Blog Engage Community Blog – Page 4

16 Simple and Easy Blogging Things to do Everyday

Blogging is a process, not an activity. For growing a blog, one needs to work on it every single day. Slowly and steadily, every small action you take for growing your blog will add up to your total success.

With more content and links, your blog posts will start to rank for their targeted keywords. In time, these keywords will start to generate traffic from search engines and your blog will get regular visitors. Many of these visitors coming from search engines will subscribe to your email lists, social profiles or simply convert on advertisements and affiliate links.

Here, in this article, we are going to cover several small tips that won’t make you an overnight success but will add up to your blogging efforts every day.

1. Add New Content: Adding regular content is important for building a blogging audience. If you stick to your schedule and make sure to add your new blog post on the same day and time as you have set and keep it maintained over the months and years then you will see that your audience will rely on you and come to your blog and wait for you to add the latest content.

Ultimately everything in blogging depends on your blog posts, if you add more content, let them rank on the search engines, they will generate more traffic and affiliate conversions.

2. Share and Maintain queues on Social Media: Treat your social profiles and timelines as micro blogging platforms. If you only share your own content then it won’t have a lot of effect, however if you start posting several updates on the social profiles, spaced throughout the day, you will find a dedicated audience building up over time.

3. Do Blog Commenting: Those bloggers who have taken commenting seriously, understands its true potential. This step isn’t all about link building alone. When you comment on other blogs, you get to know your fellow bloggers closely and build a strong relation. This will open up further opportunities of collaboration, link building, guest posting and so much more.

4. Use Quora: If you are a really active blogger then there are several sites, depending on the niche you are in, can send as much or more traffic compared to Quora. However, since time is limited and if you can focus on only one site for replying to answers and getting involved into discussions, then Quora is perhaps the best target for you.

5. Use Affiliate Marketing: Instead of spending few days to sign up for affiliate offers and updating all the blog posts and adding those aff links, it is best to take a long term approach. Write at least one to two articles every week, targeting an affiliate product and adding those aff links as call to action where ever possible within the article.

6. Feature other Bloggers: Every week, make a habit of featuring one blogger in your blog post. While in the blogosphere you might already know your target blogger well, still it is best to research everything before writing the post. The details of the blogger might already be available in their about and contact section, they might have a blog post on their blog explaining more about themselves and there can be past interviews that you can research.

7. Take Part in Roundups: Look for roundup opportunities where you can participate. Some people make these roundups actively and they keep a mailing list ready where they send the roundup emails. Reach out to them and make sure that when they make their next roundup, they allow you to participate in them.

8. Do Keyword Research: If you have a spreadsheet ready with plenty of keywords in it, you can easily pick the ones you haven’t used in the articles and start writing an article targeting that keyword. The key here is to keep a ready list of keywords and long tails that can be used whenever possible.

9. Look into your Competitors: The best way to research titles, content, keywords, links etc. is to look into the competition and check what others are doing. Take that idea into your research and start working on it. While we never suggest to blindly copying from a competitor, but looking for ideas and inspiration isn’t a bad thought.

10. Do Guest Blogging: One of the easiest ways of leveraging other people’s influence and reach is to guest post on their blogs. This way you get to post on a blog that already has link value, audience, social influence and subscribers. If you make a habit of doing at least one guest post a week, you will be able to gain a lot of benefits from it.

11. Be Active on Forums: Whatever niche you are blogging in, it is likely that you will be able to find a relevant forum where you will be able to contribute. The first priority here is to build up a natural profile in the forum before you start to post anything promotional. Every day post a few replies to forum threads and in the process build up a strong forum profile. After that, when you come across a thread where one of your blog posts can be linked with ease, based on the requirements of the thread, feel free to do so, but once a month or less.

12. Share on Blogging Communities: There are several blogging communities where you can share you content. These communities are built for sharing content and the more you share, the stronger your network will become and the members of these communities will further share your content on their timelines.

13. Network with other Bloggers: If you follow the above steps of blog commenting, guest posting and sharing other people’s content on your social time lines then you have already started to network with other bloggers. One can take this a further step ahead by linking to other blogger’s content and then doing an outreach campaign and letting others know that you have linked to them.

14. Use Canva: Good images are always helpful in sharing and promoting blog posts. With the help of a tool like Canva, one can easily update and add more images in old blog posts and make them catchy and attractive.

15. Optimize old Content: Over the years you might have added several hundred blog posts and some of them might be ranking well on the search engines. If you take out some time and optimize old posts for keywords, relevant content etc. then more and more blog posts will rank on the search engines and bring passive traffic and audience.

16. Research and Stay Updated: With time, new tools and trends come into play. A blogger needs to read and research to stay updated with the times. Keep aside an hour or two every day for reading blog posts that keeps you updated and stay with the trends.

Every blogger needs to make sure that these small blogging actions are taken care of every day. In blogging, time runs out quickly, so rather than doing things randomly, setup a blogging schedule and make sure to include all of the blogging tasks in that daily routine.

Blogging Budget – Top 8 Tips to Do a Full Calculation before you start your Blog

As a new blogger, wanting to get started with your blogging life, the last thing you want to hear is to stop and plan. However, just like anything else in life, the more you think and plan, the less you will lose and spend.

Blogging is a career, a way of life, a means to earn money and much more. If you start your blog on the correct foot from day one, chances are that your blog will become huge and perhaps someday it will be your full time business.

