Blog Promotion : @ProBlogger

Written on 2/8/2012 at 12:04 am by Darren Rowse

How I Beat my Best Month Ever by Doing Something Good, Better [Case Study]

Mid-December 2010: on my photography site, we launched a new campaign—our first ever 12 Days of Christmas promotion.

The result was my biggest month of earnings ever up to that point.

The idea was simple: offer discounts on 12 products over the 12 days leading up to Christmas. I used a mix of my own ebooks and products from other photography sites with affiliate commissions.

The result was massive. Not only did we see some great revenue generated, it created some lovely buzz on the site.

Due to the success of the 2010 campaign, in mid-December 2011 we launched our second 12 Days of Christmas promotion. This time around we made some changes and evolved things a little. The result? It was big. I’ll tell you more about just how big below.

A number of my Twitter followers have been asking how it went and how we changed things this time, so here’s a quick snapshot of the changes and lessons we learned.

The Web Marketing Ninja helps out

Last year, I ran the promotion completely alone. I’d seen similar promotions on other sites and thought it’d work well on dPS. But never having done such a promotion, I made numerous mistakes and spotted many ways I knew it could be improved. So I brought the Web Marketing Ninja (regular guest poster here on dPS who recently revealed his identify) on to manage it for me.

The Ninja worked hard on adding some of the new strategic elements mentioned below into this year’s promotion. Plus, his work took a massive load off my shoulders in terms of the day-to-day running of the campaign. 12 Deals in 12 days is a big task—that’s 12 sales emails, numerous blog posts, loads of tweets, liaising with partners, and more.

Using MailChimp

I decided this year to take the opportunity of sending out 12 emails to our list in 12 days to test out a new email newsletter provider: MailChimp. I’ve wanted to test out this service for a long time based upon the amazing feedback it constantly gets from other bloggers.

I’m very glad that I have tested it, because so far, using MailChimp has been a real pleasure. Their interface is really intuitive and their technology is innovative. Deliverability rates were high, support staff were really helpful, and there are loads and loads of add-ons and extras that you can plug in to make the service even more powerful.

If you’re in the market for an email newsletter provider, I can certainly recommend you check MailChimp out (yes, that’s an affiliate link).

A new landing page

Probably the biggest change we’ve made this year is to create a central landing page for the promotion. You can see it in full here (although all the deals are now over, so it’s not active). This is the work of the Ninja at his finest.

Last time, the promotion largely happened around a series of sales pages, but there was no central place to tie it all together and build buzz. This year, having the central landing page worked really nicely.

Offering better deals

Having run this promotion once before, we were in a better position to make smart decisions about what deals to run this year on a number of levels.

Firstly, we know what types of products converted last year, and could focus on those. For example, last year we ran a couple of days on Photoshop actions which didn’t perform as well as teaching resource, so we swapped out the actions in favor of some new courses and ebooks.
We learned last year that the bigger discounts converted better than the smaller ones—we were able to offer bigger discounts on our own products easily, but also feed that back to the product owners we promote with the affiliate deals, and in most cases they came to the party to give bigger discounts.
We saw last year that bundles of products converted particularly well, so this year’s deals were more centred on bundles (around half of the the days’ deals) rather than single products.
We were also in a better position this year to negotiate better commissions with some of our partners, having shown them what we could do last year. Interestingly, word had gotten out about 2010 and this time around I had potential partners pitching us to be involved months out from December.

Other lessons learned

Use clear calls to unsubscribe: One thing that I’ve done in both campaigns is to give our newsletter subscribers a very clear way to unsubscribe right up front. Our first email explained the next 12 days’ program (and the fact that we were about to send 12 emails), and acknowledged it wouldn’t be for everyone, with a clear call to unsubscribe if it wasn’t of interest. Of course in each email we sent there was a similar call to unsubscribe. Note: we set up a separate email list for this campaign so that subscription cancellations wouldn’t stop people from getting our weekly newsletter. Feedback on this from readers was excellent.
Super deals: We suspected that some of our deals would perform better than others, based largely upon last years results. As a result, we placed these on mid-week days (Tuesdays) to give them the most exposure possible. I also gave them extra promotion with blog posts on those days (I didn’t post on the blog for every deal).
Diversity of deals: One thing that we were very aware of and tried to balance was mixing deals up so that readers didn’t get 12 invitations for fairly similar products. We did deals on physical products, software, ebooks, courses, and other teaching formats.
Give some “space” in the lead-up to your campaign: We purposely didn’t promote anything to our readers for a good month before this campaign. While we could easily have launched a product or promoted an affiliate campaign late November or early December, I didn’t want to push our readership too hard. In fact, I sent an extra email or two in that period that was simply free good content. The same goes for afterward—we had a great new ebook on post-processing ready to launch mid-January, but pushed it back a week to give a little more space for our readers to “recover” from December.
Be organized: The biggest tip I can give is to be organized. Work on partnerships for a month or two ahead of time, start working on sales emails as early as possible, and so on. The more you do ahead of time, the better, as there are always last-minute things to take care of.

