9 Tips How to Create a Wildly Successful Blog

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DigitalPhotographySchool.com is seen by over 3 million people each month.  In April 2006 when Darren Rowse started his site, it was just a simple blog that saw 3-4 new posts a week. 
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The growth of Darren Rowses' blog can be attributed to many different factors: quality content, generating a subscriber’s list, and excellent Search Engine Optimization. Rowse says that “leveraging” had a big part in his blog’s success. What he did was:

• directing readers from a previous photography blog to his new site
• using his connections in the photography blogging world to get some promotion from other sites
• asking his Flickr followers to promote his site
• Among other good practices, he also used resources that he already had on-hand to help him to boost his new site.

How You Can Create Web Content Without Writing
No time to write? No problem! There are so many ways to create content for your blog:

• Photos and Videos
• Re-blogging
• Slide-Shares
• Guest posts
• Info-Graphics
• Snippets from your book
• Polls / Surveys
• Curating other blog articles

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What Can YOU Do With Your Blog Content?

Post on Social Media
Recycle some of your most interesting content and post it on Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, eZines – always with a link to your blog.

Refer-a-friend Promotion
Provide a reward for your users that gets another person to become a visitor, member or sign up for the email list.

Guest Posting 
Guest posting allows you to attract targeted traffic (readers) that is already interested in your niche.

Create an E-book
Find a series of articles that have a similar topic and compile them into a marketable format. Sell it for a low price on Amazon or give it away for free

Create a Video Series 
Say you’ve got a bunch of articles that describe, step by step, how to create (…fill in…)

Create an Email List
Don’t wait to start your newsletter email list. Sign-up today with any of the email newsletter services (often for free).  Your email newsletter should serve as the voice or spokesperson for your blog or your books. All exclusive information should be send via this medium to your readers. 

Blog Comments
Participate in the comments section of other blogger’s posts and on social sites, e.g. Google+ or on LinkedIn or Goodreads.

Spread the word about your blog are directories, here just a few:
http://blogs.botw.org/Arts/Literature/Publishing/
http://www.bloggeries.com/Writing_Publishing/
http://technorati.com/blogs/directory/entertainment/books/
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There’s no need to constantly create new things – instead form new relationships, or attract new readers to your blog. You can even use this post to start leveraging right away – can you leave a comment that will get me to visit your site?
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More About Blogging
http://savvybookwriters.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/how-your-blog-helps-your-books-taking-off/
http://savvybookwriters.wordpress.com/2013/09/10/5-tips-for-re-blogging/
http://savvybookwriters.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/guest-blogging-etikette/
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5837/The-First-Step-in-Email-Marketing-Optimization.aspx

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How to Improve Photos for the Internet

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My largest visitor stream I ever got on any blog was via Google Image Search. People were looking for a certain image on Google and found my website. The photo had the right size, motive and it was named with the right keywords.
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Improve SEO Through Your Photos
There is more to it, than just placing attractive photos on your blog or website. Here are some tips how you can optimize your photos to improve SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and to get more traffic to your website or blog.
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Reduce the File Size of Your Photos
NOT the dimensions of the image, but the pixel size. When you re-size a photo manually in WordPress (for example) you only change the dimensions, and the amount of pixel stays almost the same. A file size of 1.8 MB can be easily reduced to 300 Kb without compromising the quality for the viewer. Adobe Photoshop or Adobe “LightRoom” software can be used to re-size the photo’s pixels – not the dimension!
IMPORTANT: Make a copy of your original photo BEFORE you re-size. Otherwise it would be lost forever and you would keep only the lower pixel version. There is no way back!
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Name Your Photos
File593730.jpg or DSC_8405037.jpg is not helpful to you and totally meaningless to search engines. Keywords in the photos name should be separated by hyphens, NOT underscores, and shouldn’t be squeezed into a single word, e.g. Antique-Leica-Camera.jpg.
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Always Use ALT tags
Wordpress makes it easy for you when adding photos to your text. The fields for Title, Description, ALT and caption are build-in, so you can fill them out easily. Search engines can’t “see” photos, but “read” keywords, that describes your image. Keywords that you use on your web page should work together with the keywords you use for your images.
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Where to Find Inexpensive Photos?
You might be an avid photographer, just like me, taking often several hundred images a month. However, from time to time the need for a certain motive arises, and the question is, where to turn to for inexpensive images for a blog or a web site? A lot of research brought up a handful of online offers that I like to share with you.
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You will find websites in these articles that provide good deals on royalty-free photographs or even free ones.  Don’t know the difference between royalty-free and free photos?  Take the time to read these articles:
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Where to find free photos and illustrations?

Why Steal When You Can Get it for Free ?

5 Laws Writers Should Know to Avoid Getting Sued

10 Rules of USA Copyright Infringement

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SEO Ranking Factors for Blogs and Websites

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According to Moz.com's latest surveys these Search Engine Optimization efforts accumulated to top rankings on Google search results:

1. Page Authority correlates higher than any other metric we measured.
2. Social signals, especially Google +1's & Facebook shares are highly correlated.
3. Anchor text correlations remain as strong as ever.
4. New correlations were measured for schema.org and structured data usage.
5. More data was collected on external links, keywords, and exact match domains.

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Explore more infographics like this one on the web's largest information design community - Visually.
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Conclusion:
Writing frequently, relevant, quality-content and networking on GooglePlus are a great start to better Search Engine rankings.  Content is also responsible for converting search and the visitors.  More than half of readers or consumers are inclined to buy goods from businesses that provide custom content and blogs will impact their buying decisions. 

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SEO and Content Marketing

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As 80 % of consumers search online for a product before purchasing it, the goal of content marketers is to find a way to make it more discover-able in top search engine results.

In a great article by Lauren Mobertz  "SEO Experts Reveal the Future of Marketing" it is demonstrated how Content Marketing changes SEO.  "On the topic of how content marketing has changed SEO, experts suggested that it's more important now than ever to create content people need rather than creating content just for content's sake. Now marketers will have to determine which audiences are most important to target and what exactly those audiences want to see online."

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Embedded from Pardot
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Businesses need to understand how search algorithms work to make their content perform on Google's Search Engine.   How this is done in an easy way is the topic of our next blog post.

Read also more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in these books:


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