To make sure that happens some day, you need to plan everything well before you start your blog. Here in this article, we are going to discuss several tips to plan the start of your blog.

Calculation of Blogging Funds

1. Domain and Hosting: Buying a domain is a yearly expense while a web hosting account charges on a monthly basis. There are ways to start a free blog on a sub domain but that will be a negative thing to do. You won’t own your blog and if something goes wrong, you might lose your blog and all the hard work.

As far as web hosting goes, there are cheaper shared hosting service providers which starts at $2 a month. Whatever be the cost, it is always better to factor in the costs and renew the hosting and the domain for atleast 2 years in the future. Further discounts can be made available if you wait till the time of black Friday and cyber Monday offers.

2. Premium Themes and Plugins: While this is not a necessity, one still needs to have a good looking blog. Some people even go for custom themes which make them unique as no one else can have the same custom made theme. However, if you don’t have a huge budget for a custom theme, you can still buy a premium theme license and use it.

3. Content: Most people who are looking to get started with blogging are good with writing as this is one skill which is an absolute must have. That said, if you are not good with writing, or you are making a blog which isn’t in your expertise, or you simply don’t have enough time, then you have to set aside some funds for getting the content ready.
Getting articles written up for the blog section, getting content written for guest posting and other marketing purpose is an expensive process and you have to include it in your blogging funds.

4. Email service: Most successful bloggers consider, not starting email marketing from day one is a blogging mistake. Whatever visitors that lands on your blog by way of your initial hard work won’t stay around if you aren’t able to capture their email address. Having their email ids is only half the battle, one needs to setup an auto-responder series to make sure that the email subscribers stay updated and loyal.
There are many email services, from mail chimp to aweber, there’s simply no limit to choose from the option available.

5. Canva Pro: Having good images for your blog posts are a basic requirement. Canva pretty much covers this area well, however if you want to make good images for your blog posts then get a canva pro license. This simple step will open up all of Canva’s features and templates.
Canva has a huge collected of pictures and templates. Their paid membership allows us to use most of Canva’s well kept graphics. There aren’t too many alternatives to Canva which makes this tool and it’s pro version an important thing for blogging.

6. Stock Images: If you want to make your blog unique, your blog posts need to stand out. One easy way to do this is to add catchy images on your blog. While the Canva pro has a good collection of images, this search for getting a very good image can be future raised by another notch. This is where the stock image option comes into play.
Stock images aren’t used by too many people. This is where one can really stay ahead of the competition and add unique and good looking images to their blog posts.

7. Social Media Management: One cannot imagine a successful blog without scheduling content on the social media. For proper social media management it is important that all the features are utilized. These tools provide social listening features, tracking brand names and keywords, statistics etc. One needs to utilize all of these features to stay ahead in blogging.

When you start to calculate the SMM spend, you will find that the scheduling software is only half the expenses. One still needs to hire staff to make sure that the publishing queues are all full and content is being added on a regular basis.

8. Keyword tool: There are many free keyword finder tools available on the internet. Most of those tools have a lot of limitations. Finding long tail keywords for your blog is an important task. Thus it is very important to use a pro version of your favorite keyword finder tool.

UberSuggest is one such tool that has been around for a very long time and its free version is also very affective. Such tools might not require you to keep a pro version of it for ever after all keyword research is something that one can do thoroughly once and keep the data for future use.
Calculation of Blogging Time
When it comes to time management, we often consider time to be free. However, once you start to allocate the bulk of your time for blogging, you will realize that time is the most valuable asset you have. Surely, one can delegate their work, but it will cause a number of other issues. Someone needs to check the quality of the content to make sure that outsourcing of work does not lower the quality of your content.

13 Tips to Grow your Blog for Free

Growing a blog is much like growing a tree. It can be done for free; all you need is regular watering, perhaps adding some compost and occasionally look into weed management. All of it is free as the nature already provides everything; all you need is some effort and hard work from your end.

Similarly, a blog requires regular content, some basic link building, sharing and promoting of content on the social media and networking with other bloggers. Much of this process is free and if regular effort is made by a blogger, traffic and audience will surely grow in time.

Here, in this article, we are going to cover some basic and free ways in which one can grow their blog.

1. Add regular content: Adding blog content is a hard work as it takes several hours of time to craft a really good article. Once the content is ready, it will require another few hours of image creation, content formatting and scheduling after which it can be posted on your blog.

However, apart from your time, it won’t cost you anything else. If you are able to give content creation a few hours of your days time then slowly, in time, your blog will grow and gain plenty of readers, subscribers and regular traffic.

2. Allow Guest Posting: If you are looking to get some free content for your blog without compromising on the quality then opening up your blog for accepting guest posts is a great idea. Surely, one needs to be choosy when it comes to allowing guest posters, else the content quality will suffer and along with that, all posts need to be thoroughly proof-read before posting. Yet, it is an easy way to get good content.

3. Publish Interviews and Roundups: Content formats like Interviews and Roundups are both easy to write and has a lot more impact than regular content. Since both these content formats require outreach which is time taking, so here too, the biggest investment will be your time.

4. Do Blog Commenting: When it comes to growing a blog, commenting on other blogs has proven to be a successful method. The backlink value of comments might not be much, but it is a good way to get connected with other bloggers. The benefits of such connection are huge. From social media shares to mentions and links on future articles, everything can be gained by networking via. blog commenting.

5. Share content on Social Media: Posting regular content on your blog is only half the work. Make sure to share all of your blog posts on as many social media sites as possible. Share other people’s content too, this will keep your social followers busy and you will see a lot of bloggers share your content in return.

