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Working with bloggers on collaborations is a great way to drive traffic back to your company or service. No matter what you sell, it is very likely that there are a group of bloggers out there who can help you reach your audience. Here are 7 primary benefits of working with bloggers to promote your business. 1. Use The Power Of Leverage For Fast Results The reason it is so powerful collaborating with other bloggers is because you have access to their audience of followers. It is very important that the audience listens & trusts the blogger you are working with. The volume of followers doesn’t matter as much as the quality of engagement that happens on the blog. Whenever you work with a blogger with an engaged following who recommended your company you are reaching a wider audience of people who are then introduced to your product or service. 2. Cost Effective Marketing Tactic Working with bloggers is a fairly low cost marketing activity. If you are doing it yourself the only cost will be providing whatever it is you want to provide to the blogger. And if you are DIYing it I suggest you sign up to our Guest Bloggers Wanted tool and connect with bloggers for free! It is a really easy way to collaborate with bloggers in multiple different niches at a very low cost. If you want someone to run your blogger outreach for you then you will need to pay for this service, and the more you can afford to pay for a high quality guest posting service the better your results will be long into the future. 3. Open To Every Business No matter what your business is blogger outreach is a useful tactic. You might adjust it differently depending on the type of business you are… for example a mostly offline business might choose to only appear in well trusted and high authority online magazines and newspapers in order to build their brand trust. Whereas a mostly online business might decide to heavily focus on working with bloggers to drive online traffic to their site and make more online sales through increased search engine traffic. 4. More Search Engine Traffic Collaborating with bloggers can help drive more search engine traffic back to your site. This is of course assuming you have the correct strategy in place first. Make sure you know what keywords you are targeting and what you want to be ranking for! Assuming you have this keyword plan in place the additional links that you pick up from collaborations will help your blog content & product pages to rank. 5. Grow Your Brand Trust Research by BlogHer found that 81% of respondents to their 2012 survey said that they trust the information and advice that blogs give them and that 61% have made a purchase based on a recommendation from a blogger. Working with bloggers grows trust. 6. Grow Your Network Everytime you collaborate with a blogger you have also introduced your company to them as well. Don’t always just think about the audience you are reaching but the person you are in direct contact with! Guest blogging and collaborations is a great way to grow your network and will start to snowball once you hit a certain number of them. 7. The Process Is Fun Working with bloggers is fun! You are speaking with a person who has spent a lot of time and effort on their blog, growing & nurturing their audience. It is a pretty special thing when they are accepting to work with you and help promote your product or service to their audience. Enjoy the process of creating content, promoting it and seeing the results! If you want to work with bloggers check out Guest Bloggers Wanted, our new outreach tool which helps you connect with the bloggers & influencers SUPER easily. You don't need to build long outreach lists & get lost in email. Just post your guest post title in the tool and you'll find bloggers who want to collaborate with you!
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Did you have a hamster as a kid? I did. We had Teaky, and Hammy From Hell (that one used to escape all of the time), Ham - Burger came a little later (But we used to call him Ham) & Snowy.. Decided to go conventional with her. Jubious hamster names aside the strongest memory that has stuck with me from owning those hamsters was listening to the squeak of the hamster wheel turning round, and round and round at night. Squeeek Silence Squeeek Silence Squeeeeeek Poor little hamster. Stuck in a cage with only a squeaky wheel as entertainment. (p.s. I am dramatizing this a little for effect... our hamsters were very much loved!). The image of my hamster running round and round on his squeaky wheel has stuck with me. It’s the same feeling I get when I’m on the running machines at the gym (which is the reason I do yoga instead). And it’s the same feeling I get when I am scheduled down to a rigorous content generating schedule. In this post I’d like to share some top tips to help you drive traffic to your blog WITHOUT needing to feel like a hamster caught on a wheel. Because no-one wants to feel like that. We didn’t quit our 9-5, start blogging or start a business to feel trapped in a cage of our own making. It’s true that studies show that through creating more content your traffic will go up. Makes logical sense right? BUT, producing more is not the only way to generate more traffic to your blog. 1. Add Storytelling To Your Writing See what I did at the top there? I told you a little story about my hamster. If you are reading this sentence it means I got you this far down the page which means you are far more likely to make it down to the end of this post. The longer I can get you to stay with me, the less lonely I feel (jokes!), the more value I can offer which means you might take action - leave a comment, share this post or even join me on my email. Woohoo! That would be grand! Adding storytelling makes your writing more engaging. Two Examples: Without Storytelling; Cheryl is a copywriter who has several clients she needs to write content for today. She loves writing. With Storytelling; Cheryl gets up with a million ideas buzzing in her head. She can’t wait to get to her laptop & immediately pours a coffee, sits down at her desk and switches it on. It’s going to be a busy day writing content for her clients with the sun streaming through the window. This is just a short example but you can see that with just a few extra lines you can really paint the picture for your readers. Show don't tell. Take your audience on a journey and allow them to feel the mood of your writing rather than just telling them blandly. Instead of writing “Cheryl loves writing”, in the second example I am showing the reader through the excited way Cheryl starts her day writing. P.s. plug time. If you need content, find hundreds of amazing bloggers who can work on your project on Guest Bloggers Wanted. 