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.

Trigger Emails

6 Clever Triggered Emails to Inspire Your Marketing Automation

by Sam Kusinitz

July 10, 2014 at 6:00 AM

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Triggered emails can be a great way to deliver the right content at the right time to the right people. A sincere thank you, a courteous confirmation, or a concerned abandoned cart message that automatically follows a specific behavior someone took on your website can be the difference between a very happy customer and losing a contact altogether.
As long as the automated email is relevant, timely, and provides value to the recipient, triggered emails can be used to save marketers a tremendous amount of time and, more importantly, better engage your contact database.
Take a look at the examples below for some ideas of triggered emails you can incorporate into your own email marketing campaigns.

1) Uber: The Welcome Email

Uber sends an automated welcome email to anyone who registers for their services. The welcome email is simple and straightforward, welcoming new users and thanking them for signing up for Uber. To assist the new users and to encourage them to actually start using the car service, the welcome email also explains how Uber works in three simple steps, followed by a few tips on getting started with Uber. We love how Uber capitalizes on this opportunity to further educate their users.

2) Dropbox: The Re-engagement Email

Dropbox uses a triggered email to re-engage people who signed up for Dropbox, but have not actually installed the software on their computers yet.
The first great thing about this email is it uses personalization tokes to address the recipient directly, using his first name. The body of the email is very brief, which is nice. The text identifies a few specific ways Dropbox can assist you in organizing your files and a large blue CTA is noticably positioned directly in the middle of the email. It's short, sweet, yet still informative -- exactly what people in a re-engagement campaign need.

3) ModCloth: The Date/Time Tigger Email

ModCloth sends this email to people who have been subscribed to ModCloth’s email list for six months to celebrate their “anniversary” together. Of course, the true purpose of this email is to drive contacts back to their website -- and maybe make a purchase. To encourage recipients to visit ModCloth’s site and make a purchase, the anniversary email offers a coupon code for $5 off the contact’s next purchase. It's a small thing for ModCloth to give up in exchange for repeat business.

Source: Pure360

4) Amazon: The Thank-You Email

Amazon uses this triggered thank-you email to drive customers back to their site and gain information about the consumer that can be used to suggest additional products in the future.
In addition to thanking the customer for their recent purchase and personalizing the message using the consumer's full name, the email also asks the recipient to review their new product. And chances are, people are only going to review products they feel strongly about. Based on the products they review and how they review the product, Amazon can show them products they may like in the future. Plus, if the person ends up leaving a review, it could convince someone else to buy that product, too.

5) Zappos: The Confirmation Email

No one likes waiting day after day for a package arrive, wondering whether or not the item was ever actually shipped. To quell unnecessary anxiety, Zappos sends an automated email to customers as soon as their package is shipped. The email is personalized as it provides a picture of the specific item(s) the consumer purchased as well as the shipping address, a link to the order information, and the anticipated delivery date.
As the bottom of the email states, one of the core values at Zappos is to “create fun and a little weirdness." The email clearly adheres to this value addressing the recipient as “Zappos Zealot” and closing the intro to the email with “XOXO, Zappos.com."

6) Urban Outfitters: The Unsubscribe Email

Urban Outfitters automatically sends this email to people when they request to unsubscribe from the clothing store’s emails. The purpose of this automated email is a last-ditch effort to convince recipients not to unsubscribe. To appeal to their young adult target audience, this email creatively plays on the idea of a salvaging a relationship.
Rather than simply providing a checkbox to either confirm the unsubscribe request or remain on UO’s email list, this email features an amusing image of a text messaging conversation that expresses Urban Outfitter’s desire to avoid “breaking up” with the recipient who is shown as contact “BFF” on the mobile phone. We love how this email is something that their buyer persona can definitely relate to.

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.

Right Place, Right Time

Top Searches for Handicap Accessibility:

Rising searches

Rising searches are searches that have grown significantly in popularity over a given time period when compared to a preceding time period. For example, if you're comparing searches for starbucks coffee during May 2006, the comparison would be April 2006.

For each rising search term, you’ll see a percentage of the term’s growth over a period of time. If you see Breakout instead of an actual percentage, it means that the search term experienced growth greater than 5000%.



CAPS builders, not enough search volume.

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.

Improving productivity

Get it Done: 35 Habits of the Most Productive People (Infographic)

BY Catherine Clifford | December 13, 2013|

65 Comments |

Image credit: ryantron on Flickr

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7K

You know those people who get so much done it seems like they have 30 hours in every day while the rest of us mere mortals have a measly 24? You know, the ones who seem to get more accomplished before breakfast than you do all day?
You can actually become one of them. For starters, spend one minute replying to each email – max -- and don’t feel compelled to respond to everything. Also, take a play from Steve Jobs, Hillary Clinton, President Obama and Mark Zuckerberg and wear the same thing every day. It saves time that you spend trying on different outfits every day, says Anna Vital, the co-founder of the San Francisco-based startup organization Funders and Founders who compiled the tips and made the infographic below.
Take a break from your procrastinating and check out the infographic below.

Click to Enlarge+

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/230392#ixzz2oUe5Ql7Q

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?