6. Do Keyword Research: Keyword research and finding new long-tail keywords is an ongoing process. If you are able to invest some of your free time in keyword research, you will soon have a huge list of potential blog titles to write your future content. When such content will go live, it will be targeted towards a specific keyword that is means to rank and get traffic.

7. Schedule and Automate Content: Social media is here to stay, it is up to you to adapt and make changes so that you can get the maximum out of social media. One such method of utilizing social media is scheduling content so that every few hours, your content gets automatically socialized.

8. Optimize Old Content: Old content is your asset, whether that asset is bringing you money or it is simply sitting around is another thing. If you want to make your old articles rank for keywords then it is time to edit those articles and add your long tail keywords in it. Editing old content is easier than creating fresh content and the benefit is usually much more with older content as it ranks easily after basic tweaking.

9. Link to others and Outreach: Out linking to other bloggers is perhaps one of the easiest ways to get someone’s attention. Even if the blogger you are linking to is running a popular blog, they will still respond warmly as links are powerful digital assets and helps in ranking on the search engines. However linking is only half the work, make sure to outreach and let them know that you have linked.

10. Connect with Influencers: Social media influencers have a lot of followers and when they share content, it makes a huge impact. While this step is totally free, it requires a lot of hard work and effort before you can get any benefit from an influencer. One needs to share, link, comment and repeat for a very long time before the influencer starts to notice them.

11. Review Products: Testing and reviewing products is a good way to get more content for the blog section. After posting the review, make sure to let the product owners know that you have reviewed their product. In return, you will find that the owners of the product will always share your review and chances are that they will link to it as well.

12. Collaborate with Other Bloggers: Bloggers are mostly good people who like to connect and collaborate. If you find good bloggers on your niche, look for opportunities of collaboration.

13. Guest Post on other Blogs: Just like opening up your blog for guest posting, one can do it the other way round by finding other blogs that allow guest posting and post on them. One can build links by guest posting, get more traffic and audience, get subscribers and boost readership.

The guest posting process is fairly simple. As bloggers you already create a lot of content for your blog, in the same way you need to create content for other people’s blog and send them the article for publishing it on their blogs.

There are many ways in which a blog can be grown over time. If you are able to give your blog a few hours of dedicated time where you can work on content as well as promotions then in time your blog will grow and it won’t cost you anything in the process.

14 Online Reputation Management Tips for 2023 and Beyond

In the heavily active world of social media, any business or individual isn’t alone. Even if you aren’t involved, perhaps you don’t even have an online presence, still your brand will be mentioned, discussed and criticized on the social media.

In such a case if you aren’t able to actively monitor your brand’s mentions on the social media then your business and brand will be defenseless against the huge social media crowds whose main focus is to simply bash and trash talk brands for pretty much anything and everything.

However, reputation management isn’t just about protecting a brand but it can also be used to take advantage of any situation and bend it in your favor. Here, in this article, we are going to discuss some tips to help manage your business reputation online.

1. Claim your digital identity: Most businesses who have started their online journey’s haven’t looked beyond Facebook or Instagram. The world of social media isn’t limited to a few popular platforms. Services like Pinterest, Linkedin or YouTube are equally important. However, do not stop there, check for smaller niche sites especially if they are on a category, which is relevant to you.

2. Search for any mention of your brand term: Simply search for your branded keywords and make sure to setup some alerts for the main keywords so that if there is any mention of the brand, one can quickly look up and post a response if required.

3. Spend time training your social media customer care staff: Social media customer support is a very tricky work. Here, your customer support isn’t talking to the customer directly, it is rather a one to many conversation and if special care isn’t taken by your support staff then this response will quickly go out to control.

4. Simply being there matters: The last thing a dissaponted customer of your brand needs is your absence on the platform. If you or your customer support can simply acknowledge the problem and post a reply that they are looking into the matter, is enough to keep the loyal customer hooked.

5. Keep checking your reviews and feedback: Always keep an eye out for reviews and feedback. Even if the review is positive, one still needs to read it in full and if a reply is required, make sure to add the reply.

6. Be honest and transparent: If your business is clear and honest then the best way to post a response on the social media is to simply reply with as much details as required. Keep things clean and discuss openly about the issues the customer is facing.

7. Encourage Reviews: Positive reviews, feedback and testimonials are the biggest asset of any company. If you have happy customers that can leave five star reviews for your business then setup an automated system for asking reviews and make sure to thank them once they post their reviews.

8. Hire a Team and Plan for the Future: Social media monitoring isn’t a one person’s job. The time and effort required to manage social media successfully is insanely huge. The best way to approach this situation is to hire a small team and get started with SMM.

9. Make posting of reviews easier: Happy customers will always want to post a review of your business and services. However, they will only put in the extra effort if the process of adding the review is easy. Send your customers link to the places where they can post a review. Once you see these reviews being posted, start sharing them on the social media and in the process, make sure to tag the reviewers.

10. Hire Influencers to defend you on the social media: It is a common practice now, where the influencers are hired for brand promotions and reputation management. Someone with a huge following and a powerful social influence, can easily highlight positive reviews and bury the negative ones deeper.

11. Be quick while responding: If you have angry and unhappy customers on the social media then it is time to quickly post responses and minimize the damage. If you delay your response then chances are that the customer might post the poor experice in other social media platforms as well.

