Lessons from Blogging-Great Post

100 Lessons Learned from 10 Years of Blogging

by Neil Patel on December 17, 2014

I can’t believe that I’ve been blogging for over 10 years now. Boy, has it been a fun journey!
Overall, I love blogging because I enjoy helping others. In addition to that, it’s helped generate a lot of traffic and revenue for my companies. It’s actually our main marketing channel for each of my software companies.
But if I had to start my blogging journey all over again, I would have done things differently. Why? Because I’ve learned a lot over the years.
Sadly, I don’t have a time machine, so I can’t go back in time and avoid the major mistakes I’ve made… but I can share my lessons with you so you can learn from them. Here are 100 lessons learned from blogging for 10 years…

Headlines

Here are some lessons learned from creating over 1,000 headlines:

1. Headlines with facts and data tend to get shared well within the B2B community.
2. Keep them short and sweet, or else your click-through rate will decrease.
3. The headline is the most important part of a blog post.
4. If your headlines are too long, they will get cut off within Google’s search results. Try to keep them to fewer than 65 characters.
5. Don’t assume you know what your readers want. Make sure you A/B test your blogging headlines.
6. Try to think what people would search for to find your blog post on Google. If possible, incorporate those words and phrases within your headlines.
7. Using negative words within headlines is a great way to increase your click-through rates.
8. If you use numbers within your headlines, use odd numbers — they tend to get more clicks.
9. People scan headlines and tend to look only at the first 3 and last 3 words within the headline.
10. Try to address the readers within the headline.
11. Make sure your headline is clear. If people don’t know what they are reading, they will bounce off.
12. If you aren’t sure how to write great headlines, start by using these formulas.
13. Don’t try to click-bait your readers. If you deceive them, you will lose their trust.
14. Evoke curiosity when possible. This also tends to help with Facebook shares.
15. Leveraging emotions within headlines is a great way to get more people to read your blog post.
16. Use magazines for inspiration. Their writers tend to know how to write popular headlines.
17. When you’re stuck, you can always use a headline generator. It’s not the be-all and end-all tool, but it will help you get started.
18. Make sure your headline is short enough to fit within a tweet.

Writing

Here are some writing lessons I’ve learned:

19. Be sure to check all posts for grammar and spelling errors. This affects your readers and your search engine rankings.
20. Try to start off your introduction with a question. It’s a quick way to hook your readers.
21. Use the words “you” and “I” within your post as it will help create a conversation.
22. Wrap up your post with a conclusion. It’s a great way to summarize your message and provide key takeaways.
23. Use subheadings within your body. They make your posts easier to read.
24. Stylize your posts by bolding and italicizing words and phrases.
25. Using bullets and numbers is a simple way to make your content more digestible.
26. Always outline before you start writing. It helps speed up the process.
27. Telling a story is a great way to make your content stand out from the crowd.
28. Opening up to your readers is a great way to build an emotional connection with them. You can easily do this with your words.
29. Only write about things you are passionate about. Those are the posts that will do well. Your readers can tell when you blog on stuff you love.
30. Experiment with different writing styles. It’s the best way for you to figure out your voice.
31. The best time to write is when an idea hits you. If you can drop everything and focus on writing, you’ll be able to blog efficiently.
32. Don’t rush your writing. Creating high quality content takes time and practice.
33. Don’t publish everything you write. Some of your posts will suck, and you shouldn’t release them. It’s okay… it happens to all of us.
34. Make sure you get to the point as quickly as possible. Fluff doesn’t help.
35. If you are struggling with writing, you can always hire an editor to help you out.

Idea generation

Here is what I learned about coming up with blog topic ideas:

36. Your best ideas typically aren’t generated from sitting in front of a computer. Experience the world, interact with others, and let your creative juices flow.
37. Use tools like Buzzsumo to come up with ideas. What’s worked before still works now in most cases.
38. Follow your competition. Knowing what works for them will help you come up with topic ideas.
39. Use Google Analytics to analyze your posts. Stop writing about topics that receive very little traffic.
40. Pick up a magazine or a book to spur ideas.
41. Don’t force ideas — let them come to you naturally. Forced ideas tend to turn into crappy blog posts.
42. If you are stuck, ask others for help. From peers to people within your industry, others can give you ideas.
43. You can use tools like Qualaroo to generate ideas from your website visitors.
44. Start subscribing to the popular forums within your community. The most asked questions tend to be great blog post ideas.
45. Google Trends is a great place to find up-and-coming topics to blog about.

Commenting

Here is what I learned about commenting:

46. Always ask your readers a question at the end of your post. It helps increase the number of comments you receive.
47. Remove trackbacks from your blog. They just get in the way of people seeing and reading the comments.
48. Make sure you use threaded comments to help with responses.
49. Don’t use Facebook comments. The text within them isn’t crawlable, which hurts overall rankings.
50. Don’t expect people to comment if you aren’t willing to respond to each commenter.
51. When responding to comments, make sure you give thorough responses. It shows that you care.
52. Try to respond to comments right when they come in. Your prompt replies help increase responses.
53. Use email notifications to let previous commenters know when new comments have been left. You can use the Subscribe to Comments plugin for this.
54. Moderate your comments. You don’t want a lot of spammy comments, or they will kill the vibe.
55. Encourage people to use their names instead of their website names when leaving a comment. Commenting should be a personal thing.
56. Avoid self-promotion. Your goal should be to help readers and not convince them to pay you for anything. In the long run, this will help build goodwill and increase sales.
57. Personal stories and experiences tend to receive the highest number of comments.
58. People tend to prefer commenting at 9 a.m. versus other times.

Email marketing

Here is what I learned about email marketing:

59. Email marketing is the number one way to get people back to your blog.
60. Readers who come to your blog from email are more likely to share your content on the social web and to comment.
61. Pop-ups on the entry and exit are the best places to collect emails.
62. Even though you may hate pop-ups, very few of your visitors will complain about them.
63. Sidebar opt-ins and opt-ins beneath blog posts (above the comments) are also effective areas to collect emails.
64. The best way to collect email addresses is to offer each reader an incentive such as a free e-book.
65. When testing the call-to-action button for your e-book offer, start with the “get instant access” call to action as it tends to convert well.
66. Every time you publish a blog post, send out an email to all your subscribers, letting them know you published a post. Make sure you limit the email frequency to two or three times a week.
67. When emailing your readers, limit the number of links in your emails. Using more than three tends to cause more emails to go into the spam folder.
68. Don’t keep emailing those readers who don’t open your emails. It causes spam issues. Your email provider should help you filter out these emails.
69. If your email offer is related to a specific blog post, your opt-in rate will go up.
70. Make sure your offer is very valuable, or else it will ruin your reputation and cause a lot of unsubscribes.
71. Don’t sign up with an email provider that puts you on a shared IP. If you manage your list right, a dedicated IP will help with deliverability.
72. Getting Return Path certified will help you get more emails into people’s inboxes.
73. Keep your email subject lines short — it will help with open rates.
74. When possible, keep your subject lines casual as it also helps with open rates.
75. Do not put your whole blog post within the email. Make sure you put only the first paragraph or two to help drive more traffic back to your site.

