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How to Profit from Blogging & Marketing Online

Pinterest Traffic Tips to Take Your Blog from 0 to 100,000 Views Per Month

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Pinterest is MASSIVE. Period.

While there are millions of bloggers who thrive on web traffic they generate from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

Pinterest is popular amongst bloggers who work with media, however these days even content marketers are finding ways to drive traffic to their blogs and businesses.

Why?

Because its one of the largest traffic referral networks available today after Facebook.

While Pinterest is has a different audience focus. Everyone can benefit from it if they know what they are doing.

Starting at the bottom of the social network list, Pinterest is the second largest source for traffic for bloggers big and small.

For example, here is a traffic generation board on Pinterest.

The way to building high quality traffic and following on Pinterest depends on how well you optimize your activities.

Reviewing over 50 profiles, I found that bloggers and internet marketers post a ton of stuff on Pinterest hoping they will drive visitors to their blogs.

While the technique might work, your not doing a great deal to ensure your someone who people want to follow in the long run.

Your soon forgotten because your not memorable.

To create a positive and reinforcing impact on your fellow pinners, you need to do more than just posting images on your Pinterest Boards.
Pinterest traffic is considered to be one of the most healthiest traffic after Facebook.
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5 Tips to Becoming an Influential Blogger

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Who do you blog for?

Before you answer that. Being a blogger is not enough.

If you are looking to become a successful blogger, you better start learning the tricks of being influential.

Thus becoming an Influential blogger.

Because, a successful blogger is one who is able to influence his readers.

Trust me, if you’re in the blogging space you are already being influenced by some of bloggers mentioned on the influential bloggers list at Income Dairy or the 50 most powerful blogs mentioned at the guardian.

While influence is the key any bloggers success, millions of us bloggers are still struggling to understand what it takes to be authoritative in the online world.

You can be an expert in the field, but if you are not doing the right things you will not influence people.

Having an influence over other people’s decision can be a boosting factor, that can go a long way.

Both as a blogger and a professional or even a business, you need to understand what it takes to influence your customers or readers.

While there are a lot of things that makes a person influential there are a few basic traits that you will need to develop to become an influencer.

Let’s take a closer look at what makes you authoritative.

Show Interest in your Audience

Being genuinely interested in other people’s interest can be a good thing.

You don’t have to run around people to cater to all their needs all the time.

But to have a focus at addressing your readers or clients interests can be a very good thing for business.

This helps build trust, respect and authority over your subject matter.

You become a better person as an individual by offering advice, service, consulting for people who really deserve it.

Community building is essential for anyone who is looking at building authority and credibility with people.

Be a Good Listener

Another trait that every influencer or authority has online is to be able to listen to what others have to say.

It does not matter how stupid or silly or right or wrong, what matters is that you listen to your readers and clients and do your best to help them out.

Caring for others can be a plus when it comes to selling better and winning over individuals.

What can do you as a blogger to listen better?

Leave a suggestion box on your blog allowing readers to simply pick your brain, conduct Google Hangouts where you can meet up with people across the globe to simple talk about the subject your good at.

Addressing others concerns or questions can prove your capability as a blogger and a pro.

Encourage your Audience to Share their Goals

Before you can encourage other people to talk about themselves freely to you, you need to be able to show some interest in other people, listen to their needs and requirements.

Once you are able to focus on what your readers want more than what you want, you will come to realize that you are building a community or a relationship with your readers.

Once your able to build a healthy community, its quite simple to get people to talk about their requirements and what they want, like, their goals and more.

Offering them ethical bribes( e-books, themes, plugins and stuff that makes work easier for them daily) can be a big boost and will soon have people opening up to your to share their views, perspectives and what not.

Engage with your Readers Interest in Mind

Every time you blog or do a podcast about something keep the readers interest in mind.

This highlights the fact that you are interested in what your readers want, you have been listening to their conversations and requirements and you encourage and motivate them.

