Affiliate Marketing Tune Up: January 2013

Do Affiliates Have To Build Links Differently Than Merchant Websites?

Having an affiliate website can be difficult especially when it comes to competing with other affiliates and merchant websites. Let's face it, Google hates affiliate sites, especially those sites that have little to no content. These sites are better know as thin affiliate sites. Plus as an affiliate, you get the same tools, promos, ads, and articles that other affiliates get, so there's no difference in that. On the other hand, merchant websites can build their brand and be set apart from their competition. So what are other differences. Look at this article from Affilorama

The truth is that there isn’t really a lot of difference in the techniques that affiliates can use compared to other websites. This isn’t to say there are no differences at all, the one that I do feel does exist, and what I’ll cover shortly is the differences in resources and setup of affiliates.

However there is a difference in a few on-page areas for affiliates compared to other websites:

No USP on the product you’re selling – it is probably available to anyone else who wants to be an affiliate too
You get the same boilerplate content that every other affiliate gets and it can be hard to scale making it all unique

These are just a couple of problems that affiliates have to compete with that relate to content. Before you invest heavily in link building, I’d strongly advise you to invest in your website – try to get out of the mindset of it being an affiliate website and try to not make it look like an affiliate website. Here are a few things that make affiliate sites stand out and look bad:

Lots of product pages but very little depth of content on them
Lots of external links but no content to give me the context of those links
Not much engagement on social including a blog, Q&A, videos etc

It is clear that Google doesn't want to see thin affiliate websites dominating it’s search results, so don’t act like one. See more from Affilorama here.

See what the last statement said about thin affiliate websites? This is one of the biggest things Google is trying to combat. So how do you deal with being an affiliate with huge competition? You become an authority site. When your site is an authority site, Google will reward you instead of condemn you.

If you are just starting out, focus on posting quality content to your site. Do this before you do anything else, including building links. Don't think about building links until you posted high quality content to your new website for awhile. Make sure you are building a site that will fit in with the mainstream sites and not like the affiliate sites.

If you already have a website and have very little content, focus all of your attention on posting high quality content all the time to your website. Make sure you give people something that will stick to their mind. Create content people can always use. If you can create content that will always help people, they will share your stuff with the world and you will always receive visitors regardless of Google's forecast for the following weeks, months, or years. Remember, Google can't take away your voice if it is being heard above the rest.

Make your site look like a regular website, not a site filled with affiliate links and ads. And as I always say, be unique, be set apart, and stand out from your competitors.

Recommended reading

Disadvantages Of Using Affiliate Marketing Tools
Use Semantic Keyword Research For Higher Affiliate Sales
Affiliate Marketing Tune Up: Affiliate Marketing Program Checklist
Use Content Curation To Attract Readers
What Does Duplicate Content Really Mean?
Email Marketing Secrets - Key to your Success
Why Deep Linking is Important

Use Pinterest To Grow Your Blog & Business

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social networking sites around. Millions of people became attracted to the site and so did many companies. Pinterest is driving many visitors to blogs and sites, plus many are building followers and most importantly their brand. If you use Pinterest effectively, you will be positioning your business to gain much greater success.

The World Wide Web is going towards the direction of visuals and being social. As I mentioned in previous post, Google and Bing are relying more on social media sites such as Pinterest to determine how popular a website is. If people are sharing the links to your site via social media, your site will benefit more in the long run than if the links weren't being shared. Google looks at shares as votes, and if you don't have a lot of votes, you wont receive a lot of visitors which means your business will suffer.

Neil Patel, who is the Owner of the popular blog Quick Sprout and the co-founder of the internet companies KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg, talked about how to leverage Pinterest like a power user. Here is what he had to say................

Tactic #7: Leverage Pinterest like a power user

The image-driven new social media powerhouse known as Pinterest can also provide you with massive traffic. But you have to know how to get people to pin images of your content and products from your website and blog.

Here are 6 techniques that are tried-and-true methods for creating a flood of visits using Pinterest.

