8 Slow, Difficult Steps to Become a Millionaire

Money of course isn't everything. Not by a long shot. Where your definition of success is concerned, money may rank far down the list. Everyone’s definition of “success” is different. Here's mine:

"Success is making those that believed in you look brilliant."

For me, money doesn't matter all that much, but I'll confess, it did at one time (probably because I didn't have very much). So, let’s say money is on your list. And let’s say, like millions of other people, that you’d like to be a millionaire. What kinds of things should you do to increase your chances of joining the millionaire's club?
Here are the steps I'd suggest. They're neither fast nor easy. But, they're more likely to work than the quick and easy path.

1. Stop obsessing about money.

While it sounds counterintuitive, maintaining a laser-like focus on how much you make distracts you from doing the things that truly contribute to building and growing wealth. So shift your perspective.

"See money not as the primary goal but as a by-product of doing the right things."

2. Start tracking how many people you help, even in a very small way.

The most successful people I know – both financially and in other ways – are shockingly helpful. They’re incredibly good at understanding other people and helping them achieve their goals. They know their success is ultimately based on the success of the people around them.
So they work hard to make other people successful: their employees, their customers, their vendors and suppliers… because they know, if they can do that, then their own success will surely follow.
And they will have built a business – or a career – they can be truly proud of.

3. Stop thinking about making a million dollars and start thinking about serving a million people.

When you only have a few customers and your goal is to make a lot of money, you’re incented to find ways to wring every last dollar out of those customers.
But when you find a way to serve a million people, many other benefits follow. The effect of word of mouth is greatly magnified. The feedback you receive is exponentially greater – and so are your opportunities to improve your products and services. You get to hire more employees and benefit from their experience, their skills, and their overall awesomeness.
Related: How To Keep Software From Stealing Your Job (LinkedIn)
And, in time, your business becomes something you never dreamed of – because your customers and your employees have taken you to places you couldn’t even imagine.
Serve a million people – and serve them incredibly well – and the money will follow.

4. See making money as a way to make more things.

Generally speaking there are two types of people.
One makes things because they want to make money; the more things they make, the more money they make. What they make doesn’t really matter that much to them – they’ll make anything as long as it pays.
The other wants to make money because it allows them to make more things. They want to improve their product. They want to extend their line. The want to create another book, another song, another movie. They love what they make and they see making money as a way to do even more of what they love. They dream of building a company that makes the best things possible … and making money is the way to fuel that dream and build that company they love.
While it is certainly possible to find that one product that everyone wants and grow rich by selling that product, most successful businesses evolve and grow and as they make money, reinvest that money in a relentless pursuit of excellence.

"We don't make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies." ~Walt Disney

5. Do one thing better.

Pick one thing you're already better at than most people.Just. One. Thing. Become maniacally focused at doing that one thing. Work. Train. Learn. Practice. Evaluate. Refine. Be ruthlessly self-critical, not in a masochistic way but to ensure you continue to work to improve every aspect of that one thing.
Financially successful people do at least one thing better than just about everyone around them. (Of course it helps if you pick something to be great at that the world also values – and will pay for.)
Related: The Mere Mortal's Guide To Growing A Startup (LinkedIn)
Excellence is its own reward, but excellence also commands higher pay – and greater respect, greater feelings of self-worth, greater fulfillment, a greater sense of achievement… all of which make you rich in non-monetary terms.
Win-win.

6. Make a list of the world’s ten best people at that one thing.

How did you pick those ten? How did you determine who was the “best”? How did you measure their “success”?
Use those criteria to track your own progress towards becoming the best.
If you're an author it could be Amazon rankings. If you’re a musician it could be iTunes downloads. If you’re a programmer, it could be the number of people that use your software. If you’re a leader it could be the number of people you train and develop who move on to bigger and better things. If you’re an online retailer it could be purchases per visitor, or on-time shipping, or conversion rate…
Don’t just admire successful people. Take a close look at what makes them successful. Then use those criteria to help create your own measures of success. And then…

7. Consistently track your progress.

We tend to become what we measure, so track your progress at least once a week against your key measures.
Maybe you’ll measure how many people you’ve helped. Maybe you’ll measure how many customers you’ve served. Maybe you’ll evaluate the key steps on your journey to becoming the world’s best at one thing.
Maybe it’s a combination of those things, and more.

