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3 Great Marketing Strategies for Bloggers With Limited Time

October 22, 2009 by Dee Barizo

If you’re anything like me, you don’t have much free time to blog. Many of us just don’t have the time to spend four hours a day blogging. We’ve got the day job, family, social life, and other things taking up our time. So anything that can really help improve our blog without spending too much time is a good thing.

In this post, I’ll share the top three methods in my experience that provide the best results in the least amount of time. One disclaimer before we start. Just because these methods don’t take a lot of time doesn’t mean you won’t be working hard to implement them. The methods are based on creating something of value and doing that requires a little bit of determination, focus, and effort.

With that in mind, let’s go to the first strategy.

1. Keyword-Based Posts

One thing I’ve found is that if you’re intentional with using keywords in your posts, you’ll get a lot more traffic than simply writing whatever comes to mind. I’ve checked out many of the popular blogs in my niche and they don’t use keywords well. These blogs have many more links than me but I outrank them for key search terms because I do keyword research and insert the keywords in my posts.

You don’t have to spend months learning SEO to use this tactic. The process is simple.

First, do some keyword research.

Check out your keyword logs and see what keywords are driving traffic to your site. You can usually find keyword patterns that you can capitalize on. For example, let’s say you have a pet blog. You check your logs and see that you have a bunch of traffic for the keyword labrador retriever training tips. With this in mind, you can be sure to get traffic by targeting similar keywords by just substituting the name of the dog breed. Create posts that go after keywords like dachshund training tips and german shepherd training tips.

Also, think of some common search terms in your niche and then enter them in Google’s keyword tool. The tool will give you a lot of related keywords that you can use.

Then, simply include the keywords in the title tags of your posts.

That’s all there is too it. Yet, many bloggers don’t take use this strategy and they end up missing out on a lot of traffic.

2. Flagship Posts

I got the term “flagship” from Chris Garrett’s great ebook, Killer Flagship Content. Definitely check it out for more information. Flagship posts are posts that have a ton of value. They are comprehensive and longer than your average post. They are the type of posts that people bookmark and send to their friends.

You won’t be writing these posts in less than an hour, but they are great for your blog. Most posts are just not very good. This is sad to say but if you look at the average blog, their posts are not memorable at all. Flagship posts are therefore great at setting yourself apart and helping readers remember your blog.

For example, one of the blogs in my niche has really grown to be very popular. They’ve only been around for less than a year and they don’t post very often – around two posts a week. But each post is very good. They average about 1200 words per post and they routinely go over the 1600 word mark. Each post has relevant pictures and they use formatting wisely with headings and paragraphs so the posts look organized and are attractive to the eye. Their posts are so meaty that they only show 2 posts on their front page.

You can tell they put a lot of effort into their posts. As a result, they have a big audience with many repeat visitors that regularly comment on their posts.

This strategy may need a little promotional push especially if you have a new blog and don’t have an existing audience to spread the word about your blog. That brings me to the third strategy.

3. Guest Posting on Popular Blogs

Sending a guest post to a top blog and then having them publish it brings many dividends. You get your blog exposed to a big readership base and you connect yourself to a top blogger. Also, you brand yourself as an authority figure since you were able to get published on a reputable site.

The quality of your guest post is important. Most top blogs won’t take any post. They are looking for something of high quality. As such, I would treat these posts just like flagship posts from the previous strategy. Also, the better your post is, the more likely people will visit your blog and become a regular reader.

If you can’t seem to get published on the top blogs, then a publishing on popular forum can be an alternative. However, it shouldn’t be too hard to get a guest post on top blogs as long as you have a really good post for them. Therefore, don’t be afraid to send them quality guest posts. Blogs are always looking for fresh content so you have a great chance of being published.

Trade your money for our time and effort. Performancing offers blog management services to improve your blog.

So What Should the Performancing Hive be Really About?

October 21, 2009 by Rico Mossesgeld

We’re currently in the process of revamping the Performancing Hive, Performancing’s paid subscription community. Like the current sign-up page says, Hive “exists to provide you the help you need to increase the performance of your blog.” As we take steps to improve Hive and re-examine the focus of the community—not to mention Performancing itself—we would very much like to hear from you. [Read more…] about So What Should the Performancing Hive be Really About?

Blogging More Efficiently by Doing What Works

October 13, 2009 by Dee Barizo

I often meet bloggers that think that blogging is about doing certain things. They’ve read a couple blogs about blogging and find out that there are many different blogging activities they can do. So they create a checklist and methodically try to complete every activity on the checklist. These activities may include:

Twitter marketing
Guest posting
Blog commenting
Submitting to article directories
Creating list posts
Doing interviews
Writing humorous posts

The problem with the checklist approach is that different activities will yield different results. Guest posting may send more traffic than blog commenting. Or list posts may attract more links than interviews.

As you manage and promote your blog, if you’re watchful, you’ll see that certain activities will be more successful than others.

Once you’ve made that realization, you should move more time and effort to those successful activities.

Sometimes the first thing you do provides very good results, so there’s not much reason to spend a lot of time on the other activities.

The 80/20 Approach

Instead of the checklist approach, I suggest the 80/20 approach.

With this approach, you spend 80% of your time on activities that have worked well for your blog. If being active on Twitter has brough a sizable increase on your RSS subscriber base, then you spend a lot of time of Twitter. If funny posts have been well received by your audience, then you set aside much of your time to create those posts.

With the rest of the time, you use it to try out new things or the activities you like that don’t provide the best results.

The 20% is there so you don’t get bored. It seems to be human nature to try new things. Plus, by trying out new things, you could find an activity that works even better than your current best activities.

Different Activities for Different Blogs

One thing to note is that certain activities work well for some blogs but not for others. Just because article marketing works for your pet blog doesn’t mean it will work as well for your travel blog.

This means you should spend time testing different activities to see which ones work for each blog.

For example, I used to do a lot of article marketing but I found that it didn’t work that well for many blogs. For many niches, article marketing is very saturated and overdone. Your articles don’t really get much traffic because there are so many competing articles.

But I submitted some test articles for a new blog in the gaming industry. These articles did well since surprisingly the gaming industry is not active on the article directories. Therefore, I spend most of my marketing time doing article marketing for the gaming blog.

To recap, through testing figure out which activities work well and then spend the bulk of your time and effort on those activities. This strategy will improve your blog as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Performancing offers an authority builder service to help you discover which activities provide the best results for your site.

How to Get Traffic by Blogging about Future Events in Your Niche

September 30, 2009 by Dee Barizo

traffic-spike-from-future-event

Isn’t it great when you get a traffic spike? 🙂

The image above shows a spike I recently received. I credit the increase in traffic to blogging about an important future event in my niche.

In this post, I’ll tell you specifically what I did. Also, I’ll give examples from other niches to help you understand the principles behind my strategy. Finally, I’ll share a way to take the strategy to another level.

Defining an Event

First of all, let’s look at what constitutes an event. An event is anything on the calendar where you can expect many people in your industry to be a specific topic.

My blog is in the trading card game niche. Every 3-4 months we get a new product, which gets players excited and causes them to go online for information about the product.

Every product is associated with a tournament a week before the official release date of the product. Joining the tournament is the only way you can own the product before it’s actually released. As you can imagine, many people take advantage of this opportunity.

With a little bit of thought, you can define events in your niche. Here are two examples from other niches.

If you have a NFL betting blog, the first week of the NFL season is always a big event because gamblers are excited about trying to win money. Therefore, there will be a huge spike of traffic for keywords related to the this event.

If you have a gardening blog, you had a great opportunity a couple days ago. Fall season just started so there was a spike in traffic for keywords related to fall gardening.

Setting Up Your Landing Page

Since you can predict events in your niche, you can create a landing page that targets those events.

Two weeks before the tournament, I set up a page on my blog that gave strategy tips for doing well in the tournament. I used relevant keywords for my title tag and headline.

I placed a link to the page on my header so every other page on my site linked to it. I used relevant anchor text for the link. This internal linking tactic builds link equity for the page and tells Google you consider that page to be very important.

Why create the page two weeks early? This time period gives Google time to index and rank the page. Google doesn’t work instantaneously. It needs time for its bots to spider your site and find new pages.

Let’s go back to our other two examples. An NFL gambling blogger could set up a page entitled “Betting Picks: NFL Week One Games”. The gardening blogger could create a page entitled “Fall Gardening Guide: Fall Plants and Flowers”.

My recommendation is setting up a page rather than a blog post. If you have a blog post as your landing page, it will look old by the time the event comes around blog posts show the date of publication whereas a page doesn’t. Of course, you do want to create a blog post to tell your readers about the page right before the event.

Also, the page can be a place to add links to relevant blog posts. For example, with the fall gardening page, the blogger could update it with a link and short summary whenever she creates a new post about fall gardening. This keeps the landing page updated with fresh content.

Change in Mindset

I had to change my mindset to implement this strategy.

I got into blogging because it allows you to cover the latest information about your niche. I’m used to giving my thoughts about events that just happened. Also, I like to blog about what is current, so it was hard for me to blog about something in the future. But now that I’ve seen the results of a little planning and preparation, I’ll be aiming for more future events.

With this strategy, you’ll have to prepare and plan ahead. Your landing page won’t get much traffic in the beginning. But your preparation will be pay off as the event arrives and your page ranks well on the search engines.

Performancing offers link building services to promote your event landing pages.

7 Quick Blog Post Ideas

September 22, 2009 by Justin Wright

If you’re like me, you’ll run in to writers block from time to time. Coming up with a new blog post idea everyday can really be difficult, especially if your blog covers a very specific niche. So here’s a few quick ideas for your next blog post:

1. Build Off An Existing Post

One thing that I find really effective is writing a post that builds off of another one. It could be one of your old posts from your own archive or it could be a post someone else has written on a different blog. Basically, you start off where you (or they) left off and build from it.

2. Answer A Question

Nothing is more effective than answering a question. It could be something one of your readers left in a comment, something you found on Yahoo answers, or simply a general question that a lot of people ask. Not only will it make a good post but it will also help your readers.

3. Ask Your Readers A Question

If you don’t want to answer a question, you can also ask your readers a question. This helps generate comments since a lot of your readers will want to submit their answers.

4. Create A List Of Something

Of all the blog posts I’ve ever written on my personal blog, the majority of them were lists. Such as 10 ways to do this or 7 tools to make this easier. They make for really catchy titles and often spread like wildfire across the web.

5. Review A Product (Or A Blog)

If you’re in to software or gadgets, writing a review can be an easy way to come up with a new blog post. Don’t forget to look at the basic things like an application you may have downloaded. You can also write a review of your favorite blog. This not only gives the other blogger some recognition, but it also gives your readers a valuable resource.

6. Interview Someone

Nothing gains credibility faster than interviewing someone in your niche. If you’re a writer, seek out to find an author you can interview. If you run a local blog, find someone in your area that will sit down and answer some of your questions.

7. Tell A Story

While it’s true that not everyone likes reading your stories, they can sometimes be very useful for your readers. Especially if you write about a struggle you had or an obstacle that you’ve overcome. This will help your readers avoid the problems you’ve run in to.

Have any more ideas? Feel free to share them below!

Will Online Micropayment Systems Help Save Newspapers?

September 13, 2009 by J Angelo Racoma

Newspapers are not dead. Even with the Internet providing free content on just about anything, people still do read newspapers for a variety of reasons. These days, though one big challenge faced by newspaper publishers is how to bring their mainstream business online while still being profitable and sustainable.

Newspapers–and other periodicals–are said to have a three-pronged approach when it comes to revenue streams. It’s comparable to a tripod, in which if one leg fails, the whole thing collapses. First is the subscriptions: the good number of businesses, establishments and individuals who pay a subscription fee to receive copies of a paper or magazine regularly. Second is advertisements: sponsorships are a lifeline of the publishing industry. Third is newsstand sales: these are people who are not regular subscribers, but buy off the stand anyway.

The argument here is that the three-tier revenue scheme provides a good check-and-balance system for the focus of the publication’s editorials and content. If one only relies solely on advertisers, then a newspaper stands to lose editorial integrity. If one relies only on subscribers, then content tends to be monotonous. If one relies only on newsstand buyers, then you tend to focus on sensational news to get people to buy each issue.

The challenge with bringing content online is that users tend to prefer “free,” and so a publication is therefore effectively taking out the newsstand revenues from the picture. There is therefore a heavy reliance on advertisements, and to some extent regular subscriptions. If newspapers find a way to bring the newsstand to online readers, then this might bring back the balance to its revenue streams. In a proposal by Google to the Newspaper Association of America, they propose a micropayment system that will allow users to purchase content.

Fast Company discusses the implications of this proposal.

As newspapers seek to generate new revenue channels by switching to online publishing, there’s a fabulous business opportunity opening as the provider for their payment systems. The micropayments system will apparently share revenue in a similar fashion to the iTunes App Store, and Android Marketplace, so it’ll be a profitable system for Google as well as the newspapers. The upshot for Google is that it will remain at the core of the process (a position it loves to be in) and able to monitor its user’s habits in the hope that it can glean more information about them–useful for tailoring its own operations, selling advertising and so on.

Google, after all, has been digitizing content for some time now, and therefore it is not new to the game of bringing us content from books and even old newspapers. But to the end-user, what makes this different from existing checkout or subscription systems, such as those powered by PayPal and the like? Perhaps it’s the trust factor that the Google brand brings in. Perhaps it’s Google’s ability to aggregate content from various sources and bring these together under one portal (think Google News).

And so with a system for bringing the newsstand right at your fingertips, do you think this will help newspapers thrive in the ever-competitive world of distributing content online? To me, if it’s a matter of paying a few cents to access a newspaper or magazine issue, then it will be all right. But the clincher here is whether it will be an easy enough process, and whether the price will be reasonable enough.

Then there are the pros and cons of having all your content in digital format. First, there are the green implications. Less paper means less trees cut down, less ink used for printing, and less material to recycle. Being fully digital also means I can access the content from anywhere–my computer, my smartphone or even an e-book reader. Content is now also more easily searchable than physically printed material. On the other hand, paper is sometimes more convenient to use, and there are people who prefer the actual feel (and sound, and scent) of paper.

For now, I’m still content with buying my weekday paper from the newsstand each morning when I drive the kids to school. I still read my share of online news from various sources. This means I get a mix of digital and print content in my daily consumption of information. The question is how easy will it be for me to fully make the move to digital?

Image credit: flickr/inju

Why Forums Have Stood the Test of time

September 1, 2009 by J Angelo Racoma

Forums pre-date blogs, microblogging services, social networks and other social mediums as we know them. I remember the first forums I joined in the mid 1990’s, which were about mobile phones. The bulletin boards are still up today. I’m not as active, but I got to meet some new friends (face to face) from those forums.

If you aren’t strict with the software or method of content distribution, I can even say forums pre-date the Internet as we know it. For my part, I was active in bulletin board services of old–where you manually login to an online service by dialling in to the host computer, and with interfaces that command-line junkies would surely appreciate.

These days, I still visit my favorite forums, with topics including cars, notebook computers, social media, and the like. I especially like how passionate some forum members can be about the topic. Here are a few reasons why I think forums will last the test of time.

Community

Forums are usually about topics that like-minded individuals love to talk about. Be it mobile phones, netbooks, social media, marketing, or just about anything, people will flock together. And it’s not just about sharing the same passions that makes a community. It’s also about genuinely extending a helping hand to those in need. I’ve experienced a few times when I had real-world troubles, and posted my problem on the forum, and just a few minutes later responses came trickling in. Some members would even be willing to physically assist you when in need!

Longevity

Forums usually stand the test of time because of the rich archive of content they have. And forums are not personality-driven like blogs are. Forums are not friends-driven like social networks are. As long as the topic is still interesting, there will always be people who will carry the torch. Even if founding members, moderators or even the owner tire out, other people will be willing to continue managing the community.

Social structure

Forums usually have social structures. There are the managers or moderators. There are the “senior” members. There are the newbies. Forums have rules, and everyone is encouraged to contribute positively. Sometimes, it’s not just the metrics that give a member credence and seniority. At times, it’s the quality of your contributions to the community. And bad eggs are usually weeded out. Even if a recalcitrant user can just come back using different aliases and IP addresses, forum members usually police each other, making sure that everyone is acting good.

Return readership

Most blogs have about 40% return readership or so. Most would have 80% of its audience coming from the search engines, and many of these are just one-time readers (looking for some information, perhaps). Forums, on the other hand, are often checked by its members for new posts. And members often stay online for hours at a time, just to be part of the active discussions. Sure, this can be bad for monetizing through pay-per-click campaigns, but it can be a good way to earn from brand advertising.

For more than a decade, perhaps it’s the software that has changed form and functionality. In some cases, “bulletin boards” have also taken the guise of usenet groups and even e-groups. But the concept of online forums has remained the same. And as long as there are people who share an interest in any particular topic (and there’s someone willing to manage and maintain the forum), then these will go on and on. Do you think other social mediums will stand the test of time in a similar way?

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