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12 Things You Need To Build An Audience Around Your Blog

As a blogger, you want to attract traffic and post comments and perhaps sales of product and service offerings. However, without the right audience, none of your plans will work. We have derived lessons from the greatest bloggers of our time, to bring you this list of 11 things you absolutely need to build an audience around your blog.

1. Dare To Be Different

If there are many blogs in your chosen niche, you need to do something to stand out, if you want to attract quality traffic. Why should readers come to your blog, when there are so many like yours out there? Figure out what you can do that’s different, unique and attention-provoking, and you’ve got your audience by their scalps.

2. Don’t Make The Same Mistakes

Know what not to do so that you avoid common pitfalls. Common mistakes new bloggers make are waiting too long to create an email list, sticking with the wrong crowd, not preparing enough and blending in to avoid criticism. Study failed blogs and learn more about other people’s mistakes.

Secret Content Marketing and Social Media Strategies

For the most powerful and effective marketing strategies you must combine your methods. If you have a social networking account you want to put these buttons on your website or blog. This allows people to friend you or to share your website or blog on whichever social network.

Visitors won’t revisit your page if your content isn’t top quality and informative. So you can’t just leave it up to networking, you must combine your networking efforts with your content marketing efforts.

If you are not sure how to effectively marry the two I can help you out a bit. Continue reading for some strategies that will help you combine social media strategies and content marketing in the most effective way.

• Ensure all the articles you publish are full articles. You can place these articles on websites such as LinkedIn or on your Facebook Fan page.

• Whenever you post an article or write a blog post or answer a question in a discussion forum or make a comment you can benefit from placing your link into it. 

You can link it to your social network page or straight to your website in different ways, you can do a straight headline or with a small paragraph then the link or you can do it in the form of a question. The latter is said to have the best effect for improving click through rate.

Downsides of Having a Popular Blog

According to Technorati, millions of blogs and websites are created daily. And with each blog created, taking yours to the top could truly be a daunting job. But if you’re one of the lucky ones who manage to get your blog to top, you should be ready for the downsides of having a popular blog. Getting to the top is easy but staying there is another thing altogether.

A successful blog translates to better following. And when you’ve got hundreds or thousands of visitors trooping to your blog every day, you have to take a second look into each word you place on your post. What began as hobby now takes precedence in almost every aspect of your life.

More Working Hours

The first that any successful blog owner would notice is the additional hours they have to put up as they answer every comment, research for additional content and come up with new ideas. You also have to manage your advertiser’s accounts and more importantly keep track of your competitors.

Why You Should be Adding YouTube Videos to Your Blog Posts

Video is the ruling party of Internet searches. People want images, charts, drawings, pictures and especially videos. Because the human attention span has withered alarmingly over the years due to lightning speed content, grabbing a visitor with a video is essential. The chance of someone opening your video post is 11,000 to 1. This may seem like a lot until you compare it with the chances of someone opening your web text post which comes in at approximately 500,000 to 1. Therefore, including YouTube videos in your blog posts, even if they aren’t yours rings true to be a savvy move in generating traffic your way.

It’s Easy: Just Cut and Paste

Locate the embed box along the bottom of the YouTube video you want to post. Copy the embedded code and paste it into your webpage and you are done. For WordPress, locate the TinyMCE editor that comes with it. Turn off the editor for the post you are creating and paste the YouTube code into the post.

5 Free Ways to Promote Your Blog

Finding free ways to promote your blog can seem intimidating to new bloggers. Many blog owners do not have the resources to invest in a large online advertising campaign. Even if you do have the means to invest in PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising, there are still significant SEO benefits you can gain from other methods of blog promotion. Free blog promotion is blogger’s best friend.

Facebook and Twitter

Both Google and Bing announced in December 2010 that they factor “social media signals” in their search engine algorithms. Every link you generate on a social media website helps your blog’s SEO and builds traffic.

Links on Facebook and Twitter have the potential to go viral. If you post a link to useful information on your blog, your friends/followers will be inclined to share it with their connections.

Twitter is especially good for posting links because many other sites search Twitter for quality blog posts that they can link to on their website. If your post appears on one of these sites, you get double link placement.

