DKSpeaks Podcast: Internet Marketing, Blogging and Social Media Tips

Note – This is a continuation to the last post where we discussed about Buyer Personas. Just go out there and publish a post every week.. Isn’t that the advice you generally get, when you are just starting to blog? It isn’t a wrong advice but can you just go out there and publish a post without knowing who your audience is? In fact, this is a mistake a lot of us do, I am no different. When I started off blogging, that is just what I did. But over a period of time, I realized that I was missing the connect with my audience. Why? Because I wasn’t really writing for my audience. In fact, I didn’t know my audience and so I was writing for some general audience. This wasn’t really something my audience was expecting. So, I lost that confidence and connect with my audience over a period of time. And I could see this in the decreasing email open rates and decreasing readership for the blog. After having spent a few weeks and after I put together a reader profile, my posts were extremely targeted and gradually the response rate started going up. But, the big question here is, how do I know who my audience is, when I am just starting off? It’s an absolutely valid question. And I am sure, that a lot of you guys starting off out there would have this question.. So, in this episode, I am going to tell you about 3 simple steps in which you can create a reader profile for your blog. How to Create a Reader Profile in 3 Easy Steps We will keep the entire process of creating a reader profile absolutely simple. That’s a promise. But keep in mind that “Simple things are at times the most difficult and the easiest to ignore”. So, you’ll need to promise that you will implement every single one of these steps. So, Let’s start out. Research your competitors Your competitors are your biggest source of information and what you can learn from them is extremely valuable. We tend to often ignore them, just because they are our competitors. That’s one mindset that you need to change. Some of the best things (I mean in terms of returns) I have implemented, are things I learnt from my competitors. So, what exactly do I mean when I say “competitors”? Competitors are the blogs that are operating in the same niche as yours and are targeting the same audience as yours. At this point, there could be 2 obvious questions * What if I don’t have any competitors? – Then you are in the wrong niche. If there is no competitor, then it esentially means that the niche is not something you would want to get in because it is very likely that there isn’t an audience in the niche.* How do I know if they are my competitors? – Just browse through their blog and check if the content they are publishing is something you too are planning to publish. That would mean that they are your competitors. Now that both of these obvious questions have been answered, let us look at the not so obvious question. Where do I find my competitors?

Are you marketing to the right people? Do you know your audience well and are you pitching your content to the right person? In my last post I had spoken about some of the experiments that I did in the last 18 months or, so. One of them involved this product that I and one of my friends had created. We were actually bitten by the product creation bug. So we set out to create this product. When the product was ready, we were so excited with the result that we jumped straight into selling it hoping that we were going to make millions out of it. We had confidence in the product. We knew it was of great quality and that it was an information that was sought by a lot of people. We launched the product and waited for the dollars to come in.. But that did not happen. The wait continued but the results did not change. We got a few sales here and there. But it certainly wasn’t enough.. After spending a lot of time and wasting a lot of money in promotions, we finally decided that it was enough and so called the entire thing off. But why did this product launch flop? We got the answer when we looked into our promotions and the audience type that we were promoting the product to. The one line answer was that we didn’t target the right audience. There is this course from Andre Chaperon – Auto Responder Madness. If you haven’t gone through it, I would recommend you to do it at the earliest because it is one course you shouldn’t miss. In one of the chapters in this course he talks about customer avatars. If you wish to know more about it, you can visit frankvsmatt.com Customer avatar is another name for Buyer Persona. What is Buyer Persona? The definition of “Buyer Persona” goes like this. A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents a segment of your customers that you are planning to target with your product and services. Though we refer to it as Buyer Persona or Customer Avatar, it need not necessarily mean only buyers or, customer. It can represent anything from the audience you intend to reach with your content (if you are a blogger), the market that you plan to target with your products and services, the type of customers that you wish to market to, etc. Andre is an advocate of relationship marketing. His style of marketing is different. He builds relationships with his prospects and the relationship is so strong that his audience trusts his recommendations and buys whatever he recommends. That is how he promotes his products. And because of the style of promotion that he uses, his conversion rates are extremely high. Auto Responder Madness and Email marketing intensive course teaches how to build this relationship and marketing to your audience. So when he talks about creating a buyer persona for your market, it stamps its importance. Because it implies that building a buyer persona is in someway important to build a relationship. I remember reading an article at Digital Marketer about how they had to build a new customer perso...

