Growing Your Social Media Following – Tumblr, Google Plus, Twitter and Pinterest Update

It’s been a while since I posted on this blog, last time I posted about social media I promised to post about how to grow a following on Tumblr, Twitter as well as Google plus so I am going to post about that today as well a little info about how I am doing on Pinterest. I have been very busy these past few months and have seen very good results for my main fitness blog since I started focusing on social media marketing. So let’s get this started, I am going to be catching you up to what I have been doing these past few months, what has been working and what I am going to do to improve my following.

How to grow Tumblr followers and views

 

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So the last time I posted about Tumblr my Tumblr blog was doing really well in terms of traffic, everything was on the up and up but soon after that the traffic went down again. I can only explain this by saying that maybe certain tags were bringing in traffic but since tumblr is constantly updated others started getting traffic for those same tags.

 

click to enlarge and see traffic stats

-          Tumblr blogs often do not rank very high on search engine results unless you are looking at the image results which are a totally different story. Tumblr ranks highly for the names of famous social media personalities and celebs, but usually when Tumblr is ranking on the search engines it’s a tag that’s ranking so the person with the most recently updated Tumblr or most shared/reblogged post for that tag which could be a particular celebs or social media personalities name gets the most traffic at that point until someone else is on the front page on that tag. This is why my traffic did not stay high for a long time because I was on the first page for a certain tag than my post was replaced by newer and more reblogged posts on the front page for that particular tag.

-          A good way to track which terms are bringing you the most traffic is to simply have a Google Analytics account for your Tumblr, insert the analytics code in your Tumblr. When you know which tag brings you the most traffic, you simply include that tag by posting more pics relevant to that tag so that your posts are always on the first page of that tag.

-          The reason normal image Tumblr posts do not often rank well in non-image searches is because there are no words in posts, people simply post images or images with quotes but the thing is Google can’t rank and image without knowing what the image is about. So what I usually do is to write a few relevant words under the posts to make sure it’s easier to rank my posts, even if it’s a picture quote I still write down the quote under the picture as a caption so that I may rank for that quote in the search results or so that my posts show up when people search for different things related to that particular quote.

-          If I post a video, I also write down a short description so that it ranks better both on Tumblr and in Google, for the same reason I wrote above for the images.

-          I also put many relevant tags or different variations of the keyword I am trying to rank the image, written post or video for.

-          I post different types of media like written quotes, old images with inspirational quotes or if you have great photoshop skills like gymandmotivation.tumblr.com you can create signature posts that everyone knows are from your blog through branding, so it’s a good idea to have your own style of blogging don’t just copy what others are doing.

-          You can post original images instead of always reblogging and then insert a link to your tumblr on the image so that people click back to your tumblr for some reason many people like clicking on images.

-          Don’t keep asking people to follow you that’s annoying. Just follow many blogs like yours and they often follow back, to make sure they notice you just like their posts, reblog some of them and also send them a message about something you noticed about them or their blog.

-          I have been posting 3 times a day queued to get posted throughout the day between 12pm and 12 am. So I post 3 times within a 12 hour window. Using this method my tumblr is growing at 10 – 15 followers a day, so my followers have been growing by between 300-400 a month. Now these are not impressive numbers buts its growth.

-          Oh and I almost forgot, there are many themes on tumblr try to play around with the code a little and personalize your theme. I took a simple and popular theme on tumblr and personalized it with my own colours and changed the background image to a plain white. Your blog needs to be unique so that people remember it and hopefully follow.

click to see personalized theme

Posting more often is said to grow your tumblr even faster because your posts will always be on the front of peoples dashboards giving them a better chance of being seen therefore a better chance for reblogs and likes, also if you are tagging properly posting more often will get you see in more places if you are using a variety of related tags. I have been posting 3 times per day and many times I queue posts weeks ahead so it’s pretty difficult to find relevant pictures and quotes that meet my standard that I can post more often than 3 times a day and schedule weeks ahead (I would have to schedule 100’s of posts and find 100’s of quotes which is a lot of work). People doing this have seen faster follower gains and more traffic than I am seeing only posting 3 times a day. So try to post like 10 times a day but queue the posts so you don’t spam people, you don’t want all your posts showing up at once in peoples dashboards.

