Creating valuable content is no longer a big problem like it was when blogging was new. More bloggers than we’d ever know create valuable content.

The big problem is that as more valuable blog posts populate the web, more of them are becoming some of the greatest secrets on the web. These blog posts do a great job at entertaining and/or educating, but no one sees them.

A lack of visibility doesn’t reflect the quality of the blog post. It reflects poor marketing.

Despite blogging being seen as a long game, especially with SEO as the epitome of long-term growth, you can double your blog traffic in one month. Whether you’re just starting out with a few hundred visitors every month or thousands of visitors every month, you can double your blog traffic.

1. Do You Believe In Yourself?

We’ll get into the nitty gritty soon, but think about this question. Do you really believe you can do this? The upcoming strategies work, but you need to believe in yourself before you achieve big results.

Even if you haven’t seen much success lately, you can do this. Repeat that in your mind as you read and implement these strategies.

2. Ask People To Share Your Content

While you can double your blog traffic in 1 month, it’s more difficult if you fly solo. To boost your chances of generating more blog traffic, you’ll need to ask people to share your content.

By initiating these conversations, you’ll build relationships with people in your niche. Some of these people will not share your content. Others will share one of your blog posts. A small group of these same people will continue to share your content over and over again.

You’ll achieve exponential success with this tactic based on the number of micro influencers you contact. You’ll have more potential if you contact 100 micro influencers every week than if you only contact 10 micro influencers every week.

3. Where Do I Find People To Contact?

There are so many places where you can contact people. However, the top two places to go are LinkedIn and Twitter. On LinkedIn, you can make your request in the message you send people as you request to connect with them. On Twitter, you can mention the person you want to contact and ask them to share your content.

I aim for people who have 500+ LinkedIn connections or at least 1,000 Twitter followers depending on the social network I’m using.

4. What Do I Say?

To get more people to share your content, don’t come right out of the gate asking for a share. Instead, you need to take a permission marketing approach. Instead of saying, “Can you please share this article?” say something like, “I wrote this article on X, and I thought it might be useful for you and your audience. Do you want me to send it over?”

It’s up to the other person to initiate the conversation. This approach creates a friendly dialogue and gives the micro influencer full control over the decision without any pressure or sense of pushy marketing.

As these people share your content, some of their followers will follow suite. Some of these people will repeatedly share your content with their audiences. This is something that will grow over time, but if you contact even 30 people every week, you’ll see significant process towards doubling your blog traffic.

5. Using Your Own Platform To Fuel Growth

While SEO is more of a long-term game with very promising upside, getting micro influencers to spread the word is the best way to generate short-term results. These short-term results can continue over the long-term and even aid your SEO efforts.

But there’s more to double your blog traffic in 1 month. You also have to promote your own content. That means getting more active on social networks. If you want to double your social media traffic, you can do it in a few ways:

• Double Your Social Media Audience Size — Focus on growing a targeted audience. Go where your ideal follower goes. You can double your number by buying fake followers, but that won’t do you any good. Even if you double your audience with real but non-targeted followers, that won’t help since they won’t care enough about your niche.
• Double Your Social Media Posting Frequency — This is easier for most people, especially as your audience grows. While you don’t want to post too often, you can experiment to determine what works. I tweet over 100 times per day but would never think of publishing 100 Instagram pictures every day. Each social network is different, but work on boosting your frequency.
• Double Down On What Works — Not all social media posts are created equal. Most social networks come with built-in analytics which allow you to see your top and worst performing posts. Eliminate the worst and promote the best more often.

Read More: Why Social Share Buttons Need To Be Labeled For Traffic Increase?

And don’t forget to connect all of your efforts to grow your email list. You’ll get more engagement on your email list than anywhere else.

What were your thoughts on these tactics to double your blog traffic in one month? Do you have any tactics you want to share with us? Sound off in the comments below.

The post 5 Proven Strategies To Double Your Blog Traffic in a Month appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

Interacting with these types of influencers is no easy task as many gatekeepers expand the gap between your message and the influencer’s ear.

Enter micro influencers who have smaller but very targeted and loyal audiences. These are the influencers you need to find to take your business to the next level.

They have no gatekeepers and appreciate every share they get. While macro influencers also appreciate when people share their content, it’s harder for macro influencers to interact on an individual level with the people in their audience.

Where Can We Find Micro Influencers?

Micro influencers aren’t as pronounced as macro influencers. They tend to cluster around the macro influencers and macro influential brands. You can find them in the comments on other people’s blogs, but there’s a better way to find them.