8. Build routines that ensure progress.

Never forget that achieving a goal is based on creating routines. Say you want to write a 200-page book; that’s your goal. Your system to achieve that goal could be to write 4 pages a day; that’s your routine. Wishing and hoping won’t get you to a finished manuscript, but sticking faithfully to your routine ensures you reach your goal.
Or say you want to land 100 new customers through inbound marketing. That’s your goal; your routine is to create new content, new videos, new podcasts, new white papers, etc. on whatever schedule you set. Stick to that routine and meet your deadlines and if your content is great you will land those new customers.
Wishing and hoping won’t get you there – sticking faithfully to your routine will.
Set goals, create routines that support those goals, and then ruthlessly track your progress. Fix what doesn’t work. Improve and repeat what does work. Refine and revise and adapt and work hard every day to be better than you were yesterday.
Soon you’ll be good. Then you’ll be great. And one day you’ll be world-class.
And then, probably without even noticing, you’ll also be a millionaire. You know, if you like that sort of thing.

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?

What is a Marketing Funnel? | Why You Should Have A Marketing Funnel

by Rich Miller ·

Welcome Googler! If you find this page useful, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

What is a marketing funnel? That might be a foreign question to you if you are new to online marketing, but don’t lose heart I will explain it. A marketing funnel is one of the critical keys to building a successful business and your Freedom.  Read this entire article so that you can learn more about what is needed to get your marketing funnel up and running!

What is a Marketing Funnel?

For those of you who don’t know what a marketing funnel is, let’s get to it. Think about what a funnel really is. You might think of a tornado first, that takes you by storm, and you might think about things that get sucked in fast and either continue on or get spit out.
This is the same principle as a marketing funnel that you would use to build your business. There are normally a few steps in the Sales Funnel process simply because once you capture your targeted customer you want to accomplish some critical steps to get them through your funnel. Designing your own Marketing Funnel can be technically challenging, especially if you are new to marketing and don’t have the technical skills.

Designing A Marketing Funnel

In designing a good marketing funnel system there are many psychological factors that are considered when designing the process that your Lead will follow. Dialing in a good funnel that converts can be very time consuming and costly if you’re just learning the basics. Because of the time involved in learning, testing its usually best to use a system like MLSP that already has a marketing funnel that is already tested and ready to go.

Floating Through the Marketing Funnel

There are many phases of a funnel including the initial phase of discovery like. That could be a magazine ad, internet search or an online paid ad that attracted the lead to the first stage of your marketing funnel. Some refer to this as a trigger, but call it what you want, it got their attention!
If you did your job correctly, you have peaked the leads interest in your offer / product and you take them to your squeeze page where you deliver enough information so that your lead wants to know more, this is the most important step of the funnel as you now are capturing their contact information.  That Lead then gets added to a database that you own, most people use Aweber or GVO for that purpose.
Normally the next step in your marketing funnel is exposing your new Lead to your product or service.  This is what we call the exploration stage; or rather they are discovering what it is that you have to offer. Makes sense right?  This is the point that your lead can decide which path they wish to take, they may make the purchase at that time or not, but don’t worry it’s not over yet!

What Happens to The Leads In A Marketing Funnel?

Heres where the design of your funnel pays off, sometimes resulting in thousands of dollars of recurring sales. Many people get disappointed when they don’t initially convert a lead to sale, but thats ok!
A VERY important part of your marketing funnel is the follow up sequence that you have built into your sales funnel. This is where your emails start working for you on autopilot and build relationships with your subscribers. Sometimes it takes 10+ exposures to your offer before someone makes that buying decision.

