Archive for the ‘blogging’ Category
This is a guest post by James Tayo of Entrepreneur Blog’r.
One day I was shopping for groceries and as I walked through the magazine section, I was stopped in my tracks. A title on one of the magazines had caught my eye and it read “One Wedding secret Prince Charles must take to his grave”. I just had to stop to pick it up to find out what they were on about. If you live in the UK, you always are interested in some crazy thing the royal family does. This moment reminded me of how powerful a great headline can be.
The Power of a Headline.
In a previous post, Pat explained why an incomplete headline will help you get more traffic to your blog and this post is a follow up to expand on that idea. In the age of social media and millions of other blogs competing for your audiences attention, it has become a noisy world out there. Today it is not who shouts the loudest that gets the most attention but who shouts the smartest. Especially if you are a new blogger, you could write all the great content you want, but to get that content read, you need to have a great headline that pulls people in from the RSS readers, Twitter or wherever you may be promoting it.
How to Learn to Write Great Headlines
Writing great headlines is not hard at all, you just need to know what works, the psychology behind why it works and put that into practice.
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Last year, I made a conscious decision to turn my growing Smart Passive Income blog into the Smart Passive Income brand.
I knew nothing about “branding” at the time, except that I knew that successful brands utilized all different mediums to reach their audience. Stick to one medium, and you’ll limit your reach to only those who use that medium.
That’s why you see major brands on television and on the radio (and everywhere else it seems), or why you see many of the top bloggers syndicate and expand their written content with videos and podcasts too.
I wanted to do the same, and that’s why I have my YouTube Channel, and most recently, my Podcast.
So is it worth all the effort?
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There are hundreds of different ways to setup a niche website – you know this, but I’ll outline my process for you below because it’s easy to follow and it doesn’t require much know-how. If you have anything to add, I’m sure the people here who are unfamiliar with this process will appreciate your insight in the comment section.
1. Setting Up The Blog
For my niche site challenge, I’ll be using a WordPress blog with a domain and hosting from Bluehost.com.
In the past, niche sites were almost always static sites, and blogs were just a way to keep your friends informed about the shenanigans from last weekend’s party. They weren’t given much in terms of priority and ranking in Google’s search engine algorithm.
Now, as I’m sure you’ll know, blogs can rank high – really high.
Why?
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As I was cleaning the house today, I found a book that I had purchased a couple of years ago, called The Little Blue Book of Advertising: 52 Small Ideas That Can Make a Big Difference.
I don’t really know why I had purchased it. I was still working my 9 to 5 job, and it’s a book that’s mainly geared toward those in advertising.
I was in architecture.
Sadly, I never had the chance to read it, but when I was flipping through the pages today, I randomly opened up to page 205, which was a chapter entitled: 43. Blogs – Still Lots of Learning to be Done.
Since I have a blog, I was interested and read on.
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Non-Google search engines are a beautiful thing – and no, I’m not talking about Yahoo or Bing.
I’m talking about other search engines that you can use to discover a ton of valuable information about the niche you’re in.
I guarantee that you’ve heard of these search engines before, although you probably never thought of them primarily as search engines:
- YouTube
- Twitter
- Facebook
- iTunes
Let’s go one-by-one through each to discover how we can utilize these search engines to enhance our own websites, blogs and brands.
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Over the past week, I’ve received at least 15 emails from SPI readers asking me whether or not the new Subscribers Magnet WordPress Plugin by MaxBlogPress (makers of the popular WordPress Plugin, Ninja Affiliate) would be something worth investing in. To be honest with you, I hadn’t even heard about the plugin until some of you emailed me about it.
I built my online businesses with WordPress sites and never once paid for a single plugin, so I was a bit skeptical because I only know a handful of plugins that are worth paying for, such as WP-Wishlist. With so many people wanting my opinion about it, I decided to see what the big deal was.