12. Listen more and Type Less: On the social media, your presence matters. If you are able to listen to your customer’s feedback and then reply wisely, half the battle is already won. Your customers should be able to understand that you are listening and that their issues are heard.

13. Display recent reviews first: Being fresh matters because there is no point in having a great brand if the popularity was lost months ago. What matters is how good the brand is currently. This is why a recent review helps.
When you setup the review page on your website, make sure to display the recent feedbacks and testimonials on the top of the page. Let the older feedbacks be at the bottom of the page and as more and more new reviews start to pour in, post the new ones at the top of the page.

14. Improve your products and services: At the end of the day, if you products and services are good then it will automatically attract positive feedback. At the same time, if your products aren’t good enough then it is quite natural to attract criticism. The best way to fix the problem here is to improve and optimze your products and services.

Let the internet praise your business while you stay at the center of it all and spend your time in collecting positive feedback and adding them to your testimonial collection.

Internet moves at a very high speed and to keep up with it, one needs to be equally fast in responding to customer queries and feedback. Do remember that people will always post negative reviews on Facebook rather than sending you a message on your contact us page. This is the reason why people need to be on the social media to post a timely response to the customer.

12 Tips to Write Good Content in 2023

As a blogger or digital marketer, one skill that you will always require is content writing. Whether you are writing content for your blog posts, or guest posts and articles for other content marketing activities, the core skill that you will require is writing good content.

Content writing skills don’t happen overnight, it requires practice and the more you write the more it sharpens. If you are new to writing content online then take a target for content writing, for example a thousand words a day to get started with and keep the word count increasing day by day so that you get the habit of writing good content at a quicker pace.

Here, in this article, we will cover some content writing tips so that you can write better content at a faster speed.

1. Start with an effective article title: If your article title is catchy, optimized for ranking and relevant to the niche and the topic you are writing, then you have won the initial battle. Everything related to content writing starts with the article, it should be the first thing you should work on. Always write multiple titles before starting the article and pick the one that fits the best.

2. Write a very catchy opening: Readers attention span is very small on the internet. Always remember that you are only just a tab in the reader’s browser and it will take him a fraction of a second to close your tab.
Write really small paragraphs and sentences at the start of your article, perhaps only a few words long. Keep such catchy sentences going throughout the opening till the points starts. Think of every sentence as a hook which is keeping your readers glued to your article.

3. Think of the points and note them down: Take some time to write down all the points. Don’t begin expanding on the points just yet; write down every point first so that you know exactly what you are going to write about. If you are planning to write a longer article, it is best to start with more points, perhaps twenty plus so that you know that the article is going to be a longer one.

4. Do a closing that inspires further action: Dive straight into the closing so that you know how your article is going to end. This closing should solve multiple objectives like the reader should take part in the comments section, or signup on your email list, perhaps download an ebook as a content upgrade or even convert on an ad or a product or service.

5. Research well: Take your time to research your niche well. Read some similar articles; check some content that explains your points in further detail. See how your competition handles such content. The more hours you put in research, the stronger and deeper content you will be able to write.

6. Optimize your keywords: Start with keyword research, make sure to include those keywords in your article. Don’t stuff too many keywords, the article should look natural and the readers should be able to read it like any other normal article.

7. Link to relevant content: Every article that you write, should link out to some relevant content online. These out going links should preferably be of government or media websites so that your readers can research further. Avoid linking out to commercial or new and weak domains. At the bottom of the article, add some links as sources and make sure these links are relevant and high quality.

8. Break it down into sub-headers: Once you have completed the opening, it is time to craft the rest of your article. If there are bulky paragraphs throughout the article then it will be quite a challenge to keep the readers glued till the end of the article. This is where the sub-heading comes into play.
Divide the article into several sub-headings and make sure that these headings are catchy and easy to understand.

9. Include Quotes and Tweetables: How the end user interact with your content is a strong ranking signal for the search engines. This is where adding quotes and shareable bytes throughout the content helps. The easier you make content sharing for your readers, the more tweets, likes and pins you will receive. In this regard, embedding tweetables within the content helps a lot.

10. Add a few good images: With the rise of different social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest, the preferred size of the images make a big difference to the entire content sharing process. The best way to make sure that all the social media sites get enough images to consume, is to add a number of images of different sizes and resolutions depending on the preference of the social sites.

11. Write longer articles: If you have in-depth content which acts as a resource page on a topic then you can feature that content as an ultimate guide where the reader will get all the details in the same article and won’t have to look for any more information on the given topic. Such articles will always be useful and it requires only a one time effort to create it and in time it will continue to rank for it’s given keyword.

12. Edit and Polish your content: Once the entire article is ready, it is time to edit and polish it. To start with, do a through proof-reading of your content. Try to make sure that the article does not have any basic spelling and grammar issues. If everything is all right, proceed to the next point where the article needs to be polished thoroughly. The best way to polish your article is to read it line by line and where ever necessary, change words and phrases to make sure it shines.

Good content solves a variety of problems and brings in a lot of benefits. It will attract a lot of visitors, turn them into readers and subscribers for future content, inspire them to take action and end up in your sales funnel. Writing such content is all about developing a content writing skill that comes with time and practice.

13 Practical Content Marketing Tips for 2023

If there is one thing the marketers have learnt over the ages, it is about how much more content is effective, compared to advertisement.

Be it an advertisement campaign, a research data, white papers, tools and plugins, pretty much anything which is effective is in the form of valuable content. If the same content or resource is written with the intent of promotion then it will look like a sponsored post and it won’t get too much of recognition.

