeling sad about it, you can use this to your advantage to get coverage for your own business or website as well.

When you see that someone in your niche has gotten a post on a huge site, you learn two things:

1. This particular site accepts guest posts.
2. The kind of topics they are looking for in their guest posts.

With this knowledge in hand you can contact the blog or main stream media site and pitch them a similar idea for a guest post you they will be happy to publish. They already published something similar so you know they would be happy to do so again. There is simply less friction. Just make sure it is not actually the same idea and that it is something similar that will add some value to their site.

Find blogs that are authorities in your niche and take a look at their posts that are guest posts. Make a list of similar ideas you can blog about and send them an outreach email pitching them a one or few of those ideas those ideas. Mention the similar posts already published on their site and tell them why you think your post will be just as good and maybe even better.

4. Link To Bloggers In Your Posts

Link to other bloggers in your post. That’s really all there is to it. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is never linking out. Link out to others in your posts and they will take notice of you, most of them will tweet about your post at the very least. Some of them will even link back to you. This is a easy and free way to get traffic. Just don’t forget about your readers and make sure that the links are relevant.

5. Use The Intro Method To Get Massive Forum Traffic

Using Forums to drive traffic is pretty well known. It’s also one of the easiest way to send traffic to your site.

Here is how you use forums to send massive traffic. This method was originally talked by Diggy at ProBlogger in much more detail. Go to a forum you participate in regularly and simply start a new thread mentioning your newest post like Diggy.

Think about it. If you were at your favorite forum and you saw a thread to a link that was actually interesting and full of useful information, wouldn’t you be inclined to check it out? Make sure your title is catchy and if your forum is in your niche and it has a high enough traffic, your results should look something like this:

Some forums have rules against this kind of thing so check the guidelines first. If this seems like something that’s in the grey area for a particular forum, you can start your thread with simply giving out free information or part of your post and end it with saying “you can find more tips on how to get traffic here”. If people liked what you had to say or found it useful, chances are they will check out the link.

6. Do Interviews

Interviews are like video guest posts. Interviewing someone is also a bit like linking to someone except now they are much more likely to share and link to the interview. There are advantages to both being the interviewer and the one getting interviewed.

• Why Be Interviewed – Obviously this sends traffic, but more importantly this establishes you as an authority in your niche. Why would anyone waste time interviewing someone who isn’t important? Because you will be seen as an authority, people who come to check out your blog or website will be more likely to stick around and comeback.
• Why Interview – If you interview someone and post it on your blog, chances are the person you interviewed is going to share it in every way that he or she can think of and probably even link to you. Interviewing someone who is important makes you seem like a bit of an important figure in your field as well. You become an authority by association. Say for example you saw a post by some random blogger where he interviewed Sir Richard Branson on video. Wouldn’t you suddenly think that this blogger is someone important?

Use HARO to get interviews and be interviewed. HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out and is a service that used by news agencies like ABC and FOX. Here is how HARO works.

When you go to HARO, you can sign up as a reporter or a source.

If you sign up as a source, you will get emails with a list of people who are looking to interview experts in different fields. Each interviewer will give a summery as to what they are looking for in their interviewee, which looks something like this:

If you qualify, and would like to be interviewed, you can simply send them an email saying so, and you will almost always get a reply immediately. By using HARO, you may be able to land yourself an interview on a huge mainstream media outlet.

If you sign up as a reporter, you just have to fill out who you are looking to interview in what subject every time you want to do an interview and your request will be there in the next email.

7. Use Your Email Signature.

Let all those emails you send work harder for you. Place a link to your website in your email signature. People are lazy and don’t like to take time to find out what your site is or even bother typing it in the URL bar. So make it really easy for them. Make your site only a click away by placing a link to it after your name in your signature. If you use Gmail, there are plenty of other things you can do to use Gmail like a marketing machine.

This makes a bigger difference than you think. Steve Krug in Don’t Make Me Think talks about how every action you are asking people to take causes the number of people to go through with it to drop drastically. Why force people to take more actions than necessary?

8. Be A Case Study

Businesses and people always need testimonials saying that their product or service works. Be that testimonial. If you end up being a case study that they showcase on their site, it can end up sending you a good amount of reoccurring traffic as well as establish you as someone of importance. If you try a product or service in your niche and found that it was useful, send them an email saying that you use the product and it did this and that for you. Be detailed in how it helped you.

