11 Ways To Boost Your Blog Readership

Starting a blog is an exciting venture. Whether you’re doing it to help promote your business or just as a personal enrichment activity, it’s your chance to broadcast your ideas to the world. But, as excited as you are about your posts, it will take some time before you build up a significant reader base that is also excited about your posts.

Here are eleven easy tips you can utilize to help boost your blog readership from the beginning of your online writing adventure. Follow these tactics and you’re likely to see a boost in stats in the days and weeks that follow.

1. Network

Get involved in the blogging community and network with other bloggers. If they start to mention your blog in their posts, their readers will be intrigued and will check out your blog. There are forums and special events that you can participate in to meet with the other bloggers. You can also network by reaching out to other bloggers whose blogs you respect.

2. Promote it in your email signature

Think of your email signature as a digital business card. This is where you can provide your contacts with your pertinent contact information. By including your blog URL in your signature, those who you communicate with will have easy, instant access to your site.

3. Add to forum signatures

Online forums are another fantastic place to promote your blog. There are forums about every subject, so it will be easy for you to find one or more with people who have similar interests to what are discussed in your blog. By adding it to your forum signature, your blog URL will appear in every thread in which you post. It’s a subtle way to gain readers and will look less self-promoting than just adding posts that are asking people to read your blog.

4. Give something valuable for free

No, you are not going to loose money in the process. Something valuable could be in the form of an eBook, a report, audio file, screencast etc that you made. You can offer this as a bonus to users who subscribe to your blog. This technique is usually used with an email signup tied to an autoresponder.

5. Build a landing page for subscribers

This option can go really well with the “giving something away for free” option. You can build a squeeze page whose soul purpose is to convert the visitor into a reader by giving them something valuable for free then you drive traffic to this landing page.

6. Engage your readers by encouraging commenting

It’s not only important to gain new readers but also to ensure that they will keep visiting your blog. That’s why it’s important to get them engaged.One way to engage your readers is to pose questions to them; ask them for their opinions, advice and experiences as they relate to your blog post. After all, who doesn’t love to provide others with their advice and opinions?!

7. Put it on business cards

Business cards are inexpensive and easy to have made. Business people have been publishing their website information on their business cards for years, so why not include information about a blog? Even if your blog isn’t connected directly to a business, you can have business cards made with your blog information.

8. Submit your URL to search engines

Search engines don’t automatically detect every single website that is ever created. Sometimes you need to speed up the cataloging process by submitting your URL to the search engines. The popular engines often will have a “submit” link that you can utilize to add your blog. Keep in mind, just because you submit your URL doesn’t mean it’s going to appear on the first page of results. Nonetheless, getting your blog listed with Google, Yahoo, and the likes, is a great first step.

9. Utilize tags

Once you have your blog listed with the search engines, tags will help ensure that it appears more frequently in search results. With each posting, pick three to five main subjects to tag. The tags that are often most searched are people’s names.

10. Set up an RSS feed

Readers who utilize your feed will easily be able to access your new posts as they are published. This is a great tool to retain your current readership! If you use WordPress as your blogging platform then you get this by default.

11. Make it easy to subscribe

Offer an email subscription option as well as the RSS subscription. Some readers just like the good old email subscription method. Make sure the subscription option is easily visible to your site’s visitors (some people have a tendency to go out of their way to make it hard to find).

I am sure I haven’t covered all the easy ways to boost your blog readership techniques so please feel free to share your tips in the comment area below.

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Selling Confidence: How Optimism Can Bolster Your Sales Team

A sales team needs optimism to succeedin the face of rejection. Credit: Half-full glass image viaShutterstock View full size image

Sales is like acting: You may have something great to offer, but no matter how hard you try, some people just aren't going to like it. Just as actors don't nail every audition, a salesperson won't close every deal or chase down every lead. Dealing with this kind of rejection day after day can really wear your salesteam down — if they don't have the right mindset.

"One of the most crucial skills you can help your sales team develop is the ability to effectively manage adversity and overcome rejection through the power of positive thinking," said Larry Caretsky, president of customer relationship management software providerCommence. "With rare exceptions, a salesperson faces more losses than wins. As a sales team leader, you'll need to find a way to keep your group motivated and focused on overcoming the many obstacles they'll face in the course of cold calling and pitching proposals."

Inspiring optimism in your sales team isn't always easy, but you can do it with the right techniques. Caretsky shared three tips for helping your team take the "glass half full" approach to its work.[Customer Loyalty: 5 Tips for Sales Reps]

• Retrain worn-down employees. Constant rejection when making a few dozen calls a day can take its toll on even the most optimistic person. The first sign that sales representatives are struggling comes when they claim that the product is too expensive or does not provide the functionality customersare looking for. Those salespeople then expect rejection from every additional call. This may mean they require more training on what differentiates the product from the competition. If this is the case, it's best to get those representatives off the phones and into a training session, where you can fine-tune their approaches and rebuild confidence.
   
• Meet one-on-one with your sales staff. It's important that your sales team recognizes the direct connection between their attitudes and their results. As a leader, you can help by assessing individual performance and talking through how each person's perceptions affect his or her results. Different techniques will appeal to different individuals, so it's best to take a personalized approach.
   
• Encourage team members to share success stories.Gather the team and have all salespeople share stories about how they overcame obstacles and reversed setbacks. By learning how other team members succeeded after initial adversity, sales professionals can learn to be more optimistic in their own thoughts. You can also review one of the most impressive wins your team had for the quarter and outline what enabled that sales representative to win the deal. This is a great way to build confidence in the company's product and service, and do some team building at the same time.

"We're not 100 percent in control of our circumstances, but we can control the attitude with which we confront them," Caretsky toldBusiness News Daily. "A prospect can tell in just a few minutes if you are confident and passionate about what you are selling and if you are prepared. Your confidence often breeds confidence in the prospect, which more often than not leads to winning the sale. By choosing to see the glass as half full, we can position ourselves for greater success."     

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10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy

There are generally two approaches to social media policy making. Some organizations handle social media in an evolutionary way. Chad Houghton, the director of e-media and business development at the Society for Human Resource Management, told me that he thinks, “it might be beneficial not to create some arbitrary rules without first seeing where the opportunities and risks really are.”

Other organizations, meanwhile, feel more comfortable establishing a clear policy from the outset. IBM, for example, has published their social media guidelines publicly for anyone to read. It's a great policy, though rather long.

Whether you're writing your social media policy from the get-go, or letting it develop organically in reaction to situations as they arise, here are 10 things you should definitely consider. These 10 tips will help you steer clear of pitfalls and allow you to focus on what’s important: engaging the customer.

1. Introduce the purpose of social media

All policies need to address what's in it for the reader/user — what should the reader take away after reading the policy? One of the common themes I kept coming across in introductions to social media policies is the idea that the policy should focus on the things that employees canrather than what they can't do. For those of us who have experience writing policies, this is a real paradigm shift.

But that’s the spirit of social media — it’s all about leveraging the positive. And that needs to be evident in the policy. Houghton agrees, “The old way of doing things is to create an unnecessarily restrictive model of engagement that prevents companies from leveraging new media appropriately.”

2. Be responsible for what you write

Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery, explains that “people tend to interpret having the ‘right’ to express themselves online as implying a lack of consequences when they say stupid things.” That's not the case. Your organization and its representatives need to take responsibility for what they write, and exercise good judgment and common sense.

"Dooced" is an Internet expression that means to lose one’s job because of things one says on one's website or blog. No one wants that to happen, of course, so using common sense and being responsible is important.

3. Be authentic

Include your name and, when appropriate, your company name and your title. Consumers buy from people that they know and trust, so let people know who you are.

4. Consider your audience

When you’re out in the blogosphere or Twitterverse or other social media channels, remember that your readers include current clients, potential clients, as well as current/past/future employees. Consider that before you publish and make sure you aren't alienating any of those groups.

5. Exercise good judgment

Refrain from comments that can be interpreted as slurs, demeaning, inflammatory, etc. The Internet is full of varied opinions, and it's okay to share yours, but you never, never, never want to be branded a racist or narrow-minded or an unstoppable hot-head.

Your employees should understand that companies can and will monitor employee use of social media and social networking web sites, even if they are engaging in social networking or social media use away from the office. Eric B. Meyer, an associate at the labor and employment group of Dilworth Paxson LLP, reminds us that, “employees should always think twice before hitting ’send‘; consider what could happen if your organization sees what the employee publishes on the Internet and how that may reflect not just on the employee, but also the company.”

Bottom line: good judgment is paramount regardless of whether an employee's online comments relate directly to their job.