As you can see there are a lot of moving part to a successful marketing funnel. I have built many marketing funnels, but to be honest with you I prefer to focus on getting traffic and let someone else do the heavy lifting for me. That’s why I have used the marketing funnels that have been designed and tested by some of the best internet marketers in MLSP.
 Take a test drive of the same powerful marketing tools I use and you can use to make a new life and a new business with new results? CLICK HERE and  get immediate access to the same Marketing Funnel System I use.
 Wishing You Great Success! 

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!

Google's New Secure Search Means More Work for Online Business Owners

This week, Google started encrypting all organic searches on the site. This means that business owners who track keyword data provided by Google on search traffic are now out of luck as keywords won't be supplied for these secure searches.
In 2011, Google started masking keyword data and labeling it as "(not provided)" for anyone that was logged into their Google account. Also known as secure search, Google mentioned that this was done in an effort to protect personalized results that it delivers. Google noted that this change would initially impact single-digit percentages for all Google searches. Today, that number stands close to 75 percent of websites tracked by Not Provided Count (see graphic below).

For business owners who develop web content based in part on the keywords Google says people search for when they land on their website, here are some important notes to keep in mind:
You can still get keyword data if you buy ads.
Interestingly, Google will pass you keyword data if you're running ads on Google. This might raise the question of whether Google is trying to generate more revenue by hiding organic keyword data.
Related: Google Looking Beyond 'Cookies' to Track People Online
You can still get keyword data from Google Webmaster Tools.
You're able to see the top 2,000 queries per day going back to 90 days through Google Webmaster Tools. Google has indicated that this will increase in the future to one year. You'll have to continue to archive these on a consistent basis or else you'll lose all the data. With AdWords, however, you can save this data for as long you like.
It's time to start adopting other methods to develop content ideas.
It used to be that you could look at keyword data in Analytics to generate content ideas but since that is now going to be stripped away, it's time to look at other methods for keyword and content research. Ubersuggest is a strong tool for providing content recommendations. Another one is analyzing your internal search data.
Start focusing more on conversion rate optimization.
Keyword data disappearing isn't such a bad thing in this case, as the loss of it will cause online business owners to focus more on the right things, individual landing pages, instead of individual entry keywords for each landing page. This is a more optimal way to be optimizing your conversion rate because you are focusing on increasing the conversion rate of the page instead of looking at lesser details.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/228561#ixzz2gYZvWwcj

Growing Business not Spinning Wheels

Posted by Susan Brown on September 10, 2013

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Thinking about building a business from scratch or have a business that desperately needs attention, but having a hard time getting started? Getting your act together does not have to be this big, overwhelming process. Taking the tiniest, most simple-looking steps could be just what you need to get into gear and jump start your business.
The following are ten practical steps to building a business or starting a new project that anyone can do. With a little willpower you’ll be able to achieve goals you may have never thought possible.
Skeptical?
Go through the steps below, and give it a try. You may be surprised by the difference a systematic approach can make.
Recognize what you are ultimately trying to accomplish and why. The very first step is clearly mapping out your goals. Merely having a rough idea of where you are heading is not enough. Write down exactly what you want to accomplish, and more importantly, why you want to accomplish it. I personally am a very visual person, and I’ve found that mind mapping is really helpful in this process. I use FreeMind, which you can download for free here.
Make sure your business goals are manageable. If your goals are too broad or the bar is being set too high, then you will be much more likely to get overwhelmed or burnt out. The trick is knowing how to break down your goals into manageable steps or focus areas. For example, if one of your goals is to learn how to successfully promote your business via social media, you’ll need to break this down into small steps such as:

• Step 1: Getting a basic understanding what each of the major social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest) will allow you to do.
• Step 2: Determining which platforms attract your target audience
• Step 3: Picking ONE social network platform and then….
• Step 4: Learning about how your target audience uses the network
• Step 5: Learning how to optimize your profile
• Step 6: Learning how to optimize posts for targeted reach and exposure

