Open Communication: Are You Reaching Your Entire Audience? - DailyBlogTips

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Open Communication: Are You Reaching Your Entire Audience? Posted: 23 Jul 2016 03:35 AM PDT You have your blog up and running, yet it feels as if you just aren’t attracting enough of your target audience. Sure, you’re posting everyday, you’re sharing on social media, but, you’re lucky if you get one or two comments per post. Then, you take a look at your competitor’s blog, and they seem to have your entire audience engaged and coming back for more. Here is how to make sure you are reaching your entire audience. Choose the right links You do want to add authoritative links to your post, but you should also make them work for you. What you need to do is choose the types of links that will increase your reach. You can achieve this objective by looking for posts that have similar subjects and are written by someone who has a good chance of sharing your post. You want a link that not only adds value to your post, but is written by sites with strong social media teams. Then, let sites know you mentioned them in your post. They may immediately share your post without you having to ask. This is truly a winning situation for all involved. Partner with another blogger for cross promotions When two bloggers help each other, everyone wins. This is most successful when both blogs have a corresponding number of readers. You might exchange ads or even share email lists. In addition, you can both mention each other in your posts. Be available One thing your audience wants is trust. They want an outlet to share their comments, but they also want to know that your business is available to speak with them to answer questions. You don’t have to give out your mobile number. You can easily get a toll-free number to use for client and prospect calls. Not only does it add a sense of professionalism, but it lets your audience know that you are there for them. Use competitive analysis for topic selection When you use this method, you have the opportunity to find out what topics and keywords are trending for other bloggers in your niche. In addition, you can find out topics that are attracting the most traffic. Then, do some research to get the most impactful headline. You want to produce something new and exciting. Even a fresh twist on a popular topic can bring in a stream of comments. If your industry’s influencers are sharing your competitor’s posts, they might even share yours. It doesn’t hurt to ask. Targeted and paid options You already know that you must share your content on all of social media. Although, if you want to truly reach targeted individuals, you might consider utilizing paid social media. You can start with promoted tweets, Instagram ads and Facebook ads. You may be surprised by how many followers you amass even through a small, $25 campaign. Add a link to your latest article in your social media bio Notice how all the biggest Instagram accounts have links in their bio for whatever it is they are promoting at that time? People might not read all of your IG posts or your tweets, but they will look at your bio. In this location, you have space for a link. So, to promote your blog, add a link to your latest post in your bio. Then, ask for retweets or reposts. Of course, if you post 10 pieces a day, this would take up a lot of time. Used sparingly, you could reach all of your audience over time. Email signature Does a day go by when you don’t email someone? Think of all the emails you send every single day. Why aren’t you marketing your blog posts this way? All you have to do is place a link in your email signature that invites people to check out your most recent blog post. Some people may have forgotten you have a blog so, this reminds them. Verify your information People want to read blogs that have accurate information. It does not have to be a thesis by any means, but you don’t want to misinform people. This sometimes means you need to have contacts throughout the world, sending you information either via fax or email. In some places, a fax is their only means of communication with the outside world. As a result, you must get your work right every time. It only takes getting it wrong once to tarnish your reputation. Get statements from influential people It could be anyone from the CEO of your favorite micro brewery to Bill Gates. What you may find is people love to give advice and share their experiences. Plus, through social media, you can essentially reach out to almost anyone. Let them know why you are interested, and what you intend to write. Even if it is just for a quote, they may share your piece. Then, imagine all of their followers heading over to your blog! Sticking to the blogging basics is a good start. However, to reach your entire audience, the above tips will help you get there. Katrina (Esther) Manning is a professional web writer for eVoice. This is her first contribute article for Daily Blog Tips Original post: Open Communication: Are You Reaching Your Entire Audience?