“I am Back!”T-850 (Terminator – Rise of the Machines) Remember that famous dialogue from “Terminator 3 – Rise of the Machines”? It’s that one dialogue that has become synonymous with Arnold Schwarzenegger, now. In fact nobody does it better than he does. And when he says it, you can see the joy and conviction in that statement. It is clear that he means business and no nonsense business. And that he is back to beat the heck out of all his enemies. I am no Arnold Schwarzenegger. And I do not have any enemies that I want to beat the “heck out of”. But, I mean business and no-nonsense business. So “I am Back“. Buy Why a Comeback, You Ask? If you have been a regular reader of my blog here, then you would have realized the reduced frequency of posts on the blog for almost the last complete year. And when I am talking about readership, it is important that I also mention the fact that I lost quite a lot of readers in the past year or, so just because of the irregular publishing pattern. Sad, Isn’t it? My podcast had also gone into hibernation since almost the last year and a half. And that too was a deliberate decision albeit at the wrong time. Just when the listens had gone up, I withdrew and today I find that the listens are almost negligible. But why did I do all this? You know, one of the best things about internet marketing is that when you strike gold, you just go on and things fall into place one after the other. But at the same time, if you fail then there is a high possibility that things take a downward spiral, unless you know how to control it. While the fear of such failures can deter you from trying new things, the experience and the learnings that you get from such failures are immense and can help you for your future. There were quite a few experiments that I tried in the last 18 months or, so which included launching a new course, attempting selling on Amazon, book writing, public speaking etc. Some of these were utter failures like trying to sell on Amazon, some were partial success like the product launch and some others were a success like public speaking. There are yet others that are work-in-progress like my book writing venture. Failure or, success, there was something that I learnt from each of the experiments. And since these weren’t small experiments, these learnings will play a considerable part in my future endeavor. Remember the tagline that Pat Flynn used on his blog, smartpassiveincome.com I am Your Crash Test Dummy. Let’s See What Works!Pat Flynn Every experiment in Internet Marketing is a “Crash Test”. And if somebody hasn’t done it already, then you need to do it on your own. What I learnt from my experiments are pure gold that I will retain for my future experiments. And I am sure it will make me a better marketer. What You can Expect from the DKSpeaks Podcast in its new Avatar? When I started the DKSpeaks podcast, I was already listening to a lot of podcasts. In fact, there were a few that I was regularly following and really enjoyed listening to. But one thing that I found was that I wasn’t getting actionable advice f...

The other day I was searching for a specific recipe that I had bookmarked some time back. I was on my mobile phone and I had to quickly access the recipe blog. I clicked on the link and waited for the page to open. The wait went on for a few seconds and the page was still loading. Out of desperation, I closed the site and quickly switched to my laptop. I went to my bookmarks and clicked on the link again. The site started loading. After some preliminary stuff had loaded the site was still loading. I waited because I was not able to do anything. My browser was stuck, the page wouldn’t scroll, nothing would click and nothing would move. Guess what would have been my reaction – Frustration. And out of frustration I closed the site and searched for other places where I could get hold of that recipe. I even deleted the bookmark because keeping that there was of no use. Now, this is a situation where I knew about the blog and I was willing to give it a few minutes. Imagine if you are browsing to find something and you stumble upon such a site. You are seeing the site for the first time. What will be your reaction? This is not an uncommon scenario. There are thousands of blogs and websites out there which take ages to load. Wise men say that a user will wait only for about 10 seconds before browsing off. And if your site takes more than 10 seconds to load, the result is obvious –  a lost reader. So, what do you do about it? Let us look at 9 Simple ways to speed up your blog’s page load times. How to Speed up Your Page Load Times Improving your page load time, is not as difficult as it sounds. There are a few simple tweaks that you can do which can speed up your blog load times considerably. So you need to first assess your site load speed, which you can do by going to tools.pingdom.com to understand the amount of tweaking you will do. Check out the below image to see a snapshot for my blog. Now that you have assessed your site load speed, let us look at some simple tips to improve your site load speeds. Selecting a Reliable Hosting Provider Start with your hosting provider and your hosting plan. If you are using a shared host and they run a lot of websites on the same server, then there is no way your site is going to load fast. Cheap hosting providers often do this and that is one of the primary reasons for a poor loading website. Ensure that you are hosting your blog with a reliable hosting provider. Bluehost, Hostgator and iPage are some of the best hosting providers as per our experience. They are reliable and they all provide you with a free CDN which helps in improving the page load times. Use an Image Compression Plugin If your blog is an image focussed one, then there is a high possibility that your high quality images are impacting your overall page load times. Niche blogs in food blogging, fashion blogging etc. where there are a lot of images uploaded to a post, can face this problem. There are 2 ways to get over it. Firstly, compress the images even before your upload them to your server. You can use a free service like Optimizilla.com to compress the images.