…You get the point? Each step becomes a goal in and of itself that requires sufficient mastery.
Pick a starting point… and start immediately. Let me begin by saying that the actual starting point in and of itself is NOT so important. I know that may seem counter-intuitive, but in practice it’s not. It is much more important to just commit yourself to one area and get going since the biggest hump for most people is taking those first steps. Even if these steps are small and far from perfect, you’ve already put yourself on the road to growth and development merely by starting, and that is no small thing. You also want that start to happen right away, as in TODAY! Pick a very small thing that you can do right now, and just do it.

I couldn’t resist

Keeping yourself accountable. Defining your goals and finding a starting point may not be enough to keep you motivated over the long run. For this reason, you should create additional, “outside” motivators. Depending on your personality, there are several things that you could do. You could make a monetary investment into the business (for example, registering a domain or buying a piece of equipment that you know you’re going to need). You could also get others involved: you could join a support group, find a mentor, or even call on a friend or family member to help keep you accountable to your goals.
Don’t consult too many resources. Another reason why people tend to put off building a business or taking their current business to the next level is that they are overwhelmed by the shear amount of information available, and depending on the topic, a lot of it may be contradictory or unclear. There is just way too much noise: too many “experts,” too many resources, and too much data for a person to possibly go through. You’ll have much to gain by just picking one or two sources to follow and consult. Look to learn from those who have mastered their skills enough that they can teach it to you in a way that you can receive it.
Make sure you have what you need. Before you get started you need to be certain that all the resources you need to accomplish your goals are in place. This includes things like equipment, materials, supplies, and even qualified workers.
Make a commitment to your goals. This may sound simple, but it’s one of the most common pitfalls people have when trying to build their businesses. It’s not just that you need clear goals and the resources to fulfill them, but you have to actively commit yourself to using these resources for the process. This means setting aside the necessary time, attention, and money and doing so consistently.
Don’t move on till you’ve achieved sufficient mastery. Following on the heels of the point above, don’t run after content for content’s sake. Seek to master the gaps in what you already know in a given area. Once you’ve reached a sufficient level of mastery, you can then move on to something else. Again, this is about focus. If you are constantly scattering your attention and resources, you simply won’t get so far.
Work with your natural rhythm and learning style. When are you most productive? What is your ideal learning style? How long can you focus on the given task? Knowing this information and acting on it can make the whole process go much quicker. It will help you to maximize your efforts. To help you find out this information about yourself, you could take a look at the site Qualified Mind. It allows you to conduct experiments on yourself to determine your peak mental performance. To find out your learning style, there are many free online tests you can take. Here is a sampling of some good ones:

• http://homeworktips.about.com/od/homeworkhelp/a/lstyleqz.htm
• http://www.learning-styles-online.com/inventory/
• http://www.edutopia.org/multiple-intelligences-learning-styles-quiz
• http://www.acceleratedlearning.com/method/test_flash.html
• http://sunburst.usd.edu/~bwjames/tut/learning-style/stylest.html
• http://www.vark-learn.com/english/page.asp?p=questionnaire

Record your progress, test, and get feedback. Building a business from scratch is not a static process. If you really want results, then you need to be testing, reporting, and generating feedback along the way. Obviously, the kinds of reporting and testing will vary depending on what you are trying to accomplish, but it may include things like: A/B testing, looking at site analytics, and other performance tests and reports- all in the name of keeping tabs on your progress. This will help you to stay on course so that you can pursue the activities and strategies that are really working and be alerted to the things that aren’t.
In closing, building a business is a process like anything else. If you know how to approach this process properly, you can avoid a whole lot of wasted time and other resources and end up accomplishing much more than you may have thought possible.

8 Tips to Create a Killer Gamification Strategy

8 Tips to Create a Killer Gamification Strategy

How to Get Prospects to Stampede to Your Trade Show Booth

by Robert Moskowitz on August 28, 2013

If your small business exhibits at trade shows or conferences, you know both the importance — and the difficulty — of generating substantial traffic from attendees. To bring more people to your booth, try one or more of these tactics.

