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14 Online Reputation Management Tips for 2023 and Beyond

In the heavily active world of social media, any business or individual isn’t alone. Even if you aren’t involved, perhaps you don’t even have an online presence, still your brand will be mentioned, discussed and criticized on the social media.

In such a case if you aren’t able to actively monitor your brand’s mentions on the social media then your business and brand will be defenseless against the huge social media crowds whose main focus is to simply bash and trash talk brands for pretty much anything and everything.

However, reputation management isn’t just about protecting a brand but it can also be used to take advantage of any situation and bend it in your favor. Here, in this article, we are going to discuss some tips to help manage your business reputation online.

1. Claim your digital identity: Most businesses who have started their online journey’s haven’t looked beyond Facebook or Instagram. The world of social media isn’t limited to a few popular platforms. Services like Pinterest, Linkedin or YouTube are equally important. However, do not stop there, check for smaller niche sites especially if they are on a category, which is relevant to you.

2. Search for any mention of your brand term: Simply search for your branded keywords and make sure to setup some alerts for the main keywords so that if there is any mention of the brand, one can quickly look up and post a response if required.

3. Spend time training your social media customer care staff: Social media customer support is a very tricky work. Here, your customer support isn’t talking to the customer directly, it is rather a one to many conversation and if special care isn’t taken by your support staff then this response will quickly go out to control.

4. Simply being there matters: The last thing a dissaponted customer of your brand needs is your absence on the platform. If you or your customer support can simply acknowledge the problem and post a reply that they are looking into the matter, is enough to keep the loyal customer hooked.

5. Keep checking your reviews and feedback: Always keep an eye out for reviews and feedback. Even if the review is positive, one still needs to read it in full and if a reply is required, make sure to add the reply.

6. Be honest and transparent: If your business is clear and honest then the best way to post a response on the social media is to simply reply with as much details as required. Keep things clean and discuss openly about the issues the customer is facing.

7. Encourage Reviews: Positive reviews, feedback and testimonials are the biggest asset of any company. If you have happy customers that can leave five star reviews for your business then setup an automated system for asking reviews and make sure to thank them once they post their reviews.

8. Hire a Team and Plan for the Future: Social media monitoring isn’t a one person’s job. The time and effort required to manage social media successfully is insanely huge. The best way to approach this situation is to hire a small team and get started with SMM.

9. Make posting of reviews easier: Happy customers will always want to post a review of your business and services. However, they will only put in the extra effort if the process of adding the review is easy. Send your customers link to the places where they can post a review. Once you see these reviews being posted, start sharing them on the social media and in the process, make sure to tag the reviewers.

10. Hire Influencers to defend you on the social media: It is a common practice now, where the influencers are hired for brand promotions and reputation management. Someone with a huge following and a powerful social influence, can easily highlight positive reviews and bury the negative ones deeper.

11. Be quick while responding: If you have angry and unhappy customers on the social media then it is time to quickly post responses and minimize the damage. If you delay your response then chances are that the customer might post the poor experice in other social media platforms as well.

12. Listen more and Type Less: On the social media, your presence matters. If you are able to listen to your customer’s feedback and then reply wisely, half the battle is already won. Your customers should be able to understand that you are listening and that their issues are heard.

13. Display recent reviews first: Being fresh matters because there is no point in having a great brand if the popularity was lost months ago. What matters is how good the brand is currently. This is why a recent review helps.
When you setup the review page on your website, make sure to display the recent feedbacks and testimonials on the top of the page. Let the older feedbacks be at the bottom of the page and as more and more new reviews start to pour in, post the new ones at the top of the page.

14. Improve your products and services: At the end of the day, if you products and services are good then it will automatically attract positive feedback. At the same time, if your products aren’t good enough then it is quite natural to attract criticism. The best way to fix the problem here is to improve and optimze your products and services.

Let the internet praise your business while you stay at the center of it all and spend your time in collecting positive feedback and adding them to your testimonial collection.

Internet moves at a very high speed and to keep up with it, one needs to be equally fast in responding to customer queries and feedback. Do remember that people will always post negative reviews on Facebook rather than sending you a message on your contact us page. This is the reason why people need to be on the social media to post a timely response to the customer.

12 Tips to Write Good Content in 2023

As a blogger or digital marketer, one skill that you will always require is content writing. Whether you are writing content for your blog posts, or guest posts and articles for other content marketing activities, the core skill that you will require is writing good content.

Content writing skills don’t happen overnight, it requires practice and the more you write the more it sharpens. If you are new to writing content online then take a target for content writing, for example a thousand words a day to get started with and keep the word count increasing day by day so that you get the habit of writing good content at a quicker pace.

Here, in this article, we will cover some content writing tips so that you can write better content at a faster speed.

1. Start with an effective article title: If your article title is catchy, optimized for ranking and relevant to the niche and the topic you are writing, then you have won the initial battle. Everything related to content writing starts with the article, it should be the first thing you should work on. Always write multiple titles before starting the article and pick the one that fits the best.

2. Write a very catchy opening: Readers attention span is very small on the internet. Always remember that you are only just a tab in the reader’s browser and it will take him a fraction of a second to close your tab.
Write really small paragraphs and sentences at the start of your article, perhaps only a few words long. Keep such catchy sentences going throughout the opening till the points starts. Think of every sentence as a hook which is keeping your readers glued to your article.