Content marketing, if done correctly, it will have a greater reach and the audience it will build will be a lot more loyal compared to any other form of marketing. Such content based marketing has a higher possibility of going viral, thus the return on the content creation effort is manyfolds.

Here, in this article, we will discuss several content marketing tips for 2023 and beyond.

1. Write your objectives clearly: Any marketing process will fail if your objectives aren’t clear. Make sure to clearly define what you want to gain from your content marketing campaign. If the targets are sales, branding, getting subscribers or traffic, building links, the benefits can be many but it still needs to be clearly defined so that we know exactly what the campaign is aimed at.

2. Create your content: Based on the targets, the content needs to be created in a way that the objectives will be fulfilled. From eBooks to in-depth guides and resources, every form of content is capable of bringing in leads and customers. While writing these articles, special attention should be given to call to actions so that the readers end up as a subscriber or a customer.

3. Organize similar content: Over the years, while adding content in a scheduled way, without even knowing about it we create some content that can be easily grouped into a series. The best way to make this work is to write an article and introduce the series. Then, link all related content of that series from the article in a way that it seems like a chapter wise breakdown of content.

4. Research your competitor: The best way to move forward with any content marketing activity is to research your competitor. See how they create their content, what topics they cover, how they write their content and in what ways they re-purpose and market their created content. Based on your research you can optimize and tweak your strategy.

5. Share and Promote your New Content: If you are actively writing content for your blog section then you need a plan to promote your content. Make a list of places where you can share your content, starting with social media channels to your own newsletters, social time lines etc. are all good places to promote new content.

6. Image Size: Creating graphics for your new article is a great way to boost user attention. However, with the rise of different social networks and their image requirements, one needs to add a variety of images to cater all social media sites. Make sure to have longer images for Pinterest and square images for Instagram.

7. Inter Change Content Type: Content can be in any form, depending on the requirements it can be a blog post being posted on a pre-scheduled date. However, it can be easily changed into a slide or a YouTube video and cross posted into different places for extra exposure. The same blog content can be further edited and added to your newsletter or your auto-responder series.

8. Let the world know: Your piece of content can be good and yet it won’t reach enough people if you don’t actively reach out to bloggers and marketers. Most bloggers are happy to link and mention people from their blog posts but unless you constantly remind them to do so, they are likely to forget you.

One can take this one notch higher by mentioning and quoting bloggers in their content and then run an outreach campaign and let the bloggers know that they have been mentioned. This way, more bloggers respond positively and share and link to the same content.

9. Keep your content updated: Old content is your asset and it needs to be updated regularly so that it stays current and fresh. Along with adding text, make sure to include images, quotes from bloggers and influencers, infographics etc. to keep making your old and time tested content stronger and more valuable.

10. Publish Original Research: When you publish original data and resource within content, it becomes more valuable. Such content becomes link worthy and everyone starts to link to this type of content as a source while using your data as reference. While it might seem difficult to produce such content, it actually isn’t. All you need is some outreach and perhaps a bit of PPC ads to get people to contribute to your research.

11. Do Guest Blogging: With guest blogging, you have the opportunity to craft content for posting on other blogs. This way, you can plan your content to be relevant to your content marketing goals and easily link to content that you are planning to promote. Guest posts brings a variety of benefits, starting from relevant traffic, backlinks to subscribers and even buyers if the audience is targeted and you have something valuable and attractive to sell.

12. Make a list of Influencers who share your content: Now that you are getting some visibility on your content, it is time to track your social media progress. Try to find the influencers who are actively sharing your content and try to retaliate and give back. Start with following back, sharing their content and checking out their sites and blogs to find content that you can share on your own timelines.

One can take this one step higher by making an excel sheet with your influencer’s data so that you can always quickly reference and tag them in your future updates.

13. Keep an eye on your website’s loading speed: Finally, many of these content marketing tips won’t work if your site as technical issues. Start with your website speed and make sure your site opens up quickly. Further, make sure to check your subscription boxes, contact forms etc., if any of these things aren’t working, try to get it fixed as soon as possible. Content marketing is an ongoing process, it isn’t an activity.

The best results from content marketing comes overtime if you keep doing it consistently. Everything from the links, to the audience and the influencers add up and thus your marketing efforts will keep generating more and more returns in the future.

12 New and Unique ways to Build Links

As a blogger, you are constantly trying to rank for keywords and writing articles targeting various long tail keywords and doing all the optimizations to make sure it ranks. In this process, one of the most difficult aspects of ranking an article is building relevant links to it.

When it comes to link value, if the in coming link is coming from an authority site on the same niche as yours and the link is from within a relevant piece of content then that link is fairly strong. However, building only one kind of link is always bad for your link portfolio. The best aproach is to keep a diverse back link profile.

Here, in this article, we will cover several methods to get back links for your websites and blogs.

1. Profile Links: Surely, profile links aren’t in the trend as it once was. But it still carries weight and for the little effort it requires, it is always worth it. The best way to build profile links is to research your competitors and see from where they are getting their profile links. Other than that, there are several popular sites that allows you to signup and add a link to your website in the profile section. Most of these will be nofollow but still you will be able to find some dofollow gems if you research hard.

2. Web Directories: Both free and pay to get included web directories are good places to get backlinks. Against popular belief, directories aren’t as bad and if you test it on your niche blogs you will see that the directory links, if done at a smaller scale, bring a lot of ranking value.