• Ask for tweets or text messages as entries in a contest. Raffles and other prize giveaways can dramatically increase the footfalls at your booth. Make it easy for people to enter your contest by asking for a tweet or a text message with the person’s contact information. To attract the greatest number of prospects, keep the contest closely aligned with your product, service, or brand.
• Give away valuable information. Another angle on the freebie is to disseminate sought-after information at your booth. Most people willingly yield their contact information in return for a white paper, an e-book, an industry report, and the like. In fact, if contact information is all you seek, you could deliver the goods wirelessly and remotely via email, text, or other means. To draw people to your booth, provide the information in a tangible format, such as providing a printed report, a prerecorded CD, or a download to the recipient’s flash drive.
• Hire an extrovert in a costume. Draw traffic to your booth by hiring an interesting character to pose for photographs with attendees who leave a business card or otherwise share their contact details. Your extrovert should pose in front of a large sign touting your brand, product, or service. It’s also helpful to ask your character to put a flyer, a coupon, or a spec sheet into the hands of each person. Be sure to snap your own pics, too; you’ll get even more marketing mileage out of these shots by streaming or posting these photos online.
• Supply free Wi-Fi. You’d think that every exhibit hall or trade show venue would offer free Wi-Fi to all comers, yet connectivity remains a major issue at many industry gatherings. Capitalize on this shortcoming by providing wireless access at your booth, trading the password for people’s contact info and providing a place to sit. 
• Provide a charging station. At many trade shows and exhibitions, the only things in shorter supply than free Wi-Fi are electricity and a place to set devices while they recharge. You can earn a lot of appreciation from attendees by providing extra AC outlets and shelf space — and if the area happens to be boldly branded with your logo, they’re unlikely to complain.
• Donate to charity for each visitor. Giving your time or money to a worthy cause sends a positive message about your company and influences people’s attitudes toward you, your product or service, and your unique selling proposition. Donating $1 per business card collected isn’t likely to break the bank, but it makes a powerful statement. This tactic will be even more powerful if the charity you select ties in with your brand.
• Give live talks on interesting topics. Does your company have interesting insights to share? Dynamic mini-lectures on topics related to your offering can quickly draw a crowd around your booth. Line up a charismatic speaker to offer a 10- to 15-minute talk every hour — or give the presentations yourself.

Read more: http://blog.intuit.com/marketing/how-to-get-prospects-to-stampede-to-your-trade-show-booth/#ixzz2dqSqB9to

Things to know to Make Money Online

Posted by Andrew on August 30, 2013 | Reply

While there are wonderful opportunities to generate wealth online, people continue to face problems achieving this. These problems are often attributed to information overload, unscrupulous gurus, and complicated technology.

Agreed, those are some of the symptoms, but they’re not the disease. These symptoms don’t just affect new marketers. I have seen people who’ve been at this online marketing game for a long time, and who do very well, but they suffer from these limitations. They have found something that works and they make money by scaling what works. But they are missing the concepts that could elevate them to the next level.

What are those concepts?

I know your mind instinctively may have gone to the various make money online tactics you would have seen in some book. There are plenty of books out there, and few offer real strategic principles, but even fewer offer things that can propel you to the top.
Most of them just do the job of motivating you enough to get you to leave your boss and becoming a business owner.
Being your own boss can be wonderful, but that can be a good thing only if your online business proves to be better than your boss. If not, you’ll end up with a feeling that your boss wasn’t that bad after all.

