This is a guest post by Daniel Cassady from BenchmarkEmail.com

How’s that blog going? Good, you say? Same here. Of course, I could use some more readers, but then again, who couldn’t, right?

Does this sound familiar?

If you’re a blogger – especially one that is trying to make money with your blog, there’s a good chance that you’ve spent your fair share of time trying to figure out how to lure new readers to your blog, and with varying amounts of success.

Most people tend to move toward social media sites like Facebook and Twitter when they want to increase their readership, and they are right to do so. The world of social media, if you didn’t already know, is growing by leaps and bounds every year, and with smartphones and tablets with built-in social media apps becoming as common as the rhinovirus, you can be sure that the influence social media has over the decisions people make will only grow stronger.

Then, of course, there is old reliable – email marketing. Not too long ago, email marketing was considered a passé tool for promoting and marketing. But, take a look at your inbox. Email marketing is back and in a huge way. Groupon and Living Social are two perfect examples of email marketing at it’s most successful.

So what does this mean for you, the blogger looking to hit it big?

It means that if you want to make the most of your promoting buck (an odd choice of words, I know since both social media sites and email cost little to nothing), then wouldn’t it make sense to combine the promoting power of social media and email marketing?

Of course it would. And here are a few ways to do just that.

Share-Worthy Content

This first tip is pretty simple. People are more apt to share exciting, fun content like videos or podcasts than run of the mill blog posts or price lists. Think about it this way. What are you more likely to forward to a friend, a photo ad or a funny video? If you keep your content in your emails interesting and engaging, the higher the odds of your content being shared on social media sites.

Encourage The Sharing Mood

As much as you would like them to, people don’t generally pass on promotional emails to their friends with excitement. Maybe once in a while, a blog post or coupon will be so fantastic that the person may share it with a friend or two, but that doesn’t really build your brand in any significant way.

Now – if you simply add social sharing buttons to your emails, that’s a whole different story. By adding these social sharing buttons, you’re inviting you’re readers to share your content with all of their contacts with one swift click of a button.

Start An Archive

So, you have a backlog of promotional email that you’ve sent, all of which have social sharing links attached. Now what? Do you just let these past emails dissipate into the ether until they’re forgotten? No way! Those emails still have a lot of life in them.  You just have to know how to coax it out.

Start an archive on your website of all the past emails that you’ve sent and put those emails to work. The great thing about archiving your emails is that you increase the odds of someone finding your blog via a random web search because you’ll have that many more pages on your website. More website hits means more visitors.

Develop A Sense Of Community

In the same way that there are bloggers just like you out there who want to build an audience, there are social sharing communities all over the web that are looking to help bloggers do just that. It’s a beautiful concept. A group of like-minded bloggers and business folk upload their emails and newsletters to one specific site, making them available to every member of the communities audience because it’s a shared site. Minimal work, maximum payoff.

The Mobile Solution

I mentioned mobile devices at the beginning of this article and how they seem to be everywhere these days. A great way to combine your emails with social media is to optimize your emails for viewing on mobile devices. There was a time when people only checked their email at work or at home. These days, people check their email in line at the ATM or waiting for their meal at a restaurant.

Make your emails mobile friendly, don’t forget those handy social sharing buttons, and you’re sure to see a spike in your email views.

Promote Yourself

For my last tip, I’m gonna go a bit old school. Every time you send out a new email, get on Twitter and let your followers know. Log into Facebook and plaster it on your wall. With all the work you are going to put in trying to use other people’s social networks, it’s easy to forget that you’ve got a social network as well. Don’t forget to use it.

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Article Written By Daniel Cassady

I am an experienced freelance writer and frequent contributor to an email servicesblog, hosted by Benchmark Email.

Daniel Cassady has written 2 superb article(s) on this blog

This is a guest post by Luca Filigheddu from Twimbow.com.

Gaining Twitter followers is, in my experience, way easier than gaining RSS readers or, in general, regular and engaged readers. For this reason, making Twitter an important source of traffic for your blog is becoming more and more strategical for every blogger.

How to achieve that when you are starting from scratch? How to leverage Twitter in order to grow your audience?

Today, I would love to share with you three simple tips to make this happen as quick as possible.

1. Monitor Your Niche

First of all, you must try to figure out who your potential readers are. The best way to do this is to track all the tweets that contain blog posts from other blogs in your space.

