America In Transition

Monday, January 4, 2016

10 Ways To Simplify Your Local Marketing Strategy In 2016

Looking back at lessons learned last year and expected trends for this year, columnist Wesley Young cuts through the clutter and suggests ways to make your marketing strategy simpler, clearer and easier to execute. The post 10 Ways To Simplify Your Local Marketing Strategy In 2016 appeared first...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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Forget Your Testimonials Page, 2016 Is The Year Of Reviews

Let's face it: Customers aren't reading your testimonials page. So what can you put in its place? Columnist Greg Gifford shares his ideas. The post Forget Your Testimonials Page, 2016 Is The Year Of Reviews appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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How to Set Blog-Changing Goals for the New Year

For the first ProBlogger podcast of 2016, I wanted to get you all into the planning mood – to think long-term and broadly about where you and your blog are going in the years to come.

The beginning of January is prime resolution-making time, but I’m a little different: I prefer to make goals.

Goals are great for a number of reasons, and I think they’re actually more actionable and easily achieved than perhaps a New Year’s resolution might be.

If you’re like me, or you’d like to choose practical goals over good intentions, you can start this episode off by thinking about your blog as it stands today… is it the same as you want it to be in a year’s time?

If not – something needs to change, and for that change to happen, you need to know what those changes should be and how to go about them.

In the podcast today I chat with Stacey Roberts, the editor of ProBlogger about her post “Setting Goals: Why You Need Them, and How to Write Them“. We discuss:

Why goals are vital if you want to succeed
How goals can keep you accountable and on track
How to set practical, achievable goals
How to stay motivated to achieve your goals
How to resist being distracted by the unimportant
Why vague goals don’t work
What type of goals are the most likely to be reached
Why your goals need to be SMART
How you can take step-by-step action to succeed
The usefulness of partners or goal buddies (and how that can also be derailing for the wrong people)
The usual reasons people cite for not setting goals, and how to circumvent them

We cover a lot of ground in this episode, so I hope it is useful to you as you start your blogging year with fresh enthusiasm and organization!

You can find the show notes here, and we’d love to chat goals with you on Twitter – you can reach me @ProBlogger, and Stacey @veggie_mama.

Sunday, January 3, 2016

Start The New Year off Right with Jeff Goins’ Three Secrets to Full Time Blogging

Welcome to 2016 on ProBlogger! I hope you’re ready for an amazing year of blogging together. We at ProBlogger HQ are really looking forward to being able to help you achieve your online dreams!

Last year, we heard from writer and blogger Jeff Goins about how he finally made the switch to full time blogging, and the three lessons he learned while getting there. I hope it inspires you as we set off on a brand new year of writing online.

This post was originally published in March, 2015.

This is a guest post by Jeff Goins of Goins, Writer.

“I’d like to be a writer,” I told my friend one day when he asked what my dream was. “But that’ll never happen.” And I quickly went back to moping around, waiting for my big break.

At the time, I was working for a nonprofit as a marketing director, secretly wondering what it might be like to write for a living. Little did I know how close I was to my goal.

My was staring me right in the face the whole time. I was just blind to it.

“Every great dream begins with a dreamer,” Harriet Tubman once said. “Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.”

That’s absolutely true. Your dream lives inside you, not somewhere out there. And instead of waiting for someone to come along and give you permission, you need to realize that you have everything you need to do this right now.

So let’s look at what you already have at your disposal and how I launched my own full-time blogging career using these same tools.

Secret Weapon #1: Listen to Your Ache

Have you ever felt jealous of someone else’s success? Of course you have. You’re human, aren’t you. But don’t feel bad. Envy isn’t always a bad thing, if you know how to use it.

Being jealous of what someone else has or has done is a sign of somethign you don’t have. You’re not living the life you dreamed of, not making the money you want, or simply not getting the credit you think you deserve.

Left unchecked, those feelings of missing out can get nasty really quickly. But when properly channeled, they can be a means to you discovering what you’re meant to do.

Here’s what I mean.

What bothers you that you see in the world? What problems in your industry or social ills do you see that you think should be fixed? When you see someone publishing their words or getting paid to pursue a passion, does it stir something in you? Does it make you a little angry, even a tad frustrated?

Good. Listen to that.

All dreams begin with frustration. But they don’t end there. It takes a person of action to do something with that feeling. Because really, frustration is just a surface emotion. It’s just pent-up passion with nowhere to go.

So pay attention to what makes your heart ache. When you’re feeling frustrated, remember it’s a sign of what you’re missing out on. It means you need to get to work.

Secret Weapon #2: Take the Long Road

Once on a webinar, I heard Darren Rowse say his first year of professional blogging had only made him something like $30,000. When I heard that, it sounded like a dream come true.

