How to Get A Website/Blog Approved and Listed in Google News

Google News has been an abundant source of Traffic for many websites since few years. Previously there were only a few publishers on Google News so things were pretty easy, back then. But now many sites got into google news to drive traffic to their blog/websites. However, Google News still acts as a good source of traffic for websites that produce good quality content in large volumes.

If you are new here you should check out my article on Things you need to know about Google News.

In this article, I will explain you the step by step process to get your website/blog into Google News. Things are not that easy but if you follow all the steps properly then the chances of your website getting into news would increase.

Steps to get your Website into Google News:

1.Your Website Theme/Look

Your website theme plays a key role in getting you approved for google news. It should be of Magazine Style with proper section wise news on various topics like Politics, Education, Entertainment, Technology etc.

As the name says the theme must look like a news website. There are many themes out there, if in case you are a WordPress user you can go ahead with some popular Magazine Style Theme.

You can have a look at popular news sites India Today, Times of India, All India Roundup etc

2. Your Website must be complete with all required info:

Your website must have pages like About Us, Contact Us, Media Kit and an Authors page as well. Of all these, you must have an about us page where you have to list all your authors with a brief bio.

• You can have a look at a sample page here

3. Website must be Multi-Authored:

This is quite obvious. A single person alone cannot produce lots of content daily. So, it should have a minimum of 2-3 authors who covers on various topics each and every single day.

4. Do not post about Job Updates, Notifications, and How-To Guides:

This is one of the biggest mistakes people do, posting about jobs and job notifications is completely against Google News TOS. So, if you have any articles about Job updates and notifications you have to remove them immediately before you apply for Google News.

However, you can post few job updates after your site gets a full approval for Google News.

Along with that do not post How-To guides, a website with how to guides doesn’t get a news approval as the name says the website must be updated with latest news stuff and not how to guides. If in case you are posting How to guides exclude them for the news sitemap.

5. Author bio on Post Pages

The author name is a must, but bio is generally optional. But if you are applying for an approval then having an author bio will increase your chances of getting approved.

6. You must divide content into sections/categories

Every news website has some categories so divide content into different categories because Google News will ask you for different sections like Headlines, Technology, Entertainment etc while you are applying for Google News.

7. You must publish good number of articles per day

Generally they say you can get into news if you publish 3 articles per day. But believe me, that wouldn’t be sufficient enough. You must publish at least 10 articles per day and before few days of applying publish at least 15+ articles per day.

8. Grammar plays a key role

Your application will be reviewed manually by someone from Google News team. They will verify the complete website to the best possible extent and they will manually read few articles posted on your website. So, no matter even if you have satisfied all the above guidelines if your website doesn’t have proper grammar then your application will be declined without any hesitation.

9. Google News Sitemap and News Keyword Tag

Google News sitemap is a little different from the sitemap which you generally have on your blog. A Google News sitemap will have only a maximum of 1000 URLs in the index at a time.

Also, you need one more additional tag called news_keywords tag, however, this is optional initially but if you have one for your blog the chances of getting approval would increase.

For these two I would highly recommend you to go for Yoast SEO News Plugin if you are a WordPress user which is a premium plugin and you have to pay for it.

Alternately you can also use Google News XML Plugin for Sitemap and Google News Keywords from Tags plugin for news_keywords tag.

10. If you cannot do all the above steps then do this

If you follow all the above steps properly then you can definitely get into google news but I know the above-mentioned steps are a little difficult to achieve and takes some time.

Also, sometimes even though you have followed all the above steps, still your application might get rejected due to some unknown reasons.

Alternately you can buy a website/domain which is already listed in Google News. There are quite a few brokers on Flippa and few other marketplaces who sell expired/parked domains that are already listed in Google News. It would cost you anywhere between $500 to $5000 based on the demand for the domain/website.

• One you are done with all the steps head over to this page and click on Google News Publisher Center at the bottom of the page. Generally it takes 2-5 days to know whether your application is accepted or rejected. If in case its rejected you have to wait for 90 more days. So, give your best on the first attempt itself.

So, I guess it’s very clear on how to get your site listed on to Google News. It’s not easy at the same time it’s not impossible as well. Do contact me if you need any help in getting your site listed on Google News, I can help you out with the same.

My next article would be on optimizing a Google News website stay tuned.