Micro influencers usually make guest appearances on macro influencer shows and podcasts. If I want to find micro influencers, I look no further than influential podcasts and guest blogs. I go on the EOFire Podcast to see who John Lee Dumas recently interviewed.

The majority of his guests are micro influencers. They have large, loyal, and targeted audiences, but they don’t have millions of followers. If you email them, you have a much higher chance of getting a response and building a relationship.

After looking at the latest EOFire episodes, I’ll head over to Jeff Bullas’ Blog. Jeff is rapidly approaching 1 million followers across all of his social networks, and his blog gets 400,000 monthly views. Many of the blog posts on his site are from contributors. Virtually all of these contributors are micro influencers.

The podcasts and blogs will be different for each niche, but when you find active podcasts and guest blogs, you’ll find many of the micro influencers in your niche.

How Can We Build The Relationship?

Micro influencers don’t get as much attention macro influencers. That is to your advantage. Any email you send to a micro influencer is much more likely to get a response than emails you send to macro influencers.

But how do we build the relationship? What do we say in the email?

While there are many reasons to send an email to a micro influencer, the best emails boil down to one of two ingredients:

1. Praise — When doing research for my blog posts, I prefer to mention micro influencers over macro influencers. Micro influencers are much more likely to see that you mentioned them, and some will even share your content. If I choose to mention a micro influencer’s article, I tell them how much their article impacted me. I prefer to request an optional share over being pushy.

2. Opportunity — Micro influencers want to grow their audiences and gain more visibility. Most micro influencers will be more than ready to jump on an opportunity to do so. My favorite way to build relationships with people is to invite them to become guests on the Breakthrough Success Podcast. Most of the people I ask end up becoming guests on the show. What follows is a 30-45 minute conversation, and if you spend that much time talking to someone, you’ll probably have a healthy relationship at the end of that conversation.

How Can We Preserve These Relationships?

Micro influencers will take more time to respond to their audience than macro influencers, but micro influencers also have a lot on their respective plates. Micro influencers usually wear many hats and don’t have a team to delegate tasks to. Many of them work alone.

That means you need to make every effort to strengthen the relationships you have with these influencers. Don’t just email them when you need help.

Be willing to give. Share their content on social media and tag/mention them so they get notified about your post. If you find an article that you know would benefit one micro influencer, send that article over to the micro influencer. Comment on their content.

Read More: Get 6 Incredible Ideas For Micro-Influencers To Reap Your Business

Micro influencers will respond to those types of interactions. Some of them will follow suite. They’ll share your latest blog post without you reminding them, leave a comment, and tell people about you.

Your ability to preserve these relationships is dependent on your willingness to follow-up with your existing relationships. Don’t bother building new relationships if you can’t leverage and build upon the relationships you’ve already built.

What are your thoughts on building relationships with micro influencers? Where do you go to find micro influencers? Do you have a question? Sound off in the comments section below.

The post Micro Influencers: Find, Connect, Preserve and Grow appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

Reaching out to influencers and starting the dialogue is not as difficult as it seems. You need to create a reason for the dialogue and determine your goal.

What’s Your Goal?

Do you want influencers to share your content, become guests on your podcast, or something else? Determining your goal will improve the dialogue because you’ll have clarity. Having clarity is the first step towards meaningfully achieving your goal.

What’s In It For The Influencers?

Once you determine your goal, your next step is to determine what’s in it for the influencer. Remember that influencers are people too, and some of their in boxes are stuffed with messages like yours.

They get plenty of emails that ask them to share content or to be a guest on a podcast. By answering this question in advance, you can write an email that sets you apart.

When I ask influencers to become guests on the Breakthrough Success Podcast, I make it clear what type of exposure they’ll get. I mention right away that I have over 500K social media followers, over 10K email subscribers, and almost 70K students on Udemy. My potential guests know that this episode will be seen by a lot of people.

I also establish the credibility of my podcast by mentioning some of the guests from past episodes. If you are just launching your podcast, just focus on your audience size and how many people you’d spread the message to.

If you don’t have a podcast, there’s still plenty you can offer to an influencer. A popular tactic to reach out to influencers is to mention them in one of your blog posts before reaching out. You can then tell the influencer that you mentioned him/her in the blog post and ask for a share.

Influencers, just like anyone else, are more likely to share content that they got mentioned in. If you mention five influencers in all of your blog posts, and you reach out to all five of those influencers, you can start generating massive traffic.

How Do I Get Them To Notice Me On Social Media?

For some influencers, an email isn’t enough. While the above tactics are the most effective for getting a desirable response, there are other ways to reach out to influencers…and get them to notice you.

We can’t do everything or be everywhere at once. This is a popular lesson that gets repeated time and time again. While you can’t be everywhere, you can be everywhere to someone. In this case, that someone is an influencer.

