Showing posts with label stumbleupon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stumbleupon. Show all posts

Monday, 12 November 2012

How to create a successful blog

When producing content to engage with your audience or for the purpose of improving your search engine ranking, producing fresh and entertaining content on a regular basis can often be difficult. However, whether you run an ecommerce store or another type of business, there are a number of different ways you can keep your audience engaged on a regular basis.


  • Break up your text - If a reader has to read through reams and reams of text, no matter how appealing your writing is, there are soon going to get either bored or frustrated. The best way to avoid this is to break up your text by either separating the text into paragraphs, using bullet points to make key points concise or inserting a range of different images that relate to your subject.

  • Don't waffle - Just like having clumps of text all together, taking three sentences to say something that can be summed up in one is another way to alienate your audience. Keep your writing sharp and concise, allowing your writing to be as informative as possible.

  • Offer guest bloggers - While you might produce appealing content and have a dedicated audience, having a guest write an article for your site from time to time can have a number of benefits. The obvious benefit is that you are getting fresh content without you having to actually write it. Furthermore, you are also getting a professional source with their own following to write for your site. This means that their audience will visit your site to view the content the guest blogger has produced for you, resulting in your brand image, website traffic and total blog reads taking a healthy boost.

  • Stay topical - When coming up with ideas for content, you should always be aware of what subjects are topical both in the news and in social circles. You can then look to create your own slant on this subject by relating it to something to do with your ecommerce business. This allows you to try and achieve the highest reads possible as there will be a number of people out there currently interested in that specific topic. However, this interest works both ways. There is no point writing about something that people were interested in a few months ago as they are likely no longer interested in anything relating to it. 

  • Get your audience involved - When writing a blog article, try and pose questions in your text that that makes the reader think and possibly encourages them to engage with you either through your social media pages or by commenting at the bottom of the blog post. Creating a platform for discussion at the end of your article is a great way to establish a dedicated audience and achieve a high amount of reads and shares.

  • Share your content - While you may get a few reads from your dedicated audience by just writing a blog post and then leaving it there for people to read, you need to share your content in a number of different places to give your content the best exposure possible. This means sharing your articles across Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Reddit and any other social bookmarking sites you come across. Depending on the CMS system or ecommerce software you are using to create your blog, you also want to include links to the social media pages to do with your business. That way if someone stumbles across one of your blog articles, they can visit one of your social media pages to get more information about your business.

  • Post regularly - Whether you are posting to entertain your audience or to improve your social media ranking through backlinks, it is vitally important you post on a regular basis. Just writing an article every few months isn't going to be enough to get enough backlinks to boost your ranking or to get a dedicated following. At the very least you should be producing one or two articles a week. If you have the time you may even decide to produce one every day. 

  • Link to other areas - If you are looking to produce your blog in order to help generate traffic and hopefully turn them into customers, remember to mention the services you provide within the text as well as placing links to other areas of your website.
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Thursday, 13 September 2012

Beginners guide social media success

When running an ecommerce store, the ability to effectively engage with your community through your social media channels is going to be important in helping bring traffic to your site and encourage them to purchase. However, for those who may not use social media often or may be new to running an online store, where should you create social media accounts and what should you post?

Where to post?


While the two obvious social media sites you definitely need to look at are Facebook and Twitter, these shouldn't be the only two that you focus on. Today, there are a number of different social media sites that are able to get a high number of users interacting with their site each day. These platforms include Pinterest, YouTube, Google+ and also social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious and Reddit. Placing your content on each one of these sites is going to allow as many people as possible to become aware of your business name and what it is you offer. This, albeit limited initial engagement, forms the basis for your customer relationships, increasing the chances of you generating traffic and sales. 

What to post?


So now we have decided where we need to place our social media content, the next thing we need to decide is what are we actually going to post? Well what you post depends on what it is your business offers and how much time you have to spend on it.

Blog Posts - This isn't a sales piece, rather an informative piece that is related to your business. So if you run an electronics store, you may write some articles on the latest technology news or how certain electronic products could help make managing your life easier. Your blog posts are a great way to not only improve the ranking of your website through keywords, but to also create a platform to inform and engage with your customers. Within your blog you can also place links letting people know how they can access your online store.

Products - The more places you can show off your wears to people, the more chance you have of turning them into customers. You should be placing images on all of your social media sites on a regular basis, showing off the most popular products you have for sale and also any new products that you add to your store. While the best social media sites for showing off your product images are Facebook and Pinterest, there is nothing wrong with placing them across all of your social platforms. The strength of social media comes in the ability for users to share these images between their contacts, meaning your content can be exposed to a whole new customer base who didn't even know your store existed. 

