Blog Engage Community Blog – Page 7

23 Free Blogging Tools to try out in 2023

There’s plenty of tools on the internet which are available to the bloggers for free. Several of those have a free version available with limited features and a more comprehensive version which requires a paid upgrade. Either way, as long as the free features are worth using, bloggers will continue to use such tools for making blogging life easier.

These tools cover a number of niches like design tools, text and content tools or even SEO and PPC tools. Both new and seasoned bloggers need to use tools to simplify and speed up blogging activities. Thus we are covering some really important free blogging tools in this article.

Here’s the Top 23 Free Blogging Tools for 2023.

1. Canva: It is more than just an image editing tool, with images, styles, fonts and templates, Canva is a gold mine for bloggers who are looking for editing images for blog posts, social media updates, YouTube thumbnails etc.

Every platform and every action within a platform requires images of different sizes and resolutions. For example Pinterest prefers images that are longer than wider, while instagram prefers square images. These requirements are met exactly pixel for pixel in the Canva options.

2. Buffer: For social media scheduling, Buffer is one of the oldest and free tool available on the internet. It is easy to use and does exactly what it is meant to do, which is schedule content for social media sites and post them when you want them to be posted.

3. CopyScape: There’s several services that checks for content plagiarism but none is as effective as the copyscape. The free version allows checking URLs, so all you have to do is to enter the link of the page which you want tested for duplicate content and Copyscape will show the results.

4. Grammarly: When it comes to writing top notch content, this one tool can help in writing flawlessly without even the slightest of grammar mistakes. Content is more than just grammar though, and Grammarly fixes the way in which the content is presented, not just the grammar basics.

5. Quora: Quora isn’t a tool, it is a social network that works in the question and answer niche. For bloggers and marketers, this site not only presents with the best answers, but as a contributor of these answers, a blogger can drive home some targeted traffic by giving relevant links from the answers they contribute.

6. Linkedin Pulse: Linkedin is a massive social network that targets jobs, carriers and professional life. This site has a blogging option where a blogger can add regular content and build an audience. This traffic can be targeted to several sources and make the best use of it.

7. Trello: When it comes to organizing your blog or your business, a tool like trello helps you to keep track and progress of all aspects of your business. Any work in progress can be shown in a board, the works currently going on can be displayed in cards. It has the option to add comments and details so that several people from your network can give their feedback.

8. Google Drive: Keeping and sharing content across all your digital assets like laptops, desktops, cell phones etc. is a difficult task. But if you have Google drive, all you have to do is to upload the data in the drive and access it from where ever you have drive logged-in.

9. Google Trends: This is yet another amazing tool from Google that shows what is trending. They have a specific page for hot trends that shows the exact hash tags that are trending now. Based on those keywords, one can write targeted content and rank for terms that are currently getting a lot of searches.

10. MOZ: When it comes to checking incoming links, DA, links gained or lost from specific domains etc. Moz comes to the rescue. It has a platform full of tools for various blogging requirements.

11. SEMRush: SemRush too has a number of tools and the SERP checker is one of the best tools that this platform has.

12. MailChimp: There’s many tools that can be used for email marketing. MailChimp is one of the oldest and free tool which allows sending of emails to your email list and keep the list growing till the free limit allows.

13. Google Analytics: For tracking visitors to a website, people have been using this free tracker which is provided by Google.

14. WordPress: There’s plenty of blogging CMS available on the internet. Many of those are free, however, most blogs use the wordpress system as it is both free and easy to manage.

15. Slack: As a growing business, when your team grows further, Slack comes in handy for managing your team communication and activity.

16. Skype: Over the years, Skype has been used for online communications and since most people already have it installed so it becomes the go-to tool for communicating with people online.

17. Akismet: There’s many tools that can be used to stop spam comments in your blog. However, since Akismet is free and it already comes pre-installed with a wordpress blog, it naturally becomes the most used spam blocking plugins for wordpress.

18. Fiverr: For selling and buying online, people use Fiverr. In spite of their huge charges, this platform is free and easy to use, so people join it for getting started with freelancing.

19. Discord: Discord is easy to setup and plenty of people prefer it for online chatting and group discussions.

20. UberSuggest: For keyword research, especially the type that shows up in the Google keyword suggestions, this tool presents a comprehensive report of such keyword suggestions.

21. Facebook Groups: Groups of Facebook are free to join and they can provide a lot of targeted traffic if you share relevant information. This feature is very under used and if bloggers use it actively, it will help them greatly.

22. Medium: This is yet another blogging platform and several bloggers use Medium as their blogging destinations instead of posting content on their own blog.

23. AllTop: While AllTop isn’t exactly as big as it once was, but still it has a decent collection of blogs and media sites which are sorted by categories for easy browsing.

Free tools are always great to get started. As long as the feature available in the free version serves the purpose, it is worth using. As the requirements increases, one can opt for a new tool or if the budget allows, pay for the paid features and get a premium version of it.

15 Tips on How to set yourself apart from other Bloggers

Blogging is getting competitive. These days, with every passing moment, many new bloggers enters the blogosphere. Most people start blogging the same way which means they aren’t any different from the next blogger.

In a situation like this, it is important to set yourself apart from other bloggers who are working on your niche. If you have a unique voice, a unique personality, your content and design sets you apart from others then you have started on the right foot.

Here, in this article, we will discuss several ways in which you can set yourself apart from your competition.

1. Share your story: If you want to look different among other bloggers in the crowd then start with your story. If you have a unique story and you are able to present it well, then you will be remembered.

