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Blog post titles are often an afterthought. You spent time researching keywords. You spent time researching your topic. You spent time writing your post. Now, you are ready to hit Publish and move on to the next task. It is easy to simply throw something up there and move along. Surely your regular readers will have inkling as to the type of content you provide so they will click through, but that may be the lifespan of your post if you don’t spend a few extra seconds crafting a good title. Use these tips for writing post titles that get readers clicking through long after today.

It’s a numbers game. People love numbered lists. Maybe they simply want to double-check that you delivered on your promise of six tips. Whatever it is, it works.

•  Example: 6 Tips for Conquering Insomnia

Remember the 5 Ws (and that poor H). Try starting your titles with Who, What, When, Where, Why or How. You may ask a question or just make a statement. Either way, changes are good you may see an increase in your click through rate. Make sure you are answering the question.

• Example: Why You Need to Change Hosting Companies Now

Use adjectives. Words like best, worst, top and awesome get us intrigued.

• Example: Top 5 Summer Vacation Spots

Title length should be not too long, not too short, but just right. Give your readers an introduction. If your title is “Hostgator” I am going to be a little confused as to what’s next. Are you sending me to the Hostgator site? Are reviewing Hostgator’s service? Is there some important news that I need to know? Let me know where I’m going and what to expect. This is especially the case on Twitter where previews are not available.

• Before: Hostgator
• After: Top 10 Reasons to Make Hostgator Your Host

When all else fails, use a template. Simply fill in the blanks of a proven formula and you are well on your way to a better blog post title.

• Example: Amazing [items] Under [low cost]

We have become a little dependent on post previews and our personal connections carrying the weight of titles. They are not always available however. Putting a little extra effort into the title of your blog posts can greatly increase your click through rate and keep those posts active long-term. 

I was trying not to post about Google’s announcement of another big algorithm change. Upon reading it Tuesday, I had a feeling there would be mass panic in the coming days. There has been. Forums were abuzz yesterday. My inbox was a little abuzz this morning. Here is what I have to say to those of you paralyzed with fear:

Get Back to Work – Sitting in the forums swapping possible “chicken little” scenarios is not earning you any money. If you are worried about your own sites, get to work. If you are worried about your clients’ sites, get to work. If you are worried about losing your clients, get to work.

Get It Together – If you are worried about your own sites because you have been spinning some serious webspam and stuffing them to the gills with keywords, get it cleaned up. Google has been openly talking about updates coming down the pipeline for a year. How long are you going to keep pushing it? I don’t think this is the end of it. I think we have some serious updates to come this year (“rel” =author, anyone?). Clean yourself up and get it together before it is too late.

Talk to Your Clients – If you have personal clients, you should have an open dialogue at all times. If you know something they are doing is putting their business at risk, you should feel comfortable enough to discuss it. I don’t know how everyone else runs their service business, but I’m not afraid to speak up when I see a serious potential issue. And if I make a client aware of something that I think is going to have a seriously detrimental impact on their business in the long run, I know that this is probably a client that I won’t have long-term. At least I know where their business stands, and I can plan accordingly. Talk to your clients. You are going to feel a lot safer in these situations if you do.

That’s that. Now stop searching for more doomsday scenarios, and get to work.

Whether you are a new blogger or you have been around for years, from time to time you may feel stuck in a rut. You may feel at a standstill when it comes to promoting your blog. Perhaps you have forgotten all of those beginner strategies to get your blog noticed. When you are not sure where to turn to next for new traffic, here are a few places to start.

How Can I Promote My Blog Today?

Commenting – There are other blogs out there. Those blogs’ owners and readers may be looking for a blog like yours. Stop over at a few new blogs each day and leave a comment. It only takes a minute. We are an inquisitive species. If a newcomer shows up, we want to find out more about them. A few new people may follow your comments back to your blog. There are a few places you can look to find new blogs for commenting in an instant:

• Sites with Daily “Featured” Bloggers – Two sites that come to mind here are Problogger and the SITS Girls. On most days, these sites have guest or “featured” bloggers. You may or may not choose to leave a comment on this blog, but I do suggest you follow this guest back to *their* blog. There can sometimes be a lot of hustle and bustle around a guest post. Take the extra second to click-through and leave a comment on the blogger’s home turf.
• User-Generated Newspapers – You are likely familiar with services like paper.li that will allow users to publish and share online newspapers. You can visit paper.li’s Newsstand, do a search for a relevant keyword and you will be shown newspapers in your niche. These newspapers will likely have quite a few new blogs for you to visit.
• Blog Round Ups – Many bloggers post “round ups” on a regular basis. 1099 Mom is one that I watch. Once per week she publishes a list of her favorite posts from the work at home world. These are often blog posts and articles that I may be interested in and can comment on. Another example would be 24 Work at Home Blogs of 2012. Here are 24 blogs in my niche, minus the two that are mine, that I could run over to and drop a comment. Someone else has done the heavy lifting here. You only need to take advantage of the opportunity.

Guest Posting – You don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. You already know who takes guest posts from the commenting we did in the last step. Take a look around their site for submission information.

You can also watch the social profiles of similar blogs. They likely announce when they have guest posted on another blog. Make note of that location. If you are at a total loss, you can use a site like Blekko to better your blog. Take a peek at the backlinks of similar blogs. You may not only find guest posting opportunities, but also directories and social communities.

SEO – No post about promoting a blog would be complete with Search Engine Optimization. Learning SEO will give you the biggest return on your investment long-term. The search engines are there for the sole purpose of directing interested parties to the right information. They can’t send anyone over if you are not letting them know what you have to offer searchers. Mom Blog SEO is a great resource for getting those basics of search engine optimization down.

If you have been sitting around every morning asking yourself, “How can I promote my blog today?” the answer is simple – Get out there! Don’t be afraid! There is not a single blogger out here that has had people magically show up on their virtual doorstep without any intervention. Let the world know you are here and you have something of value to share. Most importantly, let them know where they can find you.

How are you promoting your blog today?

I had a nice search traffic spike last week due to one post in particular. This wasn’t the first one, it hopefully won’t be the last, and it wasn’t a total surprise. It is a method that is often overlooked however, especially if you are in a more saturated niche. You may be so focused on producing evergreen content that you are overlooking an easy, though sometimes short-lived, source – trends.

The post I’m referencing is What I Really Do. If you have seen these floating around the past two weeks and didn’t create your own, you likely just slapped yourself upside the head. If you have not seen these floating around the past two weeks, what are you doing over there?

© Karen Roach - Fotolia.com

That simple little image-based post was created on the fly after seeing several versions roll through my Facebook newsfeed over the course of one day. If both online and offline friends were sharing these so rapidly, it was a safe bet these would be booming shortly. They were. Google sent a whole mess of searchers to that post over the next few days.

Memes are not your only option, and you shouldn’t just be watching for trending memes in the first place. They are fun. But, they are not usually bringing in long-term readers or conversions.

Relevant, trending news items are often a great search traffic source for my blogs however. If I see a story that fits into one of my niches, I’m going to try to squeeze it in as quickly as possible. If people see something of interest, they are heading to their favorite search engine to learn more.

Am I simply spinning the news? No. An example of a news-inspired post is Earn Extra Cash Working at Home in 2012. One of the big three morning news programs did a segment at the first of the year about ways to make extra cash working from home. I used the keywords I thought viewers would likely be hitting the search engines with in the days following the segment and created my own list.

Where to Find Trending Topics

The News – I usually have the news on in my office each morning. If I catch something I can use, I do. Google Alerts are also a great way to receive notifications of news stories in your niche. This may take a little playing around with if your blog’s topic is a hot topic in general. You may need to pick specific terms and/or use quotes around your search term to narrow things down. You can receive Alerts by email or feed.

Twitter loves a trend. They even make it easy to find out what people are talking about this very instant.

Magazines – Readers can’t click through a magazine to read more. Just like news viewers, they are hitting their computers to get more information.

Other Social Networking Sites – Twitter makes it easy. Other sites are not so helpful. Just as with my Facebook inspiration, watch what your friends or the people you follow are sharing.

Even if your chosen niche is something as saturated as general weight loss, you can take advantage of trending search traffic. Pay attention and act quickly. It may not be evergreen content in some instances, but it is a way to connect with a new audience. If possible, try to link to other posts and urge them to subscribe. They are already on your site. They may as well hang around.

Do you take advantage of trends? 

Scroogle Scraper was a quick and easy way to check search rank for over 10 years. This free search rank tool would allow you to perform a Google search without the standard personalization (location, search history, etc) to get a better look at where your page ranked in search results.  It recently served up its last search result however. Now what? If you have been looking for a Scroogle Scraper alternative, here are two to check out.

What Page of Search Am I On

This is a cool little free search rank tool. Enter your keywords and URL, and What Page of Search Am I On will tell you straight out – Page 6. While it only allows you to check search rank within Google, it does allow for international checking.

Starting Page

This search engine will also allow you to perform private searches. However, you need to go digging through the results to find your page. The results will be listed just as you would find them in Google.

This Week’s Blogging Posts of Interest

Sugarrae says you have more than enough time to get started in affiliate marketing. Stop making excuses and get started.

If you saw another traffic quake around February 20, you aren’t imagining things. Another Panda Update has been released. Some changes have also been made to the weight certain links have on search rank, but Big G is trying to keep that under wraps.

I am going to be talking “topics” here and around the web in the upcoming weeks. If there is something blog or home business related that you would like to know more about, please leave me a comment. I’m more than happy to help.

As I read through Blog Wise last week, I came across new-to-me blogger Leo Babauta of ZenHabits. I had heard of this blog before, but I never knew what it was about or why everyone was reading it (250,000 subscribers to be more exact). After all, there are no pictures, no comments, no nothing but black text on a white background over there. Leo’s interview sucked me in however. I read and reread this portion of the eBook. Why? Because Leo’s philosophy goes against everything we are taught about how to achieve anything of significance in life…and it is where I have kind of been at lately as a blogger.

You see, in November I hit my big blog goal of earning four-digits per month through blogging. I was excited. I was proud of myself. I did my happy dance. Then, I didn’t know what was next. That was the one big goal I had set for myself when I started blogging. I had reached that. I really didn’t care to set another monetary goal. I’m confident that my blogging income will continue to increase as my existing sites get bigger and I add more sites.

I’m also not big into the “numbers game.” I like looking at my stats. I like to see them moving in the right direction, but my big focus all along has been on quality not quantity. I don’t buy into this “he with the biggest list/lowest Alexa/highest PR wins” mentality. Sure, they are measurements of success in some sense – the visual and competitive sense that we use to compare our blogs to every other blog out there. However, they often have little relation to monetary compensation and they are easily manipulated. Looking at them from that point of view, now what do they mean?

So, the past few months I have been sitting here in limbo. I’m still blogging, but I’ve been feeling rather lost about it. I don’t have a goal! How can you live without goals?! What am I working towards? How will I know when I get there? There have also been a few things that I wanted to do but didn’t because they weren’t on “The List.” What is that about?

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Leo Babauta’s philosophy is that you don’t need goals to accomplish big things. In fact, you can probably accomplish much more with a no-goal lifestyle. You go where your passion takes you.

What a relief! This is where I am now. I have no expectations. I am going to do what feels right to me, not what the blogging community says I should be doing in terms of content production and marketing. If I feel like writing nine blog posts one morning, I will. If I feel like I would rather spend my time on Twitter, I will. If I feel like losing myself in work instead of doing anything blogging related, I will do that. And you know what? I’m really not feeling fearful about it.

Here are some quotes from ZenHabits that are resonating with me now. If you aren’t “feeling it” right now, perhaps these will give you a little peace as well.

If you find yourself swimming with all the other fish, go the other way. They don’t know where they’re going either.

Let go of expectations. When you have expectations of something — a person, an experience, a vacation, a job, a book — you put it in a predetermined box that has little to do with reality. You set up an idealized version of the thing (or person) and then try to fit the reality into this ideal, and are often disappointed. Instead, try to experience reality as it is, appreciate it for what it is, and be happy that it is.

Do less. Most people try to do too much. They fill life with checklists, and try to crank out tasks as if they were widget machines. Throw out the checklists and just figure out what’s important. Stop being a machine and focus on what you love. Do it lovingly.

From 38 Things I Have Learned in 38 Years

What do you do, then? Lay around on the couch all day, sleeping and watching TV and eating Ho-Hos? No, you simply do. You find something you’re passionate about, and do it. Just because you don’t have goals doesn’t mean you do nothing — you can create, you can produce, you can follow your passion. ~ The Best Goal is No Goal

That’s the thing: even with goals, some people aren’t going to achieve anything, because they haven’t figured out how to motivate themselves. Goals don’t do that for you — they just make you feel guilty that you haven’t gotten them done. And even without goals, people who are motivated are people who will get excited and do stuff. They’ll accomplish something great, no matter what.

Goals keep you focused on something in the future, instead of being present and enjoying what you’re doing right now. Goals keep you fixed on one path, which might not be the best path in a week or a month or a year. They keep you fixated on one thing, rather than being open to new opportunities, being flexible as the landscape changes, being free to pursue something you’re newly passionate about rather than sticking to something you’re tired of.

Achieving, Without Goals

What do you think? Could you accomplish great things with no goals?