Basic Blog Tips

Your small business website is the online face of your business. But what do you put on your site. Members of the small business community, this week, shared some helpful tips on building a better business website.

Headline writing is an important skill to master for every online publisher today. In a previous episode of the podcast we talked about how it's just as important to spend time promoting your existing archives of content as it is to keep churning out new content. In this episode, my goal is to take that concept of promoting your existing content a step further. by giving you concrete examples of ways you can use good headline writing skills to promote your existing content. Whether you have a blog post, a YouTube video, SlideShare presentation, or even a Periscope video you'll hear how to tweak your headlines and make them so intriguing, that you'll start seeing results right away. http://traffic.libsyn.com/msileanespeaks/5_Ways_to_Sharpen_Your_Headline_Writing_Skills.mp3

On today's episode Jeff Sieh talks with Ileane Smith about Driving Traffic With Pinterest. Discussion includes best practices for group boards, maximizing your time on Pinterest, tools that Ileane recommends, and much more Pinterest advice.

Let me tell you about my friend Ileane Smith. She has worked in a publishing company for 30+ years, and other times, she is founder and publisher at Basic Blog Tips. You can also find her popular You Tube channel showing you how to use many social media tools, You Tube, and Blab platforms. She has a gift to make complex and obscure tools seem simple and possible to use by anyone. Here are a few highlights from our discussion done live on Blab with a few folks in the virtual audience. 

As productive bloggers, the time has come for us to evaluate our ever expanding list of blogging tools, and decide which ones we plan to keep and which ones we need to purge! It's all part of a cleansing process that is an exercise we should all do at least one per year if not more. Let’s start by looking at these 5 categories of blogging tools. First of all, once you have determined your blogging goals, and you really get focused on them and have the proper mindset, it will be easy to decide which tools are best for you to invest in.

Today is the day of honesty (yeah, I just created that day.) So let`s be totally honest; you are REALLY fed up. Fed up by not having enough traffic to your blog... fed up by not having enough social shares... fed up by not having enough comments... fed up by not having enough email subscribers. But worst of all... ...you are so freakin` fed up by being invisible in the overcrowded blogosphere. Sounds familiar? No worries. I have been there too. And to be completely honest (since it`s the day of honesty) it sucks BIG time! You would do almost everything

On this episode, we’re joined by well-known blogger and podcaster Ileane Smith to discuss her favorite blogging tools and tactics.

WordCamp US took place on December 4 – 6, 2015 right here in my hometown Philadelphia, PA.  It was the biggest WordCamp ever with over 1,800 attendees and this also marked the 10th anniversary of WordCamp.

Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of WordPress and each year he gives his “State of the Word” address to the community. Here are some of the incredible things he announced and what they mean for brave bloggers like you and me.

  In today’s episode of the ProBlogger podcast, I am talking about a new tool for bloggers and content creators that I’ve really taken to: Blab. It’s kind of like the lovechild of Google Hangouts and Periscope, and I’ve been experimenting with it a lot lately. When I first heard of Blab I was sceptical, but [...]

Linking is the way to bring up your old content, make your content more trustworthy and, yes, build connections with niche influencers.

Learn about the most influential bloggers in the blogosphere and what they're doing to gain incredible success. Follow the leaders, and be successful too.

Ileane Smith

The catchphrase of Ileane Smith’s Twitter page is “Find Your Voice, Capture Your Audience.” And, that is what this blogger and self-proclaimed social media diva specializes in. She offers plenty of tips and tricks, but also she announces her podcasts too.

If you want to do social media right, you need to be strategic. Many of us don't start out that way. We sign up for a site to try it out and fumble around

Suffering from bloggers fatigue? Looking for ways to boost your blog readership? Or just want to spice it up a bit? Here are 20 free blogging tools that will help you be more productive, more creative, and bring in more readers...Become an Infographic Wizard
Infographics are a great way to depict all kinds of data – from survey results to how your product works. Free tools include easel.ly, Infogr.am and Piktochart. For tips on creating these, check out this blog from Janice Wald: How to Create Infographics that Send Hoards of New Visitors to your Blog.