This is one of the most important aspects of being an authoritative personality in the online world of marketing or blogging.

Some of the successful minds online will be able to share their expert opinion and why community matters to build a brand around what others simply call a company.

Its really the authority or the influence one builds over the years in the field.

Make your Readers feel Important

By giving your readers the due importance that they deserve, you tend to build real trust.

When you are sincerely and genuinely interested in your readers and make them feel important and as part of your growth as a blogger you also become important to them.

They will soon turn to you for advice on blogging or whatever your area of expertise is.

You as a reader are very important to my success, use the comments box below and tell me what’s your most hardest to accomplish as a blogger.

If you are looking for additional information on Influencing people, do checkout Dale’s book at Amazon.com.

15 Reasons Bloggers are Obsessed With AWeber

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Have you noticed that almost every email newsletter you sign up to is managed by AWeber? The email marketing software.

Well, that’s because bloggers are obsessed with AWeber to manage their email newsletters.

There are well over 10 premium top quality email marketing software that are quite affordable.

Some of them are even free to use with a few restrictions.

So I asked myself, why don’t these bloggers keep the cost down and go for the free tools?

This entirely depends on who your target audience is.

Sometimes it depends on what you’re trying to do with your email list.

I decided to get to the bottom of this to figure out why is that bloggers are obsessed with AWeber.

Why do Bloggers need Newsletters?

No one asks this question anymore they all take it at face value depending on who is advising the readers.

At one point we were all told that RSS was the best technology to distribute our content.

Back in 2007 when I started blogging almost every blog I read told me that list building was everything and everyone need to generate a lead with an optin form on their blogs.

Have you checked the AWeber pricing page?

Before I even realized what I was getting myself into, I was in 100’s of dollars in credit.

If you choose to start sending out email newsletters understand this.

  • List building is lead generation – if you don’t nurture the lead and convert the customer there is no point in list building.
  • AWeber is a premium email marketing software and one among the best I’ve used when compared to its competitors like (Get Response, Mail Chimp and others.) and they cost you if you don’t have a plan to figure out a profitable ROI.
  • You can start building a list early, but have a future plan to sell to the list.
  • Its too expensive to be used as just a blog content delivery tool.
  • The potential of a newsletter is more than what most bloggers do with it. (Build community or drive sales)

Premium Email Marketing Software

AWeber (aff link) offers a free 30 day trial so you can play with them to all to your heart’s content and see what the obsession is all about. Sign Up NOW!

My research shows different pointers why both bloggers and internet marketers are obsessed with AWeber despite the pricing.

Here is a list of reasons why bloggers like AWeber:

