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“Weekend Project: Sharing a WordPress War Story” plus 1 more

“Weekend Project: Sharing a WordPress War Story” plus 1 more

Link to @ProBlogger

Weekend Project: Sharing a WordPress War Story

Posted: 02 Aug 2012 01:08 PM PDT

While we love blogging, we all know there are some aspects that really do seem impossible sometimes—none moreso than transferring a WordPress.com blog to the WordPress.org platform.

We’ve discussed the differences between these two platforms before, because more than one blogger has been caught up by the limitations of WordPress.com (usually the limitation that this platform doesn’t allow you to monetize your blog). But it’s well known that swapping to the .org platform from .com can be a challenge.

This weekend’s project explains the WordPress war story of a blogger who chose to start a blog on WordPress.com, because it required so little technical knowledge. But when she wanted to monetize her blog—and switch to the .org platform—that lack of technical skill proved a major hurdle. It’s no wonder the process has gained such a bad reputation!

Actually, I think this is something that blog platform developers probably want to consider as they’re creating their platforms‚ because any help they can give to users who want to upgrade or switch to other versions of their products is always much appreciated.

If you’re one of those bloggers who’s itching to move your blog from .com to .org, but you’ve been too scared, clear some time in your weekend schedule to implement the process that our Weekend Project sets out. I’m giving you plenty of warning for this project—it starts tomorrow!

For now, if you have a WordPress war story of your own that you’d like to get off your chest, feel free to vent in the comments.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
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Weekend Project: Sharing a WordPress War Story

3 Strategies that Brought Me 11,710 Subscribers in Six Months [Case Study]

Posted: 02 Aug 2012 07:04 AM PDT

This guest post is by Mary Jaksch of Write to Done.

Imagine boosting your subscriber count by more than 50.7% in under six months.

You'd like that, wouldn't you?

Okay, so if your blog has only about 200 subscribers, growing by more than 50% in under six months isn’t a big deal. However, it’s harder to achieve neck-snapping growth on an established blog.

Yet a combination of three booster strategies lifted Write to Done from 23,120 to 34,830 subscribers in under six months.

I'm not talking of becoming a guest-posting machine, like Danny Iny, who fired off 119 guest posts in the last nine months, or of becoming a heroic blogger like Leo Babauta. He kickstarted Zen Habits by writing five posts a week, plus five guest posts (whilst holding down a full-time job and raising a family of six kids). You wonder when these guys found time to sleep…

The number one challenge

Ask any blogger, and they’ll tell you that gaining more subscribers is their number one challenge.

My first blog, Goodlife ZEN, had an initial growth rate of … well, near zero. At the end of the second month I was so desperate, I subscribed my cat Sweetie. That made three subscribers: my son, by best friend, and my cat.

Like many newbie bloggers I asked myself: how can I gain more subscribers?

The root of the problem is that in order to grow your blog, you need traffic. But not just any traffic.

You need resonant traffic. You need the people who visit your blog to resonate with your content.

When I decided to rejuvenate Write to Done—the writers’ blog originally started by Leo Babauta—the challenge I faced was to lift this established blog into a new orbit. A combination of  three booster strategies did the trick.

How to put a rocket under your blog

The booster strategies I'm talking about are simple to implement, don't take much time and effort, and they work—no matter how big or small your blog may be.

Strategy #1: Run an event on your blog

Running an event on your blog can create a buzz and draw resonant traffic—especially if you involve other bloggers.

I experimented with this strategy early on, when I launched the "Blog with Heart" competition on Goodlife ZEN a couple of years ago. The idea behind this competition was to get other blogs to participate in creating competing lending teams for the microlending charity Kiva.

The blog that raised the most money (relative to its subscriber numbers) was declared the winner. We raised over $16,000 during this campaign and subscriber numbers on Goodlife ZEN rose dramatically.

Later on, I created From Fab to Fit: the Great Fitness Challenge, an event that created a host of new followers.

There are many different kinds of events you can run on a blog. For example, you can run charity drives, competitions, challenges, or projects on your blog.

