How To Plan And Write A Blog Post To Go Viral

How to write a viral postIs it possible to plan and write a blog post to reach a precise amount of exposure, engagement or traffic?

Without Jennifer Aniston?

Of course it is possible, if you pay close attention to your blog performance, the industry, and how the blogosphere behaves, you can actually anticipate what kind of exposure each blog will get. If you promote all your content the same way, you will still know based purely on the type of content you’re about to drop.

If you have been blogging for a while, I bet you can tell the different kinds of posts you publish and which ones perform better without even looking at the stats. Do the exercise.

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Dear Online Entrepreneur, Stop Stressing About The Daily Stuff

Online Entrepreneur: Stop Stressing Over The Daily StuffThis is a guest post by Martina Iring from MartinaIring.com

We all have those days. Days when it feels like nothing is going your way. Days when you’re ready to chuck that damn lap top out the window and go get a normal job. Days when you question your ability to succeed at this online business stuff. The pot of gold seems far, far away. You’re beginning to question whether that pot of gold exists at all.

This is pretty normal in the life of an online entrepreneur. Especially when you’re first starting out.

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How Being Inconsistent Can Damage Your Online Brand

Being inconsistent could damage your online brand and reputationLast April was a crazy month for me. I was in Antigua Guatemala for a week, came back to Los Angeles for 3 days, flew to Santiago Chile for 10 days (that’s a 12-hour flight in case you didn’t know), came back to Los Angeles again for a week to finish rushing to Miami for a couple of days.

But that wasn’t all, I did all this in the middle of clients projects and, except for Guatemala, the rest of the traveling was strictly business (when I say business that includes drinks and cigars in the middle… I didn’t say I was complaining). On top of that, my blog has been experiencing some serious issues that required some special attention. Just so you get an idea, every time I publish a post, the entire site goes down, sometimes it will disconnect from the database or it will go completely blank.

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Free is Boring: Why You Need to Change How You Give Stuff Away

Change how you give stuff awayThis is a guest post by Thom Chambers from In Treehouses.

On January 15th, 2001, a revolutionary website launched with a simple goal: to provide a home for the world’s knowledge. The aim was ambitious, but that wasn’t what captured the imagination – what grabbed people was that this online encyclopedia would be free. Free to read and, more importantly, free to create.

The story of Wikipedia from this point on perfectly shows the three stages in the life of that thing we call Free:

At first, Free was considered impossible; even Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, anticipated that entries would be “complete rubbish”. Next, Free was remarkable. An online encyclopedia created by volunteers and free to access? Incredible! Then, finally, Free was boring. Information is being added to Wikipedia faster than you can read it. It’s normal. When you can get a song or a TV show or a movie for free, of course you should get information for free.

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Blog Post Promotion: A Look Inside Kikolani’s New eBook

The ultimate blog post promotion guide by kikolaniContent is no longer King. It has become a minimum requirement to do anything online. It’s expected.

What really makes a difference in the blogosphere today is a good set of skills to promote that awesome content you craft week after week. This is something I have emphasize in numerous occasions here at SocialMouths, if you have something amazing to share, something that can affect people’s lives, you are responsible for putting that awesome sauce in front of the right audience.

Last week in San Jose, Costa Rica, after 2 days of intense learning at a private marketing conference in which I also had to present, I’ve decided to take Friday to empty my brain, enjoy the beautiful weather and do nothing. Let the day take me wherever… Pura vida!

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How To Successfully Use Twitter For Relationship Marketing

How to use twitter as a relationship marketing toolThis is a guest post by Antonia Harler from Social Glitz

I’m not telling you anything new when I say that Web 2.0 and social media have changed the way we use the Internet. Neither am I telling you anything new when I say that that’s the reason why marketers and PR professionals are finding themselves in an increasingly difficult situation. We, as consumers, are no longer as easily identifiable as we used to be. These days, us consumers can be any number of things. Producers, users, active participants, members of niche communities, and if worse comes to worst, even critics.

So how can the companies of today ensure that they don’t only find new customers and retain existing ones but also avoid all hell breaking lose when they are confronted with a critic that happens to be quite influential in the online space?

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How To Measure Blog Conversion

How To Measure Blog Conversion by SocialMouthsBlog traffic, content engagement, online community, social proof, all key aspects of blog marketing. All easily measurable items. But the ultimate goal is one and today my dear friends, we are going to talk about how to measure blog conversion.

Conversion can mean different things for different people. If you blog as a marketing vehicle there are usually two ways of looking at it: a 1-Step process where you directly sell a product and a 2-Step, where your blog focuses on converting a visitor into a prospect, in other words, what we know as Lead Generation. This is usually done through email subscriptions.

Either way, you need to have a way of measuring and visualizing your blog’s performance. Is this possible? Not only it’s possible, it’s also easier than you think.

But let’s start at the beginning. We’ll create an example to explain the process. Let’s pretend you are a consultant/coach for entrepreneurs.

Business Objective vs. Digital Goals

Your business objective has nothing to do with the Internet, it’s a general objective. In this example you sell coaching sessions, you need to find clients that will put you on a retainer for a period of time. That’s your service.

Your digital goals are of course, online focused. What you are trying to accomplish with your blog to get you closer to your business objective. For this example, let’s say that you create content on your blog to attract visitors and on top of that, you have developed other free products to offer those visitors in exchange of an email subscription.

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Your Own Product: How Much Value Do You Need To Deliver?

How much value do you need to deliver?

I’m a big observer of the internet, not the usual trends, but how online marketing moves. What’s working and what is not good enough anymore…

And I have one thing to tell you: The bar has been raised. Again.

If you have been crafting a kick-ass product for the last 6 months and you’re about to launch with a big splash, I recommend you take one last hard look at what’s going on out there. Stuff that use to be premium is now free, in exchange of a simple email address.

So, here is my question for the online marketer: Exactly how much value does your product needs to deliver in exchange for how much cash value?

For a second this thought will go through your mind: Shouldn’t we measure what we deliver? Aren’t we giving everything away for too little?

Well, what else are you going to think, the internet is already way too competitive, too fast and now you need to kick it up a notch. Again…

I wanted to write a post that will let you visualize how much value is being delivered out there, something that will give you an idea of how much creativity and hard work you need to put into the content you publish, free and paid. At the same time, look at the return on investment. So I took the weekend to think about it and try to land a meaningful post.

Staples Gives Me Half The Answer

I stopped by Staples this afternoon looking for a graph paper notebook, I wanted to get something kind of nice. Turns out they don’t have anything “kind of nice”. I got the impression that everything there revolved around how cheap can we build stuff and how cheap can we sell it for. Walked out empty handed, not the first time, but this time I felt like not going back in there ever again.

As a consumer (that tries to consume less everyday) I noticed that have also raised the bar, my expectations are different. Bottom line is that I want to feel good about myself when I give you my cash.

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