How can I get readers for my blog?

Use Social Media
Social media can be a very effective way of getting the word out about your blog. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram etc can be brilliant at driving traffic.

Just posting your blogs onto social media won’t work very well. Using social media to promote your blog means you will need to put in some time to create genuine and thoughtful posts and connections.

Guest Posting/Blogging
Contact sites you feel you could write a great, interesting post for that would interest their readers. Contact the editors of those sites with a personal, engaging and unique message complimenting them on their site and pitching some ideas for articles.

Make sure you make it clear why you think you can add value to their readers with your guest post. The more information you can provide about what you plan on writing the more likely you are to get a positive response, it’s all about making it as easy as possible for them to make a decision.

Commenting and Connecting
Another great way of promoting your blog is to comment on the blogs of others in a similar niche (but not in direct competition with you). Like and comment on their blogs, offer to link to them (or even better, DO link to them and alert them you’ve done it).

After a period of time of interacting directly, post an article into the comments of one of their most relevant blogs with a link to your article and an explanation of why you think they will find it interesting. The link may not be a “do follow” but you’ll be presenting your blog to an audience who is already reading the kind of content you offer.

1. Create compelling unique content that fosters growth: contests, reviews, controversy, etc. "Link bait" 
2. Link from your posts to other blog posts. Not other websites, not other blog homepages. Link to blog posts which often automatically link back to you while pinging the author to which you are linking.
3. Post to Twitter
4. Post to Facebook
5. Post to G+
6. Comment on a bunch of commentluv blogs so people can see your recent post.
7. Deep link to other bloggers posts so they will be sent trackback notifications, getting them to your site might get it mentioned elsewhere - engaging with other bloggers is the best way to get your content promoted.
8. Mention other people and products in your post and send out tweets letting them know they were mentioned.
9. Get guest bloggers who will often promote the post to their audience (ex / current journalists have a healthy audience).
10. Send an email newsletter to your list with a personalized intro and a link to the blog post (I use MailChimp it's great).
11. Go into forums that are are active in and look for threads that your post relates to, if rules permit reply with a link to the post.

How to Generate Leads with White Papers

What’s the difference between selling $900,000 business software and a $0.99 iPhone App? One requires getting the attention of an executive in a company…

While the other requires a few taps of your fingers. If you’re in the business of selling complex, high price products and services – aircraft, enterprise technology, consulting to name a few – traditional, consumer oriented sales strategies will not work.

Ever wondered why? Let’s take you inside the buying process at a multi-billion dollar company. This example is based on a real bank that spends over $9 billion per year on suppliers and vendors of all kinds including multi-million dollar purchases with professional services firms and technology companies. This is how you generate leads with white papers.

Inside The Corporate Buying Process.
As a sales representation visiting Big Bank Inc, what’s the first thing you try? You might try looking up a prospect on LinkedIn and sending them a cold email (or call).

Unless you’re unusually well informed, you’ll probably get nowhere. Even worse, you might be told something like “Visit the procurement website: that’s where all our major purchases are done.”

You take the feedback in stride and check out the procurement website. Before you know it, you’re knee deep in “RFPs” (requests for proposals) that have endless requirements.

Big Bank Inc has eight people work on each procurement decision – a purchasing specialist, a technical subject matter expert, the end business user and more. With this kind of committee style buying process, you can expect to wait weeks or months to close a deal.

Why do companies –your potential buyers – have these complicated procedures? Why wouldn’t they just let you in to present your product?

It all comes down to one word: risk. In the corporate world, everyone is SCARED of killing their career by buying a million dollar software system only to have it fail. A procurement failure like that could set back your buyer`s career by years. Fortunately, you can soothe their fears by using white papers in your sales process.

The White Paper Solution.
How do white papers open new doors for complex sales? Let’s quickly define our terms. “A white paper is a persuasive document that usually describes problems and how to solve them.

The white paper is a crossbreed of a magazine article and a brochure. It takes the objective and educational approach of an article and weaves in persuasive corporate messages.” (from “Writing White Papers” by Michael A. Stelzner)

According to Stelzner’s research, over 80% of executives report that white papers are extremely helpful or helpful. Even more important – over half of executives state that white papers influence their buying decisions. White papers are highly popular and most heavily used in the technology sector.

However, they can be used in other areas where buyers are making complex or large budget decisions. In contrast to a presentation or visit from a sales representative, most prospects view white papers as non-threatening. If you’re tired of getting told no when you ask for an appointment, consider offering a white paper to your prospects instead.

2 Reasons To Market Your Business with White Papers.
Before you commission a white paper for your business, consider the following.

1) White Papers put Technical Stakeholders At Ease: Without a robust white paper, your sales effort may be defeated by the fear, uncertainty and doubt of a technical stakeholder.

