Posts Tagged ‘Blogging’

I’ve recently been working on a new service for my search engine and social media marketing business. The idea is to list local businesses in over 120 local business sites for a small cost in order to get them massive exposure. You can click the following link to see the Business Listing Service.

Anyway, it got me thinking about you lovely readers of mine, here on the Adventures blog. That service of mine is targeted at UK business owners, but it got me thinking…

What are the best universal ways to get more customers, regardless of your country?

Well, with my thinking cap firmly in place to keep my shiny head warm, I came up with the following 4 simple methods. Use them wisely, young Jedi…Oh, and as with all the strategies I share with you, make sure you focus on one and master it before you start another. Be a master, not a jack of all trades.

Presenting, How To Get More Customers, the Matt Duggan way!

Build Your List of Prospects and Customers

You will have heard this time and again in you’ve been in online marketing for longer than about 5 minutes, but there’s a reason for that: It works.

Those people that are making good money in their businesses have a way of getting in touch with their existing clients in order to promote new offers to them.

Think about this for a moment…

Imagine you have a new service or product you want to sell. Naturally you want to sell as many as possible because you know that your offering is going to help people.

Who will be easier to sell it to?

• People who’ve never heard of you before and with whom you have no rapport.
• People with whom you have a relationship with and who may even have bought from you before.

In case you weren’t sure, I’ve given you a clue!

With that in mind, you need to be building a list and dividing it between prospects and customers. If you’re not sure, it’s easy. Customers have bought something and deserve special attention. Prospects haven’t. They may or may not buy something in the future, but until they put their hands in theit pockets, they’re prospects.

How to Do It:

Simple. Give something away for free.

It can be a report or whitepaper (these tend to be more popular than the word ‘ebook’) on something in your industry that people want to know about. For example, this article, if expanded with more illustrations and step-by-step elements, could easily be a white paper. In fact, I’ll be using parts of it as part of the giveaway on the site with the business listing service.

If you’re feeling more ambitious, Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to sitting down to write a blog, one issue crops up for bloggers time and again.

Even when we’re passionate about our subject, at one time or another we’ll draw a blank and wonder what to blog about. This article aims to show you a few sources you can use for inspiration as well as a few of my own ideas on how to find and/or create some good content that people will actually want to read.

OK, first things first: The idea that there’s nothing to write about is nonsense. Really, it is.

Think about it. There are hundreds, thousands maybe even millions of very specialist blogs out there (just search on Technorati) that all manage to produce information about their topic day in and day out. There are also thousands of news networks across the world who can produce enough news to fill their bulletins. If there’s that much information out there, surely you can find something to write or comment about in your own niche or area of interest.

What’s really required is a shift in the way you think about what to write in a blog. Rather than thinking about what you can tell people, look at what people want to read or consume. If you master that, you’ll never be without a topic again.

Here are some ways I use to discover what my potential readers want to read and therefore what to blog about:

• In the spirit of researching your readers, look at your own blog and see which of your posts got the most feedback. This can be in the form of sharing your posts on Facebook or other social sites, or simply the fact that the post got the most comments or views. Google Analytics will give you the information about the number of view you’re getting. If you blog using WordPress (as I do) then you can use a plugin like WordPress Popular Posts to get the lowdown on what’s popular on your site.

• If you’re looking to attract new readers (and who isn’t?) then go to the top blogs in your niche or market and see what they’re writing about that’s getting lots of comments. If they’ve started a discussion about a topic, see if you can start a similar discussion on your own site. It doesn’t have to be about the exact same topic, but perhaps you can take an aspect of it and expand upon that in a way that the top blogger didn’t. You could even link your post to theirs, saying that you were inspired to write your post after reading theirs. This gives them some love from your site (which they’ll appreciate) and also lists you in the pingback section of their blog post (usually close to the comments section) giving their readers a way to find your blog and expand on the discussion.

• You know how I mentioned the news channels earlier? Read the rest of this entry »

‘Yeah, yeah,’ you may be thinking

‘Free traffic? Whatever…’

But bear with me. If you’re a blogger, you’re leaving money and traffic on the table if you’re not doing this.

OK, first of all, you might have heard of my friend and blogging consultant, Chris Garrett. He wrote the Problogger book with Darren Rowse.

Well, he has a new e-book out that tells you everything you need to know to get quality authority links and a boost in traffic, all through a quick and easy approach to guest blogging.

http://www.adventuresininternetmarketing.net/guest-posting

Guest blogging is simply the idea of making a guest appearance on someone else’s blog in your market. You write them an article that provides great quality content for their readers and subscribers. In exchange, at the end of the article, you get a link from their site back to yours. This does several things
Read the rest of this entry »

As many of you regular readers will know, I’m a very big fan of WordPress. It’s an excellent system with a myriad of applications. In fact, I run all my sites on WordPress, ever since David Cavanagh first showed me how easy it is.

The plugins – elements that can be added to increase the functionality of the site – are part of what makes WordPress so good.

Anyway, I thought I’d share with you the 10 top plugins that I believe every blog site needs to run effectively. There are other plugins out there that do similar things but from my own testing and plenty of trial and error, these are the best ones. To get them installed on your blog, simply go into WordPress, click ‘Plugins’ on the left hand menu and click ‘Add New’. From there, just type their names into the search bar (one at a time) and then click ‘Install’ next to the one you want.

So, here’s the list for your blogging/site-building pleasure…
Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick ‘cool tool’ for you today. This is an excellent and very simple tool, whether you’re a blogger or just a blog commenter.

As you may know, blog commenting is a great way to get a little bit of traffic from other blogs, but also to build backlinks to your site from other related authority sites.

I always saw that some of the commenters on blogs had a photo (avatar) next to their comment. It made them more engaging and made them seem more transparent. Also, the fact that they have a photo when most commenters don’t, makes them look more professional. All of this makes me want to find out more about them, especially if they look approachable.

A good comment that adds to the discussion on a blog, plus a good photo, is a far more effective way of commenting on blogs and having your comments approved. If you Read the rest of this entry »

I was chatting to a friend of mine who has recently set up her own fashion and beauty magazine-style blog. She mentioned that – like many people online – she wanted to spread the word about it and build the amount of visitors to her site.

As usual, this got me thinking…

She’s already got writers who are creating great original and targeted content for her. All of these great articles are going straight onto her blog for her readers. I realised that she’s not making the most of this stream of information.

You see, if you’re a blogger, the articles (or posts) that you’re creating can also be published on article directory sites. There are several top sites (which you can see below) that get massive traffic. You can also have your article re-published by other people on their blogs, thus creating a viral effect with the same article.

The best part of submitting your articles to sites like EzineArticles is Read the rest of this entry »