Solutions to Any Blogging Pitfalls
There are ‘broad’ niches and ‘narrow’ niches.
Broad niches are very general, and something like ‘make money is a broad niche.
A narrower version would be ‘make money online and an even narrower version would be ‘make money blogging’.
Keyword Research
On the SEO front, once you’ve come up with a niche, you’ll have to research the keywords within that niche if you want to stand a chance at getting traffic from search engines.
Doing this will give you the means to get traffic (i.e. visitors) to your blog, and thus make sales.
Be sure to know exactly what keywords you’re targeting before you actually write content because your content should be laced with these keywords for the best results.
In fact, other aspects of your blog should incorporate keywords too, such as headings, titles, tags, and so on!
Without keywords, you won’t get very far at all.
Selling Products that Don’t Sell
Whatever the case, picking products that don’t sell are recipes for disaster.
Choosing the right product to sell is more than just opting for the one that has the highest payout, or the one that ‘feels’ best.
However, it should be noted that while choosing the wrong product is bad. choosing too many products is worse.
Piling Up Monetization Options
Yet another common mistake with monetization is choosing to promote a whole slew of products instead of just one.
Solution: Plan Monetization Well!
To get the best results out of your monetization, you’re going to have to plan your monetization well.
Doing so requires two things in particular:
1. Selecting the right products to sell
2. Marketing your products in the right way.
If you can do both – you’ll be all set, but let’s go over them individually to be certain that you understand what they entail.
First off, you need to know how to select the right products to sell, i.e. how to choose a monetization option that is going to work when you market it on your blog.
Selecting the right product merely means that you want a product that is going to sell. That in turn means that it should be a product that is already selling well if it’s been on the market for a while.
A good product is basically one that helps people in your niche solve a particular problem that they might be facing.
As long as it solves a problem, it should be a candidate for the ‘right’ product.
Even after you’ve selected the right product though, you’ll need to market it properly.
The right way to market products using your blog is to do so individually.
Space them out so that you’re not just throwing product after product at your readers, but are also giving them other ‘valuable’ things for free in between.
Getting this balance right is the key to marketing your products in the right way.
Fixing and Diversifying Traffic Sources
In order to ensure that your blog is never left wanting for traffic, you’re going to need to take two steps in particular:
1.Ensure that your current traffic sources are fixed so that they’re pulling their weight
2.Diversify and pursue more traffic sources to supplement your current traffic.
Both of these steps will help you to get more traffic than ever before, and so ‘not having enough traffic’ should never be a problem.
You need to identify your current and potential sources of traffic.
Main sources of traffic that you could be pursuing:
· Search Engines
· Article Marketing
· Video Marketing
· Forums
· Blog Commenting
· PPC Advertising
· Social Bookmarking
· Squidoo Lenses and Hubpages
· Press Releases
· Syndicated RSS Feeds
· Guest Blog Posting
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
To troubleshoot your SEO efforts, you should first concentrate on your on-page SEO and then move on to your off-page SEO.
What this means is that you should first look at everything about your SEO which is located on your blog itself, and this would be:
· Keywords and keyword targeting
· Meta tags
· Sitemap submissions
· Blog pinging
If you can make certain that all these four areas are covered, you should be fine.
Off-page SEO means backlinks.
Make certain that you’re getting as many backlinks as possible, and that you’re using a keyword as your ‘anchor text’.
The Truth About Conversion Rates
Conversion rates are simply the number of people per 100 visitors that you’re convincing to buy a product.
That means that if your conversion rate is 1%, you’re only convincing 1 of each 100 visitors to make a purchase.
Conversion rates are just a reflection of how well your blog is selling products.
Factors Behind Low Conversion Rates Problem Areas
1. Traffic that isn’t targeted enough
More traffic is good, but if it isn’t targeted then it isn’t going to convert very well at all.
2. Bad designs
Some designs work better than others when it comes to marketing. Often, blogs make the mistake of being too ‘cluttered’.
3. Awful sales copy
Without a good sales copy, you’ll find that you’re not going to be selling much at all.
Fixing the Causes of Bad Conversion Rates
1. Use highly targeted keywords in your content
By using these types of keywords, you’ll find that you’re at very least able to get highly targeted traffic from search engines.
2. Opt for clean and uncluttered designs
Clean designs win hands down against cluttered ones, and if you can use a design that doesn’t appear ‘stuffed’ with widgets, content, or anything at all, you’ll find that you get a lot further.
3. Benefit-oriented copy
Starting out with writing sales copy can be tough, but here’s one rule to follow: Talk about benefits rather than features.
People like to know how a product can help them, as opposed to simply knowing its features.
