2. Visual content will only get bigger
If you aren’t taking your own photos yet it might be time to get started.
At a minimum, you want to be part of a quality stock photo site that allows you to use photos on your site with an attribution license. I use Dreamstimeand Gratisography for a lot of my photos but I also take my own.
Visual content has been growing for years and it appears to be speeding up, not slowing down. We now have retina display tablets and our smartphones are getting bigger. Social networking sites like Facebook and Google+ are favoring images over text – never mind sites like Pinterest which are totally based around photos!
If you’re not working with visual content yet it’s time to start.
3. Growing a mailing list is still the most important thing
If you asked a big blogger for advice about the most important thing to do in 2004 they would have probably told you to grow a mailing list.
Ten years later and nothing has changed.
Your email list is a means to get into people’s inboxes whenever you like. That can lead to increased traffic to your new blog posts as well as more sales when you launch a product or promote an affiliate product.
But the main reason that you want to grow an email list is because you justcan’t trust Google for traffic. And you can’t trust social networking sites that constantly change their policies. It’s only the mailing list that gives you a constant source of traffic, should something go wrong.
I recommend Aweber for all bloggers but there are many other options out there.
4. It’s time to get smart about competition analysis
I reckon about 90% of bloggers that I talk to do zero research when it comes to writing new posts, creating new blogs or coming up with products.
No one is thinking about the competition!
This is a big mistake in my opinion. Almost every post that you write has been written before. Every blog that you think of is already out there. Most products have things that are pretty much the same.
It’s really important to use a quality program like Market Samurai to do some research into the competition. A quick look around and you’ll be able to see what keywords people are targeting, how many back links they have for their main posts and where those back links are coming from.
This is invaluable information as it helps you decide whether or not you can compete in certain niches and keywords. If someone has links coming fromHarvard, Wikipedia and NASA then it is unlikely you’ll be able to outrank them in a hurry.
5. Long content still works
Long content has been working for years. One of the first posts I ever wrote on this site was several thousand words on how I sold a blog for $20,000. That post went viral and got the attention of a lot of bloggers.
It put Blog Tyrant on the radar.
If I’d just written a little 500 word update on the topic nothing would have happened. The whole thing would have fizzled out into nothing.
Unfortunately that is what happens to a lot of bloggers.
Neil Patel has talked about how well long content works for him and now even Google has launched an in-depth articles section on their search results.
Forget about short little updates and start working on longer content that solves problems and provides so much value that people can’t help but share it with their friends.
6. It’s time to spend money on promotion
For some reason bloggers hate the idea of spending money on advertising. It’s a real shame.
One thing you’ll start to see more and more in 2014 is that the bigger bloggers (and other internet entrepreneurs) will start to pay to promote their posts and products a lot more.
There is so much noise online. Just think about the niche you are in – how many competitors are there that are doing better than you?
Well, one way to bypass their domination is to spend a little bit of money promoting your best work to a targeted group of people who are likely to be interested in your stuff.