  • Built-in A/B split-testing – Makes it easy to optimize subscription rates for any form. Split Tests are a good way to test different versions of a message to see which gets the best response. AWeber randomly sorts your subscribers into up to 4 groups so that you can send a slightly modified version of your message to each group.
    For example: Different subject lines.
  • AWeber Form Scripts Integration – AWeber just gives you one simple little line of code to embed a form you’ve designed anywhere on your site.
  • Selection and Control over Web Forms – AWeber’s interface for designing forms is just easier to use, and there are more options to start with. This allows you to create AWeber forms that blend into your site’s design.
    Send Subscribers to a Specific Page – Instead of showing your subscribers an error message. You can set a specific URL and redirect your subscribers to a desired portal or location.
  • Better Deliverability – Blogger claim that from their experience in using different systems more people receive their messages with AWeber than with other email marketing software. Most bloggers also claim that other email marketing systems where often market as spam emails while the numbers were reversed when they switched to AWeber.
  • Unlimited Lists in One AWeber Account – Some providers charge per list or sites to send out email to. With AWeber they were practically able to set up email newsletter for multiple websites they owned. Isn’t that something?
  • Unlimited Emails – Some services charge per email that is sent out using the marketing software. With AWeber bloggers were able to send out as many as they wanted to each month to as many lists they wanted.
    Auto-responders – Offering mini course via email is a great way to generate leads. Bloggers loved to put together a sequence of emails that you can schedule to go out to your subscribers so that when they signed up for the course they got them in an order and timing as scheduled.
  • Text and HTML Emails – Some bloggers who were not very good with deign, CSS, HTML, loved the fact that they can choose both HTML and Text based email newsletters. As these built in HTML templates save a lot of time. And for when times you just need to send out a text based email, AWeber does the trick.
  • Analytics – AWeber has interesting ways to track the activity of subscribers of your newsletter. Not only can you track which links in your newsletter get clicked it allows you to know things like sales, CPC, CPM and more.
    Blog Newsletters – With Google not paying any importance to RSS anymore. Bloggers find it handy that a premium email software allows them to do something as simple as deliver blog posts as and when published.
  • Customer Service – AWeber customers loved the way they were being treated, guided and some of them even claimed that the customer service was impeccable. I as an AWeber customer was impressed with the support that they offered when I migrated from MailChimp.
  • Personalization – Many bloggers believed that the AWeber system was much better equipped to handle email customizations based on customers or lists. My bloggers lose customers because they feel that its like talking to a teller machine if the emails are not personalized.
  • Incentive – Both bloggers and marketers alike love to add incentives for their newsletters, like a bait to a fish. Having an immediate email delivered right to your subscribers inbox is a much better experience.
  • Follow Up – Auto-responders are terrific tools for developing an ongoing readership. They allow you to drip out valuable content over time (lead nurture) automatically. This allowed the bloggers to build up the excitement and interest before they made their sales pitch.

AWeber offers a free 30 day trial so you can play with them to all to your heart’s content and see what the obsession is all about. Sign Up NOW! (aff link)

5 Quick Tips To Increase Website Speed

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Over the last three weeks I’ve been working on optimizing one of my tech blogs that was impacted in a negative way by the Google Panda update. After extensive research and listing down everything I had to do to ensure that the blog recovers from Panda update. I began work on making changes. The first item on my list was to address the site speed.

Even though this was not a major factor that impacted the site in relation to the Panda update, It was something that was impacting how long the customer stayed on the blog. This article covers all the important steps that I’ve taken as part of the recovery process and in-turn speeding up my website. There are a few things that you need to do before you begin working on your website speed.

These are the 5 things I did before I began work on my blog.

  • Back up all my blog data using BackupBuddy WP Plugin, or something of your choice.
  • Use Premium WP Theme Frameworks like StudioPress (aff link) that has well optimized coding.
  • ​Set up a maintenance webpage up while your working on your blog.
  • Depending on your site size you might want to notify your hosting provider (aff link).
  • Now that you are ready to start making changes to your blog, lets get to the first thing that you will have to as part of speeding up your WordPress powered blog.

Before we get to the tips, check out this video by Matt Cutts answering the ever important question.

Is speed more important than relevance?

Increase Website Speed by Reducing Links Per Page

The first thing that would come to your mind the moment you read the subtitle is – why on earth would I need to reduce links on my site? How can that increase my site speed. Let me explain. There is a concept called Text To Code ratio, where your blog is expected to have more text than code. When I say code, it also refers to the HTML coding, which includes, ad banners and so on.

The purpose to run a test to identify how your site is fairing is to not just evaluate the text to code ratio, but to know the size of your website and how much impact is coding having on the site size.

I used a neat web tool available at SEO Chat. The screenshot of my website performance after the change is reflected. I was so focused working on How To Increase Website Speed I forgot to do the test before I started optimizing my blog.

Since you’re starting to optimize your blog, I think its a good thing to test before and after optimizing your blog. Once you get an idea of the size of your blog or website, its time to start finding ways to reduce links and unwanted codes or buttons or badges that add little to no value to your blog.

