15 Free Ways to Increase Blog Traffic

Get More Blog Traffic for Free

Generating traffic is the lifeblood of your online business. Without sufficient traffic your site and blog will never accomplish their purpose. And while there are numerous pay options to generate traffic, there are an equal number of effective and free tools and approaches. Here are some great traffic generators:

1. Free Traffic Source: Forum Marketing
Forum Marketing: Share your expertise with people asking questions about your industry. In return, you’ll get a steady flow of traffic to your site. You will be the expert, after all. To ensure that you get traffic from all the time you spend answering questions, be sure to spend time on your forum marketing signature. Your signature tells other forum members who you are and how to read more about you. As you begin in forum marketing, you will want to watch out for (and completely avoid) these 8 Common Forum Marketing Mistakes. 

15 Free Ways to Increase Blog Traffic

Get More Blog Traffic for Free

Generating traffic is the lifeblood of your online business. Without sufficient traffic your site and blog will never accomplish their purpose. And while there are numerous pay options to generate traffic, there are an equal number of effective and free tools and approaches. Here are some great traffic generators:

1. Free Traffic Source: Forum Marketing

Forum Marketing: Share your expertise with people asking questions about your industry. In return, you’ll get a steady flow of traffic to your site. You will be the expert, after all. To ensure that you get traffic from all the time you spend answering questions, be sure to spend time on your forum marketing signature. Your signature tells other forum members who you are and how to read more about you. As you begin in forum marketing, you will want to watch out for (and completely avoid) these 8 Common Forum Marketing Mistakes. 

How Email Can Expedite the Sales Process

Too often a sales cycle will get bogged down at one or more points. A prospect may need an approval from a higher-up, may need to wait until the funding is available, or may simply want more time to think things through. Using email throughout the sales process can help avoid these delays or at least minimize them.

After you first speak with a prospect (which will usually happen as part of a cold call), send her a brief email that includes the date, time and place you've agreed on for your sales appointment. Not only does this help cut down on “oops, I forgot about you” on the day of the meeting, it also gives you an opportunity to include a link or two in your email that provides useful and interesting information. You might link an article on a topic you discussed during the cold call, or a document that relates to the prospect's business. This helps you to get off on the right foot with her and also to begin building your reputation as a helpful, experienced contact.

Facebook Using Data, Tools To Bring Online And Offline Consumer Marketing Together

If you’re a privacy advocate you might find it creepy or worrisome. But if you’re a marketer, you might be thrilled by the moves that Facebook is making to bring the online and offline worlds together.

AdAge highlights a number of initiatives that Facebook has undertaken to both show the offline sales impact of its ads as well as to bring offline consumer data to online targeting. Both involve the two-way flow of consumer data between online and traditional offline databases.

Facebook isn’t the first company to try any of this, but its scale puts it in a better position than others to successfully execute.

3 Ways to Stay Ahead of the Competition

Here are three tips on keeping your company competitive with innovation.

There's no time to rest when you're building a business. As I've mentioned in previous articles, innovation is key to sustaining your company and insuring its growth. It is so important to stay ahead of the competition and keep your company and your products fresh. Here are three tips on keeping your company competitive with innovation: 

Why You Need Email Marketing Advertising for Your Online Business

Email Marketing Advertising for the Growth of Your Business

According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA): “Email delivers the highest ROI (return on investment) by an eye-popping margin: a whopping $57.25 for every dollar spent on it”. (2005)

I know what you’re thinking: “Email marketing has been around forever – I get 23 marketing emails every day.” Our overflowing in-boxes are proof that email is used (overused) by many companies.

Why should you still consider this for your business?

Are you protecting your Online Reputation

Protecting your online reputation is not so important than it is at the present for everyone. As people surf the internet to search for any information, the people will say that you are readily accessible as well as easily shared.

Good reputations are the things which can be damaged or tarnished in a moment. Famous Warren Buffet said that more than 20 years is required to build or gain trust or reputation but it takes only a matter of five minutes to ruin it. Rich Gorman is a person who usually works for the reputation changer LLC.

8 Quick & Dirty Tips for Successfully Selling Products Online

It’s an exciting time at your business – you’re confident that you’ve identified a product your market will like. How high will the revenues go? It’s hard to say, but if you keep the following tricks in mind for selling products online, you’ll set yourself up for success right from the start:

1.  Develop a measurable marketing campaign – Are you going to use promotions on your own site, social media, organic search, PPC, and guest blogging?  Will you try some other tactics?  What mixture do you think will be most effective?

What’s the ROI of Corporate Blogging?

In a few weeks this business blog will be 9 years old.  That’s 3,145 posts overall, of which I have written 2,537 myself.

If someone would have suggested to me 9 years ago that I should write 1.2 million words as a key component of my agency’s online marketing strategy, I would have dismissed them as crazy. And yet here we are.

I know a lot of companies have dabbled in blogging with mixed results and many are considering either starting a blog or scaling their blogging efforts. There are reasonable questions about how a business blog will add value to the bottom line. How will a corporate blog contribute to leads and sales? What is the ROI of blogging for each quater, month, week, day, hour and dollar invested? Those are great questions.

