How to improve your blog posts
Let me share my process to write blog posts.
When you setup your blog I hope you created a list of categories. Make sure your subject matches one of the categories, that it matches your site.
I always start with a title. When you begin it does not have to be really great. Just a title that summaries what I intend to write about. This helps you get started.
I use Word to write my posts but I you can use any word processor or even write directly in Wordpress.
Try to write as quick as possible. Personally I type rather fast and can keep up just writing down my thinking. A technique I know some people use is to record a first draft on tape and then write it down. The important thing is to get into a flow. You can go back later and fix errors. Just write and write as thoughts enter your mind.
When I have completed my writing I check the wordcount, about 300 words are a good length for a blog posts. If it is too long people will not bother reading it and it is better to split it into two posts. Too short and it will have a hard time getting indexed in search engines.
Now go through the text quickly, fix spelling errors, correct sentences and perhaps rearrange it?
Next change the view you use in word. I write in the print layout mode and change to outline mode.
Reread your text.
Changing the layout will cause your brain to see the text in a new way and you will discover new things to improve.
Now is a good time to change the title to something that is compelling and suits the text. Remember that your goal with the title is to get people to read your text.
When I have the title as I want it I print the new entry on paper.
Wait at least two hour and read the paper, its even better if you can have someone else do it. The change of media from computer screen to paper and the wait time will stimulate your brain. You will see even more new things that your eyes were previously blind to.
Make your corrections on the paper and transfer the final corrections to your document.
Now you are finished with your document and can publish it on your blog. The next step is getting traffic to the page. Learn how by subscribing to my free daily traffic tips.
Are you wasting half your life?
How to get more done every day
Being successful on the internet or in life in general requires you to get things done. One very common technique to help you with this is to start your day with a planning session. This is really simple and I will tell you how. If you don’t do this or something similar you are in effect wasting half your life!
I have taken up this habit the last year and I would say it has about doubled my productivity. It has also decreased stress and increased my motivation as I see myself making much more progress toward my goals.
Start the day with a blank paper and write down everything you plan to do during the day.
Sit down alone and remove all distractions. Take the phone off hook, disconnect your mobile phone and really concentrate on what you need to get done today.
There will be things that you have to do, for example buy food, wash laundry.
Then there will be stuff you have promised to others.
Finally there is stuff you need to do to make progress on your current projects.
When I have something I need to have completed on a particular day I use outlook and book a time with myself just to get a reminder.
During your daily planning session you write down the tasks for the day on the paper. Then carry around the paper during the day and check off each item as they are completed. If there are stuff left at the end of the day you use them as a starting point for you next planning session.
Working with paper works fine and was recommended in the classic Lead the field from Earl Nightingale.
Now I use Simple-ology that uses this system as part of its first course. I highly recommend you try it. It is free and can be a real life changer. The only “problem” is that it is done by Mark Joyner who truly is a master marketer. You will probably end up buying some of his other products as well, they are good though.
So now you can get even more of my daily traffic tips done.
Anyone want a free ingoing link from google?
Just recently Google started to index their google profiles. At the moment the links from the profiles are giving page rank and are not marked as no-follow, ie you can get a free link from google to your site.
Write your own profile at http://www.google.com/s2/profiles/me and don’t forget to link to your own sites.
The profiles are actually a nice feature and I like the integration with google maps. I added a link to my proile on the about page of this blog if you want to see how it looks.
To get the page rank (PR) your profile will need to be linked from at least one other place. you can use one of your feeder pages. If you don’t know what I am talking about you should subscribe to my free web traffic newsletter.
3 ways to NOT get web traffic
I have written a lot about what you should do to get traffic to your web page. You can probably learn just as much from what you should not do. I have personally tried most of these. Boys and girls do not try this at home.
Ignore your keyword research
It is easy to ignore your keyword research. It happens to me from time to time when I get to excited about something. If you ignore research for your site you will end up with something you will have very hard to attract traffic to. Even worse is if you ignore market research for your product. It is way to easy to get caught up in something that you are very excited about but unfortunately not many other are. On the other hand, you should not focus on what everyone else is doing. Start with a niche focus and work from there. Grow your focus step by step to a broader focus.
Ignore updating your sites
Don’t grow tired of your site and stop updating it. The site will eventually lose in interest for your loyal repeat visitors.