Are You spending a lot of time writing Clickbait Headlines like Buzzfeed? Then you might just be doing the worst thing you could ever do for your blog.. A Clickable headline is what every blogger wants to write because his ultimate objective is to get readers to click on that link and come over to his blog to read his blog post. There are 2 noteworthy points in the above statement. First, readers clicking on the link because of your headline. Second, they come over to your blog and read your post. Does a Clickbait headline satisfy both these points? It will not, because it is meant to take care of only the first part. The second part is to be taken care of by your content. You need to ensure that your content ties really well into the headline that the reader clicked on. And it is here that the problem lies. I remember how the headlines formula changed after sites like Buzzfeed and Viralnova emerged on the blogging horizon. All of a sudden it was all about traffic from social media and, Buzzfeed like posts were all over your social media feeds, especially Facebook feeds. The inquisitiveness that the headline created made people click on those and a multi-million dollar business named Buzzfeed was born. But this trend did a lot of harm than good to blogging and content marketing in general. There are so many instances where you would have clicked over a headline to be taken to a post that sucked from the beginning till the end. Why You Shouldn’t Focus too much on Clickbait Headlines Something that a site like Buzzfeed destroyed was genuine content generation and the use of genuine headlines – headlines that conveyed the essence of a post. While a lot of bloggers adopt this style of writing headlines, this might just not be the right thing to do. Let us see why it is not the right thing to do and why writing Clickbait headlines could prove disastrous for your blog. The Unnecessary Hype The Buzzfeed like headlines generate inquisitiveness by creating an unnecessary hype. I still remember one of those headlines that I saw in my Facebook news feed, that read – “8 Horrible places in the World that You would never want to visit – the 6th is the most Frightening”. While the headline in itself was interesting, the last few words generated an inquisitiveness to find out what that 6th place was and hence I clicked over to go to the post. And what did I find.. Absolutely nothing different from the rest of the 7 places that were quoted there. All of them were equally frightening and the 6th one was no different from the rest. Though the post was interesting, I felt I was cheated by the headline. In spite of an experience like this, I still clicked on many more such headlines that I saw in my Facebook newsfeed and most of them turned out to be just the same – an unnecessary hype. Something that you need to keep in mind is that such headlines generate a lot of hype and it is almost always, very difficult to live upto that hype that you have created which eventually means you are going to upset your readers, if your content doesn’t live up to the expectations generated by the hyped headline. Clickbait Headlines are a Fading Trend This trend of writing clickable headlines is soon fading. After all of the fake links that people click over to see content that is nothing more than just crap, it was just a matter of time that people realized that these headlines were nothing more than hoax. More than the way Buzzfeed dealt with it, it was the way other websites copied this strategy over. Their objective was only to get people to click through and they never really cared about the quality of the content that they were creating. As a consequence, the internet was full of crap articles with only a click worthy headline. These days,