Read More

Why Internal Links Are Essential To Your Website

What’s the big deal about internal links, and why should you pay attention to them?

An internal link is a hyperlink which points to a page or target on the same website from which it is situated; in other words, it can be used to navigate to a different area of the same domain. Often their importance is understated, even by professionals who devalue them. So here it is, everything you need to know about how and why you should be using internal links in your websites, and what may have gone wrong if for some reason your pages are unreachable.

• They make your website navigable for users

Let’s set the crawlers aside for just a moment and discuss what internal links do for the users of your site. Being that they link all of your pages together, displaying internal links become critical tools for binding your website together in such a way that your users can easily navigate around it.

This is where custom software development and web development become very useful because the right company can help you make something that not only caters to your business needs but also your users’. There would be very little point to putting in all that time and effort into developing a series of stunning pages if no one were to see them, having come from your landing page.

If you’re relying purely on SEO to make your pages navigable then you aren’t really being fair to users who actually want to traverse your website. But quite frankly, if you have no internal links setup, then even your SEO will suffer. This is when you need to ask yourself, is your online marketing bringing you results?

• They give your website structure

One of the most important functions of internal links is their ability to create hierarchy within your website. Your homepage links to parent pages, which link to child pages and so on and so forth in a neat fashion which benefits your users and the crawlers.

Let’s take the example of DigitalSearchGroup.com.au, from their homepage you can navigate to ‘home’ (the homepage itself), ‘organic search’, ‘about’, ‘blog’, ‘testimonials’ and ‘contact us’; some of which have sub-links within them to navigate further down the site. Doing this has essentially created a yellow brick road which can be followed by both users, and search engine crawlers to properly index the site.

• They spread out the ranking power

There are many ways to secure your WordPress site while optimising your pages so that they rank for the queries they are intended for. Any page of your website does not need to suffer in ranking to accommodate the other pages which have theirs boosted. In terms of SEO, wouldn’t it be better if a user could be directed to pages and services they are looking for, directly from the search engine, depending on their queries.

Internal links help create what is commonly referred to as ‘link juice’ by giving search engine crawlers bridges to the other pages on your site. Without internal links it might be impossible for the crawlers to even know that other pages actually exist on the site, which means they will not be indexed into the search engine, and therefor may get completely lost in the digital ether.

This can also make things difficult for you as a developer to manage, especially as far as bad backlinks are concerned. To earn more about distinguishing bad links from good links as well as local SEO services in Sydney, contact Digital Search Australia.

• Reasons for unreachable pages

Of course, simply laying out internal links for every page may not be enough to make pages easily available for users, but it’s the crawlers which can be most finicky in this regard. There are a few things you should look out for when using internal links that might still make the pages unreachable:

1. Links to submission required forms like drop down menus and surveys will not be recognised by crawlers since they will not attempt to submit a form, be careful to make sure that there are other internal links pointing to these pages.
2. Links from internal search boxes will not be make visible since crawlers will not attempt to submit a search query, perhaps this may work in the distant future when artificial intelligence becomes an actual thing, but as for now, this isn’t enough of an indexing strategy.
3. Java-scrip, Flash, and other plugins could also be uncrawlable and if they are, often do very little for the rating of a sites. For the best results in this regard it is often better to use HTML.

Hopefully this has given you a better understanding of the benefits and proper use of internal links to help users and crawlers to navigate and index your website.

Read More

How Much Money One Can Earn From Google Adsense Through A Blog/Website by Lavakumar

I get bombarded with this question a lot of times. Recently, after my answer on Quora, the number of people who have been asking me about this question has gone high. So, I thought to make a clear article on what factors contribute to the earnings of a Blog/Website through Adsense.

Google Adsense has been a primary revenue model for many Bloggers and Internet Marketers. The best thing about Adsense is that they don’t have any traffic requirement and accepts almost all the blogs/websites that abide by their TOS. However, most of the Bloggers are not aware of the fact that you don’t start earning money if you have an Adsense account. You need traffic and that too targeted high-quality traffic. Let me explain you what that means;

How Adsense Revenue Actually Works?

Adsense has both CPC and CPM-based revenue model. Now let me explain the terminology that we use on Adsense first;

1. CPC – Cost Per Click – Varies anywhere between $0.02 to $1 (Max. it can go up to $100 as well but in very rare cases.)
2. CPM – Cost per 1000 Impressions.
3. RPM – Revenue per 1000 Impressions.
4. CTR – Click Through Rate – Clicks per 100 impressions. Varies anywhere between 1% to 10% based on your niche and ad placement.
5. The other terms like Pageviews, Impressions and Earnings; which I guess are pretty much straight forward.

