Blog Is Critical, Blogging With Best Tools

Blog Is Critical,  Blogging With Best Tools

If you still aren’t convinced that having a blog is important – It’s understandable your skepticism. When they first started out with building websites and trying to get traffic to them, some of them thought blogs were just for trendy hipsters with some social or politic message to spread. They couldn’t be more wrong. The fact is that a blog is the best tool you can have in your marketing arsenal. There is nothing that you can ever buy that will replace it. There is nothing you will ever find that will compliment your goals, no matter what they are, as well as a fully function and interactive blog will.

In fact, without a blog are you entirely sure what you or your business is doing online at all… So let me give you some reasons for understanding why a blog is so critical to what you do online.

Blogging has become one of the best and most effective methods for marketing a business online. While there are many tremendous benefits to blogging, two stand out in particular. The first is getting free traffic to your website through search engine optimization. Turning site visitors into paying customers is the second.The more you write new posts for your blog, the more traffic you’ll get. Every piece of fresh, new content you put on your site is another opportunity to attract visitors.

Most traditional marketing is dying. When was the last time you picked up your yellow pages? Where is yours? Most businesses, when we ask them, they say it is a doorstopper or they recycled it. When was the last time you got a listing from the ads you place in the newspaper? Readership in newspapers is rapidly declining. It is expensive and no longer gets the phone to ring the way it used to.

When was the last time you watched TV looking forward to the commercials? If you are like the majority you are using DVR or TiVo and skipping right past the commercials. Companies are finding this out. When was the last time you hired a telemarketing company or did cold calling in your business? The Do Not Call list has made telemarketing a tough field. The results are not great because this is considered “interruption marketing”. The consumer is turned off by that. They want to engage on their own terms.

Direct Mail-We still do a lot of direct mail but truth be told, it is expensive. A good return is 1% to 2%. We get about 3% to 4% on our Expired Listing open rate and return call rates. But not all agents can afford the time and the expense of direct mail. Companies are realizing that this is still a great vehicle in which to drive offline traffic to their sites online. But most companies are not doing that.

Print Ads-When was the last time you put a listing in the homes review magazines? I see even on the shelves at Publix that the numbers of these magazines is dwindling. Most of those magazines are trying to now compete on line. The rising costs of printing are also a factor. Oil is used in print inks. Oil is used in print presses. As the price of oil raises so does the price of printing. In my product launch mastermind group there is a man who is a printer. His print shop was doing well over 2 Million in print jobs in 2009. In 2010 he saw the number plummet well below 1 million.

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Email marketing by the blasting methods is pretty much out the door. With Spam Software and people reporting spam every hour you are not getting your message across in a delightful manner. Again, this is not permission based marketing. Of course the exception is in building your own list. That is still the most valuable asset you have on your computer. The fact is that only 1 out of every four businesses has a website today in 2011!!! Most brick and mortar businesses still don’t have websites.

Blogs are a favorite for search engines.  Blogs are a favorite for search engines, there they found contain highly unique content.  Blogger and WordPress are both optimized for search engines which means that network marketers do not have to work extra hard in order to get their blog at the top pages. Slots for keywords and tags are already premade thus allowing owners to simply input their preferred phrases and allow the search engine to do all the work, blogs typically attract visitors faster than your typical websites.

Blogs are 100% free Advertising. Blogs are 100% free thus allowing marketers to utilize it for marketing purposes without spending much money. Of course, some blogging platforms may require subscriptions as well so that users can utilize the full features of the service. However, even the most basic blogging platforms already contain everything bloggers need to make the site stand out. Blogs would also allow the upload of different media ranging from pictures, documents, music and video. This ensures that the network/internet marketer would be able to share practically anything they want with their prospects. Different applications or widgets are also available, providing extensive customization opportunities from the user.

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Communication for Clients. The chronological element of blogs makes them the perfect tool for communicating with prospects. Marketers would be able to post new updates about their company, inform others of new products or simply post interesting information that is indirectly related to the they are promoting. This open communication significantly helps network marketers when it comes to building their reputation and ultimately establishes their brand. Ultimately, blogs make it possible for you as a marketer to gain new prospects and retain the ones you already have.

