Category Archives: Blogging

WordPress Blog Article Strategies

Blogging, content marketing, SEO, Wordpress

Photo Credit by Heisenberg Media / Flickr

If you’re looking for great WordPress blog article strategies, you’ve come to the right place. A lot of people have WP blogs these days, but not everyone knows how to come up with good content in order to attract and – more importantly – retain readers. Below are several ideas and strategies that you can use to increase your chances of blogging success.

WordPress Blog Article Strategies

Here are some ideas that will help you deal with content on your WordPress blog.

  • Know Your Audience – The first thing you need to do is make sure you know your audience. The more you know about them, the easier it will be to come up with article ideas that they’re going to like. And if you do manage to hit a homerun when picking topics to write about, you’re going to attract an audience – one that will keep coming back for more content.

  • Be Consistent – If you can only publish once a week do that, but make sure you’re consistent with it. Some bloggers only post occasionally with no rhyme or reason as to when they post. This works as long as your content is very high quality and can’t be found anywhere else on the Internet.

  • Be Useful – This should be common sense, but you might be amazed at how many people think they just need to write out a certain number of words that sound good together without actually being useful in their posts. The more useful your articles, the more readers you’re going to attract – all without spending money. The good news is that it’s not hard to be useful if you spend some time writing the content.

  • Be Entertaining – This is not a requirement, but if you can also be entertaining – especially funny – you can get a lot more action with each article you write for your WordPress blog. You want to make sure you don’t push it too far, though. There’s a fine line and you need to make sure you walk it carefully.

  • Be Interactive – In the past, when an article was published it was difficult for the writer and readers to interact with each other. The Internet has changed this. These days it’s important to acknowledge and interact with your readers. You don’t want to spend all your time on this, but it’s something you should do a little. It can really make your readers feel special and make them lifelong fans of your blog.

If you can follow some or all of the tips and advice above, there’s a good chance you’re going to be able to slowly but surely increase your audience quite a bit. And when you have more readers, you’re going to have a better chance of making money with the website.

This writer enjoys reading infographics online – at least the ones that are well designed.

Best Apps And Tools That Will Make Your Blogging Life Easier

Blogging, Business Tech, Content creation, Self-employed, Small Business Marketing, Technology

blogging appsBlogging may be hard for some of you who are not yet comfortable into the routine of coming up with something exciting and new to talk about regularly. It is very necessary that you are able to catch the inspiration when it strikes. It may be on the breakfast or dinner table, while you are on the thunderbox or when you are lying on the bed. This is where the apps come in handy and allow you keep your genius along with you always. 

Here is a list of the best apps and tools that will make your blogging life easier:

1. Evernote

This is one of the most famous web capture tool these days primarily due to the fact that it enables you to grab full web pages, audio, images, text snippets etc. and allows you to recall them whenever needed. Those who are on Evernote find it easy to recall information. If you come across such situations where you encounter a setting that you wish to write about later, use Evernote to clip it and save it for future reference. Evernote also has a lot of cool integrations to offer that make it super-easy-to-use app.

2. Tape-A-Talk Recorder or Dragon Dictation

If you are among those who prefer speaking over writing, it is advisable to get a voice recorder app that will enable you to talk about your post instead of writing it down by typing each word on the keyboard. This voice recorder app can also come in handy when you are driving to work and enroute your mind fills with ideas that you wish to write about. For Android users, Tape-A-Recorder is a useful app as it gives you the freedom to append the recording and send it across to Evernote or e-mail easily.

For iPhone users, a similar app is called Dragon dictation which has the capability of making your dictation appear as text instantly. This app can also be integrated with Evernote.

3. Google Drive

One of the biggest conveniences for any blogger can be the freedom to take his or her content anywhere and post ideas from where he or she is. This is where a web based word processor like Google drive comes to rescue. For those who keep writing on different terminals or devices and collaborating with various authors, storing documents on cloud enables an easy access to the documents to either pick up from where they left or to find out what edits have others made to it. Cloud enables a 24X7 access to your documents from any computer or gadget.

4. Springpad

This app is much similar to Evernote. Other than saving notes, you can also save tasks, look up items to save, and set reminders for particular tasks. Springpad has a wonder feature of organizing your thoughts by itself and does not bother you to do so. Hence in case you wish to blog about a location or a particular product, this app reminds you of these items and allows you to access them easily from your mobile device or computer.