Stories which are heart touching can spread faster than any ad. Your competition might have more money and connection compared to you, but your story has the potential to reach an even greater audience. That is the power of emotional connection.

2. Get a custom Theme: There are tons of themes and designs on the internet. Most people look for free themes and thus they all look the same. However, some of the bloggers do spend a bit in buying a premium theme and they look better and get premium support. But at the end of the day, there’s many blogs with the same themes, so they too look pretty much the same.

If you have the funds then get yourself a custom theme designed. This theme will be available on your blog alone and if you can make it well, it will stand out and look much better than any other blog.

3. Find your Voice: Each of us has our own voice. This voice is the reason why our content reads different from the next blogger. But we don’t utilize this power well and end up writing content which sounds like boring essays. Once you start to write directly from your heart, you will find your true voice and it will indeed sound unique and personal.

4. Show your personality: Just like the voice, each of us has a unique personality which will show up in our content if we stop holding ourselves behind and let go of the invisible shackles and write more freely.

5. Make a Lasting Relationship: When a new reader lands on your blog, or your social media channels, try to make a first impression that lasts a lifetime. Do the basics well, like replying to their comments, following them on the social media, liking and sharing their content. But don’t stop at that, take the further step and post a comment on their blog, share their content further on your own time line and if possible signup to their newsletters and courses to make your connection stronger.

6. Keep the newsletter rolling: When someone joins your newsletter, it is important to make sure that your auto-responders are running so that your new guy gets hooked right away.

7. Get busy in the comments section: This is where all the fun happens. If you are active on the comments section then you have already made sure that you are better than the competition as several popular people on your niche does not do it. Responding to individual comments is a difficult task but it builds stronger bonds, if you skip this step then there will be no difference between others and you, but if you are ready to take the extra mile then much can happen in the long run.

8. Remember your customers and their important events: People forget that the business works when you stop talking about yourself and start listening to your buyers. It is their birthdays and family occasions which are important and not yours. Do your homework and make sure to keep a diary with the details of your customers. Send them social media updates, newsletters and other notifications on their important events.

9. Be consistent: Once you start to become popular, you will forget to keep a posting consistency. This is where you have to stand out from the rest of the bloggers and make sure to deliver content on time, day after day, year after year as people will always expect more from those who always deliver on time.

10. Read other people’s Blogs: It is important to stay updated and the easiest way to do so is to keep reading more content. Reading and understanding your competitors will help you to know why you are different from them.

11. Keep learning new Skills: Learning new skills that are relevant to your niche can help you in crafting content which will have an edge over your competition. You will be able to give something more to your readers and this extra information will keep pushing the quality of your content to new heights.

12. Reward Loyalty: When you see loyal readers who always stick with you, it is perhaps time to start planning on rewarding those readers. Think of a way by means of affiliate system where you will be able to reward those readers who are loyal to you.

13. Do something good for your readers: Plan on gifts, contests and giveaways where you can give something back to your community. This way, you will be able to retain your audience base and make them further loyal to your blog and your business.

14. Work on your Weakness: Look for the areas in your blogging which might need more work. Perhaps your writing isn’t good enough, in a case like this, try getting yourself some courses where you can improve your writing and make it better.

15. Deliver actionable and real information: People are always on the lookout for real information. It is a general habit of the people of the blogosphere to skim through the points in an article, looking for tips that they can implement right away. If you are able to deliver actionable tips consistently then you have already managed to set yourself above your competition and your readers might never have to look somewhere else for good content.

Being a true expert in your niche and doing things differently from the competition always helps in keeping you ahead from the rest of the lot. Sometimes it becomes extremely difficult when the niche is heavily competitive and yet, one still needs to keep working hard to achieve their goals.

17 Tips to Boost Customer Trust in 2023

Trust is important for any business to retain its customers and gain new buyers by increasing sales and conversions.

There are no short cuts to gain this trust overnight; one has to work their way in order to earn customer trust. There are however several ways to lose this trust in an instant, so while you work on building trust, at the same time one needs to make sure that they don’t do any mistakes that might cost them their earned trust.

Here, in this article, we are going to discuss several ways in which a business can earn customer trust.

1. Display Testimonials: Whether you are a new brand or an old one, if you are getting testimonials from your customers then you are doing good. However, these testimonials aren’t meant to keep somewhere hidden, they need to be presented, read and consumed by other customers.

Once in a while, share these testimonials on the social media. People like to read positive things about a brand they trust and value, so reading positive testimonials will help in building brand trust.

2. Incentives: Customers like to promote and recommend a brand they personally use. However, this recommendation happens more speedily if the customers are incentivized for doing so. Once you have a good incentive and loyalty program going, your customers will promote your brand which will build further trust in your business.

3. Keep the Talks Open: Talk freely about your business plans, the direction in which your business is moving, the upcoming features etc. so that your customers get to have a say in things that matters to them. When they give their inputs, make sure to listen to them and let your customers know that their messages have been heard.

4. Customer Related Events: Every business celebrates their own events. It is important to make sure that your customers important dates like their birthdays and anniversaries are remembered so that they can take a buying decision on those days. Your customers will know that the brand values them and the trust in the brand will grow further.

5. Improve Customer Service: Make sure that you have enough people on the customer support and all issues faced by the customers are promptly resolved. Any delay in support needs to be fixed immediately.

6. Feedback: Take feedback from your customers regularly in the form of surveys and contact page. Add a small feedback form in all places where your customers fills up forms like registration form, check out form etc.

