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Comments are one of the many metrics used to measure the success of a blog. If your blog isn’t getting any comments, you’re probably not doing too well.

Here are 5 reasons nobody is commenting on your blog.

You’re playing it safe – If you never take a side on an issue or stir up any sort of debate, people won’t have a reason to leave a comment. You need to appeal to your readers’ emotions so they’ll get fired up and want to share their thoughts on the topic at hand.

You’re not asking for comments — It’s simple, but effective. Ask your readers to leave a comment. Treat it like a call to action. When you ask someone to do something, they’re likelier to do it.

You do a poor job moderating comments – Why would anyone leave a comment if you take forever to approve comments or if your comment section is riddled with spam? You have to be an active moderator if you want to give people a good reason to interact in the replies.

You make it too hard to comment — The harder it is to leave a comment, the fewer comments you’ll get. If you require the reader to register for an account before he can comment, you’re going to miss out on a lot of potential comments. Also, if you require the reader to complete a CAPTCHA before their comment can be approved, you could lose more comments because sometimes those images are just too hard to understand.

You’re not getting any traffic — We conclude with what’s probably the most obvious reason you’re not getting any blog comments, because you’re also not getting any traffic! Just because you have a blog and post great content doesn’t mean that readers will automatically come. You have to take the time to promote your posts effectively. Spread them to your audience using Facebook, Twitter, blog carnivals, emails, and other tactics.

What are some of the other reasons blogs don’t get comments? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

Last week, I talked about how SEO is meaningless if your website isn’t getting conversions. I mentioned that one of the most important things you can do to get more conversions is to have a strong call to action. Today, I want to offer you tips for creating better call to actions, helping you get more sales, sign-ups and customers.

Know the purpose of the page — Each page on your website needs to have a clear purpose. Some pages may be designed to get the customer to inquire for more information about your products or services; others may try to close the sale right there on the spot. Know the purpose of the page, and craft your call to action accordingly.

Put a call to action on every page — Every page on your website needs to have a call to action. You never know how people are going to arrive on your website or what path they’ll take once they’re there. By placing a strong call to action on each page of your website, you make certain that visitors are being driven to conversion no matter where they are, giving them fewer options for leaving your website without taking action.

Place a call to action above the fold — Web users spend 80% of their browsing time looking at information above the fold of the page (the part of the page that displays without scrolling down). That’s why it’s so important that you put your call to action above the fold, so that visitors see it the moment they land on your page.

Make your call to actions more visually appealing — Add a little pop to your call to action by transforming it from basic text into a graphic. You can make your call to action a button, a banner, a contact form, or anything else that will stand out and grab the visitor’s attention.

Use words that create a sense of urgency — You’ve seen those infomercials where they encourage viewers to call within the next few minutes to take advantage of a special offer. There’s a reason for this. Smart marketers understand that customers won’t take action unless you make them feel like they need to take action now. If your call to action doesn’t create a sense of urgency, the customer will put it off until tomorrow…or the day after that…or never. Use words like today, now, or limited time only to encourage customers to take action now.

Include a call to action in every screen view — By repeating your call to action once every screen view, you ensure that no matter where the visitor is on the page, they’re being encouraged to take action. This is especially important for long pages with lots of copy and graphics.

What’s your best tip for creating a call to action that gets results? Share it by leaving a comment below.

Looking to get more from Twitter? You don’t have to spend a lot of time on Twitter to get positive results for your business. Here are 5 simple things you should do every day on Twitter.

1. Read through your feed — You’re never going to be able to keep track of everything that everyone you’re following Tweets. Twitter is going 24/7, nonstop, so that’s impossible. But you should spend a few minutes scanning through your timeline to see if there’s anything interesting you can respond to.

2. ReTweet something interesting — ReTweets make the Twitter world go round. ReTweeting is a good way to share interesting content with your followers without actually having to think of anything new on your own. It’s also a good way to engage the person you’re ReTweeting. They’ll see it, and you may be able to have a conversation with them to start building that relationship.

3. Interact with your followers — Social media is all about interaction. If you’re not interacting with your followers on Twitter, what are you doing? To generate sales and build customer loyalty, you need to build relationships, and you can’t build a relationship with somebody if you never interact with them. Spend a little time each day starting and joining in meaningful conversations.

4. Try a little promoting — There’s nothing wrong with self-promotion on Twitter, in moderation. Each day, you can do a small bit of promoting. Maybe, you can drop a link to a recent post on your blog, or you could let your followers know about a special deal you have going on right now. The key is to pick your spots carefully for promoting your company. Nobody wants their stream to be clogged with ads 24/7.