Formatting photos - First off, your blog should be set up to allow people to share content on Pinterest. This means having a simple Pinterest button on your site. However, have you ever considered whether your photos are even going to work on Pinterest? You can check by going to this page and replace your URL with “YourWebsite.com.” That little test will help you see what people might see on Pinterest. If your photos are not optimized, then use these great tips on optimizing images for Pinterest.
Put messages on your images – You probably put a lot of effort into writing great content, but do you do the same with your images? To get people to pin these images, share a great message about your content on your featured image like this one from a blog post title from Complex Style. You can use tools like Pixlr,FotoFlexer and Gimp 2.6 to create these messages.
Daily theme board – If you want to take the text-based message image idea into overdrive, then create a board in your Pinterest account that is based on a theme. Sevenly has done this very well with their Daily Inspirational board.
Run contests and giveaways – Do a simple search for “giveaway” on Pinterest and you will see that contests are very popular. The reason they are popular is because of their ability to stir up traffic. Create a contest where people have to go to your site to enter, and you’ll get that spike that you’ve been dreaming of.
Share pics of people, animal and cool technology – Since Pinterest is hugely visual, images of people and animals work really, really well. GE has created an account with boards that show off their badass machines , full of photos of trains, airplanes and huge turbines. The U.S. Central Command has done a really great job of humanizing their institution with a board called Interesting and one on their military dogs.
Follow the golden rule – This one is simple and basic…if you want people to pin and share your pins, then you need to do the same. You need to develop relationships with targeted users and share their stuff. The karma will come back to you…I promise. Read more from Neil Patel here.

I read Neil Patel's blog often because he has such good and in-depth blog posts on how to do things and to me this post he recently wrote was one of the best. This is exactly what anyone who wants to gain more exposure for their business, blogs, and sites should be doing.

Pinterest will change the way people shop online. Why, because Pinterest will help people realize they want to buy something when they see it. For example, when a product gets re-pinned by lots of people, this can be looked at proof that a product is very good to have or use. The re-pinning will serve as a good review for the product. Just think about it like this; a person can see that nice picture you posted from your kitchen utensils website of the beautiful new non-stick frying pan set with 10,000 re-pins and be one click away from making the purchase from your website.

Pinterest won't be going anywhere anytime soon and everyone with a business, online or off, should have a Pinterest account. Having an account can open up several opportunities for you. Make sure you have your site set up to be "pin friendly" where people can "pin" your pictures and encourage them to share your stuff. And make sure you follow the golden rule Neil Patel gave and re-pin and share other people pictures. Make sure you follow them too.

Google+ Is Now The 2nd Most Popular Social Network

If you're not using Google+ for your business you better start. Google+ has now overtaken Twitter and YouTube and is in second place behind Facebook. Read this.................

Despite early reports declaring the social network a failing enterprise, Google+ attracted some 343 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2012, up 27 percent from the year prior. The firm defined active users as those who have used or contributed to the site in the past month. In recent months, Google has more closely tied Google+ to its other services, so signing up for a Gmail account means creating a Google+ profile, for example.

Google's uber-popular video sharing site YouTube ranked as the world's third-largest social network with about 300 million active users, followed by No. 4 Twitter with 288 million active users. Facebook is still by far the most popular social network, with 693 million active users around the world, according to the Global Web Index. Read more here

So if you're not using Google+, now is the time. Google makes it easy and convenient for you to sign up because as stated above Google+ is tied to other services Google offers. If you have a blog or email it's so easy to run your business. Google has it's services linked together to get more people to use their services and they can collect the much need data they need to improve users search experience and increase their income. Plus you can claim your work.

Recommended reading

Is Tweeting Videos Good For Your Company
Amplify Your Tweets for Better Click Through Rates
Help Grandma Find Your Blog
Get Amazon's Customers to Buy Affiliate Products Through You
Google Plus Circles & Hangouts For Business
5 Creative Traffic Building Ideas

Do You Consider The Load Time Of Your Website?

You're working on your website and blogs daily. You spend hours, sometimes until 3 in the morning adding valuable content to your blog. You're in hopes that people will visit your site. But you look at your stats after some time and find that you're not getting a lot of visitors and your making little to no money. Then you find that some of your visitors stay on your site for a few seconds then their gone for ever. You ask yourself a bunch of why questions and still can't figure out what's going on. You visit your own site and it you see it takes for ever to load.

No matter what you do and how well you do it, people are impatient and if your website is slow, they will leave. No if's and's or buts about it, they're gone, never to be seen or heard from again. Let's see what Ste Kerwer has to say about your sites load time.............

The biggest turn-off is a slow load time. You've probably visited a blog or two that took forever to appear on your monitor. In reality, it was probably only 5 or 6 seconds, it only seemed like an eternity. And you've also probably clicked away from a good number of these blogs before they ever finish loading. That’s exactly what your own visitors are doing if your site loads too slow. So it’s important that you regularly check the load time of your site.

It’s not enough to simply visit your own blog and see how fast it loads. Each computer is different and your computer may be accessing cached pages which will load faster anyway.

Instead, use WebPageTest.org, a free online tool which allows you to simply plug in your URL and you’ll get an instant response that tells you how fast your website or blog is loading.

Keep in mind, you only have two to three seconds to grab your visitor’s attention. If it’s taking two seconds for your site to load then that doesn't leave much time for the visitor to browse your content and see if there’s something there that grabs their attention. So the faster your site loads the better. See more from Ste Kerwer here

The bottom line is you only have a few seconds to grab a person's attention. People are in a hurry these days and it's only going to get worst. If 3 seconds past it's too late. Take the steps you need to take to make your site faster and use the free tool Ste Kerwer mentions to see how fast your site loads.

Recommended reading

Why Deep Linking is Important
There's No Mystery to Traffic Generation
Amplify Your Tweets for Better Click Through Rates
Use Content Curation To Attract Readers
6 SEO Secrets & Tips

What Do Dogs And Blog Titles Have In Common?

Why Deep Linking is Important

Many bloggers and site owners build links to their blogs and sites and usually focus more on the home page rather than the pages within the site or blog. While this is a good thing we should also think about deep linking. Deep linking is the process where a blogger or site owner links to a specific page within a website or blog (the blog post itself). Deep linking is good because the post or webpage need to obtain as much attention as the main or home page. The home page is not going to show you all of the pages that are in the blog. That's why it is very important a person links to the pages within the sites and blogs.

It is also important to make sure you deep link every time you do a blog post. Look at the end of this blog post to get an idea what I am talking about. You're basically linking back to previous blog post and giving them life again. These are post you wrote and they still need to be seen so it is important that you use deep linking. You'll get more visitors from search engines and those individual post will get higher rankings.

Enterprises are being urged to incorporate deep linking in their marketing strategies. Why, because many big companies have a lot of products and services they offer. For example, if you are looking to buy a pair of running shoes and you want those shoes to be Reebok Realflex women's running shoes; you will want to go straight to where that shoe is being sold right?

Well Reebok or another shoe selling site will want to build links to that product page so it can more easily be picked up by search engines. If you had a product site wouldn't you want customers to find what they are looking for with ease? Certainly and that's exactly why deep link building is important for all enterprises, companies, bloggers, and site owners. When you write articles or post comments on other blogs, try linking to specif pages with in your blog or website rather than always linking to your home page.

By the way, the more specific a person is in their search, the better chances the person is looking to make a purchase. Any woman looking for Reebok Realflex women's running shoes is looking to buy a pair in most cases. So consider that if you are not currently building deep links.

Also consider what Eric Enge had to say about deep linking................

Enterprise Branding & Link Building

A lot of major brands cover many types of different products. Proctor & Gamble lists 47 different brands on the All Brands page on its website. Even Ford Motor Company lists five major categories of product lines on its home page. Digging in a bit further, they list six major lines of cars, ranging from the inexpensive Fiesta, to the sporty Mustang, to the pricier Taurus.

(Did you notice how those two companies each got a “free link” from me just because they are major brands?) However, let’s look at these links, and the pages they point to. Would a user, or a search engine, use those links to decide that Ford is the best company to buy a sports car from, or that P&G makes the best laundry detergent?

Of course not.

We can learn from the example of the offline advertising world. Does P&G run ads to promote that they are a large consumer goods company? Again, not really. What do their brands do instead?

Old Spice runs ads to tell you that they are the best deodorant.
Tide runs ads to tell you that they are the best detergent.
Ivory runs ads to tell you that they are the best soap,
… and so forth …

Ford does the same thing with its line of products. They have one set of ads for trucks, a different set for SUVs, and another for economy cars. These ad campaigns communicate to consumers both the relevance and importance of a product line. This type of campaigning is the logical equivalent of deep link building. You establish relevance and importance on a product line by product line basis.

For fun, I decided to see how many ads were posted on YouTube for each of their car product lines. You can see it here:

My technique of using these search queries is admittedly crude, but the point is that they run ads for each of their product lines. Your online strategy needs to reflect this, too. Search engines try to look at signals the same way that users do.

One set of such signals is the links that your product category pages get. This goes back to the traditional model of links being seen as academic-type citations for your content.