Even though my Tumblr daily Traffic has dropped from my Jan Stats, however the time on site has improved and the pages per visit has increased meaning I have more pageviews  per visit than before and my daily followers have improved slightly. Also I am getting more regular asks than before which is good because the questions I answer are free content and they give me post ideas for my written blog which bring in good traffic. My Tumblr is Killin' It in Da Gym/ check it out, drop me a message if you like those are always welcome. Also as you can see from the title of my Tumblr I am a fitblr so choose a niche you like and blog about that, blogging about everything under the sun makes it difficult to gain followers unless you are a pretty girl, a YouTube celeb or a skinny pretty boy with a cool hairstyle with lots of fan girls.

How to grow twitter followers for free

 

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I am not twitter famous but I have figured out a way to get twitter followers who are interested in the same things I am interested in and are more likely to retweet and click on links that I share. In growing my twitter following I also wanted to connect with people I could actually form friendships with; I did not want to follow celebrities or celebrity wannabe’s. So at some point I was gaining like a hundred followers a day till I reached a follow limit when I had followed more than 2000 people. I will tell you how I was getting a 100 followers per day and the reason why I stopped this approach.

I would follow the hash tag #followforfollow or #followback or some variation of this and I would follow every one of those people. Then I would follow guys who are twitter promoters and get on follow trains basically following everyone who retweeted a certain tweet about people who follow back.  I got lots of followers this way but they were not good followers, because they were just kids wishing to be twitter famous, the problem with people obsessed with being twitter famous is that they copy others tweets, or they tweet crap and they unfollow people as soon as they have many followers making it seem like they are twitter famous when all they did was lie and say they were #followback.

My thoughts back when I was following all these people was that fitness is for everyone “who doesn’t want to get fit?” I thought. I was wrong I soon used http://who.unfollowed.me to find those who unfollowed me or who were not following me back after a while to unfollow all of those bastards.

My next tactic since I was into fitness was to use fitness hashtags to find relevant people to follow. I did that successfully using tags like #fitnessfollow, and #fitfam and #beastmode and various variations of those tags to follow different people interested in fitness. I was just following people because they were into fitness and many of them followed back and it was great but many did not follow back and here's why... Those #fitfam members with alot of followers already stop following back after a while so they get a twitter famous mentality and some start off following back but as soon as they reach like 2000 followers they unfollow people and adopt the loser twitter famous mentality. I did the same to those fitfam fame seeking bastards that I did to the #followback liars I unfollowed their asses. There is a lot of talk about how great the #fitfam is but I have found that only a few are genuine and willing to have real interaction others are there merely to get attention by showing off their bodies and getting attention and compliments.

What I learned from the above experience was to check the persons follow to followback ratio before you follow them if they have too many followers and they are only following back a few, do not follow that person.

To get better followers follow those who follow people who follow you with the same interests. Follow new people who like the same things you do and tweet them whenever you see a tweet you can reply to, retweet tweets you like and favourite tweets from others it gets them to notice you and you can build a twitter relationship from there.

Another tip is to follow famous twitter accounts that are not personal such as accounts like she want the D or a gym motivation twitter accounts in the fitness niche then follow most people who are following them people they are more likely to be people just like you but make sure to check the things I pointed out above to make sure they are not bastards like the rest of the twitter famous wannabe’s.

If you liked my twitter advice make sure you tweet this post and tweet something to me @ZuLuMuScLE I would like to get to know more people.

