There is only one way to make your blog profitable, and that is to focus on one group of users and to solve their problems. People only buy if they like and love and trust you. Even if you help people, it takes time to build the trust necessary to make someone comfortable about opening his wallet.

Invest Your Time

Growing a blog takes a massive investment of your time. It’s a long-term project, just like planting an apple tree. It will bear fruit, but not in the first few years.

Blogs fail when the authors give up on them. That’s why you’ll find most blogs have been abandoned. (PsychCentral.com)

Unlike a fruit tree though, a blog needs you to spend time on it every week, and you can never stop adding new posts. Most blogs die quickly because their owners fail to appreciate the lengthy lead-in period before success slowly develops.

Your apple tree may have just two or three fruits in its third or fourth year, but by Year #12 there are hundreds. You will see slow growth in visitor numbers and subscribers at first, but if you persist growth will come in time.

Grow Your Knowledge

Your first three years’ blogging is an apprenticeship. You use that time to build your knowledge until nobody knows more than you about your subject. You become the king or queen of ‘growing new potatoes’ or ‘novel ways to use a screwdriver.’

Data is not information; information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom. Clifford Stoll

Knowledge is much more than information; it includes understanding the links between information packets as well as how that information can be applied.

Eventually, you have so much knowledge in your head that you can give away all the information you have without fear of empowering competitors. Your readers will have the information you share, but you are the only person with the understanding and total knowledge of your subject.

Grow Your Reputation

The object is to earn money from your blog and to do that you need people to *know* you are the top person in the niche.

You must share your knowledge freely and without asking for payment.

What,” Give away all I have learned?”

Yes. You only grow your reputation and credibility when others see you sharing that knowledge. When you share it, you are demonstrating your dominance because only someone with supreme confidence would give it all away. Your readers will never develop your in-depth understanding, so will never become competitors.

Get More Readers

Some users will become clients, but very few.

Once you have established your position in your market with a regularly updated blog, it is time to reach out to people who could use your services or products. Especially if you are selling to other businesses, you need to contact them rather than wait for them to realize they need you.

There are two parts to this; finding decision makers’ business emails and sending them cold emails where you ask permission to phone them.

● Finding Business Emails

You can spend hours searching the Web, LinkedIn, and Twitter, or you can use an application like Voilà Norbert

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VoilaNorbert is free and is very easy to use, and you get fifty business email addresses without even handing over your credit card details, so there is zero risk.

● Sending Cold Emails

If customers don’t come to you, you must go to them, which means sending cold emails. This will get you many spam complaints that your email host will be unhappy about. Even if you have a traditional email management program and autoresponder, you will be banned for sending unsolicited emails.

MailShake is one SaaS solution whose business is to send cold emails.

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Using this app, you have full control of when your emails are sent so that you can block out weekends and Friday afternoons. You can also send follow-up emails to those who fail to respond to your first message within MailShake.

Solve More Users’ Problems

Cold emails can be the start of long and profitable business relationships.

Use your blog to find the problems and pains people have that you could solve. When individuals search Google for the solutions to their problems, your site will come up. Regular site visitors cannot help but be impressed by how much you know and that you are not afraid to share your knowledge freely.

Earn Money

You never know which of the contacts you make through your blog will give you paying work, but some will. And a few will send you a lot of work. You have no control over when this will happen, but if you keep on learning and growing your reputation by sharing that knowledge, it will happen.

Make it easy for people to buy from you by offering high-level coaching, one-to-ones, and e-books for a range of prices. Grow your email list and build loyalty in your subscribers by giving them exclusive access to you and the services you sell on your site.

The Short Version

It takes a while before any blog is profitable. Grow your knowledge until you are the boss and grow your reputation by writing extraordinary posts that solve niche problems every few days. Once you have a good number of authoritative posts, go looking for clients and send them cold emails using apps like VoilaNorbert and MailShake.

Keep writing and helping people to maintain your position in your niche. Build paying programs people can opt into starting at just a few dollars and going up to thousands of dollars for intensive personal access.

The post 5 Growth Steps to a Profitable Blog appeared first on The Blog Herald.

Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a webinar newbie, it’s helpful to have a road map. Leading webinar service provider, ClickMeeting, developed an insanely helpful webinar promotional timeline infographic that details everything from a month prior to launch to two days after the event; it’s a comprehensive flowchart that leaves nothing to guesswork.