Concepts For A Successful Online Business

As you probably guess from the title, there are five concepts you must be aware of, in order to build a really successful online business.
* A product offering immense value
* Communication of that value through your site
* Visitors already looking for your product
* Leverage
* Focus
The first three are something many successful marketers focus on to make money online:

#1 – A Product Offering Immense Value

The core of our vision-based strategy is “cross-selling”— the process of offering customers the products and services they need, when they need them, to help them succeed financially. The more we give our customers what they need, the more we know about them. The more we know about their financial needs, the easier it is for us to work together for them to bring us more of their business. The more business they do with us, the better value they receive and the more loyal they become. The longer they stay with us, the more opportunities we have to satisfy even more of their financial needs. That’s the mutual benefit of cross-sell. ~ Wells Fargo
Although the above is a beautifully written bank strategy, it makes perfect sense in the marketing community.
This is the easiest, as long as you understand the definition of value from the perspective of your potential customers.
Not you.
It really doesn’t matter how “cool” you think a product on creating widgets is, if you try to sell them to people who don’t know anything about widgets or why they need to create them.
Remember – if your product solves the problem of 100% of the people, and 0% of the people care about it, it’s of no use to them and it just won’t sell.

Value is defined as what people “want.”

Not what they need.

Not what you think they need.

Not what you think they should have.

Not what you think will make them happy.
Yes, there is another line of thought that says “make them want” your product, and to a certain extent this is possible. But it is time-taking and may as easily backfire if you don’t do it right, with unhappy customers “crying over spilt milk.” They will wonder why they bought your product in the first place. You don’t want that.
What do they want?
How powerful is their want?
The more powerful their want, the better your product will sell, and the happier people who buy from you are.
Your job is to fulfill that want in the best way possible. Making sure it offers value is the surest way to make money online.

#2 – Communicate That Value Through Your Site

Create a site that shows them what’s in it for them. Communicate the benefits. Don’t mistake features for benefits. You can take a look at the articles on our website that talk about this.
Here’s a definition: Benefits exist in the head as well as in the heart, and everything else is a feature.
Create an excellent sales page that shows things people perceive as benefits. Things that make them feel better. Everything else is fluff.
Your site should have great content that revolves around the goal of communicating to your visitors that you have what they’re looking for.

#3 – Visitors Already Looking For Your Product

When you’ve convinced people that you can satisfy their longings (the deeper, the better) — then people will not only fall in love with and buy your products, they will become unstoppable evangelists as well. ~ Demian Farnworth via copyblogger.com

This is the kind of traffic you need. This is the traffic you’re trying to find. This is the magic wand that opens up locked doors to a treasure not many can get their hands on.
This is where most marketers go wrong. “Any traffic is good traffic” is something they believe in and end up unsuccessful.
Irrespective to what your product is, it’s important to create a plan to find and attract people who already want your project. Make sure what you spend in getting them to your site is less than what you’re going to profit from selling your product.
This is easily done if you have created a product that has a huge demand, and you’ve already identified the sources you’re going to be driving traffic from.
Watch your “visitor value.” You need to see the income generated on an average, for every person visiting your website. You must see which traffic source is sending people who buy from you. Use analytics and do the math to ensure you make money online.

#4 – Leverage

The ability to share a message with a few and have it reach the many has never been so available. As marketers we have to start thinking about exponential reach. ~ Jolina Pettice via toprankblog.com.
This is a simple concept. This involves getting better results from a specific effort than what you would normally get.
For example, if you write an article and submit it to different ezines. If people like it, you will get decent traffic from it. That’s a good thing.
But how can you make it better?
* Create a small report and offer a small article. Tell readers to visitor your website for the report and tell them to go there. Offer it as a bonus for subscribing to your list.
* Include a link to your product in your article and give it to your affiliates to use on their sites or mailing lists.
These are just a couple of examples. You can do it several ways.
Whatever you create, think of ways how you can use it in different ways to get more for your effort.

#5 – Focus (To Make Money Online)

But the landscape evolves faster than ever. In the field of marketing, the lines will continue to blur. The tools and tactics we rely on will continue to change. The need to focus on the customer will not. ~ Barry Feldman via copyblogger.com

I don’t need to explain this to you. We’ve discussed this many times.
Anyway, I’ll say it again – Focus means desperately wanting something, so every action of yours should answer the question: Am I moving closer to what I want faster than other methods?”
Focus is what separates the successful marketers from the “almost” successful people.