Another great example is Courtney Carver's Minimalist Fashion Project 303. When Courtney casually mentioned the idea of a minimalist fashion challenge to me over a late-night cup of coffee in San Francisco,  I got so excited I jumped up and swept my cup off the table! Now Courtney's blog Be More With Less is booming and the movement has spawned a Facebook page with over  3,300 Likes.

On Write to Done, I was able to utilize a ready-made event: our annual contest, the Top 10 Blogs for Writers. As part of the booster combo, we decided to run the Top 10 Blogs for Writers contest in November and December of 2011, integrating it with the two other booster strategies. We received 2,174 nominations, and traffic came pouring in.

But traffic isn't enough to grow a subscriber base.

Reader habits have changed on the Net. Subscribing used to be a slow courtship where readers returned to a blog repeatedly before deciding to subscribe.

These days it's more like speed-dating: you only have a few moments to turn an interested glance into a lasting relationship.

Great content, arresting headlines, and an attractive design used to be enough to grow your blog. But now you need something else to turn a first-time visitor into a subscriber.

Which brings me to the next strategy.

Strategy 2: Offer a subscription reward

If you want to turn visitors into subscribers as soon as they visit your blog, offer them a subscription reward. This could be a report, an ebook, a couple of videos, a short course, an app, or anything else that your readers would find extremely useful.

An easy solution is to compile an ebook from your best posts. This is what we did on Write to Done: we created The (nearly) Ultimate Guide to Better Writing.

You can also create a bundle of free ebooks, videos and podcasts. An example is The Blogger's Toolbox. Another nifty way to create a subscriber reward is to invite other bloggers to contribute to an ebook.

The delivery method depends on how your subscriptions are set up. If you use an email responder service, like Aweber or Mailchimp, the delivery is pretty straightforward: create a follow-up email that goes out automatically as soon as someone confirms their subscription. The follow-up email should contain a link to a delivery page.

If you use Feedburner for subscriptions, use a plugin called RSS Footer. The plugin will put a link to your delivery page at the bottom of every post delivered by Feedburner, whether it's by email or by RSS. You'll need to tell your readers that the link to their freebie will be at the bottom of the next post they receive by email or in their RSS reader.

Strategy 3: Launch a product

Whenever you launch a product on your blog, you generate excitement. The excitement is generated in the run-up to the launch. The key is to foreshadow the arrival of the new product so that your readers look forward to it.

I recently asked Jon Morrow when you should start telling readers about a new product. He said, "Tell them about it as soon as you have the idea!"

Here’s an example of how a launch boosted subscriber numbers: Scott Dinsmore used a product launch to revitalize his blog,  Live Your Legend, with great results. Watch the video of an interview with Corbett Barr where Scott explains how he doubled his readership during the launch.

On Write to Done, we decided to create a launch for our ebook, The (nearly) Ultimate Guide to Better Writing in order to drive traffic to the blog.

How the strategy combo works

We combined three booster strategies: creating an ebook as a subscriber reward, launching the ebook, and running an event. This gave Write to Done the momentum to grow by 50.7% in under six months.

If you want to grow your subscriber numbers dramatically, create a booster campaign in five steps:

  1. Produce the product you want to offer as a subscriber reward.
  2. Plan your event and invite other bloggers to join in.
  3. Get your subscriber reward in place with signup forms and delivery page.
  4. Launch your product.
  5. Run your event.

If you follow these steps, you'll be able to take advantage of the traffic surge created by your event and the product launch.

Just make sure that your event is in tune with your blog topic so that you generate resonant traffic. This means that  people who swing by your blog will be more likely to turn into subscribers—especially if you offer them a useful product in return for subscribing.

What growth strategies have you tried on your blog? Did they work? Please share them with us in the comments.