If that influencer tweets, start liking, retweeting, and responding to their tweets. Like and comment on their Facebook posts. Repin their pins, and comment on their Instagram pictures while you’re at it.

Liking and sharing will get the influencer’s attention, but nothing is more powerful than leaving quality comments and responses to their content. So many people are willing to like, fewer people will share, but almost no one is willing to leave a comment.

That’s why you’ll see the Instagram pictures with thousands of likes but only a few dozen comments. If you frequently comment on an influencer’s content (that in some cases, you would have consumed anyway), immediately positions you in their frame of mind.

When it comes time to ask the influencer for a favor, they’ll remember you from all of the likes, shares, but most importantly, comments, that you leave on their posts.

How Do I Continue The Conversation?

Some influencers will respond to your emails while others will respond to your comments. A few will even respond to both. At this point, you have a conversation.

The way you continue the conversation depends on how the influencer responds. The rule of thumb for continuing a conversation is to think of the conversation with someone offline.

If they weren’t interested in your idea, you wouldn’t just blow them off and not write back. You would thank them for considering your idea or use another approach without being too pushy.

If the influencer is interested in continuing the dialogue on social media, asking questions and sharing additional insights will continue the conversation. When you ask a question, the influencer needs to answer it.

If you share an additional insight, the influencer will elaborate on that insight and maybe offer some of his/her insights.

If the influencer agrees to be a guest on your show or to share your content, provide them with the next steps.

What’s The Most Important Thing For Me To Remember?

Influencers are people. The moment you treat them like people instead of opportunity-bearers, you’ll have more success.

Also, don’t stop interacting with any influencer. There is no end-goal with influencer relationships. Sure, you may want them on your show or to share your content, but you need to continue the dialogue.

Read More: 3 Must Know Ways To Fight Negative SEO & Protect Your Site

Follow-up with influencers you haven’t been in touch with for a while. Just check in and keep those relationships healthy. You may need them in the future, and they may need your help in the future.

The post How To Reach Out To Influencers And Be In Touch With Them appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

The way most people approach the situation is by doing a little bit of everything. They’re sending out a few posts to each of their audiences and responding whenever they can.

Audiences on some social media platforms get forgotten about, and growth is an entirely different issue. The result is mediocrity at all and mastery of none.

What’s The Best Way To Master Them All?

Ironically, the starting point for mastering every social network is to focus on a single social network.

When I first began my social media journey, I was mediocre at all of the social networks but a master of none. I was throwing content all over the place and hoping some of it would stick.

Although the results weren’t good at the time, I got the most results from Twitter. Once I made this discovery, I went all-in on Twitter, and that’s why I have far more followers on Twitter than any of the other social networks.

Right now, you might be all over the place on social media or doing decent on a few platforms.

You need to examine all of your social networks and see which one brings in the most results. If that’s the social network you feel the most confident in (it usually is), then go all-in for that social network.

During the all-in phase, 90% of your time should go towards the one social network and 10% of your time should go towards the other social networks. With this approach, you’ll eventually become the master of a social network.

But How Do I Then Master Them All?

Once you master a single social network, it becomes exponentially easier to master them all. For starters, mastery of any social network involves a series of tactics that are all interlaced within common principles.

For instance, a very basic, well-known principle is to consistently post valuable content. On YouTube, the posting mechanic is videos while on Instagram the posting mechanic is a square picture. However, the principle remains the same.

Mastering one social network allows you to discover more of those principles and some tactics based off those principles that you can use to expand your social media empire.

This approach has one limitation…time. As you add more social networks to your workload, you have less time to address them all, let alone the other areas of your business.

Once you master a social network and decide to move towards the next social network, you need to train someone to do your work.

The moment I mastered Twitter, I wanted to master all of the social networks. I built massive tribes on Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, and a few others.

However, some of those tribes haven’t seen a post in a while because my time couldn’t expand to keep up with all of those demands.

My solution was to outsource virtually every part of my Twitter game. I’m not the person scheduling the tweets. I put all of my tweets into an evergreen cycle that ViralTag tweets for me.

I have a virtual assistant who grows my Twitter audience. With growth and posting covered, all I really do on Twitter is interact with people for 10-15 minutes every week.

Since this discovery, I have outsourced more of my social media tasks. For instance, I am finalizing an evergreen schedule for my Pinterest boards, so I no longer have to worry about scheduling pins.

I am also working on an evergreen posting cycle for Facebook, so I no longer have to think about whether the posts are going out the way they should.

It becomes much more difficult to master all of the social networks when you have to think too much about what you have to do.