5. Check the trending topics — The trending topics are the hot issues everyone is talking about at the moment. It’s always a good idea to keep an eye on the trending topics so you can jump in the conversation if there’s something of value you can add to it.

Are there any other daily Twitter tasks I overlooked? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

Working in and around the SEO industry for many years, I constantly hear clients (and SEO companies too) talking about rankings, rankings, rankings. That’s all anyone seems to care about. They want to increase their rankings, so they can get found by more customers and drive more website traffic.

These are all very important things, but guess what? They’re meaningless if one important piece of the puzzle is missing—the conversion. You can have top rankings for all of the most competitive keywords in your niche and your website can get thousands of visits from qualified customers, but if your website isn’t optimized for conversion, it’s all for nothing.

Results are the name of the game. An SEO campaign that doesn’t produce more leads and more sales is a failure. Period.

How to Improve Your Website’s Conversion Rate

All of this leads to one important question: How can you get more conversions on your website? There are many different things you can do, and I’ll go over a few of the tactics I feel are most effective below.

Have a defined purpose for each page – A well-organized website is a website that usually gets results. When each page has a specific purpose, the visitor is able to find what it is he or she is looking for more easily, leading to more conversions.

Eliminate anything on the page that doesn’t need to be there – Contrary to what you might believe, it’s okay to have blank spaces on a webpage. Whitespace is your friend. Whenever you cram your page with all sorts of text, graphics, videos, buttons, forms, etc., you overwhelm the visitor and pull their attention in too many different directions at once. The result? They take no action at all.

Make sure every page has a strong call to action – If you don’t tell your visitors what you want them to do, how can you expect them to do it? If you want to get their email address and personal information for lead generation, tell them that’s what you want (e.g. “Schedule a free consultation by completing the short contact form on this page.”). If you want them to place an order now, tell them to order now. Simple enough, right? You’d be surprised at how many websites get this wrong.

Study your analytics – Hopefully, you have some sort of analytics tool you use to monitor the activity on your website. Pay close attention to this data. Take note of how visitors are arriving to your website and what they’re doing when they’re on your site. Are there certain pages that have high exit rates? Do visitors seem to be lost on your site? Study your analytics and make the necessary adjustments.

What are some other tips you’d offer for improving website conversion rate? Share your thoughts by commenting below.

Blog posts are a great way to increase search engine traffic. There are many who think driving huge amounts of traffic to their blogs is quite difficult. However, this need not necessarily be the case as it actually depends upon certain factors like:

• The niche you have chosen
• Marketing and SEO techniques

It also depends on how dedicated a blogger you are. Every day, there are millions of searches on major search engines and if you want to dominate your niche, you will have to take advantage of this huge traffic. One way of doing this is to optimize your blog so that it not only attracts more traffic to your site but also helps you rank higher on the search engines. Given below are a few techniques that can help you in optimizing blog posts.

1. Choosing the right niche and domain
Once you have chosen a particular niche for your blog, make sure that the domain name is short and includes a couple of related keywords so it’s easy for visitors to remember when they leave your site.

2. Using Google Webmaster Tools
The Google Webmaster tools help you submit the map of your blogs to search engine crawlers. This will help you in getting your blogs indexed quickly and in a comprehensive manner. These tools actually provide information about the performance of your site so you can take steps to increase visibility.

3. Loading Speed
Google has begun using loading times as a factor to rank a site’s authority on search engines. Websites that perform better are accorded a higher ranking as they provide the visitor with a better experience. Using tested techniques such as using a dependable host, reducing your image sizes and caching plugins can aid in reducing the loading time for your blogs.

4. W3C Compliant
Poorly coded sites can prevent search engine crawlers from indexing your site effectively. This is precisely why your blog’s code should be W3C compliant. You can in fact use the W3C mark up validation to check for any errors. A few minor errors may be acceptable but if there are many, you may have to hire a developer to make the necessary corrections.

5. Increasing Backlinks via Guest Blog posts
Guest Blog Posting that are well written are one of the best ways of getting quality backlinks to your site especially with the recent updates to Google search algorithm (Panda). Guest Blogging helps your blog gain exposure and increase search engine traffic and gain backlinks.

Apart from the above discussed techniques, you can also use the following to optimize your blog posts.

• Avoid Black Hat SEO Techniques
• Web Directory Submissions
• Creating Original / Informative Content
• Update your Blogs Frequently
• Writing New Product Reviews
• Social Media Marketing

These techniques will help in optimizing your posts and will also help your blogs gain popularity and rank higher on the search engines.