How grow Google plus followers and get more traffic to your blog from Google plus

 

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Google plus has become my favourite social network this year, I did not understand it much last year but I have grown to love it. I have made a lot of new friends there who I interact with on a regular bases and a lot of people and bloggers have come to know my fitness blog www.zulumuscle.com because of G+. I have had people pitch ideas at me and I have gotten guest posting opportunities to other blog and to my blog through Google plus. It’s a great place for both professional and social relationships.

It is very easy to get more followers for Google plus, all you have to do is find communities on Google plus that are in line with your interests and in my case that is fitness communities. In those fitness communities you will find thousands of people so in order to get them to add you to their circles you have to be a contributor to those communities by posting there regularly, now I am not just talking about posting your own stuff I mean engaging with people there asking questions, answering question, posting helpful link and pictures quotes and relevant videos.

Then as soon as you are a regular and people in those communities recognize you because of your daily helpful posts you will get some who add you to their circle, you can be a good person and add them back (remember you are no celeb), and for others you will need to make the first move and add them and most of them will add you back.

Also just to make sure the chance of them adding you back is high check they circles to see if they are followed by more people than they follow back, if they have less people in their circles than they are in other people’s circles it is unlikely they will follow you back unless you share really good content. Follow as many people as possible and post to your goggle plus daily.

Getting more traffic from Google plus

To get many views to your blog posts just share your posts on all relevant communities when you write them and add a description of what you talk about in the post and why you wrote it, it’s a community so you have to encourage discussion not just drop a link there. Make sure you engage with the community not just drop a link every time you post because your post won’t get many views then. You have to form relationships with people in the Google plus communities so they want to share your stuff because you are their friend and provide helpful information.

Post regularly in communities by sharing all kinds of stuff not just your blog posts; share other google plus users posts as well so that they can share your stuff with their followers if they like it. I always find that I have very few people in common with my followers so if they share my posts to their circle another set of eyes views my post.

Sharing on many related communities will get you traffic and it will give you 1+’s which will make sure your post ranks highly in search engines especially in the results of people in your circles and their circles if they 1+’d your post. SO there are so many benefits to using Google plus and following many people, joining all relevant communities and sharing your posts and other people posts on these communities and forming relationships which all helps you grow your following and 1 pluses and traffic.

Growing Pinterest followers and traffic from Pinterest

 

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I do not have many followers on Pinterest but they are growing slowly and they are are starting to share my pins more regularly. I am going to post a few observations I made while using Pinterest.

Just like the other social networks you have to find a relevant nice to post to and then you have to follow tags in that niche to find people to follow so I would search for gym motivation in Pinterest and find people sharing gym motivation then like their post and repin a few of their pins then I would follow all their fitness related pins, I have found that most people follow back on Pinterest. The only people who don’t follow back are the 100 automatically followed pinners I followed when I first got Pinterest. From the people that I purposefully followed I would say more than 90% have followed back and were it not for my limited time I would put more time into Pinterest and find more like minded people on Pinterest.

I have found that pinning images regularly throughout the day gets me a lot of repins and likes and has increased clicks to my fitness blog even though I post pictures mostly from my Tumblr dashboard from other blogs.

You should add a pin button to your bookmarks bar so that whichever site you are on you can pin images whether or not that site has pin buttons. When you pin posts that have been pinned by others, it usually shows others who have pinned that picture so it’s a good idea to follow those people.

Make sure you don’t put everything together so have different pin boards for different categories for example since I am a fitness blogger I have boards dedicated to female fitness, gym motivation, ripped celebs, bodyweight training, abs workouts etc. Another good idea is to have a cool image as the cover for each board. Income diary wrote some good posts on getting pinterest traffic and having personalised pin board covers with written titles http://www.incomediary.com/the-beginners-guide-to-seeing-massive-pinterest-traffic.

So that is it for now, as I learn more I will share more on this blog. It’s pretty difficult to be on so many different social networks at the same time and be able to grow your following and traffic from each of them that’s why each month I focus my attention on two social networks more than the others that is Google Plus and Tumblr (recently) as they give me some good traffic which sticks around on my blog for longer. I am sure with more work Pinterest can be a gold mine just as was revealed in the income diary post I shared above. I do not blog regularly on this blog but that is I have not had time between school and my fitness blog, gym and social media marketing. What I can tell you is since I have started focussing on G+ and Tumblr my fitness blog traffic has grown from like 150-200 visitors a day to 750-1000 visitors a day, now that traffic is not the best in the world but it’s a big growth in traffic, also note that those are just visitors so the page views are even more than that.

Thanks for reading this far, this was a long post (over 3000 words), please share this post if you liked it and add me to your google plus circles and say hi.

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Getting More Followers, Visitors, Reblogs, and Likes on Tumblr

Getting more Tumblr Reblogs and likes from my tumblr dashboard

Tumblr is a very popular blogging and social media platform, if you are looking to start a blog this is a great platform in terms of how your content gets shared by others. You could also use Tumblr  as a picture blog that links to your main written blog because people on Tumblr like short content as opposed to 1000 word posts. If you are planning to start a Tumblr blog or already have one but want to increase your followers and the hits you get each day then continue reading this post as I share some of the stuff I learnt since joining Tumblr about 9 months ago.

How to Get More Tumblr Followers

• To get followers on Tumblr you need to get   people to see your stuff first. How do you make people see your stuff? Well first you have to make it interesting, if it is interesting people will share it and with a social/blogging network like Tumblr your blog could go viral.

• Post stuff that is unique, do not just reblog other people, if you want to grow your number of followers you should post mostly stuff that you created or you found, stuff that you think no one else has posted on Tumblr yet. You want to be the go to person not the copycat.

• Tag your pictures with the write keywords for your target market, go to google type in the first few words of the terms you want to rank for, use the other related searches that show up on google in your tags to get more people. For example if you are a fitspo, people on google now search for terms like gym motivation tumblr instead of just gym motivation so use that as one of your tags.

• Do not just post pictures; write something related to the picture as a caption. Write down a quote that you think goes well with the picture. It’s not enough having a picture having a quote written on it, the search engine can’t read that. Most people do not write stuff underneath their pictures that is why you do not find a lot of tumble blogs ranking well in google for non picture searches. I managed to rank my Tumblr blog well on the first page of google for my target keywords because I give all my pictures written titles or captions that are quotes or little words of wisdom.

• Schedule your posts so that you posts often per day and your posts are spread out throughout the day so that you do not spam people’s dashboards. I usually only post 2 to 3 posts per day spread evenly throughout the day, Posting more would have given me more followers but I am unable to do that right now as I do not have the time and I do not want to simply reblog other peoples post’s.

• Follow other tumblr blogs and read their about me pages and give a well thought out compliment to the blogger or just start a conversation. Then like their stuff and reblog some of their stuff so that they take notice, this will lead to that person checking out your Tumblr and reblogging, liking or even following you.

• When you reblog other people’s stuff be sure to write something as a caption to make it unique, possibly a caption related to the pic or a funny comment, Tumblr peeps love a sense of humor.

• Reply to those who ask you stuff except maybe those annoying anons who have nothing better to do than ask rubbish.

Screenshot of my Tumblr Google Analytics, showing growing traffic to my Tumblr  from AUG 2012 - JAN  2013
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• I prefer a theme with a side bar, not the cluttered theme with pictures everywhere. A simple theme with a few pictures per page does the job. In your side bar place a picture of your or your interests creates a good first impression, and if the people are interested in getting to know you further make sure you have an “about me” page where you share some interesting things about yourself. You can modify and personalise a theme to look unique by messing about with the code. I personally just googled colour codes and I changed my common theme to a unique one. Check out my blog to see for yourself http://aesthetic8packabsworkoutprogram.tumblr.com/ , its nothing spectacular but it serves its function.

• If you are good with photoshop even better for you because you could create beautiful images and be as successful as http://gymandmotivation.tumblr.com/. That blog has a great design and a huge following which grows every day.