3. Forums: There are several ways to build links from online forums. If the forum is relevant, the content of the forum matches that of your blog and you have built up a fairly good profile on the forum, then you can post some relevant links along with your replies in the forum. Some forums allow signature links which is another easy way to build links. There is a profile section in most forums and it is often dofollow. If you come across such forums, make sure to fill up the link field of your forum profile with your website’s link.

4. Make Infographics: Infographics acts as a link magnet. If you are good with designs or you have some funds to hire a graphic designer, then try getting some high quality infographics created. However, having the infographic is only half the battle. One needs to actively contact and outreach other bloggers to publish your infographics and in return provide a source backlink.

5. On Line Calculators: Online tools and calculators that can be embeded in a web page is a great idea to let others post your tools and calculators and display your branding link somewhere on the same page. These tools are easy to create and they are helpful too. The more blogs and websites embed your tool, the viral effect will let others do the same.

6. Research and Surveys: While writing an article, almost all authors and writers search the internet for citing sources. If you are able to outreach and collect data and then present it in the form of charts and diagrams, people will link to your content and use your research for making their content stronger.

7. Feedback and Testimonials: Have you ever bought something online. Chances are, most people have and so you are able to provide a review for your purchase. But if this review goes to an ecommerce site then you will simply get recognition for your review, not a backlinks. However, if you look up the websites of the items you have bought, and email them your review and testimonial then chances are that you will earn a proper backlink from the brand’s testimonial section.

8. Start a linking culture: Most bloggers are good with retaliating. That means, when you comment on other people’s posts, they do the same in return, when you share someone’s post, they share your content. In the same way when you start linking to other bloggers, they link back to your posts in return. If you continue working towards linking other people’s content from your posts, soon you will develop a linking culture in your blogging network.

9. Write Press Release: At one time, this form of marketing was heavily used to the point of even being misused for the purpose of marketing. Even now, press release does work and if some of the niche sites or media sites catch you press release then very soon your website will start attracting some very strong backlinks.

10. Keep an eye out for brand mentions: Sometime brands get mentioned on various sites and blogs. Often these mentions are simply text, not links. However, if you reach out to them and ask them to change the mentioned text to a hyperlink then it will become a backlink. Depending on how important the incoming link can be, one can do some additional work and write a piece of content which is relevant and worth getting linked from the mentioned text.

11. Check for broken links: Broken links are often excellent ways to get back your backlink. Monitor for broken links and when you find some, ask the webmaster to fix the link. It is pretty simple and this way you can quickly earn a backlink.

12. Look for your competitor’s backlink: Every business has several competitors and the backlinks built and earned by your competitors are always some of the best and most relevant links available. Start doing a competitor analysis and check how many backlinks they have. See if those backlinks can be easily achieved or if not then look into the efforts it might require to get a similar link.

Links will always be one of the most important ranking factor for search engines as it is one of the hardest to manipulate ranking signals. In time, the value of links will keep rising and thus it is considered as one of the most valuable digital asset.

Squidix Web Hosting Review – An Amazing Webhost

Having a good web host is the key to running a successful online business. Whatever be your niche, blogging, ecommerce website, digital products, everything requires an always live website.

A good webhost is much more than being online 24*7. It should be able to handle surge traffic, should be secure enough to keep hackers away, must have a helpful and friendly customer support along with several other features and benefits.

There are a number of popular web hosts on the internet whos support is weak and provides very limited resources. The moment your website starts to get some traffic and customers, they fail to keep it live.

Today, in this article, we are going to review a web host named Squidix, it has been pretty amazing so far. We are going to base our review on the below mentioned points for easy reference.

1. Price Point: With shared hosting starting as low as $2.95 a month, Squidix is among some of the cheapest web hosts available on the internet. All this with unlimited bandwidth and a thirty day money back option and if you wish to add another dollar to it, you get the option to host unlimited number of websites too.

If you want to move your website from another hosting provider to this one, then they will migrate your site at no extra cost. Along with that, they provide free domain registrations with a web hosting account. As long as you keep your hosting account, your domain stays with you for free forever.

2. Customer Support: Just like any other company, here too you will get support by opening tickets, sending emails or simply calling them. However, do note that their turn around time is fairly quick. From our own research and experience we can state that their average response time is less than thirty minutes.

To be very honest with this point, we haven’t really required a lot of support as the website is always running smoothly without any issues.

3. Resource Availability: Shared web hosting and VPS mostly run on resource sharing. If you are consuming too much resources then your site is sent off line or if someone else on your shared hosting is taking up too much resources then your website’s performance goes down. This is how most shared hosting works, however we haven’t experienced any downtime or slowness of our sites while hosted on Squidix. There can be a number of reasons for this, we might not know for sure, but we can make a guess that their resource management is better than others.

4. Secure: There are several web hosts on the internet that works great while things are sunny. But the moment some hacker breaks through, they fall apart. This host on the other hand is fairly safe and haven’t caused any issues so far. They are also pretty quick in resolving any security threats and neutralize them before they can cause any harm.

On the internet, when a site gets hacked and malecious codes are uploaded on it, slowly the site starts to get penalized by search engines. This is where a prompt recovery can help in minimizing damage. Everything ultimately depends on how fast the web host responds and how quickly it cleans your site.

5. Flawless Experience: Over the years, if there is one thing we like about any web host is how smooth the site works while it is hosted online. The visitors of the website will thank the site and the webmaster for keeping the service always running, without any issues. But this experience is powered by the web host that no one really notices. We bloggers and web masters understand the reason behind this flawless running of our websites and thus we thank our host for keeping us live and kicking.