9. Take Advantage Of Communities like Bloggers.com

Bloggers is a huge community of bloggers from every niche. Participating here will send you the best kind of traffic because everyone here is capable of linking to you. Not only will you directly get traffic to your blog from Bloggers but you will also end up getting traffic from any of these visitors who end up linking to you.

Getting traffic from Bloggers is simple. Create a full profile like and just start exploring. Find people in your niche that interest you and comment and vote on their profiles or blogs. Most of the time they will vote you back and you will end up getting that much more exposure in the community.

How do you get traffic to your website?

The post 9 Killer Ways To Get Traffic Without SEO Or Social Media appeared first on .

Marketers spend a lot of time on Gmail. For most of us that means staying on Gmail from the second we get up to the second we sleep. Email is an important tool in any marketer’s arsenal so whether you are a blogger, webmaster, or an entrepreneur using Gmail is a must. Here are five solid ways you can use Gmail like a marketing machine.

If you use Outlook or some other email client, this post isn’t going to be of too much help to you. Sorry about that.

1. Manage Your Gmail Better

If you are sending a lot of emails to potential clients or bloggers for potential guest post opportunities, you understand how difficult it can be to manage all those emails and stay on top of replying to all the right people. There is nothing worse than missing an email from someone who could have been of great help to you. This is where Streak comes in.

Streak makes management of important emails easy by allowing you to not only categorize different emails but also make sub categories for where each email thread is in your process (are you still making the pitch, negotiating, is it a closed deal, etc..). You can even group all the emails from the same person together.

Here is how their demo explains it:

You can also use streak to preset when to send the email. You can write the email whenever you want and send it at the time they are most likely to read it. Write an email and set it to send tomorrow morning exactly at 9:30 AM and you can sleep right through 9:30, wake up at 10:00 and see that it has been sent. Isn’t that enough to make you get Streak? All you have to do is click on the send later button when you are composing an email and choose a timing.

With Streak you also get the option of creating email templates. Like most marketers you probably have to send a lot of emails that are very similar to each other, with only a few minor changes. A perfectly crafted outreach email asking for a guest post for example. You can create a template for this in minutes and save a lot of time not recreating the same message over and over again. This will make sending out reach emails a lot quicker. The only thing you have left to worry about is coming up with great blog post ideas to pitch to bloggers.

Get Streak. It will make your life easier.

2. Use Gmail Faster

If you are not careful, Gmail can suck your time away. It is a great tool to help you procrastinate when you are trying to put things off, but even when you are trying to actually be productive, Gmail can eat up your time. I like to think that I have learned a few life lessons throughout my existence. One of the most important ones being that you should always use time efficiently. Here are a few ways you can save time on Gmail.

• Multiple Uploads. I like to include images in my posts, even if I am writing that post as a guest author at someone else’s blog. When I am sending that post, I generally have to attach all the images along with the word document. This used to take a few minutes because I would attach each image one at a time. This is a mistake that you can easily avoid. You can save time by uploading multiple files at once. When you click attach a file and the window pops up, you can simply hold control and click on all the files you want to upload to the email in one fell swoop (multiple images and docs all at once).
• Use Gmail Shortcuts. Anyone who is a PC gamer knows that it is faster to do most things with your keyboard than it is to do with your mouse. You save time by using keyboard shortcuts instead of using the mouse to click on the appropriate button on your screen, and this time adds up fast. You can find the full list of Gmail shortcuts here, but here are the most useful ones: undo: z, reply: r, reply all: a, forward: f, save draft: ctr + s, compose: c.
• Make Search Easier. When you get a lot of emails, searching through your archives to find a particular email can be a long process and if it is an especially old email, it can even take hours to find. Usually this happens because most people do not delete any emails and archive everything, so that they never have to lose any email. This is great and all but when you need to go search through your emails to find something, you now have a huge clutter to weed through. Delete emails that you absolutely do not need, especially if it spam. There is no need to archive that.
• View more in your inbox. Aren’t you a little annoyed that you have to click next every time you want to see more than 25 messages in your inbox? This just wastes time. Go to your Settings and change the maximum page size in the General tab to 100.

3. Get A Better Understanding Of Your Contacts With Rapportive

You talk to a lot of people and naturally, keeping track of who all these people are, what their likes and dislikes are, and what their deal is, can be difficult. Rapportive does this for you. Every time you are emailing someone or reading an email from someone, Rapportive will display important information about them as well as their recent tweets. You can even attach notes to each of your contacts.