His intentions were to set our expectations low. He explained how hard he worked, staying up late and getting up early, how difficult it was. Not everyone can make six figures in the first month was his point. He was trying to keep us grounded. But it gave me hope.

I didn’t want fluff. I wanted someone to tell me exactly what I needed to do to pursue my dream. And for some reason, telling me it was going to be difficult and not very rewarding made it real. It made it attainable.

Sometimes, you have to hear someone else describe the life you long to live before you can begin to visualize it yourself.

Darren’s words spoke to the frustration I felt. They made me realize I was going to have to work hard if I wanted to live my dream and that patience was going to be an important factor in my success.

When I started my blog, I was determined to not worry about stats for the first two years. I would just write. The audience would come as my craft grew. If that took years, so be it. Six months later, I had more traffic than I ever could have imagined—hundreds at first, and then thousands of daily readers.

It would be a long while before I’d start making money, but still, seeing it was possible changed everything. Right around that time, my wife and I decided to start a family and began counting down the days until our son would be born.

At that same time, I started to hatch a plan for how I could make money with my blog.

Secret Weapon #3: Don’t Neglect the Past

When you decide to go full-time with your blog, you may be tempted to make the biggest mistake most dreamers make. You may think that dreaming is about looking forward.

It’s not. Dreaming is about looking backward and remembering what it is you have always loved to do. “Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it,” Parker Palmer wrote, “I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”

So before I could even figure out what I wanted to sell, I was going to have to figure out what value I had, what strengths I possessed that could benefit someone. And the answer to that was buried deep in my past.

“Jeff,” my friend said to me that day I announced my dream was to write, “you are a writer. You just need to write.”

He was right. I had been writing. All these years. In various capacities. But somehow, it just didn’t feel like enough. I didn’t feel like enough. But when I heard those words, I knew they were true.

Maybe, I thought, before we can do something, we have to become someone. Activity follows identity. It was a simple principle but one I’ve come to embrace in all areas of life.

What that meant for me was looking honestly at my life and identifying what strengths I had to offer. I had spent the past seven years as a marketing director and before that as the leader of a music group.

I couldn’t remember a time in my adult life in which I hadn’t been working with creative people. That was a bigger clue than I first realized. Maybe, I thought, I could do that online.

So I gradually turned my new blog, which had been more of a leadership blog, into a writing-focused resource. First, I tested out posts on writing to see if they appealed, and I was amazed at how much people connected with the content.

What Derek Sivers says is true: “What’s obvious to you is amazing to others.” The secret to discovering the value that you offer the world is hidden in the strength you’re probably taking for granted.

The Finish Line

A year after starting my blog, I launched my first eBook on writing and made $1500 from it.

A few months later, I launched an bundle product and made $16,000 in the first six weeks.

Several months after that, I launched my first online course, Tribe Writers, and made $25,000 from it.

By the end of that year, I had made over $150,000 blogging.

I couldn’t believe it. This was my dream, and it had come true in ways that completely astounded me.

But the truth is the process took two years from start to finish, plus another seven years of preparation. It required all those things Harriet Tubman mentioned: passion, patience, and strength.

If you’re going to come face to face with your dream, you’re going to need them, too. You’ll have to:

Turn your frustration into passion.
Be willing to take the long road, understanding that good things come in time.
Embrace your past, using whatever strengths you’ve accumulated along the way and putting them to use.

Yes, it will take time and it won’t be easy. But the good news is you don’t have to sit around feeling frustrated or like you missed out. Everything you’ve done up to this point has prepared you for what you’re about to do.

Now, it’s up to you to get started.

Jeff Goins is a full-time blogger at Goins, Writer, where he shares tips on writing, creativity, and making a difference. His latest book, The Art of Work, is all about discovering your calling.

The post Start The New Year off Right with Jeff Goins’ Three Secrets to Full Time Blogging appeared first on ProBlogger.

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First meteor shower of 2016 peaks tonight: Watch online, right here

The first meteor shower of 2016 will occur in the wee hours of the morning on Jan. 4, and you can watch it live, right here. The shower is known as the Quadrantids, and while it is not very well known, it can occasionally be quite spectacular. According to NASA, the Quadrantid shower could yield...

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Saturday, January 2, 2016

Top 5 Video Websites And Why They Are Important For Your Business

It is imperative that businesses put themselves out there and engage with the consumer in order to drive success. Video production is an ever-increasing method by which businesses are marketing themselves in a new and fresh way. A study by Cisco predicted that video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic by 2017.

Video is naturally engaging and easy to digest and it could drive huge amounts of traffic to your site and create more business. Video has the potential to set you apart from competitors if it is done well, which is normally achieved through going to a professional advertising or marketing agency.

Video marketing can add a new element to your online and social presence, and using any of the following video websites could help you increase traffic to your site or simply boost brand awareness.