6. Easy Upgrade Options: From shared hosting to VPS, to semi-dedicated to fully dedicated servers, the path of upgradation is available with plenty of options to choose from. Having several options with different price points and features, it becomes easy for people to choose the right combination. Everyone’s requirements are unique, thus having more options helps in choosing the right hosting plan.

7. Discounts: Talking about discounts, you get free migration of your website, free domain for life as long as you keep your hosting account running, free firewall, free SSL, off site backup and several other free and discounted items.

8. Affiliate Options: Squidix provides an amazing affiliate setup where you get $10 for free, just for signing up. They have a fixed commission system where you know exactly what you are going to get paid for referring customers of different plans. This way, you know exactly what you are going to get by referring people to Squidix.

9. Independent and Aged Host: So far on the internet, we have observed that several web hosts are connected to the same parent company and they all lack the same basic support and resource issues. Squidix on the other hand is unique in this regard as it operates alone and has been online since 2010.

10. Our Recommendation: Our reviews and the openions we express comes from first hand testing. We review services that we have used and based on our own experience, we review it. That way, the review is fair and honest. Squidix has been a total and complete success. We haven’t faced much of a downtime, the sites are always lightning fast and never fail to open. Their customer support is quick to respond and always fixes the problems quickly. On the whole, we recommend Squidix and use it ourselves for hosting our websites.

An online business has several layers of work. Starting with content, rankings, customer support, advertisements and so on and so forth that it is enough to keep any online businessman busy. At times like this, we have at least a good web host that we can rely on and allow us the peace of mind to keep working hard.

10 Tips to Boost the Ranking of your Niche Blog

Niche blogs are easy to rank, when compared to general content blogs. Being niche, helps to keep the focus of the content restricted to a particular topic. This way, the blog becomes more targeted, which results in getting more relevant links and ultimately the blog becomes an authority on its niche.

All this is great for rankings. Search engines like content which is written by niche experts, they like backlinks which comes from highly relevant sources and they value in-depth articles that are detailed and have a lot of insights.

While having a niche blog does bend everything in our favor, it still needs a lot of hard work before it starts to rank and compete for keywords and long tails.

Here, in this article, we will discuss several niche blogging tips to boost your rankings.

1. Stay as niche as possible: A niche blog only makes sense if the content that you publish is stictly restricted to the same niche. If you start posting any article which isn’t on topic then the niche dilutes and the benefits of being on the niche dissapears.

If you have already posted content that isn’t on your niche then it is best to remove that content and post it on a general blog that you might own. Re-direct the article URL to the new post so that the link juice isn’t wasted.

2. Hire Experts for Content Writing: If you have started a niche blog in your area of expertise then you can simply mention that you are an expert on your niche with possible educational qualifications and that you are simply sharing your professional experience. However, this might not be the case for most niche bloggers. This is where you can hire freelancers who are an expert on your niche. For example, if you are looking for health and medical content then you might look for doctors who are working as freelance writers.

3. Network with other Niche Bloggers: Everything from getting targeted niche backlinks to getting mentions from niche influencers start with your blogging networking. Most bloggers are good with their networking skill. The process starts with posting good comments on the target bloggers posts. Slowly, make sure to share their content on your timelines and other social media websites. Once you have made your presence known, it is time to reach out to your fellow niche blogger and ask for some favors.

4. Use Expert Quotes with-in Content: Niche content needs to be strong and resourceful. Simply writing articles won’t help, the content has to be good quality with a lot of relevant information. One way to make an article stand out and have valuable insights is to contact some niche experts and ask them some question. Once you have their answers, make quotes out of their answers and post them along with your blog posts.

These quotes by niche experts and influencers can be made even more attractive by making an image out of these quotes. Canva or any other similar program can easily make beautiful quote designs by choosing an attractive template.

5. Publish Niche Reports: Conduct surveys and take feedback from a lot of people and publish those reports on your blog. One can easily achieve this by doing some outreach to your niche experts. There are tons of niche influencers on the social media whom one can easily send an outreach message.

6. Participate in Niche roundups: Roundups are yet another method to get a quick and relevant backlink. If the roundup post goes live on a strong niche blog then along with the link value, some targeted traffic and social media followers are surely going to add up.

The easiest way to get started with niche roundups is to search for such roundups on the internet. Once you find the roundup posts, send an email to the roundup creator and see if you can participate in the existing roundup and get notified for the future roundup opprotunities.

7. Check for Interview Opportunities: Interviews are yet another method to get some niche visibility. In an interview, along with getting link value, social media shares and followers and a number of other benefits, you can also establish yourself as a reputed expert on your niche.

For getting started with interview opportunities, simply search for existing interviews on the internet. When you find some relevant interviews on niche blogs, simply reach out to the blogs hosting those interviews and ask them if you can participate on your upcoming interviews.

8. Make a List of LongTail Keywords: While running a niche blog, you must have already figured out that longtail keywords are the best way to grow and rank for various terms on your category. However, simply knowing won’t help. The best way to approach longtails is to make a list. Once you have a long list of long tail keywords, start making article titles that covers one longtail key phraze.

This way, once enough articles are posted on your blog where each article targets one relevant longtail keyword, your ranking will start to improve and you will start to see a positive growth in your organic traffic.

