Case Study: How To Gain Traffic Towards Your Blog Site

We’ve got a brand new case study to share with bloggers in our audience this week. This week’s case study deals with TRAFFIC. Why we are featuring a case study? From time to time, my connections on LinkedIn will reach out to ask for help on a specific topic. I wanted to share the same advice with you that brought success to fellow bloggers within our LinkedIn network. Who we are featuring this week? This week we are featuring Tracey Nguyen and her blog, Lipstickandmuffin.com. Tracey’s blog is a perfect example of how a blog is used to represent a personal passion. In this case, Tracey’s passion is in beauty and fashion. Tracey is a former street style blogger turned fashion and beauty blogger. Her blog explores the world of fashion for young women. What Tracey needed more help in? Tracey came to me asking my advice on how to gain more traffic to her online store through her blog at Lipstickandmuffin.com. She was selling cosmetic products through her online store, and wanted to increase her blog traffic and re-direct them over to her product pages. What was our recommendation and why? Since her blog was catered towards teens and young female adults, we suggested for her to try and use Facebook ads, if the budget allowed. We suggested setting up a Facebook ad that targeted other fashion pages on Facebook relevant to her blog. He asked her to entice the audience with a free offer so that they will click through to her blog. Tracey tried a Facebook ad for a free product for a short period of time, but the results didn’t seem to favor her. Currently we are reviewing her Facebook ad campaign to see how we can help her improve it by looking at her target interest pages she targeted, her demographics she chose, the budget she used, the offer she was giving away and her ad copy. All of these have an big impact on how well the ad will perform. We also suggested Tracey try Guest Posting, where she will go and contact expert fashion blogs in her niche and see if she can submit a guest post. Guest posting will help her gain access to a similar audience base along with gaining that valuable, relevant backlink that search engines love. Most sites will allow you to do guest posting as long you can produce good material worthy of their audience to read. Once she gets a good amount of guest post posted she should see a very consistent traffic flow to her blog. Now we also asked her to start and build an email list of her audience clientele. We asked her to create a free report to give away to her audience in exchange for their email. This way she can provide instant information on new material, products, and offers. The key point here is to not only get more traffic, but to keep the traffic once they visit your site. People ...

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The Sales Funnel Money Making Makeover

So many of us start our online presence, set up a blog, get in a groove and then wait for the money to come in. If you’re lucky, this will work for a while. In most cases, you’ll not see a pickup in sales or you’ll see a stark drop off after a very quick initial spike. So if you become stagnant or if you fail to ever really launch your blog into a money making tool in the first place, you have to rethink your sales process. As we’ve mentioned, you have to start with your audience. You must know who it is you want to buy your product so you know how to property set up your sales funnel to target them. To be successful making money online, you need to build a marketing funnel to nurture leads into sales. Establishing a process to take your leads and turn them into buyers is essential. It is also one of the biggest areas that people fail to make money with their blogs online. We all work very hard to generate the traffic to our websites and then we play the balance game of educating vs. selling and in many cases we lead people to a dead end. They come to the website for information and leave with just that. While the visitor benefits, you’re still waiting for the money to come in with no return on your time. This is where you need to rethink your marketing funnel to ensure the visitors to you site, become buyers on your site. As you build your marketing plan you need to have a cohesive walk-through that not just makes sense to you, but also takes visitors to your website on a logical, informative and relevant path to a point that they don’t just end on a sales page, but they feel the value from the product is a must buy for them. Start with your messaging. What exactly do you want your website visitors to feel when they get to your website? Next ask yourself how you can communicate that message to your audience in a concise way. Keeping the message short and clear will make it not only easier for them to understand, but also easier to duplicate in the various marketing vehicles you will be drawing your leads from. Depending on your audience and the marketing funnel you’ve set up, this can include email campaigns, blog/articles, social media, and of course, the content on your site. This language should not be pushing them to buy but instead leading them to a solution to a problem they are having. Think of the marketing funnel as more of a well-defined roadmap, rather than a funnel. When they get to the end of your sales funnel, you want to have eased them into it so much so that they feel like it’s their idea to make the purchase, not the other way around. Use links and call-outs to move the visitors through ...

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Convert Traffic into Cash with Just 1 Little Change