Scheduling blog posts

Here is what I learned about blog post timing and frequency:

76. Publish blog posts on a consistent basis, or it will be hard to grow your traffic.
77. Come up with a regular posting schedule, and stick with it. Whether it is once a week or once a month… stick with the schedule.
78. Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays tend to be the best days to blog.
79. You’ll get the least amount of traffic on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
80. Most people read blogs in the morning. Afternoon is the second popular time.
81. The best time to schedule a blog post is on Monday at 11 a.m.
82. People who blog twice a day generate more than twice as many inbound links as people who blog once a day.
83. Women are less likely to read blogs posts during the evening than men.

SEO

Here is what I learned about optimizing your blog for search engines:

84. If you are using a WordPress blog, use the Yoast SEO plugin.
85. Interlink your blog posts when it makes sense as this will help with crawling and indexing.
86. Avoid writing content for search engines. Write content for humans as eventually search algorithms will adapt.
87. Posts that are 2,000 words or longer are more likely to rank on page one of Google.
88. Creating infographics is a great way to gain new readers and backlinks. In the long run, these backlinks will help boost your rankings.
89. Avoid keyword stuffing in your blog posts — it will just hurt you.
90. Blogging is a long tail strategy, so don’t focus on optimizing your blog posts for any particular keyword. Just focus on writing high quality content.
91. Having subheadings and headings within your blog posts will help you rank for more keywords.

Social media

Here is what I learned about social media marketing:

92. Make sure you use scrolling social buttons like Flare as it will help generate more social shares.
93. Only place two or three social sharing options on each blog post. Fewer options will help you generate more social shares than five or six will.
94. Place social sharing buttons at the bottom of your post as well as on the side.
95. Most people are on Twitter during 5 p.m. EST. That is when you should share your content.
96. Share the same post on Twitter multiple times in order to get maximum visibility.
97. People prefer sharing content on Facebook at 12 p.m. EST during Saturday.
98. Asking people to share content at the end of each blog post is a great way to get more social shares.
99. If you want more social traffic, make sure you are using social meta tags.
100. If you have co-workers, ask them to share your posts. Every share helps.

Conclusion

I’ve learned a lot about blogging over the last 10 years. I’ve enjoyed my journey, and I will continue to learn more as I blog over the next 10 years.
I hope you can gain some insights from my experiences and grow your blog at a much quicker pace than I have been able to do.
Is there anything you have learned during your blogging journey that you would like to share?

Blogging

How to Hire a World-Class Blogger for Your Company

by Neil Patel on June 25, 2014

You know the benefits of blogging, but you don’t have the time to blog yourself. What should you do? Hire a blogger, right?
You should. But do you know how to find a great blogger?
Luckily for you, I’ve had a lot of experience in hiring bloggers for both KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg. Some of these bloggers worked out great, while others did not. Through the whole process, I’ve learned where to find great bloggers and what to look for when hiring them.

How to hire an exceptional blogger

Unlike for most jobs, you don’t find world-class bloggers through job postings. It’s not because a lot of great bloggers are already busy. In reality, a lot of them are not. Not only that, most of them don’t even get paid well.
The simplest way to find a great blogger is to scour marketing blogs. Although your business may not be about marketing, it doesn’t matter in this particular case. A great blogger can write on any topic due to the fact that anything can be researched on the web.
The first thing you want to do is make a list of all the popular marketing blogs such as Copyblogger, Problogger, KISSmetrics, and Moz. Each of those blogs accepts guest posters, which is what you want to look for.
Typically, if a blogger was able to get his or her content published on one of those blogs, this person is a good enough blogger as each of those blogs has strict editorial guidelines.

What a world-class blogger looks like

Now that you have a list of potential bloggers to hire, you need to look for the following qualities:

1. Traffic generation abilities – if the posts they are writing receive more social shares than other posts published on that same blog, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their content is better. It usually means they know how to generate traffic. Two of my blogs are run with content published by guest bloggers, and I’ve learned that some of these bloggers are great at promoting content, while others are only good at the writing part. You want to hire the ones that are good at both writing and promotion. Typically, if their content has more social shares, they understand content promotion.
2. Conversational writing style – no one wants to read an essay. Blog posts are supposed to be conversational and fun to read. Look for writers that use the words “you” and “I” a lot within their blog posts. This is important because I’ve found that bloggers who don’t write in a conversational tone receive 31% fewer comments per post. You want more comments because that means more engagement, and engaged readers are more likely to convert into customers.
3. Storytelling – you only have 8 seconds to grab the attention of your readers. That’s short! So short that it’s actually a second shorter than the attention span of a gold fish. One of the best ways to hook a reader is by telling a story. If the blogger can incorporate stories within each blog post, these posts will be more likely to be read.
4. Analytical abilities – how do you prove a point? By using facts and data, right? You don’t want to hire a blogger who can’t prove a point. Why? Because I’ve found that blog posts that contain data and stats, assuming they are accurate, generate 28% more social shares. That means more traffic to your blog.

Conclusion

When it comes to evaluating bloggers’ abilities, you don’t have to look further than the points above. Sure, there are other important qualities a blogger should have. The advantage of finding these bloggers on other popular blogs is that those other qualities have already been pre-vetted for you.
Once you find a few bloggers that meet the requirements above, you’ll want to shoot them an email asking if they are interested in contractual gigs. Contract means you just pay them for every blog post they write.
What you’ll find is that most of these bloggers will want $100 to $200 for a blog post between 1,000 and 2,000 words. Paying more than $200 usually isn’t worth it unless your ROI warrants it. And paying less than $100 isn’t very realistic as most good bloggers spend four to five hours writing a great post. That means you would be paying them less than $20 an hour.
It’s as simple as that. There isn’t much more to finding a world-class blogger.

1000 True Fans-

1,000 True Fans

The long tail is famously good news for two classes of people; a few lucky aggregators, such as Amazon and Netflix, and 6 billion consumers. Of those two, I think consumers earn the greater reward from the wealth hidden in infinite niches.

But the long tail is a decidedly mixed blessing for creators. Individual artists, producers, inventors and makers are overlooked in the equation. The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artist's works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?
One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

To raise your sales out of the flatline of the long tail you need to connect with your True Fans directly.  Another way to state this is, you need to convert a thousand Lesser Fans into a thousand True Fans.

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day's wages per year in support of what you do. That "one-day-wage" is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that.  Let's peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.

The key challenge is that you have to maintain direct contact with your 1,000 True Fans. They are giving you their support directly. Maybe they come to your house concerts, or they are buying your DVDs from your website, or they order your prints from Pictopia. As much as possible you retain the full amount of their support. You also benefit from the direct feedback and love.
The technologies of connection and small-time manufacturing make this circle possible. Blogs and RSS feeds trickle out news, and upcoming appearances or new works. Web sites host galleries of your past work, archives of biographical information, and catalogs of paraphernalia. Diskmakers, Blurb, rapid prototyping shops, Myspace, Facebook, and the entire digital domain all conspire to make duplication and dissemination in small quantities fast, cheap and easy. You don't need a million fans to justify producing something new. A mere one thousand is sufficient.

This small circle of diehard fans, which can provide you with a living, is surrounded by concentric circles of Lesser Fans. These folks will not purchase everything you do, and may not seek out direct contact, but they will buy much of what you produce. The processes you develop to feed your True Fans will also nurture Lesser Fans. As you acquire new True Fans, you can also add many more Lesser Fans. If you keep going, you may indeed end up with millions of fans and reach a hit. I don't know of any creator who is not interested in having a million fans.
But the point of this strategy is to say that you don't need a hit to survive.  You don't need to aim for the short head of best-sellerdom to escape the long tail. There is a place in the middle, that is not very far away from the tail, where you can at least make a living. That mid-way haven is called 1,000 True Fans. It is an alternate destination for an artist to aim for.