It even gives you the option of connecting with your contact via social media right from your Gmail. Sure, this won’t take the place of any social media management tools but it still a great convenience and just adds to the list of awesome things that Rapportive can do.

4. Undo Sending Stupid Emails

Sometimes you look over an important email a million times before sending it and find no mistakes. You only realize that you had made a horrible mistake in that email seconds after sending it. This is where this very awesome undo-sending email link comes in. It actually allows you to un-send an email for a few seconds after you sent it. (It just doesn’t send it for a few seconds after you click send and just cancels it when you press undo) This new undo button can be an absolute life saver.

Set it up by going to Settings and clicking on Labs.

Scroll down until you find Undo Send, click enable and click Save Changes.

5. Tweak Your Inbox: Show Unread Messages First

Weeding through all your messages to find the ones that are unread just makes you less efficient. You can change this by tweaking your inbox to display unopened messages first. Since all your unread messages now float to the top, it will be hard to miss any important emails. As an added bonus, your inbox will also look a lot cleaner and more organized which will make it much easier for your brain to process what’s going on in your inbox. This will also make you less likely to procrastinate because you won’t be tempted to browse through all the emails that you already opened.

Setting this up is simple. Go to Settings again but click on Inbox this time. Where it says Inbox type, choose unread first.

6. Bonus: Remote Sign Out

You may sometimes have to log into your Gmail from an computer that is not yours. If you end up forgetting to logout from that computer, it could end up coming back to bite you. Luckily, you can logout of all computers from anywhere. If you scroll to the bottom of your Gmail page, you should see a link that says details. Click on details and a window will pop up and if you are logged into any other computers, it should give you the option of logging out of all other computers.

How do you tweak Gmail for marketing?

The post How To Use Gmail Like A Marketing Machine appeared first on .

Seems like everybody and their grandmother has a blog these days and why not, it is so easy to make. Well, setting up and having a blog is pretty easy but getting a loyal following and using that following to help your business is an entirely another matter. Whether you are a one man start up or a fortune 500 company, you need to have a blog.

This post is not going to be talking about how to get traffic to your blog, that’s a post for some other time. I am going to assume that you already have a ton of loyal followers and receive a lot of daily traffic. This is a post about how you can use that amazing blog for your business.

1. Become an Email Marketing Expert

Use your blog to create a list of subscribers. If done right, email marketing can be a powerful way of generating sales. Email marketing is an art that may take a little while to learn, but it can be done.

The number one way of getting your audience to subscribe is by using sign up forms. These forms should be as simple as possible. The more fields that your visitors have to fill out to sign up, the less likely they will be to do so. Research at Hubspot showed that going from four fields to three fields increases the likelihood of someone signing up by almost 50%.

As you add more forms to your blog, it will start becoming cluttered. It is your job to decide when the negative aspects of that clutter outweigh the increase in subscribers you get. Regardless, here are a few things you can add to your site to gain more subscribers.(The pictures are from this blog and Matt Carter’s marketing blog.)

• The sidebar. The sidebar is the default location your visitors will look to when they are looking for what to do next. Take advantage of this, by giving them the task subscribing to you. You can place something simple like this in the side bar.
• The end of the post. The point isn’t to place as many subscription forms in front of their face as possible. The point is to earn their trust through good content that they will naturally want to subscribe, but this doesn’t mean you should make it hard for people to find the subscription box. This is why placing a form at the end of the post is perfect. Most people who will see it are people who have bothered to read to the end of the post and these people are most likely interested in more things you have to offer. Placing the form here serves as a simple reminder to those that are interested in getting more content from you. 
• Popups. You can also show a popup to your visitors asking for their name and email address. This will greatly increase your sign ups but also really annoy your visitors. Stay away from this method of getting subscriptions if you do not have a loyal following or if your main goal is to increase your traffic.

2. Link Within the post

You write great content that your followers love to read. Use that to your advantage. When it is relevant and only when it is relevant, link to your business landing page from you post. Be very careful not to overdo this. It is very easy to come as spammy when you are trying to promote yourself. I strongly suggest staying away from this entirely unless you have a strong following or you know how to make it seem natural. Here are a few rules to follow.

