Cofounder and CEO of Fizzle. Entrepreneur for a decade. Blogger, podcaster, lifestyle business builder.
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You can read all the blogging advice in the world, but none of it matters unless you take action. To set your blog up to be a massive success, you have to ruthlessly focus your efforts on things that work, and stop spending precious time on things that don't.
Ever try replying to an email newsletter or customer service email from a big company? If you have, you probably received one of those annoying, frustrating or infuriating (depending on your situation) automated responses telling you that you can't reply directly to the email.
"Should I quit my job?" That's a question I hear a lot.
Gary Vaynerchuk doesn't beat around the bush. With two New York Times bestselling books under his belt (including the excellent new Thank You Economy book), a thriving marketing consultancy and multiple popular websites and his new Daily Grape site and iPhone application, it's a fairly safe bet to say no one works harder on the Internet than Gary Vaynerchuk.
When someone asks what the fastest way to grow traffic to a website is, first I tell them they're asking the wrong question. Wanting to know the "fastest" or "easiest" way to do anything is a sure route to failure. The fastest route is the path sold to suckers with no patience for the actual process involved in creating real value.
In the current blogging landscape of lowest-common-denominator marketing and recycled "top 10" lists, there's something incredibly simple you can do to dominate your topic and stand above your competitors as a leader.
If you want to build a thriving online audience of fans and customers who will push you to unthinkable heights, there's one thing you have to get right first, above all else. Have a vision for your followers.
There is a time for basic information. Everyone needs to know what an RSS feed is, how commenting works on blogs, that guest posting is sometimes a viable strategy for gaining visitors and that WordPress is probably your best choice of content management system. You should also know when Twitter is important and that you can use a Facebook page to spread your message.
Chances are, when you think of blogging, you also think of commenting. Comments have been a unique and tightly integrated feature of blogging since the beginning of blogs. But several high-profile blogs have decided to turn comments off in recent years. Zen Habits is one of the biggest examples. Seth Godin doesn't allow comments on his blog either and never has. These two blogs are among the biggest in the world.
A reader asked me on Twitter the other day if I would start writing more traffic-building tips here. The implication was that I haven't been publishing content that will directly help you build a bigger online audience.