5. White Noise – Rainy Day

There is no denial that the environment poses the biggest threat to your idea of working and writing on the go. All public places are so loud that you can barely concentrate on an idea. This app is a wonder way to combat such a situation. This noise generating app blocks all other distractions around you enabling you to concentrate on better things. All you need to do is plug in your earphones and run this app to focus on writing and do the task at hand.

6. Focus Booster

This free app is a simple app that runs on your desktop but the dividends that it generates are far more productive. You can set the timer and start doing the task at hand viz. designing, writing or whatever you need to do to grow your blog. After the preset time is over, take a break that is built in the app and take your time to freshen up so that you can be back with a better focus.

7. FireShot

This is a Firefox, Chrome, SeaMonkey and Thunderbird extension. This enables you to get screen shots from the web and annotate, edit, export, upload and even print them conveniently. There are a number of capture options viz. full page, visible part of the page etc. One unique offering with this extension is the set of annotations and editing tools that come with it. It also lets you capture flash content.

About the Author:

Robert Bryant is a blogger and works with MaxWell Systems – A Construction Software Company. He likes blogging about online strategies that are related to Social Media, Online Marketing and Legal issues.

How to Get More People to Read Your Articles on Social Media

Blogging, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Traffic, ,

social media Social media is a wonderful tool that helps expand the networks of a lot of people and businesses, and it’s especially great for people who want to share information. If you write a lot of articles and want them to get more attention, then there are a lot of things you can do to make this happen. If you’re not sure where to get started, then take the tips that are listed below. These can help you make the most of those articles you work hard to write so that they get more attention and you see more traffic through your social media sites.

1. Use Stumbleupon

This is a great tool for driving a lot of traffic to web pages because it finds content and then recommends it to users. It gives even smaller social media accounts the chance to get noticed, so it can be very useful if you’re just getting started. In fact, many users have had their sites get tens of thousands of hits just because they used Stumbleupon to drive traffic to an article they wrote. The best part is that if people like what you wrote, they are likely to follow you or bookmark your site for future use.

2. Use Your Connections

It never hurts to use your friends, especially when it comes to social media sharing. Get some of your friends who have popular accounts through social media. Ask them if they would be willing to share your article with the audiences that they have. Their sharing (and linking back to your websites) can result in a lot of traffic to your site and an incredible amount of exposure to your article. Tell your friends that you will share their articles as well, especially if it’s related to content you already have.

3. Submit to Editors

Article publishing is becoming much easier than it ever was before, so it’s something you might want to try out for yourself. As long as you don’t have a piece that is a complete ad for your products or company, you may be able to get it published. There are tons of websites you can find by doing just a simple search online for editors looking to publish articles. Send it out along with information about yourself so that the editor knows more about you. Also make sure you only send a portion of the article as a teaser, and so your content doesn’t get stolen. If you have a great article then it can easily lead to exposure through publications you may have never considered!

4. Publish it Online

If you only save your article on your computer and send it out as an e-mail, it is never going to get noticed. Instead of just sending it out to a few people, mass market it! Publish your article on your most popular social media site and then link back to it on all of your other accounts. For example, you could post your article on your blog and then link to it through your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any other accounts. This is basically free advertising and can lead to thousands of people seeing your article without you have to do more than link to a page!

5. Use Digg

The website digg.com is a great website for people who are looking to get their interesting articles written. It’s packed full of great articles about political issues, science, the internet and so much more. You can submit to them a link for your article and see if it gets approved. If it does, then you will soon get a ton of traffic to your page. This can lead to a lot of views, but also a lot of loyal followers, if they enjoy the information that you write.

6. Keep at It

Don’t let one unsuccessful article ruin your writing for good. Keep doing it and you may find that your future pieces are more popular than you could have imagined. You never know what topics are going to gain the interest of the masses and get you more popularity on your social networking sites. Just make sure you still write articles that look nice and have good content, or else people may not want to continue reading them as you release them.

Author Bio: Joe Laden is the owner of WBTutorial.com where he reviews the best website builders and writes helpful tutorials like this Weebly tutorial.