The results

In 2010, this campaign contributed to December being our biggest month ever, up to that point. This last 2011 campaign saw us almost triple revenue from 2010. We have a new record-breaking month!

Revenue Comparison between 2010 and 2011 Campaigns

I did invest more into the 2011 campaign—paying the Ninja, investing some money into the design of landing page development and design, and beefing up our web hosting—so profit wasn’t tripled, but it wasn’t far off.

While this was a highly profitable way to end 2011, I can’t emphasize enough just how much work goes into a campaign like this. The 12 days itself were intense, with a lot of late nights and quite a bit of juggling.

For example, on one of our last nights we were preparing to go live when we realized the coupon code a partner had given us didn’t work. We had to quickly switch deals over, as it was a weekend and we couldn’t contact the partner.

Of course, along with the work comes a lot of fun. I’m coming to realize that there is a real rush that comes with launching products. Devising strategy, implementing it, and then waiting to see how things convert is a lot of fun (for me and the Ninja, at least). Doing 12 launches in 12 days just multiplies that!

Another big benefit—beyond profit and fun—of this type of campaign is that you learn a lot about your readership. In running 12 deals in 12 days, you get to test out a lot of different things. For example, this year our products included physical products, single ebooks, ebook bundles, courses, and software. Price points were also interesting to watch—products ranged from $17 right up to $180! While dPS has traditionally just published ebooks at a pretty similar price point, we now have some great information on what other types of products and price points our readers are interested in.

Onward to 2012

So with the 2011 12 Deals of Christmas behind us, we’re already thinking about how we can make the 2012 campaign even bigger!

Written on 1/13/2012 at 6:00 am by Guest Blogger

What Motivates Readers to Share?

Filed Under: Social Media 30 Comments

This guest post is by Dan Zarrella of danzarrella.com.

In my research into sharing, I realized I needed to develop a framework that would serve as a model for the decision-making process that takes place before someone spreads an idea.

This framework describes the three criteria that must be met before someone will spread an idea in any format:

The person must be exposed to your content. This means that the person has to be following you on Twitter, be a fan of your page on Facebook, subscribe to your email list, and so on.
The person must become aware of your specific piece of content (the idea you want to spread). S/he has to read your tweet or open your email message.
The person must be motivated by something (generally in the content itself) in order to want to share the idea with his or her contacts.

Every piece of content, social network, and campaign has a vastly different conversion rate at each step of this process. For you to understand the scales involved, it helps to visualize a hypothetical set of percentages. If you email 900 people, and 20% of them notice and open the message, and then 10% of those readers forward it to a friend, your email message was shared 18 times.

At each step, you can change the numbers in your favor:

Increase the number of people exposed to your content. Get more email-list subscribers or Twitter followers.
Create attention-grabbing content. Do lots of testing on your subject lines to increase open rates.
Include powerful calls to action.

The keys to real science are data and experimentation. I’ve spent nearly five years conducting research into the why, how, and what of contagious ideas. In the three middle chapters of Zarrella ’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness (“Exposure,” “Attention,” and “Motivation”), I present some of my most important findings and describe how you can use them to optimize your ideas for maximum spread at each step of my hierarchy. This is an excerpt from the chapter “Motivation.”

The bottom level of my hierarchy of contagiousness is motivation, and it’s the trickiest to achieve. Once someone is exposed to your idea and it catches her attention, she has to be motivated by it to want to share it. This is where you can find the most superstitious advice.

People claim that they spread ideas only when those ideas are good, are funny, benefit the world, or conform to some other nebulous standard. So how do we really motivate people to share our ideas? That question is best answered in two parts: Why do people share ideas? And what kinds of ideas do they share the most?

What do people share?

Now that we’ve got an understanding of the real reasons people spread ideas, let’s talk about what kinds of ideas they share the most.

Uncomplicated language is contagious

Readability tests are designed to measure the reading grade level required to understand a specific piece of content. The higher the score, the more complex the language is. The most popular readability test is called the Flesch-Kincaid test and is built into Microsoft Word.

While studying Facebook sharing, I gathered a database of stories published in a variety of popular news sources, including geeky places, like Mashable and TechCrunch, and mainstream outlets, such as CNN and The New York Times. I measured how readable each story was and how many times it was shared on Facebook. I found an inverse correlation between the complexity of the articles and the number of times they were shared. As stories became more challenging to read, they were posted to Facebook less often.

