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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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How to Handle Bad Online Reviews

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Bad online reviews can really hurt.Ouch!

Bad online reviews online may have the power to cost you new customers. And if you’ve ever received a bad review, you’re painfully aware of how that stings — especially for a small business.

Do you have any bad reviews?

The first step to dealing with the problem is knowing it exists. You can check for yourself at the most common sites that post reviews like Yelp, Google Places, Angie’s List, Judy’s Book, CitySearch, and so forth.

One approach we handle for many of our clients is PowerListings. That’s primarily a service to ensure that your NAP (name, address, phone) information is correct and consistent across more than 50 local search engines, directories, and applications. One of the more valuable features is that it lets you check reviews at any of those sites as well.

Contact us to get started with PowerListings.

Oops! You have a bad online review!Gulp! You found one or more bad reviews.

Your first reaction is likely to be angry denial. Stifle that. In a helpful article in Small Biz Trends, Megan Totka discourages your gut reaction to

  • Argue about it
  • Pay people for good reviews to counter it
  • Ignore it

Instead, she suggests that you be objective. If the review is a flamingly irrational rant, it maybe best to ignore it: the tone will convince people it’s not worth serious consideration.

Otherwise, you should respond tactfully and positively. If it’s a legitimate complaint, apologize and try to make it right. You’ll be seen as sincerely wanting to help. That can actually turn a negative review into a positive experience that more than compensates for the initial review.

Oh, no! You’ve got a bad online review! How do you deal with it?

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Become proactive

There are a number of ways you can become proactive and at the same time encourage happy customers to write positive reviews and discourage disappointed customers from posting negative reviews. There are a number of “reputation defense” organizations that purport to fix a problem review reputation, but we haven’t worked with any of them so can’t vouch for them.

Need some personalized help with online reviews? Rank Magic can help!

How have you dealt with negative reviews, and how well did it work? Tell us in the comments below.

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How Reviews Affect Sales for Your Small Business

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Customer online reviews can influence sales.Online reviews are increasingly being consulted by consumers before making buying decisions. It’s important to appreciate how online reviews affect sales.

Here are a dozen reason they can affect your sales.

  1. Local sites featuring reviews are more prominent in search than in the past.
  2. Two thirds of local directory traffic comes from people searching for products & services. (source)
  3. Regardless of your SEO, local sites drive visitors to your site. (source)
  4. Each star in a review translates to 5-9% impact on revenues. (source)
  5. Local independent businesses are the most affected by reviews. (source)
  6. 61% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision (source) and Forbes says it’s as high as 90%.
  7. People are 63% more likely to buy from a site with user reviews. (source)
  8. Reviews are 12 times more trusted than your web site itself. (source)
  9. More reviews lend credibility to the ratings, driving visitors and sales. (source)
  10. The Harvard Business Review says that good reviews can increase sales 32%-52%.
  11. Negative reviews can cause a drop of 15% in sales (source)
  12. But for an unfamiliar product, even bad reviews can sometimes increase sales. (source)
12 ways online reviews affect your sales

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Do you have a process in place to increase the likelihood of getting good customer reviews? If so, let us know about it in the comments below.

Need better rankings or more visibility in local directories? 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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Tag That Tweet!

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How hashtags can help you build your business, gain new followers, and showcase your expertise

hashtag-300

The simple little number sign first began appearing on Twitter in 2000, and has since become a widely used, well-recognized Twitter topic categorization tool.  Now dubbed the “hashtag,” the symbol is used to classify an extraordinarily wide variety of topics.

You see those tags everywhere, but perhaps you aren’t sure what they are or why you should care. Your organization can leverage hashtags to meet a variety of marketing objectives.

Take to Twitter to drive website traffic, build brand awareness, showcase your expertise, announce events, and keep followers engaged by enabling them to easily follow relevant tweets. (Such as, lowest prices of the year #BoulderAutoSale!).

You can also encourage followers to visit your website or blog by tweeting about topics they care about. The tags can be used to link back to an article, blog post, site, or video (for example, the benefits of using your dealer for regular maintenance #dealermaintenance #BoulderAuto).

You can use the hashtag classification system to identify tweets related to the same topic. The more users who employ the same hashtag, the more the topic will trend upward. Those topics that are tagged the most will end up highlighted in Twitter’s Trending Topics page. Though the concept of tagging is relatively simple, it’s critical that you understand how to appropriately tag your posts without offending or annoying others, miscategorizing posts, or inadvertently claiming or creating a tag that’s already in use. Armed with this information, you can then get to work using the hashtag to your advantage.

If you’re looking to highlight a unique aspect of your business, announce an event or promotion, or discuss a relevant hot topic related to your organization, the first step is to choose a hashtag. Perhaps you want to join a conversation already trending in order to promote yourself or your business as a topic expert. In this case, carefully research the most popular version of the tag, which may have a variety of formats (#carmaintenance, #vehiclemaintenance, #carcare), and choose the most widely used.

Or you may want to create an entirely new topic unique to your business, event, or idea. If so, choose wisely. With so many hashtags in use, you’ll want to be sure to employ a tag not currently in use. The best way to do so is to add uniquely identifying information (#BoulderAutoDecemberSale).

Regardless of the topic you choose, tag your own company’s name separately within the same tweet (#BoulderAuto), so you can begin to build a group of tweets that are all related to your company. While you want to ensure your tag is unique, take care to ensure spelling is correct and that the tag isn’t so long that others might find it cumbersome to retweet or write about on their own (especially important given Twitter’s 140-character limit).

#Hashtags are good outside Twitter, too, like on Facebook & Instagram  #RankMagic

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It’s not just Twitter

Though Twitter is the birthplace of hashtags, it’s not the only social media site on which the symbol can be found.

If you are looking to create a real presence for your new tag, consider employing it across multiple channels, such as Facebook and Insagram. You can and definitely should also use tweets to link back to your pages on those sites, as well as to existing blog posts, your website, relevant articles, and more, boosting traffic on your organization’s other online “homes” and/or raising awareness of a given subject.

Before you get started, remember that it’s easy to get tag-crazy. You may assume that the more tags in your tweet, the more searches you’ll show up in, and the more folks will read your posts. Unfortunately, many users before you have been there, done that, and it’s generally considered poor etiquette to include more than three tags in your post.

Those users who add too many tags or who attach unrelated tags to their posts may lose the interest of their readers or even find themselves suspended or kicked off social media sites.

Hashtags are highly effective means of categorizing and organizing tweets in what would otherwise be a rather chaotic, albeit character-limited environment. Your organization can reap the benefits of tagging by carefully considering which tags to use, following proper etiquette, and using tags as a means to not only build a following but also drive traffic to your organization’s other social media sites and website.

With knowledge and understanding, as well as some research and preparation, you can easily begin leveraging hashtags to promote your business, help your customers to see you as an authority in your field, build brand and subject awareness, and boost web traffic. So go ahead and tag that tweet!

Do you use hashtags in a special way? Please let us know in the comments below.

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