7. Stay active on all Channels of Contact: Do note that contact us isn’t the only place where your customers will contact you. Make sure to check the direct messages on social sites like twitter, facebook etc. as your customers can contact you anywhere and it is your responsibility to make sure that you are present on all contact channels.

8. Keep the About Us page updated: Most people who are looking to learn more about your business is going to check out the about us page. If you have kept your about us updated with current information about your brand then just by reading the about page, your customers will gain plenty of insights about you and your business. This will grow a lot of trust in your business.

9. Show your Human Side on the Social Media: On the social media, as a company when you simply post important updates and company news, the entire feed becomes a tasteless radio broadcast. To remedy this, start showing your human nature and start sharing some of the pics that you take during your work. Simply post pictures of your office, your celebrations and fun moments that happens in your office. Keeps things natural and it will start to look better on the social media.

10. Work on Reputation Management: Some times, even after doing everything right, you will still find yourself at a loss to fix your reputation. This is where you should start looking for professional help in fixing your reputation online.

11. Do Guest Posts on Industry Sites and News and Media Magazines: Posting content and getting published on popular news and media sites helps a lot in building trust and reputation. This step isn’t easy as the editorial reviews on those sites are insane, but if you do manage to get published, the rewards are pretty awesome.

12. Get Interviewed: When you get interviewed and featured on top media websites or YouTube channels then the reputation of that source which is publishing you flows through your business and brand. People start to become a bit more trusting, once they see your face or your name on a popular site.

13. Tell your story on your Company Blog: Most company blogs are boring as they only carry important news and updates. It becomes like a robot and trusting a faceless robot is difficult. However, if you start telling your story, how you began what challenges you faced and how you conquered those challenges can be a great start in developing trust with your readers.

14. Stay away from Hype: Most businesses fail because they promise too much and deliver too little. It is important to stay away from hype because promising too much is easy, but following through and delivering is difficult.

15. Request for Reviews: There are an endless amount of places where people can post reviews about your business. If you had a positive response from any customer then it is important that you ask for a review so that you can boost your trust on several platforms and review sites.

16. Work on Site Security: It is easy to work on a lot of places but in the process ending up forgetting about the most important thing in your business. The entire online presence of your business depends on your website and its security. If it crashes or worse, get hacked, your entire trust will go down the drain that same instant. Make sure to look up your site security and have it fixed before something goes wrong.

17. Improve Site Speed and Design: A slow site and crappy design will never gain trust from customers. People expect top-notch service when they are ready to pay and thus your site needs to be really quick and have a catchy design to build trust with your customers. Any brand requires time and effort in creating trust. Customers don’t value a business overnight, years of consistent delivery of hard work and value is required for growing a trust worthy brand. The secret here is to keep working towards building a great brand and trust will follow in time.

Top 12 Elements of a Good Blog Post

Writing a good blog post will attract more traffic to a blog. It will make sure that your visitors don’t bounce back, rather they will end up consuming the full article and leave thoughtful comments or exit with an outgoing, hopefully affiliate link.

All this is easily possible if your blog post has several good elements that make the post a powerful piece of content. This way, the post will become catchy; it will be easily scanable with good formatting. It must also include quotes, infographics, slides and images for easy skimming and understanding.

Surely, there’s no definite way to write a post as every post has to include several of the below mentioned things depending on the requirement of the specific post.

Here are the top 12 elements that a quality blog post must include:

1. Catchy and Optimized Title: A good title must include the keywords that the article needs to rank for and it also must be catchy enough to bring the readers in. Even on the SERPs, a catchy title always gets more attention.

People are always looking for the latest and updated information and thus a title that has the name of the year at the end of it gets more value. Along with that, list based titles are catchy and get more clicks.

2. Really catchy Opening Paragraph: The work of the opening paragraph is to make sure the reader reads the next paragraph and so on. If the first few lines of the opening paragraph are sort and catchy, the readers will always keep reading and stay hooked till the very last paragraph of the article.

Here, the secret is in the really small and catchy sentences. If you have paragraph chunks at the top of the article, then chances are that people will close your article right away and you will get a heavy bounce rate.

3. A Table of Content: The table of content, preferably clickable so that the readers can quickly reach the places where the sub-headings are placed within the article.

This comes in really handy when the article is particularly large in size.

4. Lists and Sub-Heads: List based posts get a lot more attention than regular posts. Since it is points based, so the user already knows how many tips and ideas can a particular list based post can provide. Such posts are very easy to skim through.

However, not every post is list based, but even under a sub-head or a point, there can be several lists and bullets used for quick formatting and easy reading.

5. Images: Every post should include multiple images. It makes the post stand out and if the images are relevant then it adds to the content value of the post.

Use tools like Canva to make your images stand out and add more value to those images by adding some catchy texts on those images. A single image can include multiple smaller images like an image collage which are easy to make and can include more value in a small space.

6. Quotes: Use quotes from influencers and use relevant images with their headshots edited into a single image. Such catchy images work well on the social media and they are easy to make by using free tools like Canva. When you include such image quotes in your blog posts, they are often shared on the social media which brings in a lot of targeted traffic.

7. Infographics: When it comes to adding a lot of information in a single large image then infographics is something one should look into. Such large size graphics are basically complete with images and text, but they work even better when they are embedded in a quality blog post.

These infographics often gets linked from popular websites and media houses. This results in a lot of traffic to the blog that hosts such graphics.