Want to improve your writing? Check out Write to Done and enjoy more posts by Mary Jaksch. You’ll also find The Blogger's Toolbox insanely useful.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
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3 Strategies that Brought Me 11,710 Subscribers in Six Months [Case Study]

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Link to ShoeMoney Internet Marketing Blog

How @iAcquire and @ipullrank Played the Entire SEO Industry

Posted: 02 Aug 2012 05:44 AM PDT

So probably by now everyone knows that iAcquire is now back ranking in Google, thanks to their recent promise to no longer buy links and presumably by cleaning up some of the spam they created for clients, as well as Michael King’s whining that nobody was covering the fact that they were being good boys now.

Michael (aka @ipullrank) is implying that the fact they are back into Google is big news while Joe Griffin more than once has been implying that he was closely working with Google on getting them back into the index – so it doesn’t take much of a leap for others who are banned in Google to think “Well hell, if they managed to get themselves back into Google through this so-called special relationship with Google, I bet they can get my dirtier than dirt site back in Google too!”

Ben Cook (aka @skitzzo) asked them very pointedly in their blog comments about this implied relationship:

My question was more about how you let Google know about your actions & what they required.

You mention contacting them multiple times per week. Was that emailing Matt Cutts, via a help forum, through an email thread, or did you just do a reinclusion request?

Pretty fair question and something a lot of people were wondering about, namely if they had any kind of special relationship that saw them back in more quickly than another site would.  And Joe Griffin’s response:

Ben, we made contact through pretty much all of those channels. I don’t know exactly what got us back in at this point. I believe that the various attempts were heard. Many of the communications did include transparency around what we’ve done in the past and also the plans we had to fix things which have violated those guidelines.

So he is definitely implying that emailing Matt Cutts was one of the avenues he took, and heck, if you think an SEO company has a direct line to Google, isn’t that the one you would go with?  However I highly doubt Matt Cutts did any favors in this case since it was Google’s very public message about buying paid links being something that could get you kicked out of the index – and the way these two love publicity, you know they’d be a lot more blatant about anyone helping them back in.  Sure, maybe a Google rep gave them some more clear cut “here is what you need to clean up” but I just cannot see them pressing the magic unban button simply because they proclaim they are “nice guys”.

Both Michael King and Joe Griffin have come off a bit cocky in this entire situation, particularly on some of the tweets made by Michael King and the blog comments by Joe Griffin, but turns out they have a pretty damn good reason to be laughing.  Check out this graph showing search traffic for iAcquire since the beginning of 2011.

Well, well, well.  Looks like iAcquire was a bad boy long before the link scandal hit.  And it also raises the question about what exactly iAcquire did to really get banned.  It had been assumed that it was the paid links fiasco that hit them hard when it reality they lost their search traffic back in the second half of 2011, long before they were publicly implicated in the link buying scandal, and quite some time before Michael King came on board iAcquire as well.

So it begs the question, were they simply looking for some good publicity and they manufactured the whole “we got banned for buying links for clients” as nothing more than a publicity move?  Because yes, it was big news that a company got banned in Google for buying links for not their own site, but for client sites.  After all, while a few people had heard of Michael King through his speaking and wannabe badass rap persona, very few people had heard of iAcquire until this happened.

If you also look back on all the news stories about iAcquire getting banned, there was never any comment from Google on the situation or the exact reason why they removed iAcquire from the index.

And the other huge thing iAcquire got out of it?  Hundreds and hundreds of very, VERY targeted backlinks from highly respected SEO and industry related news sites and blogs.  Sure it was negative press, but at the end of the day, a quality link is a quality link regardless if it is linking because you are shitty or because you are good, and that is nothing some good reputation management can’t fix (although I do question whether they can afford someone who can fix it).  And most of the sites gave full link juice across the board without putting any kind of no follow attributes on it.  So really, it was just a huge WIN for iAcquire.  And a big score for Michael King, the head of inbound marketing, in getting all these links by what looks like false pretenses.

Yes, there has definitely been a upsurge in their search traffic very recently.  But the real question is why did they really get banned?  And how do you feel knowing that iAcquire and Michael King just played the entire SEO industry for all those juicy backlinks while misrepresenting what really got them kicked out of Google?  I sure know this is the last publicity I want to be giving them.

#SEOBitch

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