8 reasons to start an online business and work from home

As always, I’ve probably missed all of the important ones! Feel free to add a comment if you run an online business or work from home and have something inspiring to share.

1. Avoid the office politics bulls#@t

Whenever I catch up with my real-world friends I find that the conversation always turns to how annoying their office is in one form or another. A bad co-worker, a micromanaging boss, not enough pay, etc.

The sad thing is, sometimes these issues are really quite serious. I know several people who have taken stress-leave after being pushed to the limits by managers or board directors. I know of people who get so depressed because they don’t see any way out in such a sub-optimal economic climate.

Well, when you run your own business you have a lot of other problems but you don’t have that one. You can choose who you work with and who works for you. You might have to put up with some annoying clients in the beginning but as you grow you can “filter” it all out.

2. Put your energy into your own asset

While you’re kissing the butt cheeks of that Michael Scott-style manager/owner you’re also working on someone else’s asset. It might even be his asset! That creative thinking and after hours sweat that you pour into your work does nothing for you in terms of ownership and equity.

Now this might be the entrepreneur in me but I find that idea really quite abhorrent. I’d rather work harder and earn less if it meant that I was building my own asset vs another guy/girl’s.

If you feel the urge to create something for yourself and see it grow or fail but do it because it was your own thing then the online space could be for you.

NOTE: This goes for starting a blog as well. Set it up on your own host instead of a free one so you are in complete control.

3. The internet is the modern Gold Rush

Now to some serious financial reasons. The internet is booming. And it has been booming for a long, long time. And if you start to think about stats like the fact that there are more smart phones on Earth than toothbrushes and that whole nations are moving to high speed fiber networks, you’d be wise to invest in the internet while it is growing so fast on so many platforms.

Please don’t take this to mean that making money on the internet is a really easy thing to do. It isn’t. I imagine it’s probably a bit easier than mining for gold (or bitcoins!) but it is still a lot of work.

The great thing about the internet is that you aren’t just doing one thing. There’s shops, forums, Apps, websites, blogs, software, tools, etc. You can jump on the rush and find something new or something to compete with.

4. The barriers to entry are really low

If you’ve ever been to an economics class you’ll hear a lot about barriers to entry. They present serious problems for many industries and even entire countries. Think about all the things you have to do if you want to start a physical business like a factory: get capital investment, purchase machines and vehicles, hire staff, get insurance… the list goes on.

Online businesses, on the other hand, have relatively low barriers to entry. You really just need a domain name and some hosting to get started. The major outlay, at least initially, is your own time. Sure, you can invest money and hire designers, coders, writers, marketers, etc. but you don’t have to.

This particular point means that you can start an online business while you’re still working and leave your job once it starts to take off.

5. You can be who you really want to be

I could be wrong but I don’t see many people who work in offices being themselves. You have to jump through so many hoops to please clients and seniors and usually that means doing or saying things that aren’t totally consistent with the person you’d like to be.

Well, when you work from home you can forget all of that. Don’t shave if you don’t want to. Don’t wear that pencil-skirt if you don’t want to. In fact, my friend Mayi Carles usually works in her pyjamas!

More importantly, working for yourself means that you (hopefully) never again have to compromise on the kind of person that you want to be. You set yourself up so that you’re surrounded by people and things that are important to you.

6. You can go after the things that matter

Okay, so now we are really getting into the deep and furry stuff! When you work for someone else you are severely limited in the other activities that you can pursue. You might get some weekend time and after work time but what if your son has a thing on when you need to be at work? What about if you want to go overseas or do some charity work (Break: I have something VERY different happening in this regard soon) while you write your blog?

Well, when you work have a truly online business you can set yourself up to make those things possible. One of my closest friends quit his job and started an online business so he could spend more time at home with his boys. He works late but he has most of the day with them. That is priceless.

Again, these things are not just “givens” for any online business. You need to make it happen but, unlike the traditional workplace, it is possible.

7. Your industry is changing (and might not be around long)

I don’t want to sound alarmist with this point but an actual consideration for workers these days is that their job might not be there when they wake up tomorrow. It happens all the time.

This is both a result of new technologies, the economic climate, and the changing nature of globalization. So, in this regard, your job might get taken over by a computer or robot, made redundant or outsourced to a cheaper workforce in China, India or the Philippines.

The great thing about starting a blog or an online business is that it can be a very part time affair. That means you get a few extra dollars in the door but also set it up in a way that you could expand if things go pear shaped in the “real world”.

8. You can play video games at lunch time

I couldn’t end this post without the obligatory work from home smugness. Yes, you an set your own hours. Yes, I usually play Battlefield 3 at lunch time. Sometimes I finish work at 4pm to go play tennis with my brother.

The “do your own thing” that comes with owning your own business can, however, be a double edged sword. If you aren’t disciplined you will wind up not being very productive. And if you aren’t very productive you might not have enough money to eat.

When it is all said and done you can have a long lunch break or go to a movie if you want. It might mean you have to make up the time at 11:02pm (like I am now) but at least you have the choice.

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Social media is for all businesses

Big businesses have embraced social media, and some of the most successful marketing campaigns are a product of established firms taking risks on various social networking sites. Small businesses can also get in on the act though, and they can compete with the big guns for customer interest. All it takes is a good strategy, a little creativity, and in no time your company will be well equipped to take your products and services onto social media.

Source: minoamarketing.com

Persist with an idea

Be consistent with your grand idea by knowing exactly how many times you are going to tweet or post during the day, and this ensures that you don’t overload or deny your customers of important information. Tweeting too much will force your customers to tune out from your ideas, but tweeting just enough will keep your audience engaged and interested in what will come next. Updating 4 or 5 times a day is appropriate, but make sure it is at the same time of the day/night to ensure consistency.

Customer service is key

As interest in your business increases, there will be questions, or concerns communicated by customers, for you to respond to. In order to maintain a good relationship, it is crucial to respond as quickly as possible.Many people opt to complain via social media these days, but you must be consistent and respond on thesocial media platform. This will increase your reputation, and help humanise your company. Good customer service is key, and this is especially true over the Internet where everything is displayed in front of the eyes of millions.

Consider all networks

Each different social media tool will appeal to different kinds of people, so utilising each platform is essential for the success of any online strategy. It is advisable to research which platforms link in with your business as investing time in networking sites that will give minimal success can be a waste of time. The essential social media sites are Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, so remember to be heavily active on these as they will bring in the most customer interest.

Source: topdogsocialmedia.com

Research

Researching your competitors can be of great benefit in the long run, as you can learn from their mistakes. Get an idea of the social media tools your direct competition is using and see whether they are seeing benefits from it. This can save a lot of time conducting trial and error research, and time is money in the world of high modernity. You may see ideas that you wish to advance or implement into your strategy, so taking note of the competition is imperative.

Track your process

Having a thoroughly thought out strategy will do no good if you are not tracking your progress on a regular basis. The area that are worth tracking consistently are the follower growth, page views, post likes or shares, and impressions. Tracking this progress will ensure that you are reaching set goals, and will hopefully show that what started off as a small company, is now a huge player due to the success of a social media strategy.

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5 Smart Solutions For Women Entrepreneurs on The Go

This week I’m writing to you from my childhood home in Charleston, West Virginia where I’m caring for my aging parents who are health challenged at the moment. Today, I’m going to share my best tips for running a business when traveling. With all the new gadgets and apps available to entrepreneurs today, business on the go is a snap.

Maximize with Mobile Devices – The beauty of technology today is mobile devices are small, weigh very little and make business on the go accessible. There is a range in pricing but with cloud based software like Google Drive and Dropbox (no cost to less than $9 per month) you don’t need the storage capacity which historically made laptops and desktops more expensive. I currently use a desktop in my office and an iPad for travel. I gave up the laptop a few years ago as I wanted to relieve my shoulders and back of any extra weight during travel. I use a Sena external keyboard that’s compatible with my iPad, however there are a wide range of choices which make typing documents (like this article) easy and fast.

Activate your Apps – I’m continually surprised on a daily basis by the variety of no-cost to low-cost apps you can access for your business. There seems to be an app for just about every need we have – from meditation to productivity, there’s an app for you. I use the Cozi app to keep our busy family organized when I’m traveling. Everyone in the family can access the app to check-in and see what’s happening each day. You can color code each family member to make it easy for them to identify their schedule for sports and after school activities.

Outsource to Office Supply Stores - Whether it’s Staples, Office Max or your local small office supply store, let them handle your printing needs when you’re traveling. I emailed a document to the local Staples here this morning and it was ready in minutes and cost pennies.

Hooking up – I find the placement of electric outlets in hotel rooms interesting. They never seem to be quite where you need them for easy access and to make your work time more productive. That’s why I carry my own extension cord with multiple electrical outlets attached. I can set up my mobile office in the room where I’m most comfortable and have access to all my devices at my fingertips.

Charge it – I carry two chargers when traveling (one for my iPad and one for my iPhone) to ensure that both devices have a full charge at all times.

Get smart and take advantage of all the no-cost to low-cost mobile tools to help your business stay the course and create momentum no matter where your travels take you this holiday season.

Anything is possible. Everything is waiting for you.

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5 Ways to Increase Your Brand's Online Visibility

Increasing online marketing efforts is criticalfor businesses trying to reach more customers. Credit: Online Marketing image viaShutterstock View full size image

An easy way to increase your company's visibility is to boost your online marketing efforts.

Online marketing opens up a business's doors to customersthey wouldn't be able to reach otherwise, said Joe Palko, chief marketing officer for eCommerce platform provider3dcart.

"Implementing a strong, multifaceted online marketing plan can help your business stand out," Palko told Business News Daily.

Businesses that aren't promoting themselves online are missing out on a simple way to gain new customers,  Palko said.

"You want to build a strong customer base, who ultimately become ambassadors for your brand," he said. "Having an online marketing plan and publishing compelling online content allows customers and fans of your product to find your business as well as spread the word through their social networks."

To help small businesses increase their online visibility, Palko offers these five tips.

• Get busy blogging. Setting up a blog on your website can be a great way to drive more traffic to your site from potential and current customers. For blogs to be a successful tool, though, you need post frequently and use custom-written content that shows you're an expert in your field.
• Make it hot. Do your research, and find out which keywords for your market are "hot" and frequently used on search engines. Websites like Wordtracker.com allow you to see the amount of times a keyword has been searched in the last 24 hours. Once you've figured out what those "hot" keywords are, incorporate them into your posts.
• Go off-topic. Your articles and contributions to social medianeed to be interesting, and not sales- oriented.  You want the posts to be something that people share with their friends, such as tips or photos. For example, the 3dcart blog features everything from Valentine's Day ideas to tips on how to improve your online store.

[For a side-by-side comparison of the best online marketing services visit our sister site Top Ten Reviews.]

• Get authorized. Google Authorship is a free and easy way to claim all the content you've written and cultivate an online presence. To set it up, you'll need to go to your Google+ profile and fill out details about your background, experiences, and the websites where you are a contributor. Once you become a verified author, people will believe that your website is legit and in turn, view you as more of an authority figure.
• Spread the message. Use social media platforms likeFacebook, Twitter and Pinterest to share the content you've written. All you have to do is write a brief description about the post and then include a link to it. I highly recommend taking advantage of promoted posts on Twitter and Facebook because they can work for anyone no matter your budget. It's also a great tool to really reach out to and hit your target audience since you can be very specific in the reach for who should see the post.

Palko said businesses that aren't using online marketing to grow are losing ground to their competitors, who most likely are, each and every day.

"You want to grow your online following and improve your search engine rankings," Palko said. "The sooner you begin to effectively market your business online, the more dominance you will establish."

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Truth about online businesses

Push button millionaire programs do not exist - there is no such thing as get rich quick, unless it is a scam or you are lucky enough to win the lottery.
You CAN make money on the internet and a lot of it - but it will not be overnight - you must treat your online business as just that - A BUSINESS!!
It does not have to cost you a fortune, but you do have to invest a lot of time, or you invest more money to save you the time (i.e. outsourcing)
Certain software can help you , but again, it costs money.
The customers you gain online, MUST be treated the same as if you were face to face with them.
Form a business relationship, based on reliability, trust and honesty.
If you want to sell something, make sure you have checked it out thoroughly first - if you just sell something on its' owners recommendation and it falls short of what is expected - you look bad to your customers, and they will not rely on you the next time they need something.
Many years ago, I worked in a mobile phone shop - then the local supermarket started selling cheaper than we could - but people came to me as I knew what I was talking about, I was friendly and helpful, and they were confident that if they did have a problem, I could sort it out for them.
I treat my online customers the same way - and you should too.
Think of the standards you expect from other people, and show the same respect to your customers.

LinkedIn to Let Users Bedazzle their Profile Pages

Among social media outlets, LinkedIn (LNKD) is one of the more straightforward: a respectable photo, a flattering but brief work bio, and perhaps some quirky personal interests. A little dull maybe, but that’s about all a recruiter needs to know about you.

That’s about to change: This week, LinkedIn announced that users will soon have more design license over their profile pages, with the option of adding  stock images (some pencils, a laptop, or flowers, for example) or a custom backdrop—similar to what’s already available on Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR). The banner background is available only to premium subscribers now but will be rolling out to all users in a few months.

I’ve added an image of a jacaranda tree to my profile (right).

STORY: Facebook Succeeds Because Deep Down, We're All Stalkers

The background is a small and subtle change, but it does reflect a willingness to use design to engage users at LinkedIn, which has thus far kept the profile pages corporately uniform. “It’s a natural next step for users to own their professional real estate,” says LinkedIn spokeswoman Kenly Walker. “It’s an opportunity for people to be more unique.”

Before you start stressing out about hunting down the perfect uniquely-personal-but-still-professional-enough photo, consider that recruiters might not really care too much. Those in creative industries might value candidates with a little more flair, but “more recruiters are concerned with your background and professional experience,” says Derek McKechnie, managing partner at recruiting firm Lucas Group. If you really want to declare your love of wine—or your dog, or live-action role playing—just include it as a bullet in your interests section, he adds. It shouldn’t be the first thing a recruiter learns about you through a splashy background banner.

With the new features, LinkedIn is doing more than encouraging users to put their most design-y foot forward. It is also eager to keep its users invested and engaged. Facebook, Google, and Twitter are increasingly being used as professional and job-hunting services; Zappos recently announced that it was launching its own social network for aspiring employees. “Personalization is the Holy Grail,” said Dipchand (Deep) Nishar, LinkedIn’s senior vice president of products and user experience. Get a user to spend time making his profile just so, and he’s more likely to come back again—and again.

STORY: UnGoogle Me: The Case for Scrubbing Search Results

The company declined to comment on whether users will eventually be able to control other aspects of their profile design, such as font and layout. If you want to do that, for now you’ll still need an old-fashioned resume.

STORY: The Case for Scrubbing Search Results

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8 Strategies For B2B Marketing

Here we are in the back half of the year. Chances are, you’re thinking about how to guide your team toward hitting your numbers for 2012. Marketing-generated revenue is on the line, and the task of planning next year’s marketing budget is looming. The good news is, now is a great time to get your team thinking about both short-term goals and long-term activity. Here are eight concepts to focus them on.

Short-Term Winning Strategies

1. Play The Volume Game: Do your team members know exactly what they need to do to hit your marketing team goals? High-performing marketing teams understand the volume of marketing activity and precise actions they require to hit their targets. In fact, the best marketing cultures rally around these numbers, which are closely tracked and understood throughout the marketing department.

It is not difficult to run numbers through a marketing funnel tool. Many calculators exist for doing so, or your team can create its own using conversions at all stages (either your internal conversion rates or published averages). As a result, your team will be able to predict how much activity is needed in order to hit revenue numbers and plan its activities, such as number of programs, contact data purchases, and programs spend. Beyond running the numbers for the year and quarter, consider requiring team members to run the funnel numbers prior to the launch of each individual program. You’ll want to set the precedent that these figures will become the success measures for programs and individual performance of marketing team members.

2. Assess The Quality Situation: Great marketing campaigns start with great contact data, yet all too often the state of the marketing database is left to chance. In fact, according to SiriusDecisions Research, between 10 percent and 25 percent of B2B marketing database contacts contain critical errors. Imagine the net impact on marketing programs of a database that is only 75 percent marketable. A short-term fix is to assign someone on your team stewardship of the data. Having that person get a handle on the current state of the database and understand how to fix it quickly will prevent negative impacts of incorrect data on your campaigns. Be forewarned, however, that databases grow and change quickly, so your data quality efforts cannot be a point-in-time fix. High-performing marketing departments have assigned owners of the data, often part of the marketing operations function, and an ongoing plan for assessing and repairing data quality. Make this part of your long-term core strategy, and you’ll see positive results over time.

3. Take An Extra Step In Qualifying Your Leads: Are all of your marketing leads going directly to sales? Fully qualifying your marketing leads into sales-ready opportunities with the help of teleprospecting could dramatically improve the quality and conversion of leads that end up in your sales pipeline. Studies show that marketing leads sent directly to sales may not receive follow-up (as much as 50 percent, according to MillerPierce VOC) because sales folks responsible for closing business may not have the cycles to fully qualify and convert marketing leads. Employing a teleprospecting effort, with a dedicated calling team, ensures no marketing lead is left behind. This approach requires agreement with sales leadership on the specific definition of a fully qualified sales-ready lead and can be a great boost to help everyone meet their goals.

4. Get Feedback: In addition to reviewing metrics from the sales automation tool, make sure your team members are constantly engaging with sales to discuss their perception on leads passed and opportunities created. The definition of marketing success also includes the perception of sales, and it is important for marketers to understand the perceived value of the leads they are passing. Doing so will allow your team members to actively engage in dialogue with the members of the sales team about the real (rather than perceived) results and reset any misconceptions. The process will build the relationship with sales, and your team will likely get some good feedback about ways marketing can support sales through the selling process. 

Long-Term Gain Strategies

5. Assess The Targeting Situation: Ensure that you have crossed the “T” in targeting. With a large volume of marketing activity, both inbound and outbound, happening in your department, it can be easy to lose resolution on the target. To ensure you have all of the right target buyers in your database, encourage your team to analyze historical purchase data. Your team should use data from sales automation, marketing automation, and your CRM system to identify as much as possible about the target buyer and other influencers who were involved in the buying process. After all, the shortest path to a sale is to involve all of the influencers from the beginning to get them aligned. In addition, take note of the length of the buying cycle and average deal size. This information will help you frame the schedule and frequency for marketing activity required to hit future goals.

Once target buyers and influencers are determined, your team should evaluate your prospect database to confirm that it has these buyers--both the primary targets and influencers--in the right volumes. Your team can again leverage a marketing funnel calculator to determine the correct database size and take steps to grow the database if needed. This is a great time to append missing contact info (email/phone), add segmentation criteria, such as demographic/firmographic info (industry/title), or include behavioral data, such as installed technology data.

6. Persona Research: The emerging trend of B2B buyers’ decreasing their engagement with salespeople until they’ve narrowed their options to just a few solutions is not going away.

Now more than ever before, your company’s success requires content that is grounded in deep insight about buyers’ decision to choose you over a competitor, or to do nothing at all. Marketers on your team need to become experts in their target buyers, how they buy, and what is important to them in order to be successful.

As a marketing leader, it is incumbent on you to instill the importance of this in your team and move them away from a culture of creating stuff that meets the sniff test of all the smart people on the team. Drive them to understand what each of your buyers wants to know at every step in their evaluation process and create relevant content to support it. Establish formal programs and ongoing measurement for team members who are responsible for researching, documenting, and communicating buyer persona information. To reinforce the desired behaviors, add to their performance goals metrics for number of win/loss interviews conducted and number of sessions where they communicate insights from the research across the marketing team.

7. Messaging Alignment: Marketing creates a lot of stuff. And it is easy to get in the habit of creating unnecessary new stuff to support new demand gen activity. One way to combat that is through planning. Once your team is aligned around the target buyer, conduct an inventory of the content you currently have. Have team members review all content, checking to ensure it maps to the messaging themes of the persona and establishing how the buyer expects to use that content in his buying process. The results can be captured in a simple matrix that will easily the identify gaps that exists and allow you to plan for content creation.

To further align the team and ensure on-point messaging, consider conducting a workshop where you identify all relevant messaging themes for your target buyer, as well as important messages for your business (e.g., to support product releases), and plot them on the calendar for the year, aligning all of your team’s marketing activity, such as events, demand gen, product launches, PR, social media, etc., under the messaging themes.

As your team works through the exercise, you’ll want to create repeatable top-of-funnel programs for messages that are important to the target buyer and can be repurposed throughout the year to net new prospects. You’ll also want to build repeatable nurture programs for leads that fall out of the funnel. Doing so will give economy of scale and remove the need to create unnecessary content. Plus, your team will have a messaging map that shows exactly what is planned for the year in terms of activity and how the pieces fit together.

8. Measure, Analyze, And Hold Accountable: With the tools available today, there is no excuse for not being nimble and adapting in real time, yet busy marketers can easily lose sight of tracking the effectiveness of campaigns in real-time and miss the opportunity to adjust to hit goals.

Today, marketing leaders need to foster a culture of numbers accountability, expecting their teams to understand the performance of their efforts and eventually be able to project results of future efforts based on past performance. And while it may be a new direction for some marketers, focusing on the quantifiable results will help them understand what tactics work and what do not so they will become more strategic about their future planning and decision-making. Make sure that your team formalizes around what it measures, having metrics for both overall macro performance, such as YTD numbers, as well as microlevel metrics for individual program performance.

-- This article was written in partnership with AG Salesworks.

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The Top 10 Ways to Get the Traffic You Crave

Sometimes I wonder if the Internet turned us all into a bunch of traffic junkies.

I mean, you’ve felt the cravings right?

Oh, sure, it starts out innocently enough.

You build a website, start a YouTube channel, create a podcast, whatever your passion may be. You create some content. A few people stop by and compliment your work, giving you that thank-God-somebody-finally-noticed-me feeling.

That’s when the cravings start. Not strong, at least not at first, but you find yourself spacing out at odd moments, like when you’re driving or at dinner or watching TV, drifting off into a silent little scheming session about how you can get more visitors.

And it gets worse.

You go from someone just toying with this whole online marketing thing to a serious student, Googling for traffic strategies on your lunch break, going to webinars instead of movies, and even studying blogs like Copyblogger (muahahaha!).

But you know what?

I totally sympathize. I’m the King of traffic junkies, going so far as to dedicate my entire blog to it, and after studying it for years now, I’ve slowly but surely figured out what works.

The next time you find yourself jonesing for a few more visitors, give these strategies a try:

10. Buying pay per click (PPC) ads

Listen to the prevailing wisdom, and you’d think this one would be numero uno, but here, I have it as #10. What gives?

Well … listen:

Buying PPC ads does work. I do it. I’m even starting to make money from it.

But it’s pricey. These days, many keywords run you more than one dollar per click, and if you’re going to do that for long, you’d better have a proven sales funnel optimized for particular keywords.

Most of us don’t. In fact, most of us also have more time than we do money, making the whole idea of paying for traffic unpalatable.

9. Chasing free press

If you can’t afford advertising, you’ve probably wondered how to get some free press.

You think a mention on the nightly TV news, a radio interview, or an article about you in a newspaper or magazine will send you a huge flood of traffic.

The truth?

Not really. Yes, getting free press continues traffic, but it may not be the numbers you’re hoping for, unless you land on the front page of the New York Times or get interviewed by Oprah. And obviously, those are hard to do.

To make it work, you have to put real effort into it. In my opinion, chasing free press is worthwhile if you’re trying to become a nationally recognized authority. If you’re not there yet, consider some of the other strategies first.

8. Dedicating yourself to a social network

Social networks like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and Pinterest have hundreds of millions of users that are self-organized around every imaginable topic. Having a presence on each of them must be a smart strategy, right?

Yes and no.

If you’re publishing remarkable content on a regular basis, social networks will be consistent winners in your traffic stats. You can also get massive spikes in traffic from when something you publish goes viral.

Problem is, you’ll spread yourself too thin. The only people who can effectivelymaintain a presence on each of them are social media supergeeks or business owners with entire teams of people dedicated to nurturing the network, day in and day out.

Most of us don’t fall into either of those two camps, so for us, the smarter strategy is picking just one social network where your audience seems to congregate and then putting in the time and energy to really do it right. You can focus on others later.

7. Expanding into other media

In a similar vein, a lot of content marketers think they need to dominate all media. They want to have a blog, podcast, YouTube channel, book, everything.

In the beginning, it’s a mistake, because once again, you’re spreading yourself too thin. However, once your audience is established in one medium, expanding into others becomes a much smarter strategy. Here’s why:

The audiences in each media don’t overlap as much as you’d think. The people who read blogs about marketing and the people who listen to podcasts about marketing are two relatively distinct audiences. So, by expanding into other media, you can instantly increase your potential reach.

This is what happened for Derek Halpern. He already had a successful blog —Social Triggers — and then he expanded into video by creating a YouTube channel. He essentially doubled his traffic by reaching a new audience.

6. Enlightened SEO

Most people totally misunderstand SEO.

They think it’s about technical aspects like pure keyword frequency or link architecture. Yes, those are factors, but any SEO expert will tell you they can only take you so far.

The most important factor?

Links from trusted sources.

For example, a link from Seth Godin is worth infinitely more than a link from a spammy directory site. (The spammy link will probably actually hurt your rankings.) That’s because Seth only links to stuff he thinks is awesome, and in Google’s eyes, he’s been proven to be good judge of quality content.

So, how do you get links from Seth (or any other trusted site, for that matter)?

Simple: Create something awesome.

Not just a little bit awesome, either, but so awesome that influential people can’t help talking about it.

Get that part right and the rest of SEO is much easier.

5. Guest blogging

If you’ve been reading my posts for long, you know I’m a huge fan of guest blogging. In my opinion, it’s the most effective traffic strategy there is, assuming you do it correctly.

So why is it #5?

Because it’s hard.

While the long-term results of guest blogging are stunning, most people haven’t learned to write and think well enough to land a spot on the biggest blogs in the world. They can with practice and training, but some of the other strategies here are easier to implement.

Such as …

4. Interviewing authorities in your space

What? How does interviewing a bunch of big shots get you traffic?

Well, here’s a little secret:

Traffic comes from links, and links come from a combination of two things:incredible content and powerful connections.

By themselves, interviews aren’t the greatest content, but they are awesome for connecting with influential people. Be respectful of their time, and ask insightful questions, and you might be surprised about how long they remember you.

You don’t even need a big audience. When I was a beginning blogger, I landed interviews with about half a dozen New York Times best-selling authors, and I could count my readers on my fingers and toes.

Give it a try. This is one of the easier traffic strategies to implement, and it’s amazing how many connections it can create for your time.

3. Building your email list

What’s the easiest way to get more traffic?

Email your existing subscribers.

Let’s say you email a link to a new blog post to your 1,000 email subscribers. 20%, or 200 of them, click on the link. Of those 200, a dozen or so share it with their friends on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and so on, sending you another 100 visitors.

That’s 300 visitors from one email. You can also repeat the process as many times as you like. Publish three great blog posts per week, and you get yourself 900 visitors a week, easy as pie.

That’s why building an email list is so important. It’s traffic on demand.

It’s so important, in fact, that increasing the size of your email list should be moreof a priority than just getting traffic. So, put up an email subscription box your site, pronto, preferably with a nice, juicy incentive to make joining your list irresistible.

2. Writing a big ol’ list post

Ever get a little sick of list posts?

Yeah, me too. They’re everywhere, and most of the people who write them wouldn’t recognize an original idea if it arrived priority mail from God, with neon lights and polka music.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write them, at least occasionally. Here’s why:

They get crushing amounts of traffic.

Even if it’s as boring as watching stoplights change on a country road. (Ideally, of course, you’re going to work so this isn’t the case.) Even if not a single person reads it to the end.

If you doubt me, go ahead and write a post about 50 ways to do something your audience might like. I’m betting it’ll be the most popular post in the history of your site.

1. Crafting the perfect headline for your content

If you could multiply your traffic by 50 times in five minutes, would you do it?

No-brainer, right? Well, listen to this:

A few years ago, John Wesley from Pick the Brain wrote a post that only got 100 visitors, and he was really disappointed. He thought maybe the headline was the problem, so he deleted the post, changed the headline, and republished the exact same post, and it got 5,000 visitors. You can read the entire case study here.

What’s so amazing is that type of story is commonplace. The difference between a good headline and a bad one is very often thousands upon thousands of visitors, and you can change them in minutes.

Granted, learning to write a great headline does take time.

If you’ve never studied it, start with How to Write Magnetic Headlines. Also, be sure to grab a copy of Headline Hacks, maybe the most popular content I’ve ever published.

Whatever you do though, don’t make the mistake of thinking your headlines are insignificant. In my not-so-humble-and-excessively-qualified-opinion, getting better at writing headlines is the fastest and easiest way to skyrocket your traffic.

Nothing else even comes close.

And yes, it applies to every type of content. I don’t care if you’re running a YouTube channel, a podcast, or publishing a free report; your headline is more important than the rest of the content, combined.

But don’t take my word for it

Test it.

Not just your headlines, but everything I said above, and let the results speak for themselves.

Because the honest-to-goodness truth is, all of this is totally worthless if you never use it. Doing something is the traffic strategy that beats them all.

Of course, nobody wants to hear that. That’s why I had to sneak it in at the end.

But you know it’s true.

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