Young artists starting out in this digitally mediated world have another path other than stardom, a path made possible by the very technology that creates the long tail. Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum hits, bestseller blockbusters, and celebrity status, they can aim for direct connection with 1,000 True Fans. It's a much saner destination to hope for. You make a living instead of a fortune. You are surrounded not by fad and fashionable infatuation, but by True Fans. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.

A few caveats. This formula - one thousand direct True Fans --  is crafted for one person, the solo artist. What happens in a duet, or quartet, or movie crew? Obviously, you'll need more fans. But the additional fans you'll need are in direct geometric proportion to the increase of your creative group. In other words, if you increase your group size by 33%, you need add only 33% more fans. This linear growth is in contrast to the exponential growth by which many things in the digital domain inflate. I would not be surprised to find that the value of your True Fans network follows the standard network effects rule, and increases as the square of the number of Fans. As your True Fans connect with each other, they will more readily increase their average spending on your works. So while increasing the numbers of artists involved in creation increases the number of True Fans needed, the increase does not explode, but rises gently and in proportion.

A more important caution: Not every artist is cut out, or willing, to be a nurturer of fans. Many musicians just want to play music, or photographers just want to shoot, or painters paint, and they temperamentally don't want to deal with fans, especially True Fans. For these creatives, they need a mediator, a manager, a handler, an agent, a galleryist -- someone to manage their fans.  Nonetheless, they can still aim for the same middle destination of 1,000 True Fans. They are just working in a duet.

Third distinction. Direct fans are best. The number of True Fans needed to make a living indirectly inflates fast, but not infinitely. Take blogging as an example. Because fan support for a blogger routes through advertising clicks (except in the occasional tip-jar), more fans are needed for a blogger to make a living. But while this moves the destination towards the left on the long tail curve, it is still far short of blockbuster territory. Same is true in book publishing. When you have corporations involved in taking the majority of the revenue for your work, then it takes many times more True Fans to support you. To the degree an author cultivates direct contact with his/her fans, the smaller the number needed.

Lastly, the actual number may vary depending on the media. Maybe it is 500 True Fans for a painter and 5,000 True Fans for a videomaker. The numbers must surely vary around the world. But in fact the actual number is not critical, because it cannot be determined except by attempting it. Once you are in that mode, the actual number will become evident. That will be the True Fan number that works for you. My formula may be off by an order of magnitude, but even so, its far less than a million.

I've been scouring the literature for any references to the True Fan number. Suck.com co-founder Carl Steadman had theory about microcelebrities. By his count, a microcelebrity was someone famous to 1,500 people. So those fifteen hundred would rave about you. As quoted by Danny O'Brien, "One person in every town in Britain likes your dumb online comic. That's enough to keep you in beers (or T-shirt sales) all year."

Others call this microcelebrity support micro-patronage, or distributed patronage.
In 1999 John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier published a model for this in First Monday, an online journal. They called it the Street Performer Protocol.

Using the logic of a street performer, the author goes directly to the readers before the book is published; perhaps even before the book is written. The author bypasses the publisher and makes a public statement on the order of: "When I get $100,000 in donations, I will release the next novel in this series."

Readers can go to the author's Web site, see how much money has already been donated, and donate money to the cause of getting his novel out. Note that the author doesn't care who pays to get the next chapter out; nor does he care how many people read the book that didn't pay for it. He just cares that his $100,000 pot gets filled. When it does, he publishes the next book. In this case "publish" simply means "make available," not "bind and distribute through bookstores." The book is made available, free of charge, to everyone: those who paid for it and those who did not.

In 2004 author Lawrence Watt-Evans used this model to publish his newest novel. He asked his True Fans to collectively pay $100 per month. When he got $100 he posted the next chapter of the novel. The entire book was published online for his True Fans, and then later in paper for all his fans. He is now writing a second novel this way. He gets by on an estimated 200 True Fans because he also publishes in the traditional manner -- with advances from a publisher supported by thousands of Lesser Fans.  Other authors who use fans to directly support their work are Diane Duane, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, and Don Sakers. Game designer Greg Stolze employed a similar True Fan model to launch two pre-financed games. Fifty of his True Fans contributed seed money for his development costs.

The genius of the True Fan model is that the fans are able to move an artist away from the edges of the long tail to a degree larger than their numbers indicate. They can do this in three ways: by purchasing more per person, by spending directly so the creator keeps more per sale, and by enabling new models of support.

New models of support include micro-patronage. Another model is pre-financing the startup costs. Digital technology enables this fan support to take many shapes. Fundable is a web-based enterprise which allows anyone to raise a fixed amount of money for a project, while reassuring the backers the project will happen. Fundable withholds the money until the full amount is collected. They return the money if the minimum is not reached.

Here's an example from Fundable's site;

Amelia, a twenty-year-old classical soprano singer, pre-sold her first CD before entering a recording studio. "If I get $400 in pre-orders, I will be able to afford the rest [of the studio costs]," she told potential contributors. Fundable's all-or-nothing model ensured that none of her customers would lose money if she fell short of her goal. Amelia sold over $940 in albums.

A thousand dollars won't keep even a starving artist alive long, but with serious attention, a dedicated artist can do better with their True Fans. Jill Sobule, a musician who has nurtured a sizable following over many years of touring and recording, is doing well relying on her True Fans. Recently she decided to go to her fans to finance the $75,000 professional recording fees she needed for her next album. She has raised close to $50,000 so far. By directly supporting her via their patronage, the fans gain intimacy with their artist. According to the Associated Press:

Contributors can choose a level of pledges ranging from the $10 "unpolished rock," which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it's made, to the $10,000 "weapons-grade plutonium level," where she promises "you get to come and sing on my CD. Don't worry if you can't sing - we can fix that on our end." For a $5,000 contribution, Sobule said she'll perform a concert in the donor's house. The lower levels are more popular, where donors can earn things like an advanced copy of the CD, a mention in the liner notes and a T-shirt identifying them as a "junior executive producer" of the CD.

The usual alternative to making a living based on True Fans is poverty.  A study as recently as 1995 showed that the accepted price of being an artist was large. Sociologist Ruth Towse surveyed artists in Britian and determined that on average they earned below poverty subsistence levels.

I am suggesting there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. Somewhere lower than stratospheric bestsellerdom, but higher than the obscurity of the long tail. I don't know the actual true number, but I think a dedicated artist could cultivate 1,000 True Fans, and by their direct support using new technology, make an honest living.  I'd love to hear from anyone who might have settled on such a path.