5 Blog Basics of SEO Anybody Can Implement

Anyone can create a blog or website, but not everyone has what it takes to create a well optimized website that ranks well in search engines and enjoys a ton or traffic as a result of their efforts. If you want to build a blog or website that has the potential to perform well, then there are a number of blog SEO basics that should be kept in mind.

1. Optimized Page Content

One of the most basic fundamentals of SEO is valuable and unique content. It’s a known fact that search engines love fresh and unique content. This is due to the fact that they are constantly evolving in order to provide the most relevant and valuable content to those who use them.

In order to become an authority figure in the eyes of search engines, you have to provide content that is relative to the keywords or key phrases that you are targeting. Optimized content will contain your targeted keywords or phrases an appropriate number of times, which is typically anywhere from 2% to 5%.

2. Internal Links

10 Free WordPress Themes to Get Your Blog Started

Whether you’ve decided to host your own WordPress blog to let your family and friends know what you’re up to or you’re going to try and take on the Huffington Post, you’ll need an eye-catching and easy-to-use theme. There are a number of web design companies and websites that will try and sell you WordPress themes for as much as $400, but there are a ton of great, free WordPress themes out there. And here are just a few to get you started.

1. Satoshi

This is a great clean, professional-looking blog theme with simple black, white, and red coloring and an open feel. It’s a fantastic theme for a modern and clean look.

2. Reptile

Another great minimalist theme, Reptile has a clean UI and easy-to-use navigation. It’s simple and elegant and doesn’t distract the reader with any flashy imagery.

3. Newspress

This is a blog template for anyone who is going to be posting a lot of content regularly. It has some awesome featured story areas at the top of the page where your best and latest content can be highlighted. If you’re going for a newspaper-style blog, give Newspress a try.

Designing the Perfect Blog – Tips from Plugins to Design and Things in Between

How many times have you sat down at the computer, read a blog, and immediately started thinking about what you would do if you were writing the blog? Instead of just thinking about it, why not try it? You may now be thinking that it probably wouldn’t do any good because there are so many blogs out there. Well, consider this. By now, many of those blogs are out of date or have been posted for so long that the readership has drastically decreased.

Preparing For Your Readers

Readers are always looking for new avenues of information and opinion, so when they see a new blog entry, it likely they will click on to it at least once just to see what it’s all about. The trick now is getting them to return.

That’s where advance preparation comes in. Before you ever post your first blog, you want to make sure it has been designed in such a way that it will catch first-time visitors’ attention and make them want to return again. You can do that by paying attention to these three areas:

How to Write Attractive Article Titles

Good SEO is mostly achieved by generating regular and good quality content on a website. I believe that finding a good title is the most important task while writing an article. We come across with hundreds of new content on the web everyday. Our Inbox traffic is going crazy with regular emails, RSS feeds, newsletters etc. We unfortunately no longer have time to read all those stuff so we scan and only stop if the title gets our attention; correct?

I just came across to a list of head turning praises those might kick start your articles. Here is a list of which I’ve found useful:

1. Do You Struggle With…
2. The Untold Secrets to Making…
3. Who Else Wants to…
4. 10 Ways to…
5. Learn Exactly How…
6. 7 Amazing Strategies to…
7. A Guide to…
8. How to Attract More…
9. Want to…?
10. READ THIS: If You Are Truly Serious About…
11. Tips on…
12. Learn How to Start…
13. How to Make Your…
14. Double Your…
15. More Tips to Improve…
16. Learn the Secrets to Becoming…
17. Instant Strategies Anyone Can Use to…
18. 5 Big Reasons to…
19. 10 Steps to…

WordPress 2.8 Baker Released Today

We’ve been waiting for WordPress 2.8 since yesterday and finally, the latest and fastest version of WordPress, version 2.8 “Baker” has been released today with a one day delay.

New version has been named in honor of noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker. Baker version gives  better user experience with many new features and has fixes over 790 bugs.

I just started using WordPress Baker and will soon let you know about my 2.8 experience. I wonder if it has any new features to make our blogs and websites  more SEO Friendly.

Here is a video to give you some insights of what 2.8 is all about: