Growth Hacking Your Blog: 10 Tips from the Experts

Posted: 23 Dec 2014 02:57 PM PST

The world of blogging is massive and ever growing. People have found a thousand ways to find success and a million ways to crash and burn. What does that mean for you? Well, it means there's a lot of experts out there that have some great (and free) advice to help you grow your blog. Sifting through the countless self-proclaimed experts though takes too much time.

That's why I'm here, to bring you 10 tips for growing your blog that come from unquestioned experts in the field of blogging. You want credibility? These guys have it in spades. So, let's take a look at what today's masters of blogging are saying about the every constant need for growth in our individual blogs.

10 Tips to Grow Your Blog

These tips are pulled from the top blogging experts in today's industry. If you've ever wanted the definitive guide to building your blog, this is the place to find it.

Become an Exert Yourself by Using Data

This tip comes from a massive and informative article by the famous Neil Patel over at Quick Sprout. Credibility is one of those things that online readers take with a grain of salt. If you really want to come across as an expert in your field, Neil recommends that you use data, and you link to your sources (like I did above).

In many of the articles over as Quick Sprout, you'll find numerous infographics and plenty of links to outside sources. If you throw out data and statistics, people are going to wonder if you're just making them up, so ensure your expertise by linking to the source where you got that data from.

Use the Skyscraper Technique to Build Traffic FAST

Brian Dean over at Backlinko made a great point about using something called The Skyscraper Technique to generate huge amounts of search traffic very quickly. In just two weeks, he was able to generate a 110% increase in his links, and he doubled the site's organic search traffic. He stands by this technique, and so should you. Here's how it works:

Find high ranking content that's worth linking to.
Absolutely destroy it with your own article on the subject
Reach out to your influencers and promote the new post like crazy.

It may seem simple, but it has worked plenty of time for Brian, and it focuses on becoming the best possible source for information on that subject. This is a great way to drive attention to your site and build a pool of readers without already having a huge network in your possession.

Create Engaging and Well-Written Posts

As an experienced blogger myself, I have an article on promoting your blog and increasing traffic over at On Blast Blog that contains a number of tips you can implement in addition to these. Among them is one that I think all of these experts would agree upon: high-quality engaging content is an absolute must.

From the headline to the invitation to comment, your post needs to be irresistible and well-written. People will stop in and stay for a while if you grab them and don't let go. How does this happen? Here are some tips:

Use normal language, don't try to wow people with SAT level vocabulary. You'll just end up frustrating and alienating most of your readers.
Always provide a takeaway or a call-to-action. Readers want to leave your blog feeling like they gained something. Value is the name of the game.
Open with a great hook or story that immediately grabs their attention.

Traffic Generation Doesn't Have to be Complicated

An interesting article by Matthew Woodward touched upon the subject of shirking the complicated promotion and traffic building concepts and instead going a simple route that focused on the people behind the numbers. While link building and promotion are vital elements, sometimes you just have to take a step back and remember who you're writing for.

Here are some tips he offered on generating traffic through a simple, but effective strategy:

Find other people in your target audience by exploring forums and social media sites. See what problems they have and create/link to your methods for solving them.
Set up a free Google Alert about your subject so you can stay in the know about what people are saying in your niche.

Matthew put it perfectly when he said "No PPC, no link building, no SEO, no media buys, no spending money, just good old fashioned human interaction."

Spend Time on Your Headlines

This one comes to us from Yaro Starak over at Entrepreneur's Journey. He makes a good point about how beginners tend to jump right into the content and forget about the importance of a great headline. If you don't already have a large following, grabbing your reader's attention should be the first thing you do. The only way that's going to happen is by creating an awesome headline.

Here are some tips for creating the perfect headline:

"How" headline example: "How to avoid common blogging mistakes"
"Why headline example: "Why Your Blog isn't performing."
Open loop headline example: "Does Anyone Really Understand SEO?"
Context Phrasing headline example: "From the Bottom to the Top: Improving your search ranking."
Listing headline example: "The Top 10 Blogging Tips out There."

Increase Your Followers on Social Media

Brian Lang over at Blogging Wizard posted a great article that included tips on how to increase your followers on LinkedIn and other social media sites. Even if you stumble on one of your articles, if you have plenty of social media followers, you're still bound to get a lot of views. On the flipside of the equation, authors with fewer followers only get views on their featured pieces.

Here's how you can start this today:

Grow your network on LinkedIn by reaching out to influencers in your niche.
Post more about your niche and your blog on Facebook, Twitter, and other sites.
Keep these pages updated and relevant to continue building that following.

Use an Email List to Grow your Blog

A great article from Adam Connell over at Blogging Wizard talks about the importance of building an email list as a means of reaching out to and understanding your followers. He offers a number of great tips on how to build this list quickly and effectively. While the article does feature a massive number of tips, he also boils things down to a simple two-step formula:

Make it Incredibly Easy for People to Sign Up
Keep your Pitches Relevant to your audience

If you use WordPress, there are countless plugins that can help you create a simple and effective email signup box. Using this and targeting your audience with exclusive tips, newsletters, and the like will go a long way towards building your blog.

Sometimes Best Practices Aren't the Best Idea

As much as some people like to think this way, SEO is not set in stone. What works today may not work tomorrow, or it may not ever work for you. Cyrus Shepard of Moz fame has a great video/transcript where he talks about the times when it's okay to break the rules of SEO. His philosophy is based on a if it isn't broke, don't fix it mindset which is a good one to have.

For example, we know that permalinks with a defined structure and keywords tend to work best. That doesn't mean you have to go through your entire site and redo all the permalinks with 301 redirects. If your site is working, don't change anything drastically. As Cyrus says, "SEO is about discovery."

Establish and Maintain a Content Schedule

Noah Kagan makes an excellent point in his article about building 100,000 visitors in the first year of his blog. In the beginning, he was posting every five days or so, but then things started to get in the way, and suddenly he was only posting a couple times a month. When it comes to growing your blog, you need to have a set schedule that never wavers.

Every time Noah publishes a post and sends it out via email to his followers, the leads skyrocket. No matter how large or small your blog is, every time you post something and promote it, you'll see ripples in the waters of the internet. Your followers will come to expect a regular schedule and you'll need to provide it to them.

Learn to Love Entities

A major term being thrown around in the SEO world these days is "Entity Salience" and while the term may sound complicated, it's simple to understand. Bill Slawski over at SEO by the Sea boiled the concept down into a great piece that not only defines the subject, but shows how it can be used to create better content for your readers.

The concept of entities refers to real places and things in your content. The example article that Bill was talking about in his piece was on Black History, and while branching off from that was okay, they discovered that using entities would elevate the article to new heights of traffic.

They branched off of the subject and instead focused on historical sites in Baltimore and famous figures from there that exemplified that concept of "black history." The article was suddenly geared towards an optimal user experience, and not focused on making Google happy. With that approach, it soon became one of the most popular articles on the site.

Plan a Schedule Based around The Kaizen Technique

Yaro Starak over a Entrepreneur's Journey recently published an article about using a Japanese technique called "Kaizen" to build your blog and turn it into a profitable business for yourself. The overarching concept of Kaizen isn't strictly something applied to business or blogging, but Yaro was able to use its principles to break down major goals into easy to achieve daily tasks

Growing your blog may seem simple on paper, but it's quite a task, so use these four daily goals to better understand and break down your overarching goals:

Acquire New Customers – Your first task should always be to find new ways to bring people to your website and convert them into followers or paying customers.

Create New Products and Services – Every day should also be focused on creating a new value or product for your readers. If you're a business, find ways to improve upon or supersede your current offerings.

Network with other Bloggers – Create and grow your relationships with other partners in your niche. Find ways each day to help your fellow bloggers and partners.

Never Stop Learning – We should never stop growing or education. Your blog cannot grow until you do. Learn something new, and grow as a person and a business owner each day.

Final Thoughts

The internet is an endless font of information. Tips like these are all pulled from fantastic blogging resources where you can find more tips like these. Remember to write content for your readers and always keep them in mind. From there, it's all in the details. Tell me about your personal blogging tips and how you promote your content in the comments below!

Matt Banner is the author of OnBlastBlog.com?, a resource dedicated to providing easy to understand and essential tips to starting and growing a blog!

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

ProBlogger: Selling eBooks and Digital Products on Your Blog? You Need to Know About EU VAT-MOSS

Selling eBooks and Digital Products on Your Blog? You Need to Know About EU VAT-MOSS

Posted: 23 Dec 2014 06:54 AM PST

This is a guest contribution from freelance writer Jawat Khan.