2. Publish > Shout > Market I mentioned this concept in an article I wrote for for Rising Tide, I’ll mention it again. It’s important. Very rarely does content magically start getting hundreds of thousands of views and shares. I’ve seen people in tons of Facebook groups complaining that they’ve been blogging now for 4 whole months and they aren’t getting the results they expected. Um. Sorry, let me get my violin out. Do you know how long and hard top bloggers have worked to get to where they are? They spend hours and hours (if not days) crafting content, and then they spent 10 X the effort promoting it. And that doesn’t mean tweeting it out a couple of times & sharing it on a few Facebook group threads. These bloggers write hundreds of Guest Posts, they actively reach out to other bloggers to promote their content. They engage, network and work their freaking asses off. It’s great that you want to help millions of people with your wisdom, but the honor of doing so comes after learning not just how to write, but how to market. Sorry. I’ve written more about Guest Blogging here and here. I've also put together a post which makes it easy for you to find guest blog opportunities, there are thousands of blogs waiting for your pitch, cut out the leg work and check out this post. And will be publishing a post soon about different ways you build links to your blog without Guest Blogging. Or, check out our guest blogging service and have us spark conversation around your product or service. Not sure you have time to market your posts? Get creative, bloggers come up with all kinds of ingenious ways to get the word out there. Check out this hack for getting Haro Traffic for example, it resulted in 238 + free subscribers.  3. Reference & Link To Influencers In Your Post Adding examples and references in your blog post boosts its credibility. Why would anyone believe a word you have to say? Back it up with proof from other well known sources. There are a couple of rules to follow here:
Once you’ve written and published your post, reach out to those that you have included and let them know. The chances are, if it’s any good they will share it. Neil Patel links to around 100 - 150 different sources PER POST. By the way if you haven’t checked him out, he offers a fantastic resource for learning about Content Marketing. 4. Start With Keyword Research Use keyword research not just to for the SEO, but to improve your writing and relevancy. Google is the number one research method aside from word of mouth. You have access to all of that beautiful lovely data (slightly less accurate data now but we will get to that). Why wouldn’t you want to see what your audience is searching for and make sure your content is exactly what they need? Not only will your content do better in search (eventually when you’ve built a ton of links and social equity), but it will do better in social media as well. I’ve written in more depth about how to use Keyword Planner here. 5. Use Quality Images This applies to within your post and the images you use to promote it. The web is a visual place and with the rise of easy design software like Logojoy and Canva the competition is fierce. Your audience is far less forgiving now, they expect perfection. Once your business gets to a certain level and you can afford to outsource images, design is one area to do that. Quality images really do make a difference. They increase your click through from your social media channels, and they encourage users to come back to your website & sign up. T Harv Ecker, one of my favorite coaches likes to quote; How You Do One Thing Is How You Do Everything. We all subconsciously know this. So, don't skimp on your photos! Having a professionally designed logo also makes a huge difference. It is much easier to align the imagery on your website when you can tie them back to a central point - your logo. We always place our logo on our Pinterest graphics so that we have visual branding on our social media channels. Logo Joy is a great tool to use for creating your logo. It is intuitive and easy to use, the AI technology is like having a designer in your back pocket.  6. Join Popular Facebook Groups There are tons of great Facebook groups for you to join. For more groups you can join check out Hit The Gems post The Best Facebook Groups To Hang Out In If You’re An Entrepreneur And white corner creatives; 8 Facebook Groups Every Blogger Should Be A Member Of Each of these groups has special days when you can promote your content or sell your services. Make sure that you check out the other content on the thread and retweet / pin / comment on posts which you enjoy. I have gotten a lot of cross promotion from doing that, and it’s quite fun reading new posts. 