Since social media advertising is one of the most potent ways to drive signups, it’s priceless to know the most prosperous ad formats to leverage and which audiences to target with these advertisements.

If you’re curious about what times of adverts create the highest conversion rates, keep reading.

#1: Facebook Quiz Adverts

Interactive content is the bee’s knees in today’s digital world; hence the often times marvelous performance rates of contests, live streaming video, digital mini-games, and other related materials.

Quizzes also fall under this category and are fantastic at driving increased user engagement.

The ultimate goal with promoting a quiz is to drive webinar signups. This can be accomplished by structuring the assessment of your quiz to reveal gaps in the user’s knowledge that your webinar can help to fill in.

One plus side to this method is that even if users don’t register for your webinar, these people can be added to a remarketing list in the hopes of capturing them later down the line.

When targeting your audience, focus on some of your most active website visitors; these are warm leads and will be more likely to attend. Using lookalike audiences won’t be as fruitful here as you are not capturing an email address and asking them to take a lot of steps for someone they have no awareness of.

Target a 10-day window of active website visitors to avoid irritating your followers with constant ads. By doing this you will also limit your ad’s impression frequency and maintain some of its freshness.

#2: Website Conversion Ads

In order to effectively optimize your Website Conversion ads, it is recommended to install a Facebook Pixel on your site; the key reason is for remarketing.

Once again, your goal is to drive signups. Fortunately, you can accomplish this while still making ads evergreen in the process; this is particularly useful if you plan on running the same webinar multiple times with a few variances.

By excluding the webinar broadcast date and regularly updating that on the landing page, you will have an advert that can be used many times over.

When targeting users with these ads, it is beneficial to split the audience into two groups; those who have visited your webinar landing page but didn’t sign up (abandoned page) and those who have previously registered for one of your past webinars (if applicable).

Admittedly, the volume of signups you will gain from this method will be limited, but since these folks have already expressed interest in your broadcast, the chances of registration are significantly increased.

#3: Lead Ads

This tactic is similar to the approach used for Website Conversion ads; one of the differences is that the dates will be included in the adverts since lead ad forms are date specific. Another deviation from the previous method lies in the targeted audience; this will help to avoid saturating the aforementioned crowd.

For this group of ads, it is best to target those who have abandoned your webinar’s landing page as well as lookalike audiences.

Lookalike audiences are quite beneficial for this ad type as they are users similar to those who are already interested in your offerings.

With these adverts, split testing is recommended to verify if more conversions are achieved by sending users to a landing page instead.

#4: Recent Blog Content

While promoting recent blogs should be a practice you undertake regularly, this is especially helpful when gearing up to launch a webinar.

Additionally, the goal of promoting your blog content is twofold; create an active website custom audience (used in tip #2) and take advantage of Instant Articles traffic by placing ads promoting your webinar on your own blog.

For this ad set, your best bet is to target users who are already engaged with you or your brand; focus on individuals who have visited your website twice or more in the past 180 days as well as those who are most active on your site.

While it can certainly be beneficial to have the post center on the topic of the webinar’s materials, it is not a requirement as you will also be advertising it with adverts on that page.

Just be sure that whatever content you choose to put a spotlight on is top-notch work. Working to market a lackluster blog is wasted effort.

#5: Carousel Ads

Since images and videos are some of the most arresting and enticing content on the web today, Facebook’s Carousel Ads are highly effective for driving traffic, sales, etc.

Since Facebook now allows up to 10 images or videos, you can create a variety of content that supports your webinar; image posts, video propositions, relevant blog posts, and so forth.

Here, your goals and target audience should be identical to those for promoting a recent blog. The only differentiator here is that targeting lookalike audiences can also help to drive more signups as these folks might find your ad set compelling enough to investigate; especially considering their similar interests and behaviors to existing followers.

Bonus: Use Email Marketing Wisely

Email marketing is still an extremely effective marketing avenue despite its age. And since you likely send a ridiculous amount of emails every day, you should be leveraging those communications to simultaneously promote your webinar.

WiseStamp enables users to develop compelling and professional email signatures. Using the company’s Gmail signatures or Outlook Signatures, you can effectively drive traffic to your webinar landing pages or social media channels where your webinar is also being pushed.