A few good places to start working on are –

  • Remove non converting advertisement banners
  • Remove poorly coded ad codes
  • ​Remove badges and buttons
  • Don’t place too many recent post or text link items on sidebars
  • Once you have made these tweaks, you will surely see a considerable change is blog file size as well as a text to link ratio.

You’re now one step close to speeding up your blog.

Reduce the number of URL Redirection

As second part to speeding up your site, its time to focus on redirection on your blog, We all make mistakes when it comes to using the right type of permalink.

We read some poorly written blogs and make changes that drastically affect our blogs in the long run. While redirection is a way forward after permalink are corrected, its not not help with maintaining your blog load speed.

If you run a large blog, then the impact is higher the larger number of redirection. While I do have a few good redirects on my blog, I’ve ensured that I deleted and removed listing from Google for the ones that don’t really make a difference and the new and updated post has much better page rank.

If you are a techie, do a .htaccess redirect vs. using a plugin to redirect. This has a small amount of site speed impact to your blog. And when it comes to site speed, even a small difference counts.

While different people have a different take on this, I would leave this decision entirely to you. You can choose to keep or get rid of your redirects.

Minimize Plugins, Code Edits And Heavy Images

The next step I took to increase website speed is to reduce the number of WordPress plugins I used. Simple remove the plugins that do not add any value to your blogs performance.

Even if it is a back-end plugin that does nothing to make your blog better, its not required. Try and avoid editing the codes of your WordPress theme. This can slow down the performance of your site.

Premium themes are often well codes and optimized for maximum performance. If you make edits and changes with poorly written codes, and insert ad codes in your theme template, they are going to slow things down for your blog.

Using images that in format .png or .gif are much lighter and suited for the web. Using heavy images can also slow down your site considerably. Try to convert the images to more suitable format for better performance.

You are almost done with all the manual effort that is required to speed up your blog. Now lets get to the much simpler aspects of optimization where you need to set up a few WordPress plugins.

Optimize Database Tables

This is a very interesting aspect of optimization that I never really knew about. WordPress has a very poor functionality in this aspect. Every time you write a blog post, make edits and save a post WordPress creates copies of that post.

It then stores them in your database even though we all know we so rarely use them. In order to free up space on my WordPress database I simply downloaded and installed a plugin called wp-optimize.

You can find this plugin via the plugin directory right from your WordPress dashboard. Once you install this, you simply navigate to it on the left panel in your WordPress admin area and follow the steps.

The plugin clearly shows you how much space is being utilized and can be reduced. This process of removing unwanted entries from your database, you will increase the load time of your database.

Plugins have a huge impact on blog speed

The most important plugin that you need to install is the W3TotalCache plugin. This is considered to be one of the best optimization plugin when it comes to clearing out stored up cache and controlling site loads.

You can find this plugin right from your admin dashboard as well. If you are confused about the various options, simply follow the tutorial from WPBeginners like I did.

Once everything is complete, do not forget to clear cache using the plugin. Now its time to do a speed test at Google’s PageSpeedInsights. Here is a test that I did while writing this post.

Here is an interesting infographic from Neil Patel highlighting the importance of loading time.

loading time infographic

 

If you choose to implement the tips listed, I would like to know how it works out for you. Do share your experience in the comments section.

99 Blogging Tips I Wish I Knew Before I Started Blogging

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If you don’t already have a blog, you can launch a blog in 5 mins.

I’m sure you would have read thousands of blogging tips from n-number of blogs. Every blogger has his/her own way to share their daily blog tips with their audience.

The internet is an over whelming place filled with information. As bloggers we are all inclined in a certain way to share our experiences and expertise in the field of online marketing.

I’m a regular reader of blogs like Blogging Tips, Daily Blog Posts, Goins Writer, and Smart Passive Income that continue to share some excellent blogging tips for every type of blogger.

While everyone does their part, I think its time I put up my list of tips, tips that I’ve learned and or experienced as a blogger of the 7 years I’ve been blogging.