• Lastly do not give up, I was stuck on 70 followers for a while about 6 months ago till I started doing the things I have been telling you about, now my Tumblr is growing at about  10 -15 followers a day. I know that is not a big number but it’s something, its shows growth. 

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Ways to Use Tumblr – How to Increase Visitors on Tumblr

Tumblr is a blogging/social network on the rise. It owes its popularity to the fact that it acts as both a blogging platform and also like a social network. Short image posts are what works best on Tumblr, but   text based post work as well especially if the text is made into an image or printing on top of an inspiration background. Tumblr has a very viral nature and if people love your stuff they reblog it and your message spreads like a wildfire and followers follow suit.

Get traffic, followers and monetize your Tumblr

There are lots of ways in which you can use Tumblr, such as using it as a mini-blog to increase your blog network and get your message across to a different audience.  You can use Tumblr best if you are an image based blogger, to spread your photography around the web for more people to see with a link back from you the original source. With enough followers and traffic you can monetize your Tumblr blog so that you make some coffee money while social networking.

How to Grow Traffic and followers on Tumblr

First I will tell you how I began using Tumblr, I was trying to do some back-linking by creating little web 2.0 satellite sites. I posted only one article at the time which was a long text article (not knowing that the Tumblr audience favoured image posts) with a link pointing to my fitness blog. I had no idea of the viral nature of Tumblr’s reblog function. I later on posted a more image based post with some text, Upon check my Tumblr a few months later I realised that my post had been shared and that my links in the post were still intact in the other people’s Tumblr’s, I also realised I had gotten followers.

From then on I saw the value of Tumblr to promote my non-Tumblr fitness blog. I decided I would be more active on Tumblr. At first I would post once or twice every week and would notice that every time I posted I would get more followers, I also realised that not all posts got reblogged the same, some were more popular than others. In fitness blogs the inspiration quote on an inspirational background was the most popular amongst fitblr (which are fitness bloggers in Tumblr language), also images of aesthetically muscled guys and fit hot babes were a hit. Once you get to a certain number of followers on Tumblr they reblog everything you post (I am yet to reach that stage, I just recently started working on increasing my efforts on Tumblr).   

I realised that the most reblogged and followed Tumblr’s posted very often more than 5 times a day sometimes, they also follow a lot of other people (some people follow you, if you follow them), popular Tumblr blogs also like a lot of other peoples posts and comment on other peoples Tumblrs. It is also important that you reply to messages from your followers to build a great community environment.

Another way to build Tumblr traffic is to not focus all your efforts on activities on Tumblr alone, try to target search engine traffic and rank for your key word. You can do this by mixing the types of posts you make from images, to text to video and quotes. (If a lot of people ask you question that could be a lot of helpful content when you are having question and answer sessions).

Try link building outside Tumblr and doing article marketing to promote yourself where you share your Tumblr in your author bio box. Going back to your onsite work, you should have static pages like your about me where you can write long text descriptions to help people know where you are coming from and why you do what you do, also you can make other static pages where your non-image content can be shared. Make sure it’s long, descriptive and well optimized for search engines then you could build backlinks pointing to those static pages. If they rise in the search engines, more people will be exposed to your blog. Your static pages could include links to your other social networks that you use and your main blog.    

Ways to Monetise Tumblr

Tumblr is tricky to monetise, and let me tell you why, it is more of a social place so people might not like to have ads show when they visit your Tumblr, it could chase away visitors or followers, and secondlyfollowers hardly ever need to visit your blog after they follow you because Tumble shows all updates to blogs you follow in a dashboard format which does not show blog format, but only the post itself. A way to make followers click so they actually go to your Tumblr would be to post image based pictures in sets with post describing the images so that followers would have to click to view the whole thing.