How to Grow Your Blog to 100,000 Visits a Month

by Neil Patel on December 2, 2013

I’ve done marketing for 20 of the top 100 blogs on the web, and I’ve created 3 blogs for my own businesses that achieved at least 100,000 visits a month.
With Quick Sprout, it took me 4 years and 9 months to hit 100,000 monthly visits:

With KISSmetrics, it took me 1 year and 10 months to hit over 100,000 monthly visits:

And with Crazy Egg, it took me 1 year and 6 months to hit 100,000 monthly visits:

As you can see from the graphs above, the amount of time it took me to hit the 100,000 mark decreased. I went from being able to achieve the goal in 4 years and 9 months to 1 year and 6 months.
Luck has nothing to do with this achievement. I actually have a formula, which works every time. And if I leveraged it again today, I bet I could achieve similar results in less than 12 months.
Here’s the formula I use to get blogs to 100,000 visits a month:

Quantity is king

With Quick Sprout, I noticed slight gains when posting 2 pieces of content a week instead of 1. KISSmetrics only started to see big traffic increases when I started to publish 5 pieces of content a week. But with KISSmetrics, we went from publishing 2 a week straight to 5 a week.
This is why KISSmetrics had a much faster growth rate than Quick Sprout. In addition to that, we recently started testing posting 6 pieces of content a week instead of 5.
When we posted 5 a week, we had 422,885 visits a month.

When we tested posting 6 articles a week, our traffic went up to 501,573 visits.

By posting an additional blog post each week, we were able to increase our blog traffic by 18.6%. My experience of working with 20 of the top 100 blogs showed that if we published 3 pieces of content each day (21 pieces a week), we could easily get our traffic to over a million visits a month over time.
When posting in high frequency, make sure you are still maintaining the quality of your content. Writing a lot of blog posts that are low in quality won’t help you see a big increase in traffic.

Infographics

The simplest way to increase your traffic is through infographics. This has worked well for blogs like Mashable, and it’s what caused a huge spike in traffic at KISSmetrics.
Within 2 years, we were able to generate 2,512,596 visitors and 41,142 backlinks from 3,741 unique domains from 47 infographics.
Just look at this screenshot of our traffic in August 2010:

And now look at our September 2010 traffic:

We went from 56,380 to 146,197 visits because of infographics. This strategy was so effective that we started to create an infographic each week to boost our overall traffic. Still, today, even if we don’t publish an infographic, old ones generate at least 50,000 visits for us each month.
If you want to copy this strategy, just follow the steps in this blog post. It will teach you everything you need to know about creating a popular infographic.

Write headlines for both people and search engines

The one thing that all three of my blogs have in common is that they all get a lot of search engine traffic. “Why?” you may ask. It’s because we write blog headlines that appeal to both people and search engines.

Just look at the Crazy Egg blog. Last month, we had 127,373 visits from search engines. All because we write headlines for both Google and people.
In the short run, you won’t notice much traffic from this strategy, but within 6 months, you’ll notice a nice increase in your search engine traffic. From that point, you’ll continue to see increases quarter over quarter.

Cover trending topics

Our biggest traffic days tended to be those when we covered major events within our niche.
For example, with Quick Sprout, when I covered Google updates like Panda and Penguin, I saw a surge of traffic. The same thing happened when Hummingbird was covered on KISSmetrics.
We also saw similar traffic trends when we blogged about Apple’s marketing around its events.
The beautiful part about these surges is that when they are over, your traffic is still a bit higher than it was before the spike.
If you are interested in covering trending topics, you can use Google Trends to see what is hot. Make sure you don’t write on just any topic. The content needs to be relevant to your niche. With a quick search on Google Trends, you should be able to get a good idea on what is increasing and what’s decreasing in search volume.

Write in a conversational tone

Have you noticed that I get over 176 comments per blog post on Quick Sprout? It’s because I write in a conversational tone.
Sure, you can use tricks like “top commenters” to try to boost your numbers, but by making your blog posts sound like a conversation, instead of an essay, you’ll invite more comments from people naturally.
You can create the same effect on your blog by:

• Using the words “you” and “I” within your content.
• Asking questions throughout your blog post.
• Making sure anyone can understand your content…In other words, write for a 5^th grader.
• Keeping your paragraphs short and to the point.

Comments are a great way to increase your readers’ loyalty. If people continually comment on your blog, it means they are reading your content, and they are more likely to share it via the social web.
Having multiple authors on your blog, instead of just one, decreases comments and engagement as your readers don’t have a chance to build a connection with you. Just look at the Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics blogs. We have multiple writers, and most of them don’t write in a conversational tone. As a result, those two blogs get far fewer comments than Quick Sprout’s blog does.
If you take my friend’s blog (he ripped my design…you can too if you want), you’ll see that he only gets 2,000 visits a month, and yet some of his posts have 13 comments. That’s because he writes in a conversational tone.
And if you are thinking about using Facebook comments to increase your engagement and social traffic, don’t. Every single popular blog I’ve worked with always receives more Google traffic than Facebook traffic. With Facebook comments, the comment text doesn’t get indexed by Google, which means you will get less search traffic.

Collect emails through offers and opt-ins

All the blogs I’ve created have a common trend… email is one of the biggest sources of traffic.
For the month of November, emails made up 18% of the traffic to Quick Sprout, 6% to KISSmetrics and 4% to Crazy Egg.
Those percentages may not seem high, but there are two good reasons for that:

1. All three blogs get a lot of traffic, so small percentages still add up when it comes to visitor count.
2. Except for Quick Sprout, the blogs do a terrible job of collecting emails. If KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg were optimized like Quick Sprout, the numbers would have drastically gone up.

If you want to collect more emails from your blog, follow step 2 in this blog post. It will teach you everything you need to know. Plus, you can just download the WP Lead Magnet plugin. Those are the tactics I use on Quick Sprout, and they work wonders.
Once you have an email list, you should blast it with your new blog post every time you publish it. Why? Because it will drive traffic, create more comments and, best of all, generate social shares. Email subscribers are 3.9 times more likely to share your content than your other blog visitors.

Content marketing doesn’t have to be a hit-or-miss game

The most important element of a blog post is its headline. No matter how good your content is, if your headline sucks, very few people will read the post.
In most cases, content marketing is a hit or a miss: your content will be widely read or just ignored. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
You can use tools like Social Crawlytics to see what sort of content has done well on competing blogs. For example, if you had a marketing blog and you wanted to see what was hot on Quick Sprout, you would just type in www.quicksprout.com and see a table that looks something like this:

You can then sort the data by social site or by total count. In essence, it will show you all of the popular blog posts and their headlines. If you look at the top 5 posts, the advanced guide to seo, content marketing and growth hacking are 3 of them. That shows that if you create advanced guides and use similar to mine headlines for marketing-related topics, you too can get a lot of traffic.
In addition to finding topics and headlines that work, you can use formulas in this blog post to come up with attractive headlines. That post will teach you how to use opinions, create a sense of urgency or evoke curiosity within your headlines.

Build up your social media profiles

Another commonality among all three of the blogs I created is that they all get a lot of traffic from social media sites. In the last 30 days:

• KISSmetrics received 36,862 visits from social sites.
• Crazy Egg received 5,976 visits form social sites.
• Quick Sprout received 25,350 visits from social sites.

How are we able to achieve these results? It’s because we build up our social profiles. You can do it too if you follow this strategy:

• First, tackle the social media low hanging fruit through these 12 steps.
• Then, follow the steps and data in this infographic to maximize your Twitter traffic.
• Accept all of the friend requests on Facebook and then follow these steps to maximize your Facebook traffic.
• Lastly, make sure you are publishing your posts during peak hours so you get the most social engagement.

When building up your social profiles, you have to be patient. It typically takes 6 months to see consistent social media traffic to your blog.
In addition to focusing on major social media sites, consider leveraging smaller ones in your niche. For example Inbound and Growth Hackers are two social sites that focus on the marketing niche. In an average month, Inbound drives around 1,700, and Growth Hackers around 400, visits to my site. It may not seem like a lot, but it all adds up.

Partner up

Within a few months of launching the Crazy Egg blog, I was able to grow it to over 30,000 visits a month. Do you know how?
No, it wasn’t through SEO or even social media. It was through partnerships. The first partnership I went after was the Smashing Magazine Network. Because we were included in their RSS feed, we were able to get from them 22,181 visits a month.

The cost for this was $0. All we had to do was place a badge on our blog that stated we were in the Smashing Magazine network.
It’s not the only network on the web… before that, I was part of the 9rules network. There are a lot of blog networks out there. You just have to find the ones your space.
But don’t stop with blog networks. You can also share your content with other blogs in exchange for them driving traffic back to your blog. Business Insider has taken posts from Quick Sprout such as this one. I asked Business Insider to link back to my blog within the post, which they gladly did.
Popular blogs like Business Insider are looking for more content. If you provide it to them, they won’t have an issue linking back to your site and driving thousands of visits to you.
To get these partnerships, you have to continually reach out to popular blogs in your space. Most won’t accept your content or let you join their network, but for every 10 blogs you hit up, at least 1 will say, “yes.”

Conclusion

It may have taken me years to get Quick Sprout to 100,000 visits a month, but it shouldn’t take you that long. When I started Quick Sprout, social sites like Facebook and Twitter weren’t as popular as they are now.
You have more sites and partnerships you can leverage today than you ever had, and people are craving more good blog content than they ever did before.
Why not give it a shot? Follow the steps above, and you should hit 100,000 visits a month in no time.
So, what other tactics can you use to get to 100,000 visits a month?

Tools for Blogging

20+ Essential Tools and Applications For Bloggers

By Charnita Fance. Filed in Tools

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Blogging can be quite a process. First you may have to do some research, then put your thoughts together, and of course add any necessary screenshots and images. Let’s not forget the optimization part (SEO, keywords, etc) and sharing your content on the Web so that others will read it and hopefully share it. With all of these steps involved, blogging can be quite time-consuming and many bloggers get burnt out rather quickly doing these things on a daily basis.

Lucky for us, the process doesn’t have to be so difficult anymore. Thanks to the Web and technology, there are hundreds of tools out there to assist your blogging process and make it less of a headache. This list will take a look at some of the top tools for and applications for making blogging easier.

Save Ideas for Later

Tools that let you save items for later use are great time savers because you can save Web pages, images and files as you’re reading or browsing. If you come across an interesting tool that you may want to blog about later, you can just save it with a single click and then look at it later when you have the time. These tools are also great for storing and organizing all of your ideas and then finding them again when needed.

Read-it-Later

With this tool you can save Web pages to your Read-it-Later list to be read at a later time. Items can be saved from your computer or mobile devices via numerous applications and integrations. You can access your list just about anywhere for online or offline reading.
A similar tool is Instapaper, which works in the same way, but doesn’t have as many applications. One of the best things about Instapaper is that you can forward full emails to save for later (Read-it-Later only allows you to save links via email).

Evernote

You can capture anything from Web pages to images, text, and voice notes with Evernote. Just like Read-it-Later, there are numerous applications and integrations that let you save items to your account. Your notes can be accessed from just about anywhere via a computer or mobile device. Plus, with the ability to search through all of your notes (even text within images), you’ll be able to find things super fast.

Springpad

Springpad is much like Evernote, but refers to itself as “really, really smart notes.” It’s about more than just saving notes, you can also save tasks, set reminders with alerts, and look up items (like products, restaurants and recipes) to save. With Springpad, you don’t have to worry about organizing your thoughts because it does it all for you automatically. So if you want to blog about a specific product or location, Springpad lets you remember and access these items conveniently from your computer or mobile device.

Catch

Don’t let the simple design fool you, Catch is a very effective tool for privately saving notes, ideas, images, places, lists and more. You can then sync those items between your computer and mobile device. It uses a hashtag system (much like Twitter) to add tags to your items for organizing. If you’re looking for a simple too without all the bells, whistles and extra features then Catch is a great option. They have a variety of browser extensions and mobile apps.

Trail-Mix

Trail-Mix lets you “squirrel away” notes, images, Web pages and files right within your browser. It currently works as a Firefox sidebar only. You can drag and drop items like links, text and images right into the sidebar to save for later.
If you’re looking for a similar tool to use in Chrome, you may want to check out Read Later Fast from Diigo (no relation to Read-it-Later). Items are added via an option in the right click content menu. It’s a Chrome app, so it works in its own tab as opposed to the sidebar (like Firefox).

Diigo

With Diigo you can annotate the Web by highlighting, adding sticky notes, bookmarking, taking screenshots, saving images and more. You can then manage it all and reference your findings from your Diigo account for later use. Best of all, whenever you return to a page that you’ve annotated, your notes will still be there. You can even see annotations that others have added to pages as well. You can use Diigo to annotate specific parts of Web pages that you want to use for a blog post or to save items that you want to read at a later time.

Blog Editors

While many prefer to use the blog editor that comes with their blogging platform, it can be much more convenient to use a blog editor – especially if you have more than one blog to update. With most blog editors, you can even write offline and then publish whenever you’re online. They often also make it easier to add pictures to your posts (via drag and drop). You’ll also find many other features that you often can’t find in your blogging platform.

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is one of the most popular blog editors for the Windows platform. You can create new and edit previous blog posts, see what they’ll look like on your blog before publishing and set up multiple blogs. You can add things like images, videos, Bing maps. There are also 100+ plugins that you can use with Windows Live Writer in order to add more features and increase its functionality. Best of all, Windows Live Writer is complete free.

BlogJet

BlogJet considers itself to be the “most advanced Windows blog editor and manager.” With it’s WYSIWYG editor, you don’t have to have any HTML knowledge. It’s very speedy and lets you add Flickr images, YouTube videos and file attachments. There are numerous other amazing features and it works with numerous blogging formats. Unlike Windows Live Writer, BlogJet isn’t, but there is a free demo version.

ScribeFire

ScribeFire is an extension that you can get for Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. It’s a full featured blog editor that lets you create and publish blog posts right from your browser. You can drop and drop text and images, schedule blog posts for later, tag and categorize, edit pages, post to multiple blogs and more. While some find the endless features in ScribeFire overwhelming, others just can’t live without them.

Qumana

Qumana is another desktop blog editor that lets you edit and publish posts to one or more of your blogs. It can also be used offline and includes text formatting, Technorati tagging, and the ability to add images and advertising to your posts. Qumana works on both Windows and Mac and lets you type in the WYSIWYG editor or Source view (for editing your own HTML).

Veeeb

Veeeb is a unique editor that integrates with your blogging platform (currently only WordPress and Drupal). It uses a process called “semantic text analysis” in order to scan your content for significant keywords and suggest relevant media and links. You can then drag and drop images and videos right into your posts or store them for later use. If you need to find out more about a topic, you can do that as well with the integrated search.

Deepest Sender

Deepest Sender is another blog editor that lives in your browser. It runs inside Firefox, SeaMonkey and XULRunner. You can add multiple accounts to be used with the WYSIWYG editor. It can be used as a full page editor in a new tab or right from the sidebar, which lets you drag and drop text and images from the Web right into the editor. Other great features include crash recovery, drafts, post editing and offline mode.

More

• Desktop Blogging Software – The Ultimate List
• Complete guide to Live Blogging

Content

These tools will help you create content quicker and also help make your posts more interesting to your readers.