CTR = (Number of ad clicks * 100) / Number of page views

If my blog has 10,000 pageviews per month and 800 AdSense ad clicks, then my CTR is 0.8%.

CTR = (800 * 100) / 10000 = 0.8%

Most of the ads on Google Adsense are Cost Per Click based. That means you get paid whenever a visitor clicks on your ads(You are not allowed to click on your own Ads, it might lead to a permanent BAN). There are very few ads that are CPM based that means you get paid even though a visitor doesn’t click and just view the ad, but these ad formats are very less, and most of the advertisers avoid these ad formats.

How much money can you actually make from Adsense?

It depends on a lot of factors and out of all these the primary factors are CPC and CTR. CPC varies from niche to niche and also depends on the geographic location of your audience. If you are getting traffic from Tier-1 countries like US, UK, Canada, Australia, etc, then your CPC is likely to be high. But if in case you are receiving traffic from Tier 2 and Tier 3 countries CPC would be low.

CPC also depends on the keywords that you are targeting. If you are targeting keywords related to Gadgets, Health, etc., the CPC tends to be high because there is a lot of competition among advertisers in those sectors. So, if you are in a less competitive niche like the entertainment or education, that too in India then obviously your CPC will be very less.

So, lets suppose you have good CPC, and that doesn’t end there. You need a good CTR as well; that means you want more people to click on your ads. This depends on a lot of factors like Ad Placement, Source of Traffic, Web Page Loading time and a lot many other factors.

It all depends on these two factors. Combing these two a simple term is used to understand how well our ads are performing and its called RPM.

Page RPM = (Estimated earnings / Number of page views) * 1000

Estimated Earnings = CPC * Total Number of Clicks

                                         = CPC * CTR*100

Ops, don’t panic. Am not teaching you any formula, and you don’t need any. You just have to look at the RPM.

Lets suppose like your RPM is $2 then you must be making around $2/1000 pageviews.

Then if you are receiving about 10,000 page views you should be able to make $20.

So, if your RPM is $5, then you would make $50 for every 10,000 page views.

If in case your blog is receiving an average of 10,000 pageviews per day which means 3,00,000 pageviews per month at an RPM of $3, the calculation goes as follows;

Total Revenue = RPM * Pageviews/1000 = 5*300 = 1500.

You should able to make about $1500 per month. So, now I hope you understand how to calculate the earnings.

Read More

A Complete Guide to Optimize Google Ads and Maximize your AdSense Earnings By LAVAKUMAR

I have been an Adsense Publisher for more than five years now. Google Adsense has been a primary revenue channel for me in the initial phase of my Blogging. AdSense has rewarded with few Premium benefits where am allowed to display more ads than an ordinary user with a dedicated support. Now Adsense has become a part of my earnings, but we don’t completely rely on Adsense anymore. My journey with AdSense has been very smooth, and I must mention that AdSense is best when it comes to Display Advertising.

The best thing about AdSense is, they come with a lot of new features based on the technology trends. As you know, Technology has been moving at a faster pace in the past two years. We have clearly seen a shift from Desktop to Mobile First to Mobile Only generation. With these things taken into consideration, AdSense has come up with Responsive Ads, Page Level Ads, Matched content and more in the past few months.

AdSense is an excellent revenue source for individual bloggers. I also know many small companies who rely on AdSense to run their businesses which of course, not recommended as AdSense income is dependent on several factors like CPC, CTR, Advertisers demand, etc. We have seen a lot of decline in CTR of Display ads as there was a shift from Desktop to Mobile technology.

In this entire blog post am sharing my 5 years of experience as a Google Adsense Publisher and things I have learned to boost my AdSense Revenue without violating any Google AdSense Terms of Service.

In case you missed I already wrote an article on “How much Revenue one can generate from Google Adsense” read it first.

What is AdSense Optimization?

Optimization is improving the business or product or service with the existing resources itself. So, when you talk about AdSense Optimization, it means optimizing your current traffic for better revenues.

Please note that Optimization is a never-ending process, and you have to keep on experimenting to find what works best at that particular point in time.

