The Secret to Creating Shareworthy Content

I often refer to the term I use to describe amazing content that people want to share online as shareworthy, and today, I’d like to dive a bit deeper into the concept of creating shareworthy content, so your blog and online reputation can benefit from the compounding effect of blogging, attract more visitors, and grow organically over the long term. In other words, shareworthy content leads to sustainable growth, and I’m going to tell you how to do it.

What is shareworthy content?

It’s simple. Shareworthy content is amazing content that people like enough to want to tell their friends about it and share it with their social media connections. They can share that content by blogging about it on their own blogs, tweeting it on Twitter, linking to it on Facebook or LinkedIn, and so on. Therefore, shareworthy content is not necessarily viral content that explodes across the Internet. Instead, it’s a tangible form of the world-of-mouth marketing of the social web that businesses covet.

How do you create shareworthy content? [Read more]

5 Ways to Drive a Buzz about Your Events Using Social Media

Whether you’re a blogger, business owner, or individual with an event to promote, you can spread the word and drive an online buzz about it using the free tools of the social Web.

Some tools integrate directly into popular social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn while others not only let you promote your event but also let you search for events, people who might want to attend your own event, and more.  Suffice it to say, the social Web offers everything you need to create a successful event buzz at your fingertips!

Following are five easy-to-use and free social media tools that you can use to promote your online and offline events across the social Web: [Read more]

7 Tips for Bootstrapping Your Blog Traffic

Any time you start a new blog, the biggest concern tends to be “how do I build traffic?” Unless you’re hiring or have a crack team of web gurus who know the tricks for building up your blog fast, you’ll just have to do it yourself. However, if you haven’t luxury of a big budget and have minimal time, one recourse is to bootstrap your blog traffic with the same general principles with which entrepreneurs bootstrap their startup businesses with minimal funds and resources.

Here are some tips for leveraging your publishing and promotional plan to build initial trickles of traffic into much more.

1. Write content and publish consistently. It’s easy to come up with a plan, even create an editorial calendar. It’s much harder to actually stick to a consistent schedule. This is a common area of difficulty for bloggers, but important to master. Let’s just say that search engines and readers both love consistency of frequency. Unless you’re running a news site, you don’t necessarily have to publish tons of content daily.
2. Tweak your content to searches. You don’t want to cater entirely to site visitors’ searches, but do focus on search keywords that are relevant to your site’s niche. If visitors are reaching your site via a particular search but the “bounce” (leaving) rate is high, then they probably didn’t find the content they were seeking. Mine your site metrics for the most popular search terms for the recent past, then see if you can write content to match, while staying within your site’s niche.
3. Build up your posting frequency. Start small, build up your content as time, resources or budget permits. Additional content will bring additional readers, especially if you’re leveraging your social media channels.
4. Build your social networks.  There are a variety of social networks, including social bookmarking sites (Stumbleupon, Delicious), social voting sites (Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Reddit, Propeller), Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, other blogs, forums, media sharing sites (Flickr, YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare) and so on. Don’t forget to factor in the time it takes to build your social networks, so work at it daily if possible. Of course, having these networks is useless unless you leverage them to promote your content.
5. Promote content on at least two social media sites. There are a variety of ways to promote your content, including the social media sites mentioned above, as well as a variety of non-social profile pages that are free for use. These methods differ in the amount of Web traffic they each bring, though collectively they can make a tremendous difference to your site. You don’t have to use all of these methods, especially when you’re starting out. Bloggers differ on what they feel is most important, but if you have to pick just two to start with, a few of my blogging colleagues have variously suggested the following pairs as being “most” effective, in their experience:
   • Stumbleupon and Digg.
   • Stumbeupon and Twitter.
   • Twitter and Facebook.
   • Twitter and Digg.

   Personally, I’d pick Twitter and Facebook, but it really depends on your content and your social networks. Promoting content successfully online really is about who you know and whether they’ll share your content. If you can get them to do it regularly, even better. Your Facebook Wall or a Fan Page serve as great reminders. Just don’t overdo it, and learn to balance promotion and social network building tasks when you’re not writing.