So when you look at one of your product lines, some questions you can ask yourself are:

Is my product covered in reviews of similar products in major magazines?
Do major websites covering similar products write about your product at other times (not just reviews)?
Do lots of bloggers who fit your target demographic write about you?
Is there any evidence online that your company is an expert in your product’s topic area?

There are plenty of these basic types of questions. Let me enhance them one step further. Do the places that write about you online include links to the relevant pages on your site? Note that someone writing about you without a link could represent some level of endorsement, but implementing a link, which offers the user the opportunity to leave the site publishing a link is, by definition, a stronger endorsement. See more From Eric Enge here

See how he talks about how Ford and the other companies run ads for a specif product. When these products are promoted, the link takes you straight to the page the product is on, not the homepage or main page of the website. Each product has to be promoted in this way. In his article he also says that the need for deep linking will not be going away any time soon. Also product line promotions will always be important. So with that being said, if you are not already doing so, you need to incorporate deep linking into your marketing strategies. Visitors will end up visiting the inside of your website more than the home page because the home page contains a variety of things, but still not a link to every post or webpage.

Search engines display results based on what a person type in the search box and if you're not building deep links to those post or webpages with in your site, you could set yourself up to not receive as much traffic as you could be receiving.

Related reading

Is Tweeting Videos Good For Your Company
Use Content Curation To Attract Readers
Amplify Your Tweets for Better Click Through Rates
How to Select A Profitable Niche
There's No Mystery to Traffic Generation
Is Link Building Still Effective

Amplify Your Tweets for Better Click Through Rates

One of the best ways to share a blog post, article, message, or anything is through Twitter. If links are good they will get shared and re-tweeted super fast. That's only if you use the right words, titles, and verbs. Twitter is becoming more and more popular by the day and if you tweet your followers you need to know how to effectively use twitter and amplify your tweets for better click through rates. Linda Bustos shared a very important message on improving the Twitter link click through rates and this is what she had to say.......

When it comes to sharing links through Twitter, what makes them click?

Dan Zarella from HubSpot set out to answer that question, analyzing over 200,000 link-containing tweets, and measuring several characteristics that appear to influence click through. Dan’s findings are presented infographically (WordPress tells me this is not a word, but I don’t care), which we will here break down tip-by-tip, along with some real-world examples.

Now here is a tip she shared............

6. Tweet on the weekends

From getelastic.com

No surprise here, tweet volume from marketers is understandably down on the weekends, so there’s a better chance your links are seen by weekend socializers. Schedule tweets in advance with Crowdbooster or Hootsuite, and of course monitor click-through vis-a-vis similar links during the work week.

Another tip: Check out (ah, see what I just did there?) Tweriod, an app that will tell you your ideal time to tweet based on your audience. See more from Linda Bustos here.

I like how she shared Dan Zarrella's results from his study of more than 200,000 tweets that contained links. Another thing I learned from this site is to increase the usage of verbs and action words. The info-graphs from her site shows you proof that the click through rates are higher when you incorporate these tips into your own tweets.

Related reading

Is Tweeting Videos Good For Your Company
Attract Readers To Your Blog Like Perez Hilton Does
How Buzz Marketing Can Increase Affiliate Sales
What Do Dogs And Blog Titles Have In Common?

How to Select A Profitable Niche

In order to be successful as an affiliate marketer, you have to choose the right niche. The mistake a lot of affiliates make is trying to find a product to promote before choosing a niche. This is not the best way to choose a product, it's best to choose an evergreen niche first then worry about the product later.

Much like a store, there's a variety of niches. Which will you choose?

I'm about to explain to you how to select a profitable niche. First of all you, need an evergreen niche as I just mentioned. An evergreen niche is a niche where people will always need what you have to offer. For example a health product such as weight loss, anti aging, or an embarrassing body odor; or self improvement products such as dating or success. Evergreen products will always make you money because people will always have needs and people will always experience these types of issues. Products like these will always be in high demand because people are always looking for solutions and they want quick solutions.

Plus the niche you choose need to be a niche where the market is big enough and the demand is high. You need to choose a market that is starving for the product you want to promote. If people are not hungry enough for the product or niche, you need to steer away from it.

You need to also consider choosing a niche where you can find products that people are desperate for. For example, think about the guy who is about to go on a date and has an on going problem with stinky breath; you could choose a product in the health niche that will help this guy fix his bad breath issue. Also think about the person who has a sexual problem; example premature ejaculation or loss of sexual desire, you can find a product to promote that will help people fix these problems. What about a person who has infertility issues or the one who wants to prevent identity theft; you can look for products geared towards helping these people prevent identity theft and a book on healthy eating to help prevent infertility.

