Archive for the ‘Blogging Tips’ Category:
5 More Ways To Take Your Podcast To The Next Level
Starting a podcast may look tough on paper but taking an existing podcast to the next level can be even more difficult.In the first part of this series, I talked about simple ways you can build a business around your podcast. Podcasting for fun is one thing, but you want to monetize your work at some point (preparing podcast episodes is not going to be exactly something you can do in 10 minutes or an hour). If you have taken the first few steps with your podcast and are ready to take it to the next level, these 5 steps should give you some ideas:
Get your community involved
Many small podcasting businesses leverage their community’s true power to get the word out about their product and grow their business. There are plenty of ways to get your community involved in efforts to push your business. You can throw cool contests for your fans. You can also ask them to display your brand on their shirts or other belongings. Some top podcasters that I know actually use the graphics and music created by their members to offer a unique experience to all their listeners. There is no reason not to take advantage if you have an audience that is willing to help you out. Read more »
How To Add a Posterous Share Button To Your Blog
Adding share buttons to your website is the best way to increase your incoming traffic and leveraging your readership to spread your content around. All top bloggers have Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon buttons on their websites. But one shouldn’t stop with those. There are plenty of other communities that one can be a part of and encourage others to participate in as well. Posterous is one of those websites. It’s a fast rising community that can get your content some decent action if your visitors decide to submit your posts to it.
Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Posterous does not really give you too many options as far as those share buttons are concerned. I still have not been able to find a decent plugin that targets Posterous users. You do not really need a plugin to install a Posterous button on your website though. All you need is a button (which you can grab from Posterous.com or right at the top of this post) and this piece of code:
10 Stupid Blogging Mistakes You Should Avoid
Nobody is perfect. Even the best bloggers in the world make small mistakes from time to time. As a blogger, I try everyday to minimize the number of mistakes that I make and learn from those I have made in the past. Unfortunately, some mistakes are harder to get rid of than others. Take typos for instance. Once you start typing a word a certain way (the wrong way), it almost becomes a habit. You may know how to spell the word “their,” but if you type “there” instead enough times, it will be tough to get it out of your system.
With that said, all bloggers should try their best to avoid those simple mistakes. Here are 10 avoidable mistakes that I have seen bloggers make all the time:
- Typo in headline: this seems to happen all the time. Most content management systems do not come with a spell-checker for the post title section. I have made enough of these mistakes. Unfortunately, I am not the only one doing it. I have seem many “super-bloggers” make the same mistakes. The best way to address is to read your title right before you are ready to publish your story.
- Typo in first sentence: that’s one of the most frustrating mistakes one can make. You try so hard to keep your copy clean and get the typos out. For some reason, some bloggers have typos in their very first sentence (and in a lot of cases nowhere else).
- Including broken images: always make sure you have the image you want to link to on a reliable server. It is just ugly to have broken images in a post.
- Posting under uncategorized category: this one is a biggie. Many new bloggers forget to set up the right categories for their blogs from the get go. There is simply no excuse for having the default “uncategorized” category on your blog. Read more »
How To Add a Q&A Section To Your Blog
One of the best ways to build a solid community around your blog is by getting your visitors engaged in discussion on your website. Everybody who comes to your blog has needs and will have questions. That’s why adding a Q&A section to your blog can help you take it to the next level. Thanks to WordPress, you can easily add such a functionality to your website (regardless of what platform your main website is run on). Instant Q&A is a super clean and dynamic theme that does just that without you having to make any changes to your main blog.
All you have to do is create a new folder (/answers) on your blog domain and install WordPress and Instant Q&A theme on it. That’s really all there is to it. Once done, your visitors can take advantage of this theme to ask and answer questions on your website. Why install it separately? Q&A sites do get attacked a lot. If you are not accepting user registrations on your blog for security reasons, you don’t have to make any compromise by taking this approach.
5 Ways To Adopt a Freemium Business Model On Your Blog
When you are making money from your blog (and are new to it), it’s easy to get greedy and try to charge for every little thing that you offer. While you want to make money as a blogger (your bills are not going to pay themselves), you don’t want to focus on short-term gains at the expense of long-term growth. There are many affiliate marketers who do that. But many of those folks are just marketers and have no interest in becoming pro-bloggers. Instead of charging for everything, it’s better to give lots of stuff for free and ask your visitors to pay for “premium” content. What do I mean by premium content? We are not talking about more regular blog posts. If you want people to pay and become a paying member in your freemium community, you need to offer them something worth paying for.
Let’s face it. We all like free stuff. Most blogs offer most of their articles and content for free. While you may be able to get away with selling your regular content to your readers in the short-term, it’s not something you can sustain over the long run. You are going to need something unique to get people to join. If you are stuck and don’t know what type of content to offer to your potential paying members, here are 5 ideas that should help:
- Exclusive Videos: depending on your target market, you may be able to use your videos to get people to sign up for your membership program. We are talking about exclusive content here. A couple of websites were able to do just that with their BP oil coverage. You can do this in almost any niche. You just have to be a bit creative. The goal is to offer something people can not find anywhere else. It does not need to be earth-shattering, but it does need to be unique and exclusive to your paying members. Read more »
How To Get The Most Out of LinkedIn Answers
LinkedIn is one of the most underrated social networking websites around. It may not be as fun as Facebook and people on it may not be as talkative as those on Twitter, but it still offers a lot of value to those who are willing to pay attention to it. LinkedIn has plenty of features for bloggers to take advantage of. My favorite feature is LinkedIn Answers. It’s a great place to find what people are curious about and learn a few things in the process.