5 Reasons Why Website Speed Matters Posted: 22 Jul 2016 11:12 AM PDT Speed kills. But in the case of websites, speed is essential for success—it's the lack of speed that will kill your website. The faster your site loads, the greater is the probability that you will be able to attract and engage more users. For a blog, speed will also determine whether users will stay on to read more, or if they will simply navigate elsewhere. When it comes to website loading, virtually every second counts. 47 percent of users expect a website to load within 2 seconds. And 40 percent of your potential users will typically abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. For businesses, bloggers, publishers and webmasters, this means that every second you can trim from your website's loading time translates to precious traffic and conversions. On the other hand, every additional second can lead to erosion of users over time and a decline in search ranking. User experience is, of course, one of the most important reasons why you should optimize your website's speed. Here are five other reasons why your site should load as quickly as possible: Google Favors Faster Websites Google loves speedy websites, and so you should also make sure that the Google bots that crawl to find new content will not have a hard time navigating through your website. Website loading speed can be a big factor in determining its ranking on search engine results. You might find your website losing ground on search result pages if it takes more than a few seconds to load the site. This is even truer for websites meant for a mobile audience. Google will soon start ranking mobile search results according to page load speeds. Slow blogs and websites will therefore lose visibility and traffic. You Have a Global Audience The fact that your blog exists means that you intend to have a global reach and appeal. Your visitors may come from all corners of the world. And while some of them will have fast broadband connections, other will access your website through slower infrastructure. In particular, website traffic goes through several "hops"—meaning it passes through several points such as service providers, undersea cables, satellite uplinks, and the like. The good news is that it's not that complicated (or event expensive) to deploy a content delivery network (CDN) to help speed up access from distant places. A CDN uses servers located all around the world to cache website content and deliver it based on users' geographical location. By using the server closest to the user, a CDN can boost load speeds by up to 50 percent – significantly boosts the user experience of all visitors regardless their country of origin. People Have Short Attention Spans The sheer amount of content available online today means that users' attention spans are declining rapidly. According to studies, the attention span of an online user was 8 seconds back in 2013. Today, however, your website has a mere 3 to 5 seconds to make an impression on a user. If the impression is positive, the user will tend to stay and come back for more. If the impression is poor, the user is likely never to return again. And speed is a decisive factor here. Your blog needs to load within this tiny bracket of attention span and display relevant content to sufficiently interest a user. Unlike what many publishers think, users are not attracted by an instant overload of content. Rather, a rapidly loading site balanced with a small, but relevant, amount of data will hit the sweet spot in building an audience. Conversion is More Important Than Raw Traffic No matter how great is your marketing, if it doesn't translate to new regular readers, you are not doing a good job of it. Similarly, if you have a blog with a large readership but are unable to persuade sufficient users to come back regularly, you are doing something wrong. Whether you are an online retailer, publisher, blogger or simply a webmaster managing a business website, conversion is absolutely critical for success. Even something as trivial as a one-second delay in website loading speed can lead to 7% decline in user conversion rates. So even if your blog or website is getting excellent leads and you are attracting a solid audience, retaining this audience will be a different story altogether. In fact, you should ideally optimize your blog or website to load quickly before launching any new marketing campaign. The Future of the Internet is Mobile Back in 2015, Google revealed that mobile devices were generating more online searches than desktop computers. More than 65% of digital media time is represented by mobile devices today. For publishers, this means that future growth in terms of users will be directly tied to how well you cater to the mobile audience. A critical part of mobile-optimization is to design your website with user experience in mind—this will involve loading speed, too. Mobile users are notoriously demanding when it comes to site speeds. About 43 percent will abandon a site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. So if you plan to build up your site over coming months and years, you will have to plan for the mobile audience in terms of optimal page load speeds. The Takeaway Improving website speed isn't rocket science. It simply takes good planning and a proper infrastructure to ensure that you can shave away all unnecessary milliseconds to minimize loading time at the user's end. From CDNs to mobile-centric site implementations, there are a myriad of ways to implement this. What is certain is that site loading speed directly impacts user experience and conversions. For a blogger and publisher, this means that you should take action and take the right steps to optimize your website loading speed. So, what are you doing today to make this happen? Original post: 5 Reasons Why Website Speed Matters

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