8. Bullets and Points: When you write content in the form of bullets and points, instead of large chunks of paragraph, they automatically become easy to read. Most sub-headings can be easily broken into bullets and points for quick scanning.

Do note that when you write content in the form of points always mention the name of the point, don’t just start off with the sentence directly. Such points where you mention the name of the point makes it easy for the reader to quickly check the point list.

9. Slides: There are several sites that are built only for displaying the slides. If you are able to create catchy slides, they will get a lot of traction on the social media and soon people will start to link to your slide or your blog posts.

10. Out Going Links: It is important for a blog post to include several links that goes to good and relevant resource on the website. Along with that, make sure to link to authority websites and their content. The part of the search engine algo values the outgoing links that are linked from your site. If you do it properly, it will give you an SEO edge.

11. Author Bio: It is easy to include an author bio if you don’t have already. Simply edit the profile section of your word press blog and enter your author bio details. It mostly includes a few lines of yourself, links to your social media profiles and your website. However, it is up to you to write it in any way you wish.

12. An Ending: Every article should have a concluding ending. With a proper ending, the readers will be able to summarize the content and the main idea behind the article. A closing also leads the user to take several actions like posting a comment, or sharing the article on the social media.

The point that a reader has read the whole article and is now going through the conclusion means that the reader is fairly satisfied with your content. Such readers can be converted in more than one ways and one of the best ways to exit the user is to have his email id for further marketing. One needs to plan the blog posts well. A good post has several great features which, in a combined way help in growing the blog further. It will generate social media sharing, email subscriptions, affiliate sales and so many other benefits.

Step by Step Guide on How to Get your Guest Posts Published

Guest blogging was perhaps one of those holy grails of blogging that was pretty much kept secret for a very long time, till the message got out and the blogosphere got flooded by guest posts.

The best part about guest blogging is that you don’t need to have a blog, or build a readership or pretty much do anything to build an audience. One can simply leverage the power and reach of other bloggers and use it to your own advantage and benefits.

If your content is good and whatever you are selling is both high quality and relevant then there is nothing much that is required from your end as the target blogger who is going to publish your content already has a readership base on his blog, an email list for newsletter and social media reach and followers. In short, the bloggers are ready with their audience; you only need to have good content to keep feeding this hungry audience.

Here, in this article, we will discuss several steps to get your guest posts published quickly.

1. Build a Connection: Most bloggers who accept guest posts don’t publish content from total strangers. There are a number of things that can go wrong if someone accepts content like that, so in order to get a pitch read, one has to build a genuine connection with the blogger.

Start with blog commenting and post a really good comment on the latest post of the blog. After adding your comment, share the post on the social media and make sure to tag the blogger while sharing. Make sure to do this for months before pitching a guest post request.

2. Research the target blog well: Not all blogs are same, even if they are on the same niche; the way a blog writes and publish content is unique to it. In such a case, one has to learn the tone well so that the post is well received by the blogs audience.

Along with that, look into content formatting. Check how the sub-headings and other forms of content presentation are used. Try to make sure that your content looks similar in format when you send over your post to the blog owner.

3. Pitch content that isn’t already published on the blog: If the blog has been running for some time then it might be possible that a similar content to what you are planning to write is already present in the blog. This is why it becomes extremely important why you should always search the blog for content similar to what you are working on.

4. Make sure to write the article well: As a blogger and a writer, you should always edit and fix the article to its most polished form before publishing it. However, when you write for someone else, it becomes even more important to edit and check the article for hundred percent accuracy before forwarding it to the blog owner.

Do note that it becomes difficult to edit the posts at a later time for several reasons which are outside your control. But while the article is still with you, make sure to edit it properly.

5. Always be ready to edit and re-send the drafts: Most of the popular and premium blogs are difficult to get posts published. Their editorial standards are usually high on such A-List blogs. In such a case, be prepared to write, edit and re-send the articles as many times as the A-list blog asks.

Even if the draft you resend, gets rejected and you get more edits and corrections, you should still try to complete those edits and re-send the draft once again.

6. Be very polite while following up: Sometimes you don’t get a response when trying to contact the blogger. Everyday, pitches like yours, about a hundred of those are received by the blogger. It can be easily possible that the blogger is busy and might miss your emails. In such a case, always make sure to be polite and wait for their response.

This can be even more difficult when you send a draft post for publishing and you don’t get a response from the blogger. You might get tempted to scrap the guest post idea and pitch another blogger and get the post published. This is a bad idea, because when the blogger finally manage to post your content, it will be published elsewhere already. This will eventually cause duplicate content – thus it is always better to keep patience while guest posting.

7. Once published, share it enough: Now that your post is finally published, it is time to start sharing your content. Share your published guest posts on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social media sites. Feel free to share your content with your email subscribers or social media followers.

The more you share your content, the more authority you will gain for yourself. Try to get your guest post linked from other bloggers, that way your post will start to rank and trend.

8. Use the published post as a reference to get more guest posts approved: Now that your post is live, don’t stop here. Start pitching more blogs and this time, as a reference use this published post so that people can check your content quality before allowing you to guest post for them.

Bloggers want to see quality and actionable content and the moment they see a quality guest post published, they will start allowing you to add more content. Another thing to note is that, when a post is published on a bigger blog that has more authority, smaller bloggers who value the popular blog naturally accepts your pitch and allows you to post on their blog easily.

9. Set up an As-Seen-On page: Just like testimonials or about us, make a page that showing the list of all the guest posts that you have published so far. Similarly, one can also make a page that lists all the sites that has ever linked to you or mentioned you in their posts. This way you will have a reference to the posts that you have published and along with that, people will see your guest post quality and allow you and invite you to write for their blogs.