• Only mention your product or service in relevant posts. The trick is to come up with genuinely great ideas to blog about, that are related to your product or service.
• For every post that you link to your business in, have 5-10 posts where you don’t.
• Be sure to provide other useful content and links in the post that you mention your business in. You do not want that post to come off as being made purely market your product. This will cause people to distrust you.

3. Take advantage of the sidebar

Have a direct ad for your business in your side bar. As mentioned before, the sidebar is where your eyes land when you are looking for the next thing to do. Push for directly sending your blog traffic to your business landing page by placing a sort of an “Ad”. Here is how Neil Patel of Quick Sprout does it.

Understand that this only works for Neil because his followers trust him. He constantly gives his followers useful and unique content that helps them out. If there isn’t a strong trust there, far fewer people are likely to even bother clicking on the ”Ad” and even if they do, the lack of trust and reliability will make it harder for them to go ahead and buy whatever it is that you are selling.

Think about it, if one of the bloggers you trust and have been following for a long time says “hey, here is something I made and put a lot of work into”, even if it looks mediocre wouldn’t you be more inclined to give it a try?

4. Grow and use your social media presence.

As you blog, you should be building a social media presence with the help the traffic and the followers of your blog and then turning around and using that social media following to send traffic to your posts and introduce your blog to new people. ( Managing your social media channels can be very time consuming. Using the best social media monitoring tools can not only help you save time by automating a large portion of this process but give you more control on what you do on these sites.)

Right off the bat, this will indirectly help you grow your business by sending more traffic to your blog. But there also ways to use your social channels to directly send traffic to your business.

• Share and like from these accounts, your business promotions, contests and discounts.
• Retweet tweets from your business account.
• Share and like updates and new releases.
• Follow your business accounts.

As always be sure not to overdo this because you never want to come off as too self serving. If you sprinkle this in with the rest of your social media activity where you share other useful content with your followers, you should be more than fine.

5. Take Advantage of The ‘About Me’ Page

People will check the about me page when they are more interested in finding out about you. “Well, yes, obviously Mark.. ” Okay, okay, but there are generally two kinds of people who do this in two different ways.

• Person A will check the “About me” page before reading any post on the blog, to find out who is doing the talking.
• Person B will check the “About me” after they read a post or even after they have been following your blog for a little bit. Most of the times this person was a already a person A (meaning he or she already read your about me page but is going back to read it again in more detail after he or she has been following you for a while).

You should take advantage of the interest people have in you to introduce them to your business. If this type A person reads that you are a big shot at this business then they are more likely to follow your blog because they understand that you are someone who knows what they are talking about. Chances are they will also just go ahead and check out your company and if it interests them enough, they might even end up trying your product or service right then and there.

If the type B person goes ahead checks out your about me page after you have earned their trust, they are going to be very compelled to check out your company or the company you work at. Because they trust and respect you from all the quality content and information you have provided for them over time via your blog, they understand that you probably wouldn’t associate yourself anything but the best. This transfers a bit of value and trust from you to your business and they more likely to give it a try.

6. Build Relationships

Naturally as a blogger you are going to have to reach out to a lot of people. Whether it is sending outreach emails that actually work to ask for guest posts or just commenting to thank a blogger for a mention, you are always building new relationships.

I probably don’t have to tell you that networking is a key element in any successful business. But sometimes bloggers forget that the relationships that you build from your blog do not have to be separate from those that you build from your business. They can help each other out.

Use your blog as a tool to reach out to more people than you would have been able to with you business alone. Foster all relationships and do not let them die right after you get that guest post you wanted. Always, give, give and give. Help those in your network so that when the time comes and you need their help for spreading the word about a new update, a new company you are starting, etc. they will be more than happy to do so.

7. Recommended Tools Page

Have a recommended tools page. In this page you can list different tools and services that you find to be useful. Among these tools and services can be your business. As always, the main objective is to not come off as self serving, so this only works if you follow a few rules.

• Never place your product first. Just don’t do it. Even if your tool or service is the best, it comes off as very untruthful if you place it first. Place it second.
• Don’t order or number your list in any particular way, this way it doesn’t cause problems with where your product is.
• Full transparency. You have to tell your audience right off the bat that you are a founder/creator of this or you work there. You do not want your audience to feel tricked.
• Chances are, you probably already know a bunch of great tools for your target audience, but you should still do a lot of research into these tools and other potential tools before you put your reputation on the line and recommend them. You are going to have to kill any impulses to procrastinate because this might take a while.
• Have more than three or four items on this list because otherwise it will just look like the entire reason for making this page was to promote your product.

