For every blog that succeeds and builds a solid following, you have at least a hundred blogs that end up in the graveyard. Building a high quality blog following requires both dedication over the long haul as well as an in depth understanding of what actually works and what doesn’t work in the blogging world.
Here are six tips for building a blog following that follows your each and every post.
Tip #1 – Stop Using “Get Traffic Quick” Tactics 
Stop trying to circumvent the traffic generation process. Building a solid blog following is a process that does inherently take some time.
Tactics like gaming StumbleUpon or Reddit, writing deceptively attention catching titles and so on are not the answer to getting high quality long term traffic.
Instead, aim to provide quality content that people will actually want to share. Create content that inspires people to come back time and again. That’ll get you more blog traffic than any quick fix solution.
Tip #2 – Tap Your Customer Base
One place people often neglect is their existing customer base. Often time’s people try to separate their customers from their blog.
For example, they might only send marketing materials using email to their customer list, while they try to use their blog to attract new customers. This is counter productive.
Your customers need to be sold just like anyone else. They need to continually be reminded of your credibility and expertise. Furthermore, by continually providing value in the form of free content, you increase the chances that they’ll buy again.
Try and get your buyers to become readers. Let them know about your blog in your promotional emails and perhaps even in the product itself.
Tip #3 – Narrow Down Your Audience 
Does your message hit home? Do your customers feel like you’re talking to them directly?
Many blogs try and be far, far too broad and generic. For example, a blog that’s targeting “internet marketers” is almost definitely going to get lost in the crowd.
On the other hand, a blog that’s dedicated to helping new stay at home moms create a second stream of income could work very well.
What is your core audience? Try and narrow your audience down to the people who would most likely relate to you. Then speak to them directly.
Tip #4 – Do Guest Posts, Accept Guest Posts
Guest posting is one of the best ways for bloggers to vouch for one another and share traffic.
If you guest post on someone else’s site, they’re implicitly endorsing you. You’ll get your content in front of their audience, which means a lot of high quality traffic back to your website. You’ll also get a great backlink.
By accepting guest posts, you give back to the blogging community. You add variety to your blog, so it’s not always just you writing. Other bloggers are also likely to link to their own guest posts, which means a high quality backlink as well.
Tip #5 – Leverage Current Events and Trends
You can get a lot of blog traffic by tapping into existing trends and things that people are already talking about right now. 
For example, the founders of Air B’n’B tapped into the election by helping people find beds near the democratic and republican conventions. A spa might tap into Valentine ’s Day by offering a couple’s tandem massage.
Blogs can do something similar. Try to tie your blog’s content to existing events and use that to drive more traffic to your blog.
Tip #6 – Publish Consistently
Having a consistent publishing schedule is one of the most important things for a successful blog. If you get someone interested in your content, they’ll want to come back and see new content. If they come back a few times and don’t see anything new, they probably won’t return again.
Set a publishing schedule and stick to it. Let people know what to expect from your blog. That schedule could be every day, or just a couple times a month. You don’t have to publish very often, you just have to commit to publishing consistently.
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Outsource Your Social Media to the Professionals
By Chris Abraham
I really believe it’s bad advice to recommend that companies fire their social media consultants, experts and agencies only to bring everything in house.
While “everyone” is on Facebook, social media is no longer a land of tinkerers; it’s a land of consumers. If you fill a room of potential brand ambassadors you harvest from your own ranks, I guarantee that only 1% to 10% of those people are active participants, and the rest are passive folks who are mostly lurkers. And when people bring up Zappos as the corporate exemplar, I always remind them that Zappos is exceptional and that’s why they’re the only company anyone can think of who does it as well internally. Plus, Zappos is a dyed-in-the-wool customer-service-centric company with an aggressive, visionary founder — someone who has completely rebuilt itself to over-serve its communities. Kudos, but seriously a truly exceptional example.
Only the largest companies have in-house counsel — their own corporate lawyers. Very few small or medium-sized companies maintain their own in-house accountants, designers, publicists, reputation and crisis managers, or marketers — some don’t even have their own dedicated sales teams.
And this is becoming more and more the reality of modern business — and it started in the ’90s. Why incur internal staff bloating when you can keep your staff limited to core expertise and services in focus, outsourcing everything else to professional service firms — vendors? Specialist vendors, like doctors or lawyers or management consultants, are generally staffed by people who are not only trained and experienced but also have the benefit of being able to load-balance and mind-share across the experience of multiple clients.
The best vendors, like the best docs and lawyers, keep rigorously up to date in the state of the art with a single-minded incentive to keep up and even lead the way. Personally, I have over 15 years of experience in consulting, and the only way a consultant ever gets a job — and keeps it — is by being just a little smarter, more curious, quicker, and more confident than the client — and since this is rarely completely true, most consultants worth their salt work really hard and spend many hours being and staying a top expert in the field.
Why Zappos is the unicorn of social media success stories....................