What you need to know about Skills and Strategy

If you want to see massively better results in your business and achieve more progress than ever before, you will find today’s post extremely useful.

The Skills / Strategy challenge
One of the reasons small business owners often work hard, for too little reward, is that they confuse skills with strategy. The difference was summed up brilliantly by Jim Rohn:

Success is 20% skills and 80% strategy. You might know how to read, but more importantly, what’s your plan to read? ~ Jim Rohn

5 Ways to Make Your Website Look More Professional

Online shoppers feel confident buying from websites that look professional.
Increase the Trust Level and Enjoy Greater Sales

Here’s a list of 5 ways to look more professional and increase trust in your brand:

Tip #1: Professional Looking Logo

A logo is truly important for any corporate identity.  Customers will remember your company a lot better if it’s well represented by a professional logo.  Invest in getting it designed by a graphic artist.  You can use http://www.99designs.com.  Read my article How to Make a Logo

Ελληνικά start-ups εκτός συνόρων

Η Brainbox Πληροφορική σχεδιάζει να εξαγάγει το easybike στην Ευρώπη

Στις αγορές του εξωτερικού στρέφονται ως αντίδοτο στην κρίση οι νέες καινοτόμες ελληνικές εταιρείες, τις οποίες στήνουν εκ του μηδενός (start-up) νεαροί φερέλπιδες επιχειρηματίες. Χαρακτηριστικά παραδείγματα αποτελούν το διάσημο πια taxibeat και το ανερχόμενο easybike· καρποί κοπιωδών προσπαθειών από μέλη της νέας, αναδυόμενης ελληνικής επιχειρηματικότητας δοκιμάζονται πια εκτός συνόρων, καθώς δέχονται την πρόκληση της εξωστρέφειας. Φιλόδοξα και στην πρώτη γραμμή της τεχνολογίας τα δύο start-ups, τα οποία δημιουργήθηκαν στον κυκεώνα της ελληνικής κρίσης, συνδυάζουν τις τεχνολογίες πληροφορικής και επικοινωνιών με τις σύγχρονες ανάγκες μεταφοράς. Χρηματοδοτήθηκαν από ιδιωτικά κεφάλαια, είναι μακριά από τη λογική των κρατικών επιδοτήσεων και διεκδικούν μερίδιο από τη νέα, παγκόσμια ψηφιακή και βιώσιμη οικονομία.
Εναν χρόνο μετά τη δημιουργία του, το taxibeat από την Αθήνα ανοίγεται σε τέσσερις μεγάλες αγορές του εξωτερικού, ανταγωνιζόμενο «στα ίσια» αντίστοιχα ψηφιακά προϊόντα που συγκέντρωσαν υπερπολλαπλάσια κεφάλαια από ιδιωτική χρηματοδότηση. Παράλληλα, το easybike από τη Θεσσαλονίκη ήδη έχει εξαγάγει την ποδηλατική τεχνογνωσία του στην Κύπρο και ετοιμάζεται να δοκιμαστεί στις μεγάλες αγορές της Ευρώπης.

The Importance of Your Essence in Blogging Success

So you got your blog started up. It’s time to put everything in place.

You start to study the market and conduct all the research needed. You read up on other blogs, scout forums, and buy an ebook that’s supposed to help you succeed.

Having bought into the hype, you actually force yourself to apply all the tactics you learnt, even though you don’t have a good feeling about them.

You’re basically basing your work on others’ success!

Content Creation: Why You Should Stop Thinking Customer First

Thinking customer first creates a barrier when conceptualizing ideas for content creation. By zeroing in on the word “customer”, you face the danger of typecasting people into a singular role that only exists in your own personal narrative. This is a limiting approach that overlooks an important fact: your customer is more dynamic than someone in need of a particular product or service. By adopting an outward looking approach to how you understand and ultimately reach your audience, you will start creating the content that fits into the story that matters: your customers’.

How to Utilize Content Marketing for Giving Results

Due to the creation of social media, content marketing is becoming larger each day. There should not be anything in the way to deter it. This article will show you how content marketing can benefit you by getting good results.

Find Your Content: When you apply content marketing, your number one goal is to gain a larger brand, get more conversions and obtain more business leads. However, in order to obtain this goal, you have to identify the various types of content that will be needed for your customers during the various stages of the buying cycle. For example, the message for the autoresponder would not be the same kind as the one to promote a eBook report. The more that you know about these kinds of content, the easier it will be for you to write it.

3 Keys to Influence Understanding and Leveraging Social Capital

Not all brand influencers are created equal, say the folks at Awareness, a social marketing software provider in its recent report 3 Keys to Influence: Understanding and Leveraging Influence. Most companies can use the report to guide them through the sticky maze of online social influencers and learn how to identify and leverage their clout.

Grow Your Social Capital

The secret, it seems, is about identifying those who can drive a brand’s social capital. Social capital can make or break you. According to the report, “Brands with larger social capital also have higher valuations, which ultimately delivers value to customers and partners, as well as shareholders.” Getting there, however is not always easy, but companies can harness influence in two ways to increase social capital: By leveraging influence from external sources, such as domain experts, and from internal sources, such as the brand’s existing customers and partners.