On Twimbow you can easily do that with the “Monitor”. Create one monitor for each blog and simply track “www.[blogname].com”. This way, all the tweets containing the name of those blogs will appear. You can also configure each “monitor” to generate a visual notification and a sound (on Chrome only, but it’s worth it).

After that, it could be very interesting to insert all the users who are tweeting /retweeting those blog posts in a list or mark them with a colored label (eventually, follow them with the Twitter account of your blog or with your personal account). This way, you can easily identify them in your stream and engage them lately.

In the image below, I am tracking a few blogs about cars (for example). The green speaker icon in the central monitor means I will get a visual and audio notifications when new tweets are available (that is, someone tweeted an article from that blog).

2. Schedule Posts Of Your Articles To Twitter

In my experience, if you want to give your blog posts proper visibility on Twitter, you must post them on Twitter 2-3 times a day, at least 3 days / week. Of course, it is very important to find the right compromise, otherwise your followers could be annoyed by your multiple posts.

Moreover, if you target an international readership, you must make sure to properly cover the different time zones. Good times to post are 9am, 2pm and 2am (targeting another time-zone).

You can use Twimbow Slots to schedule your posts. You have a slot for each hour of the day, set to your timezone. Just calculate the right time zone and insert each post you want to promote at least two-three times during the day. You can also choose a few blog posts to test different times and see what is better for your blog.

You can short URLS with Bit.ly from within Twimbow or with any other service that lets you track the clicks. This step is very important, since measuring the conversion you get from this activity is crucial.

At this point, make sure to go back to (1) and track who is retweeting and sharing your stuff. It is essential for (3).

3. Engage, Engage, Engage

Last but not least, be active on Twitter. No, better, be VERY active on Twitter. You should engage all the people who are reading and sharing your posts (yes, all!), asking for feedback and, eventually, telling them about other related content from your blog that could be potentially interesting for them.

For example, if you blog about technology and wrote a post about the latest cool gadget, tell people (tweet people) who shared that post on Twitter that you (you did, right?) wrote another post and the previous version of that gadget or about the brand in another post.

Even better, add a comment to that tweet. It is very useful to make people aware you are expert in your field and this increases the probability they will follow you and bookmark your content. Nothing new here, people want to feel important, want to have the perception that behind that blog there is someone who cares of them and use Twitter actively to engage readers and be helpful. I firmly believe this is very important for a blog as well as for any customer care who actively work with social media.

Ok, are you ready to start making Twitter the #1 source of traffic for your blog? It is incredible how some bloggers still underestimate the power of Twitter despite it is a wonderful way to make people know about your blog and create and manage a faithful readership. What do you think? Please drop me a tweet, happy to discuss. I am @filos

Bonus: for a complete analysis of the best time to tweet, check this post.

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Article Written By Luca Filigheddu

Hi, I'm Luca Filigheddu, CEO of Twimbow. A blogger, geek, early adopter, italian, living in san francisco, twitter addict, piano player, taekwondo, love gadgets, proud dad and husband.

Luca Filigheddu has written 1 superb article(s) on this blog

This is a guest post by Jesse Langley from TechNected.com.

There’s a corollary to the famous P.T. Barnum quote, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and it is: “and when they grow up they buy +1 button votes.”

The phrase itself might not stick, but bloggers who see shiny gold in any of the numerous ads by companies selling such things should stop and say, out loud, one mind-clearing word: Panda!

What are the odds that the search-engine force that introduced that most recent of updates to its own algorithm won’t be able to detect – and downgrade – sites using such black hat gaming schemes?

No Surprises

When Google Plus and its attendant Plus 1 button were introduced nearly three months ago, masters of the obvious saw the potential for Google’s equivalent of a Like button to become a factor in search rankings.

Its own advice for webmasters certainly suggests that to be the case. The jury is still out on whether or not other social media signals, such as Tweets and Likes will be given reduced weight compared to Google’s own signal, but the question of using such information in general to affect page ranking is largely answered.

Considering Google’s enlightened self-interest, speculation about the actual necessity for blogs to include a +1 button, is likely overblown, if not irrational.

Google benefits most from producing reliable search results. To skew a user’s search experience by favoring their own social media signal over any other would work against the search engine company’s own goals. Following this line of thought, purchasing +1 hits not only doesn’t make much sense, it seems highly likely to be counterproductive.

In The Shadow Of The Panda

To paraphrase Google, a better user experience comes from high quality sites appearing above the fold in response to a reasonably intelligent search query.