Ask any professional blogger and he'll tell you that selling eBooks, eCourses, trainings, tutorials and other forms of digital products is one of the most profitable ways of making a sustainable income from your blog.

It's not easy, of course.

You need to spend countless hours creating high quality content, responding to reader comments, building relationships, spending money on advertising and creating products that people would gladly pay for.

It's real hard work. And anyone who's been on this path knows its challenges, and the personal and professional sacrifices that it demands.

Unfortunately, it just got a whole lot harder.

The EU VAT-MOSS Legislation

The European Union has recently introduced a new value added tax (VAT) that'll come in to effect from 01 January 2015. This new VAT will be applicable on any digital products that are sold to buyers anywhere in the EU.

And this is where it gets really tough for us.

The tax will be calculated on the basis of the buyer's location, NOT the seller. So even if you reside outside the EU you'd be required to pay this VAT on each sale that you make to a customer based in any of the 28 EU member states.

So, for example, if you're a blogger based in Australia and a buyer from Germany or any other EU state purchases an eBook from your blog, YOU will have to pay the VAT on top of your product price.

What's more, you'd need to collect evidence of your sales that indicate the buyer's location based on his IP address and credit card information. You'd then need to submit this evidence along with your returns every quarter.

Honestly, one of the best things about making an online income, for me, is the lack of administrative costs and unnecessary legal documentation. But with this VAT, all of us, the bloggers and digital sellers, would need to collect evidence and submit returns on our sales.

To make this process slightly simpler, you can register with any "Mini One Stop Shop" (MOSS) in any EU member state (UK or Ireland being the most convenient). Your VAT will then be distributed to the relevant countries according to their tax rates.

You are also required to keep the record of your sales, as evidence, for at least 10 years to avoid any legal problems in selling to EU customers.

All this is very complex legal stuff.

The objective of this post is not to give you any legal advice. I'm no expert myself. But I just want you to know about the potential repercussions of this law on your blogging income. You should definitely seek professional advice on this matter and study this law in more detail here.

So What Can Be Done About EU VAT-MOSS?

Being a blogger myself, I know you might be confused and upset by this law. Some of the most prominent freelance writers, bloggers and digital sellers have express public outrage on Twitter in reaction to this law. They've also started an online petition that is gaining momentum quickly. You can vote on this petition here.

But apart from expressing disappointment at this law, you need to do the following things.

Consult with your ecommerce software provider and tell them about this development. You'll need their help in collecting buyer data as purchase evidence. You need to collect buyer location data based on the IP address and credit card information.
You need to keep this record with you for at least 10 years so that you can present it anytime it is required.
You need to submit your VAT returns every quarter to MOSS.
Or you can take the hard decision and stop selling to EU buyers completely to avoid any of these legal issues. But you'd need the help of your ecommerce software provider here as well, because you'd need to block buyers from selected countries on the basis of their IP address and credit card information. You can't do it manually.

Several ecommerce software providers have made announcements on what they're doing about this law and the additional requirements that it has brought with it. PayPal recently announced that they'll be able to store buyer location with their API. But there hasn't been any announcement from them about data storage and country blocking.

In the last week, Selz has introduced a series of features that cover all the VAT-MOSS requirements. By enabling the EU VAT-MOSS feature in your Selz dashboard, you can receive automatically degenerated reports about the exact location of your buyers based on their IP address and credit card.

Selz will calculate the applicable VAT rate in your buyer's country, which you can add on top of your product's sales price. It also stores this information for up to 10 years and lets you export it into an excel sheet for MOSS submission.

In case you decide to completely block EU buyers (approx. 507,000,000 potential customers) Selz allows you to apply country based restrictions on downloads.

Conclusion

There's a hot debate in the blogging community about the EU VAT-MOSS that will come into effect from 01 January 2015. There's still some confusion about its application and how it will impact bloggers and digital sellers from different countries. You can follow Twitter updates on this subject on #VATMOSS and #VATMESS hashtags. At the same time, you should make sure that you have the right tools to record the required buyer information for VAT submission, in case the law remains unchanged.

Jawad Khan is a Content Marketing Specialist at Quality Trade, a leading marketing and trading platform for B2B companies. Follow Jawad on Twitter and Google+

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Selling eBooks and Digital Products on Your Blog? You Need to Know About EU VAT-MOSS

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