There are actually a lot more reasons why you need a blog, but the three mentioned above are the top concerns of every marketer. Keep in mind that the existence of a blog is not always enough. Marketers must also make sure that the blog is updated with quality information that visitors would consider important.

Blog Will Help You Develop Your Business

One of the best things about having a blog is that people can comment on your posts. They can ask questions, or tell you how helpful it was or how much they enjoyed what you had to share. This is really critical because it allows you to have a forum with potential customers. Let’s say that you are offering a product that your blog post talks about. If someone has a question – they can leave it in a comment and you can respond to it. While that’s a great two way back and forth communication, it’s even better because anyone that comes across that page in the future will see the question and answer so they won’t have to ask you again.

But, if you stop posting, people will stop checking back and your readership will dwindle. But if you are consistent and post updates regularly, people will keep coming back to see what you have to say and in all likelihood will be more inclined to share it with others which will only grow your influence and potential customer base.  So get out there and get a blog going already

Blogging With Best blogging tools

Blogging is one of the best ways to grow your business online. Blogs give you the opportunity to showcase your brand as an authority, publish consistent content and get more traffic to your website. However, just like with social media marketing, paid advertising and other online marketing strategies, there are several different steps and tasks involved with blogging.

Creating, organizing, publishing and promoting content can take a lot of time. Luckily, there are some great blogging tools that help make the process easier for marketers who want to implement blogging into their content marketing strategy.

Here Some We’ve compiled a list of the best blogging tools and here are Some tools you should be using to pull in your target audience.

WordPress  The first step in your blogging process is to build a place for all of your content to live. WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) available and it’s perfect for blogging. WordPress powers over 74 million websites and is particularly popular among businesses. Some of the key benefits of WordPress for blogging are: Ease of use ; Simple content editor ; A wide selection of themes/templates to create a professional looking blog ; A variety of free and premium plug-ins that allow you to add cool features to your blog without needing to know how to code or develop ; A built-in blogging feature ; Painless integration with several other tools you may use ; A very helpful and active support forum and community ; You can have multiple users with different permission levels so your entire team can contribute ; and If you have an existing site that was built somewhere else, you can easily add it to WordPress. Your Web hosting company or Web developer can help you set this up.

Google Keyword Planner & Long Tail Pro  Once you have WordPress, you’re probably going to want to just jump right in and start creating blog posts. But before you do, you need to perform keyword research. Arguably one of the most important steps for blogging is keyword research. It’s all about finding the different terms and phrases that your target audience will use to find the specific content you’re publishing.

Some businesses resort to just guessing what keywords they think people would use. But with the help of these two tools, you can get a more in-depth look at the exact phrases people are using. We combined these two tools on the list because they go together so well. The Google Keyword Planner and Long Tail Pro allow you to enter in seed keywords and get a list of suggested search terms along with their search volume (the average number of people that search for that specific term each month on Google). The main difference between the the two tools is that Long Tail Pro gives you more information and has extra filtering options.

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Google Keyword Planner If you want to take your keyword research to the next level, you can take some of the keywords you got through the Keyword Planner and plug them into Long Tail Pro. This tool focuses on what’s known as long tail keywords. These are phrases that are generally over three words long and have a lower search volume. The benefit of these keywords is they are less competitive, more targeted to a specific audience and there are a lot of them. Keyword research will tremendously help you increase the chances of your blog being successful. Keyword Planner and Long Tail Pro are both very valuable blogging tools that will make keyword research easier and get you better results.

BuzzSumo  You have your keywords chosen. Now, you need to come up with some different blog topics and titles focused around those keywords. There are numerous ways to come up with blog topics. But one of the most powerful methods is to find existing blog posts with your keywords already in them. It’s best to pick blogs that have seen success with social shares. That’s where BuzzSumo comes in.

BuzzSumo lets you find blog posts that have been highly shared on social media. You just do a search for your main keyword and you’ll get a list of the latest and most shared blog posts related to your search. You can even search content your competitors have been sharing to see what’s working best for them. Then, you can create better versions of their most successful content to get more views.