1. YouTube
YouTube is probably the most obvious choice when it comes to videos. With YouTube videos appearing more and more in Google searches, you can even improve your business’ search ranking through video marketing. YouTube has around 1 billion visitors a month, opening up endless possibilities when it comes to growing your audience and reaching your target market.

YouTube is the third most visited website worldwide, after Google and Facebook and brings in a weekly audience of more than 20 million people in the UK alone, therefore creating a huge platform for you to incorporate into your marketing strategy. A creative ad agency would help you implement this.

2. Vimeo
Vimeo is a video platform constantly increasing in popularity and has gained itself a reputation for high quality used by creative professionals. You may often see artists releasing new videos and other content through Vimeo, which has given the video site a credible background.

Vimeo offers a smaller and more niche community for more professional creatives. Its smaller audience can result in more engaged viewers. It has a clean layout, making the video the focus and nothing else.

3. Wistia
Wistia gives you the option to have full control over the branding of your videos and enables you to add sharing buttons and a clickable call to action. Wistia has an analytic package that includes a heatmap for every view; this shows exactly which parts of the video were watched, skipped or re-watched.
Wistia is a relatively new platform but its SEO features make it a great platform for your business.

4. Sprout
Sprout offers business video hosting solutions that provides a full analytics service and you can add call to action to capture valuable leads. You can also easily add an email collection form to build your contact list from your video marketing. This along with the ability to customise your playlists and videos makes Sprout a brilliant platform to start utilising video content. You can also customise the appearance of your video every time you embed it and there are a whole host of security settings.

5. Vine
Despite being an app, Vine is an important platform to consider. With social media becoming more and more important for business, Vine is a video app that allows you to create 6 second videos and share through your social media accounts. Targeting a younger and media-savvy audience, your business can use Vine to create eye-catching clips to help promote your brand.

It can be difficult to know where to start when it comes to video hosting but with a leading creative agency in video production and branding such as Creative Spark with its range of services, you could have a wealth of help by your side as you branch out into video production as a way of content marketing. Creative Spark offer a huge array of avenues to get into branding and advertising, whether it is through digital, print or video. If you are serious about using the advantages of these video hosting sites it may be worth looking to an advertising agency to help you get the most out of it!

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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Friday, January 1, 2016

Discover the Secrets of Productive Bloggers with 50% Off Our Blog Wise eBook

Greetings from ProBlogger HQ where I’m currently recovering from a fun Christmas with my family. I hope those of you who were celebrating this week had a happy time too and that your preparations for the end of year celebrations are going well too.

Here in Australia many of us take time off for this summer period between Christmas and New Year so things will be a little quiet here on ProBlogger until the new year but I know many ProBlogger readers use this time to get productive with their blogging.

So for those of you getting things rolling for 2016 I thought I’d drop by the blog one last time for the year with a little end of year gift for those who find it useful.

For the next week you can get 50% off my eBook Blog Wise when you use the coupon code GOODBYE2015.

Blog Wise is an eBook that is all about helping you to be more productive as a blogger and is something that I’m sure many of you will find useful as you end 2015 and get into 2016.

In this eBook my team interviewed 9 full time bloggers about their blogging habits and how they built their blog without needing extra hours in their day.

Bloggers interviewed were:

Amy Porterfield: author, prolific on Social media, contributor to numerous blogs, speaker, Mom and much more.
Brian Clark: Founder of CopyBlogger Media which includes CopyBlogger the blog, StudioPress Themes, Premise, Scribe and more.
Abby Larson: Founder of Style Me Pretty – a network of 12 sites which she manages with her husband Tait.
Matt Kepnes: Founder of Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site – constantly on the road travelling
Heather Armstrong: Founder of Dooce, author of numerous books, mother of 2 kids (and 2 dogs)
Jeff Goins: blogging at Goins Writer, writing a book, husband and…. he works a full time job
Gretchen Rubin: Founder of the Happiness Project blog, author of 4 books, wife and mother of 2 daughters.
Leo Babauta: Founder of Zen Habits and numerous other projects, author, minimalist and father of 6 kids.
Darren Rowse: owner of Digital Photography School and ProBlogger, author, social media addict and husband and dad to 3 boys (that’s me!).

As a special bonus when you order Blog Wise, you’ll also score a bonus PDF Problem Solver guide.

It covers 21 common productivity problems bloggers face with some quick answers from the interviewed bloggers to get you on the right track.

I hope you find this eBook useful – it’s just $9.99 USD this week only which is 50% off when you use the coupon code GOODBYE2015. Grab your copy here.

The post Discover the Secrets of Productive Bloggers with 50% Off Our Blog Wise eBook appeared first on ProBlogger.

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America In Transition