If you are struggling with low engagement in your Instagram posts then these Instagram Hashtags Best Practices can help you improve the engagement. One of the lifelines of Instagram is Hashtags. That is the pivot around which content marketing on Instagram works. Hashtags for Instagram is what Keywords are for SEO. Just as keywords get your content found on search engines, Hashtags get your content found on Instagram. The fact that, not a lot of marketers are using hashtags on Instagram proves that the awareness of the importance of hashtags amongst marketers who are wanting their piece of the Instagram pie, is very low. On surveying some of these marketers and asking them as to why they are not using hashtags, their response was something common – that they were not aware of researching and finding the best hashtags for their content and that they did not feel that the commonly used hashtags were doing any good. You should be able to understand the importance of hashtag from a simple example; the use of a hashtag “#followforfollow” or, its variants can get you a lot of followers on Instagram. It means that people are using hashtags to search for content on Instagram. Researching and finding the best keywords for your content requires a planned approach and it is the same for Hashtags as well. And in this episode of the dkspeaks podcast, we will be discussing about Instagram hashtags best practices. Instagram Hashtags Best Practices First things first. If you want to make the most of using Hashtags, it is important that you maintain a list of hashtags for your content, that you will be using in each of your posts on Instagram. So it is important to be prepared. And preparation primarily means researching hashtags, identifying the best ones that can help your content be found and keeping this handy in a notepad so that you can just copy and paste it into your Instagram posts. Researching and finding Hashtags is not as difficult as it is for Keywords. A simple 4 step method can help you do it and these 4 are more or, less the only ways of finding hashtags as of now. How to find the Best Instagram Hashtags Let us look at these 4 steps to finding hashtags for Instagram. Branding Hashtags Firstly decide on a branding hashtag that you would like to use. Branding hashtags help create a brand around your business and also helps your business stand out from the crowd. Let us check out some example of how big brands are using branding hashtags. Nike uses their branding hashtags #justdoit in almost all their posts. You can see this while browsing their posts on Instagram. Kitkat is another brand that uses a branding hashtag very nicely. They use a branding hashtag #HaveaBreak in all their posts. Branding hashtags are very powerful in establishing yourself as a brand and in starting a campaign around your brand. For marketers who are starting out, a branding hashtag might not be of a lot of relevance right away. But in due course when you build a following on Instagram, you will realize the importance of a branding hashtag. A branding hashtag necessarily need not be a single hashtag. It can be multiple hashtags as well. Spend time to brainstorm and decide on what your branding hashtag will be. A Friendly Google Search The next method is as simple as heading over to google and doing a quick search to find relevant hashtags. Here are some of the results when I searched for “best hashtags in blogging”. You will see hundreds of resources including blog posts which will hand over a list of the best hashtags in the blogging niche. You could use this search term in any niche and get a list of readymade hashtags. You might have to spend some time picking the best ones out of it, after doing some careful research of which ones are doing well on I...

Instagram marketing is huge and the fact that a lot of big brands are making a lot of money from Instagram, stamps its authority and makes it all the more important for internet marketers to check out the social media platform. Considering that Instagram is a simple platform where you are to share images and that too using your mobile phone, it should be a cake walk for an average marketer. But then, why is it that a lot of marketers are failing in their Instagram Marketing strategy? It is because of some very common Instagram mistakes that most internet marketers make. And in this episode of the DKSpeaks Podcast we will be discussing these common Instagram mistakes and how to avoid them so that you get better results out of your strategy. 11 Common Instagram mistakes to avoid If you have been an Instagrammer and you are not getting the kind of results that you were expecting, then you would surely making one or, more of these mistakes that we are going to talk about. In fact, I have noticed a lot of marketers making these mistakes. And the fact that these are some of the basics makes it a crime to make these mistakes. So let us discuss each of these and understand how to ensure that we are avoiding these Instagram mistakes. Here is what we will be discussing in this episode – * The most common Instagram mistakes that people make * An Instagram mistake that is almost always the reason for driving low traffic to your websites * 2 tips to make your Instagram content even more effective * A simple tip for a better profile description Resources mentioned in this episode We did not discuss a lot of tools and resources in this episode. But if you are keen on knowing about some of the best tools for Instagram marketing, then you might want to listen to the following episode – * Instagram Marketing tools We have a few other interesting episode on Instagram marketing which you might want to listen to – * how to make money with Instagram * how to build your followers on Instagram * how to market on Instagram Thank You for Joining in I would like to thank you all for joining in today for this episode on Instagram mistakes. I hope you enjoyed this episode and also learnt some tips on how not to make the same Instagram mistakes that a lot of the other marketers are making. In order to stay updated with the latest episode you might want to subscribe to the podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast using any of the below links: Click here to Subscribe via iTunes Click here to Subscribe via RSS (non-iTunes Feed) Click here to Subscribe via Stitcher

What are the different ways to use Content Curation as part of your Blogging Strategy? One of the questions I am asked the most, by people coming across my Content Curation course is the above. Most of them have never used content curation and they are absolutely unsure of how to and when to start using Content Curation as part of their blogging strategy. In this episode I will be talking to you about 5 different ways to use Content Curation in your blogs. This is the fifth and the last part in a series on Content Curation. You can find the other posts at the below links: * Episode 44 – Content Curation Tools * Episode 45 – Content Curation Types and Strategy * Episode 46 – Common Content Curation Mistakes * Episode 47 – Effective Curation Commentary Styles We will be closing off this series by discussing about how you can incorporate Content Curation into your content strategy and derive the maximum benefit out of it. If you wish to learn more about Content Curation, you can check out my course at http://blogcurationblueprint.com 5 Ways to use Content Curation in Blogging Content Curation not only helps in getting readymade content for your blogs, but also helps build relationship with influencers in your industry. If you can incorporate Curation in your overall blogging strategy and build it into your overall plan, you will be able to build an influencer tag for yourself and at the same time generate a lot of traffic by ways of referrals. But, how you would use content curation is something that you need to plan and decide. Here are some of the things that we discuss in this episode – * 5 Ways I use Content Curation in my blog * A Curation technique that will help you build a relationship with influencers in your industry * An effortless content generation technique * How to get the most benefit out of Content Curation Resources mentioned in this Episode We didn’t discuss a lot of resources in this episode. But if you have been following me on this series you would know about the essential tools and resources for content curation. Here are those – * Blog Curation Blueprint * Feedly * Content Gems * Rightrelevance * Drumup.io * Scoop.it * Paper.li * Workflowy * Evernote * Onenote * CurationSuite Thank you for Joining A sincere thanks to everyone who joined me on this episode today and for following me throughout this series. I am sure you would have learnt a lot about content curation and how you could use content curation as part of your overall content marketing. I hope you enjoyed this show and particularly this episode. Please do share it with your friends and social media ...

What is a Curation Commentary and what is the right approach to an effective commentary? This is the 4 part in a series on Content Curation. You can find the other posts at the below links: * Episode 44 – Content Curation Tools * Episode 45 – Content Curation Types and Strategy * Episode 46 – Common Content Curation Mistakes By now I am sure you would have understood what curation is all about and also about the importance of commentary in an effective content curation strategy. Curation is all about engaging your readers by providing them all the content that they are looking for, at one place and in one simple readable format. And commentary is the value add that you do to the content that you are presenting to your readers. What is an effective method of writing a curation commentary? In this episode of the DKSpeaks Podcast, we will be discussing about the different types of curation commentary. Effective Curation Commentary Styles Curation is content aggregation. You are finding the best content from around the web and posting it at a single place for your readers. This is not a very difficult thing to do and there could be many others who will be doing the same thing. So how do you stand out from the crowd? Another aspect is about adding value to the content that you have curated. Your readers are not coming to your site just to read a bunch of links that you might have added to a post. They would be interested in knowing what is so special about that link and what is your thought about the information in the post that the link leads to. This is what commentary does in curation. Commentary is about adding your thoughts about the content that you have just curated. And in this episode that is what we are discussing. Here are some of things that we will be discussing in today’s episode – * 4 different commentary styles for effective content curation * Adding value and standing out from the content curation crowd * How to ensure your commentary is effective Resources mentioned in the episode We did not discuss a lot about tools and resources in this episode. But there are some tools that we already discussed in our earlier episodes which are essentials for content curation. Here are some of those tools – * Blog Curation Blueprint * Feedly * Content Gems * Rightrelevance * Drumup.io * Scoop.it * Paper.li * Workflowy * Evernote * Onenote * CurationSuite Thank you for Joining Thank you for joining today’s show and I hope you all enjoyed the show today. Here are 3 things to do, if you really enjoyed the show today – * Subscribe to the podcast and get access to an exclusive episode on “creating effective content” and ...

So we are into the 3rd episode on Content Curation and in this episode we are going to discuss about the most common content curation mistakes. You can read the other episodes at the below links – * Episode 1 – Tools in Curation * Episode 2 – What is Curation Content Curation is a very simple method. And all that you need to do is follow the basics. The best part about content curation is that the content you are publishing is already proven to be of top quality and all that you need to do is provide a short insight into the context of the article. So you have your action plan laid straight out in front of you and all that you need to do is execute it. I often hear a lot of people saying that content curation doesn’t work. And in almost 90% of these cases, the reason why Content Curation did not work for people, is because they were doing it all wrong. And so in this episode we are going to discuss about the most common Content Curation mistakes to avoid in order to succeed in Content Curation. Most Common Content Curation Mistakes to Avoid Mistakes often happen when you are not aware of how something works. But there are yet other mistakes that happen purely because of carelessness or, the unwillingness to follow a laid out process or, system. So if you are ready to learn how Content Curation works and also have the willingness to follow the system to the “T”, then there is no reason why you would make any of these mistakes that we are going to discuss today. But if you are making any of these mistakes, then it is time that you identify them and make corrections so that your overall content marketing strategy doesn’t get impacted. In this episode we are going to discuss the following: * The single biggest mistake that most Curators make and which can prove fatal to your blog * How do you ensure that your curation is different from all the others * What is the ideal proportion of Curation Content to Original Content, in a blog? Helpful Resources for Curation Here are some of the resources that can help you in your content curation strategy – * Blog Curation Blueprint * Curation Suite * Feedly * Content Gems While I recommend Curation Suite for aggregating and curating content, it is not necessary that you use this tool. You can curate content without any of these tools, though that might take slightly more time. Thank You for Joining I wanted to thank you all for joining me on this episode today. I hope you enjoyed this episode and learnt a lot about content curation and the most common content curation mistakes to avoid. If you really liked this episode then don’t forget to do the following: * Take a couple of minutes out and write a genuine review for the show on iTunes * Do provide us with a rating, because that helps in the rankings of the show on iTunes If you are not on iTunes, then you can listen to the show on Stitcher in Android phones. You can subscribe to the podcast using any of the below links: Click here to Subscribe via iTunes Click here to Subscribe via RSS (non-iTunes Feed)

Wondering what is Content Curation and how you could make it a part of your content marketing strategy? There was a lot of feedback that I got about the last episode and some of readers even asked me to do a series on content curation. The most questions were around understanding what is content curation and what are the different types of content curation that you can use as a part of your content marketing strategy. Welcome to episode 46 of the DKSpeaks Podcast. Continuing on from where we left in the last episode where we discussed about the different tools that we use in our curation, in this episode we will discuss in detail about what is content curation and what are the different types of content curation that you can use in your content marketing. What is Content Curation & Types of Content Curation Let me first put it the way Wikipedia explains it – Content curation is the process of gathering information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. Services or people that implement content curation are called curators. Curation services can be used by businesses as well as end users. Two points are relevant in this definition. * Process of gathering information * Relevant to a particular topic So, content curation is all about aggregating content and that too, about specific topics. Content Curation was a phenomenon that always existed. If you are a fan of art and have visited art galleries, then you would be able to connect with this term. Art galleries curate art forms from different artists and presents them at one place for you. The benefit – You get to see best art forms, hand picked for you, all at one place. And this is the exact same benefit that your readers get, when they read your curated blog posts. People prefer curated posts because they can avoid wasting time on the internet looking for good content. Instead they would be able to find all of it at one place, on your blog. We discuss this and a lot more in this episode of the show. Here are some of the things that we would be discussing in this episode. * What is content curation in detail * What are the different types of content curation * How to make your Content Curation even more effective * How to make sure that your content curation stands out in the crowd What form of content curation you would like to choose will entirely depend upon your content marketing strategy. Resources discussed in this Episode Here are some of the resources that we discussed in this episode – * Blog Curation Blueprint * Curation Suite Blog Curation Blueprint is a course that teaches you everything about Content Curation. It will show you how to curate content without struggling and how to make money with content curation. I will be launching Version 2.0 of Blog Curation Blueprint by mid-April and all subscribers who join in now will get instantly upgraded to Version 2.0 free of cost. So join Blog Curation Blueprint today! Thank You for Joining in So, on a scale of 1-5 (1 being the lowest), where would you rate content curation as compared to other forms of content generation? What part of content curation do you think is the most difficult, if any? Comment below and let me know your thoughts and we can start a discussion around it. Thank you all for joining me on this episode the DKSpeaks Podcast.

Hello and welcome to episode 44 of the DKSpeaks Podcast. Have you read some of the best weekly roundup on some of the top blogs around the web. Problogger does one for blogging and you will find many other blogs like Social Media Examiner doing the same thing. Have you ever wondered why would a blog as successful as Problogger would curate content. There is a lot of noise on the internet and abundance of information suppressed in all this noise. For an average visitor on the internet, finding information that is relevant is going to be a lot of hard work, considering the amount of noise that he will have to browse through before he reaches the information that he is searching for. If such a visitor comes to your blog and finds a collection of all relevant and best content on your blog, would he be disappointed and click away from your blog. No. He wouldn’t. Rather, he would be happy about the fact that he doesn’t have to dig through the loads of pile to find what he is looking for. Tools for an Effective Content Curation Strategy Content Curation is a nice addition to your content marketing strategy. And if done well, it can not only increase your audience retention but also reduce bounce rate. I am a fan of Content Curation and I simply love its sheer power in holding a reader in his spot. You would have seen my weekly link roundups. This is just one form of content curation. There are various other forms of curation which we will be discussing in the coming weeks. In case you are interested in learning more about content curation and how you could make money with a curated blog, you can check out my course at Blog Curation Blueprint. (PS: Blog Curation Blueprint Version 2.0 is in the works and should be launched shortly. All members would be upgraded to V2.0 by default) Content curation is a win-win for both the content marketer and the reader, because the content marketer gets ready made content and the reader gets a collection of the best content at one place, that way saving him a lot of time he would otherwise have spent trying to find that information. The success of content curation lies in an effective commentary. We will be discussing about these points in the next few episodes. In this episode we will be discussing about the tools for an effective content curation strategy. Here is what we have covered in this episode – * How to improve the effectiveness of content curation * Why is content curation an effective content marketing strategy * The essential tools for an effective content curation strategy Resources mentioned in this episode Here are the resource we mentioned in this episode – * Blog Curation Blueprint * Feedly * Content Gems * Rightrelevance * Drumup.io * Scoop.it * Paper.li * Workflowy * Evernote * Onenote *

How to research Keyword for Blog Posts? Welcome to another episode of the DKSpeaks Podcast. In continuation with what we discussed in the last episode, on long tail keyword research, in this episode we will be discussing “how to research keywords for blog posts”. I was so confused with this entire thing that, whenever I read a blog post on one of the well know blogs, I would often check on the keywords that they could have possibly used for that specific post. While 90% of the time, I ended up with just one conclusion – none of these posts targeted a specific keyword and there was no real keyword research on most of these posts. Most of these posts still ranked on the first page of google for a lot of the keywords related to the topic that the post was on. The one reason I could think of, could be the brand value that these blogs carried. They were authority sites and Google might just have felt that it made sense showing them on the first page of the search results for most keywords on that specific topic. Nevertheless, keyword research has its own advantages and I would always recommend doing a thorough keyword research when you plan on writing your blog posts. How to Research Keywords for Blog Posts In this episode, I am going to show you a very simple way of researching keywords for blog posts. I would be using researching tools that are free to use. This concept follows a simple principle. We are going to pick up keywords that might not have a lot of search volume. Instead we will pick keywords that have moderate search volumes around 500 or, more per month. With these keywords you will be able to rank on the first page of Google pretty easily. And when you have many such articles targeting keywords that have 500 or, so searches per month, cumulatively you will get a lot of traffic to your blog. Here is what we will be discussing in this episode – * How is researching keywords for blog posts different from that of keyword research in PPC campaigns? * 2 simple approaches on how to research keywords for blog posts * The free tools that I use for the keyword research * How to find blog post ideas Resources mentioned in this episode Here are the resources that we used in researching keywords, in this episode –   * KeywordTool.io * Google Keyword Planner * Long Tail Pro (Paid Tool) I have used only the first 2 tools in the steps that we saw in this episode. But if you want to cut the hard work and save a lot of time, you can go for the paid tool, Long Tail Pro. Thank You for Joining I wanted to thank you all for joining me in today’s episode. What do you think about the tips that we spoke about in this episode? If you are using a different keyword research approach, then do tell us about it. If you have any questions, post them below in the comments section and I would be happy to respond to it. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you did, then I would request you to – * take a couple of minutes and post a genuine review for the show on iTunes * rate the show on iTunes because your ratings will help in the rankings of the show You can subscribe to the podcast using any of the below links: Click here to Subscribe via iTunes Click here to Subscribe via RSS (non-iTunes Feed)