2) White papers go where your sales team can’t: Getting your foot in the door at a large company is difficult. Assistants are told to keep away sales people like you. How do you get through the gate keepers? You need an insider to help you. When your white paper is read by one person inside a company, it may be shared to others. That peer recommendation opens new doors that would be difficult to open any other way. For this process to work, your white paper has to deliver highly valuable industry information and a subtle sales message.

5 ways to Build and Establish your Brand.

So you’ve taken a leap of faith and started your own business, Congratulations! For some, it’s an exciting time to venture out and put their entrepreneurial skills to the ultimate challenge, a challenge they’re so eager to embark on. For others, it can be quite terrifying to try something new, wondering if the world will appreciate what they have to offer as they determine the best path to take to success.

Your brand is how you want to appear to the world. How well do you want to be recognized? How will you build your authority and your following? We learned a thing or two about establishing your personal brand from thought leader, Thomas Smale, a contributor for Entrepreneur.com and Founder of FE International shared an insightful article on this topic. Here are 5 Brand Building Tips:

1. Be true to yourself
For a brand to be “authentic”, so should the creator. Your brand should tell your story, who you are, what you believe in, where you came from, and how you came to creating your own brand. People connect with people better than they connect with “things”. When speaking to others about your brand, wouldn’t it would be harder to fake it then to just simply be yourself? Just some food for thought.

2. Speaking Engagements
Are you a people person? Do you speak with knowledge or from a level of authority? Do you have the ability to intrigue and captivate others? Being an entrepreneur is all about developing good communication skills because part of building your brand is being able to speak about it on a regular basis.

3. Write thought leadership articles
This will build your credibility as a leader in the industry. Write about topics that talk around your brand and share your knowledge with people who are seeking this kind of information.

4. Build and protect your internet presence
Claim your business online and be aware of how you appear or what people are saying about your brand online. Embrace online reviews, even the not so pleasant ones. Start a Facebook business page and ensure that it presents you in the best light possible. Meet your customers expectations by appearing in their search results, it further legitimizes your brand and your existence.

5. Never stop learning
You may be an expert in what you do but the development and advancement of your brand has no limits. In order to stay relevant in this ever-changing, ever-growing world of technology, continue to learn from other thought leaders and competitors in your industry. You can never have too much knowledge and perspective.

The most important thing to remember is to stay humble by being open to the opinions of your followings. Be honest about your weaknesses and strengths. There’s nothing more believable when it comes to branding than one that is “human” and one that people can relate to.

Webspam Report 2016: How Google Fought Webspam

With 2017 well underway, we wanted to take a moment and share some of the insights we gathered in 2016 in our fight against webspam. Over the past year, we continued to find new ways of keeping spam from creating a poor quality search experience, and worked with webmasters around the world to make the web better.

We do a lot behind the scenes to make sure that users can make full use of what today’s web has to offer, bringing relevant results to everyone around the globe, while fighting webspam that could potentially harm or simply annoy users.

Webspam trends in 2016

• Website security continues to be a major source of concern. Last year we saw more hacked sites than ever - a 32% increase compared to 2015. Because of this, we continued to invest in improving and creating more resources to help webmasters know what to do when their sites get hacked. 
• We continued to see that sites are compromised not just to host webspam. We saw a lot of webmasters affected by social engineering, unwanted software, and unwanted ad injectors. We took a stronger stance in Safe Browsing to protect users from deceptive download buttons, made a strong effort to protect users from repeatedly dangerous sites, and we launched more detailed help text within the Search Console Security Issues Report.
• Since more people are searching on Google using a mobile device, we saw a significant increase in spam targeting mobile users. In particular, we saw a rise in spam that redirects users, without the webmaster’s knowledge, to other sites or pages, inserted into webmaster pages using widgets or via ad units from various advertising networks.

How we fought spam in 2016

• We continued to refine our algorithms to tackle webspam. We made multiple improvements to how we rank sites, including making Penguin (one of our core ranking algorithms) work in real-time.
• The spam that we didn’t identify algorithmically was handled manually. We sent over 9 million messages to webmasters to notify them of webspam issues on their sites. We also started providing more security notifications via Google Analytics.
• We performed algorithmic and manual quality checks to ensure that websites with structured data markup meet quality standards. We took manual action on more than 10,000 sites that did not meet the quality guidelines for inclusion in search features powered by structured data.

Working with users and webmasters for a better web

• In 2016 we received over 180,000 user-submitted spam reports from around the world. After carefully checking their validity, we considered 52% of those reported sites to be spam. Thanks to all who submitted reports and contributed towards a cleaner and safer web ecosystem!
• We conducted more than 170 online office hours and live events around the world to audiences totaling over 150,000 website owners, webmasters and digital marketers.
• We continued to provide support to website owners around the world through our Webmaster Help Forums in 15 languages. Through these forums we saw over 67,000 questions, with a majority of them being identified as having a Best Response by our community of Top contributors, Rising Stars and Googlers. 
• We had 119 volunteer Webmaster Top Contributors and Rising Stars, whom we invited to join us at our local Top Contributor Meetups in 11 different locations across 4 continents (Asia, Europe, North America, South America). 