The examples I give above are very good examples to help you get started. You need to aim for niches that are making the money. I will provide the steps below:

Ask yourself what is the problem that people are very desperate to fix? Think about the problems that keep folks tossing and turning or even awake all night. Think about the people in your life. What do they have problems with and what do they always talk about concerning the problem? I have a friend who is constantly talking about her excessive sweating problem under her arms. I went one day to look up information to help her and guess what; there were a lot of other people asking the same questions. Yahoo answers is a good place to start when looking for niches and products.

Now what is it that you don't like about someone you hang around? This could be a family member you live with or a friend. I know someone in my life who has a problem and it is very nerve wreaking to be around this person sometimes because it is an annoying situation.

Once you figure that out, do some research and see what other people are saying on the internet about similar problems. The more you can find other people talking about a particular problem, the more of an indicator you're on to something good.

When you do your research ask yourself do people spend money in the niche you are considering. If loads of people are spending money, it's a good sign you've found your niche. You can even type in Google words like "how do I", or "how can I" and see what else pops up. It will give you a great idea what people are searching for.

Always remember that the internet is the first place people will come when they are looking for a solution to their issues. You need to be the person that can provide the solutions. You need to also look at other products similar to the one you are considering after you've picked your niche. You need to also make sure you can provide information on your site that no one else has offered yet. This will put you ahead of the game if you can do this.

Competition will be fierce and you will have to pick the right kind of product that you can successfully promote that will make you a comfortable steady flow of monthly income from affiliate marketing. There are many people selling products online and many will be selling and promoting similar products you choose. If you can, you need to choose a product that will allow you to make money through up-selling and cross selling.

Before you make a final decision on what to promote and what niche to choose, take a trip to Amazon's website and see what's selling in the book and kindle book section. This will give you a strong indicator on what niche is hot and what's not.

You should always remember that new niches are created daily and you should always be on the look out for new things in technology, health, and well everywhere. Think about how you can now tweet videos on Twitter.

Soon you will see people creating products on how to market or make money tweeting videos. Look at Amazon kindle books, there are books out there on how to make money through that channel. There will always be new products and niches, but you have to pick the right one, that's the key. Also if you choose something you have a little knowledge about or something where you experienced you own problem or something embarrassing that troubled you, it will always be easy to keep up with a blog and write articles or blog post on your own experiences. People will feel your past pain through your writing and will be more willing to check out what you recommend.

What Does Duplicate Content Really Mean?

What is duplicate content? Does unique content make a difference when we are writing blog post or adding pages to our websites? These two questions are commonly asked and people have different views and thoughts on what these two things actually mean. We all know that duplicate content can hurt our rankings and how well we perform in the search engines, especially after the several changes done to the Google algorithms or post panda.

So what is duplicate content? To answer this question you need to know what unique content is and what it isn't and it's not what you think. Unique content is content that is that is different from what everyone else is saying. But the mistake people are making is they go find some site on the web and reword the information to make it "their own". It's unique but you are still saying the same thing everyone else is saying, aka, "me too marketing" or the "I want to say that too" theory.

Let's get something straight, the search engines want to see something of value that came strictly from you and no one else. This is what you need to focus on. You need to say something that someone else hasn't already said. If someone else already said it, than it's too late for you because in most cases the search engines already picked that up from other sites, especially the sites who are popular and those whose information is already being shared by social media outlets.

So the idea is to provide unique valuable content rather than just so called unique content. Also for example if someone is looking for an Italian restaurant, you can't just go and get information from an online directory and take the content about a popular restaurant and reword the stuff, you have to give the details about the restaurant and go above and beyond and talk about the stars that comes to the restaurant, talk about the area, and if the Italian restaurant has a movie theater underground, talk about that and get a bunch of unique pictures and put that on your site, (with permission of course). Most people aren't gonna do that. Give the details and make absolute sure you share information that other people aren't sharing.

Now that you understand what unique content is and that you should always be providing unique valuable content and something that no one else ever mentioned on any other website, you can fully understand what duplicate content is.