9 Ideas to Make Your Next Business Article Go Viral

BY Young Entrepreneur Council

How do you find readers--and get them to pause, click, and share? Nine YEC entrepreneurs tell you how to tip the scales in your favor.

508 SHARES | Share this article

We all know content is king, but you still have to get the right content out there. Then you have to figure out how to get people to read it. Nine successful entrepreneurs from the YEC share their tips for getting more eyes on your content.
1. Content That Evokes Emotions
A good blog post or article should satisfy two entirely different requirements: it should provide valuable information and it should evoke an emotion. (Humor, anger, or inspiration are all fine.) Don't go for controversy, though, just for the sake of it, and certainly not if it counters your brand's values. But do look for ways to offer people value and go ahead and tug at their heart strings. Curate and create content that justifies a share. --Fabian Kaempfer, Chocomize
2. A Clear, Honest Title
I wrote an article once for Forbes that had the title "Why Leaders Must Be Readers." I cringed at the cheesiness of it, but I believe the reason the article got more than 20,000 views was because it was obvious what the article was about. You can get a lot of views through an attention-grabbing title, but true engagement can also come when people aren't in the dark what they're about to read--and when they immediately know why friends or colleagues shared it with them.
--Kelsey Meyer, Influence & Co.
3. An Evident Tipping Point
Of course the content needs to be exceptional, but it also has to find its way to the key person or people who are going to be able to help tip it over into the world of massive sharing. In order to make your way to that tipping point, you have to ask for help. Going viral isn't something that happens to you; it's an active state of promotion in search of that tipping point. --Corey Blake, Round Table Companies
4. Organized Ideas
One thing I notice in a lot of successful articles is that it's very easy to consume content with numbered ideas. On BuzzFeed, most articles take this format: "10 Things You Didn't Know About Entrepreneurship." This is because people want information broken down for them. Organizing your ideas into a numbered or categorized format helps people consume the content more easily. The faster they can understand it, the more likely they are to share it.
--Andy Karuza, brandbuddee
5. Useful Information
There isn't one magic bullet for making a blog post or online article go viral. A combination of things contribute to the success of a post. However, one important trait of a viral blog post or article is usefulness. Giving your reader something tangible and practical that he or she can put to use will immediately increase your chances of the post being shared. If it's shared once, chances are it will be shared again. A few more shares and that post could be on its way to going viral.
--Jay Wu, A Forever Recovery
6. Unexpected Information
We've found that the key to a viral blog post is finding something truly unexpected. Whether it's insight buried deep within a data set or a case study with an unusual outcome, posts that defy people's expectations are more likely to be shared and tweeted about.
--Robert J. Moore, RJMetrics

7. Honest Advice
Be honest and vulnerable. There are so many "Top X" blog posts and impersonal litanies written for the search engines. Don't do that. Write about what you know, and be open, honest, and transparent. Don't write an article per week because it's on your schedule. Make sure you're writing about things that are important to you, and don't publish it unless it is of the highest quality. Be honest with your audience; it will help them connect with you and help you build a larger base.
--Mitch Gordon, Go Overseas
8. A Story to Connect With
If you want the kind of viral post that people act upon (as opposed to BuzzFeed lists that are passed around but quickly forgotten), you need a story that readers can connect with. Test out your concept this way: If you can't tell the underlying story your post describes, you probably don't have something that can go viral. It doesn't have to be a complicated story, but there does have to be something that's easy for people to remember and talk about. --Thursday Bram, Hyper Modern Consulting
9. A Different Angle
One key way for a blog post to go viral is to discuss a popular topic in your industry and reveal an angle that no one has discussed. If it's a hot-button topic and you can bring a new perspective to light, you have a great chance of having your article go viral.
--Phil Laboon, Eyeflow Internet Marketing