Buzzmaker

Now you have started a blog but for different reasons people are not getting to your site. What are the 10 things that will drive traffic to your site?
1.Great Title. Whatever the post is about you should look for catchy titles. Most of the viewers will read your post only if the first thing they read makes them click your post. In most cases we decide what is interesting and what’s not in a matter of seconds (less than 10 seconds) and the only thing we can read in this short time is the title of the post so have a great title and you will increase your chances of having me reading the rest of your post. If you are reading this post means that the title I’ve chosen made you click on it.
2, Great Content. In real estate there is a saying that there are 3 things that are important to make profit and these are: location, location and location. That means that if your property is in a good location then you sure can make money from it.
For your blog if you have good content you will get noticed and your blog will get big numbers of visitors. If you have a good title but the content is not so good you will have traffic but of low quality and with increased bounce rate (the percentage of your visitors that leave your site in less than 10 seconds). What else can you do to drive traffic to your site?
3. Optimize your post for Search Engines. When you write a post be sure to complete all the meta fields such as description, keywords and so on (keywords are not used by Google but the other search engines may use them). Verify if your keywords appear in the body of your post frequently enough and get as many inbound links as possible. These will help the search engines to index your post and to rank better in the search results. You can have plugins that help you optimize your blog. I use All-In-One-SEO plugin for WordPress on this blog.
4. Social bookmarking sites. Submit your post to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon. One very important thing for getting found is the number and quality of links to your blog and your post from other sites. By submitting your post to social bookmarking sites you can get quickly some links to your post. You can use plugins on you site so that people that liked your post can bookmark your post.
5. Social Media. Promote your post through social media. Write a tweet, update your status in LinkedIn or Facebook. Your followers, friends or connections will be the first to visit your article and comment on it. From my experience, depending on the moment I tweet about more than half of my twitter followers are clicking on the link to my post. If you have huge number of followers this is a great way of driving traffic.
6. Newsletters. This is a classic one, if you have a newsletter you can advertise your post there.
7. Blog comments and Forums. By posting relevant comments on other blogs you benefit of the traffic of the other site and drive traffic to yours. In most of the cases you will not get SEO credit for the links posted in the comments (while the comments may be set not to be followed by search engines) but you may get real visitors. Forums are another grate way of posting links to you article. You can answer to a user question and just ad “by the way, I’ve wrote a post on this topic and here’s the link”.
8. Pitch other bloggers to link to your post. I do this mostly offline when somebody is asking for my support, I give him my advice and then tell: “by the way, I’ve written a post on this subject, If you are interested in more details here is the link”.
9. E-mail signature. You interact daily via e-mail with people. Buy writing a link to your post in your signature will make these people aware of your post. Remember that people that know you, that trust your opinion are more likely to read and comment your post than perfect strangers.
10. Directories. Depending on your post you can submit your article to different sites that let you post news with links to your article. I use the Inbound Marketing site for submitting my stories related with inbound marketing. You can search for similar hubs in your niche.
These are the ways I promote my posts. Do you use the same? Do you have some other? What are your best practices? Share them bellow.

If you were wondering what I was doing here is the answer. I was trying to figure out a way for my name to appear on the posts I make instead of the well known “posted by admin”. But I found out 2 ways to do this with Wordpress (the CMS that I am using on this blog). For those that have the same issue here are the 2 ways:

1. The easiest way is to go to your profile page (Users->Admin) and choose your name as your nickname instead of the default admin.

2. The other way is to create a new user for you (go to Users-> Add New) with your name. In this way Wordpress will display your name (your new user name) as the one that published the post. The only thing that you have to take care is to log in with the new user name and password.

Have other issues with Wordpress? Drop a comment here!

When you start blogging many people do  not know how much of the information they have to share. The main fear is that people that read that blog, using the information provided can do what the owning company is providing.

In my opinion this is a false problem. There is a lot of information over the internet regarding SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and still a lot of companies have enough market to grow. Also the information regarding the diagnosis of specific diseases and their treatment is available on the web, but still you hardly find patients that are putting their diagnostic and treat themselves based on that information.