The advantage of having a recommended tools page is that it will be listed in the menu or in the sidebar and never go away.

8. Bonus: Use The Hello Bar

Recently, I have been seeing the Hello Bar all over the place. Which only makes sense because it drives attention to your most important website content without being too intrusive. It doesn’t interrupt the flow of your content. People who visit your blog also have the option of hiding the bar making it really un-intrusive. Use the Hello Bar to send visitors to the landing page of your business. Have one line of call to action that you know will work best with your audience.

How do you leverage your blog for your business?

The post 7 Ways To Leverage Your Blog For Your Business appeared first on .

Walter White’s transformation is legendary. He changes as a person in almost every aspect, the only thing that you be sure of at the mid season break of season five is that he still loves his children. You can argue that his change was necessary, that it was an unavoidable side effect of the situations he got himself into or you can say that he was corrupted by greed. Regardless, here are seven lessons his transformation has taught me.

There are plenty of spoilers below, so don’t read if you have not yet watched Breaking Bad and would like to. 

1. Keep Your Ego In Check

Although a good chunk of problems Walter runs into can be chalked up to bad luck and career choice, most of his problems are a simple side effect of his ego. Having ambition is a good thing but when your ambition is overrun by arrogance it can start causing serious problems. In Walter’s case, these problems almost end up killing him a few times.

By all means be ambitious and set yourself high goals, but don’t let your ego cloud your judgment. Most people who are successful in your field have probably worked very hard to get there and deserve respect. Don’t get jealous and put your foot in your mouth, or it might end up coming back to hurt you.

2. Become An Irreplaceable Cog In The Machine

More than once Walter’s life was saved because he was irreplaceable. Lets just take a look at all the people who wanted to kill him but couldn’t because they needed him:

• Tuco
• Gus
• Mike

Chances are your employers and colleagues are not trying to kill you (or maybe they are..), but you will be a lot better off if they can’t do away with you. Be the best at what you do or at the very least bring something unique to the table that they need. This way when your company is looking to downsize or the industry is changing, you know you will be safe.

3. Never Make The Same Mistake twice

When eating dinner at Gus’s house Gus tells Walt that if he had to give him one piece of advice, it would be that he should never repeat the same mistake twice. In the meth business I am sure that repeating your mistakes could be fatal, but repeating your mistakes in real life can also be very dangerous. There is no reason why you should be making the same mistakes over and over again. Actively learn from your mistakes and make better choices when similar situations show up again in both your professional and your social life. This can save you a lot of headache and help you learn and grow at a much faster rate.

4. Always Be Prepared

One minute before the twins come to kill Hank, Hank gets a phone call warning him. Hank has no gun or any real weapon to defend himself with, but because he had that small minute to prepare mentally and be on the lookout, he survived. Sure, he was wounded pretty badly and shot three times but if didn’t have that one small minute to prepare, we would be short one more character on Breaking Bad.

Be prepared for worst case scenarios and have a contingency plan. This will help you get back on your feet as soon as possible by minimizing damage. Hank has shown that even a little bit of preparation can make all the difference.

5. If You Want Something Done, Do It Yourself

Outsourcing is great but sometimes you need to do things yourself. More than once Walter did what he needed to do on his own without involving others, because that was how he could assure that things would go the way he wanted them to. If it doesn’t matter to someone else as much as it matters to you, then you need to do it yourself, even if you feel that it is below you.

6. Knowledge Is King

In the very intense finale of season 4, Walter was able to beat Gus because of one reason and one reason only. He knew a very important, key piece of information that Gus didn’t know he knew. Walt knew that Hector and Gus where mortal enemies. You will be surprised how little things you know can help you out in the most random of situations. Be a knowledge sponge and who knows, it may end up saving your life one day as well.

7. Embrace Change

If Walter was unable to accept that he was dying and he needed to make a change to the way he was living, we probably wouldn’t have a drug kingpin, we would have a chem teacher struggling very hard to make ends meet. It would be a completely different show. We all need to make changes in our lives once in a while and if you are too afraid to take that plunge, it can end up hurting you. The only thing that is constant is change.

8.Bonus: Looks Can Be Deceiving

What life lessons did you learn from Breaking Bad?

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