Getting thoughts like posting and audience growth out of your head by outsourcing those tasks will give you more time to explore new opportunities and take an aerial view of your social media strategy. With the aerial view, you can truly see what is working and how you can improve.

See More: Best Free & Interactive Video Marketing Tools For Effective Marketing

In Conclusion

After mastering the social networks, I didn’t find myself in a deeper time crunch.

I actually found myself saving more time in my day because I learned how to master one social network and hired a virtual assistant to manage that account for me as I discovered how to master the other social networks.

The results of this strategy can be truly amazing. In less than two years, my blog went from nowhere to getting over 200,000 visitors every year.

However, this strategy won’t just help you with your results. The extra time allowed me to explore new opportunities such as hosting my own virtual summits and the Breakthrough Success Podcast.

The post Get A Correct Way To Master Every Single Social Network appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.

You can’t produce the same effect with books and videos which both require visual elements. With podcasts continuing to grow, now is the perfect time to build your brand with a podcast.

How Do I Set Up A Podcast?

You can set your podcast up on Libsyn where they’ll help you get your podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Android, and a variety of other platforms. You’ll then need a tool to record the interviews such as Skype’s Call Recorder or Zoom.

I use Zoom for my virtual summits and the Skype Call Recorder for podcast interviews. Both are reliable options although I see more people moving towards Zoom.

Once you decide on the technology, you need to decide on the basic structure of your podcast. Will you interview an expert every week, or will you host a daily show where you share some tidbits for 5-10 minutes?

You can create multiple podcasts later on, but for your first podcast, decide which of these two options you’ll pursue. Just you, or you with an expert.

If you go the expert route, understand that you’ll need to contact many experts in advance. I recommend publishing a podcast with at least a month’s worth of episodes scheduled. That means you’ll have to get a certain number of people to say yes.

The amount of yeses you need depends on how many episodes you want to publish each week. The more episodes you want to publish, the more experts you’ll need to get in advance.

How Does This Grow My Brand?

You can get the top experts or deliver an amazing daily show, but if you don’t connect your pod-cast with your brand, you are missing out.

Sure, people will become more familiar with your name and your style. Relationships will be built.

But you want to lead people back to your website. More importantly, you want to make revenue from your podcast.

The most common tactic for getting more traffic and sales for a podcast is to leverage the intros and outros. At the beginning of your podcast, mention a freebie, giveaway, or a product and make the link easy to remember.

Sometimes a custom link is necessary (I use the Pretty Links WP Plugin to create those custom links).

For my eBook 27 Ways To Get More Retweets On Twitter, I tell my listeners they can get it at marcguberti.com/retweets instead of the hard to remember (and even harder to say) http://marcguberti.com/27-ways-retweets-twitter.

Both links lead to the same page, but one of them is much easier to remember than the other.

By leading your listeners to your landing page, you’ll get more subscribers on your email list, and when you get people to convert through your auto responder, that’s when you generate revenue from your podcast.

You can also lead people back to your website with the show notes. By taking notes for your listeners and providing a memorable link, you can lead more people to your website.

Leading people back to your website over and over again will make them more familiar with your brand.

That familiarity will result in more customers.

Similarly to how I made the retweets eBook link easy to remember, I make the show notes link easy to remember. Here’s the breakdown for any of my show note links:

marcguberti.com/e# where # = the number of the episode. For instance, Episode 30’s show notes can be found at marcguberti.com/e30.

What’s The First Step I Should Take?

If you want to interview experts, start sending them emails. The moment you get your first yes, you are committed to hosting the podcast.

I didn’t know how to do any of the technology when I started contacting potential guests.

When I got my first yes, I focused more of my time, attention, and energy figuring out how to host the podcast with the technology I mentioned earlier.

If you want to host a daily show, start recording episodes. Get comfortable with the process.

You’ll have to do some preparation, but it isn’t much. If you want to interview experts, you just need to write a great intro and think of some good questions to ask.

For a daily show with quick, insightful nuggets, write out the introduction to the topic so you have a starting point.

In any episode, the introduction matters more than anything else because that sets the gist for the entire episode. People will love or hate your episode based on the intro.

See More: 9 Best Successful Influencer Marketing Trends of 2017

In Conclusion

Podcasting is a wonderful opportunity to grow your brand. Taking the first step now will set you on the path to becoming a successful podcast host.

Make sure you use the intro and outro to promote easy to remember links that point back to your website.

What are your thoughts on starting a podcast? Do you have any podcasting tips for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.

The post Podcast Branding – Can Podcast Help You To Build Your Brand? appeared first on Proven SEO Blog.