Before I go on, I just wanted to say this to you up front: I don’t normally do posts about products like this here on SPI. I usually only promote products that I’m hardcore familiar with (i.e. Market Samurai), but I did do my best to get as familiar with the plugin as possible so I could leave you an honest assessment. There was apparently a ton of buzz about this plugin (which I somehow missed until recently), so my goal here is to give all of you my first-hand, educated opinion about it so that you can make your own educated decision whether you like it or not.
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We all know that guest posting is one of the best ways to get highly targeted traffic to your website. Everyone makes it sound so easy too: write a killer post, deliver it to a fellow blogger in your niche, and then BAM…instant traffic, and some new subscribers to boot.
Although I wholeheartedly believe that guest posting is a tactic that delivers exactly the traffic that you need, and one that you should definitely attempt several times throughout the life of your growing site, the truth is that it’s not always as easy as it sounds.
Why?
Because the author of the blog you are targeting has the option to reject your guest post request. It could be for any number of reasons, many of which are beyond your control.
There is, however, a strategy that I’ve noticed being used on a number of blogs lately that is working wonders – driving large amount of traffic, earning tons of retweets and landing tons of new subscribers. It’s a strategy that I wish I knew when I was just starting out, and the best part is that it’s a post that you publish on your own blog, so there’s no need to worry about rejection.
The strategy?
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Last week, I posted a question asking all of you whether you prefer a full post or a partial post in your RSS feed.
The argument was that a full post is what most subscribers favor, but showing a full post keeps people off of your site. On the other hand, you could get more traffic coming to your site by showing a partial post or “teaser”, but then it would defeat the purpose of having an RSS feed in the first place.
The response was amazing. In fact, more than 60 individual people commented with their opinion – and almost all of them favored ‘full post’.
Although we can easily conclude that a full post is the way to go, I wanted to illustrate two principles that came about as a result of asking this simple question: social proof and putting your readers first.
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Last week, an SPI reader asked me the following question:
“Pat. You seem to be EVERYWHERE online. Everywhere I go, people are talking about you and your name always comes up. How do you do it?”
To be honest, I never believed I would become this successful online, especially with SPI – a blog in the “make money online” niche, which as you probably know is wildly over saturated. Although my success is partially accidental I know exactly why I’m here.
What it really comes down to is this:
If you want to become successful online, you must think about what you do as building a brand. In order to build a brand, you must do what you can to be everywhere.
A successful blogger is not just a blogger. True – it’s the blog where things get started. It’s where authority is constructed and content is published. But if you stick to just a blog, you’ll be just that – stuck to your blog.
Your blog or your website is only the beginning. It’s your hub, your homebase where people can go to find out more about who you are and what you do, but it’s also just one piece of the giant puzzle that is your brand – your omnipresent, influential and (if applicable), money making brand.
Below are 7 ways to simply be everywhere:
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When you visit a non-existent URL on a website, you’ll often come face to face with an error similar to the following:
“Oops! We couldn’t find what you were looking for.”
or…
“Page not found.”
What you’re actually seeing when you come across this error is the “404 Page”, which is a page that your browser goes to when the page you were looking for was – well – not found.
Common reasons for landing on a 404 page include:
- A misplaced letter or misspelled word in the URL when typing manually into the browser’s address bar.
- A misplaced letter or misspelled word in an existing link.
- The link or URL is typed correctly, but the page just no longer exists (aka. broken link)
- A redirection error.
Whatever the path may be, when people land on your 404 Page they will most likely exit your site.
It’s sad, but true. People are spoiled, especially when it comes to searching and surfing online, so when they don’t immediately find what they’re looking for – it’s on to the next thing like there’s no tomorrow.
However, there are things we can do as website owners, bloggers and internet entrepreneurs to decrease the chances of people leaving our sites when they do reach a 404 Page, which I’ll outline for you below.
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No, I'm not a millionaire, but I am living off of passive income made online. I'm here to show 
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