Last week we covered how people’s instincts may be causing them to fail at making money online with blogs. Now, we’re going to go over another possible cause that you’re struggling to mentise your blog. The inability to convert traffic into buyers. We’ve all opened the door to a door to door salesman, saw the uniform, hears the pitch and preceded to polutkey decline whatever it is that they were selling. In some cases, you may have even bought what they were selling(ahemm, Girl Scout’s we’re looking at you and your irresistable cookies). For the most part, door to door selling is not effective. It is even more ineffective to do it online. Even though its a salesman’s job to try to make you want to buy whatever  they’re selling, but the truth isusually make you irritated , closed off, and unwilingly to even hear their sales pitch enough. This is the same with online sales pages. The cold-call, blind, hard sell of a product is in most cases a lot of time and effort for a very low payoff. When trying to make money online, you want to use your blog to do the work for you. You put the time and expertise into writing the blog and you don’t need to be spending even more time selling at people. Driving traffic to your website or blog is what we’re all striving to do. We’re all guilty of incessantly checking the view numbers each time we publish a new blog to see what kind of new viewership we’re getting. And then we wait. We wait for them to click the embedded links, to navigate around our blogs, sometimes even get them onto a landing sales page for a product and then hopefully we wait for them to make a purchase. If you’re like a large majority of online bloggers out there, this is where you fall short. No purchase is made and you have no more money in your pocket. Converting the traffic you get into motivated purchasers willing to spend money on your product to solve a problem they are having. So how do you convert website traffic into buyers? Educate.  Back to elementary days here, folks. To really promote a product online and make people want to buy it, you have to educate them first. In the online arena you need to add an extra step to convert people into buyers. You need to take the time to build the relationship with the buyer, and let the buyer they have a problem and then how they can fix it. The fix should be related to your product but not entirely your product. Take for example a revolutionary weight-loss product. We’ve all heard a million pitches for the newest weight-loss drug that promises results. Let’s take it a step further. Get specific on who your weight-loss product is for. You don’t want to fall into the cold calling area here and cast too wide of a net or ...

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Are Your Instincts Driving Away Your Business?

You’ve done all the right steps. You’ve made a blog, you update it frequently, established your presence and you’ve offered your product(s) for sale online and yet your wallet remains empty. Where did you go wrong? You, like many other people who are in the online space trying to monetize a blog, have most likely failed in one key fundamental area. Your audience. While there are a few places you could have run askew in your marketing plan, we suggest starting with audience because that’s where all your marketing and sales stem from. If you’re positive you’ve identified the right audience and know everything about them and how to directly reach them, check out our full list of the top reasons people fail to make money at blogging to see where else you may have gone wrong. If you’ve done the head tilt head or given out a big sigh after reading the last couple sentences and think you may need a little more direction in ensuring you have truly identified the right market for your product that is actually motivated to buy, continue reading. As we’ve said before, your audience is the foundation of your marketing. Not knowing how to identify a buying audience is a deal breaker. Even worse is thinking you have identified an audience and assuming you know what they want. We all know what they say about assumptions…. This is more than a misstep — it is a step backwards. Promoting your products based on instinct rather than fact is a surefire way to not make sales and send yourself running in circles. Luckily for you, it’s very easy to avoid this with just a little research. Without verifying your assumptions, you won’t know if there’s a demand for your product online. The two key words in that sentence are demand and online. Demand being, having a buying audience that is actually looking for a product to fix a problem they are having AND so much so that they are actually motivated to buy online, not just look for information and make a purchase elsewhere. Is it very well known that some markets and products do very well online, and others do not. So how do you find out if your product will have what it takes to make the cheese online? Competition is Key! Never underestimate how much you can learn from your competitors. I’ll say it again. Use your competitors as learning tools to improve your own marketing strategies. Now, we’re not suggesting you call up your competitors and asking them point blank what strategies have or haven’t worked for them, but we are suggesting you put in the legwork and find this information out yourself. Go to Amazon and find similar products to what you are going to be selling. See who is selling them, how they have positioned the product and then most importantly see who is buying them. The easiest way to do this is through the reviews. Amazon is ...

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How to Use the WOW Factor to Gain Authority

In such a crowded online space I frequently get asked how someone can stand apart, be noticed and in turn increase their online branding and authority with their followers. There are 3 magic words everyone looking to make money online blogging needs to know to stand out from the crowded online space. The WOW factor. Stopping people in their tracks and giving them a reason to respect you. When one WOW is nice, many WOWs are awesome. The more you can get your audience to have the WOW factor over and over and over, the more authority you will have. When you get people to say WOW it gets people to recognize you and you become an authority voice. In fact, one of the reasons many people fail to make money blogging is because they are lacking the WOW factor. We have compiled a list of the top 10 reasons people fail at making money blogging. With so much of the internet being generic information there is plenty of room to differentiate yourself with original unique content. To start, you have to do your research. Understand what type of information your audience is looking for. This is very different than just thinking you know what your audience wants. Find out what they need to know and don’t be afraid to ask about what types of information they ACTUALLY want. Second, you need to find out what information is already out here. What has been published and what holes exist in that that you can fill. Your report shouldn’t be identical to those. As before, it should give your readers something new. So to get the WOW factor and stand out from the crowded online space, you should use 3 methods. Empathy: I’ve talked about this before to build trust with your followers online and it works similarly here. Identify the pain points and identity what your audience is feeling on the inside. Describe exactly how that feeling is so they know you feel their pain. Frustration, or helplessness, will create a WOW factor. Showing them that you know exactly how they feel will build trust and authority. Information: Give your audience facts that they need to know. Statistics and data figures that are relevant to them are always a good idea and make great content. Do some research here and find the information that your audience can use to educate themselves. Giving them pieces of information as “water cooler” talk is something all people will thank you for and return to your blog to get more of. Solutions: This may seem like a no-brainier but it can frequently be overlooked. Providing solutions that are different attract people’s attention. Skirting around a solution or just bombarding people with information that is not actionable or feasible for them is everywhere on the internet and does not make your blog more attractive or profitable. Now that we have identified the 3 methods of getting the WOW factor, we need to identify the 6 different ...

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