How to Ensure Your Future Blog Posts Are Popular

By Eric Siu
Published September 2, 2013

Are you struggling to come up with blog posts that attract the right type of visitors?

Are you unsure where to turn for new article ideas?

In this article I’ll show you how to make sure your future articles are the ones your audience is really interested in.

Here’s a hint how: your social connections can help you discover the topics that will perform well on your business blog.

Invest in writing about the topics that are most likely to appeal to your target audience. Image source: iStockPhoto.

Follow these 4 easy steps to get you on your way to finding great topics that resonate with your audience simply by looking within your social networks for inspiration.

Not all blog post topics are created equal. A great topic immediately catches readers’ attention with a snappy headline that speaks to their needs and conveys an obvious value proposition to them.

One of the easiest ways to find out which topics have this type of impact is to find articles that are performing at a high level for the big brands and leaders in your industry.

To do this, identify influencers within your industry and monitor their Facebook and Twitter feeds to find posts and updates that garner an unusually high level of engagement.

For example, the following Zappos Facebook update garnered a stunning 4,157 likes, while other entries on the page averaged between 300-1,100 likes.

Lacoste brand posts are especially popular on the Zappos Facebook page.

While it isn’t exactly surprising that one of the web’s top retailers would amass so many likes, what’s interesting is that of the other posts on the page, this Lacoste brand post received an above-average number of likes—even beating out always-popular contest-related posts.

If you’re an online retailer of luxury goods, this trend could demonstrate consistent interest in the Lacoste brand name, providing you with perfect fodder for a future blog post.

And if you’re in a different type of business, remember to look for similar spikes of interest from within your industry to discover great blog topics.

The topics that are popular for influencers might not resonate with your readers. Instead of following in big-brand footsteps, ask your followers what they’d like to read about on your blog.

Remember that questions like, “What do you want me to write about next?” are too broad. Instead ask a specific question to help readers give you an answer you can work with, like, “Which of these do you struggle with most on Facebook—creating ads, using Insights or creating custom tabs?”

Darren Rowse posted a question to his Google+ audience in July.

The high engagement the question received led him to write a blog post titled, “Don’t Quit Your Job to Chase Your Dreams… Until You’ve Read This.”

Darren Rowse published a crowdsourced article to Facebook.

To ensure your topic is tailored to the needs and interests of your target customers, create blog posts based on your readers’ feedback.

One way to determine whether a topic is of interest to your target audience is to research your top posts on Facebook.

The Facebook Insights program compiles data on how well your individual Facebook posts are performing based on their overall reach, the number of users who have engaged with the post, the number of people talking about it and the post’s overall virality.

As an example, check out the following screenshot from the Facebook Marketing Solutions Insights page:

Facebook Insights can provide data on the posts your followers have engaged with most.

The top two entries in the list both include the word “tip”. This demonstrated interest could be used to develop a series of blog post topics based on helpful, actionable tips on an industry topic.

Find common factors in different entries in your top post list on Facebook and use them as inspiration for a single blog post topic or a series of articles on your blog. Remember, you can also use this data to identify topics that don’t resonate well with your audience, and remove them from your content plan.

If your marketing efforts are geared more toward Twitter, you’ll want to use a tool like Sprout Social to find out which of your tweets have had the biggest impact on your target audience.

Sprout Social measures the clicks, response rate and reach of each tweet you send.

It’s clear that the tweet titled, “Why Social Media Managers Should Be Integrated With Sales and Support” received a substantially larger number of clicks than any other tweet released by the company in the time range selected.

Sprout Social’s bloggers could use this information to conclude that the topic of integrating social media into sales is of particular interest to their company’s followers. This insight could then be spun off into a series of blog post tutorials that are practically guaranteed to capture the attention of their readers.

Conclusion

Certainly, these aren’t the only ways that your business can use information derived from social channels in order to develop successful blog posts, but they do represent a great place to start.

First pay attention to what the influencers in your industry are saying and consider asking your followers for feedback on what topics your blog should cover.

Then as you share posts generated using these techniques on your social channels, use Facebook Insights, Sprout Social or similar social media monitoring programs to see which topics stick and which ones fail to attract interest.

Good business blogging is all about flexibility and commitment. Make it a priority to invest in writing about the topics most likely to appeal to your target audience and you’ll see sustained growth and increased profits.

Over to You

What do you think? Have you tried any of these strategies for developing great blog post topics? What other strategies have you had success with? Share your suggestions in the comments section below!

About the Author, Eric Siu

Eric Siu is the Chief Operating Officer at digital marketing agency Single Grain. He has previously consulted for Fortune 500 companies and led the growth team at education startup Treehouse. Other posts by Eric Siu »

View the original article here

5 Steps to Ensure Your WordPress Blog Is Secure

By Marko Saric
Published July 4, 2013

Is your WordPress blog safe from malicious people?

Would you like to make your WordPress blog more secure?

Most often, people don’t think about security measures until it’s too late. But there are some simple steps you can take to keep your blog safe.

A blog that has been hacked can suffer from loss of content, stolen data and expensive downtime. Maintaining the security of your blog helps you protect your reputation and provide your visitors with the best service possible.

Because WordPress is such a popular platform for blogging, it’s a regular target for hacking attacks launched by people who find and exploit weaknesses and vulnerabilities in websites.

Here are 5 simple security measures that you should implement on your business blog today to protect it from hacking attacks.

Hackers look for blogs that use the default WordPress admin username because it’s half of the information they need to gain entry to your blog. When you use “Admin” as your username, you save the hacker a lot of time. All they’d need to do next is to figure out your password. Once that happens, they can enter your blog and do whatever they want.

The first step in making your blog secure is to create a new user profile for yourself and delete the default admin username. This makes it more difficult for someone to hack into your business blog.

To create a new username profile, open the WordPress admin navigation, go into Users and click on Add New.

Create a new user profile and change the role to administrator.

Fill in your details and make sure to give yourself the role of an administrator so you have the ability to make any necessary changes on your blog. After your new username is created, log out of your WordPress dashboard and log back in with your new user details.

Go back into Users and delete the default admin user. At this stage, WordPress gives you the option to transfer the posts authored by the admin user to your new user profile; choose that and you won’t lose any of your content or data.

No matter how much awareness is raised around the danger of using a simple password, many people continue to use simple passwords that are easy for them to remember. Unfortunately, this also makes those passwords easier to crack.

It’s important that you use a strong and secure password. It should be a minimum of eight characters long with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters.

To change your WordPress password to a stronger character string, go into Users and choose Your Profile. At the bottom of that page, fill in the New Password fields.

WordPress interface for adding a new password.

Make this a requirement for every member of your blogging team as each login password presents a potential gateway for hackers to try to enter.

In response to security vulnerabilities, the WordPress software, themes and plugins are regularly updated with the latest patches and fixes.

When a WordPress update is available, you’ll see a prominent notification across the top of your dashboard.

You’ll see a yellow notification banner across the top of your WordPress dashboard when there’s a new update available for you to install.

Updating is a simple 1-click process in your dashboard so you won’t need to leave your browser or do any manual uploading via FTP.

Backing up your database is an important part of keeping your blog secure.

WordPress makes the backup process simple with both free and paid options. WP-DB-Backup, a free option, is one of the most downloaded WordPress backup plugins and is a simple solution for beginners.

To install WP-DB-Backup, go into Plugins and choose Add New. Type “WP-DB-Backup” in the search box. Click Install Now and then click OK.

It’s easy to find and install a plugin to back up your blog. Under Plugins, click Add New and search for WP-DB-Backup or another backup plugin.

From the Plugins screen, Activate the plugin.

After the plugin has been activated, you’ll have a new addition to your navigation in Tools named Backup. From Backup, you can either back up your database immediately or you can set the backup to occur on a regular schedule. The backup files can be downloaded to your hard drive or sent to your server via email.

WP-DB-Backup gives you the option to save to server, download or email.

You’ll appreciate knowing you always have an up-to-date backup of your blog in the event something does happen.

The Limit Login Attempts plugin is especially useful in helping to repel brute-force hacker attacks by blocking access to the login page after a series of incorrect login attempts have been made. As administrator, you decide how many login attempts to allow before the plugin launches the block.

Install this plugin by going into Plugins and choosing Add New, just as you did to find the WP-DB-Backup mentioned above.

This time, search for “Limit Login Attempts,” click Install and then OK. Activate the plugin from the Plugins screen and you will have a new Limit Login Attempts option in your Settings.

To set the number of allowable login attempts and other limits, click on Limit Login Attempts, fill in the options and click on Change Options to save your work.

Limit Login Attempts plugin settings in your WordPress dashboard.

Bonus Tip: Here’s one last tip to help keep your blog safe. Remember to research any plugins you are interested in. This is one tactic used by others to try to attack your blog. So only install plugins from reputable sources and check the reviews on WordPress.org.

Keep your business blog safe.

These are five things you can quickly put in place to help make your business blog more secure. They will go a long way in protecting your blog from the majority of hacking attempts and give your blog more security than many of the other blogs published today.

What do you think? How often do you think about the security of your blog? What other precautions do you recommend to keep a blog safe? Write your comments and questions in the box below.

About the Author, Marko Saric

Marko Saric is a bloger at HowToMakeMyBlog.com, a site that teaches you everything you need to know on starting a blog and making it a success. Other posts by Marko Saric »

View the original article here

5 Steps to Ensure Your WordPress Blog Is Secure

By Marko Saric
Published July 4, 2013

Is your WordPress blog safe from malicious people?

Would you like to make your WordPress blog more secure?

Most often, people don’t think about security measures until it’s too late. But there are some simple steps you can take to keep your blog safe.

A blog that has been hacked can suffer from loss of content, stolen data and expensive downtime. Maintaining the security of your blog helps you protect your reputation and provide your visitors with the best service possible.

Because WordPress is such a popular platform for blogging, it’s a regular target for hacking attacks launched by people who find and exploit weaknesses and vulnerabilities in websites.

Here are 5 simple security measures that you should implement on your business blog today to protect it from hacking attacks.

Hackers look for blogs that use the default WordPress admin username because it’s half of the information they need to gain entry to your blog. When you use “Admin” as your username, you save the hacker a lot of time. All they’d need to do next is to figure out your password. Once that happens, they can enter your blog and do whatever they want.

The first step in making your blog secure is to create a new user profile for yourself and delete the default admin username. This makes it more difficult for someone to hack into your business blog.

To create a new username profile, open the WordPress admin navigation, go into Users and click on Add New.

Create a new user profile and change the role to administrator.

Fill in your details and make sure to give yourself the role of an administrator so you have the ability to make any necessary changes on your blog. After your new username is created, log out of your WordPress dashboard and log back in with your new user details.

Go back into Users and delete the default admin user. At this stage, WordPress gives you the option to transfer the posts authored by the admin user to your new user profile; choose that and you won’t lose any of your content or data.

No matter how much awareness is raised around the danger of using a simple password, many people continue to use simple passwords that are easy for them to remember. Unfortunately, this also makes those passwords easier to crack.

It’s important that you use a strong and secure password. It should be a minimum of eight characters long with uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters.

To change your WordPress password to a stronger character string, go into Users and choose Your Profile. At the bottom of that page, fill in the New Password fields.

WordPress interface for adding a new password.

Make this a requirement for every member of your blogging team as each login password presents a potential gateway for hackers to try to enter.

In response to security vulnerabilities, the WordPress software, themes and plugins are regularly updated with the latest patches and fixes.

When a WordPress update is available, you’ll see a prominent notification across the top of your dashboard.

You’ll see a yellow notification banner across the top of your WordPress dashboard when there’s a new update available for you to install.

Updating is a simple 1-click process in your dashboard so you won’t need to leave your browser or do any manual uploading via FTP.

Backing up your database is an important part of keeping your blog secure.

WordPress makes the backup process simple with both free and paid options. WP-DB-Backup, a free option, is one of the most downloaded WordPress backup plugins and is a simple solution for beginners.

To install WP-DB-Backup, go into Plugins and choose Add New. Type “WP-DB-Backup” in the search box. Click Install Now and then click OK.

It’s easy to find and install a plugin to back up your blog. Under Plugins, click Add New and search for WP-DB-Backup or another backup plugin.

From the Plugins screen, Activate the plugin.

After the plugin has been activated, you’ll have a new addition to your navigation in Tools named Backup. From Backup, you can either back up your database immediately or you can set the backup to occur on a regular schedule. The backup files can be downloaded to your hard drive or sent to your server via email.

WP-DB-Backup gives you the option to save to server, download or email.

You’ll appreciate knowing you always have an up-to-date backup of your blog in the event something does happen.

The Limit Login Attempts plugin is especially useful in helping to repel brute-force hacker attacks by blocking access to the login page after a series of incorrect login attempts have been made. As administrator, you decide how many login attempts to allow before the plugin launches the block.

Install this plugin by going into Plugins and choosing Add New, just as you did to find the WP-DB-Backup mentioned above.

This time, search for “Limit Login Attempts,” click Install and then OK. Activate the plugin from the Plugins screen and you will have a new Limit Login Attempts option in your Settings.

To set the number of allowable login attempts and other limits, click on Limit Login Attempts, fill in the options and click on Change Options to save your work.

Limit Login Attempts plugin settings in your WordPress dashboard.

Bonus Tip: Here’s one last tip to help keep your blog safe. Remember to research any plugins you are interested in. This is one tactic used by others to try to attack your blog. So only install plugins from reputable sources and check the reviews on WordPress.org.

Keep your business blog safe.

These are five things you can quickly put in place to help make your business blog more secure. They will go a long way in protecting your blog from the majority of hacking attempts and give your blog more security than many of the other blogs published today.

What do you think? How often do you think about the security of your blog? What other precautions do you recommend to keep a blog safe? Write your comments and questions in the box below.

About the Author, Marko Saric

Marko Saric is a bloger at HowToMakeMyBlog.com, a site that teaches you everything you need to know on starting a blog and making it a success. Other posts by Marko Saric »

View the original article here

How to Ensure Your Facebook Contests Attract Genuine Fans

By Emeric Ernoult
Published June 10, 2013

Are you thinking of running a contest on Facebook?

