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How to Drive More Readers to Your Blog Posts

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There are lots of ways to attract readers to your blog.None of us writes a blog just to admire our own words of wisdom. We write it to provide information, to bolster our credibility, to illustrate our expertise, to attract new customers … the reasons are many and varied. But they all share the common factor that we want readers.

 

Attracting Readers

Just creating and writing a blog is not a guarantee that it will attract readers.  There are many things readers may find attractive: humor, images, pithy writing, helpful information, insightful analysis, compelling content and more. But if no one knows about your blog, no one will read it.  Just like a website without SEO, it may end up being like a Billboard in the Woods.

How to drive more readers to your blog.

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Where Do You Get Exposure?

There are a bunch of places to seek visibility for your blog posts. BlogPros.com recently listed 50 of them. Let’s highlight some of the best ones for a small business blog.

  • Social Media Sites
  • Social Bookmarking Sites
  • Article Directories
    • These no longer provide link juice to your blog posts like they once did, but they can still drive traffic to your posts. Here are a couple of the best:
    • Blog Engage
    • EZine Articles
  • Personal Resources
  • Paid Advertising
    • Pay Per Click ads can get expensive, and many businesses spend thousands of dollars a month on them. But they can also help on a much smaller scale for small businesses. These are the top two:
    • Google Ads
    • Facebook Ads
  • Specialized Sites
    • Google AdWordsBusiness2Community is a great place to automatically syndicate your blog.These are similar to blog directories and bookmarking sites, but are more narrowly focused. Here are a few examples:
    • Business2Community for business related content
    • BizSugar for content related to small businesses
    • DesignFloat for material related to web design
    • DeviantArt for the art and design community
    • MySpace for music and entertainment related content

Tell us about your success (or lack of it) with these. Is there a technique you’ve found that’s not listed here? Please tell us about it in the comments below.

Need help with your visibility? Rank Magic can help!

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Market Your Blog with Social Media in 3 Easy Steps

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How you can leverage social networking sites to kickstart your blog’s promotion efforts

Social media platformsNo matter how engaging the content, you won’t build a following if no one knows about your blog. If you’re like many new bloggers, you don’t have a marketing budget to speak of. Luckily, social media is a completely free means of promoting your blog.

Today’s most popular social networking platforms each have hundreds of millions of active users. Those users troll the social web to connect with others, seek and share information, express opinions, and be entertained. Get in on the action and show them what you’ve got with these simple steps.

1 — Set up Social Accounts

If you don’t have them already, set up accounts on the most popular social media platforms. You need Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles. If you’re already well established on these sites, you might also consider adding Tumblr, Pinterest, or Instagram. When creating your profiles on these sites, be sure to link back to and reference your blog. The goal is to ensure everyone you come in contact with on the social web is aware of and has easy access to your blog.

How to use social media to promote your blog.

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2 — Add Social Media Widgets & Links

Add social media widgets and/or links to those social media accounts to your blog and your email signature. Place a Facebook Like button, a Tweet button and a Google +1 button on all your blog posts. For example, see the ones we have at the top and bottom of our own posts. Include social media Share buttons like the ones on this blog post from Sumo so readers can share your blog posts with others.  You can also place social icons and your profile addresses on your business cards and any other literature you distribute. If you’re active on forums, web rings, and chat rooms, include them in your signature there, too. Ditto when you comment on others’ blogs (which you should do, as often as possible!)

3 — Use Automatic Sharing Features

Use automatic sharing features to post links to your blog on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. Many social media platforms offer features that allow for automatic sharing. External, third-party applications such as Buffer and the WP to Buffer WordPress plug-in, Zapier, TweetDeck, and Dlvr.it are also great options that offer automation features to post across your online profiles to save time and simplify your social media marketing efforts.

Market your blog in 3 easy steps!

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Remember …

Remember that every time you participate in a conversation, post a comment, or tell the world what’s on your mind on Facebook or Twitter, those words and ideas should ultimately link back to your blog. When you’re online, you’re always representing your brand. (You’ll want to consider this carefully before posting anything.) And take some care to ensure that your comments are relevant, timely, and appropriate, especially when you’re adding a link to your blog as your signature. Otherwise, your post may be ignored as unwanted spam.

Blog orangeThere are a variety of ways to enrich and enhance your readers’ experience with social media, and plenty of more advanced methods for driving traffic to your blog. But the steps above are among the first and most important you can take in order to leverage social media to boost your blog’s readership. By using applications that automate your social media activity and posting your blog’s web address on your social media profiles (and vice versa) you’ll ultimately create a system that consistently puts your blog and its content in front of hundreds of potential followers who want what you have to offer.

