Tag Archives: blogging tips

Tips For Bringing Traffic To Your Blog

Starting a blog is the easy part of getting going in your blogging pursuits. Even if it’s the most incredibly exciting and original creation there ever was, without marketing to an audience, it will just fade into the background of the interwebs.

Imagine your blog is a vehicle and your audience is the gasoline. Without the gasoline, your vehicle simply will not take off. Once you start bringing in more traffic to your site, the more money you will be able to make and the greater your opportunities. Here are some of the best tips for getting your blog’s traffic into gear. Continue reading

Originally posted on January 25, 2017 @ 3:24 am

5 Online Collaboration Tips for Successful Blogging

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Thanks to the internet, people from across the world are now as connected as ever. Online stores, industry news sites, and blogs; professionals with the right skills and talent can now contribute to these websites without the hindrance of location. All it takes is to establish a seamless collaboration platform that improves communication and productivity between online teams.

If you’re a blog owner and constantly outsource remote contributors, then here are five essential tips and tools that will help you maximize their productivity:

1. Use a Project Management Tool

First things first, you need to have a tool that will enable everyone to know exactly what they should be doing. The traditional practice is to use emails as the primary means of communication. While this still works, it’s difficult to convey the sense of urgency even if you specify deadlines in the email. This can make it difficult for your writing team to keep up with the editorial calendar, the blog’s quality standards, and each other when working on collaborative content.

CoSchedule

This is why the first software that every blogger should use is a project management tool such as Trello and CoSchedule. These tools offer a visual interface that can be used to assign tasks, set deadlines, and manage the workflow of every team member. Trello is a little more straightforward than CoSchedule, which can be seen as an advantage. It offers a fast user interface that organize projects into cards, which can contain an indefinite number of tasks. Each task may contain checklists, in-depth details, comments, attachments, labels, and deadlines.

On the other hand, CoSchedule provides a host of useful features that are specific to content marketing. It offers a comprehensive marketing calendar, social media scheduling, and integrations with other productivity apps such as Evernote and Google Docs.

2. Meet Occasionally

A team with mutual respect between each member is far more capable in functioning together and accomplishing goals than teams with little to no communication. However, not even the best online collaboration and communication platform can foster trust and team spirit. This is why you should also arrange occasional meet-ups that will allow teammates to get to know each other and discuss big goals with clearer detail.

W1 Office

Renting a co-working space for facilitating meet-ups is a good way to go, especially since it allows your team to do something that’s not work-related afterwards. It should be easy to find co-working space services in your area. For example, if you’re living in Seattle, then you can use a service like Office Nomads. For UK-based teams, then you may opt for W1Office.

Alternatively, you can still hold meetings online with a platform like GotoMeeting. It is a popular online meetings tool that features a simplistic yet functional interface. You can easily hold ad hoc meetings, collaborative discussions, presentations, and so on. It also allows you to organize and manage a list of meetings to stay ahead of your schedule.

3. Keep in Touch All the Time

Apart from an online meeting tool, you also need an online communication platform that will keep everyone on the same page – at all times. Remember that a team needs constant communication to work faster, brainstorm content ideas, share suggestions, and finish projects faster.

Slack

One of the best tools you can use for this would be Slack. Despite its name, it is one of the best online tools you can use to maximize productivity and foster team effort. It gives users access to direct messaging as well as channels that may facilitate specific conversations. For example you can have a channel for your content development, social media, and security teams to keep the discussions on-point.

Apart from sending messages, Slack also enables you to share files and integrate other enterprise tools for quicker access. This means members no longer have to check each individual tool for updates.

4. Store Files on the Cloud

Although Slack, Trello, and a lot of online collaborative tools include a file sharing feature, you still need a full-fledged cloud storage app to make your files accessible to everyone. One advantage of this is that you can have a single place for all your files, whereas sharing them with other collaboration tools means looking for the specific conversation first.

Google Drive

Today, two of the leading cloud storage platforms are Google Drive and Dropbox. Although Dropbox is also feature-rich, Google Drive offers more storage space (15 GB versus only 2GB on Dropbox) on the free version, which is already a huge difference. Furthermore, Google Drive includes easy integration with Google Docs, which can be used for quickly proofreading content submissions by writers.