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Visit My Website
Webmasters push back against recent changes at Google by JD Lasica
Target audience: Businesses, brands, marketers, search specialists, SEO experts, Web publishers — anyone with a business website.
By and large over the years on number of fronts — search, mobile, open source, public policy — Google has generally worn the white hat. They’ve played the good guys in this still unfolding Internet saga right from the start. Back when search was still young, as I wrote in 2001, Google decreed that there must be a clear demarcation between search results and sponsored links, and it has been thus ever since.
So it was somewhat jarring to see the cool reception that Google’s Matt Cutts — probably Google’s biggest superstar behind Larry, Sergey and Eric — received yesterday at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco. Cutts laid out a rosy portrait of the company’s Knowledge Graph, unveiled last week. Search on “chiefs” on Kansas City and you’ll get a different result than if you searched out the Chiefs rugby team in Australia or New Zealand. (For the possible downsides of this, see my interview with Eli Pariser, author of “The Filter Bubble.”)
But Google is doing more than just personalization, and audience members took to the microphone to push back. Their objection came down to this: By all appearances, Google’s recent moves seem to be moving the company away from its search roots and more into the role of an online publisher, a one-stop shop, a commercial Wikipedia.
Google’s entry on Tom Cruise, part of its Knowledge Graph initiative.
As one questioner put it — and you may have noticed this trend — when you do a search on Tom Cruise now, you don’t just see link to his Wikipedia page, his website or other sources, you see a content capsule right there in the search results (see image at right).
And not just good ol’ Tom. Do a search on best hotels in San Francisco and you’ll see a spate of choices that Google ranks before Frommer’s or Trip Advisor. When you search on hotels or other items, the results you get, well, depends
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Your Business vs. Cyber Bullies By DYAN MACHAN
In the old days, if you were mad at a merchant, you could muster an angry mob and have him tarred and feathered and run out of town. These days all you have to do is write a nasty report on a complaint message board. But it s worse: The digital angry mob will be back to chase the victim out of town every single day.
I first encountered the phenomenon a few years ago when I was looking to hire a landscape designer. A friend recommended a local gardener, but when I searched for that person s name online, the first result that came up was a Web site that lambasted his performance in boldface type, accusing him of overcharging and shoddy workmanship. When I asked the gardener about it, he said the site had been put up by a disgruntled customer he didn’t t know much more about it, he explained, because he doesn’t t own a computer. The gardener said he had asked his lawyer what he could do. His answer: nothing.
Fortunately for him and other entrepreneurs, that’s not exactly true. Over the past few years, a brand-new industry has sprung up to help businesses protect their online corporate images. Small businesses and entrepreneurs are among the top customers of the firms that offer these Internet Write-Out skills, which combine public relations finesse and search engine technique.
When a large company gets a tongue-lashing online, the complaints often get shoved to the backwaters of a search result, because there s such a sea of other information available. But there s typically less information online on a small fry, which means a customer s diatribe on a complaint board can be sticky and devastating. That s where businesses like Reputation Defender, specialists in online sanitation, come in and offer their services. Of course, you don t have to turn to a white knight to fight your battles for you but it takes a lot of elbow grease to wipe away a concerted online smear.
Where the attack originates has a big impact on your odds of making it go away. If inaccurate or libelous information is posted on a blog, you have a chance of getting the blogger to take it down just by asking. Many bloggers would prefer to avoid a defamation-of-character lawsuit or at the very least, a pissing match, notes Kevin Spleid, a New York based computer consultant. And in many cases, the law prohibits individuals from making false or defamatory statements online. But there s a colossal exemption built into the Communications Decency Act that protects Internet service providers and any review site that allows other people not its employees to post comments. Ripoff Report, one online gripe net, says it has successfully defended itself against 20 lawsuits and is adamant in its refusal to take down reviews even when an author asks to retract one.
While you can sue an individual for posting malicious or false information, winning a lawsuit doesn’t t mean the offending content will go away. Digital material that’s archived or stored doesn’t t easily disappear. My gardener friend s problem was particularly tricky because it wasn t a matter of one bad review tucked inside some sprawling Web universe. In his case, the site that criticized him occupied its own, easily found Web planet.
Digital Reputation Management To solve problems like this, the larger reputation management firms generally ask for a retainer that can run up to $1,000 a month to take care of cleanup and monitoring. For this cash, would your online-meanie problem go away? Sort of. According to the whitewashers, the best you can do is bury the offensive material under an avalanche of more positive fare. As students of how search engines favor certain types of information, these firms know how to create content that pushes the nasty stuff away from the top of a search-results page. Reputation Hawk, for example, has created business-related sites where it posts its customers positive reviews. If successful, the technique makes an impact, because 90 percent of people don t look past the first results page after an online search.