Buzzsumo: Research Potential Guest Authors and Set-up Content Alerts

Learn how Buzzsumo will help you vet potential guest authors so that you can maintain high-quality standards and authority on your blog!

Influencer marketing is the next gen strategy for smart marketers. Here 25 triberr influencers are sharing their best tips to be successful on it.

If you're not promoting your content, it might as well be invisible. There are more than 2 billion netizens, creating zettabytes of data...

you want to get your content in front of as many people as possible. That means setting a schedule for promoting it.

For my own work, I use a tool called CoSchedule (reviewed on Basic Blog Tips). This lets me schedule social media updates on different platforms at different times relative to the date of content publication. While it automates the posting, you still have to create the updates yourself, with help built into the tool. CoSchedule's CEO, Garrett Moon, uses it to promote his blog posts over a two month period.

How to create a blogging workflow that makes sense....

Blogger Networking 101 (the condensed version).

a) Leave useful + insightful comments on their blog posts. Be genuine and add value instead of being self-promotional.

b) Share their blog posts (I find Twitter very useful for this)

c) E-mail them thanking them for the blog post and what you learned from the blog post

d) If you want to take it even further, put one thing they have written about into practice and report on your results in an e-mail to them.

For a long time, I ignored networking with other bloggers mainly because I had an inferiority complex and I was not sure how to go about it.

If you are in that place, let me suggest Triberr to you.

Ryan Biddulph and Basic Blog Tips both have amazing blog posts on Triberr and how to use it.

How to build quality links from authority sites in the Post-Penguin era? Blogger outreach strategy is the best way to build links and grow your traffic...

Yes, creating viral content helps you build great links but you should also reach out other bloggers if you want to get more exposure on your blog posts.

It’s a lot easier for you to get incoming links from other blogs if you mention them in your blog posts. Remember, blogger outreach strategy is all about win/win approach. So you can’t ask anyone to link to your sites without linking to their posts first.

By using the strategies mentioned in this post, shoot an email to a blogger who you linked from your post and tell him you have just linked to one of his posts. That’s it! It’s a perfect way to cultivate the blogger outreach strategy.

This is how you get influencers to promote you....

Once someone likes you and pays attention to you, it’s a smart strategy to do what ya can to stay in their good books.

It can become a double win – you help them, and they help you too.

Kinda like how Ileane from BasicBlogTips.com tweeted out one of my freebies to over 10,000 followers the other day.

I wrote a couple guest posts for her – this one and this one – and continued to follow her, comment every once in a while on her posts, and share her stuff.

Of course I didn’t do it just so she would help me out.

But in my experience karma exists in the online world (just like in the offline world).

When you help others out, at some point, in some way, that generosity is gonna come back for you.

Making things easier is the name of the game if you're trying to blog every day. Here are 3 things that help me get stuff done effortlessly...Now I just need to brush up on my SEO skills.

A/B testing just takes applying an extra bit of text to your email body copy, using an extra subject line field or setting up a second email and marking it as variant "B". Once you do that, your email marketing service takes care of the rest...

Credits: Screenshots from respective app help documentation pages. AWeber results screenshot via Basic Blog Tips. Unhaggle email screenshots courtesy Vero.

From Justin Germino:

"I decided to poll some of my most long term blog friends and contacts on how their strategies apply and if they had any new strategies for 2015 compared to previous years.  These are bloggers that I personally have known since either 2008 or 2009 when I started Dragon Blogger and a great group of bloggers who are all carving out their own place in the Internet for their own passions and ventures.  Here are their strategies or blogging tips for 2015 and I share mine at the end of the article.I decided to poll some of my most long term blog friends and contacts on how their strategies apply and if they had any new strategies for 2015 compared to previous years.  These are bloggers that I personally have known since either 2008 or 2009 when I started Dragon Blogger and a great group of bloggers who are all carving out their own place in the Internet for their own passions and ventures.  Here are their strategies or blogging tips for 2015 and I share mine at the end of the article."