Blogging and internet marketing has taught me a lot about making money, being independent and even learning to overcome my fears in a certain way.

99 Blogging Tips So You Don’t Miss Anything

  1. Ask questions to your readers
  2. Ask your readers for ideas
  3. Avoid black hat seo
  4. Avoid duplicate content
  5. Backup your blog
  6. Be awesome
  7. Be consistent
  8. Be honest with claims
  9. Be unique
  10. Become an expert in your niche
  11. Blogs take time to generate traffic and revenue
  12. Check out popular topics on other blogs
  13. Choose your niche wisely, not too big and not too small
  14. Commit to a publishing schedule
  15. Conduct keyword research when writing articles
  16. Create a unique writing style that readers love
  17. Define your blog’s purpose
  18. Do not clutter your sidebar
  19. Do not try to copy or replicate other bloggers
  20. Don’t give up
  21. Don’t measure stats too early
  22. Don’t write too little or too much
  23. Encourage community engagement through comments
  24. Expect critics
  25. Experiment with different revenue sources
  26. Feature advice from industry experts
  27. Find ways to regularly get inspired
  28. Follow proven blueprints
  29. Generate leads with an email list early on
  30. Generate quality content on a consistent basis
  31. Get to know other bloggers personally
  32. Give customers the information they want and actively seek
  33. Give stuff away for free
  34. Give yourself time off
  35. Good content is the skeleton of any blog
  36. Google can mess up your search rankings
  37. Guest post
  38. Have a spare post ready for publication
  39. Include data in blog posts
  40. Inspire your readers with your close
  41. Integrate product messages
  42. Keep a list of blog post ideas
  43. Keep costs as low as possible
  44. Keep track of investments
  45. Learn the basics of seo and more
  46. Leverage social bookmarks
  47. Link to other blogs as often as possible
  48. Link to previous content
  49. List your best articles
  50. Love your existing readers
  51. Maintain a social sharing checklist
  52. Make it easy for visitors to contact you
  53. Make your content easy to share
  54. Make your posts scannable
  55. Map every blog post to one of your buyer personas
  56. Measure, adjust and measure some more
  57. Network with other bloggers
  58. Offer useful tools or resources
  59. Optimise each post with images
  60. Optimise your blog for seo
  61. Optimise your blog for seo and donít change it ever
  62. Participate in blogging projects
  63. Participate in online forums like problogger community
  64. Pick a quality theme
  65. Place ads wisely
  66. Proofread
  67. Provide a series of articles
  68. Put a link on your signature
  69. Research before you write
  70. Save some spare posts for emergencies
  71. Share content your audience is looking for
  72. Short sentences win
  73. Sprinkle questions all over your content
  74. Start writing early
  75. Take the time to promote your content
  76. Think before you write
  77. Understand your audience
  78. Use a rss reader like feedly
  79. Use a short and easy to remember blog name
  80. Use examples and case studies
  81. Use google trends to gain insight about the latest search queries
  82. Use paragraphs
  83. Use readable fonts
  84. Use relative sub headings
  85. Use feedburner
  86. Use google analytics
  87. Use meta tags wisely
  88. Use pictures wherever possible
  89. Use WordPress
  90. Watch what experts do
  91. Write about what you love
  92. Write as often as possible
  93. Write catchy headlines
  94. Write content thatís not just about your products and services
  95. Write down the structure of your blog post
  96. Write for yourself first
  97. Write timeless content
  98. Write with a personal touch
  99. Write with perspective

This is not all, there are even more tips out there. I’m sure you have a few awesome tips up your selves as well. Do share them with me and help the community grow.

We are all experts in some way and we are all here to learn and grow together as a community. The guys at First Site Guide were kind enough to share this awesome free blogging guide with the Eddie Gear Community & I’m happy to pass it along to you. The best part is that you don’t even have to sign up to get the guide, just click and download.