3. Think of the points and note them down: Take some time to write down all the points. Don’t begin expanding on the points just yet; write down every point first so that you know exactly what you are going to write about. If you are planning to write a longer article, it is best to start with more points, perhaps twenty plus so that you know that the article is going to be a longer one.

4. Do a closing that inspires further action: Dive straight into the closing so that you know how your article is going to end. This closing should solve multiple objectives like the reader should take part in the comments section, or signup on your email list, perhaps download an ebook as a content upgrade or even convert on an ad or a product or service.

5. Research well: Take your time to research your niche well. Read some similar articles; check some content that explains your points in further detail. See how your competition handles such content. The more hours you put in research, the stronger and deeper content you will be able to write.

6. Optimize your keywords: Start with keyword research, make sure to include those keywords in your article. Don’t stuff too many keywords, the article should look natural and the readers should be able to read it like any other normal article.

7. Link to relevant content: Every article that you write, should link out to some relevant content online. These out going links should preferably be of government or media websites so that your readers can research further. Avoid linking out to commercial or new and weak domains. At the bottom of the article, add some links as sources and make sure these links are relevant and high quality.

8. Break it down into sub-headers: Once you have completed the opening, it is time to craft the rest of your article. If there are bulky paragraphs throughout the article then it will be quite a challenge to keep the readers glued till the end of the article. This is where the sub-heading comes into play.
Divide the article into several sub-headings and make sure that these headings are catchy and easy to understand.

9. Include Quotes and Tweetables: How the end user interact with your content is a strong ranking signal for the search engines. This is where adding quotes and shareable bytes throughout the content helps. The easier you make content sharing for your readers, the more tweets, likes and pins you will receive. In this regard, embedding tweetables within the content helps a lot.

10. Add a few good images: With the rise of different social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest, the preferred size of the images make a big difference to the entire content sharing process. The best way to make sure that all the social media sites get enough images to consume, is to add a number of images of different sizes and resolutions depending on the preference of the social sites.

11. Write longer articles: If you have in-depth content which acts as a resource page on a topic then you can feature that content as an ultimate guide where the reader will get all the details in the same article and won’t have to look for any more information on the given topic. Such articles will always be useful and it requires only a one time effort to create it and in time it will continue to rank for it’s given keyword.

12. Edit and Polish your content: Once the entire article is ready, it is time to edit and polish it. To start with, do a through proof-reading of your content. Try to make sure that the article does not have any basic spelling and grammar issues. If everything is all right, proceed to the next point where the article needs to be polished thoroughly. The best way to polish your article is to read it line by line and where ever necessary, change words and phrases to make sure it shines.

Good content solves a variety of problems and brings in a lot of benefits. It will attract a lot of visitors, turn them into readers and subscribers for future content, inspire them to take action and end up in your sales funnel. Writing such content is all about developing a content writing skill that comes with time and practice.

13 Practical Content Marketing Tips for 2023

If there is one thing the marketers have learnt over the ages, it is about how much more content is effective, compared to advertisement.

Be it an advertisement campaign, a research data, white papers, tools and plugins, pretty much anything which is effective is in the form of valuable content. If the same content or resource is written with the intent of promotion then it will look like a sponsored post and it won’t get too much of recognition.

Content marketing, if done correctly, it will have a greater reach and the audience it will build will be a lot more loyal compared to any other form of marketing. Such content based marketing has a higher possibility of going viral, thus the return on the content creation effort is manyfolds.

Here, in this article, we will discuss several content marketing tips for 2023 and beyond.

1. Write your objectives clearly: Any marketing process will fail if your objectives aren’t clear. Make sure to clearly define what you want to gain from your content marketing campaign. If the targets are sales, branding, getting subscribers or traffic, building links, the benefits can be many but it still needs to be clearly defined so that we know exactly what the campaign is aimed at.

2. Create your content: Based on the targets, the content needs to be created in a way that the objectives will be fulfilled. From eBooks to in-depth guides and resources, every form of content is capable of bringing in leads and customers. While writing these articles, special attention should be given to call to actions so that the readers end up as a subscriber or a customer.

3. Organize similar content: Over the years, while adding content in a scheduled way, without even knowing about it we create some content that can be easily grouped into a series. The best way to make this work is to write an article and introduce the series. Then, link all related content of that series from the article in a way that it seems like a chapter wise breakdown of content.

4. Research your competitor: The best way to move forward with any content marketing activity is to research your competitor. See how they create their content, what topics they cover, how they write their content and in what ways they re-purpose and market their created content. Based on your research you can optimize and tweak your strategy.

5. Share and Promote your New Content: If you are actively writing content for your blog section then you need a plan to promote your content. Make a list of places where you can share your content, starting with social media channels to your own newsletters, social time lines etc. are all good places to promote new content.

6. Image Size: Creating graphics for your new article is a great way to boost user attention. However, with the rise of different social networks and their image requirements, one needs to add a variety of images to cater all social media sites. Make sure to have longer images for Pinterest and square images for Instagram.

7. Inter Change Content Type: Content can be in any form, depending on the requirements it can be a blog post being posted on a pre-scheduled date. However, it can be easily changed into a slide or a YouTube video and cross posted into different places for extra exposure. The same blog content can be further edited and added to your newsletter or your auto-responder series.

8. Let the world know: Your piece of content can be good and yet it won’t reach enough people if you don’t actively reach out to bloggers and marketers. Most bloggers are happy to link and mention people from their blog posts but unless you constantly remind them to do so, they are likely to forget you.