So what is duplicate content? This is the process where a blogger or site owner take full blown copies of someone else's work and put it on their blog or site without proper credit given back to that person's blog or website. Also when people take content that already exist in the internet world and put it on their blog. If that content was already out their first, that site will show up before anyone else who puts the same content up afterwards. Basically, duplicate content is another form of plagiarism. We can just call it plagiarized content or high-jacked content. That's all it is.

Now this is what duplicate content isn't. It isn't when a person takes a few sentences from some one else's blog post or article and post it on their blog post or article with some of their own unique content. Too many people get that wrong. It also is not when a person cites what some one else says while also providing unique value. Why, because you can share what someone else said on your blog as long as you give them proper credit. This method is known as content curation and this is actually better than saying "oh me too". You pretty much learnt that in school.

Bloggers and site owners get this stuff confused all the time. But that can stop today. As a matter of fact, below is a video from SEOmoz. Rand Fishkin is doing a segment called whiteboard Friday, which many of you may already know about. He is talking more on this subject and I believe it is very important for you to hear. Rand Fiskin clears up the confusion on duplicate and unique content. The video is titled: How Unique Content Needs to Be To Perform Well In the Search Engines? Take a look at it now.

Now doesn't that help you? It's really good info.

Related reading

Use Content Curation To Attract Readers
Brainstorming For Fresh Content? Try These Ideas
Attract Readers To Your Blog Like Perez Hilton Does
Google Over Optimization Penalty: Too Much SEO
Blog Writing Is A Piece Of Cake
Struggling Affiliate? Learn To Offer Quality To Your Visitors

Attract Readers To Your Blog Like Perez Hilton Does

Phil Vassar Country Singer

So you're writing blog post after blog post in hopes of attracting more readers. But who are you trying to attract? This is the question you have to ask yourself when you are blogging. Before you even start a blog you need to know what type of audience you're trying to attract. With many people doing niche sites and blogs, you need to be able to set yourself apart from the rest and give readers what they are looking for.

How do you attract readers to your blog? You blog about something that your readers want to read. It needs to be something engaging and attention getting. One way you can do that is by content curation. I talked content curation in a different post but I bring this up again because this is a popular way to get attention instantly. Perez Hilton's blog is very popular because he uses this method. Then on top of that he talks about something most people like to read about and that's celebrity gossip.

When Perez Hilton blogs, he is always talking about celebrities. He pick the hottest stories he finds on other popular websites takes the content and curates it, add his own twist to it with a title that attracts his readers, and send them on the the popular website so that they can continue reading what the gossip is about. Perez Hilton picks out the news that's popping and talks about it. For instance, you can go to Perez Hilton's blog now and at the top you can see what's trending. When I took a look at his blog recently, the trending celebrities were Beyonce, Kim Kardashian, Justin Bieber, and a few others. During the inauguration, people talked about Beyonce lip syncing at the event. This discussion became so popular people wanted to know more about it. Perez Hilton put up a funny short video clip and at the side of the video put a title telling people "Beyonce Fake It! National Anthem Lip Synching Confirmed By Inaugural Official!"

Now for most people this title would be too irresistible to resist clicking on. The same goes for some of the other things he put on his sites about celebrities. Another example of what he posted to his blog was "Nicki Minaj STORMS OUT of American Idol Audition after Judges Fight! WATCH HERE!". Anybody who loves or follows Nicki Minaj will want to know what and why this happened, especially if these folks didn't watch the episode. Perez Hilton can create blog titles that will make a person want to click on it. This is what you have to do to attract readers to your blog like Perez Hilton and he does it well.

Perez Hilton's blog is making the man a living and he's making big money by drawing people to his blog. How, because he is providing content that people want and crave. Then he monetize his blog with advertising. He's doing extremely well. Perez Hilton also has followers via social media, which makes him even more popular.

You can do the same thing he is doing. How, by writing epic topics, stuff people want to see. As I already mentioned, Perez Hilton does this and he's doing it multiple times daily.

For example, if your blog is about weight loss, you can find a celebrity who lost weight and talk about how they did it. You can create an irresistible title, and if the celebrity has a blog, share some of what they talk about on your blog and link back to that celebrity's blog giving them credit.

You can even interview well known bloggers in your niche and create a blog post around that. Just make sure everything you write about somehow relates to your niche.

Also look at your comment section and create a blog post by answering questions. If a lot of people ask similar questions, this is an indicator you need to make a post about it.