Sales and Offers - In terms of providing content to make sure you are able create a popular social media platform, this is the most important. As we have mentioned in the past, the majority of people who follow a business on social media sites, do so to find out about the latest sales and offers. For this reason you should make sure that as soon as you decide to launch promotion, you place it on your social media sites for everyone to see. You can also choose to reward your social media followers by creating a promotion specifically for them. This would allow them to enter a specific code you have posted on your social media account, which they can then use to receive a discount on a product. Not only does this make your social media followers feel more valued, it also attracts new customers to join your social media channels just to find out about these offers. 

Also, when running a promotion, you can also look to increase customer engagement by creating a promotion that specifically requires them to give their opinion, possibly through some sort of voting system. For example, you could post four items from your store on a specific social media site, such as Facebook and ask your fans to vote on which item they would like to see a discount on. This way you are placing a promotion on an item that you know will be popular with customers and will also get sales. 

Answering Questions - Sometimes it is the simple things that are going to bring you the greatest success. While posting blog content, images and offers are all very important, sometimes answering a question from a user could be just as effective. Answering any queries users may have not only makes them feel more comfortable about purchasing from your store in the future, it also helps give your business a personality, making it seem much more approachable and trusting in the eyes of potential customers. 

Social Commerce - Within today's world of online selling, social media is not only a place to interact with customers, but is now also a platform where you can sell products directly to the customers. If you have your own Facebook store, you are able to have customers purchase items directly from Facebook. Depending on the items your store sells, this could be a popular platform as they would not have to leave Facebook to visit a third party site and you could also take advantage of a customer's buying impulse by allowing them to purchase a product as quick as possible. 

Get your free ecommerce store now: http://www.esellution.co.uk/pricing.html

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Tuesday, 21 August 2012

The best way to boost your blog reads

Creating a blog for your online business is a great way to make your website SEO friendly, improving the likelihood that people will see it at the top of search engine rankings. However, with the number of people who produce their own blogs, getting readers to consistently visit your blog can be difficult. Rather than waiting for them to come to you, there are ways for you to go to them, show them your work and hopefully bring them back to your site. Social bookmarking websites are a great way to help give your blog that extra boost in terms of reads.

StumbleUpon

One of the best social networking sites around in terms of boosting the number of readers your articles can achieve. However, these reads aren't necessarily from people who are interested in reading your content. How StumbleUpon works is that you sign up and select a certain number of categories that you are interested in. Once you click the "Stumble" button, you are then sent bounced to random webpages that are to do with one of your specific interests. If you have your blog content within StumbleUpon, it means that your article will be one of these pages that users see. 

When you use Stumbleupon, you need to make sure that you don't use it as a one way street to only promote your own content. If you continually submit pages from the same URL address, StumbleUpon will tag you as being a spammer and will block you from submitting future pages from that URL. To avoid this you need to make sure you use the bookmarking site to its full potential. Visit different websites that are of interest to you and like their pages. This will not only tailor your Stumble feed to show articles that are of interest to you, but will also allow you to keep posting your own blog articles without being seen as a spammer.

Digg

Digg is a social bookmarking site that has stood the rest of time, still ranking in the top five of all bookmarking sites despite being one of the first created. While it is harder to get reads on Digg as opposed to the previously mentioned StumbleUpon, if you manage to get your blog posts on to the front page of Digg you are guaranteed to have people reading your article in droves. Posts that tend to do better than others on Digg are news articles and niche articles. What I mean by niche is articles that stand out from all others, creating humour and touching on a topic that previously hasn't been touched on much by other users. 

Delicious

The first ever social bookmarking site to go live on the Internet and it's still going strong today. Delicious allows you to simply add links to your blog article and then add as many tags to that post as you like. The more tags you place on a post, the more chance that users are going to come across it in their search. LIke Digg, your blog post will only really receive significant amounts of traffic to your blog if it manages to make the front page. There isn't really anyway to artificially enhance this, you simply need to wait for people to like it and move it up the ranking.

Reddit

Unlike the previous two social bookmarking sites, Digg is a site that you need to work hard at in order to make your posts a success. You cannot simply add your post to the site and then be done with it until you next wish to add a page. In order to achieve the best levels of success, you need to regularly engage in conversation with other users and help them by providing content and other information that could be of use to them.

Inbound

A bookmarking site aimed at people interested in Internet marketing posts. However, the site does allow you to post articles that are to do with related topics such as ecommerce, advertising and other forms of marketing. The website is very much in it's infancy but is full of potential. If you are someone who regularly creates posts on these subjects, it will allow you to create gain a number of dedicated number of followers who will become interested in any future posts you make. 

Other notable mentions

While these sites aren't considered social bookmarking sites, it would be crazy not to use them to promote your blog posts and articles. Twitter, Google+ and Facebook are still some of the best ways to promote your blog, articles or anything to do with your business through social interaction and social commerce. With over a billion combined users, the potential audience you can reach is simply staggering, meaning that one single post could be shared between your friends and other people who are interested in your site, allowing you to gain a substantial number of reads in a short space of time. Not only that, it allows you to promote your online store and brand image easily, enticing users to visit your site.

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