I also explored the parts of speech in the titles of those same articles. I determined that the use of flowery, adverb- and adjective-laden language was related to lower sharing rates. As Strunk and White told us decades ago in their book, Elements of Style:

“Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place… it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that give good writing its toughness and color.”

The most and least retweetable words

Perhaps my favorite data set is my giant MySQL table of 100 million retweets. A while ago, I pulled out of that table a list of the most “retweetable” words and phrases. I found twenty words that occurred more often in retweets than they did in non-contagious tweets. I also pulled out the least retweetable words, or what I call “viral kryptonite.”

I’ve presented these lists at events probably a hundred times, and at nearly every event, someone will come up to me afterwards with his phone out and show me how cleverly he smooshed all the words together to make the world’s most (or least) retweetable tweet. It is invariably meaningless. The funny part is that when I tell the person to check his mentions, he often finds that he has actually gotten retweeted.

The list of the most retweetable words is topped by the word “you.” People don’t want to hear about you; they want to hear you talk about them. Tweets that tell people how they can do things and learn things do very well. The list also contains phrases like “how to” and “top 10.” These phrases indicate that the content they point to is broken up into manageable chunks rather than being huge blocks of intimidating text.

The best phrase on the list, however, is “please retweet.” You should see the unicorn folks freak out about this one. They tell me that it sounds too desperate, demanding, and downright wrong. But it works. Try it out right now. Irving Kirsch, a researcher at the University of Connecticut backed me up in a recent experiment. He gave some subjects hypnotic instructions to mail thirty postcards, once a day. And just nicely asked another group to do so. “Please mail these.” The second group complied with the request more often. Social requests are just as powerful as full-on hypnotic trances.

On the flip side of the coin are the least retweetable words. Drivel like “tired,” “bored,” “watching,” and “game.” Words that indicate people narrating particularly boring parts of their lives. Of course I’m not going to retweet those.

The most and least shareable words

To come up with similar lists for Facebook, I looked at words in articles shared on Facebook and found the words that correlated most strongly with those articles being shared more often or less often. There are some significant differences between these lists and the Twitter word lists because the Facebook audience is a much more mainstream one.

The list of most shareable words is headed by the word “Facebook.” Yep, Facebookers love talking about Facebook. The rest of the list was mostly stuff you’d hear on the nightly news. Political words and phrases like “Obama” and “health care.” Most interesting, the words “why” and “how” do very well. Online, people want to get deeper into stories than they can with the thirty-second sound bite they heard on TV.

The list of least shareable words is full of social media dork words. Stuff like “apps,” “social,” and “Twitter.” Everyone is on Facebook. Both your mom and your college roommate are, and most Facebook users aren’t into every bleeding-edge new media website like you are.

This is an excerpt from Dan Zarrella’s latest book, to read it in it’s entirety, buyZarrella’s Hierarchyof Contagiousnesson Amazon. It’s less than $10 for the Kindle version (which will work on any computer or device).

Written on 12/24/2011 at 12:09 am by Guest Blogger

Whose Blog First?

Filed Under: Writing Content 32 Comments

This guest post is by Shakirah Dawud of Deliberate Ink.

Writing for three blogs on a regular basis, with the odd request for a guest post elsewhere, my writing plans are already tight. But because I write for overlapping fields of interest, my plans can also tangle. The most common:

Snag A: The topic could be of use to any blog I write for. Should I send it to my friend’s blog, where the people know me better, or let it air at the writing forum where it’ll snag more eyeballs?
Snag B: If I don’t write about this topic I’m gonna bust wide open, but it’s not appropriate for my audience’s needs, my friend won’t be able to post it till it’s no longer relevant, and I don’t think enough people will see it over a the writer’s group.
Snag C: I have one blog topic on my mind right now, and only one. But I have three blogs to post to this week.

Whose blog first?

It might seem obvious the answer is my blog, but that’s not always the case. Depending on who the audience is, what the post is addressing, and the characteristics of the other blogs, it can be tough to decide.

Look at the post. When you have a post that may fit more than one blog, the post itself can sometimes tell you which blog it belongs to. What level of the industry or topic are you addressing? What point are you making? What image are you projecting?

Look at the blogs. Each of the blogs you write for may lie within the same area of interest or industry. But the reason you chose to write for them is because of their differences. What are those differences? Community size, reach, posting schedule, and general atmosphere often make your pieces self-selecting.
Look at the audiences. Think of one reader from each of your blogs. Don’t make one up. Literally find the readers who interact most often with comments and shares. Ask yourself which piece each person would most enjoy reading, and don’t hesitate to give it to him.

Readers have rights. It’s unfair to try shoehorning a post into anyplace it doesn’t belong (at least, not without a good excuse). That’s why you should look at the other factors involved when deciding where to post what. But what happens if you have something valuable to share, and nowhere to share it? Network with your fellow bloggers and find the right fit for a guest post.