This potentially gives you two separate chances to capture email recipients for your webinar.

Social media advertising is one of the most fruitful and effective ways for reaching audiences (new and old) with your latest webinar. Leveraging these social adverts can boost your webinar registration and attendance significantly, ultimately leading to increased awareness, followers, leads, and sales.

Top Facebook Marketing Partner Comments On Facebook’s Newest Video Ad Format

The post 5 Social Adverts for Driving Stellar Webinar Attendance (Infographic) appeared first on The Blog Herald.

In August of 2015, Google received a patent which the company initially applied for in 2012 that allows the search engine to employ the metrics it harvests from Gmail spam filters to improve its search results.

The patent essentially serves as a way for Google to apply negative email indicators derived from its spam data and to impact the rankings of the brands sending low-quality communications.

While the system may or may not currently be in use (those algorithms are forever mysterious), Google has effectively revealed that the company has an interest in directly tying email marketing to SEO.

Marketers therefore need to pay closer attention to their email marketing efforts and the tactics they leverage, as they can impact far more than just your users’ inboxes.

Even if Google never decides to put its patent into play, email still has a sizable impact on SEO campaigns and overall search rankings.

How Email Influences SEO

There are four major ways in which email can affect SEO campaigns. Some of the points may be more obvious, but looking below the surface can reveal concealed benefits.

The first advantage email has in bettering SEO comes by way of content promotion. Content is the backbone of SEO; it’s the obvious foundation for all rankings.

Email serves as a vehicle to propel content in the same way digital ads do. By sending out email blasts that include recent and popular blog posts, you are giving that content another platform to draw in more readers. This helps to drive additional traffic to your website and keep readers engaged.

One of the best ways to ensure that you are delivering content that resonates with the right readers is by segmenting your email list with the right tools.

GetResponse’s automated email marketing solution enables users to establish different email campaigns based on specific subscriber characteristics such as goals, locations, various demographics, and numerous other fields. Using this type of feature will allow businesses to send out content that correlates with these areas to maximize potential engagements…which leads us to our second point of impact.

Consistent Communication and Link Building

Google uses a variety of metrics to determine a site’s overall ranking; two very important ones are traffic volume and engagement. When a website touts significant traffic and highly-engaged users (meaning a high time on-page and low bounce rates) it helps to bump pages up in search results. Maintaining email communications with consumers assists to keep your brand on their mind and keep them coming back to your site for content, free downloads, and other offers; just ensure that your content is valuable enough to keep them reading.

Arguably the most powerful advantage that email marketing supplies SEO comes in the form of link building. Inbound links from high-authority destinations are highly sought after for their SEO benefits.

Email marketing advocates the sharing of content. If your brand is regularly producing information-packed case studies touting tons of value, spreading the word via email is a great way to get the information into the hands of authoritative sites who can link to your content. Even if your subscriber list doesn’t possess anyone from these kinds of sites, there is another way that email marketing can get the information to them: Social media.

Email marketing, when done properly, encourages its recipients to share the knowledge. And while social media doesn’t have a direct impact on SEO, its indirect assistance does affect search rankings. By making the content contained in emails easily sharable for recipients, you are encouraging them to increase your brand’s visibility on various platforms. This in itself can help your site accrue more traffic and adds to the potential of a high-authority site linking to the materials.

Improving Email for Better SEO

The most important rule in email marketing is to provide your readers sincere value. Just as in content marketing, any reader who feels that a company is pushing an agenda or action is less inclined to engage.

It should go without saying, but don’t spam your customers and don’t purchase subscribers. If you are spamming folks, they will be quick to unsubscribe. The same goes for purchased email addresses; they won’t be on your list for long. And if they do stay, they are highly unlikely to convert as a long term customer.

Finally, as with every other marketing tactic you employ, measure everything. It is vital to understand your subscriber’s habits and if your emails are driving any results. Measure data points such as open rate, click-throughs, conversions, unsubscribe rates, and other vital metrics.

By itself, email does not improve your SEO. It takes several marketing modalities tied to one another for real impact to occur. SEO needs email, email needs content, content needs social media, and so on. By understanding the intrinsic and continuously melding links between all marketing tactics, you stand to become more proficient in each and to ultimately craft a rock-solid marketing strategy.

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