Mobile First Approach:

Before we get deep into the optimization part, I want to make it very clear that the number of visitors that we receive from Mobile has gone damn high. Slowly we are moving from Mobile first to mobile only scenario. So, you must make sure that your website/blog is well optimized for Mobile users. A responsive design is highly recommended in this case

Key factors that you need to Tweak to improve AdSense Revenue are;

1. Ads Placement.
2. Using right Ad Formats.
3. Displaying a maximum number of Ad Units.

Few more aspects which we will discuss in depth in this article.

Using Right Ad Formats:

When I say right ad formats, not all AdSense ad units perform best in all the placements. Generally, text links at the end of article perform better than a Banner Ad. So, you need to choose the right format based on your audience and Template of your blog/website.

Big is Better:

Bigger ad units like 300*600, 728*90, 160*600, 336*280 and 970*250 ads perform better as the CPC for bigger ad units will be high. In the desktop version of your website, it’s recommended to use bigger ad formats. Of course, you cannot use these ad formats in Mobile/Tablet Version.

300*250 is your go to ad unit:

If you are not sure about what kind of Ad unit to use then you can blindly go with 300*250 ad unit. As this is both Desktop and Mobile optimized with maximum fill rate.

Right Ad Placement:

This is the most crucial area and its a never ending process. We also have a Tab called experiments on Google AdSense Dashboard in My Ads section. You can head over to experiments and split test ad units and check what’s performing the best in a particular placement.

Above the fold.

Generally, above the fold is the area that loads first when you open a web page. And this is where the maximum exposure of a visitor goes into. Placing more ads above the fold in right ad formats can boost your income multiple folds.

• Do not waste the above the fold space, make sure the above the fold section is occupied with content blended with right ad formats.
• Do not push the ads and content below the fold by displaying the menu bar or a Big size logo.
• It’s recommended to use 300*250 or 300*200 ad units above the fold.

Place Ads within the Content:

Some people place more ads on right sidebar or footer which is not at all recommended. Visitors come to your blog to read your content, and that’s the place where you should place a maximum number of Ads for high CTR.

• An ad unit below the title, one random ad within the post and one ad unit at the end of the article would be an ideal approach. But make sure that the content is lengthy enough to place these many ads.
• If your content is short or having less number of words, then it would look clumsy with a lot of ads which is not at all recommended.

Top Ad Recommendation:

Placing a Responsive ad unit would be fine in this case, but a responsive ad units automatically fit according to screen resolution, and we do not have any control over this ad unit. So, I would recommend to use a custom-sized ad unit and make it responsive.

• Do check my article on how to make custom ads responsive.

Using this method you can display a bigger ad on Desktop version and a 300*250 or 300*200 ad unit on Mobile version as well. Currently, this is the best-performing Ad Unit for me on all my blogs.

Random Ad and Bottom Ad:

Random Ad, go with the same approach as the Top Ad. In the case of Bottom Ad, you can even follow the same approach as the Top and Random ads, along with it you can also use Text Link ads at the bottom of the post, and it performs better than Banner ads at the end of the article.

But however you have to split test yourself and find out what’s working best for you.

• WordPress comes with a lot of ready made plugins. You can either use Quick AdSense or Ad Injection to place random ads.
• In the case of Blogger you need to tweak the code a little – do check out my article here.

In my case, I use text link ads on AllTechBuzz (check this post) and on my other website http://www.alltecbuzz.com I use a banner ad at the bottom and text links in the middle of the post.

F-Pattern and Heat-Map:

As per few case studies, it’s known that that F-Pattern placement can yield high CTR ad the visitors look for the content in these patterns most of the cases. You can additionally use a premium tool called CrazyEgg to understand what your visitors are looking at.

Color Combinations:

Most of the publishers go with the default style but if you are using a light background or dark background trying contrast color scheme can help you in improving the CTR.

DFP and Ad Exchange:

Generally, AdSense allows only 3 Banner ads and 3 Text link ads per page for all the publishers. Of course, few publishers are allowed to use more than 3 Banner ads per page with an exclusive agreement. However, it’s not that easy to fall into that category as it requires very high traffic and consistent earnings.

Other publishers can either use DFP to show more than 3 ads, i.e., 2 more. But, DFP must be used when you are using third party ads. Just using DFP for the sake of using 2 more ads would be a violation and could lead to Adsense Ban – However chances are very less, and Google hasn’t confirmed anything regarding this.

