One of the reasons many bloggers fail is because they are so committed to selling products and increasing referrals (or people who visit your site as a result of a recommendation from someone else). These people are so committed to this process that they lose touch with their biggest fans and instead focus on delivering a product that isn’t even able to live up to its lowest expectations. This isn’t where you want to be.
I figure this is the result of close networks of people who are unwilling to branch out and include more of the community. These people are self-centered and want to keep all the profits within a close group of people. Nearly all new sales are generated from this group of people marketing to the same (generally large) group of people. While those inside of this group are able to constantly pump out new products based on their most successful products, there really isn’t much innovation going on within the circle.
Blogging is all about persuasion. Although you may be focused on writing, if you aren’t also focused on persuasion, you won’t have any readers. When you are able to persuade, you’ll be able to recruit new members to your site, encourage them to share your site or products with others, and you’ll also be able to increase your site’s revenue for long-term growth.
Increasing traffic to your site is generally much easier than trying to increase sales, but having a clear plan going forward can lead to massive benefits. Your main focus should be on creating a product others simply can’t match and everyone wants to talk about. Sure, it may sound easier to say than do, but using these few simple methods for persuading your readers, you’ll be able to increase sales without changing your product or main focus.
1. Be sincere and know your product. The world’s best marketers didn’t get where they are selling products that don’t live up to their promises. By informing their potential customers and providing truthfulness in their marketing approaches, these people have been able to sell millions of products. In addition, they rarely diverted attention to the competitors’ products – they answered all the questions in their videos or articles to effectively persuade.
While you could pay for a premium WordPress theme, there are still quite a number of free versions available. Generally, you won’t receive the same level of support with them and their back-end option panels won’t be nearly as comprehensive, but they can still be great alternatives for bloggers on a budget.
The ElegantNews theme recently caught my eye, as it offers all the features a “news” blogger needs in a template. In addition, it’s fairly clean looking and well-designed.
Main features of the theme for bloggers include an options page for changing some of the main settings, post thumbnails support, a featured content area for highlighting your best posts, and a banner ads area in the sidebar for the popular 125×125 pixel ad format.
In addition, the theme includes three columns for making the most out of the browser space you have. Gravatars and widgets are incorporated into the theme, so you won’t have to spend time coding these in.
The coding is optimized for search engines and you shouldn’t experience issues with users who can’t view your site properly: it has been tested to work across all the most popular browsers.
Although HTML5 is still in its infancy, many websites are already integrating some of its technology, allowing sites to “ditch” Flash for a more open alternative. In 2004, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) listed this next standard as “Web Applications 1.0.” There are many ways the technology will be used in the future, and it’ll certainly bring us closer to a more browser-based workflow.
TweetDeck recently announced several new changes, including plans to move to the browser – at least as an alternative to using it as a mobile or desktop app. The main reason for moving in this direction is for development. Currently, they are building a different version for the various app stores, and this results in some inconsistencies across them.
The HTML5 version is not expected for several more months, as they are focused on delivering a product that includes all the features currently available in the desktop version. When the web-based version is available, there will certainly be more integration with the TweetDeck accounts – you’ll likely need to sign in to access all the columns, saved searches, Twitter accounts, and more.
Nearly all failure comes as a result of not planning. If you consistently repeat the mistakes you have been making, you are bound to fail.
A popular quote many live by is “The only real failure in life is the failure to try.” Apply this same quote to blogging, and you’ll quickly find another source of failure.
Success is an arbitrary term for many and has a far range when one applies it to blogging. For one, it could mean that you receive ten new comments per day, while to another person it means making a full-time income through the blog.
Beyond these two main sources of failure, there are several other reasons you aren’t seeing success as a result of your work.
- When disaster hit (bad press about your business, a search engine rank hit, etc.), you didn’t have a plan for how to deal with it.
- You don’t have a plan for the future, and you run your blog day-to-day. Sure, this can work for a month or two, but it won’t last.