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Why insincerity doesn’t work in PR, sales, marketing & online media
June 12,2012
by Chris Abraham
I experience a lot of contempt for bloggers and social media influencers. From agencies
and marketing firms as well as from self-professed social media experts and social media gurus. Bloggers and other social media online influencers may not know who Edward Bernays is or have the lingua franca of a trained communications professional, but they sure can spot the eye roll of condescension and contempt from a mile away, even through the terse messaging of a single pitch.
While the biggest brands with the biggest gifts and social cachet can get away with being douche bags and intolerable asses because the level of peer and personal prestige and importance more than compensate for bad manners, rudeness, and a condescending manner — the proverbial upturned nose and eye roll — this sort of behavior isn’t acceptable from anyone but the crown king and queen of their particular demographic.
For example, if you’re offering cars, purses, trips to bloggers to review, you can act as you like; if you’re offering coupons, you had better really try to understand that it is relationships, kindness, attention, and connections that is selling your pitch — and the blogger’s valuable-to-her time — instead of your patently insulting suggestion that “you and your readers would really benefit from this dollar-off coupon.”
If you think that bloggers are actually failed journalists, you may have contempt for your audience; if you consider the time spent to become a blogger would be better spent “working,” you may have contempt for your audience. If you believe that what bloggers do is “just prattle on,” you may have contempt for your audience; and if you actively play favorites and only engage with the crème de la crème of bloggers, you may have contempt for your audience.
Why it’s important to be generous for its own sakeThis contempt is made plain by two variations of a quote attributed to Henry Louis Mencken: “No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby” and “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.”
This blog post came to a head upon reading the time-honored and often-reviled book by Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People. At first blush, it is a deeply troubling and kiddie-pool-shallow indictment of all that is superficial and manipulative about sales, marketing, PR, and social networking.
If you gird your loins, however, and push through, I kick myself for not having studied it further. I will admit that I always get to where it really sounds like Dale is suggesting that we superior elite who are reading his book need to learn to manifest the same sort of compassion, patience, and calm — grace — that we generally reserve for children and the infirm.
And then I realized that that is indeed what Dale Carnegie is saying! But that we should not just reserve compassion, empathy, gentleness, love, patience, attention, and kindness to just children, we should lavish anyone and everyone in our lives with adoration, no matter if that person is one’s child, one’s wife, one’s business associate, or one’s prospect.
What he seems to be suggesting — and this is really revolutionary to see laid out through endless illustration and scenarios taken from history’s greatest and most successful men and women — is that being nice, generous, and friendly should be something one aspires to generally and not just as a ploy to make friends and influence people.
While this book may well have been popularly reflected as insincere, insincerity is what doesn’t work in PR, sales, marketing, and especially in earned media online with bloggers and other online influencers.
Some good advice that Dale Carnegie offers is “bait your hook for the fish you want to catch rather than for yourself.” (OK, if you’re rolling your eyes now and thinking, “pearls to swine” right now, get out of the business immediately and get into a profession that better tolerates insufferable snobs and douche nozzles.)
I have been saying this forever based on what I read years ago in a very popular book of the day called Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray: “You need to give the gift your partner wants instead of the gift you want to give.” Great advice for us men who are constantly giving vacuum cleaners to our significant others for Valentine’s Day instead of a romantic weekend at a bed and breakfast or whatever may well indicate love and appreciation to her or him.
People will put up with assholes if the reward outweighs the shame
And on the topic of appreciation, Dale Carnegie addresses this, too. And you need to be obsessed with it. Too often in earned media engagement, agencies and firms keep up appearances until a media mention is acquired and then see ya! The fire-and-forget method of acquiring social media mentions works if the brand is high prestige but appreciation goes a long way toward making up for not offering the blogger an Audi A8 to test drive for a month instead of just providing a limited-time-offer coupon for sessions at a regional day spa.
Dale does address this, and I will paraphrase: People will put up with assholes if the reward outweighs the shame. Your boss can be an asshole because he can fire you; the king can be an asshole because he can make you a knight; the judge can be an asshole because he can incarcerate you and instantly turn you into a felon.
The limits to what signifies paid or sponsored media and contentEarned media marketers are pretty vulnerable in this regard! We’re not paying anyone anything. Sometimes we’ll offer a review copy or product, but we’re professionally limited in terms of what signifies paid or sponsored media and content. We have to rely on our wits and of our general, natural, and effortless love, appreciation, and respect for social media, social influence, citizen journalism, and the power of blogging.
And while I think you either have that respect, maybe because you are, yourself, a blogger or social media content producer, I do believe you can fake it ’til you make it. (I have been blogging since 1999 and have been in social media since they were called bulletin board systems and required 1200 baud modems.) But you need to make it, you can’t just grin and bear it because you’re not having fun. If you don’t love love love chatting and interacting with the unwashed masses, the hoi polloi, the vox populi of online influencers — no matter how little influence — then you’re screwed and this whole blogger outreach thing will end up blowing up in your face and you will hurt your reputation, your agency, and the reputation of your client.
Primum non nocere.
Do you have contempt for your audience?
Oh, actually…………………..
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