Ad Exchange : There are few certified Adsense partners who tie up with Adsense and are allowed to display 5 ads per page. Additionally, Ad exchange has RTB system which will yield you high CPC and CPM ads. You can join a reputed network who take a flat 8-15% commission of your Adsense Income generated from their ad units.

EZOIC:

This is one of the best platforms that I have been working on in the past few months, and they have improved a lot of features that help in not only boosting your AdSense revenue but they will directly show the best possible ad unit on your blog from the hundreds of ad networks they are working with.

I will be writing a separate article on EZOIC explaining its features. But, EZOIC is a must try platform to boost your revenue of your blog.

• The best thing about EZOIC is you can start using 5 ads from the day 1.
• Am still experimenting different features available on EZOIC. I have a strong feeling that EZOIC can easily boost your income by 200%.
• Get started with EZOIC now.

Read More

How to Get Google Adsense Approval With A New Blog

Google Adsense is one of the best ad networks to monetize a website or a blog. It is 90% better than any other CPC advertising programs. It offers the publishers the highest CTR for every web page. The publishers could make lots of revenue daily from Google Adsense. Every new webmaster has a dream to monetize his website with this ad network. But unfortunately, many of them fail. Adsense has introduced some strict rules and requirements. It seems hard to get Adsense approval for our own blog.  But, we know impossible is nothing

The good news is “Getting Approval of Google Adsense with a New Blog is Now Really Easy”, if you follow some basic rules from the starting of your blog. When I first tried, I failed to get approval. But, following these rules, now I have an approved AdSense account. Thinking about this topic, I made a decision to share the basic rules of AdSense.

First Ready Your Blog Before Applying for Adsense:

Adsense moderators always approve those blogs whose have met up the requirements. First of all, you should make your blog ready for this process. Check first if your blog considers these requirements. Now, there are some initial basic requirements announced by AdSense team, and there are some known hacks and tricks that work. For example, on this official page it’s mentioned that for countries like China & India, publishers need to own the site for minimum 6 months, which is not a thumb-rule. Many Indian bloggers have got approval with one-month-old domain. The only thing which really matter here is “Quality”. Let’s look at factors which will make your blog AdSense ready:

Write High-Quality Contents:

A writing proverb “Content is King” helps you understand this requirement. A high-quality blog is identified with the high-quality contents. Great contents mean unique, decorated, stated and clear concerted content. Some black hat webmasters say, copy paste content only between 100-200 words is enough. But, I may assure him that his journey to Adsense will be certainly finished. I think, how a blog post or content could be only between 100-200 words? In my judgment, it is not possible to completely describe a topic within 100-200 words. And if copy paste content is enough, anybody can declare him as a blogger. Please keep in mind, Google AdSense doesn’t approve blogs with copy pasted copyright content. A well-optimized blog post should be 100% unique and above 500-600 words. So, always write blog post above this limit and it must be unique which clearly determinate the post topic.engine Friendly:

Optimize your unique blog post with Meta Title and Description Tag. The meta tags describe what the content is about to the crawler bots. It is not possible for AdSense editorial board to check every single website that has applied to get AdSsense approval. So, positively they will use their crawler bots. The bots will check for every footprint on your blog.  That’s why you should make sure; you have specified these tags with appropriate information.

Please keep in mind that your Meta Title should be between 69 characters (including spaces), and Meta Description should be between 156 characters (including spaces). If you are using platform like WordPress or Blogger, here are two guides which will cover all basic SEO requirements:

• A DIY guide for WordPress Blog SEO
• BlogSpot SEO preference

Have Sufficient Contents or Posts:

You must lead sufficient contents or posts on every page and category. In total, you should have 15-30 blog posts on your whole blog. This is not an official declaration. But, I recommend everybody to at least have it. So, you should have at least 3-4 posts in every category, tag and page. Google Adsense told that we must have sufficient contents in every single web page. So, we should add contents in all pages and categories. There shouldn’t be any blank page without any content. And these posts have to pass the minimum length of 500-600 words as it is the best blog post length. The more you increase the length, the more you go towards to get Google Adsense approval.