Have you run a contest and had little success with retaining fans past the award date?

One goal of a successful Facebook contest should be to recruit fans who are genuinely interested in you, while avoiding the cheaters and faux fans who are only interested in material gain.

In this article you’ll discover five tips to help ensure that your contests attract genuine fans.

Don’t offer attractive prizes that have nothing to do with your brand.

Everyone wants an iPad—not just your potential customers. A free vacation will not just attract fans who are interested in your beauty products, but pretty much anyone who sees the contest.

An appropriate award deflects the prize-hunters who hide your posts or unlike your Page as soon as the prizes have been awarded.

Offer a prize that interests your current or future customers. If your contest attracts entries from people who have no reason to become your customer, change it.

Lord & Taylor, an online fashion retailer for women, is awarding fashion accessories from its website.

If you are an airline, offer an award of miles or an upgrade on their next flight to fans who are already members of your loyalty program. If you’re offering trips to resorts, send your winner to one of the destinations in your portfolio. If your business specializes in selling iPads, give away a must-have accessory.

When you choose the right prize, you safeguard against attracting opportunists and cheaters. You may have fewer entrants, but in the long run you’ll be far better off with 100 new potential customers than you are with 1000 scavenger-hunters who go through Facebook competition forums looking for prizes to win.

Many contests use a system of votes (photo competitions) or point accumulations (quizzes) to identify finalists or winners. These methods animate your campaign, boost engagement and can increase the chances of the contest going viral. But they should never be the only methods used for choosing your winners.

Awarding prizes to photo submissions that have received the most votes or to the highest scorer on your quiz is a sure way to incite cheaters and prize-hunters to distort the rules of your game. They may enroll as fake participants who have no interest in your brand, generate dummy votes or find the correct answers in one of the many online forums about game competitions.

For image-based contests, appoint a jury to choose your winner from a selection of finalists. The number of votes can be taken into consideration, but if the photo in question is found to be faked, they can remove it from consideration.

Choosing a winner based on the most votes runs the risk of encouraging cheaters. Allowing a jury to select the photos is often a secure alternative.

In a quiz framework, select a winner by drawing from the participants who provided correct responses, or a minimum of correct answers.

Add an element of chance to discourage cheaters and unscrupulous participants. There’s no point in going to the trouble of cheating when ultimately the chance of winning is random.

Some Facebook contests don’t require entrants to accept an app installation on their profile in order to participate. These competition providers feel the install request may reduce the number of participants.

This is untrue. Using a Facebook app install request does not reduce the number of participants significantly.

It’s relatively easy for people to create numerous dummy email accounts. It’s much more challenging and time-consuming for them to create a large number of fake Facebook accounts. Facebook is constantly policing fake accounts and deleting them.

To limit cheaters, use an application specialized for contests that requires people to register and install before participating.

Requiring a Facebook application install limits the number of fraudulent participants and scams.

Rewarding contestants who invite their friends to participate in your contest by entering them in a second random drawing can increase your campaign’s visibility.

This tactic can also increase the risk of attracting participants who have no value to your business.

If your products appeal to a large base of consumers (food, travel, multimedia products, etc.), there’s no reason not to make use of sharing options. But you’ll want to limit this type of engagement if your products are very focused or targeted at a niche audience.

The share options (sharing on Facebook or Twitter, inviting friends) are available on most Facebook applications. These can be great options for wide-ranging products, but niche businesses may be better off without them.

If you’ve meticulously followed the advice above, you’ve likely avoided creating a playground for cheaters and prize-hunters. But what about the clever few who slip through? You owe it to your genuine contestants to identify scammers.

Some Facebook campaign applications offer options to identify possible cheaters.

All entrants leave a personal signature that allows you to identify them: their IP address.

It’s very difficult for opportunists to participate from many different locations or simulate multiple IP addresses.

Choose a contest app that provides native detection functions and fraud management to track IP addresses and detect cheaters.

When all the friends of one participant or all the votes on a photo have the same IP address, you’ll want to ban the identified participants. This is another option your campaign app provider should offer you.

Contests are a good way to grow and reward your audience. The key is to make sure that the community you attract with each contest is genuinely interested in your product or service.

These are a just a few tips that address one aspect of running a successful Facebook contest. Hopefully you’ll see the results you’re looking for—more engaged fans who convert to customers.

What do you think? Have you used any of these tips? What successes have you had with contests? Please leave your questions and comments in the box below.

About the Author, Emeric Ernoult

Emeric is the founder of AgoraPulse, a Facebook marketing platform designed for agencies and businesses. He has launched the Facebook Page Barometer, a free tool to measure Facebook Page performance. Other posts by Emeric Ernoult »

View the original article here