6. Understand the concept of community

The essence of community is the idea that it exists so that you can support others and they, in turn, can support you. You need to learn how to balance personal and professional information, and the important role that transparency plays in building a community. Your community shouldn't be an environment where competition is encouraged or emphasized, but rather a platform where your customers or users feel comfortable sharing, connecting, and receiving help.

7. Respect copyrights and fair use

This should be a no-brainer, but just in case: always give people proper credit for their work, and make sure you have the right to use something with attribution before you publish.

8. Remember to protect confidential & proprietary info

Being transparent doesn’t mean giving out the Colonel’s special 11 herbs and spices used in KFC chicken or the recipe for McDonald's Big Mac special sauce.

Those examples seem pretty self-explanatory, but Meyer, points out that, “employers may fail to make employees aware of any obligation they may have to protect confidential or proprietary information.” Transparency doesn’t give employees free rein to share just anything. Meyer says that every state has a law governing trade secrets.

Therefore, employees who share confidential or proprietary information do so at the risk of losing their job and possibly even ending up a defendant in a civil lawsuit. At the very least, companies will seriously question the judgment of an employee who shares confidential or proprietary information via social media. It's a good idea to make sure all of this is clearly laid out in your social media policy.

9. Bring value

Social media will more likely pay dividends for you if you add value to your followers, readers, fan, and users. Michels, for example, said he’s used blog posts as a “means to frame the conversation around specific issues and make sure that our position is heard and commented on," or as a way to build buzz for upcoming products or services.

Joe Homs, the CEO of Headset Bros., shared with me two instances where social media has provided an opportunity to bring customer value. Once, on Twitter, they ran across a person who was looking for a recommendation for a product they sell. A simple message to her that was quick and relevant allowed them to make a fast sale.

Another time, on Facebook, a customer complaint about not receiving an order led to the realization that their shipping company had lost the package. Sending the customer a new package overnight fixed the problem and they eventually worked out the problem with the shipping company as well.

Still confused about the different ways you can provide value using social media? Check out the video from Barry Judge, the Chief Marketing Officer at Best Buy, embedded below.

(Thanks to Christine Tierney for the heads up on this great video.)

10. Productivity matters

I asked Homs if he was concerned that his employees would lose focus if they were spending too much time on social media sites. His comment: there's not much to balance. He told me, “talking to people (over social media or otherwise) is our ‘real’ job.” Headset Bros estimates that 90% of their business is communication with customers (online and by phone). To help with the rest, they’ve automated most of their other business functions.

But, your social media usage won't get you very far if you don't execute on the core competencies of your business. Remember that in order for your social media endeavors to be successful, you need to find the right balance between social media and other work.

Sample social media policy

The Headset Bros. were kind enough to let us republish their social media policy. It's short, but that's by design, because CEO Joe Homs told me, "we want people to read it."

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10 Questions Before Setting Up a Home Business

Getting ready to set up a home business? Before going any further, answer these 10 questions thoughtfully. Your answers will prove vital in determining whether or not to proceed in setting up your home business. Sure, it may seem arbitrary to spend time answering questions when so many other tangible tasks must be completed, but this step is truly the most important part in the whole set up process. Why? You want to make sure your home business dreams match with your current reality.

1. Why do you want to start your own business?
   
2. What is your product offering and what makes it better than the competition?
   
3. Who is your customer?
   
4. How will you afford the start-up costs of your business? (All businesses have some start-up costs.)
   
5. When will you work on your home business - especially if you are a stay-at-home parent?
   
6. Where will you work on your home business? (Is there a dedicated home office space or will you share common area with your family?)
   
7. Are you comfortable self-promoting? (i.e. will you actually be able to sell your product or service?)
   
8. Are you a motivated person by nature? (In home business, there is no one standing over you to ensure your work gets done. It takes pure will power and self-motivation to run a successful business out of your home.)
   
9. What does your family think about you working out of the home? (Family support is critical.)
   
10. Are you willing to make the sacrifices necessary in order to spend the amount of time required for a successful home business? (i.e. goodbye “Desperate Housewives”…hello 1:00 am work sessions.)
    

Once you have spent time contemplating your answers to the questions above, determine if your answers point you towards starting a home business. If so, it is time to move to the next step. Now we determine whether or not your business idea has the potential to be successful.

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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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