Here are my 5 reasons to share all your knowledge:

1. The more you share the more you will be seen as an expert and when I have a problem I will ask an expert to solve it for me

2. By sharing more information you will build a tribe of followers that may refer you as an expert in that particular field resulting in increased sales

3. If more people are following you and training in your subject area of expertise you can extend your business to training those people meaning again more sales

4. Not everyone has the resources and want to invest in learning from the information you share. Sufficient people will not have the time or the will to learn and they are your target clients

5. By opening discussions you open yourself to new points of view that may enable you to innovate the domain in which you have expertise. In this way you will maintain your competitive edge.

Dan Ronken elaborated more on these reasons and got to the following reasons:

1. Unselfishness attracts future customers

2. Building community

3. Helping others succeed. The old adage, “Give a man a fish feed him for a day, teach him how to fish, feed him for a lifetime.”

4. Hence a foundation of capitalism, right? Specialization.

5. Open mindedness

What do you think? Are these reasons enough for you or you want to add some more?

One of the interesting questions that appeared on the Inbound Marketing Forum was posted by Dan Ronken. He was asking if it is not better when you start a blog to shut down the comments because when you see many posts with no comment you are dettered to write one. You can find the original question here.

I said that no comments is like Communism. As you may have already found out I come from a fomer communist country. In those days you were encouraged to have just the “official” opinion and all the others were banned. I lived those days and we were afraid to talk and tell what we were thinking. We could end in jail for our opinions (some people did it). It took me a long time to go over this fear but now I am cured.

In those days you had no option. Or you go with the crowd or you go to jail. Now, your readers have a multitude of options. They can read millions of blogs and they can comment on them. Why should you put yourself in a less appealing position than your competition? Why should you let your readers go to the others without getting the feedback about your posts?

On the other hand when you start opening the comments to your readers you will be in the same position but with much more content. You will still have no comments but you will have more posts than before.

Social media and blogging is about interaction. You want to start discussions not to just state your opinion. You want people to comment and if they have the choice but they do not comment then may be you do something wrong. You should open yourself to comments, invite your readers to state their opinion and create more intriguing content and then you will have comments.

What do you think? Are you still afraid of no comments?

One of the readers of my blog asked me why I have posted under the asics category tutorials for creating a blog.  For all of you who are wondering about this topic I just wanted to give you a set of basic tools in order to start blogging. Have other questions? Drop them here.

Here are the tutorials for starting a blog on the 3 free platforms I have recomended earlier:

Wordpress

Typepad

Blogger

When I first started to blog, I didn’t know what platform to choose. There were some free platforms, some paid ones. If you got here most probably you face the same dilema.

You are starting to blog so you may have figured out what are your goal regarding blogging and how much money and time you want to invest. If you are like most of the new bloggers and you think that having a blog is trendy and will make you look cool, but you d not want to invest a lot of money in it, I will recommend to go to one of the following sites and get an account. You can choose between Wordpress, Typepad and Blogger or you can find other free blogging sites. I tried some of them and now I preffer Wordpress because the platform they have can be used also outside their site. This helps a lot when you want to see how you can start with blogging and later you decide to have your own domain and migrate what you have in Wordpress to your own site. Blogger is offered by Google so you may have some benefits in being found by seach engines and Typepad is used very much n the US.

If you have some experience blogging and you want to augment your personal brand, you should have your own domain. You can get one at different domain registrars. Depending on the domain type this will cost you an annual fee or an one time fee. Then you have to find a hosting company and host your domain and then you should install a blogging software. One of the best is Wordpress which I am also using for this blog.

Have questions or comments? Post them here now.

When we are babies and we grow up we are starting our trip by making the first step. that is by putting one foot in front of the other. When we want to start creating some buzz we will need to do the same. For me the first step should be by getting a blog and understanding the way things work.

For starting a blog you should come up with a catchy name. In order to experiment you can use one of the multiple sites that offer free blogging platforms such as Wordpress, Typepad or Blogger. You just have to open an account and start blogging.