Let us know how you promote your blog in the comments below.

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The 7 Steps to a Perfect Blog Post

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Can you really write a perfect blog post?Blog orange

Well, “a perfect blog post” is a little tough to pin down, but yes, you can make your blog posts far more powerful. A recent blog post of mine went wildly viral (at least from my own, limited perspective). It was read more than any other blog post, shared more than others, and picked up and syndicated by several blog sites like Business2Community.com. I’ve often wondered what made that blog post so special. I think the secret was that I inadvertently applied some of the seven steps below from the folks at Buffer. There’s a more thorough discussion of this over there, but here are the highlights.

Start with the perfect headline

You may realize that people tend not to read online: they scan. Research shows  that people tend to read the first three words in a headline and the last three words. I’ve used that technique in this very post.

There are also a number of headline techniques that catch readers’ attention:

  • Surprise: “Don’t optimize for Google”
  • Question: “Are You Getting Screwed by Google’s Pigeon Update?”
  • Curiosity Gap: ” Top 10 Rankings Factors – #4 Is a Shock!”
  • Negatives: “Never Ignore the User Experience”
  • How To: “How to Fix Your Keyword Stuffed Copy”
  • Numbers: ‘The 7 Steps to a Perfect Blog Post” (I’m using that one in this post)
  • Audience Reference: ‘You Need Video on Your Site Now”
  • Specificity: “Six Ways to Get More Out of Your SEO”

story-impactHook readers with a story

After you grab them with the headline, hook them with a story introduction. This turns out to be surprisingly important in turning a glancing reader into one who stays and reads your whole blog post.

I’ve started out this very post with a short story. Did it help hook you?

Cut down on characters per line with an image

Placing an image in the top right corner of a blog post does two important things. First, It provides a picture to attract attention and hopefully focus the reader on the subject at hand. But second, It makes the first several lines of text shorter. Shorter lines in a perfect blog post are easier to read and easier for the eye to scan; it’s easier to comprehend and it seems less complicated. That makes your post almost subliminally more appealing for someone to read.

An alternative is to make the font size larger for the first paragraph of your post., I’ve actually done both in this blog post.

Use sub-headings

As I said before, people tend to scan on the web rather than read left to right, one word after the other. They scan down the page seeking morsels of information that appeal to them. Then they read.

Sub headings help readers scan through your post, increasing how much they read.

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Headings and sub-headings provide the perfect scan-fodder for your readers. They also add white space and break up your text, making it more approachable. Another technique that can help is using bullet lists  — for the very same reasons.

Consider your word count

Word count does play a role here. Too low a word count makes the page look like it’s not going to be very informative. After all, how much important information can you glean from 100 words of text? On the other hand a 3,000 word post is just over-kill. It may appear too complex to read, the reader may think they don’t have enough time right now to read it, or they may think it’s got too much information to digest at one sitting. All those are turn-offs.

There does seem to be a sweet spot.

socialsharesThe folks at QuickSprout have an extensive article about this, and their research shows that longer posts get more social shares. Social shares is a simple measure of how many people read the article and found it worthwhile. Shares really start  to pick up once the post length exceeds 700 words, and is best over 5,000.

Add one or two “tweetables” to your post

Tweetables are little snippets of text — like soundbites on the news  — that are memorable and easy to tweet. You can even use a quick blog plugin to help you create them. You’ll find one of those about three paragraphs up in this post, using the Click to Tweet WordPress plugin.

Four little things to consider in your blog post

  1. Include a call to action. “Share this post” “Call us for an appointment” “Visit our website” There’s a reason the person who takes your order at the fast food burger chain always ask “Want fries with that?”
  2. Include images. We remember photos 6 times easier than text.
  3. Include social share buttons. You want your readers to share your post with their own circle of friends and colleagues, right? You’ll notice our social share buttons at both the top and bottom of this post.
  4. Create a readable URL. Instead of the URL for this post being /blog/2014/09/7-steps-perfect-blog-post/ it could be improved to /perfect-blog-post/.

stopwatch-timingTiming matters

When your blog post appears has an impact, too, but I’m not convinced this is as important as the other factors. For one thing, most blog posts are published during the workday, but most social shares of blog posts happen between 5 and 11pm, after the workday. More social shares also occur on weekends than during the work week. Do posts published outside of working hours get shared most often? Or are those posts that were published during the workday but not read and shared until after work? The research doesn’t tell us.

There you have it. Seven steps to a perfect blog post.