Blog Domain Must Old At least 6 Months:

As I mentioned above, in certain countries like India and China, there is a requirement for 6 months for the domain to apply for AdSense. Here is official statement from AdSenseteam:

In some locations, including China and India, we require publishers to have owned their sites for 6 months. We’ve taken this step to ensure the quality of our advertising network and protect the interests of our advertisers and existing publishers.

Some blog domain could get approved having less old than six months. Even, I got my Adsense account with just two-month-old domain. Can you imagine? But, the average domain age for certain geo-location should be six months.

Apply Using Root Domain:

You should always apply using the root domain like yourdomain.com. Not blog.yourdomain.com.

Be Serious to Choose Content Images:

Google Adsense doesn’t approve blogs if they lead to copyrighted contents. Copyrighted means the things that have been copied from others directory without their permission. And we make fault every time when choosing an image. Some people just go to an image directory, take their suitable images and upload these on their blogs. Did they ever check if they have permission to use these? The really sad news is that, most of the webmasters who fail to get Adsense because of this copyrighted law. And this is really caused by copyrighted images. Here are guides which will help you to find images for free:

Lead a Nice design and Blog Structure:

Blog structure is the basic structure of your blog. So, make sure that you have a nice looking header, content area, sidebar, footer, etc. Always think if the visitors will like the structure. If people like it, Adsense would definitely like it. The first impression of any blog comes with blog design, and you can take advantage of any professional looking templates (free or paid), and use it on your blog.

Check if Your Blog is Not Blocked by Google:

Be sure that, your blog is not blocked by Google. Because Adsense will check your blog statistics on their search engine. Don’t know how to check it? Just search for “site:yourdomain.com” on Google. If you find out search results, your blog is not blocked. But, if you not, it is blocked.

Don’t Have Adsense Prohibited Content:

Adsense has directly told that, sites with adult contents, copyrighted contents, drug alcohol-related contents, hacking cracking contents, violent contents, weapons related contents and other illegal contents will not be approved.

Visitors Are Not a Factor for Approval Yet:

For getting Adsense approved, visitors are not a factor. Because you will get approved depending on your blog quality. It is sure that the Adsense moderator will never check for visitor count. So, don’t worry about visitors. But, for generating revenues, you must have enough visitors.

Applying for Google Adsense:

If you follow all the above mentioned tips, you are most likely to get your AdSenseapplication approval at first go. But, before you apply for the same, here are two articles that you should definitely refer to:

• Changes in Approved AdSense host partner site accounts
• Google AdSense new account approval application process

And once you are ready, read this guide to apply for an AdSense account. Do let me know if you have any particular question related to AdSense approval, and I would love to answer them. If you enjoyed reading this article, don’t forget to share it on Facebook and Google plus.

Read More

9 Ways To Increase The Exposure Of Your Content

let me guess… You just published a high-quality content and are trying to figure out how to get more traffic to it?
Let’s talk about how you can increase the reach of your content by over 500%.
According to eMarketer, 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each week. But how many of these contents see the limelight?
Very few.
You can’t publish a piece of content and expect the world to see it when you consider the fact that over 2 million blog posts are published daily.
So how can you maximize the exposure of your content?
How can you ensure that your content gets links, shares, leads and sales?

1. Syndicate Your Content

James Clear used content syndication to take his blog from zero to 250,000 unique visitors per month. All in less than 2 years.
Content syndication works like this:

• You publish a post on your blog
• Then you republish it on an established site in your niche or sub-niche

For example, James Clear published “Lessons on Success and Deliberate Practice from Mozart, Picasso, and Kobe Bryant” on his blog.
Then, he tweaked the article a bit and republished it on Lifehacker.
Content syndication is a very powerful promotion strategy that makes your content works harder for you.

2. Do A Pre-Outreach For Your Content

In an AMA chat on Inbound.org, Brian Dean (the founder of Backlinko) confessed to emailing at least 100 people before his post goes live.
And it works for him.
Today, most of his posts rank on the first pages of Google for their target keywords.
Alex Turnbull used pre-outreach to get 1,000+ subscribers from a single blog post in 24 hours.
Turnbull created an influencers list four weeks before launch. He reached out to those influencers and tell them about his first blog post. 83% of the influencers he contacted shared his post.
Doing influencers pre-outreach can increase the exposure of your content.
Influencers hold the key to the readership kingdom. Just a single tweet from an influencer like Jeff Bullas could send massive visits to your blog post.