One of the most popular ways to monetise Tumblr is using ad networks like Google Adsense,  if you use Google adsense it would serve you well to read some of the suggestions I made above so you can get more search engine traffic as its more targeted traffic then traffic from within Tumblr.  If you are a text based Tumblr you could use ad networks like infolinks to advertise. There are a lot of adsense alternatives you can find if cannot get approved for Adsense such as Bidvertiser, Exit Junction, Chitika, Clicksor, I am not sure if they cater for Tumblr blogs but they are worth a try.

Also you could be an affiliate for a Clickbank product if you are into affiliate marketing, make sure your Tumblr does not look made for that affiliate product though, that is frowned upon and may get your Tumblr deleted. You could have a reviews of products and have some affiliate links (not every post though, but maybe one of your static pages) or banners on your side bars.

You could also sell your own services on Tumblr, especially if you become a Tumblr pro-blogger. You could sell your own product on Tumblr to your loyal and growing followers.

That is all for now, I will update this post should I acquire more information in the near future, good luck in your blogging endeavours, I hope I have been helpful.

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Increasing nudity in social media

I am fascinated by how people behave and what drives them to behave in certain ways. I like reading and watching series and documentaries based on past events and era’s, for example it is interesting watching series like Spartacus which are sexually explicit and extremely violent, depicting Rome at the height of its power. It is evident that ancient people were very open about sexuality, and nudity was something people were not ashamed of.

You've got to love motor sports and it's babes. That chick is nude in clothes.

Somewhere in between then and now someone had this brilliant idea that nudity was not acceptable and that people should be self conscious and covered up and it worked. Maybe it was because of religion and its rise to power throughout the world, it turned acts of sexuality into sins and people who went against it would be named and shamed.  Ancient statues showing nudity and even paintings depicting sexual acts where common in the past and would even be put in public places, but the world has changed now, people have changed their way of thinking but have they really?

This takes me to the real topic at hand, with the rise of social media it seems like people are going back to their ancient ways following the footsteps of their ancestors. When you think about it how many times have you seen people posting inappropriate pictures on Facebook without shame, girls clad in scanty outfits posing in questionable poses? How many people have Tumblr blogs that are about sex and how many more people have tumblr blogs made for the sole purpose of exposing themselves to the public? Some are not ashamed and even show their faces, some still afraid that someone they know will find out so they hide their identity.

Most of these people mostly girls also chat on webcams with fans and those who are smart enough make a living from exposing themselves. They start personal blogs which are monetised or they start membership sites where you have to join to see their explicit content. The less technically gifted girls earn most of their money using donations from their fans and getting gifts from fans.

It is not only Facebook and Tumblr but Twitter is also sort of like a porn site, with things like titty Tuesday, wet Wednesday,  twitter after dark, ass Wednesday, thong Thursday, thongless Thursday and many more twitter hash tags used to encourage nudity and sexuality.

Social networks give otherwise normal people a chance to get attention, be it sexual or what-ever else, it give couple and other likeminded couples a chance to find each other and explore their fantasies. You would think that the world is a conservative place but it really is not, many people are more wild then you would imagine, you never know that conservative next door neighbour of yours might be one of those people with one of these adventurous accounts posting anonymous pictures with their face covered up, some even revealing their face which is even more risky.

Even people is respectable jobs are into this exposure, I once watched an episode (I don’t remember if it was Oprah or another daytime show) where this teacher was fired from her teaching job because she had nude pictures online. Even though she was not inappropriate with the kids, I think many parents felt uncomfortable with her teaching their kids.

I do not know whether it’s the celebrities who have encouraged nudity and sexuality in the past few years with things like sex tapes and deliberate public nudity but this kind of behaviour is on the rise on social networks and everyone is doing it I mean from teenagers to old married couples. I am not against it in fact I feel that it provides and alternative for the over photo-shopped images you find on pro porn sites, the amateurs are doing it themselves now. 

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Lessons I have learnt in my first few months blogging

I have been blogging for almost 5 months now, and there is a lot of information I have picked up during this period. I have read hundreds of articles on blogging. They range from social media, SEO, monetising creating back-links to content creation.