One can take this one notch higher by mentioning and quoting bloggers in their content and then run an outreach campaign and let the bloggers know that they have been mentioned. This way, more bloggers respond positively and share and link to the same content.

9. Keep your content updated: Old content is your asset and it needs to be updated regularly so that it stays current and fresh. Along with adding text, make sure to include images, quotes from bloggers and influencers, infographics etc. to keep making your old and time tested content stronger and more valuable.

10. Publish Original Research: When you publish original data and resource within content, it becomes more valuable. Such content becomes link worthy and everyone starts to link to this type of content as a source while using your data as reference. While it might seem difficult to produce such content, it actually isn’t. All you need is some outreach and perhaps a bit of PPC ads to get people to contribute to your research.

11. Do Guest Blogging: With guest blogging, you have the opportunity to craft content for posting on other blogs. This way, you can plan your content to be relevant to your content marketing goals and easily link to content that you are planning to promote. Guest posts brings a variety of benefits, starting from relevant traffic, backlinks to subscribers and even buyers if the audience is targeted and you have something valuable and attractive to sell.

12. Make a list of Influencers who share your content: Now that you are getting some visibility on your content, it is time to track your social media progress. Try to find the influencers who are actively sharing your content and try to retaliate and give back. Start with following back, sharing their content and checking out their sites and blogs to find content that you can share on your own timelines.

One can take this one step higher by making an excel sheet with your influencer’s data so that you can always quickly reference and tag them in your future updates.

13. Keep an eye on your website’s loading speed: Finally, many of these content marketing tips won’t work if your site as technical issues. Start with your website speed and make sure your site opens up quickly. Further, make sure to check your subscription boxes, contact forms etc., if any of these things aren’t working, try to get it fixed as soon as possible. Content marketing is an ongoing process, it isn’t an activity.

The best results from content marketing comes overtime if you keep doing it consistently. Everything from the links, to the audience and the influencers add up and thus your marketing efforts will keep generating more and more returns in the future.

12 New and Unique ways to Build Links

As a blogger, you are constantly trying to rank for keywords and writing articles targeting various long tail keywords and doing all the optimizations to make sure it ranks. In this process, one of the most difficult aspects of ranking an article is building relevant links to it.

When it comes to link value, if the in coming link is coming from an authority site on the same niche as yours and the link is from within a relevant piece of content then that link is fairly strong. However, building only one kind of link is always bad for your link portfolio. The best aproach is to keep a diverse back link profile.

Here, in this article, we will cover several methods to get back links for your websites and blogs.

1. Profile Links: Surely, profile links aren’t in the trend as it once was. But it still carries weight and for the little effort it requires, it is always worth it. The best way to build profile links is to research your competitors and see from where they are getting their profile links. Other than that, there are several popular sites that allows you to signup and add a link to your website in the profile section. Most of these will be nofollow but still you will be able to find some dofollow gems if you research hard.

2. Web Directories: Both free and pay to get included web directories are good places to get backlinks. Against popular belief, directories aren’t as bad and if you test it on your niche blogs you will see that the directory links, if done at a smaller scale, bring a lot of ranking value.

3. Forums: There are several ways to build links from online forums. If the forum is relevant, the content of the forum matches that of your blog and you have built up a fairly good profile on the forum, then you can post some relevant links along with your replies in the forum. Some forums allow signature links which is another easy way to build links. There is a profile section in most forums and it is often dofollow. If you come across such forums, make sure to fill up the link field of your forum profile with your website’s link.

4. Make Infographics: Infographics acts as a link magnet. If you are good with designs or you have some funds to hire a graphic designer, then try getting some high quality infographics created. However, having the infographic is only half the battle. One needs to actively contact and outreach other bloggers to publish your infographics and in return provide a source backlink.

5. On Line Calculators: Online tools and calculators that can be embeded in a web page is a great idea to let others post your tools and calculators and display your branding link somewhere on the same page. These tools are easy to create and they are helpful too. The more blogs and websites embed your tool, the viral effect will let others do the same.

6. Research and Surveys: While writing an article, almost all authors and writers search the internet for citing sources. If you are able to outreach and collect data and then present it in the form of charts and diagrams, people will link to your content and use your research for making their content stronger.

7. Feedback and Testimonials: Have you ever bought something online. Chances are, most people have and so you are able to provide a review for your purchase. But if this review goes to an ecommerce site then you will simply get recognition for your review, not a backlinks. However, if you look up the websites of the items you have bought, and email them your review and testimonial then chances are that you will earn a proper backlink from the brand’s testimonial section.

8. Start a linking culture: Most bloggers are good with retaliating. That means, when you comment on other people’s posts, they do the same in return, when you share someone’s post, they share your content. In the same way when you start linking to other bloggers, they link back to your posts in return. If you continue working towards linking other people’s content from your posts, soon you will develop a linking culture in your blogging network.

9. Write Press Release: At one time, this form of marketing was heavily used to the point of even being misused for the purpose of marketing. Even now, press release does work and if some of the niche sites or media sites catch you press release then very soon your website will start attracting some very strong backlinks.

10. Keep an eye out for brand mentions: Sometime brands get mentioned on various sites and blogs. Often these mentions are simply text, not links. However, if you reach out to them and ask them to change the mentioned text to a hyperlink then it will become a backlink. Depending on how important the incoming link can be, one can do some additional work and write a piece of content which is relevant and worth getting linked from the mentioned text.