The trick is to make a piece of content that’s inspired by what you find through BuzzSumo, not just the same blog post reworded. Take a look at the posts that are getting shared the most and figure out how you can create something better. For instance, if you come across a blog post called “10 Facebook Marketing Secrets You Need to Know.” You could use that as inspiration to make a round-up post like “20 Facebook Marketing Tips From the Pros.”

Yoast SEO Plug-in   One of the most popular ways to get traffic to your blog posts, particularly if you don’t have an established audience, is through search engine optimization (SEO). Organic search traffic comes from people who use Google, Bing or other search engines from looking up specific phrases. Once they receive their results, they can enter your site. This is why it’s important to have a high rank on search engines, so you get more traffic to your blog. There are a variety of factors that impact SEO, but the two major categories everything falls under are:

On-page factors: Such as meta titles, Web development, urls, the actual content on each page and page structure

Off-page factors: Such as backlinks, mentions of your company/website online and social factors

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plug-in designed to help you improve some of the most important on-page SEO factors–even if you aren’t experienced with Web development and SEO. This plug-in takes care of everything from setting up your meta titles and descriptions to creating a sitemap. Yoast even helps you tackle the more complex tasks like editing your robots.txt and .htaccess. Some of the settings may seem a little complex if you’re new to SEO and WordPress, but Yoast created a complete tutorial to help you get everything set up. And the team at WPBeginner made this handy video to help you get set up quickly.

Sprout Social  You’ve created visually stunning content that’s perfect for SEO and readers, now what? It’s time to get the word out. Social media is easily one of the best ways to quickly generate activity for your blog posts. To do that, you’re going to need a social media management tool. You’ll want to use Sprout Social to schedule your posts to be sent out through your social media profiles like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It’s best to schedule your posts to go out multiple times throughout the week and even the month. Sprout Social makes it easy to schedule your posts across your different profiles at once.

Sprout Social Scheduled Posts  You can even try testing out a few different headlines in your social media posts to see which generates the most clicks and activity. It’s simple to track your content’s performance on social media right from the dashboard too. Another great reason to use Sprout Social is for outreach marketing. A lot of marketers immediately think of sending emails for outreach. But sites like Twitter and LinkedIn, which thrive on building connections and interacting, are great for outreach as well. Through Sprout Social, you can find influencers in your industry and keep a log of your past conversations with each person.

As you start to establish connections, Sprout makes it a lot easier for you to ask them to take a look at your new content. And hopefully, they’ll help spread the word about your blog posts too. Manually sharing your posts on each social network isn’t a good use of your time and it’s unnecessary. Start using Sprout Social to make your life a lot easier.

Email Marketing Tool/Autoresponder  Email marketing is another powerful way to spread the word about your latest blog posts. One of the most well-known bloggers, Neil Patel, has made it no secret that the emails he sends out to promote his new posts are one of his top sources of traffic. Emails let you reach out directly to your audience and update them whenever you have new content to share. An email marketing tool or autoresponder gives you the ability to collect email addresses and send out emails just like Patel.

There are a lot of different email marketing tools available. Some of the most popular choices for businesses and bloggers include: Constant Contact ; MailChimp ; Aweber ; and GetResponse

Once you set up your account and lists, get in the habit of sending emails on a regular basis and stay consistent to get the best results. Here are some amazing tips from a past #SproutChat on How to Attract & Retain Quality Email Subscribers.

Google Analytics   Your content is created and you’ve been promoting it through social media and email marketing tools. Now, you need to know the results of your efforts. Google Analytics is the most popular blogging tool to track the performance of your content. Google Analytics can get very advanced, but here’s a good guide for beginners that tells you the main areas you should start looking at, which are:  Audience: Who’s coming to your blog? ; Acquisition: How are people finding your blog? ; Behavior: What are people doing on your blog? The more you log-in and check your analytics, the more comfortable you’ll become with the dashboard. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed on your blog, make it a priority.