Plan ahead. Do this only if you want to avoid getting into any posting snag in the first place. Create a chart including each of your blogs and the dates you’ll be posting. Fill in each date with more than one topic idea. This way there’s no worry about topics that overlap because there’s always an extra. Pick one and start writing, tangle-free.

Shakirah Dawud is the writer and editor behind Deliberate Ink. Based in Maryland with roots in New York, she’s been crafting effective marketing copy as a writer and polishing many forms of prose as an editor since 2002. Clients in many fun sizes, industries, and locations reach her through the Web.

Written on 11/30/2011 at 6:07 am by Guest Blogger

Charles Darwin’s 12 Rules of Blogging Survival

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Blog Tips 64 Comments

This guest post is by Tom Treanor of the Business Blogging Telesummit.

Blog readers have a myriad of reading options for almost every topic you can think of. In fact, within your niche, potential customers may be enjoying blog posts written by your competitors while they ignore your blog like the plague.

So what do you do about this dire situation? Do you hire ghost writers to create more content? Do you promote your content more via social media? Do you get better at SEO so you can attract more search traffic?

Well. These may work to a degree. You may see some minor bumps with more Tweeting, Facebooking and catching more long tail keywords in Google. But, it’s a long and slow process if you’re using these brute-force tactics.

There has to be a better way. And there is.

Like Darwin’s finches, which evolved different beak sizes over the generations to better suit their differing environmental conditions and to survive, your blog has to become better suited for your audience’s needs over time. You need to develop more “evolved” blogging strategies that are more effective at differentiating your blog and attracting and keeping the readers that you target.

You don’t want your blog to end up on the wrong end of Natural Selection, do you?

Here are 12 ways for your blog to survive and thrive.

1. Be the best teacher in your niche

Explain the things that most people in your niche assume don’t need to be explained. Answer all of your potential customers’ frequently asked questions in writing, with pictures and (or) in video. Do detailed tutorials on fundamental as well as on in-demand advanced topics.

Keep the quality high and listen closely to your audience when you pick topics and develop the content. When competitors start sending customers to your site to understand a complex topic, then you’ll know you’ve won!

2. Be more personal than the others

Getting personal can lead to a deeper connection with your audience and pay dividends in terms of allegiance to your blog and brand.

Many business bloggers put up a barrier between their personal lives and what they share on their blog. Including aspects of your personal life is one way to differentiate yourself from your “plain vanilla” competitors.

3. Be funnier than the others

People love to laugh. Using humor well is hard, but can separate your blog from the pack. if you can successfully pull off inoffensive humor (depending on your industry), you’ll bring a lot of readers back again and again. You’ll also likely increase the amount of social media shares that your blog gets.

4. Say what everyone else thinks

It’s uncomfortable to do. Saying what everyone else thinks is really hard. If you can be the “voice of reason” without upsetting everyone around you, you can gather a tribe of people who say “Yes!” to every post.

5. Be the expert on a specific sub-niche

Don’t focus on widgets: focus only on the custom-designed, high-end widgets from Alaska.

If you can focus on a specific, but important sub-niche within your industry and become the authoritative source, you can develop a big advantage against your competitors in that area. Once successful, you can extend from this beachhead into the broader widget market.

6. Have a bigger vision

Tie your blog to a bigger goal. What far-reaching vision can you use to inspire people to join you in your mission? Can you align your company and blog with a bigger movement that is out there? Can you create your own far-reaching vision that aligns with your passions as well as with your company goals?

7. Be more extreme than the others

Go much further than the other blogs in terms of topics, challenges, transparency or risks. It doesn’t have to be dangerous, just extremely different. You’ll get noticed.

8. Be more creative than the rest

If everyone’s writing articles, why don’t you mix in video? How about being the first infographic producer in your industry?

Try new topics, writing styles, media or blog post structures. Think of other ideas that will provide value while separating your from the rest. Give yourself permission to try something unique.

9. Cross-pollinate better than the others

Do you only work with other real estate-related blogs or influencers? How about looking at the lending, architecture, finance and relocation industries?

Spread your tentacles where your competitors never dreamed of going by guest posting, blog commenting or connecting with other bloggers in those industries. If the target audience is the same, you can gain some great benefits from this kind of cross-pollination.

10. Be the best curator of meaningful content

Find the best information that others have written and posted online—the best articles, charts, tables, infographics, videos, or pictures. Collect it in a logical, easy-to-use navigational structure on your blog.

Make sure you link to and give credit to your sources and only summarize (or take small portions of) the articles you link to. Content curation is a way to share great information that is already available and to become seen as a key source of great information.

11. Be the news source for your industry

Focus on being the source of timely news and analysis for your industry. To be able to keep up with the news cycle, this often means a combination of curated content mixed with some original content or analysis.

