JUMP START Blog and Online Community

If you’ve already made content marketing a part of your overall strategy, great!  If you’ve decided to make content marketing the majority of your overall strategy, even better.  You are steps ahead of many other business owners. 

The next step you should take is to gain some insight into what your audience likes, what they dislike, and what they are searching for on a regular basis.  You should also understand that there is so much more to content marketing that writing and posting articles on your blog. 

We’ve all heard the saying, “if you build it, they will come,” and it’s safe to say that a lot of businesses owners and marketers rely on this theory as it relates to their business and website.  Unfortunately, though, that approach isn’t going to get you very far in the world of web traffic and blogging. 

There are a number of factors that affect your website traffic and the visibility of your blog posts.  If you’re posting regularly but still failing to see an increase in traffic, consider the following traffic influencers:

Traffic is essential to a website's success, whether it is a stand-alone ecommerce store or a complement to brick-and-mortar operations.  Web traffic creates exposure for your brand and in many cases, it also drives revenue. 

The elusive piece of this puzzle, however, is how you should go about attracting visitors to your site. There are countless ways to do this, some of which are not always ethical or productive. So before you purchase website traffic or consider any other similar desperate measures, give these tried-and-true methods a try:

I talk to a lot of marketers each week, and most of them have at least one thing in common: they're frustrated because they have to use a TON of tools to complete their day-to-day marketing responsibilities.

There are a zillion third-party tools on the market for email marketing, social media, landing pages, forms, analytics, reporting, customer relationship management, ecommerce and many others. And if you're like most other modern marketers, you have a hard time keeping up with the updates, user interfaces, training and login information for all of those disparate tools.

Often, smaller businesses try to save money by cobbling together low-cost tools and painfully trying hit-or-miss ways to integrate them together, even if they're not designed to work with one another. Sometimes it works and sometimes results are less than desirable.

In my "Choosing a Web Content Management System" ebook, which is available on Amazon, I talk about common mistakes that people make when choosing and implementing a new content management system such as Sharepoint, Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal or Hubspot.

By popular demand, I'm including the first five items in my Top 10 CMS Mistakes list below. Are you doing any of these?

Wishing you a happy Valentine's Day filled with love and chocolate (lots of chocolate!).

Want to attract high-quality traffic that converts? Follow these five steps and you'll be seeing more traffic and higher conversions in no time. Remember that consistency and frequency are KEY!

Our biweekly "Ask Flair!" Q&A sessions allow you to ask members of the Flair team questions about online marketing in a no-pressure, live group environment. Lisa Kirschner, Flair's founder and managing director, was the moderator for today's session.

Is your head spinning from all of the changes in SEO during the last few years? Not sure if local search is still important and how to implement it successfully?

Here's a great article by Megan Totka about how to build your mailing list: