If you have Google Analytics installed on your blog and you are keeping track of your traffic statistics, you are probably noticing that the amount of visitors you are getting from mobile devices is on the rise. As data plans get cheaper, people get busier and the iPhone continues to conquer the world, this traffic stat is going to continue to rise as time goes forward.
Free Pursuits Guest Post and Internet Business Path Interview
September 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Today, I want to point you in a couple of different directions. First, Corbett Barr from Free Pursuits and I did a guest post swap between my site and his. You might have read his guest post “So You Blog, So What?” already on this blog, but if you haven’t…check it out as he had some great things to say. My guest post on getting out of your own way to realize blogging success went live yesterday on Free Pursuits and it has generated some great conversation around blogging and building a successful blog over time. Take a minute today to head over to Free Pursuits and check out my guest post along with the other articles Corbett publishes on a regular basis. He is a true believer in designing your own lifestyle and his articles can really help you design your own life.
Video Podcast with Tyrone at Internet Business Path
The second site I want to shoot you over to today is Internet Business Path. Tyrone and I did a recorded interview about blogging, review blogging and getting free stuff into review on your blog. We went into depth into how you can really monetize your site through product reviews and use those same product reviews as a huge traffic generator. In the 34 minute recorded conversation, you will find tons of information about blogging from both or our perspectives. The interview was a blast to do, so when you get a minute…head over to Internet Business Path and check it out.
If you want to see the same results out of your review blogging, check out my eBook…Ramped Reviews…that spells out how you can see the exact same results I have with getting in free product to review on your blog.
How Much Time Do We Waste On Spam?
September 14, 2009 By 3 Comments
Every morning I go through the same routine. I wake up…take the dogs out…open the laptop…and then proceed to spend the next 10 minutes of my life clearing out all of the spam in my email, comments and Twitter accounts that has mysteriously found its way into my Internet life while I was asleep. It is getting ridiculous how much of our lives now are consumed with worthless tidbits of text that we really don’t want. It is getting to the point that we are having to take drastic measures that take away from the overall user experience of the web…and that is sad.
3 Things We Can Learn From New York City Water Taxis
September 8, 2009 By 4 Comments
Note from Robb: A friend of mine, Mike Davenport, shot me an email the other day asking to write up a guest post for robbsutton.com to help promote his leadership survey for an upcoming launch. Like any good friend…I said “Sure! Send it over!” So here is Mike’s guest post for robbsutton.com and you can find his survey link at the bottom of the post.
Take a quick second out of your day to take a look. It will only take a minute to fill out (you are not signing up for anything if you don’t want to).
I took off this weekend and blasted up to NYC to visit family and see some sites. Part of what we did was to take the kids to Manhattan by Water Taxi.
It wasn’t my first time on the Taxis, but by far my longest trips. After about an hour touring around a few lessons leaped out, ones that I know can help me with my online biz.
Lesson 1: Be prepared, cause you never know . . .
As we sat on our Taxi I noticed a plaque in the corner, by one of the doors. My son wandered over to check it out (not many folks riding). As he started reading it he yelled over, “Dad check this out. These guys were involved in the plane crash rescue.”
Sure enough, the Taxi we were on was the first boat to respond to USAir Flight 1549 that had to ditch in the Hudson. I asked one of the dock hands and he told us about the crash, and how they were right there. The ins and outs.
He told us that they were ready for such events, had plenty of gear, and although it wasn’t part of the normal day by any means they were ready.
Crazy, ready for a plane ditching in front of you! But someone had thought that through.
My learning . . .be ready for what may be weird, but COULD happen (like Google hating you one morning)
Lesson 2: Perform a valuable service.
This photo shows not only folks getting off the Taxi but folks glad that the Taxi got them were they wanted to go, for a decent price, and did it well.
What isn’t shown is the huge line of folks behind me waiting to get on. And they were not all tourists like me. I bet a bunch were locals who relied on the Taxi’s service for their daily routine.
My learning: give more than people pay for, and do it well, and they will line up for you.
Lesson 3: There will be businesses a lot bigger than me, so find a good niche.
The cruise liner behind the Water Taxi in the photo is fully loaded with tourists traveling probably to the Caribbean. The Taxi is traveling about 1/2 mile up the river.
The liners have their business, the Taxis have theirs. Both move people, both have a niche.
My learning . . . find a dang good niche, ace what the customer needs, and provide it well.
Mike Davenport is an educator focusing on helping emerging leaders thrive in today’s wild work place. Take a snap interview and sign up for a free mini report to learn how to quickly improving your leadership skills.
Link to survey: Lightning Blog Leading
Are you giving your readers what they want or want you want them to have?
August 27, 2009 By 1 Comment
This is one the most common mistakes among aspiring bloggers. As you continually pump out content and free ebooks, you have to look at this content and ask yourself one simple question that most bloggers never even bother to ask themselves as their blogs continue to lose traction and not gain the readership they had planned in their head.
Are you giving your readers what they want or want you want them to have?
There you are…spending your hard earned time and effort pouring your heart and soul into your blog. You are confident that what you are putting forth is amazing content that will be absorbed like water in a Sham-Wow (beware of imitators!), but comments are low…subscriptions are low…no one is signing up to receive your new and amazing eBook…what is going on? Your stats are showing that people are visiting your blog, but nothing is happening! Instead of taking a look at several factors on your blog that might be leading to this low converting result, you continue to push, shove and force this content on a potential reader with the same result. During your frustration, you become even more adiment and push harder. Eventually, you are left with a lot of work and readers telling you to “talk to the hand” because they are not picking up what you are putting down.
You don’t understand why. If they would only trust you and convert…they would see the genius behind your work! I just have to make them understand!
You Are Not Going To “Make” Readers Understand
When it comes to blogging and blog content, you are not going to make readers love your content. They are going to visit your site and within the first minute of browsing your content, they are going to make the decision to read or move on. The more you try to force feed your content down the throats of potential blog subscribers or stick with methods that are not working, the more disappointment you are going to find as you keep doing the same actions expecting different results.
There are several factors that you need to look at when you are creating content to test whether your content is working for you or you are working hard at producing results that equal nothing.
How To Tell If Your Content Is Not Working
So how can we tell if the content we are slaving over is not working for our readers and our blog?
- Comments – Are there any comments left on your posts? If you are getting a decent amount of traffic and there is zero interaction, you need to either look at your content or how you structure your articles. Blogging is an interaction with your readers and if they are not interacting with your content, you will see little results over time.
- Bounce Rate and Average Page Views – Hopefully you are using Google Analytics to track the how, when, where, why’s of your blog visitors. Historically, blogs tend to have higher bounce rates than most other internet sites because of the viral nature of the content, but if your average page views are very low and your bounce rate is very high…you need to look at why your readers are jumping off your site so quickly. What pages are they landing on and why are they leaving those pages or posts? Do you need to edit, reformat those posts to insure they are more “sticky”? How long are visitors hanging out on your little slice of the web? If this is a small amount of time, what can you do to keep them on a convert them into regular readers? By analyzing your site stats (try to watch trends and not just that day), you can see if your content is working.
- Emails – If you are not getting a single email through the contact form of your blog, you need to look at your setup. Bloggers that are interacting with their readership through engaging content get flooded with emails. You are either not asking the right questions or not solving the correct problems if you are not getting some form of email contact from readers.
- No One Is Signing Up - You have a great landing page…great cover design…but no one is signing up for your newsletter! Why aren’t they signing up? They are not signing up because that is not what they want! Seems like a pretty simple correlation but there are a lot of bloggers out there who continually beat their head against a wall hoping…that if they just spend more time on it…people will see the light. If no one is signing up to receive something for free, it is either overdone or not what they want…period.
How To Get Out Of The Force Fed Content Trap
So…you analyzed everything that is going on with your blog and you are finally at the point where you have to make a decision. As with any business…including blogging…you have to know when to abandon an idea and move onto the next. Many times, you can even tweak current ideas by taking a new look at the situation and make them successful, but one thing is for certain…what you are doing now is not working and you can not continue to waste your valuable time on it. It can be disheartening when you pour everything you have into an idea just to watch it fail, but hugely successful entrepreneurs know when to fold and learn from that project to be successful at the next. What you learn from your failures (harsh word…but true) is the driving force behind your successes.
We all wish that the first idea that hit our heads will be the golden ticket to success. Unfortunately, that is almost never true and we are going to have a lot of ideas that do not pan out. The trick to success is knowing when to fold your hand and start with something fresh and new. As much as you want everyone to have that great idea, content or ebook, if that is not what the market wants…you are just going to continue to loath in failure.
As you look at your metrics, are you giving your blog readers what they want or are you driving forward with an idea that isn’t working just because it your idea?
Talk to the Hand Image by mattfoster
Why SEO is Important for Every Blog Post
August 3, 2009 By 2 Comments
This guest post was written by Jerry Rodriguez from Rank High Solutions.
It used to be that if you mentioned the term search engine optimization, you’d just get a bunch of blank stares. Nobody knew what it meant or how to use it. However, SEO has grown increasingly prominent since when it first came on the scene, and now pretty much anyone who has posted content on the web has an idea of what SEO is. Ironically, despite it becoming the latest craze in Internet marketing, many people still underestimate the power of SEO.
Take blogging, for instance. Many individuals and companies have taken to using blogging to help promote their sites, products and services. Blogging is a natural fit with search engine optimization, and a lot of blogging elements are naturally SEO friendly. However, most people make a mistake and don’t go the extra mile to really make their blogs search engine friendly. They figure it’s just not necessary and that the gains don’t just justify the extra work. This is a huge mistake.
It’s important to optimize each and every blog post that you make to be search engine friendly. If you are really dedicated to making your blog successful, then every post you make will be loaded with quality content. If you’re going that far, why not take it one step further and make sure that the world can find it? Even if you make a post that you don’t deem to be especially important, keep in mind that traffic is traffic. It doesnít matter how people are getting to your site, so long as they are getting there.
Spend some time getting to know the Google keyword tool. Using this tool, you can input your blog posts URL and quickly have a list informing you of potentially untapped keywords that are related to your blog’s content. This tool can help you find keywords that you didn’t even realize were popular that could greatly improve incoming traffic to your blog. The tool works right alongside the standard Google AdWords tools to help improve your site’s visibility.
Now the problem that some people run into is that they just don’t have enough time to fully optimize every blog post for search engines. Or, they simply lack the know-how and don’t understand the nuances of search engine optimization, such as putting keywords in the meta title and description of the site. Fortunately, there’s an easy-to-use tool that practically automates this entire process, making optimizing a blog easier than ever.
It’s called the All in One SEO Plug-in, and works with any WordPress blog. This comprehensive plug-in does all kinds of things to make optimizing a blog easier. It provides easy ways of templating and editing your meta title and description, which are very important to SEO. It can also help you find new keywords and provide easy workarounds for duplicate content problems.
All in all, this great plug-in reduces the work it takes to optimize individual blog posts for search engines by a huge margin. With this tool, there’s really no reason not to optimize every post you make.
This guest post was written by Jerry Rodriguez from Rank High Solutions.
Unique Blog Designs – Theme Wars – Premium WordPress Theme Battle
July 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment
I woke up this morning to find an email from Unique Blog Designs crew outlining their new site Theme Wars. Pretty cool concept really. Theme Wars is going to host premium themes that you can pick up through their store, but…even cooler…they are going to pit these themes against each other for your votes. Just think of it as a premium theme cage fight! Anyway…two themes are already up and running for your votes, so go check them out at Theme Wars.
Here is a snipit of the email from the UBD crew…
Hey there,
We know you’re busy, so we’ll keep this short and sweet.
Today, UBD is announcing the launch of a new WordPress theme
store!Theme Wars is our new theme store with a twist. Top designers
battle and the community votes for the top WordPress themes.Every week there will be a “Weekly War” between two themes,
and you decide who wins! Luckily for you, we still build both of
them!We have filled the Theme Wars store with a bunch of awesome
WordPress themes to choose from, all including easy to use control
panels!We also have a support forum and resource center packed with
tutorials so that you can take your blog(s) to a whole new level!Theme Wars is also going to be completely GPL compliant, which means
all of the themes can be used on unlimited websites!Oh yeah, don’t forget to vote on this week’s war – click “Vote Now”
on the home page.To your success,
UBD Team
(Josh, Matt & Nate)
Knowing the quality that comes out of Unique Blog Designs, I would expect to see some pretty kick ass themes in Theme Wars over the next couple of months.
Click here to check out Theme Wars and vote for your favorite
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