7. Share Your Post On Pinterest If you aren’t on Pinterest yet then get on it now. I don’t buy into the idea that we need to be on all the social networks doing all the things. But don’t miss out on Pinterest. Disclaimer here, I haven’t had a chance to analyse the quality of traffic coming from there yet… so I can’t comment on that. But I can comment on volumes of traffic which bloggers are getting from Pinterest. And I can contest to that because I set up Pinterest two months ago and it has already sent me the same amount of traffic Instagram has in 6 months. So um, I’m going to run with Pinterest as a core channel to focus on for traffic generation. That being said, Facebook blows every channel out of the water and most of that traffic is coming from these group threads - so Facebook group threads is an important channel to focus on! P.s. if you are not following us on Pinterest come join. We also operate a group board called Viral Guest Posts, if you send me a message I can add you. 8. Map The Outline Before You Write Your Post (With research) If you want to increase visits to your blog then you need to be producing epic content. And that starts with mapping out your content before you start. You wouldn’t write a novel without having an idea of where it is going right? Well, it’s the same for your blog posts. Readers need to go on a journey with you through the post, it needs to feel cohesive and that only happens when there is some structure. It is also highly important to research before you write. Sometimes I think we can get in the habit of creating content in a vacuum. I know I have been guilty of that. I used to think my content needs to be original, innovative, 100% unique. But the reality is that innovation comes from smashing together different ideas, not from sitting in a dark room. So, before you begin your content do some searching on Google. Find out who has written about this topic and take notes! Buzzsumo is a great tool for finding out what is popular in your niche. Read more: 21 Types Of Content That Audiences Like To Share 9. Use Your Email Signature I learnt this tip from one of my previous clients the lovely Nadia Finer and I think it’s fab! Nadia’s email signature always contain loads of really useful information including her latest podcast. I’m pretty sure she used a plugin to generate this dynamically. I haven’t actually implemented this one yet but it is possible! If dynamically adding in your latest content is too technical for you then just review your static signature. Chances are you could improve it just by adjusting your call to actions. Make sure you link to your website & your core social media channels at a minimum. 10. Write Evergreen Content Evergreen means that it is useful for your audience throughout the year. This could be How To Guides for example. Any content which provides practical advice about a topic which isn’t time sensitive. Anything related to seasonality or specific events are topical posts which have a season to them and a specific time period where they will be read and shared. It’s up to you how you want to weight your Evergreen & Topical content. What I’ve seen larger brands do is create their Evergreen content first, with just a few topical posts thrown in to mix it up. Then once they have a strong base they start to add in more topical posts over time. At HostelBookers, by the 2nd year we were focusing heavily on events in different destinations and building out the editorial calendar around what was going on around the world. But that was because we already had a base of good evergreen content. I am using the same strategy for Ginger Marketing. So right now I am focusing on evergreen content and in the future, when we have more recourse we can start to mix up the editorial calendar. I would love to know in the comments below which tactic drives the most amount of traffic to your blog! Related Posts How To Set Up A Weebly 404 & Fix Weebly 404 Errors 3 Small Design Tweaks Which Will Have A Big Impact On Your Blog How To Choose A Blog Name You Won't Hate In 2 Years The Difference Between A Content Writer And A Copywriter Speedy Summary! Isn’t it amazing that small business owners have access to such a huge range of software products that can literally help us with every aspect of running our business?! If it weren’t for all of this software I very much doubt there would be as many small business owners as there are today. It makes it a lot more accessible to access the knowledge we need through software than paying someone to do it. I’m very grateful for the software that helps me run my white label guest posting business and I’d like to share 3 tools I’d struggle to run my business without. One: Google Drive I remember the days when it was all about microsoft office. Some people still use it, but I find Google Drive is just so much easier. When working with a remote team it is fundamental to keep everything running smoothly. We’ve used Google Forms to share new guest post opportunities and connect with new bloggers. We use Google Spreadsheets to track our client orders & our budgets. We use Google Drive to organise everything. And of course Google Docs for creating content. I’ve even hosted meetings before where multiple people in 2 different countries could edit and comment on one doc at the same time. And it’s free - thanks Google! Two: Zoom For short calls, 30 - 45 minutes I tend to us Zoom. It is super easy to connect with people via a video or call only - there is also the option of sharing the screen as well. It tends to be a little bit more reliable than Skype and the host can invite attendees by sharing a link via email. Again, this is super useful for remote working!
Plus, it is free for up to 45 minutes calls. Three: QuickBooks I’ll be honest that I actually only got this a few months ago, but it has hit my top 3 already. Quickbooks is accounting software for small businesses, and is so easy to use. I particularly love the tax estimation feature. It gives you a rundown of the expected tax payment you will need to make for the previous tax year (which by the way you can get now as it’s a new tax year). You can import your accounts going back as far as you like, and can connect it straight to your bank too. So, every time you have a transaction it gets tracked. Create profit and loss reports, track your income & keep on top of tax from $5 per month. I’d love to know, which tools you would struggle to run your business without. Let me know in the comments! |
AuthorWritten by Cheryl A Clarke Chief Happiness Officer & Content Marketing Freelancer @ Ginger Marketing (unless stated otherwise) Blog CategoriesPopular content marketing postsTotal Social Media Share Count
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“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” – Phil Frost, Main Street ROI
“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” – Phil Frost, Main Street ROI