Zemanta

Zemanta is a tool that works on the side of your blog editor. There are quite a few browser and server-side plugins that you can use in order to enrich your blog posts. As you’re typing in your blog editor, Zemanta will analyze your words and then suggest images, tags, links and related articles for your content. Zemanta features over 10 million images that you can use, all with the proper licensing.

PollDaddy

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to get opinions or feedback from your readers, creating surveys and polls through PollDaddy is a great option. You can get quick responses, plus it’s an easy way to keep tally instead of having to go through all of your comments individually. PollDaddy has a survey editor that is customizable and very easy to use. You can even get immediate responses from people using your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad with the iOS app.

Mobility

Dropbox

Dropbox is the ultimate tool for syncing files between your computer and mobile devices. There is a Dropbox app for just about every device and system and there even more integrations with other apps. So not only are your files always secure, but they’re always with you wherever you go. If you need to save files for use later, just add them to Dropbox or sync them using a supported app.

Google Docs

If you’re looking for a way to access your blog posts from anywhere, one of your best options it to create and save them in Google Docs. Since Google Docs is a Web based word processor, you can access your account no matter what device you’re on – computer or mobile device. This allows you to work on the go, from anywhere. You can also collaborate in real-time with others, which makes Google Docs great for collaborative posts and projects.

Dragon Dictation

While the Dragon Dictation computer software is pretty expensive, you can currently get it for free on the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. With it you can speak right into your device and then have your words automatically transcribed for you. This is great for recording quick notes, thoughts or ideas for your blog posts. You can then email them to yourself to look over and reference whenever needed.

Screenshots

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to grab screenshots for your posts, without downloading any software, these 3 tools are very convenient.

Awesome Screenshot

Awesome Screenshot is a capture, annotation and sharing tool by Diigo for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. You can capture the visible part of a page, selected area or entire page. Annotation tools include adding shapes (rectangles, circles), arrows, lines and text. There is also a blur tool which is great for protecting your privacy and personal information that you may capture. There are 3 options for saving your screenshots; you can save to the Awesome Screenshot website for a month, save to Diigo forever, or save on your computer.

FireShot

FireShot is an extension for Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and Internet Explorer. It lets you capture, edit, annotate, organize, export, upload and print screenshots from the Web. There are quite a few capture options: entire page, visible part of page, selection or browser window. One of the unique things about FireShot is the full set of editing and annotation tools that it provides. Plus, it can even allow you to capture flash content.

Pixlr Grabber

With Pixlr Grabber you can copy, save, edit and share screenshots and images from the Web. There is an extension for both Firefox and Chrome. You’ll be able to grab only the visible part of the page, a defined area or an entire Web page. You can then share it on Imm.io (an image sharing site by Pixlr) or save it to your desktop. Saving it your desktop then allows you to drag and drop or upload it to your blog post (depending on what you’re using to create your content).

More

• Desktop File & Image Sharing Tools
• Screen Capture Tools: 40+ Free Tools and Techniques

Optimization

SEO Blogger

With SEO Blogger, you can “find the most sought-after keywords for your subject without ever leaving your blog editing screen.” It currently works only in the Firefox sidebar via an extension. It allows you to research keywords, see how popular they are, and compare them instantly with other keywords. You’ll also be able to see how many times you’ve used specific keywords in your content. This is great for keeping track of the keyword density in your posts which is a big part of SEO.

SEO Book

SEO Book isn’t just one tool, it offers a large selection of free and premium SEO tools for bloggers, webmasters and SEO professionals. The tools offered range from Firefox extensions, to Web based tools. They also have numerous tutorials, tips and articles to help you learn how to properly optimize your blog to increase traffic and rankings. SEO Books is like an SEO goldmine; you’ll be glad that you stopped by.

More

• Ultimate Guide To Web Optimization (Tips & Best Practices)
• How to Measure Front End Performance
• Google Analytics: Why You Don’t Need The Rest

Sharing

Ping-O-Matic

Ping-O-Matic is a pinging service that lets search engines know that you’ve updated your blog. You can select the different services that you’d like to ping. The services listed are updated regularly, so you can be sure that only the most important ones are listed. You can ping your blog directly from the Ping-O-Matic site or by using the bookmarklet.

Shareaholic

Shareaholic makes it easy for you and others to quickly share your blog posts all over the social Web. There is an extension for just about every browser, plus an awesome WordPress plugin (called Sexy Bookmarks) that you’ve probably seen used all over the Web already. Shareaholic supports over 100 services for sharing and saving your content.
Another great all-in-one sharing tool is AddThis; you might want to try out the Sharebar or share buttons for your blog.

Feedburner

Feedburner is an RSS management service that provides custom RSS feeds and management tools for blogs. It also offers traffic analysis so that you can see how many people are viewing and clicking on the content in your feeds. There is an integrated advertising system that lets you inserts ads in your RSS feeds and earn money. A great feature is the ability to add links for content sharing at the bottom of your feed items via Feedflares. Feedburner really gives you total control and the ability to easily optimize your RSS feeds.
Now it’s your turn. What’s your favorite tool or application that makes blogging easier for you?

Internet Marketing Tools and Inspiration

From Zero to a Million: 20 Lessons for Starting an Internet Marketing Agency

September 19th, 2013 - Posted by Mike Ramsey to Entrepreneurship

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Mike's disclaimer: This is not a post about how awesome I am, or how there is only one way to build an internet marketing agency. It's a combination of stories and thoughts about what I have gone through building Nifty Marketing.

When I started in 2009 there was very little information online about starting, running, or growing an Internet Marketing Agency. The ones that did exist were from superstars that charged a billion dollars an hour. I am not a superstar. My company started in Burley, Idaho. Here's a rap about my town I wrote.
My hope with this post is that a few of you who are out there hustling will benefit from doing some of the things that I did, and most of the things that I didn't.

Start smart

I was in my final semester at BYU-Idaho and had accepted a job to be the chief marketing officer of Rove Pest Control after spending my summers during college as a door-to-door salesman for them. I thought my future was set. But, due to some changes at Rove I knew that I was going to have to have to find a different career. My wife was pregnant, we had just started building a house in Burley, and I had a full load of credits. My two favorite classes were a basic HTML class (that used Don't Make Me Think as the textbook) and a web business class for which we had to start an online business and make/lose money. Naturally, as any true Idahoan would do, I started HugeIdahoPotato.com and sold potatoes bigger than heads to people across the country. The website sucks; I'm pretty sure I got it penalized within a year of creating it. But I fell in love with internet marketing in the process of building that site, and I keep it up as a remembrance of where I started.

Lesson 1: Start with a reason that's more than money

After making around $100 on the site I knew that I had found my career choice. I also knew that I was going to live in Burley, Idaho, and that I wanted to bring non-agricultural jobs to the town. I can't tell you how sad it is for many of my friends who grew up in a town they knew they couldn't move back to if they wanted to make a decent living. I wanted to change that. I still do. It's one of the main driving points for me. Of course you need to make money, but if that is the only thing you are looking for as a business owner then eventually you will fail. You will make decisions that aren't for your clients, or for your staff, or for the community; you will get short-term gains and create a long term failure.