People like to read about celebrities and this is what can make you an authority. Your blog post becomes popular and people will start to follow you. Take a look at Perez Hilton's blog and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Related Reading

Use Content Curation To Attract Readers

Blog Writing Is A Piece Of Cake

Pull In More Blog Readers By Dropping The Big Names

Is Tweeting Videos Good For Your Company

Pictures is a great way to get your audiences' attention, videos can grab even more attention. Short videos are better than longer ones. But what about a 6 second video. Well Twitter's CEO, Dick Costolo, tweeted a video. That's really cool. Mashable showed the tweet Dick Costolo shared on Wednesday morning. You can read about it and see the video here. The app that's allowing Twitter users to share videos is called Vine. Joanna Stern wrote an article about the new Twitter app and this is what she had to say..........

They say a photo is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a lot more. By that math, six seconds of video should be worth a whole lot more than 140 characters of text or a Tweet. And that seems to be the point of Vine, an app launched by Twitter today that allows you to add short video clips to your tweets.

The app, which as of now is available only for the iPhone, is really simple to use and works a lot like Instagram. (Many have been calling it the Instagramof video.) Sign in with your Twitter account or via email, hit the video camera button and press down on the viewfinder to record video. Release your finger and the recording stops, so you can easily move to record something else, but you only have six seconds of space (or tape). Watch your video and then share it with others on the service. There are options to then share it on Twitter and Facebook too. You can read more about the Twitter App Vine here

This is really cool and I believe tweeting videos on Twitter will be a big thing for all of us, especially companies. Short videos will capture more attention than a regular tweet. The attention span of most is short anyway, right? Online advertising has become more popular than commercials and billboards and it will continue to grow at a fast rate. I think businesses will get millions to share videos through this app faster than sharing them any other way. What do you think?

Related reading

How Buzz Marketing Can Increase Affiliate Sales
Blog Writing Is A Piece Of Cake
There's No Mystery to Traffic Generation

Blog Writing Is A Piece Of Cake

Blog Writing Is Really A Piece Of Cake

What thoughts cross your mind when you think about blog writing? Most people will tell you it can be difficult. I will be one of the few to tell you that blog writing doesn't have to be hard at all. Really blog writing is a piece of cake when you consider how easy it is to create content. Many of you were taught to write great content and write longer blog post. While this is true, it doesn't mean blog writing has to be hard. Content curation is one of the popular methods bloggers use to create content for their blogs easily and in a fraction of the time it used to take to write a blog post from scratch. This method allows the blogger to still provide their followers/readers with high quality content in just a few minutes.

Even if you don't always use content curation, you can still create a blog post about anything you wish quickly and easy. Don't believe it's possible? Check out what the folks at the highly popular SEOmoz have to say about blog writing......

In order to create a successful blog, you have to be passionately curious about the topic you're covering.

This notion was the central point of my Mozinar on "Blogging Like You Mean It" a few weeks ago, when I shared my personal story of blogging success. Here's a concise recap of the story, for those who missed it: I was once tasked with creating a blog on a topic I was completely uninterested in: television. At that time, there wasn't a TV in my home and I had absolutely no interest in television.

In order to run the blog, I knew I had to find a way to approach the topic that would be interesting enough to make blogging feel less like work and more like fun. (That's the real trick to successful blogging, by the way: writing about things you are completely and naturally passionate about.) For this project, I was able to come up with a question that fully piqued my interest in the topic: "How has television impacted the history of our culture, and how will it continue to do so in the future?"

With that one question, I was able to get interested in the topic, and eventually the blog started ranking in the top search results for some extremely competitive terms related to TV. Within a matter of weeks, we were writing articles that captivated people from around the globe and were even featured prominently on sites like The Guardian, AdWeek, New York Magazine, BuzzFeed, About.com, and Design Work Life. Today, the blog has been taken over by a remarkable, dedicated team at CableTV.com.

Then he goes to say...........

It all starts with questions

First off, any uninteresting topic can be made interesting by asking questions.

Questions work remarkably well for two reasons: primarily, they give us clear purpose and direction in our efforts. When we're asking questions and actively pursuing the answers, our work suddenly becomes an opportunity to learn and grow, not just to get links or fill up pages on the web.

Secondly, we, as bloggers, should focus on asking (and pursuing the answers of) questions because there is bound to be an audience for the content created around those questions; people who are looking for the same answers. See more from SEOmoz here

I like how he says an uninteresting topic can be made interesting by asking questions. This is great because the answers will help you successfully and constantly write for your blog. Being passionately curious will help you to put together a good post that will draw attention every time and jump start a great discussion.