5. Invest in Editing Tools

Although Google Docs is useful for making quick edits and comments, bloggers can also use editing tools to proofread and polish articles. Some of the factors that you should never overlook are grammar, spelling, and the readability of an article. However, a simple spell-checking feature in word processing apps cannot reliably detect these issues, particularly when it comes to grammar and readability.

Grammarly

This is why you should consider using Grammarly – a web-based editing tool that checks your article for grammar, spelling, and readability issues. All you need to do is to paste your document and the tool will automatically highlight the problem points and provide you with revision suggestions. If you run a blog with multiple authors, ask them to use Grammarly first or some of its alternatives to automate and make your editing process simpler.

It’s worth noting that Grammarly can be integrated with your browser as an extension. It will then check everything you type in your browser – highly useful if you’re creating social media posts or editing blog posts directly from your CMS. Check out this link for more information on how it can be used for blogging and other writing activities.

Conclusion

Today, going the remote route and eliminating the physical barriers for collaboration have been highly effective for developing great blogs and other forms of online content. Although you have access to the global pool of talent, remember that you also need the tools that will help you manage a great team. Keep in mind that it takes the collective effort of your entire editorial team to establish an authoritative blog.

Originally posted on June 22, 2016 @ 2:11 am

Supplemental Website Posts That Help With SEO Scores

understanding seo
Creating a successful website these days requires a different set of skills than was required even a few years back. And the primary reason for this shift is because of the importance of good SEO. In the past, you could hijack search engine optimization processes with word stuffing and paid backlinks. Now, a little more thought has to go into the process.

And that’s why supplementary content has become so important in the scheme of things. It’s not good enough anymore just to have valuable information in text form. Now you have to think about things like semantics and Google penalties. So, what are these supplemental types of posts you can make to help you out with this?

Testimonials

Publishing testimonials is a good start to your SEO project. What this does is add intrinsic natural value to the subject of your website. Because people will naturally be using keywords that are associated with your business as they explain that they had a good experience with you, this will organically translate into a much better score from Google, especially compared to a site that doesn’t bother publishing these kinds of reviews digitally.

Blog Posts

And no matter what your website is about, you should always maintain a blog section. This is not only good for business because it shows people the most current news going on, it also ups your SEO score every time you post, assuming you follow basic SEO rules, like making sure there are at least 300 words, paying attention to headlines and subheadings, ensuring that you don’t overuse anchor words, and all of those details.

About Me and Contact Pages

And you should never forget to make contact pages and about me/us sections. Not only does it tell visitors to your site more about ownership and add to transparency, it also gives you ample opportunity to make use of phrases that Google will look on as adding value to your overall website. You can really dig into SEO phraseology in these sections, while still maintaining a completely natural formatting system.

Social Feeds

You can also use social feeds to populate your website in a way that will help with your SEO scores as well. If you have Facebook or Twitter feeds run directly into your site somewhere, Google’s crawlers will see the text as well as the links and images and add that value to the authority of your site.

Authoritative Explanations

And lastly, if you choose to either have authoritative explanations and language directly near certain terms in order to define them more clearly, or even have a separate section where you can use these phrases, that will also give your site a comparative advantage in terms of quality of quantity.

Originally posted on September 18, 2016 @ 1:57 am

Why SEO Is Important For Blogs, Websites, And Social Media

SEO, it’s a term you’ve been hearing non-stop, a buzzword, if you will. Bloggers and businesses alike are utilizing search engine optimization in order to make their websites and blogs easier to find. If you aren’t using SEO it’s pretty likely you’ll never appear on the front page of any search engines, and that’s where most people click links.

SEO isn’t just for blogs, though that is one of the most important places to use it. It included keywords, links, and keywords phrases, among other things. You can get more out of you SEO work by using keywords in more places. Continue reading

Originally posted on August 4, 2016 @ 2:38 am

How to Start a Blog For Your Business

Being on social media today is a must for businesses. It’s a powerful way to raise public awareness about your products and services and gain more customers moving forward.

It’s true that the use of traditional media still works up to this day but it’s also high time for businesses to incorporate other creative ways to attract more customers and increase revenues. And social media is definitely a great tool to utilize. Continue reading

Originally posted on March 18, 2016 @ 9:15 am