How many of these things do you employ in your blogging?

There’s plenty to agree and disagree on here. Which are most important? Which do you think are hogwash?Which have worked well for you? Let us know what you think about these in the comments below.

Did you find this helpful? If so, please share with the buttons on the left or the Click-to-Tweet above.

If perfect blog posts aren’t helping your visibility on the web, maybe the problem’s with the rest of your SEO. At Rank Magic, we can fix that. Drop us a note.

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4 Ways to Get More Readers On Your Blog

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Your Blog Is an Important Asset  — If It Attracts the Readers You Want

 

Promote your blog.

Your blog is one of the best ways to establish yourself as an authority in your field and to get your brand identity known broadly. It also allows you to receive and respond to feedback from people interested in your services and your blog topics. The more people who read and like your blog, the better known you and your brand become. It’s well worth the time and effort to promote your blog. Thanks to Endurance Marketing for the inspiration for this post.

1) Promote Your Blog Far and Wide

Shameless promotion of your blog on as many venues as possible will expose it to hundreds or thousands of new potential readers. Here are the most essential things to do:

  • Get your blog listed in the top human-edited blog directories. That includes directories like Technorati, Blogarama, Blogged, Blogernity, Blog Flux, On Top List, Blog Hub, and Blogger Now, among others.
  • Include prominent links to your blog from the main navigation of your website and also in your page footers.
  • Establish social media accounts at Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, at a minimum. Include a link to your blog in the About section of each of them.
  • Include a Facebook Like button on your main blog page and on all individual blog post pages.
  • Make it easy for readers to share your blog posts on their own social pages to expand your reach to all of their connections. The tool we use here is from AddThis. It provides opportunities for readers to very easily promote your post to all of their followers on almost any social media site imaginable.

Blog2) Promote Every Blog Post Your Write

Don’t just write a great blog post and hope people will flock to it. Promote it in social media. At the very least, write about it on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. And be sure to include a link to your post when you do that. For our clients, we typically promote each of their posts on about a dozen of the best social media platforms.

3)  Promote Your Blog On Your Emails

Don’t overlook the opportunity to include a link to your blog in your email signature block. That exposes your blog to anyone you correspond with.

Promote your blog! Here’s how.

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4) Promote Your Blog on Other Blogs

Many blogs have a blogroll  — a list of other, usually related, blogs that may be of interest to their readers. You can see an example of that over on the right, in the section called Other Blogs of Interest. Seek out blogs related to your topics and contact the owners of those blogs to suggest they add you to their blogrolls. You may be asked to add them to your blogroll in return, as well. If you create compelling blog posts with great information that’s helpful to your target market, similar blogs may be very eager to link to you from their blogrolls.

How do you promote your blog? Let us know in the comments below.

Like this post? Please Like it or share it with your friends via the links above, or click on the Click to Tweet above. Thanks in advance for helping us promote our blog!

Need help with promoting your blog and your website, and showing up prominently when buyers search for what you have to offer? Rank Magic can help.

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Do You Write Compelling Headlines?

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Are you writing good headlines?

You need to write attention grabbing headlines!Your web page or blog post or newsletter may be astoundingly helpful or surprisingly informative, great fun to read and generally a gem that your target market really needs to know about and read. But if your subject line or headline isn’t good “click bait”  — something that will make it impossible to pass up without clicking on it  —  no one will know.

You need to grab them with the subject line. In an email newsletter, it’s the subject of the email. In a social media post it’s the headline you give the post or the first few words of the post. On a web page  it’s the page title that will show up in search results. And in a blog post it’s also the page title, but that often duplicates the primary headline of the post.

How to write good headlines for SEO.

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The Value of Good Examples

One thing I’ve often found helpful, especially when a headline or subject line seems beyond my grasp, is to look at some examples.
Info Marketing Blog reprinted 100 great advertising headlines with a brief discussion of each. Review them and you’ll get a sense of what elements go into a real compelling, click bait subject line.

The Financial Brand has s helpful set of rules for creating a killer subject line, even though their focus is financial.

From an advertising perspective, Crazy Egg has a list of nine steps to follow to create a compelling subject line or headline.

And Position Digital has an excellent set of seven steps to a compelling SEO-appropriate headline.

If you don’t get enough inspiration from these sources, try searching in Google, Yahoo or Bing for headline ideas or how to write a headline. There are some great ideas to get you through that writer’s block.

BTW, if you found this helpful, please share it with friends: Like it or tweet it with the buttons on the left or the Click-to-Tweet above.

Join the conversation and share your thoughts in the comments below.