9. Write huge and in-depth Guides: One way to boost your rankings is to write really good articles. If your article is a complete and total guide which covers the topic well then people will spend more time on it, they will consume your content better and share it further. All these are positive ranking factors and it will help your article to outrank your competitors.

10. Connect with Niche Influencers on Social Media: Social media is a gold mine for bloggers and marketers. Whatever be your niche, you are bound to get some influencers with a dedicated following, ready to promote your content. Niche influencers have a lot of social media strength and if you are able to connect with them in a good way and make yourself known then chances are that they will share your content.

Everyday, with more and more blogs and niche content getting posted on the internet, ranking for competitive niche terms is becoming almost impossible. This is where you can follow the above tips and slowly and steadily rank for niche keywords.

15 Tips to Flawlessly Run a Co-operative Blogging Network

The best way to determine if a blog is successful or not, is to check the strength and the reach of its network.

A blogging network consists of various channels like the traffic on the blog, the reach and the follower strength of its social media channels, the number of subscribers of the newsletter etc.

These are mostly part of the easily visible network; however there are more channels where the content of a blog reaches but they aren’t so visible but they are equally valuable.

If a blog has to become successful, popular and profitable then it needs to build several content distribution channels. These channels can be built and nurtured by establishing and maintaining relations with other bloggers and influencers. Here, in this article, we will discuss several online networking tips to build and expand your blogging network.

1. Post content consistently: Posting of blog content regularly helps in several ways. Search engines like consistency and rewards such blogs with better rankings and frequent crawls. Additionally, the readers also start to check for new content on days when you publish new posts. This way, your blog builds a dedicated audience in time.

2. Share and Maintain Social Channels: Social channels require posting of content on regular basis. This way, the timelines will be filled with content that is posted a few hours apart. This prevents flooding of timelines of your followers and they interact with the content in a better way.

3. Utilize smaller social networks: Smaller social networks are a gold mine for dedicated and targeted users. These users will navigate from the social site to your blog and if your own content is good, they will become a lot more active on your own blog. They help in boosting commenting and actively share content on the social media.

4. Do active blog commenting: Blog commenting is perhaps one of the best ways to build a co-operative network where every action that you take for other people’s blog, will be returned in several folds. Do remember that if you want help and co-operation from other bloggers, you need to start it first yourself. If you comment on a blog, share their content and link to them, most of them will do the same for you.

5. Utilize Facebook Groups: Facebook groups are some of the best places to share your content and build a dedicated flow of targeted audience. There are no ends to categories in Facebook group and whatever be your niche, you are sure to get some relevant groups where you can share your content.

For best results, always make sure to post good content without outgoing links. Images and text based content are fine to share. Slowly and steadily when the groups moderators and admins start to value your content and presence, start sharing a bit of your promotional content and links and get back some traffic out of those groups.

6. Join Pinterest Public Boards: Pinterest public boards work the same way. Look for popular boards that allow submissions from contributors. Once you are able to find such boards, start requesting to join those boards. If you are allowed to post on those boards, you can easily pin your content and get some traffic coming.

7. Take out some time for blogging forums: There are tons of blogging forums that has been operational for years. Surely there isn’t a lot of traffic on those forums but they are still active and if you add to their conversations, they do respond and even follow back to your blog and social channels.

8. Share other bloggers content: The whole point of doing co-operation in blogging is to share the blogging benefits among your network. Be it traffic, subscribers, social shares, everything flows in the network well but the process starts with you. Start sharing other people’s content in your timeline across all social media channels and make sure to tag the bloggers whose content you share so that they get notified.

9. Make a habit for linking out: Linking to relevant content especially from a blogging contact is a good way to boost your connection. This way, not only the blogging contact will be happy with your effort, chances are that soon he will link back to some of your content.

10. Promote others on your Email Newsletter: News letters are often under looked by bloggers. Most bloggers do not have an auto-responder series or their newsletters sometime lack content and are almost never delivered consistently. If you make a habit of linking and featuring other bloggers in your newsletter, just like your blog posts, your newsletters too will also start getting a lot of readership.

11. Include Call-to-Action wherever possible: The best way to get help and co-operation from others is to simply ask and make yourself heard. Often due to lack of good call-to-action buttons bloggers lose sale, subscription or even comments. If you want people to share your content, make sure to have a call-to-action button that asks people to share your content.

12. Write blog posts featuring commentators: Comments section is a powerful networking system which comes in-built with your blog. Most bloggers fail to use this system to its fullest. When you start to see some comments on your blog, it is time to make your comments section stand out. Look for regular commentators and feature them on your next blog post. Call them out, link to them; mention their social profiles so that they get even more involved with your blog.

13. Start an Interview Series: Just like features, interviews too are some of the best form of blogging content. Look for influencers in your niche. Sort list them and start sending them emails for doing an interview for your blog. Once you start to see some positive responses, send your target influencer some questions. With the received answers, write an article and post it on your blog.

14. Get active on Quora: Find questions related to your niche in Quora. Reply to those questions with the best answers that you can provide. Since these questions are on your niche, it shouldn’t be that difficult to answer them. Feel free to link to your relevant blog posts from your answer for additional information.

15. Offer free advice to new bloggers: New bloggers are easy to on-board. They always have a lot of questions and as an experienced blogger you can answer most of their questions. Soon you will find that plenty of these new bloggers have started to follow your blog and your social channels.

In the world of blogging, your success directly depends on the power of your network. If your network is strong, your content will reach the masses and everything will start to fall in place.