Niche or industry news blogs can do very well because they get lots of shares, links, SEO benefits and subscribers. Just have a plan for getting regular, high-quality updates onto your site.

12. Work harder than the rest

Sometimes all the right things are in place but you don’t have the results yet. Working hard can pay off, but pace yourself and don’t burn out! Grab more virtual land than the competitors to create a barrier to entry for “lazier” niche-mates.

Come up with your own unique variation

Just like nature’s many variations (which we never could have predicted), come up with your own unique way to differentiate your blog. The blogs that thrive in a given niche will be the ones who evolve in ways that allow them to meet the needs of their audience better than the competitors’ blogs.

Avoid finding yourself on the wrong side of Natural Selection by using one of the strategies above, combining a couple or by developing your own differentiated strategy.

Tom Treanor is the founder of the Business Blogging Telesummit, designed to help SMBs succeed with their blogging and social media efforts. Visit his blog at RightMixMarketing.com.

Written on 11/18/2011 at 6:01 am by Guest Blogger

Questions My Dad Would Ask Before You Started that Ebook

Filed Under: Blogging for Dollars, Writing Content 25 Comments

This guest post is by Barb Sawyers of Sticky Communication.

The pitches go like this: turn your archived content into an ebook that will rake in bucks while you sleep. Invest a weekend, maybe a few weeks, and you’ll have a book that will establish you as a thought leader and open the flood gates to new revenue streams.

But as my 85-year-old Dad asked when I told him I was writing an ebook: “Why would you write a book, now that everyone with a computer can?”

You’ve got to admit, that’s a good point from my 85-year-old Dad, who still makes money on his investments but sometimes can’t find his slippers.

Because everyone can now publish a book, lots more will. So your book has to be great. Make that spectacular. And don’t forget that you’re not only the source of the expertise and probably the writing. You will also be responsible for editing, page formatting, cover design, sales and much more.

Depending on your skill set and budget, you can pay for help from Createspace and other self-publishers, people you stumble across on the Internet or a marble-lobby public relations firm.

But for more of the work and most of the decisions, you are on your own.

Don’t get me wrong. I am tickled pink that more people can share their wisdom or art through ebooks and on-demand print. I’m simply advising you to go in with your eyes wide open, avoid the sleazier pitches, and think about some of these questions my Dad would ask.

Are your goals achievable? If you want a book that makes money, it has to be good enough to compete with traditional publishers and the coming flood of self-published ebooks. If you are only interested in raising your prestige among a smaller group of people, you may set the bar a little, but not much, lower.
Are you an expert? Ideally, you’ve been accumulating knowledge for years and updating your wisdom daily. If you’re not already passionate about a specific topic, don’t charge in.
Do you have a unique approach? Like a product, your book has to offer something people can’t get anywhere else. In a world of countless niches, that might be relatively easy for you.
Are you willing to invest time? If you are smart enough to have the expertise that makes a book worthwhile, likely you are not going to fall for the get-rich-quick charlatans.
Can you write well? If you want to sharpen your skills, you can learn from many blogs, courses and books, including mine, Write Like You Talk—Only Better. If you’re a blogger, figure at least 30 to 50 quality posts on your theme that will then need to be edited, packaged, and sold.
If your writing doesn’t measure up, are you prepared to spend the money and time on someone whose does? Most successful nonfiction authors who don’t eat, sleep, and breath writing pay big bucks to professional ghost writers, not a stranger whose site trumpets their rock-bottom prices. You get what you pay for, as my Dad would say. Unless you can find a 24/7 psychic ghost writer, you’ll also spend lots of time thinking about the theme and feeding your ghost writer your knowledge and revisions.
Can you design the pages, cover and marketing collateral? Again, be prepared to pay for the kind of quality that will compete or at least spend the time to find the right online sources. Yes, templates are available, but much of what I viewed were woodlands or other looks that do not work for my cover. Right again, Dad. People do judge a book by its cover.
Do you have a content marketing machine? You’ll need to spend lots more time feeding and building your social networks, courting legacy media and pursuing other strategies for marketing your book. Competition is stiff and getting stiffer. You have to do a lot more than sneeze in an elevator to go viral.

If there’s an ebook in your soul, go for it. I’m thrilled that the doors have opened. Just be prepared to pour in years of learning, months of prep time and days of fretting.

It has to be your best, not something you knocked off over a rainy weekend.

That’s how real money is made. Just ask my Dad.

Barb Sawyers, who blogs at Sticky Communication, is almost ready to publish in print and for ereaders the second edition of Write Like You Talk—Only Better. Preview it here.

Written on 11/14/2011 at 12:09 am by Guest Blogger

Why Submit Your Best Posts as Guest Posts?

Filed Under: Blog Promotion 26 Comments

This guest post is by Aman Basanti of ageofmarketing.com.

If you have been in the blogging game for any number of months, you already know about the power of guest blogging in generating traffic and exposure to your blog. Yet there are new bloggers out there who hear about the power of guest posting, but still do not understand why it is so effective.

Image copyright Franz Pfluegl - Fotolia.com

As one reader commented on my recent piece on guest posting, “You people are always advocating guest posting. But I am not convinced about guest posting. Can you help me in this case? Why should we submit our best work to someone else?”

It is a valid question and as there are always new people entering the world of blogging, one that is worth answering for the blogging community at large.

Accordingly, here are three reasons why you should submit some of your best posts as guest posts.

1. It increases the chance of your guest post being accepted

Here is what a lot of new bloggers don’t know. A-list blogs get a lot of guest post submissions every week. On average, an a-list blog like ProBlogger might get around 30 guest post submissions. In comparison, most blogs only post five or ten posts a week, which means 20 posts get rejected.

If you are sending in your weak posts, chances are your post will get rejected. By sending in your top posts, you increase your chances of getting published on an A-list blog.

2. You’ll get quality “do follow” backlinks

Guest posting on A-list blogs gets you high quality backlinks that help you improve your rankings in the search engines.

Now, you might say, “But I’m getting backlinks through the comments section. Why would I go to all that effort of writing and submitting guest posts when I can easily get those backlinks through the comments section?”

The answer is that links in the comments sections of the major blogs are “no-follow,” which means that they count for a lot less (some say not at all) than the “do follow” links that you get in your by line or author box alongside a guest post.

Also, links higher up on the page carry more SEO benefit. As SEOMoz wrote in a post on SEO, “We find that links higher up in the HTML code of a page seem to pass more ranking ability/value than those lower down.” As most guest posts include a back link at the start and at the end of the post, it further magnifies the power of the backlinks.

Combine these two factors and it is easy to see that the backlinks from guest posting are far more valuable than those in the comments section.

3. Attract high-converting traffic

Traffic from guest posts is some of the highest converting traffic you can get. Here are the subscriber opt-in rates for my free ebook page:

Google Adwords (Banner ads on the content network): 5% opt-in rate (I know I have some work to do on this, but still)
StumbleUpon: 0.5% opt-in rate
Guest posting: 40% opt-in rate.

Traffic from guest posting is, hands down, the highest converting traffic you can get. Also, on a big site, the chance of your post going viral is high. It is simple maths. More readers equal more people sharing the post. The more people sharing your post the higher the chance it will be seen by an influencer, further increasing its chances of going viral.

My post on The Warren Buffett Method for Building a Successful Blog, for example, went viral because it was posted on ProBlogger. That post earned me 50 subscribers, showed that I was a good writer, and put me on the map of other bloggers in my niche.

In other words, I got a lot more value from posting it on ProBlogger than I would have had I posted it on my own blog.

Conclusion

Unless you already have a popular blog, there is no reason why you should not submit your best posts as guest posts on major sites. More traffic, better search engine rankings, and brand exposure are some of the key benefits.

Plus, it gives you a bit of kick to get so many comments on a piece you wrote, which can motivate you to keep blogging so that one day you too will get that many comments on your own blog.

Aman Basanti writes about the psychology of buying and teaches you how you can use the principles of consumer psychology to boost your sales. Visit www.Ageofmarketing.com/free-ebook to get his new e-book – Marketing to the Pre-Historic Mind: How the Hot New Science of Behavioural Economics Can Help You Boost Your Sales – for FREE.

Written on 4/3/2009 at 12:01 am by Darren Rowse

11 Ways to Increase Your Chances of Being Linked to By a Blogger

Filed Under: Blog Promotion, Featured Posts, Search Engine Optimization

Today I received what seemed like a fairly generic email from the website Dummies.com. I won’t republish the email (I’m not into that) but it was a fairly generic ‘could you link to our website’ type email asking for a link because they’ve redesigned their site. It even included a suggested link/code.

My reaction was not positive – in fact within a few moments I’d tweeted that I’d had the request and wasn’t overly impressed.

This post is not about Dummies.com – it’s about asking for links.

I have no beef with Dummies – they produce some great books by some amazing authors. This post isn’t about them. It’s about asking for links.

You see I get quite a few emails asking for links like the one from Dummies but they’re not always from big well known brands, they’re more often than not emails from bloggers. In 99% of cases the email ends up in my trash folder in Gmail but occasionally I not only read the emails but I link to the persons site.

Why do some emails generate links and others don’t?

Following are 11 suggestions for those wanting to email a blogger to ask for a link (whether they be big brands or bloggers):

Write something worth linking to – this is a no brainer but so many people don’t get it. In the same way you wouldn’t successfully pitch a TV news service or newspaper a story like ‘I’ve got a newly designed website – it’s got videos’ you’re not likely to get much success with a blogger. The best way to get the attention of a blogger is to write something useful, entertaining, controversial, helpful, informative, intriguing…. etc. Check out my series on LinkBaiting for more ideas on this (particularly the post 20 Link Baiting Techniques).
Suggest a Link to a post not your site – don’t ask for a link to your site – suggest that they check out a link to an individual page or post that you’ve written. A blogger is much more likely to run with a story linking to a post about a specific topic relevant to their topic than adding a link to your site.
Develop a Relationship – cold calling a blogger that you’ve never interacted with before asking for a link is not the best way to start off a relationship. It’s like in real life – would you walk up to a stranger and immediately start asking them for favors? Get to know the blogger, their blog and let the ‘favors’ emerge out of that.
Demonstrate Knowledge of the Blog and Blogger – building upon the ‘relational’ aspect – use the blogger’s name, show that you know what their blog is about. You don’t need to write an epic introduction that proves your knowledge – but a polite and not overly familiar approach can do you wonders. Also – introduce yourself to the blogger you are pitching to. You might feel like you know them but they could be in contact with many people – a quick reminder of who you are and what you do could help.
Research – sometimes it can be worthwhile doing 5 minutes of research before you email another blogger. Look back over their last few months of blogging. What is their topic? Do they link to other blogs? What kinds of sites/posts/topics do they link to? Do they interact in other mediums (ie perhaps Twitter could be a better place to contact them)? The more information you gather the more able you are to tailor your pitch to them appropriately.
Add Value – a blogger is unlikely to link to you unless there’s something in it for them or their blog. I’m not talking exchanging of money or even reciprocal links when I talk about value (although for some bloggers those will be motivating factors) – I mean the page you’re asking for a link for should be something of value that will actually enhance their blog. I can only speak for myself but I know that if someone pitches me a link that I’ll link to it or at least tweet the link in a heart beat if I think it adds value to the lives of my readers or followers.
Stay on topic – this really is an extension of a couple of the points above but it always amazes me how many emails I get for people asking me to link to their ‘golf’, ‘stock market’, ‘book review’ and ‘kids fashion’ sites (they were just 4 requests that I got today alone). If you’re pitching a blogger to link to something you wrote make sure that the blog you want to appear on has relevancy to your topic. For starters it increases the chances of a link, it increases the chances of a reader clicking the link and it increases the power of the search engine juice that you’ll get from the link.
Be selective in what you promote – we all like to think that every post we write is worthy of links from thousands of other blogs but the reality is that some are more likely to be linked to than others. Pick your very best posts to promote in this way and keep your requests to a minimum.
Reciprocate – I want to be clear here that I’m not talking about reciprocal links. ‘Link to me and I’ll link to you’ doesn’t really hold a lot of value in SEO any more from what I can see. What I am talking about here is being willing to be generous TO the blogger and not just expecting them to be generous to you. Shane Gibson described these emails on Twitter yesterday as “we Win you Lose invitations” – I think that sums it up nicely. See the relationship as being like a bank. You’ve got to put in to get something out. If you take too much out the relationship will be bankrupt. I’m not just talking about giving the blogger links – you can reciprocate in many ways including by writing them guest posts, sending them small gifts, sponsoring a project that they’re running, promoting them to your own network…. etc
Build on the Experience – no matter what the bloggers response is – you can learn from and build upon the experience. If they do link then there may be opportunity to deepen the relationship in some way. If they respond angrily, you probably don’t want to send them links again. If you get silence, don’t take it personally and continue to find ways to build relationships with the blogger.
Be Link Worthy – let me emphasize this again. The best way to get linked to by a blogger is to produce a page or post that is link worthy of the link.

Written on 3/21/2009 at 12:01 am by Darren Rowse

4 Pretty Pictures to Illustrate Impact of Email Newsletters on Traffic (and Social Bookmarking)

Filed Under: Blog Promotion, Social Media

Today I was reading a post on CopyBlogger by Dean Rieck on the importance of using email to grow a blog and it struck me how many bloggers still don’t fully understand the power of email as a way to grow their blogs.

I’m not going to rehash all of the reasons why email marketing is worth adding to your blogging or even give tips on how to build a successful email newsletter – today I just want to illustrate with a couple of charts why I believe in email marketing.

What you see above (click to enlarge) is a screen shot of the Google Analytics area of the forum area of Digital Photography School (ie it doesn’t include the blog area’s traffic).

The stats go back for 6 weeks and you’ll notice that there is a nice weekly pattern going on in terms of rises and falls in traffic.

What causes the predictable rises in traffic each Thursday? Thursday is the day I send newsletters.