Lesson 2: Start by interning/working at an agency

This is possibly my biggest regret of my career. I started Nifty Marketing with literally no experience at all. I had no friends in the industry, I had no idea what I was doing, how SEO companies were structured, or even how to do anything beyond what I had learned in college. I dove into blogs, but at that time I didn't know who to trust and read some really awful advice. I was not a good SEO. I was not a good PPC advertiser. I could have saved myself at least two years if I had worked for someone who could have pointed me in the right direction first.

Lesson 3: Focus on something specific

Business wasn't going very well. I had a few clients, and I decided I needed some help, so I signed up for SEOBook. There was a feedback forum, so I posted my super-awful website for Nifty Marketing. I didn't even own the domain at the time. (I had TheNiftyWay.com, and it wasn't until later—by some good grace of the heavens—that the person who owned NiftyMarketing.com let it go, and I bought it for $7.99 with a GoDaddy code.) When I posted my site on SEOBook, I got brutal feedback. People told me it sucked. But someone in the forum said something that changed my life forever.
He said something like:

"You offer SEO, Web Design, and PPC. That is exactly the same as 100,000s of companies around the world, who by the looks of things are better than you at it. What can you be the best at? What can you become known for?"

The comment hit me like a ton of bricks. The few clients I had at the time were really small businesses in Idaho, and I had been spending a lot of time in Google Maps. I realized that I enjoyed that aspect of marketing, and was getting clients ranked. So, I redesigned my site, changed my messaging, and decided to focus. I became a local SEO.

Lesson 4: Start with networking, not cold calls

I remember quite vividly trying to use my door-to-door sales skills to try and cold call businesses to get work. I grabbed a phone book and called people with big ads and no websites because I figured that they had budget. What I found was that I was caller #5 for that week offering the same thing as everyone else. Worst of all, everyone "knew a guy who knows a guy who could do it" for them. So, I put away the phonebook and started talking to my friends and asking if they knew people who needed websites and marketing. That's when leads started coming in. Then, I wrote an email to David Mihm on August 7, 2009, and asked him how I could become an expert in the local search field. This was his response:

The best advice I can give you is to optimize the local listings of a bunch of clients. The more you "play" in the space, the better you'll get at teasing out the parts of the algorithm that really matter.

Beyond that, subscribe to these blogs:

http://www.blumenthals.com/blog
http://www.localsearchnews.net [Editor's note: This site isn't around anymore.]
http://gesterling.wordpress.com
http://www.searchinfluence.com/blog
http://solaswebdesign.net/wordpress
http://www.smallbusinesssem.com
http://www.hyperlocalblogger.com
http://www.sixthmanmarketing.com/blog
http://www.expand2web.com/blog
http://www.devbasu.com
http://www.martijnbeijk.com
http://www.seoverflow.com/blog

I immediately dove into every one of these sites and learned everything I possibly could about local search. I took notes, and then I started testing and haven't ever stopped.
While doing that, I realized the most valuable networking lesson I ever learned was to simply share. I started blogging, which led to guest posts on SEJ, and I attended a few small conferences, one of which was the first ever LocalU. I offered to help any way that I could. Fast forward to 2013, and I am a LocalU Faculty Member and speak at conferences year-round. It isn't because I am special. It's because I am passionate about the space and I am willing to share information and help as much as I can. Almost every client we have at Nifty Marketing comes as a referral from clients, friends, blog posts, webinars, and conferences. Not one client came from a cold call. I will forever be in debt to David Mihm and the rest of the local search community for teaching me such a valuable lesson.

Lesson 5: It's good to have funding, it's better to have partners, and it's best to bootstrap alone

From the first year of my business until now I have had opportunities to get funding and take on partners. I have never done it. I am not saying that it's bad to do either of these things, but if you take a close look at our industry you will see that a lot of funded companies and partnerships don't make it.
I remember very clearly going to dinner with some guys from Blueglass in my first year and thinking, "Man, I wish I could be part of that company." And while I respect the founders a great deal they took a massive risk and it didn't workout. Many of them had successful businesses before then, and while the idea of a Mega Company that can make tens or hundreds of millions is alluring, the chance of you being successful and earning more on your own is better. Sure, extremely fast growth and funding means you come to market quicker. But by growing at the slow rate of 2x per year (which isn't that slow), I have been able to continually innovate and offer better services without taking do-or-die risks.
I am very glad I bootstrapped. I own 100% of my company. I can make 100% of the decisions about its future. I don't have to pay a silent partner a large chunk that makes cash flow an issue. I don't have to make short-term decisions for a board that hurts the long-term vision I have. And I make enough that I stopped caring about the money around year three; slow and steady wins the prize.
I know that there are many successful companies that haven't gone the way of solo bootstrapping. At the top of the partnership list for me is Avalaunch Media. But in order to do what they have done you have get big enough to support multiple owners and find amazing partners that can all pull in the same direction. With around 50% of marriages failing, how many partnerships in business actually work out? They are definitely not the norm, and I respect them immensely for it.

Grow smarter

Lesson 6: You are in the business of providing a service, not SEO

I remember becoming a good SEO. I also remember getting amazing results for clients and still getting complaints from them. I thought they were the problem. Then I realized I was. I thought back to the days of pest control and remember the company training techs to take their time at customers' houses. You see, you could service a house in 15 minutes or even less if you hustled. But if you did that, customers would complain that the work was sloppy and it shouldn't cost so much. Instead, you should take your time, get down on your hands and knees, and look around. Take notes and pace yourself. Then, customers felt like the service was worth it. They weren't paying for the product. They could buy the product at Home Depot. They were paying for the service.

Comparing this to Internet marketing, I knew I had done a great job gaining more traffic, but the clients had no idea what was being done. They didn't understand what they were paying for and subsequently thought that I was unnecessary. Most small businesses don't care or understand what a title tag, meta description, an exact match, a naked URL, duplicate content, etc is. So telling them you changed/created these in a report without actually showing them physical pictures is pointless.
We started creating custom reports with tons of arrows and screenshots explaining the work that we were doing. We starting giving them a complete list of the links and citations we were building. We stopped sending over a raw list of traffic counts and started providing analysis of the traffic that websites were getting, and our clients stopped complaining that they didn't know what we were doing. Clear communication is what the business of service is all about.

Lesson 7: Read The E-myth

I was doing everything myself. Everything. Then, I tried to have some people on oDesk help me. My wife even did some of the citation work. The only problem was all the information was in my head. I had very little of the processes and information organized, and I didn't have time to focus on organization when I had so much client work, sales, and bookkeeping to do. That is what The E-myth is about. It talks about the difference between being a technician and being a business owner. It talks about the need to build your business like a franchise with training manuals, easy to follow processes, and the need to not burn yourself or your first few employees out.
When I read this book, I changed my business, and I have never looked back. We were able to start hiring people locally instead of having contractors on oDesk, and we centralized information and grew. While we aren't perfect at systems and delegation, we could have never grown without improvement in those areas. It's still the case.

Lesson 8: Raise your prices; raise your minimums

When I was the only employee in my company, doing everything myself, I could still make good margins and be the lowest price around. I took clients at $200-$500 per month, built some websites, and put tons of hours in, and as long as I could get to where I had $40-50k per year in revenue, I had a decent wage for Burley. That was my first goal. I could be flexible with what I made and could literally have no cost other than a couple of tools and my personal time. Employees, though, cost more than time. Employees cost money. And regardless of how much money you bring in, an employee's wage is constant. If I wanted employees that were good, there way no way I could maintain my pricing and minimums, providing the level of service that was needed. We had to raise prices. We changed our minimum to $1,500 and determined that we would do work for no less than $100 per hour. The types of clients got better, and we had enough revenue to bring in talented people who increased the quality of our work. I know that many SEO firms/companies can charge a lot more than $100 per hour, and we do as well, depending on the type of project—but for the average small/medium business this is a price that they can afford and you can do good work for.