3. Boost Your Content With Paid Promotion

Most viral posts have thousands of social shares. You may not be aware that most of them were pushed with paid promotion on Facebook and Twitter.
For example, Viral Nova averages 100 million visits per month and was sold for $100 million. This is a business that was being run by just 3 people.
The secret to their traffic is Facebook ads. They create a blog post and push it through advertising on Facebook.
You’ll often see contents with thousands of shares on ViralNova. It’s because they promote their posts with Facebook ads.
Facebook advertising is an effective way to promote your blog post to the right audience.

4. Repurpose Your Content Into Different Formats

Repurposing your content is a new way to breed new life into it. Your content will be exposed to a new set of audience.
There are many ways to repurpose contents:

• Webinars
• Combine a set of blog posts and turn them into an ebook
• Slideshare presentations
• YouTube Videos
• Podcasts
• Infographics

If you’ve written a nice blog post, you can turn it into a video. Doing this will enable you to reach video lovers who might not read your blog post. The same thing applies to other content formats like webinars, podcasts and infographics.

5. Republish Your Content On Medium

Medium is a great community that can expose your contents to a passionate group of people who would share it with their networks.
Benji Hyam said that republishing his blog post on Medium generated 10k views in 4 days.
Smart bloggers are using Medium to get into authority publications like The Huffington Post, Business Insider, Forbes and Entrepreneur.
If your content is successful on Medium, you can just reach out to these publications and ask if they can republish your post.
These authority sites are always looking for contents that have been successful on Medium. They believe that if your content is successful on Medium, then there’s a great chance that their audience would like it. It’s a win-win deal for both parties.

6. Use Your Content To Answer Questions On Quora

Quora is a question and answer platform like Yahoo Answers and Stack Exchange. But it has a better community feature than both.
Quora is full of passionate people just like you. It’s a place where President Barack Obama can directly answer people’s questions.
Quora is a nice place to build up your profile and communicate with your target audience.
Many of your ideal customers are posting their questions on Quora. Quora lets you answer these questions and you can even use your blog post as answers. Just copy and paste and link back to your blog. Doing this will enable you to drive traffic and leads back to your blog.

7. Start Guest Blogging To Promote Your Post

Guest blogging is a powerful marketing strategy that helped Buffer acquired its first 100,000 users. It also helped Danny Ivy turned his blog into a 7-figure business.
Guest blogging is a nice way to build a business.
But what about using it to promote a blog post?
Matthew Barby used guest blogging to promote a content he published on his blog. As a result, the post got 247 backlinks from 91 domains. This helped the post ranks for highly competitive keywords on search engines.
You can use guest blogging to boost the backlinks to your blog post. As you know, links remain the number one ranking factor on Google.

8. Contact People Who Had Shared Similar Contents

Nothing beats direct outreach with people who had shared similar contents before.
As you know, Google and Bing uses social shares in their search algorithms.
Some people care a lot about the topic you’ve written about. Why not reach out to them telling them about your content?
It’s much easier to get someone to share your article than it takes them to link to your blog post. They can quickly login into their Twitter or Facebook account and share your link with their network. This exposes your content to more people which would lead to more shares, then links.
If people are sharing your contents, naturally, links will begin to follow.

9. Get Your Content Featured In Weekly And Monthly Roundups

Weekly and Monthly Link roundups are a great place to get links while exposing your content to a new group of people.
For example, Ana Hoffman publishes weekly roundups on her blog, the Traffic Generation Cafe. This is a great place to get links assuming you’re in the marketing niche.
Getting featured in a link roundup helps you establish yourself as an expert in your niche. The more you’re getting featured in roundups, the more people would start to pay attention to your blog.

Read More

Are You Building Your Affiliate Marketing Income on Digitally Sharecropped Quicksand

starting an eCommerce business is not as complex as it used to be just a few years ago. This is why you see so many online stores selling all kinds of stuff on the web.
But one problem that most of these new eCommerce websites face is attracting relevant traffic to their products.
And no traffic means no sales.
Starting a blog is one of the best things you could do for your eCommerce business. When you create new blog content, it helps you rank for relevant search keywords and generate traffic to your website. Studies show that websites that blog regularly, have 97% more inbound links and 434% more indexed pages.
Blogging is also a great way to build your brand image, connect with your audience and increase sales.