INFORMATION OVER LOAD - Finding someone to listen to

What I have noticed is that there is so much information on blogging out there, most of the time everyone says the same thing, there are no fresh ideas but other times there are bloggers out there who go out of their ways to show that they know what they are talking about and actually prove that their back-linking strategies work and that you can still have a successful blog in this day and age. There are successful 6 & 7 figure bloggers out there who share what others make you pay for free. It is hard to sift through all the garbage on the internet and find these guys but once you do, you never really need to listen to anyone else. There are guys out there that are supposed to teach you how to make money online and have a successful blog when they have no idea what they are talking about, when they themselves do not make any money and hardly have any real traffic and no authority what so ever.

image by graur codrin

I have learnt that you need to blog about something you know and are passionate about so that you share quality content with your readers, I was lucky enough to be a fitness junkie when I started my first fitness blog so it was not difficult for me to choose a niche that I wanted to appeal to, it was not difficult to post legit proven content because I was living it. I did not need to make up stuff and have to do research all the time because I had knowledge and experience with my topic. When I created this blog Genie Rising I wanted to post about other random things that interest me that were not just fitness, I did not have a niche in mind and I still don’t and that is fine with me to be general.

PLANNING AHEAD - Growth strategy

I have learnt that is it good to plan ahead, set goals for the growth of your blog so that you know what you are doing now and why you are doing it. When I started blogging I used to post every other day, which would result in 3 posts per week and about 12 posts a month. I felt like that was the right move but then I read to improve in search engine rankings and Alexa rankings I had to posts as often as possible, because in the blogging world it is believed that content is king. I then increased the number of posts per week to 5 and it did bring me results, exponential growth in fact my fitness blog moved from a page rank of 0 to 3.

Content creation was always my main kind of strategy for growing my blog with blog commenting here and there. I realised that I was listening to the wrong kind of advice from guys who were not in the same niche as me, posting once or twice everyday was their advice for the fastest growth and that really works but it is really difficult considering the fact that I am a one man team. When I looked at top fitness blogs they did not post that much on their blogs and yet they were getting lots of traffic from search engines and other places as well.

Quality vs Quantity

The key in the fitness world was quality more than quantity because unlike other niches, the content was more evergreen than stuff sites about blogging had to post because the internet is ever changing but working out and keeping fit does not change much. I realised that I was on the right track when I was posting just 12 posts a month. I have since decided that for my main blog I will post as much as possible but only if the article is great quality and I have decided to make my posts long since that helps with rankings. So now I put a lot more detail in my posts, I now make my posts a minimum of 400 words unless it is a video post or an update on something but preferably I will post articles of over 600 words, I have already implemented this on my fitness blog and the past few post have been averaging over 800 words.

I like to mix in list posts, motivational post and highly informational posts with the occasional post that is sort of like a case-study or experiment to show that the workouts I’m doing work. I have found the combination to be successful in bringing in different sorts of traffic.

THE HARD TIMES

I noticed that my fitness blog took a little hit in the recent update because I really was not doing enough back-linking and I managed to bounce back. I started creating a lot of strong back-links and link wheels through satellite site. I was submitting unique articles to ezine articles, Squidoo, Hubpages, made satellite sites on blogger, Tumblr and it was proving effective. A couple people used my ezine articles and I got linked to by others, everything was going great till one day on the 12 of april I lost 75% of my traffic and I could not find my blog anywhere on search engines. I was ranking on the first page for many keywords I was targeting and I had a lot of my posts on the second and third page of Google before the 12^th, but it was all gone in 1 day.

I was worried and I’m still worried about what was happening, I did not know what was happening. I Google to see if anyone has ever had the same happen to them and what they did to combat this problem, I found out about the Google dance, apparently if you suddenly start a back-linking campaign which is what I was doing your site does the Google dance because Google does not know where to put your site, it may take anything from a few days to a couple of weeks for your site to go back to normal and people say that they often see an improvement in their ranking after the dance is over.