Why the Future of Marketing Is All About Helping

Blogging, Help marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Video marketing, Viral marketing, YouTube Marketing, ,

The future of marketing is helping. Helping will bring you new customers, and forge trust in you and your brand for future customers. Jay Baer explains how and why the help marketing concept works here:

Transcript:

0:01 I’m going to try and make this
0:10 is entertaining as possible to start a full video watch this for me
0:16 in the right and yet he’s up
0:19 today we’re gonna show you how to remove viruses and spyware
0:22 your computer all home
0:27 the best way to remove viruses and spyware Caldwell where
0:30 video is awesome and you can see if amis it’s a guy
0:35 talking about mall so Geek Squad in addition to that sort of weird video
0:41 about viruses and spyware has YouTube channel the couple have 100
0:46 other videos on it all can you how to install Windows 8 not kinda crazy stuff
0:51 and I was at a conference
0:52 a few years ago and Robert Stevens who is the founder and Geek Squad was the
0:57 keynote and some in the audience
0:59ask him a question he was talking about the series videos
1:02 it’s Robert now let me see if I can get this straight
1:05 Geek Squad is in the business
1:09 fixing stuff for money it’s a kid that’s
1:14 that’s more or less what we do physical but you’ve got all these videos that
1:19 show people how to fix stuff themselves
1:22 how does that make any business sense at all in Stephen civil
1:27 you know first of all you gotta understand our best customers are the
1:32 people who think
1:33 they can fix it themselves
1:36 which is absolutely true right that is me I am I K
1:41 hot water heater repair in like four thousand dollars into trip to the
1:44 emergency room later we’re good to go
1:45 told effect and he said second of all eventually
1:49 everybody gets out of their depth right eventually you can’t do it yourself and
1:53 at that point who are you gonna call
1:55 but even a randomly dialed up the yellow pages or are you going to call Geek
1:59 Squad
1:59whose videos you’ve been looking at for 46
2:038 10 12 minutes because robert stevens a Geek Squad
2:09 understand a very important business principle
2:13 which is that the difference between helping
2:17 and Celine is just two letters
2:21 but those two letters make all
2:24 the difference in modern business
2:28 because if you sell something
2:32 you can create a customer today but if you help someone
2:37 you can create a customer
2:41 for life now so we’re going to talk about this evening
2:47 we are at a conference we’re talking a lot
2:50 about content and content creation and marketing automation
2:55 in feeding information to customers but the reality is
3:00 the content that will be effective is content that is truly
3:05 and inherently useful and I call that information
3:10 a utility yooo utility
3:14 and the definition of utility is simple it’s just this its market team that is
3:19 so useful
3:20 people would pay for it
3:24 now you’re not going to actually make them pay for that would be bold
3:28 but it’s so useful that if you ask them to you they actually work
3:33 me give you an example Hilton Hotels has a program
3:39 on Twitter called act Hilton suggests
3:43 they started as a couple years ago as a trial program they
3:47 they took 25 hotels across the United States took a volunteer from each ot
3:51 else was on a full-time job it was in addition to the regular duties
3:54 is that who’s we want you to do we want to listen on Twitter
3:57 pay attention to what’s been said on Twitter and if you can find a way to
4:01 help
4:02 just help so that’s what they did
4:07 here’s an example at Lt Houston
4:12 says on Twitter good places to eat your the Magnolia Hotel
4:17 downtown Dallas on Saturday Hilton suggest
4:21 jumps into this conversation note that this was an address templeton
4:25 they just thought they were strategically eavesdropping
4:28 if you will they saw this they leaped into the conversation said hey at LT
4:32 Houston
4:33 wild salsa on major camp easy’s on elmer awesome
4:36 both within walking distance of your hotel in Dallas enjoy
4:42 but here’s the fat the Magnolia Hotel
4:47 is not a Hilton property so now you have Hilton Hotels using staff time and staff
4:53 resources
4:54 to assist somebody that they know for a fact is not
4:57 a customer but eventually this guy’s gonna be in a different city and your
5:02 hotel recommendation
5:03 and at that point who’s it gonna think I’m first
5:06 Hilton because they helped him when
5:10 he needed it it’s a utility
5:15 a couple days later Melanie J who was at Rockstar
5:18 extreme on Twitter tweeted out
5:21 anybody know who’s hiring in Orlando for professional positions at this time
5:25 seems like it’s at a standstill
5:29 Hilton suggest jumps into that and says at Rockstar extreme check out Orlando
5:33 jobs dot com for a comprehensive list now
5:36 no I think what I would have said is Haley Melanie maybe if your Twitter
5:39 handle wasn’t at Rockstar extreme
5:42 you would have some additional interviewed maybe this is sending the
5:45 wrong message
5:48 it’s just one of many reasons I’m not in customer service
5:51 but now they’re trying to help her find a job and eventually maybe she’s gonna
5:55 get a job and he’s gonna have disposable income
5:57 and she’s going to want to travel and he’s going to need a hotel and at that
6:00 point
6:01 who is she gonna pinko first
6:04 Hilton because they helped her when she needed help.

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