11. Check for broken links: Broken links are often excellent ways to get back your backlink. Monitor for broken links and when you find some, ask the webmaster to fix the link. It is pretty simple and this way you can quickly earn a backlink.

12. Look for your competitor’s backlink: Every business has several competitors and the backlinks built and earned by your competitors are always some of the best and most relevant links available. Start doing a competitor analysis and check how many backlinks they have. See if those backlinks can be easily achieved or if not then look into the efforts it might require to get a similar link.

Links will always be one of the most important ranking factor for search engines as it is one of the hardest to manipulate ranking signals. In time, the value of links will keep rising and thus it is considered as one of the most valuable digital asset.

Squidix Web Hosting Review – An Amazing Webhost

Having a good web host is the key to running a successful online business. Whatever be your niche, blogging, ecommerce website, digital products, everything requires an always live website.

A good webhost is much more than being online 24*7. It should be able to handle surge traffic, should be secure enough to keep hackers away, must have a helpful and friendly customer support along with several other features and benefits.

There are a number of popular web hosts on the internet whos support is weak and provides very limited resources. The moment your website starts to get some traffic and customers, they fail to keep it live.

Today, in this article, we are going to review a web host named Squidix, it has been pretty amazing so far. We are going to base our review on the below mentioned points for easy reference.

1. Price Point: With shared hosting starting as low as $2.95 a month, Squidix is among some of the cheapest web hosts available on the internet. All this with unlimited bandwidth and a thirty day money back option and if you wish to add another dollar to it, you get the option to host unlimited number of websites too.

If you want to move your website from another hosting provider to this one, then they will migrate your site at no extra cost. Along with that, they provide free domain registrations with a web hosting account. As long as you keep your hosting account, your domain stays with you for free forever.

2. Customer Support: Just like any other company, here too you will get support by opening tickets, sending emails or simply calling them. However, do note that their turn around time is fairly quick. From our own research and experience we can state that their average response time is less than thirty minutes.

To be very honest with this point, we haven’t really required a lot of support as the website is always running smoothly without any issues.

3. Resource Availability: Shared web hosting and VPS mostly run on resource sharing. If you are consuming too much resources then your site is sent off line or if someone else on your shared hosting is taking up too much resources then your website’s performance goes down. This is how most shared hosting works, however we haven’t experienced any downtime or slowness of our sites while hosted on Squidix. There can be a number of reasons for this, we might not know for sure, but we can make a guess that their resource management is better than others.

4. Secure: There are several web hosts on the internet that works great while things are sunny. But the moment some hacker breaks through, they fall apart. This host on the other hand is fairly safe and haven’t caused any issues so far. They are also pretty quick in resolving any security threats and neutralize them before they can cause any harm.

On the internet, when a site gets hacked and malecious codes are uploaded on it, slowly the site starts to get penalized by search engines. This is where a prompt recovery can help in minimizing damage. Everything ultimately depends on how fast the web host responds and how quickly it cleans your site.

5. Flawless Experience: Over the years, if there is one thing we like about any web host is how smooth the site works while it is hosted online. The visitors of the website will thank the site and the webmaster for keeping the service always running, without any issues. But this experience is powered by the web host that no one really notices. We bloggers and web masters understand the reason behind this flawless running of our websites and thus we thank our host for keeping us live and kicking.

6. Easy Upgrade Options: From shared hosting to VPS, to semi-dedicated to fully dedicated servers, the path of upgradation is available with plenty of options to choose from. Having several options with different price points and features, it becomes easy for people to choose the right combination. Everyone’s requirements are unique, thus having more options helps in choosing the right hosting plan.

7. Discounts: Talking about discounts, you get free migration of your website, free domain for life as long as you keep your hosting account running, free firewall, free SSL, off site backup and several other free and discounted items.

8. Affiliate Options: Squidix provides an amazing affiliate setup where you get $10 for free, just for signing up. They have a fixed commission system where you know exactly what you are going to get paid for referring customers of different plans. This way, you know exactly what you are going to get by referring people to Squidix.

9. Independent and Aged Host: So far on the internet, we have observed that several web hosts are connected to the same parent company and they all lack the same basic support and resource issues. Squidix on the other hand is unique in this regard as it operates alone and has been online since 2010.

10. Our Recommendation: Our reviews and the openions we express comes from first hand testing. We review services that we have used and based on our own experience, we review it. That way, the review is fair and honest. Squidix has been a total and complete success. We haven’t faced much of a downtime, the sites are always lightning fast and never fail to open. Their customer support is quick to respond and always fixes the problems quickly. On the whole, we recommend Squidix and use it ourselves for hosting our websites.

An online business has several layers of work. Starting with content, rankings, customer support, advertisements and so on and so forth that it is enough to keep any online businessman busy. At times like this, we have at least a good web host that we can rely on and allow us the peace of mind to keep working hard.

10 Tips to Boost the Ranking of your Niche Blog

Niche blogs are easy to rank, when compared to general content blogs. Being niche, helps to keep the focus of the content restricted to a particular topic. This way, the blog becomes more targeted, which results in getting more relevant links and ultimately the blog becomes an authority on its niche.

All this is great for rankings. Search engines like content which is written by niche experts, they like backlinks which comes from highly relevant sources and they value in-depth articles that are detailed and have a lot of insights.