I had just gotten adsense and was starting to make some money when this happened to me, I did not have too many ads above the fold so I did not think that I was affected by the update relating to too many ads above the fold.

The past couple of weeks have been very depressing for me; I even lost inspiration to write posts for a couple days. I enjoy blogging and find it to be addictive and I am statistics obsessed which is why I have been depressed lately because I was making such good progress. I have decided that I am going to push on and that now is not the time to give up, I have to learn from my mistakes and continue to use all of the knowledge I pick up and eventually my blog will have multiple steams of traffic not only Google traffic.

I have that I will create back-links every month but this time my link building will be more spread out, I will continue to only use white-hat tactics so that I do not get in trouble. I hope to continue blogging and hope that my hard work pays off in the end. Every blogger experiences little speed bumps on the road and maybe it’s these little hurdles that make the difference between the successful bloggers who are killing it online and those that give up before their hard work pays off.

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How the recent google update has affected my blogs

The recent update (last week) has gotten rid of some link networks and many people who used link networks have been affected, I have not used any link networks since I cannot afford them yet, i prefer to spend money made from blogging to get more blog related paid products.

My other site which was starting to get some decent traffic was affected, before the update I was getting regular clicks and just as I joined click bank affiliates my traffic took a hit. This could have been because I did not have enough back links yet, I really have not been creating enough back links to get google trust. I could have done more in terms of blog commenting, guest blogging and submitting to article directories but I was still focusing on content creation on my other blog. My strategy seemed to be working until the update but I feel I will be back to where I was in terms of traffic in a week or so.

And as back up I have started to create content for ezine articles and I have began creating satellite sites to earn extra from affiliate sales and direct traffic to my site, this is already paying off, so I expect to be doing even better then I was before the update.

It is actually a good thing that the update came now, it has thought me to link build some more and forced me to start now and do a bit each day that will make sure my main blog grows exponentially in the next few months. I am certainly not the lazy type and I like creating new content especially in the fitness niche as I am passionate about working out and helping others gain the muscle they want.

I know that there are many more google updates coming, and I want to make my blogs so that they are not negatively affected by google updates. Pat from smart passive income made some very valid points in his lastest update. There has been talk of google taking social media into account to rank sites, that will not do me any good since I am not active yet in social media but I want to focus on content creation and building links from now onwards.

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Social Media Exponential Growth

I remember at the beginning of 2009 I did not know what Facebook was, only a few people at my school had it and they had each other as friends, I was still using another social network called Mxit back then and I was not even that keen of social media then. I don't know how I joined Facebook or why I joined Facebook but I remember it was around April 2009, by December everyone I knew had it and it was Facebook status galore. People were sharing everything from sad stuff, to upcoming parties and relationship mumbo jumbo.

Some people had so many friends I was sure they could not have known so many people, people would invite you and you would accept but they would never say a word to you. I would have people from school or someone from my neighbourhood who would talk to me on Facebook but never in real life, I found that weird. You had people constantly changing their relationship statuses. People were becoming addicted in the masses.

Since then almost every major brand has a Facebook page, we have seen a shift from Facebook groups being popular to know, Facebook fan pages being the preferred method to interact with fans or customers. Facebook has become the leading marketing tool as well as twitter and the new comer Google+.

I have seen the founders of Facebook move faster up the rich list than other people especially in the past couple of years. There are always changes happening with Facebook, before you are even used to a recent change another is being made.

As for twitter I did not like it initially I am still not sure I like it, I have heard people who use it for personal use say its the new in thing and facebook is so last year(I don't think so!), the fact that you are limited to a certain number of characters and that people update their status regularly is almost irritating. There are alot of weird non human profiles which are shady as well, and its like a home made porn site. Those very same characteristics apparently make it good for social media marketing which is why I joined and not for personal reasons.

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