Lesson 9: Learn when to pass on bad clients

When I was hungry I took whatever client walked through the door. I took abuse. Emails that called me names, clients who would not listen to my advice and would then blame me when things went wrong. Clients that paid three or four months late but would complain when I didn't answer my phone on the first ring.
I kept them because I felt like I had to have the revenue. What I didn't realize is that if I had taken the time I was putting into their project and put it elsewhere, I could have replaced the revenue plus a lot more and had a much better quality of life.
If you are not happy, then no amount of money will make up for it, so fire your bad clients, pass on the red flags, and figure something else out. Remember Lesson 1.

Retain

Lesson 10: Be trustworthy

The fastest way to lose clients and employees is to lie to them. If you want both to stick with you through thick and thin, then there has to be 100% trust. I personally think that the more transparent you can be all around the more you will be trusted.
One of our core values at Nifty is to be "willingly naked." Not literally, but figuratively. We have to be willing to share what we learn, take feedback, tell our clients the brutal truth even if we know they don't want to hear it. But you have to be willing to take feedback yourself.

Lesson 11: Reward your team

I am not going to pretend to be good at this. I know I should say "thank you" about a thousand times more than I do. Instead, I find myself more apt to criticize when things go poorly. It's something I am hoping to constantly get better at. The team at Nifty is amazing and they take a ton of stress, responsibility, and problems on themselves and do an awesome job.

Here's a few things that I have done at times:

• Thank-you gift cards
• Revenue sharing
• Company lunches
• Pop-Tarts (long story)
• Big Christmas parties
• The best office in Burley, Idaho (complete with a moose, a monster, bricks, and staked firewood)

Lesson 12: Auto-renew your contracts

When it comes to smaller businesses, I have found that month-to-month contracts that auto-renew and are paid by automatic credit card last longer than contracts that are 3, 6, or 12 months with renegotiations required. Bottom line, people don't like re-signing up for a committed amount of time. Especially small business owners who believe the word "contract" is a cuss word.

Change

Lesson 13: Never stop learning new things

There are many search companies that fall behind. It's because they don't change. They keep blasting away at the same spammy links, the same old school designs, and the same tactics from 5-10 years ago, and they wonder why a massive amount of their client portfolio drops in rankings.
I personally start every morning by reading blogs, and I have for years. The staff spends the first part of every day doing the same thing, and we pass around articles that make an impression. It keeps us constantly thinking about innovation and learning from our great community. Another way to keep up is to constantly pitch to speak at conferences. You have deadlines around which you can build tests and case studies, and you will do everything you possibly can to be up on the latest news in the industry because you never know what questions the attendees might ask you.

Lesson 14: Request feedback

The best way to find issues in your organization is to request feedback from your staff and clients. The other day, we had a client that paused his account. This is usually a soft way to end the relationship. But, upon asking for his feedback, he said he loved working with his project manager and the work we had done, saying he would be back on track in 2 months. Then he mentioned he was hoping for faster results on a side project we were doing for him. Whose fault was it that he felt that way? It was ours. I took the opportunity to clear up the miscommunication and he was very grateful for it. If we hadn't asked for the feedback, we might not have ever heard from him again and he definitely would have had the issue on his mind.

Lesson 15: Be pleased, but never satisfied

Nobody is perfect. Which means there is always room for improvement. There is always more than can be done, and there is always a better way. The day you stop growing and say that "it's good enough" is the day that a competitor is going to come in and do more that you are willing to.
We have redone our proposal process multiple times. We haven't ever been bad at it, but every time we go back to the drawing boards there is something more that we find that helps to bring in better clients. Right now we are testing out a live walk-through of the proposal, as compared to just sending over a PDF and asking for questions.

SAVE

Lesson 16: Content isn't king, cash is

If you want to run a successful business of any type, then ensure that you aren't running cash-poor. I have followed Dave Ramsey's personal financial guidelines for my business and find that it's very conservative. While it might limit the speed at which we grow, it eliminates a massive amount of risk.
Dave recommends having a personal emergency fund (and in this case business fund) of 3-6 months of expenses on hand at all times. That means that if you are going to pay yourself (your only start-up expense) $3,000 per month, then you should have between $9,000-$18,000 in cash before starting up. At $65,000 per month of expenses, you should have between $195,000-$390,000 in reserves. That's a lot of cash on hand for a small business, but if clients unexpectedly drop, or major industry changes necessitate a completely new model, you will have the cash to make good decisions and not desperate ones. I started out around the six-month reserve when I was smaller, and as time has gone by and we have a more diversified revenue stream, I am comfortable between 3-4 months of cash on hand.

Lesson 17: Pay yourself modestly, and get out of personal debt

I pay myself $4,000 per month. The rest goes to growing the business, savings, and other ventures. Now, you need to realize that I live in Burley, Idaho, and it's literally hard to spend money here. I could pay myself $2,000 if it wasn't for Amazon Prime. But, at a very young age, my wife and I decided that we would have no personal debt and worked really hard to pay off our house and buy cars with cash.

I know many financial experts will tell you that leveraging your home is the best financing you have but let me tell you that the freedom of owning your house outright means that you can make better business decisions over the course of your life. You wont have the "what if I lose my family's home" question circling around in the back of your mind and you can actually take bigger risks, and never make business financial decisions based off of your personal financial needs.

Lesson 18: Don't sign up for every Internet marketing tool under the sun

Tool subscriptions are reoccurring costs. It's very easy to spend thousands of dollars a month on different tools you don't have the cash to do that when you start up. When I first started, I only used Raven Tools, but quickly added a list of 10 to 15 tools like Moz. Occasionally, we have to go through the list of tools and find out what we are actually using and get rid of the rest. I'm not going to pretend there is one tool to rule them all, because everyone has very different needs. The key is to quickly identify which tools work for you and which don't, and to stop paying monthly for the ones that don't.

Lesson 19: Diversify

If you get to where you own a successful guest-blogging company, or a successful SEO company, or a successful content-marketing company, or whatever niche you decide to work in, then realize the problem with a niche is that you are putting all of your eggs in one basket. If that basket disappears, you're screwed.
Try going after more than one niche. We opened a division focused on SEO and website development for lawyers called NiftyLaw.com. I also owned a newspaper in my home town, and am working on some new projects so that I am not 100% reliant on Internet marketing revenue.

Lesson 20: Find a few things to help save yourself

Owning a business is hard work. It's mentally draining, and it's very hard to shut down your mind after constantly thinking. There will be times where you need to save yourself from burning out, so ensure that you have hobbies that can get your mind completely off of work. I golf, mountain bike, and travel with my family. I also don't do any work on Sundays at all.

Overall

I have loved starting an Internet marketing company. It's been hard; I'm going gray and I'm only 29.
I know that you might not agree with certain things I think are important, and that's fine. The best part about business is that it's a "choose your own adventure" storybook with no "right" answers.
Please add your own questions and advice in the comments. I hope that this is a post that can have more insight in the comments than the article itself, and I look forward to learning from all of you!