While having a niche blog does bend everything in our favor, it still needs a lot of hard work before it starts to rank and compete for keywords and long tails.

Here, in this article, we will discuss several niche blogging tips to boost your rankings.

1. Stay as niche as possible: A niche blog only makes sense if the content that you publish is stictly restricted to the same niche. If you start posting any article which isn’t on topic then the niche dilutes and the benefits of being on the niche dissapears.

If you have already posted content that isn’t on your niche then it is best to remove that content and post it on a general blog that you might own. Re-direct the article URL to the new post so that the link juice isn’t wasted.

2. Hire Experts for Content Writing: If you have started a niche blog in your area of expertise then you can simply mention that you are an expert on your niche with possible educational qualifications and that you are simply sharing your professional experience. However, this might not be the case for most niche bloggers. This is where you can hire freelancers who are an expert on your niche. For example, if you are looking for health and medical content then you might look for doctors who are working as freelance writers.

3. Network with other Niche Bloggers: Everything from getting targeted niche backlinks to getting mentions from niche influencers start with your blogging networking. Most bloggers are good with their networking skill. The process starts with posting good comments on the target bloggers posts. Slowly, make sure to share their content on your timelines and other social media websites. Once you have made your presence known, it is time to reach out to your fellow niche blogger and ask for some favors.

4. Use Expert Quotes with-in Content: Niche content needs to be strong and resourceful. Simply writing articles won’t help, the content has to be good quality with a lot of relevant information. One way to make an article stand out and have valuable insights is to contact some niche experts and ask them some question. Once you have their answers, make quotes out of their answers and post them along with your blog posts.

These quotes by niche experts and influencers can be made even more attractive by making an image out of these quotes. Canva or any other similar program can easily make beautiful quote designs by choosing an attractive template.

5. Publish Niche Reports: Conduct surveys and take feedback from a lot of people and publish those reports on your blog. One can easily achieve this by doing some outreach to your niche experts. There are tons of niche influencers on the social media whom one can easily send an outreach message.

6. Participate in Niche roundups: Roundups are yet another method to get a quick and relevant backlink. If the roundup post goes live on a strong niche blog then along with the link value, some targeted traffic and social media followers are surely going to add up.

The easiest way to get started with niche roundups is to search for such roundups on the internet. Once you find the roundup posts, send an email to the roundup creator and see if you can participate in the existing roundup and get notified for the future roundup opprotunities.

7. Check for Interview Opportunities: Interviews are yet another method to get some niche visibility. In an interview, along with getting link value, social media shares and followers and a number of other benefits, you can also establish yourself as a reputed expert on your niche.

For getting started with interview opportunities, simply search for existing interviews on the internet. When you find some relevant interviews on niche blogs, simply reach out to the blogs hosting those interviews and ask them if you can participate on your upcoming interviews.

8. Make a List of LongTail Keywords: While running a niche blog, you must have already figured out that longtail keywords are the best way to grow and rank for various terms on your category. However, simply knowing won’t help. The best way to approach longtails is to make a list. Once you have a long list of long tail keywords, start making article titles that covers one longtail key phraze.

This way, once enough articles are posted on your blog where each article targets one relevant longtail keyword, your ranking will start to improve and you will start to see a positive growth in your organic traffic.

9. Write huge and in-depth Guides: One way to boost your rankings is to write really good articles. If your article is a complete and total guide which covers the topic well then people will spend more time on it, they will consume your content better and share it further. All these are positive ranking factors and it will help your article to outrank your competitors.

10. Connect with Niche Influencers on Social Media: Social media is a gold mine for bloggers and marketers. Whatever be your niche, you are bound to get some influencers with a dedicated following, ready to promote your content. Niche influencers have a lot of social media strength and if you are able to connect with them in a good way and make yourself known then chances are that they will share your content.

Everyday, with more and more blogs and niche content getting posted on the internet, ranking for competitive niche terms is becoming almost impossible. This is where you can follow the above tips and slowly and steadily rank for niche keywords.

15 Tips to Flawlessly Run a Co-operative Blogging Network

The best way to determine if a blog is successful or not, is to check the strength and the reach of its network.

A blogging network consists of various channels like the traffic on the blog, the reach and the follower strength of its social media channels, the number of subscribers of the newsletter etc.

These are mostly part of the easily visible network; however there are more channels where the content of a blog reaches but they aren’t so visible but they are equally valuable.

If a blog has to become successful, popular and profitable then it needs to build several content distribution channels. These channels can be built and nurtured by establishing and maintaining relations with other bloggers and influencers. Here, in this article, we will discuss several online networking tips to build and expand your blogging network.

1. Post content consistently: Posting of blog content regularly helps in several ways. Search engines like consistency and rewards such blogs with better rankings and frequent crawls. Additionally, the readers also start to check for new content on days when you publish new posts. This way, your blog builds a dedicated audience in time.

2. Share and Maintain Social Channels: Social channels require posting of content on regular basis. This way, the timelines will be filled with content that is posted a few hours apart. This prevents flooding of timelines of your followers and they interact with the content in a better way.

3. Utilize smaller social networks: Smaller social networks are a gold mine for dedicated and targeted users. These users will navigate from the social site to your blog and if your own content is good, they will become a lot more active on your own blog. They help in boosting commenting and actively share content on the social media.

