With social media, everyone wants to know that what they are saying is having an impact on other people. Getting traffic that responds to your posts is extremely exciting, and keeping them coming back is even better. Here are some simple tips you can use to increase your social media traffic and success.

Be Real

It is not necessary to put on a front and pretend to be something you are not. Online, sooner or later, someone who knows the real you will blow your cover, and the response will be devastating. Besides, it’s also easier to keep up with the right personality if there are no pretenses. People can tell when you are being real or not. read more

There are many strategies that are effective in achieving the goal of increasing a blog or website’s page rank in search engines. A high page ranking means you’ll get more visits to your website, which is what all blog or website owners want. Among the many strategies that you can use, link building remains one of the most effective strategies.

There are many ways of implementing a good link building strategy for your website or blog. One of the more effective ways of doing this is by using certain guerilla tactics that will generate the links that you need. For example, a popular guerilla link building tactic is to write link bait articles. These are articles that have a compelling content that other sites will want to link to it. It could be a controversial topic or a polarizing opinion. read more

Blogs are so popular nowadays that practically everyone has a blog – be it for personal use or for the promotion of their business. Blogs are an effective way of putting your ideas across on the internet, talk about things that interest you, or market a product or service.

Starting a blog is easy and does not require a lot of hand-holding. Here are some tips and steps on how to create a blog. read more

Social networks are a juggernaut when it comes to online marketing. You can easily reach more people by using social networks in promoting a product or service, while directly communicating with your target audience, something that traditional advertising can never do. With social media marketing still in its relative infancy, new tactics and strategies are still being formed as we speak.

One of the new strategies for online branding is presenting a strong Facebook page. Facebook is arguably the most popular social network on earth. And unlike Twitter (that other social network giant), Facebook balances content with a more visual bent, which makes it a better vehicle for online branding. read more

Even with the advent of social media, digital newspapers, smart phones, and tablets, targeted email marketing is still the most effective form of marketing online. We shouldn’t expect that to change anytime soon, so in the meantime, it would be a shame to pass-up email marketing as a revenue source. To help you capitalize on it as a blogger, I put together this resource kit that lists everything you need to get up and running with your own targeted email list and campaign except……..

Opt-In Incentive

Let’s face it; people aren’t going to join your mailing list because they think you’re a swell person. You see, people have been programmed to be automatically suspicious and reluctant to give out any personal information; including their email address. So, for them to give a total stranger their email address, it would be going against what they think is the safe choice, and if you want them to do that then you have to motivate them. The best way to do that is to give them something for free. EBooks work great; templates too, short reports as well, and even software. Creating a free product to giveaway is out of the scope of this email marketing kit, but it is something you will need to do before you will see any decent amount of opt-ins.

Email Marketing List Management Services

The first thing you need is a way to manage your list and automated bulk mailings. There are third-party services that can do this for you. Some people call them autoresponder services, but today’s services handle a lot more than just managing your autoresponder. Most of them handle list management, web forms, multiple lists, social media sharing, free scripts, and more. Nearly all of them have a free option that is limited to a certain number of subscribers, which can range from 200 to 2000 depending on the service and fluctuating terms. If you are just starting out, then build up your list until you max out your limit, and then upgrade to a paid plan as you go.

• Aweber
• Mail Chimp
• Campaign Monitor
• Email Brain
• Stream Send
• Benchmark Email
• Get Response
• Constant Contact
• iContact
• Graphic Mail
• Boomerang

read more

One of the great things about having a successful blog is that it makes it so much easier to launch your next successful blog. All of the hard work that you put into building up your audience and your search engine rankings is something you can leverage for your next site, especially if it’s related to the first.

In addition to the ability to leverage your audience and steer them over to the new site, you can also launch out of the gate with a SEO benefit in the form of of links from your established blog to the new one. This gives your new site some instant search engine credibility by proving it can attract links from an established credible site.

However, one area where I see bloggers with a smattering of SEO knowledge screwing up regularly is with how they treat anchor text when cross promoting. read more

For businesses big and small, Facebook offers a great opportunity to connect with customers and build awareness.  Collecting Facebook fans through the use of the ‘Like’ button is a great way to promote all you have to offer and target potential customers with offers and news.

However studies have shown that many fans will often ‘unlike’ a brand soon after a particular promotion or offer has ended.  Other reasons why people unsubscribe like this include loss of interest in a business or product, page postings are uninteresting and a lack of postings to a brand page.  Getting the most from your social media marketing campaigns, be they on Facebook or another social network, will rely on you being able to keep fans and attract new ones.

Of course it can be difficult to predict the buying behaviour of individuals, marketing tends to rely on demographics to target certain markets and consumers.  And whilst not all promotions or offers you run will interest everyone, keeping your fans interested enough to stay with you will rely on you doing a little homework first. read more

With Halloween rapidly approaching, almost everyone is in the mood for a good ghost, zombie or vampire story. But while there’s always a good chill to be had from a scary tale or movie, some of the most frightening things aren’t works of fiction or stories at all, they’re simple facts.

Of those types of scary things, there is little more frightening than the law itself and how it can impact our daily lives.

As bloggers, we’re even more vulnerable than most when it comes to legal issues because, in addition to the usual spate of laws one has to follow day-to-day, we have the responsibilities of dealing with mass media law as well. Something, previously, few outside of the TV, radio, print and related industries had to deal with.

So, if you want some scary thoughts to give you something to ponder, here are five of the scariest legal realities and what they mean for you. read more

When it comes to legal issues, most bloggers are either unaware or misinformed about the laws that they operate under. Unless you studied to be a journalist, publisher or a lawyer, you most likely didn’t get an overview of mass media law. That’s unfortunate because now, with blogging and social media, everyone is a journalist and/or a publisher, at least from a legal perspective.

With that in mind, there is simply way too much to ever cover in one article. However, here is a brief overview of some of the facts that you need to know in order to stay safe online. Obviously, this won’t be in-depth and, if you want more information you should consult an attorney (or at least do further research).

But this should give you an idea of what you should be looking for and what questions you should be asking.

Also, it’s worth noting that these facts are based on U.S. law, if you are outside the country, obviously the situation is going to change.

On that note, here’s a look at 20 legal facts every blogger needs to know: read more

Google has done it again. There’s a new browser in town and Google has pulled out all the stops to bring users a seamless experience. Google Chrome is a popular new browser that combines a simple design with complex technology while providing searches that are lightning fast plus much more.

One of the best parts of Google+ Chrome are the extensions. They make interacting fun, easy and provide a fuller experience. Here are some of the best ones (in my opinion). They have all been tested and work as they were designed to. read more