Each week a newsletter goes out to readers that simply contains a summary of the latest activity on the site. Interestingly – the newsletter only contains one link to the forum area – yet that one link is enough to come close to doubling traffic to the forum for that day.

But Wait, There’s More

OK – so the ability to drive regular traffic to your blog is one great reason to start an email newsletter for your blog – but today as I analyzed my blog’s stats I realized that there’s another reason.

Take a look at this chart. It shows traffic from Digg to the blog area of DPS since mid last year (click to enlarge).

OK – it’s a little hard to see a correlation between newsletters and Digg traffic from that graph – but what I noticed today is that the majority of my ‘Digg Events’ happen on the same days of the week. Let me show you (click to enlarge):

I’ve had 19 ‘Digg Events’ in this period and 16 of them have happened on a Thursday or a Friday (two of the others hit the front page on a Saturday).

Articles hit the front page of Digg every day of the week yet on my site they almost always fall on a Thursday or a Friday.

I send newsletters out to my readers on a Thursday morning.

Now I rarely mention Digg or any form of social bookmarking in my newsletters – but it seems to me that the newsletters are having an impact upon social bookmarking to me.

Five Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Filed Under: Blog Promotion

With so many blogs revolving around the theme of “make money online”, John Robinson of JWRmedia focuses on ways you can improve your blog through branding, marketing and optimization which will allow you to establish a name for yourself and gain Internet success.

Why are there so many unsuccessful websites when others continue to flourish? Much of the reason has to do with poor marketing. This article explains five of the most popular marketing mistakes made by new website owners trying promote themselves. Usually with tight time constraints and even tighter budgets, the margin for error is very slim. Keep these points in mind before starting your next marketing campaign and you’re sure to see much better results.

1. A little of this, a little of that

This mistake is often made by those who want to take on the whole world with a tiny budget. They advertise a little bit on one website, a little bit on another, they try a little bit of email marketing and so on. However, with limited budgets, they only accomplish a small presence in each. To maximize results, narrow your choices and regularly run ads that will get noticed on a constant basis. One known marketing illustration is as follows:

The first time people look at an advertisement, they don’t see it. The second time they look at and ad, they don’t notice it. The third time, they become conscious of the ad’s existence. The fourth time, they vaguely remember seeing the ad somewhere before. The tenth time, they think ‘someday I am going to buy that’. The 20th time they see the ad, they finally execute the “call to action”. Establishing a well known presence in just one area will work much better than scattering yourself all over the web.

2. Ignoring statistics

If you’re one of many who dislike mathematics, this can be a hard avenue for you to overcome. However, in any marketing campaign, it is essential that you regularly measure results. Know which aspects of your marketing campaign are working best for you. Where do your visitors come from? How many unique visitors do you receive each day? How many of them are repeat visitors? Which pages on your website are viewed most often? How long does the average visitor stay on your website? On which page do they usually leave your site? What is your conversion rate? Which pages convert the most? Keep a spreadsheet to track this information on a weekly basis, and measure the trends. Doing so will allow you to cut out ineffective marketing efforts and focus more on those that work.

To help track these statistics on your website, you can use tools such as Google Analytics or Statcounter.

3. Tweaking things that aren’t broken

Here we remember the rule “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it”. If you have a web page that ranks well in Google and brings you a fairly decent amount of targeted traffic, don’t go modifying the page contents, images and META tags. Doing so will most likely penalize its search engine ranking. Constantly changing other aspects of your website will also confuse your regular readers and make it much more difficult to build up your “branding”. Find something that works for you and stick with it.

4. Jumping the gun

Many website owners make the mistake of pumping out a massive advertising campaign too soon. Don’t take action just to meet a certain date you have in mind. Be sure everything on your website functions properly and is cross-browser compliant. Nothing screams “unprofessional” more than a broken website. If you require more time than anticipated to have your site up and running, you may have to push your planned release date back a while. Correct the kinks, finish your design, and fully test your website’s functionality before inviting everyone to visit.

Browsershots is a free online utility that will allow you to see how your website appears on dozens of different Internet browsers.

5. “Flying solo”

Without a very hefty advertising budget, it will be next to impossible for you to take on the whole world without any help. Build relationships with other website owners and arrange a way for them to help you promote your site or product. Word of mouth continues to rule as the champion of advertising methods. Generate a buzz amongst the online community about what you have to offer by doing something for other site owners in return. With practically every aspect of business, it’s all about who you know. By creating a strong, positive relationship with others, you can help spread the word about what each of you are offering.

The vast majority of us don’t build our website merely as a hobby- we are usually working toward earning some sort of income online. With careful planning and by giving attention to detail, your time and money can be used to the best of its ability, thereby allowing you to gain the highest return possible.