Write boring titles
The title of your article is the most important part of your internet articles and posts. If the title is boring no one is going to read what your write. If your title is boring no one is going to click your title even if they find it with a search engine. Your titles should make people interested or raise some kind of emotion. It an art to write great titles but it is not too hard to avoid making it boring.
If you want to know what to do to build web traffic instead of what not to do you can subscribe to my free web traffic newsletter.
4 straight weeks of new web traffic ideas
Today I added a new tip that brings the total to 4 weeks of practical tips in my web traffic mailing list, and it is getting longer day by day.
When I started this blog I also started to add ideas to my web traffic mailing list. When you subscribe to the free web traffic list you get a new idea in your mailbox every day.
In a matter of fact no subscriber has yet reached the end and I don’t intend to let it happen anytime soon. My goal is to stay one tip ahead of all you who subscribe. Right now I have ideas for at least one more month and I hope to make it even longer.
So why do I do this for free, what is the catch?
I am not selling anything from the email list, and I am hardly selling anything from this blog either. The only income is a small adsense advert. I mostly have that advert there for testing purposes.
I will probably add offers to the email list in the future but now I use it to put pressure on myself. By having to come up with a new web traffic idea every day I have to focus on how to get traffic to my web sites and that is a good thing.
The other reason, and the main one, is that I am developing a web traffic generation software. If you are subscribing to the email list you will probably get an offer to participate in a closed beta. I will soon start to mail out a few offers to participate on a first come first serve basis. In other words I try to attract people interested in building their web traffic to get people to test my upcoming software.
I will keep all readers updated about the software. So far it is turning out really great and I can’t wait to tell you all about it. Stay tuned.
The magic of influence – part 2
Yesterday I started to write about the magic of influence.
A short recap of the ladder of influence.
The first step was normal everyday guys, the next step someone you know and the third step was an expert.
The next step in the ladder is the celebrity. A celebrity is a person everyone knows. If a celebrity says he prefers widget a instead of widget b he has even more influence than an expert. This is probably the main reason you see so many celebrities used in promotions. It is tempting to dismiss this but it has been proven in many a/b tests both in direct marketing and internet marketing. You do not appoint yourself a celebrity but generally appointed by media. Note that you can be a celebrity in one niche but a total nobody in another.
The final level and the person with the most influence is a celebrity expert. This would be for example Tiger Woods promoting a golf club. He is a golf expert and he is a celebrity.
So what are the practical implications on internet marketing?
The number one point to note is that you can quite easily climb from the first to the third step on the ladder. Instead of trying to get people to sell people right away, try to be their friend and get to know them. Once you know them you will have a much easier task selling. You should also appoint yourself an expert in your subject matter. Write about the subject, give value, be an expert. Write reports, write a book.
It is easy to get locked into the thinking that you are not an expert because there are people better than you. There are always going to be someone better than you. The only thing that really matters is how much you know in relation to someone else. If the gap is large enough you are an expert to them.
When you are a buyer it is also good to know about the ladder of influence. Are you spending too much money buying internet marketing reports?
Finally here is a quote from Dan Kennedy “Be the Wizard; Beware of the wizard”.
If you want practical tips on getting traffic to your site feel free to subscribe to my web traffic newsletter. It’s free and you will get a new idea everyday to get more visitors to your site, the rest is up to you.
The magic of influence
I have been listening to a lot from Dan Kennedy lately.
Dan is one of the top copywriters in the world and a genius at direct marketing.
One of the interesting things Dan teaches is how people are influenced.
Direct marketing is all about influence. What applies in direct marketing often transfers to internet marketing. For example You can have targeted visitors in internet marketing just as with direct marketing and you can measure your success with relative ease.
When you are trying to influence someone your relation to the person makes all the difference. Your relation to the person you are trying to influencing determines your credibility.
Here are the five main categories of credibility.
When you meet a person who doesn’t know you, you will by default have low credibility. The person has no reason to trust you. If you are trying to sell a widget to this person you will have a hard time.
If you are friend with the person you are trying to influence you will have a little more influence. For example; imagine that you tell a friend to buy the widget because you like it. In this case you leave a much greater impact than if a random person did the same. The chance your friend will buy the widget is much greater.
If you are considered an expert you will have even greater influence. Say you bough a book about widgets and the author of the book told you to buy widget a. Note that you often can and should appoint yourself an expert. There is no authority appointing experts, you have to appoint yourself and provide proof that you are an expert.
Read tomorrows post to learn about the next two steps in the ladder of influence. I will also tell you why this is important for you and how you can use this knowledge.
Successful press releases with PRWeb
I wrote an introduction before on using press releases as a way to gain web traffic. Press releases not only give you free ingoing links from high pr web sites. They can also give you free publicity in print media.
Now here are a few practical tips to get the most out of your press release.
PRWeb is a free service for sending your press release but as all good things in life, it is not really free. To get he most out of PRWeb you need to donate about $80 (standard visibility) when you do your submission. You will then get extra services like inclusion in yahoo news, free editorial consulting and more.
Not only does the donation give you the extra services, the amount of the donation is used for sorting press releases on their web pages. Since $80 is the amount to get all the extra benefit a lot of people will donate exactly $80, add $1 and you will put yourself ahead of all these press releases.
If you think you have something really great in your press release you can go with the professional options. Remember great for the media, not just for you. If you go with the top option for maximal media visibility you get ; Guaranteed distribution through the Associated Press to top US newspapers and media outlets, Add an embedded video to your press release and analytics to show you where your news is being read
To learn more about the details take a visit to the PRWeb site. You should go with a donation it is well worth the money.
Getting your press release accepted
Just because you submit your press release to PRWeb it does not mean it will be accepted. All submitted press releases are reviewed and will be rated by an editor. Journalist that subscribe to press releases from PRWeb can decide on the quality of the press releases they get, from the top releases to everything. The higher editorial rating your press release gets the more journalists will read the release. If the press release doest not meet a minimum quality it will not even be published, regardless of how much you donate.
Press releases is just one way to get more traffic to your web page. Subscribe to my daily traffic tips newsletter to get more practical ideas to drive traffic to your web sites.
You are talking to yourself!
You are talking to yourself in your head, everyone are. It was a big change for me when I realized I could think about my thinking. In psychology it is called Metacognition, when you are thinking of what your think about.
Here is a more formal definition – “Metacognition refers to one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes or anything related to them”
So here is a task that can really change your life, no kidding.
Set as a goal for one day to try to notice when you are thinking about something or when you are talking to yourself.
The more you are aware about your inner voice the easier it is to control it. You biggest critic is yourself. Even when no one is giving your bad feedback it is far too easy to start an inner dialog dragging yourself down. Self confidence is perhaps the most important success factor and by talking to yourself in the right way you can build your self confidence a little day by day.
Once you have an unshakable self confidence nothing can really stop you. Combine this with a positive mental attitude where you make an effort to take all news as positive news.
Now you not only have a much greater chance for success in what ever you decide to do. You will have an easier time dealing with people and most important of all. Even if what you do does turns out as a failure you will even enjoy that.
For me it was a big revelation when I realized I could actually analyse what I was thinking and try to change my thinking. I still have a long way to go. But now I catch myself all the time realizing I am thinking in non constructive ways that only harm me and I can change my thinking.
5 ways to build trust
Building a website is a lot of work, fun but still work. The ImproveByDoing blog you are reading right now is quite new and I have not had the time to do everything I should do.
This is not my first web site and it always takes a few weeks or months to do all that is important. And even if you do everything right it will take time for the site to draw visitors and build organic search engine traffic.
I personally try to focus on getting content up on the site first. If it turns out I really don’t like the subject I have to write about it is much easier to close down a site with few visitors. Not that it is hard to take down a site with many visitors, but, once you have it rolling it feels like a waste.
Today I will try to point out a few things I have not had the time to fix yet on this site. I hope to get around to it soon. If you read this entry much later than when it was published I hope all of it is fixed.
I hope you can go through the list and hopefully find some things you have missed as well and if you find more things I should do please comment.
All these small things work to improve the credibility of your site, important if you want people to buy from your site or give you their email.
A personal about page
Write in a personal voice in the about page. Explain what the site is about, what people will get out of it.
Add contact information to the site
Contact information is important for credibility, especially if you are selling from your site. In this blog I am not really selling things just hoping to get peoples email and give them my free daily traffic tips.
Add photo on the about page
A photo makes a site more personal. I have avoided to put any photos on my sites since I have not thought it relevant before. But it adds credibility and It should be there.
Write and publish a privacy policy
A privacy policy should tell people what they can expect from your site. There are many examples on the net and I should have one as well. I have no intention of selling contact information and I should make that clear.
Write and publish a security policy
This one is important when you are selling things from your site. Again, I don’t sell from this site but wanted to mention it here anyway.