4. Do active blog commenting: Blog commenting is perhaps one of the best ways to build a co-operative network where every action that you take for other people’s blog, will be returned in several folds. Do remember that if you want help and co-operation from other bloggers, you need to start it first yourself. If you comment on a blog, share their content and link to them, most of them will do the same for you.

5. Utilize Facebook Groups: Facebook groups are some of the best places to share your content and build a dedicated flow of targeted audience. There are no ends to categories in Facebook group and whatever be your niche, you are sure to get some relevant groups where you can share your content.

For best results, always make sure to post good content without outgoing links. Images and text based content are fine to share. Slowly and steadily when the groups moderators and admins start to value your content and presence, start sharing a bit of your promotional content and links and get back some traffic out of those groups.

6. Join Pinterest Public Boards: Pinterest public boards work the same way. Look for popular boards that allow submissions from contributors. Once you are able to find such boards, start requesting to join those boards. If you are allowed to post on those boards, you can easily pin your content and get some traffic coming.

7. Take out some time for blogging forums: There are tons of blogging forums that has been operational for years. Surely there isn’t a lot of traffic on those forums but they are still active and if you add to their conversations, they do respond and even follow back to your blog and social channels.

8. Share other bloggers content: The whole point of doing co-operation in blogging is to share the blogging benefits among your network. Be it traffic, subscribers, social shares, everything flows in the network well but the process starts with you. Start sharing other people’s content in your timeline across all social media channels and make sure to tag the bloggers whose content you share so that they get notified.

9. Make a habit for linking out: Linking to relevant content especially from a blogging contact is a good way to boost your connection. This way, not only the blogging contact will be happy with your effort, chances are that soon he will link back to some of your content.

10. Promote others on your Email Newsletter: News letters are often under looked by bloggers. Most bloggers do not have an auto-responder series or their newsletters sometime lack content and are almost never delivered consistently. If you make a habit of linking and featuring other bloggers in your newsletter, just like your blog posts, your newsletters too will also start getting a lot of readership.

11. Include Call-to-Action wherever possible: The best way to get help and co-operation from others is to simply ask and make yourself heard. Often due to lack of good call-to-action buttons bloggers lose sale, subscription or even comments. If you want people to share your content, make sure to have a call-to-action button that asks people to share your content.

12. Write blog posts featuring commentators: Comments section is a powerful networking system which comes in-built with your blog. Most bloggers fail to use this system to its fullest. When you start to see some comments on your blog, it is time to make your comments section stand out. Look for regular commentators and feature them on your next blog post. Call them out, link to them; mention their social profiles so that they get even more involved with your blog.

13. Start an Interview Series: Just like features, interviews too are some of the best form of blogging content. Look for influencers in your niche. Sort list them and start sending them emails for doing an interview for your blog. Once you start to see some positive responses, send your target influencer some questions. With the received answers, write an article and post it on your blog.

14. Get active on Quora: Find questions related to your niche in Quora. Reply to those questions with the best answers that you can provide. Since these questions are on your niche, it shouldn’t be that difficult to answer them. Feel free to link to your relevant blog posts from your answer for additional information.

15. Offer free advice to new bloggers: New bloggers are easy to on-board. They always have a lot of questions and as an experienced blogger you can answer most of their questions. Soon you will find that plenty of these new bloggers have started to follow your blog and your social channels.

In the world of blogging, your success directly depends on the power of your network. If your network is strong, your content will reach the masses and everything will start to fall in place.

8 Blogging Productivity Tips to Get More Work Done

Everyone has the same twenty four hours in a day and yet some people manage to get more work done, manage to spare some time for life and finally even manages to get some rest and sleep.

It might sound like some insane calculations but it is ultimately all about time management. There are no secrets or rocket science involved, it is just that some people manages their time better.

One can be a morning person, a late riser or simply like their afternoons or evenings better. Depending on what time of the day best suits your productivity, feel free to tweak your best times to get the most work done from your day’s time.

Here, in this article, we will discuss some tips to boost your daily productivity:

1. Finish what you start: When you open an email, make sure you do it with your full responsibility. Whatever the task it requires, if it has to be done, do it right away. Don’t procrastinate.

Emails are some of the worst time wasters online. You might have planned your day’s work already, should be working on an important, possibly time sensitive project and yet you have opened an email which is making you do some tasks that were not even planned for today. It is always best to set aside some time of the day for checking emails and make sure to immediately reply and getting it over with so that you don’t have to give it further more time.

2. Complete your difficult tasks first: Again, taking about procrastination, we like to keep dodging the most difficult and un-interesting tasks for later. This habit needs to be changed because, depending on your most productive time of the day, you should look to get the hardest task done first.

Be it content writing, guest posting or anything which requires more concentration, needs to be tackled when you are fresh and most productive.

3. Check your deadlines: Certain tasks has to be done, there are no choices because the clock is ticking and one can’t allow missing a deadline. This is where time management can help. Remember, not all blogging tasks needs to be done daily, for example blog commenting, forum posting, Quora answering etc. can be skipped in times of emergency which can be replaced with tasks that are nearing deadlines.

4. Take a four hour shift: Working on a longer session allows you to complete multiple works. The blogging four hour shift is an amazing concept where you take up 4 different blogging activities, for example, blog commenting, forum posting, social media management and guest posting and give each task an hour’s time. This way you will be able to complete four basic, yet important blogging tasks in one session.