LinkedIn Answers lets you go through questions by category and find those that apply to your niche. While being able to answer people’s questions is gratifying, there is more to LinkedIn Answers. Here are just a few ways you can use LinkedIn Answers to your advantage:
- Drive Traffic To Your Website: it looks easier on paper. Once you have created that perfect profile on LinkedIn, you can use LinkedIn Q&A to get more traffic to your profile and your websites. Also, there is no shame in promoting your own work on LinkedIn as long as you are not spamming. If someone is asking for a service that you are offering, there is no reason not to reach out.
- Set Yourself Up as an Authority: how many people have you seen who claim to be social media gurus? You can call yourself anything. That does not mean that you actually are what you claim you are. If you want to establish yourself as an expert in your niche, one way to do it is to be very active on LinkedIn. Answer people’s questions in the best way possible, and you are on your way to getting the recognition you deserve. Read more »
5 Ways To Start an Online Shop For Your Blog
Many top bloggers have their own online shops selling affiliate products and their own branded items. You do not necessarily have to own what you sell to start a shop for your website. Let’s say you are an iPhone blogger. You can add a store to your website just to promote the best iPhone products and accessories. The same approach can be used for other types of blogs as well. Needless to say, those hot-shot bloggers do sell their branded t-shirts, mugs, and everything in between.
You don’t have to be a genius or very well-funded to start your own online shop. There are plenty of solutions that let you host your own store. All you need is a decent web host and a domain. Sounds too difficult? These 5 websites let you start your own online shop in a flash:
highwire: a complete e-commerce solution that gives you the tools to manage your orders and customers and even market your business. Gives you control over HTML and CSS too.
Shopify: a very flexible solution that creates your web store quickly. It has plenty of themes for you to choose from to customize your online shop. It offers SSL, custom domains, discounts, and much more.
aStore: Amazon aStore gives you everything you need to start selling Amazon products (pick the products you want to sell). It is pretty flexible and can be added to your existing websites if you know your way around this product. Read more »
How to Add Like/Dislike Buttons To Your Blog
In case you have not noticed, there is no way to give a website or web-page a negative score with those Facebook or StumbleUpon buttons. Getting positive feedback from your visitors is nice, but sometimes you may need more than that to improve your blog and take it to the next level. Giving your visitors an easy way to vote your stories up and down is one way to go. Nobody likes to get negative votes from others. If you have worked hard to develop your content, you should not have anything to worry about.
LikeBot is a fun tool that adds vote-up / vote-down buttons to your blog posts. That way your visitors can tell you exactly how they feel about your work.
The script is very to install. You can either download LikeBot WordPress plugin to get the job done or use the Javascript code to install these buttons on your website (regardless of the platform). There are multiple designs for you to choose from. You can make the appropriate changes from your WordPress back-end or by playing with the code. Read more »
Blog Marketing 101: 5 Ways To Promote Your Blog
Content is king. The better quality your content, the bigger chance you have of gaining more readers and getting recognition for your work. In a perfect world, we would spend the majority of our time developing content instead of worrying about other aspects of the blogging business. Unfortunately, you can’t just sit on your content and expect people to find your work. You have to actively promote your blog and top posts to see real results. Some bloggers throw money at the problem, while others use all the channels available to them to drive traffic to their blogs.
Here is what’s beautiful about the blogging business: The playing field is more leveled in this industry than others. Setting up a website, writing good content, and connecting with others are things you can do easily these days. Besides, there are plenty of ways to reach out to other bloggers and get your content in front of more people. Here are 5 no-brainer ways to do just that:
- Get started with Guest Posting: guest posting is a must do for all aspiring bloggers. It can not only help you build relationships with other bloggers, it gets your work in front of new sets of audiences. You want to make sure you put your best foot forward. But if you have taken time to write some super high quality blog posts on your own website, guest posts can help you take your blog to the next level. Read more »
How To Handle Blogging Mistakes
Everybody makes mistakes. Some mistakes are small and negligible. Others are huge and can be devastating for your business (see BP). Bloggers make mistakes all the time. Having typos in headlines, getting stories completely wrong, or forgetting to name sources just happen Perfection is a fool’s gold. Not only it’s almost impossible to achieve, it can take away from your business too. Not everyone handles mistakes the same way. Some go crazy and start making drastic changes. Others apologize and beg for forgiveness. Smart bloggers understand the inevitability and focus more on learning from their mistakes to make sure they don’t happen again.
If you have never made a mistake as a blogger, then more power to you. But most bloggers have and will during their careers. Sometimes, you can get away with your mistakes. Some other times, your readers will call you on it. While not all mistakes are equal in magnitude, the last thing you want to do is dwell on your mistakes. Every misstep can be a learning lesson. If you don’t make mistakes, you are not going to learn much anyway.
Here are a few smart ways to handle blogging mistakes:
- How it happened: understanding how you committed your mistake can help you avoid it in the future. You certainly do not want to make a habit of making big mistakes on a consistent basis. Going through this process will help you figure out the next step too.
- Why it keeps happening: sometimes you end up making a mistake over and over again. Assuming that you are going to get it right after a while is not the smartest way to go. Those of you who have a large team may want to look at your team and find out where things broke down. Solo bloggers need to take a look at their processes and find out why they have continued to do things the wrong way. Read more »
