tools for bloggers

My dear readers,

A lot of you ask me how you can increase the number of views, or what I have done to put my blog together, and I usually respond with one answer: value. Value, value, value. Really, if you deliver tons of value, you will get traction eventually. There are a few other things that matter:

  • Do a lot. If you make a lotta videos, a lotta posts, write tons of books, send emails every day and do a lot for your blog, eventually, it will gain traction. That is just what it is. Elon Musk commonly says that if you put more hours a week in your company than your competitors, you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.
  • Be consistent. If you publish posts randomly, you can’t expect an audience to stick with you. See I want to publish every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (and a newsletter every other Saturday). Try to stick to a schedule and do not fail.
  • Accept delayed gratification.  If you do something for one year and you’re already frustrated over a small community, this ain’t the spot for you. You need to aim at something like 4 years and do a lot + be consistent. Then you can probably dream of having an audience following you.

OK but give us some technical stuff Ben… What tools can we use? OK, let me provide you with two strong things that you can easily apply that take your site to a new level.

TOOL #1

I would start with a free SEO analysis of your site, through http://agency.matthewwoodward.co.uk/. You can click on “Free SEO analysis”:

SEO tools button
It will analyze your site and give you a detail report of what to do. When I first used this, it was mind blowing:

seo tool tools free

The best about this is that you can repeat the process many times; You can check your score, improve your site based on that the tool reports and check it again! I checked my own for about 15 times the first time around.

Matthew Woodward is in fact an expert on SEO and talks a lot about it on his blog. It is clearly a free, yet good way to start! If you want to take SEO further, I would look into this website, which provides really great SEO tools. If you want to read a book on SEO I would definitely read this book: SEO for Growth: The Ultimate Guide for Marketers, Web Designers & Entrepreneurs (Affiliate link).

TOOL #2

Step two is all about backlinks.

I recommend checking your competitors’ backlinks and turn them into your own. First, you need a backlink checker. Backlink Watch is my favorite because it is free but delivers a good amount of backlinks. So, start taking your competitors URLs one at a time. At the end, simply copy the back links and past them on an excel sheet with right click > paste special > text > ok.

Do this for every competitor of yours (if you do not know who your competitors are – you should – just type a single keyword on Google search and grab the first 5 websites).

Then, you want to filter out the best links. You short those with the best domain authority and Page PR. You can do this with moz.com/.

After that, simply create backlinks on the same websites that you’re link boiled down to. It may enough to do a comment, but sometimes it can be something more engaging as commenting on a forum or having a guest post (which sometimes is very hard to attain).

Other than SEO and backlinks, and it really boils down to stuff you probably know by now, such as creating partnerships with other bloggers, etc. It will work, just FOCUS (Follow One Course Until Success) and you will crush it eventually.

If you want to start a blog, I am putting together a step-by-step tutorial to do so.

Your biggest fan,

Ben