Prior to the spring of this year, however, link farms, duplicated text and automated sentences chocked-full-of-keywords were frustrating both Google and its users.

Almost overnight, though, the advent of Panda downgraded, and in many cases, removed from search results, many hundreds of thousands, (at least), of poor quality links. What odds would put on the idea that those who paid out good money for link farms no longer appearing in searches, got a refund?

Content Is (insert superlative)

Panda and the ongoing variations of Google’s update represent a strong commitment to reliable content that is unique and relevant to the users.

For those focused on +1′s, retweets and Likes having some unintended effect that, by the sounds of some blogs, would directly undermine the last five months of improvement, why?Why would that make any sense?

Google considers a number of factors that indicate quality content in order to generate a comprehensive look at site quality, and therefore, site ranking. Bounce rate is one strong indicator as to whether or not a site accurately reflected the user’s intent in a search. It’s realistic to assume that a high bounce rate is a sign that the content on a search result site is, for any number of reasons, not what the searcher is seeking.

Average time on site is another factor considered, and one that presents strong evidence against the wisdom of buying Plus One votes. With so many analytics measured, compared and factored into determining content quality, +1′s, no matter how many, that don’t correspond to other analytics would, reason argues, stick out like the proverbial sore thumb, providing Google with an irresistible opportunity to downgrade or remove entirely those sites that chose a bush league SEO scheme over providing strong content.

Place Your Bets

Google’s two monumental developments, so far, in 2011, have been the introduction of its Panda upgrade and Google+.

The measure of social appeal that is the Plus 1 button incorporates itself flawlessly with the search engine company’s two major commitments.

As Google+ continues to grow in popularity, especially now that school openings have fostered initial visits by college students, and the platform itself has evolved from its beta status, +1 buttons will begin to be as common as other social networking user responses on more and more websites.

If you’re thinking about tossing some cash toward some broker selling votes, don’t approach such propositions from the perspective of how cheap the votes are, ask yourself if you could afford to lose a helluva lot more traffic through downgrade or worse?

This post is a part of SmartBloggerz’s guest blogging contest where you can win cash prizes for earning the most points. Help this guest author win this contest by commenting and sharing this post using the buttons below.

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Article Written By Jesse Langley

Jesse Langley lives near Chicago with his family. He writes about technology, blogging, and the job search on behalf of Colorado Technical University. He also writes for TechNected.

Jesse Langley has written 4 superb article(s) on this blog

This is a guest post by Vikas Rawat from SeoBricks.com.

So you have created a Facebook Fan page for your website and hoping that fans will automatically come. This will never happen unless you are promoting a very popular brand.

So what you will do if you have a fresh new website and looking to increase your fan base. Lots of people make the mistake of buying Facebook fans.

In today’s article, I’m going to discuss 10 killer Facebook marketing strategies that will really help you increase your Facebook fan base as well as branding for your website on Facebook…

1. Build Your First 25 Fans Quickly

Once you have your fan page running, look for ways to get your first 25 fans very quickly. You should not hesitate in taking help from your friends, relatives to get your first target of 25 fans. And once you got your first 25 fans, click here to migrate to a shorter URL for your fan page.

2. Facebook Fan Page Widget

You should get a Facebook fan page widget here and place that on prominent positions on your website. Presence of Facebook fan page widget will give one more action elements to your website readers and thus will help you generate more likes for your business page on Facebook.

3. Facebook Contests

You can build some quick fans for your website on Facebook by hosting a contest on your Facebook page. To make your contest a success, you should work aggressively for its promotion and should give attractive gifts to the contest winners.

4. Promoting Your Fan Page

There are lots of measures you can actually take for the promotion of your fan page like using your fan page in your email signatures, in your guest posts, when replying to comments on other blogs and towards the end of articles on your website.

5. Regular Content Update

You should be updating your fan page with fresh content with an aim to do maximum interaction with your fans on your Facebook. It should not be the case where you just keep on sharing contents from your website on Facebook page. You should adapt a personalized approach when writing content on your fan page. Ask questions, take views from your fans about a topic, and share interesting images and videos on your fan page.

6. Use Email Subscription List

If you are maintaining an opt-in list of users who are really interested in your website products and services, sending an invitation should help you some extra fans for your business page.

7. Contact Import facility

Why not invite your friends on Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail to connect you on Facebook. When they accept your friend request, you can ask them do a favor for you by clicking the like button placed against your fan page.

8. Welcome Landing page

Create a welcome landing page for your fan page with the intention to get more likes for your fan page. So your ‘welcome’ landing page should motive new visitors to like your fan page. You should be showing your ‘welcome’ landing page to all users who are not fan of your Facebook page.

9. Being More Active On Facebook

You can do lots of activities on Facebook that should promote your fan page even further. These activities can be in the form of being active on other popular Facebook pages, join popular groups, be part of contests on Facebook, write on others wall etc.

10. Use Facebook Ads

You can get some quick fans for your Facebook page by using the advertising option available on Facebook. You should be very targeted when using Facebook advertising.

I have seen these strategies really working for lots of websites when they were looking at ways to improve their fan base on Facebook. So I would suggest trying these techniques and if you feel I missed a killer fan page technique, please share in the comments section below.

A Note by Sushant: I am SURE you enjoyed reading this post written by Vikas. To make it more beneficial for YOU, I have thought to share something really great this time related to Facebook. You will simply LIKE it…But for that, you need to subscribe to my newsletter. So make sure you do it right now because the freebie will be going out tomorrow to all my newsletter subscribers ONLY.

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Article Written By Vikas Rawat

Vikas has been working as freelance writer for Seobricks.com, a search engine optimization consultant company, serving professional seo, link building and social bookmarking services in India, US, UK and Canada to its clients.

Vikas Rawat has written 1 superb article(s) on this blog

This is a guest post by Matt Krautstrunk from ResourceNation.

Facebook recently announced an enhancement to their core tagging system that allows Facebook photos to be tagged with company pages. Assuming your blog has a Facebook presence this could mean a number of things for both your blog, and Facebook.

This feature was rolled out recently, and incorporates the ability to tag your blog’s Facebook page on people’s pictures. Effectively minimizing the gap between product pages and people pages; and in some regards business pages are now more powerful than personal pages.

They allow the ability to add HTML coding, voting and a myriad of applications. So for instance, if you want to promote your services on similar Facebook groups and other pages, you can simply post pictures and tag related items to your blog Facebook page. This may not seem like a huge deal; however this feature will either end one of two ways.

It may open the door to spammers and devalue the Facebook like, or serve as a robust segmenting tool for marketers.

Value of the Like

Marketers have talked about how valuable the LIKE is. According to a Chompon study, a Facebook like is worth about $8 per like to businesses, in terms of gross revenue per action. Facebook Likes are a hot commodity, and this tagging feature may devalue and dilute the importance of Facebook pages for businesses and blogs.

Ideally Facebook wants to see people tagging relevant items and correlating them with product pages. For instance, say there is a picture of a Lotus automobile on Facebook, that picture can be tagged to the Lotus Facebook page and visible to everyone who views Lotus’s picture. However, I don’t foresee this to being the case. This opens the doors for a whole new method of exposure for “blackhat social media.” They will now be striving to get more people to tag their business on personal photos. I can already see promotions “tag a photo of us and receive 25% off.”

How will you promote your blog or business? Are you going to encourage your friends to tag images with related pictures to your businesses page? Will this tag system really increase the frequency of likes that a Facebook Page receives?

The future of Facebook remains in the balance, but many bloggers have leverage Facebook and Twitter to improve search rankings and exposure.

Facebook will use any tagged photo that a user says is visible to everyone, and that image will appear on a brand’s page. Does this mean that your blog’s Facebook page could be tagged 100 times with pictures of a Shih Tzu?… Maybe, but that is risk you must take with you Facebook Page now.

Advertising

From an advertising standpoint, this could be huge for small and local businesses. Integrating Facebook ads with the photo tag system would help users discover relevant Pages that they would be interested in, just by combing their friend’s pictures. If Facebook incorporates their photo tag signal into their advertising model it might give a more comprehensive segmenting tool for advertisers. Potentially allowing marketers to only place ads in front of people who have tagged them on Facebook.

We don’t know Facebook’s future plans for this photo tag system. From a blogging standpoint, I know how important Facebook is to engaging and sharing content. Getting more likes means that you are driving more traffic to your blog.  Ultimately increasing search engine presence and the money you are making from blogging.

Are you scared that people will stop liking product pages because they get are getting spammed? Or do you think the Facebook like is on the uptick, and is becoming a more flexible and integrated application for sharing?

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Article Written By Matt Krautstrunk

Hi, I'm Matt Krautstrunk from Resource Nation which is an online resource that provides expert advise for small business postage meters purchasing decisions.

Matt Krautstrunk has written 1 superb article(s) on this blog