However, since blogging is a time –intensive activity, you need to have strategy to ensure that your hard work isn’t wasted.
Here are a few eCommerce blogging tips to help you increase your online sales.

1. Understand the Needs of Your Customers

The objective of eCommerce blogging is to solve the problems of your readers by offering actionable, accurate and high-quality content for free. When you offer free actionable advice, readers start trusting you. And trust, according to several studies, is the number one factor that drives online sales.
However, to create accurate and high-quality content, you need to understand the needs of your customers and prospects. Ask yourself the following questions

• What problem is my product solving?
• What’s the core benefit and value that I’m offering my customers?
• Why would someone spend money to buy my product?
• What am I offering that others are not?
• What questions are my prospects likely to ask when I offer them my product?

Don’t just assume the answers. Look for them on Quora, Facebook groups, LinkedIn Groups and your competitor blogs. You can also survey your existing customer base to get more insights.
When you come up with precise answers to each of these questions, you can use this knowledge to create high-quality content, answer the questions of your prospects and build a strong relationship with them.

2. Build Your eCommerce Store on a Blogging Friendly Platform

Over the last few years, dozens of free web-based eCommerce platforms have popped up and made it really simple to set up an online store. But many of them do not have their own blogging platforms.
To start a blog for your business, you need to ensure that you’re using an eCommerce platform that supports blogging. WordPress is the best option in most cases, since it can be used as an online store and a blogging platform at the same time.
But in case you’re using any other eCommerce app like Shopify, BigCommerce etc, you can integrate it with your WordPress blog.
In fact, most experts agree that even if your eCommerce store app has a blogging platform with it, it’s better to use WordPress because of its seemingly unlimited range of free plugins.

3. Create Multiple Content Types To Drive Engagement

Your blog is a content creation and publishing platform.
Why stick to just one form of content when you can mix things up and generate more interest in your audience?
For example, research shows that infographics and list posts get the highest number of social shares.

The best way to approach this is by creating a content plan for your blog and include different forms of content in it.
Here are a few examples

• Product Focused Content

Since you’re running an eCommerce blog to help readers understand the benefits of your products and indirectly convince them to buy from you, product focused blog posts should be among your top content types.
Create blog posts that educate your readers and demonstrate your expertise. The eCommerce blog of Decor Clad is a good example.

Create useful content around your products and include links to your sales page within the content body where relevant.

• Emotionally Driven Content

Selling is all about persuading your clients to take action. If your content can trigger the right emotions in your readers, selling becomes much easier.
There are two main components of an emotionally driven blog post

• Effective storytelling
• Powerful headline

Effective storytelling helps you engage customers and drives action.

Source: OneSpot

Jon Morrow, one my favorite bloggers and storytellers, generated six-figure sales from just one blog post.
That’s the power of an effective story.
However, an effective headline, the second component of emotional content, is even more important than storytelling. If your content headline doesn’t engage the readers immediately, they’re unlikely to read the rest of your piece.
For example, this eCommerce store selling men’s gifts uses a headline that immediately generates interest.

• Video Content

High-quality product videos are among the most effective forms of content for eCommerce blogs. Using videos to demonstrate product usage can significantly boost your conversion rates.
You can also increase your website’s average time on site by embedding video content within text blog posts.
There are several other content forms like infographics, memes, product reviews etc. that you can include in your eCommerce content plan

4. Use Blogging to Build Your Email List

Email marketing is one of the biggest sources of eCommerce sales. According to studies, more than 65% of consumers in the U.S made a purchase in the last year because of an email.

More than 90% consumers check their email at least once a day, which gives you a great way to build long lasting relationships with your prospects.
Blogging can help you accelerate the list building process.
Not sure how? Here are a few ways.

• You can offer post specific lead magnets in your blog posts to increase sign ups.

• You can use a content locker plugin to hide a specific portion of your blog post and ask users to sign up to read the full post.
• Regularly posting on your blog brings in organic search traffic to your site which can be converted into subscribers.

A blog opens up hundreds of ways to convert readers into subscribers. And when you have a large list, you can send them new product offers and convert more customers.

Wrapping Up

Some of the biggest eCommerce companies in the world are investing insane amounts of money in content creation and blogging. By starting an eCommerce blog, you can create awareness about your products, build a loyal tribe and generate cheap word of mouth for your brand. Just make sure you keep this post in mind while creating your next eCommerce blog.

Read More