We think everybody deserves high quality, spam-free search results. We hope that this report provides a glimpse of what we do to make that happen.

Google Optimize Available Globally: Free and Premium Optimize 360 A/B Testing Tools

We know at March 15, 2016 Google Introduced the Google Analytics 360 Suite and at September 28, 2016 they rolled out Google Optimize — a free version of enterprise-class web and mobile-web testing and personalization tool. Google Optimize is aimed at help Small Businesses and Professionals track website data and it is the free version of Google Optimize 360.

At that time we were told that:

Google Optimize will be globally available at that time. Additionally, we’re including enhancements to many of our existing free products. Read on for details.

March 30, 2017 Google has announced that its Optimize and Optimize 360 A/B website testing tools are now available to everyone after a prolonged period in beta.

Both Free and Premium versions of the tools allow businesses to try out different versions of their company websites to see how each version performs based on the desired outcomes. They allow for a full A/B test with a WYSIWYG visual editor with drag-and-drop components. Tests can be targeted to specific types of users, and URL rules can be set to determine the pages that should be tested.

As we know Optimize is free, but Optimize 360 is not. Optimize 360 doesn't have a price listed online, but Convert has listed it at more than $150,000 a year. The differences are mainly in how many tests can be run at once. The free version only allows for three concurrent tests, and target metrics are limited to three as well. Optimize 360 has unlimited tests and target metrics available.

Google Optimize Features

Easy to Implement: A Google recent survey showed 45% of small and medium businesses don’t optimize their websites through A/B testing. The two most common reasons given were a "lack of employee resources" and "lack of knowledge to get started."

If you're part of that 45%, Optimize is a great choice for you. Optimize has many of the same features as Optimize 360. It's just right for small and medium-sized businesses who need powerful testing, but don't have the budget or team resources for an enterprise-level solution.

Optimize is easy for anyone to set up. Early users of Optimize have been happy with how easy it is to use. In fact, it's built right on top of Analytics, so if you're already an Analytics user you'll add just a single line of code to get Optimize up and running. With just a few clicks more, you can start using your Analytics data to design experiments and improve the online experience for your users.

Easy to Use: Worried about having to hire someone to run A/B tests on your site, or frustrated about not knowing how to do it yourself? Don't be. The Optimize visual editor allows for WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editing so you can change just about anything on your site with a drag and a drop. And more advanced users will enjoy the ability to edit raw HTML or add JavaScript or CSS rules directly in the editor.

Easy to use google optimize

Powerful targeting capabilities within Optimize allow you to serve the right experiences to just the right set of users. And you have flexible URL targeting capabilities to create simple or complex rules for the pages where you want your experiment to run. To find out if a targeting rule you've set will apply to a specific URL on your site, use the new Optimize URL tester. Just enter a URL and the tester will immediately tell you if that page is a match for your targeting rule.

Easy to Understand Data: Google Optimize calculates results based on your existing Google Analytics metrics and objectives using advanced Bayesian methods, so the reporting shows you exactly what you need to know to make better and faster decisions.

Easy to understand google optimize data

Google also upgraded the improvement overview (see image above) to help you quickly see how an experiment affects the metrics you care about most, whether that means purchases, pageviews, session lengths, or whatever else you’re tracking in Analytics.

Easy to Try: Leading businesses are building a culture of growth that embraces the use of data and testing to improve the customer experience every day. Google offering Optimize to everyone to help deliver better user experiences across the board.

Try Google Optimize

As of today, Google Optimize is available in over 180 countries. And we're not done yet: Keep an eye out for more improvements and announcements in the future.

See the Complete Customer Journey: Marketers require full visibility and context to see what’s really happening across all customer touchpoints, devices, and channels.

Useful Insights, not just more Data: Marketers need enormous computing power, data science and smart algorithms, all working together to quickly make sense of data for them. In other words, built-in intelligence to do the heavy lifting for marketers and make insights easy to see.

Enable better sharing within your organization: Marketers seek to put insights into everyone’s hands and get the whole company on the same page — resulting in stronger cross-functional goals and smarter decision-making.

Deliver engaging experiences to the right people: Internet Marketers want to make their brand immediately useful to consumers. With integrations across multiple Google technologies, the suite products not only work well together, but also with other products, including AdWords, DoubleClick, and 3rd-party platforms — enabling marketers to take immediate action and drive business impact.

What are you waiting for? Try Google Optimize Right Now!