To each, to his own, this session can be a late morning session which is mostly after breakfast or perhaps early evenings, basically one need to fit three to four hours of time in a single session to make this useful.

5. Dedicate an entire session for content writing: Writing long form blog content or any article is considered as one of the most difficult blogging tasks. Everyone has a different strategy though, for example some people likes to complete the whole article at a go, while others do the frame work for the article first and then complete it later. Either way, dedicate the bulk of the time of a session to do actual content writing, it will speed up the entire process.

6. Do multi-tasking: Eat snacks; drink juice etc. along with blogging. It has been often noticed that while you have something to munch on, you can stay glued on your computer and keep doing your work and not lose concentration or patience along the way.

If you are too much into healthy living then look for some weight loss and healthy snacks. This can include some raw vegetables, sprouts etc.

As a work from home blogger, there might be some regular things like washing clothes or cooking etc. that can be managed along with blogging. Even on a dedicated session, one cannot work for hours without taking small breaks. This is where one can utilize a few minutes of vegetable cutting, putting plates in the dishwasher etc.

7. Walk around for a few minutes: This will help to get some creative juices to flow. While working through a long session, it is better to take a two to five minutes break and walk around your room or your home to get your creativity flowing. Typing and starring into the computer screen for hours at a stretch can slow down your pace of working.

Physically too, if your back hurts or your hands feel tired of too much typing then it will affect your overall working speed and quality. Returning back fresh after a five minutes break is a productivity booster.

8. Make sure to utilize un-productive time: Sometimes when you don’t like to work or simply lie down and take rest, at times like that, try social media timeline scrolling and YouTube browsing, targeting relevant content and make sure to comment where ever possible.

The secret here is to post genuine comments, making sure that your comment adds value to the content. If you have posted the comment on a relevant video then whatever traffic that comes back to your channel or timeline is relevant and targeted. Most social media algo for video content is targeted towards watch time rather than views, so if the returning traffic is targeted then your watch time is likely going to improve which will help your overall stats. When you work for someone, there is no option but to complete deadlines and stay productive and get more work done. However, as bloggers, you might not face the same degree of discipline which might make some people less productive. This is where self discipline comes into play and with the help of the above productivity tips; one can try and make their time more useful.

11 Activity Hobby sub niches to start a Blog in 2023

Blogging is more fun if you blog on things that interests you. That way, you will post your blog entries like an expert who live the same niche life 24 by 7. If you try to learn your niche and research your way through then at some point of time you will run out of ideas and slowly your blog will stagnate due to lack of fresh content.

Every niche has sub niches and when you start to explore them, you will see that several large niches have a sub-niche that interests you more. For example, you like traveling but your hobby isn’t simply traveling, but traveling as a family in a car which is also known as taking long-drives. So, here you met the car travel niche where two large niches: travel and hobby had a cross section. If you keep exploring, you will find an exact sub-niche that interest you the most.

Here, in this article, we are exploring travel and hobby related sub niches to start a blog.

Fishing: Fishing is an excellent hobby. Your time is well spent with a hobby like fishing, you get to eat the fish and at the end of the day, you can write about your experience and earn a side income with fish blogging.

With fishing, one can take this a notch higher by leashing or owning a pond and introducing several type of fishes in the space. This way, you will be able to fish in your leasure and even invite friends and family over for fishing. With agro tourism on the rise, you will be able to ticket the fishing space and perhaps start a fishing group membership of some sorts to monetize the whole fishing adventure.

Boating: Boating is a fun activity. If you like to travel to places that has water bodies then you should explore the boating opportunities. As a blogger, when you start to write on this niche, you can dive in deeper with canoe and kayaking options and the gears required in the process. There are sub topics like speed boat racing, rafting etc. that can be covered as well.

RV: The community around this recreational vehicle is very strong. This is not just an activity or a travel hobby, it is a way of life. RV, brings with itself the freedom to travel, live and explore. You don’t need a space like a hotel to stay if you have an RV. You can be constantly on the move and worrying about a home and its security is something that won’t bother you.

Having a niche like this to blog about is always better because there are already communities and groups that are active in this space who will share your content. So promoting your content and building an audience for it is easier in this space.

Hiking: Activities such as hiking is healthy. With this niche, you will stand at a cross section of health, travel and hobby. If you like hiking then it is an excellent niche to blog about. You will be able to travel to many places and find out spaces which are developed for hiking and even trekking if your health permits. If you want to take it a bit further then try mountain climbing sometimes.

Horseback riding: Not all hobbies are made for everyone, however if you really like horse riding and it is new for you then you should be able to join a training program and get into it. However if you are an expert with horses then there are several ways you can expand into this niche, including selling and promoting items required for horse back riding.

Surfing: This activity does require some skills and you will need time to learn and master this hobby. If you live in a place which is close to the seas and you really like surfing then feel free to start blogging about it. Again, like most hobby niches, related items can be reviewed and sold with expert feedback of yours.

Camping: Most people like to camp once in a while. This activity is fun and there isn’t too much of an issue joining this activity. If you actively start blogging on this niche then you will be able to explore a lot of camping spaces around your country and abroad.

Cycling: Talking about healthy activities, perhaps this one is the best on this list. From casual cycling to taking part in races, there is so much to explore and absolutely no learning curve. This activity can be started right off and blog your way forward.

Skiing: If you live on the mountains in a cold area filled with snow then skiing is an activity you can start planning on. The requirements for this niche is mostly cold and icy spaces, if you can manage that then this hobby is good to get started with. In time, you will be able to write plenty of things including skiing gear reviews.

Water sports: There are no limits to what you can do if you have enough water around you. From boating and swimming to playing various sports under water, anything that you can do with water will work on this niche. Even if you don’t live near water bodies, you will be able to find out clubs and places that have water activity opportunities. When you have too many things to do with water, you also have too many things to write about in your blog.

Jungle Adventure: Traveling is fun, but it is even more fun if you take up an adventure travel. You can take part in actual jungle travels by joining teams which goes traveling in the jungles. If the walk through the jungle is real, you will have even more exciting adventure stories to write about. While traveling across the country, you will be able to find out jungle travel opportunities and make the most out of it.

Travel blogging is always fun and when you start to document your travel stories, take enough pictures in the process or even start a travel channel on YouTube, you will be able to watch and remember your whole travels at a later time. Years later, whether you will be blogging or not, you can still watch your existing videos and remember the golden days.

12 Places to Start a Blog Online for Free

There are two types of blogs on the internet. One is self hosted where you have all the controls and the blog is hosted on a web hosting account owned by you and the other is a free blogging method where the actual blog is hosted on some one else’s host.

There are both pros and cons in each method, however if you are looking to get started into blogging for free then there is no point in spending money in a web hosting account. This is where free hosted blogging platforms comes in.

Here, in this article, we will discuss several free hosted blogging platforms to jump start your blogging activities.

1. Blogger: This is pretty much how most people got into blogging. Ages ago, blogspot, was a free hosted blogging platform where many people started blogging online. Since it was easy to use and free to get started, the idea took off quickly. Later, blogspot was bought by Google and changed to blogger.

Additionally, the blogger platform became a way to start a blog and then apply for adsense which is the Google’s platform for earning money from blogging. This way most people got an easy way to monetize their blogs and blogging changed from a fun activity to a potential money making opportunity.

2. WordPress Dot Com: The free and open source blogging platform of wordpress has two websites. The wordpress dot org is the platform from where one can download plugins, themes and the CMS to start your own self hosted blog. On the other hand, the wordpress dot com is the place where one can start a blog for free and get started into blogging without having to buy a web hosting plan.

3. Medium: When we think about getting started with blogging, some people choose Medium even after having a self hosted domain. The basic idea of blogging is to have a community and perhaps that is the reason why people choose to blog on this platform as the sense of community can be easily felt on this platform.

4. Tumblr: Every platform is unique in its own way. Most Tumblr blogs are short and heavy on graphics. If you are into catchy and viral type of blogs and does not really like to write very long pieces of content then this platform might be the ideal place to get started.

5. LinkedIn Pulse: LinkedIn is the professional network where people look to get a new job or choose a career path. Sometime back LinkedIn experimented with longform content and allowed some of its members to start blogging. The idea took off and several people started to blog on this platform actively. Very soon, this beta blogging feature was opened to all of its members and everyone got this opportunity to start a blog on LinkedIn.

6. Quora Blogs: If you have questions or you like to give answers on topics that are in your expertize then Quora is the perfect platform for you. However, this question and answers website has recently started a blogging feature where its users can start adding blog entres.

Just like LinkedIn, Quora too has a huge user base and blogging on such platforms provides bloggers with opportunites to grow quickly and reach a bigger audience.

7. HubPages: This is one of those really old platforms for blogging where users can start a blog and monetize it using Google Adsense and Amazon affiliate links. Most people join this platform with the hope of earning money from blogging and HubPages has a good reputation of paying its users for their blogging efforts.

8. Weebly: This is yet another platform for hosting your blog for free and get started quickly with blogging. The interface is fairly simple and easy to understand. If you are new to blogging and does not really want to bother yourself with the technicalities of other platforms then Weebly is a good choice for you.

9. Square Space: Depending on features, templates and other blogging benefits, SquareSpace is becoming a good choice for many bloggers. When it comes to free hosting blogging sites, templates plays a crucial role as the look and feel of a blog totally depends on the choice of templates. SquareSpace here has a positive score because of its huge range of diverse template choices.

10. Penzu: Bloggging was initially started as a means to write a journal and keep it private. Penzu is pretty effective in this regard and if you buy their premium plans, they can even encrypt your entries so that your data is truly safe.

11. Webs: Just like any other platform on the list, Webs too has a huge collection of templates and with its easy site builder tools, one can easily drag and drop items and quickly get an active blog live and kicking. As a new blogger, simplicity and template collection is a primary requirement which is why plenty of people go for Webs for their blogging needs.

12. Jimdo: There is a purpose behind using every free blogging platform. Here, the main benefit is the search engine optimization features. Normally, when you start a blog on Jimdo and add valuable content to it, the articles starts to rank in the search engines. This is mainly due to the SEO power and optimization of the Jimdo platform.

If ranking your content on the search engines is a primary requirement for your blogging activities then Jimdo is a platform that you can test. Do note that ranking content isn’t easy and requires a lot of effort, the platforms can give you an edge but ultimately everything depends on the blogger himself.

It is always preferable to start a blog for free and get the taste of blogging. After a few months of successful blogging, if you like the process then you have the choice to either keep blogging for free or get a self hosted blog and move away to a custom setup. Some people like to blog on multiple places and these free hosted blogging platforms are ideal places for them.