Getting your first guest post published will help you to build a port folio and use this as a reference for pitching more blogs. Make sure to target the bigger blogs too as these blogs has a huge authority and getting posts published on such A-list blogs helps a lot.

9 Ways to Utilize the Power of Existing Customers

Existing and repeat customers are a gold mine for any business. If a business has a lower churn rate then it is able to retain a good portion of its existing customers. This way, when the business adds new customers, the growth rate increases by a lot, as the existing customers are already retained.

This is however only the financial side of the business. Existing customers helps a business in many other ways, for example spreading the business by word of mouth and becoming a loyal ambassador of the company. Surely, the benefits are plenty, but much of these benefits have to be gained as everything depends on how you handle your current customers.

Here, we will cover several ways in which a business can make the most out of their existing customers.

1. Offer Customer only Products: Launch certain products for customers and introduce them in the existing pricing plans. The already subscribed paid customers will get this add-on for free as their existing plan did not have this new feature and product upgrade.

Lock certain features of this new upgrade for old clients and mention that one needs to be a year old customer to access this new feature.

2. Start a loyalty credit system: Let users earn some credits on every purchase they make. This way, the existing customers will earn and accumulate credits that they can use to redeem in some way and get free or discounted products and services.

This will encourage the existing customers to make some extra purchases in order to gain more credits. In a way, the customer is already paying to gain these credits but they will still think this whole process as getting a freebie and thank the business for their generosity.

3. Customer Feedback: It is important to listen to your customers. Anyone who is paying to get something can move to a competitor if they are better in some ways or your own system is difficult to work out. The customers are always ready to tell you what problems they are facing with your system, but you still need a setup to learn more about their issues. The best option is to set up a survey system where the customers can give their feedback and help you solve their issues quickly.

4. Up sale: If your customers have bought certain things from you then it is likely that they might buy some more stuff. Look for what else their business might require and if it is something that you provide then it is time to pitch them a relevant up sell opportunity.

Every business has more than one aspect and if you are able to sell something then it is quite possible to look into what else they might be looking for there lays your opportunity to sell more. For example a business might need web hosting, logos and designs, pay per click promotions, social media marketing, content writing and marketing. If you are able to provide any one of these services then it is likely that you should be able to provide the rest of the services too as most of these services are related to one another.

5. Stay Connected: Keep the customer in the loop. Even if it has been only a few days after the sale and you haven’t talked to the customer much, it might be too late before you start a conversation.

The moment you close a sale, it is important to keep an ongoing conversation with your customer so that you can do exactly what the service requires. Even keeping a few days of radio silence might break the customer relation that you should look to nurture.

6. Create a referral system: Most loyal customers refer a business anyway but to take this one notch up, you have to setup a referral system where your existing customers can promote your business and your products and earn a part of the income that is generated by a new client.

7. Build Testimonials: Asking for a testimonial is easy if you have some satisfied customers. Now that you have received your testimonial, it is time to display it on your homepage and your blog sidebars. Let people see that others are recommending you. Testimonials, especially from popular market leaders help a lot. Your customers recognize these celebrities and then read the testimonials and become further loyal to your business.

Along with testimonials, ask for ratings where ever possible. If you have an app then ask for Google play ratings etc. There are endless places where your customers can recommend you and give you nice 5 star ratings. This is the biggest power of having existing customers; they are able to promote a business faster than what one can accomplish by spending money.

8. Train your staff: Most good businesses with strong and growing paid membership base are spoiled by unhelpful staff. Make sure to train your staff so that they can handle your customer requirements, the way you used to handle it yourself. Sometimes, try to be a client yourself, or ask your friends and family members to pretend to be a customer and see how your staff deals with these clients. If there is something wrong with your staff, you will be able to find out that way.

9. Encourage social media content: Good customers who are happy with your service and products will often talk about your business on the social media. This is your opportunity to high light these stories and make them visible on the social media. Spread them, share them, run some PPC campaigns on them, promote them on your official pages and accounts – these success stories are your biggest digital assets and if you are able to make good use of it, your business will spread like wild fire and no competitor can do anything to block your progress.

New customers have a cost on them; it is the money that is spent to acquire them. On the other hand, existing customers don’t cost to acquire, they just need to be retained so that they provide you with continued business. One should do all that they can to retain the existing customers for creating long term successful businesses.

7 Types of Blogging Goals to Setup for 2023

It is again that time of the year when everyone starts to set their goals and targets for the upcoming year 2023. Every year we make several such goals but never really follow through on them. The biggest reasons why our goal making process fails is that we aim for too high and ultimately it becomes unreachable and at some point in time we our self realizes that our targets are impossible and we abandon our quest.

We need to be calculative to determine what we can truly achieve. For this to happen, we have to understand where we are currently and determine the path that we should take in the next one year to reach our end of the year targets. Feel free to break down the targets on monthly or quarterly basis so that it becomes further easier to track and achieve.

Today, we are going to discuss 7 tips to make the best blogging and marketing goals for 2023.

1. Don’t chase everything – It is easy to forget the actual targets once you start exploring your business and your niche. You will find gold mines everywhere and whatever you expand into will start to seem promising. Don’t lose your way in the process and stick to the exact goals that you have setup at the starting of the year. Doing too many things and not completing anything in particular is always bad for business.

Think about it deeply. If your target is to create one strong niche blog then don’t start twenty and build nothing.

2. Set a target to learn something new – It is a new year and with the starting of a new year, you should always plan to learn something new. Make sure this talent is strictly on niche so that it helps you in the long run. As a blogger, your immediate courses might be from learning languages like PHP, html and design and development studies.

3. Analyze what had worked and set goals to scale those – If you are very new to your business then there isn’t too many things that you can scale. However, if you are in this business for sometime then it is easy to analyze what has worked so far. Check what type of content is working for you, the type of landing pages that are converting, the newsletters that are selling and so on and so forth. List them up and start scaling them. Do more of what is working for you currently.

4. Set Social Media Targets – Making social media targets is always a tough call. So much changes in a year that it is hard to keep up. There are people who have made targets for Google+ from reaching 100k followers, to a Million and more, only to know that their work is going to go down the drain as GooglePlus was coming to a close.

With social media, your targets need to be dynamic. Every month you need to analyze where you are currently and then change your goals to make sure you keep up your momentum. Some things on social media do not change and that is micro blogging content. This content can be shared across all of your social profiles, so even if some social site does decide to close down, your content will still be flourishing on other similar sites.

5. Set up your Budgets – For some reasons, most people forget to allocate the required amount of budget for setting up these goals. If you don’t break down the budget into some of the major categories, like Pay Per Click Ads, SEO, Email marketing, Staff and Vas, Site and hosting etc. then there are several items that you won’t be able to plan for. If you are planning for PPC in your goals and you don’t have a budget for it, then it is best not to include it in the goal.

6. Identify Marketing Channels – Research and identify your marketing channels and setup specific goals for every marketing channel you might have. This way your goals will be more specific and you will know what you want to achieve.

Email Marketing: If you don’t have an auto-responder series then you can include that in your goals. Furthermore you can set some numerical targets for your email list and grow it with time.

Search Engine Optimization: Set some ranking targets, that way you will keep track of certain keywords that needs to rank better. Setup an excel sheet with those keywords and see how month after month, they improve on their current rankings.

Referral and Affiliate Setup: If you don’t already have an affiliate setup then you can put this in your goals. However, if you already have this setup done, then it is time to set some targets were you can aim to get this many affiliates at the end of every month.

Giveaways and Contests: Contests are excellent for goal settings as you can track various aspects of contests and see how they help with your overall marketing targets.

Organic Marketing: Comments, Forum posts, Guest Posts etc. are all part of organic marketing. As a blogger you can always take targets to make a set number of comments and forum posts and see how you reach your targets on a weekly basis.

7. Build an emotional Connect – This year, put this into your goal making. Take a target to do the following things:

Get into your Customers Shoes: Think and act like a customer. Do an actual check-out and see if your customers are able to buy your stuff smoothly or not. When you see some issues, talk to your customers and try to get some feedback on how you can improve the whole process.

Get yourself a Personality: This year, set a target to build a personality and make sure that your blog posts and other content is showing your newfound personality.

Develop a Story: Put this in your yearly goal to take out some time and start developing a story. Work on your story and fine tune it and deploy this story, part by part, over the year – via. several blog posts and other type of content.

Make sure to share personal pics: Now that we are talking about developing a brand story and connecting with your customers, it is important to share pictures and videos of your own personal life so that your customers feel like they are part of it.

Let this year be different, make goals that actually help you in achieving your targets and in the process improve your overall business.

Top 12 Tips to Build a Personal Brand Online

A business needs to sell. It needs to build a customer base, a recurring income and ultimately make money from the various activities it does.

But there is a personal side to every business. A side that connects well with the customers on an emotional level. It works because a business is raw and robot like that does its job and that is about it. The customers of the business get their work done but as soon as there is an alternative, they make their shift because there is no connect. All that changes if the customers are loyal and they stick to their brand. For this to happen, the business has to show their personal side and connect with their customers emotionally.

Here, we will cover several ways in which a business can build and develop their personal brand.

1. Personal Social Media Accounts: For a business, it is important to secure your brand’s exact term social accounts on all top-tier social sites. In the same way, it is equally important to register personal social handles and keep them unique across all social sites.

Even if you aren’t as active on the social media on a personal level, you still need to register on all social sites and check once in a while so that others can’t make fake profiles of you on social sites.

2. Share everyday work: Now that you have your personal social accounts, feel free to share your every day’s routine on the social media. This way, you don’t have to create content specifically for the sharing purpose, rather you can simply post your daily activity and keep your profiles active.

Posting your work on your business profile is relevant to your audience. This gives them transparent insights into your business and your followers like to keep checking these details daily, which increase engagement.

3. Post pics of family and vacations: Being personal with your audience helps in building long term trust and loyalty. However, posting the same pics daily does not adds much value. This is the reason why, once in a while when you are on a vacation, you should share your pics and videos on the social media. This not only tells them that you are away from business and should be returning shortly, but at the same time, they understand that you value the relations with family and friends which builds stronger bonds with your customers.

4. Run an office party and share it online: Any business likes to share their office pics and videos online. This is a great marketing tool as content travels faster than ads.

However, you need a reason to post those pics. Office birthday parties or any other event can be a great excuse for sharing office pics.

5. Do something good: Don’t limit your pics and videos to parties and fun activities only. You can do a lot more than just party. Take for example a road side plantation drive.

Personal Brand

If you do something good, it will not only be helpful towards your community but you will have a lot of content that you can share on your social profiles. Depending on the nature of such an event you can further share these same pics and videos on relevant social media groups and get further visibility.

6. Help a YouTuber Out: Look for YouTubers in your town and do a collab. This way, your business and your personal brand will get the power of the YouTuber’s reach and your content will spread faster on the social media.

YouTubers are powerful influencers who are not just active on YouTube as the same suggest but are pretty much active throughout all the social media networks. If a picture says a thousand words, a video says a million.

7. Join Facebook Groups: There are several groups on the social media. Every network like Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest have their own groups and boards where there are plenty of active members who are interested in a specific niche. Look for such groups that interest you and share relevant content and grow your personal brand.

8. Always Reply on Social Media: When you bring in your personal face on the social media, there will be a lot of followers who will comment and try to know more about you. This communication cannot be one sided and you have to respond to their comments and questions to keep this connection going.

9. Questions and Quiz: From time to time, make sure to ask questions and polls and quizzes to your followers. These questions need to be relevant so that your readers can respond and in the process make a stronger bond with you.

10. Connect with Influencers: There are a number of influencers who ignores the brand profiles and keep their distance. But when you bring in your personal voice, you will see that many of these influencers change their ways and starts to respond to your messages and questions. It is easy to connect with influencers if you are keeping your personal side up.

11. Build a Story around your Brand: If your story as a business, how you started and reached to where you are – is already an inspirational journey then everything is already set. All you have to do is to write it down and make it a great story.

If this isn’t the condition for you then you have to research a bit. Not everyone has a story but still you can write it by applying some creativity. Think about it, how you started and what challenges you faced. How you tackled your issues and grew with time and persistence. Your hard work will surely have a story of its own. If it is too difficult for you to craft your story then take the help of writers and get yourself a story written.

12. Automate and Schedule: Now that everything is set and going well, it is time to get serious. On social media one needs to be consistent with their updates. Use a scheduling tool and queue up enough updates and make a social media calendar with discipline and consistency.

Being personal on the social media help in leveraging the human side of your business. This is an easy way to build real and emotional connection with your audience. As a business, you should always keep your personal brand to propel your entire business forward.

Top 12 Must Have Skills for Blogging Success

As a blogger your work will mostly revolve around writing content, making it more readable and search engine friendly and once you are done with your content, you will have to start outreach and networking for getting yourself heard and your content consumed.

On the face of it, everything seems easy but once you start to actually do it, you will understand that the process is fairly complicated and your competition is doing pretty much the same, making it further difficult for you to stand out.

You still need to do the hard work but if you plan it out well and do it correctly then your progress will be faster.

Here, we will discuss some of the most important skills to develop in order to become a successful blogger.

1. Content writing: Take a target to write at least 3,000 words a day. You can either break it down to three articles or write one single article that covers the topic well. Even if you are a good writer you will still need practice because as a blogger you have to write a lot. You are expected to publish at least 2 to 3 articles a week and some of them need to be very long and in-depth. Then, you have to write several guest posts which are equally challenging as it needs to be of top quality, else other bloggers won’t publish it.

2. HTML and PHP: As a blogger, your content management system is going to be mostly wordpress. Even if you use a different CMS, you will still have the options to manage the features and designs by installing and removing plugins and themes. However, if you have basic knowledge of HTML, then there are plenty of customizations you can do easily. The more plugins you use, the slower the system gets. If you are able to add simple codes and get things done, it is a far better choice.

Learning to code isn’t just about fixing your own site. If you can take this to the next level then you will be able to make those plugins and themes or at least be able to customize them and provide the same as a service. This will help you make money on the side. There are plenty of bloggers who are incapable of fixing their blogs even if those fixes are simple and easy. This is where your expertise as a blogging coder will come in handy.

3. Networking talents: Blogging does not only mean that you have to keep adding content on your own blog. There are plenty of things that a blogger has to do, for example posting comments on relevant blogs, replying to comments on your own blog, doing guest posts on other people’s blogs. Much of these activities require networking and communicating with other bloggers.

4. Designing and photo editing: As a passable design talent, if you are able to use Canva and other relevant tools then you can get away with your blogging requirements. However if you are able to do more than that as a designer, for example use Photoshop and other similar tools for making logos, banners etc. then this talent will open up many possibilities.

Logos, banners, infographics etc. are items that are sold for a lot of money online. This will boost your blogging income and you will be able to brand yourself as a designer and charge premium for your services. Along with that, such talents also helps with link building as infographics are easy to publish on other blogs and get relevant backlinks for free.

5. Being Creative: As a blogger, you won’t find a guide that fits everyone. Much of your blogging activities require creativity and unique thinking. If you are able to do that, then you can achieve a lot of success in blogging. Think yourself as a growth hacker who finds new and different ways to achieve various blogging successes.

6. Basic SEO: The knowledge of SEO will help you to optimize your blog and your content for search engine visibility. This way, you will write for both your readers and the search engines. When your content starts to rank higher in search engines, you will gain a wider audience and your blog will grow faster.

7. Social Media: Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc. are excellent places to start sharing your content. But before you can do that, you have to build your profile in these platforms. Depending on your niche, you can also look for smaller social sites that are strictly on your niche. Such communities have dedicated audiences that help in growing your blog faster.

8. Patience: Blogging takes time to be successful. If you are expecting some returns quickly then blogging might not be for you. If you are thinking about blogging as a long term career then it is important that you learn to be patient and keep working hard even if you don’t see an immediate success.

9. Be a Problem Solver: There are many issues that people on your niche might have to go through on a regular basis. If you are able to locate these issues and write tutorial on how to fix the same then you will be able to build a dedicated audience easily. For this to happen, you have to think like a problem solver, someone who always finds the answers at the end and comes up with unique solutions.

10. Outreach Talent: As a blogger you have to reach out and let other know that you are here. This outreach can be for guest posts, for asking help and links, for letting people know that you have linked to them and shared their content. In short, you have to do outreach for a number of blogging things.

11. Time Management and Self Discipline: Being your own boss and doing things that you want to do is truly a gift. This way you don’t have to take orders from others and you can choose to do what you like and how you like. However, this can lead to laziness and soon you will find that you aren’t getting any work done and wasting your time with useless and mindless net browsing and watching shorts. Your ability to discipline yourself can help you in such situations and that way you will be able to manage your time better.

12. Research and Analytics: This is not just checking your own stats but learning to research your competitors and gain insights from it. Being analytical helps you to understand your and others stats well. You will know your audience better and will be able to craft better content to make sure that your audience feeds better. Blogging skills, some of which you already have and some you need to learn but as a blogger you have to constantly hone your skills to stay competitive. These are some of the important skills you can learn to get started with blogging and gain quick success.

15 CTA – Call to Action – Buttons to Include in your Blog

Blogging can be done for fun; it can be your hobby. One can blog without really expecting anything to gain out of it.

If you are blogging without any purpose of gain then CTAs aren’t a big concern for you. However, most people and businesses blog to get some sort of benefit out of it. It can be monetary, subscriptions, promotions etc. and for such targets, it is important to set up some buttons that calls for an action from your blog visitor.

In this article, we will discuss several CTAs and where to place them in your blog to get the maximum benefits.

1. The sidebar social media connect CTA: The top section of the sidebar is an important place. Most readers glance at this section before scrolling down into the content. At the top, just after the about page teaser details, if you place your social media connect buttons and link to your social profiles then plenty of blog readers will start following you on the social media.

2. The footer eBook download box: The footer section of a blog is a place which is optimized for conversion. Most readers who have bothered to read the article to the very end are already happy with your content and want to get more information if possible. In such a situation if you have an eBook with further relevant information then the reader will surely download your eBook and signup to your newsletter in the process.

3. Exit Intent Popup: Among the several email signup boxes, the exit intent has so far been the most effective one. Here, the user is going to leave the site anyway, so why not offer something to keep him connected with your blog. If the user drops his email id, even if he leaves the site at that point of time, you can still reach him by your newsletters.

4. Author Bio Optimization: Author Bio section is a place at the end of your blog post that tells the reader more about the author of that post. Mostly it contains a few lines about the author and has some links that goes to the site and the social profiles of the author. This space too can be optimized with text and links that attracts the users and make him take an action.

5. Email Signup Footer Box: An email signup box with a content upgrade, mostly in the form of an eBook is an easy way to gain your visitors email. This form of email marketing is clean because it does not forces the user and simply presents this signup form in an idle way and waits for the user to take the action by himself.

6. Various In-Line CTAs: In the article itself some form of CTAs can be added which will both blend neatly and at the same time it will be relevant as it is contextual. If the readers are hooked into the content, such call to actions become very powerful as they can get the users to take instant actions and yet, keep them on site for further content consumption.

7. Banner CTAs: Graphical banners can be added throughout the article and such banners can be linked to relevant pages where the users can take further action. Banners are a helpful medium to present content and since they are graphic rich, they can easily attract the visitor’s eye.

8. In-Post small landings: While entire landing pages are built to get more out of PPC ads, small sized landings which are optimized with an email signup form, a small excerpt and a button that suggests further action can be placed right into the content and the users can interact with this kind of landing while still reading the article.

9. Email Signup in-post: Certain times when the article demands the users participation for updates at a later time, it is always preferable that the users share their email ids to stay updated. In such cases, if the link to the email subscription form is added in the content itself, the users can easily click on it and add their email ids.

10. Share on Social Media: Visitors like to share your content on their social timelines and if there are buttons that suggests social media shares then the chances of getting tweets, likes and shares increases by manifolds.

11. Free Trial Offers: In-Line or banners that offer free trials are often seen to get more clicks. Free itself is a very powerful CTA text. This becomes even more powerful if the offer is relevant to the content the user is reading.

12. Pin it CTA on Images: Most blog posts have multiple images which can all be shared on the social media and especially on Pinterest which is a graphic powered content site. Pinterest has this feature where you can make your images sport a pin it button which gives the users an instant ability to share those images on their Pinterest account.

13. Embedding Tweets in Posts: Any tweet from twitter can easily be embedded within the blog post. Twitter provides codes to do this and all you have to do is to copy the embed code, directly in the blog post. The embedded post includes a tweet, like and share buttons which are strong CTAs for social sharing.

14. Tweetables and Quotes: Quotes, made from Canva for example, is a catchy piece of graphic that includes an image of the person quoted with a small quote text next to it. If you include a tweetable, just below the quote, several users will take the tweet action and the quote will be shared on twitter for future re-shares.

15. Asking to Comment: Certain blog posts attract more comments than others. The trick here sometimes lies with the content writer. If the writer prompts the readers to give their replies or their feedback on the current topic, the chances are high that the reader will drop a comment. Blogging for business makes sense when there are powerful CTAs included in your blog that helps you in boosting conversions. This conversion can mean different things for your business, depending on your objectives. In most cases, getting the reader to leave their email ids on your newsletter subscriptions is considered one of the best conversions. Simply use the power of creating CTAs and make your blog a conversion funnel for your business.