6. Deep link to your older content. For each new post that you write, you should try to link to at least two older posts in your own site’s archives. If your post is sufficiently long, you can link to more than two. Remember to link with appropriate keywords in the anchor text. The cynic might say that this is a cheap way to get more page views for your site, but linking to your own existing content from each new post serves multiple purposes
   • Keep readers on your site. Yes, that gets you more page views, but is there really anything wrong with that if you’re giving readers what they want, possibly in your archives?
   • Expose older content to readers who might have missed it.
   • Build authority for your site for the keywords and variations used in link anchor text (more on this in a later post). From a search engine perspective, keep in mind that they all want relevant links to give to search users. If your site happens to have relevant links, why not emphasize that by deep linking? This potentially helps to reduce the waiting time it takes to rank in search engines.
   • Throw a whammy at site scrapers who grab your content. They might steal your content but having a link to your own posts means you’ll at least know who did it and be able to take action, if desired.
7. Use target=”_blank” in your hyperlinks. If you don’t know what this means, don’t worry for now. If you do know, then use it for any links that go outside of your sites. This way, the main browser window/ tab stays on your site, hopefully keeping readers there longer and potentially building traffic.

If you are bootstrapping with limited resources and funds, you can ease into your publishing and promotion plan. Though the more effort you put in early on, the sooner you hit the point of exponential growth. If you have a blog for your business,  build it steadily, keep costs to a minimum, bootstrap your way to higher blog traffic to gain leads and sale. If you get too overwhelmed, hire an intern until you can afford to hire staff or an agency such as Performancing Services.

Image: Flickr.

How to Encourage People to Read Your Blog Posts

This is a guest post by Phyllis Zimbler Miller,s co-founder of the social media marketing company www.MillerMosaicLLC.com, where she also writes a blog.

All bloggers share one main goal – having as many people as possible read the blog posts. Leaving aside search engine optimization, links from others blogs, etc., what is the number one way to encourage people to read blog posts?

Make reading those posts as easy as possible, which isn’t always as automatic as it sounds.

The truth is that bloggers are often unaware that their posts need to be served up with elements that encourage people to actually read the posts.

Here are recommended steps on which elements should be used to encourage people to read your blog posts:

Step 1: Make the font size large

No matter what a website design book says about how big the font size should be, you should choose a font size that is easily readable.

I once had trouble reading the content on someone’s blog and politely emailed the site owner suggesting larger type. I got a nasty reply saying that 11 to 12 pt. type was recommended and her type was 11 pt. and it was fine.
In truth, what is fine is font size that is easily readable, not a size that a reader has to work to read. [Read more]

Blogging Tricks Will Only Bring You Part of the Way

Recently, I was working with someone that considers themselves an expert in social media marketing, SEO, and other popular terms these days for promoting a site and getting it some traffic. The person ran their ideas past me, and there were two things I quickly noticed.

The first was that they had probably read some blogs that told them to do various things to increase their SEO, things like bolding keywords, stuffing meta tags with keywords, and changing out H2 tags for H1 tags all in the hopes of beating their competitors.

The second was that they were focused on various tricks relating to creating landing pages, buying links, and other marketing methods.

All of the information this person passed by me was older information, most of which was nearly useless today as well as short sighted, with possible results that would end in disaster.

Imagine if you will, owning a blog for years, slowly building it up, trying to get to the next level in traffic, revenue and whatnot, hiring an “SEO expert” and having that person create, via tricks, some serious traffic.

You pay the person, thinking they’ve done a great job, and three months down the road, your site starts dropping in rankings, traffic dries up, and various other things happen that puts your site lower than it was before the “SEO expert” came along.

This is a far too common occurrence in blogging. Even the bloggers managing their sites make mistakes in SEO, marketing and social media in hopes of creating a hugely successful, viral, high positioned page that they can leverage in terms of making huge amounts of money or popularity that they can leverage in other ways.

People have to stop and realize that blogging tricks will only get you part of the way to your goals, and if done incorrectly they can actually cause huge setbacks.

Too much optimization, too overt in your self-promotion, and you’ll end up wishing you could undo your hard work.

The best advice I can give someone looking to do better with their blog would be to research as much as you can before you act in any way to effect your blog in any important way.

Don’t just leap into action after reading one person’s experience, and always check the age of the information because all the search engines are working hard at providing the best natural, gaming free search results.