How do you do Long tail keyword Research? Keyword Research is one of the most misguided aspects in internet marketing. There are a hundred different methods and theories out there that tells you how to do keyword research. But most guides and theories out there complicate keyword research to such an extent that it is highly unlikely that you wouldn’t get confused with the entire thing. In fact, Keyword research used to be extremely overwhelming for me as well and I would spend hours researching keywords with no real results. I had also spent a lot of money on the latest keyword research tool, all of which would be marketed as the next best thing, but would eventually turn out to be nothing more than crap. Of everything in keyword research, long tail keyword research used to be the most mis-interpreted and consequently the most confusing concept. And if you are to do a long tail keyword research for the next post you are going to write, then you are sure to spend the next few hours trying to figure it out and end up losing all the time that you could otherwise have used on writing your blog post. So how do you do long tail keyword research? In this episode, I am going to show you a simple step by step method that I follow to research long tail keywords so that you don’t spend hours doing something that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. How to do Long Tail Keyword Research I follow a very simple technique to research long tail keywords. And this technique doesn’t take more than 30 minutes. This might not be a technique that a lot of the experts might be using, but this technique yields results. And since it follows the basic concepts, there is no reason why it would go wrong. In this episode we will be discussing – * Why long tail keyword research is important? * What are “seed keywords” and where is it used? * Why you wouldn’t need expensive software to research your keywords? * A few simple techniques to generate proven long tail keywords with high search volume and low competition * How does Google’s autocomplete feature help you in your keyword research? Resources mentioned in this episode Here are the resources mentioned in this episode – * KeywordTool.io * Google Keyword Planner * Long Tail Pro While I do not recommend buying any expensive softwares for keyword research, Long Tail Pro is something that you would want to go with, if you want to save some time. The method that I discuss in the episode is a manual process and takes about 30 minutes. But this very same process takes less than 5 minutes on Long Tail Pro. Thank You for Joining So how do you do your long tail keyword research? Did you find the steps that I mentioned in this episode, easier that all the other methods that you have heard off? We would like to hear from you. Please comment below and let us know your thoughts. I hoped you enjoyed this episode. If you really liked it, * Do provide us with a rating on iTunes * Subscribe to the podcast to stay updated and also to receive an exclusive episode that is not published elsewhere * Do share this episode with your friends You can subscribe to the podcast using any of the below links: Click here to Subscribe via iTunes Click here to Subscribe via RSS (non-iT...

How to do SEO Yourself for your blog? SEO or, search engine optimization is a big thing. Or, so it looks! And videos and articles that talk about link building, Private blog networks, Google penalties etc. make it overwhelming for the average newbie. And we end up paying dollars to SEO experts who promise first page rankings for your websites. But do we really need an SEO expert for your blog? Not really! SEO for your blog is all about following some very simple steps. And most of it is laid down in simple and understandable terms. If you are able to do these, then there is no reason why your blog posts will not rank on the first page of Google. How to do SEO Yourself for Your Blog The objective of search engine optimization is to rank on search engines. In fact, I should put it as “ranking on the first page of Google”, because for a blogger, Google is synonymous with search engines. And that too, if you are not able to grab the first couple of slots on the first page of Google, then the effort is not worth it. And this is where all of it goes wrong. Because people start to tweak their websites and articles with everything that the SEO experts out there says in order to be picked up by the search bots. Search engine optimization is not about tweaking your websites for search engines. Instead, it is about letting the search engines know that you content is reader focused and that your readers are sure to find valuable information about a specific topic in the article. And, this is done by marking out certain points in your article. Following these guidelines is what goes into On-page SEO. In this episode we will be discussing about SEO and how to do SEO yourself for your blog in 3 simple steps. Resources mentioned in this Episode Here are the resources that we spoke about in this episode – * Adwords Keyword Planner * Keywordtool.io * Yoast SEO * SEOPressor * Cloudflare CDN * Hostgator Hosting * Bluehost Hosting * WP Super Cache * PR Buzz * Fiverr * Domain Hunter Plus The following are some of the posts that we spoke about, with relevant information on backlinks building. * Moz * Quicksprout * Ahrefs * Backlinko – a slightly different variation to Broken Link building Here is the video on how to configure Yoast SEO. Thank you for joining What’s your thought about SEO and how do you optimize your blog? We would like to hear from you. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode and I would like to thank you all for joining me today. If you really liked this episode, then here are 3 things you might want to do – * Subscribe to the podcast so that you are updated with t...