how-to-create-a-blog

Grow BLOG TRAFFIC USING TUMBLR

That’s the social media dream, right? To set it and forget it, and gain thousands of followers without even trying or thinking about it?

To be honest, getting 8k followers on Tumblr in 5 months without ever logging in was never my intention.

Tumblr was distracting me from my “real work” so I thought I needed to take a break. I actually forgot about my account. Then months later thought I’d check up on it. Imagine my surprise when I saw how much it had grown.

The last time I was on I only had 500 followers. I spent that entire day studying analytics, reblogging cool pictures, and optimizing my Tumblr page to drive traffic back to my website.

Though it seems like my Tumblr blew up on its own, there was actually a very important seed that I planted, and several strategies that I implemented, that made it’s growth possible.

Let me show you how I did it. I’ve broken it down into 7 easy steps.

Oh and here are some pictures so you know I’m not just blowing steam.

This is my account back in early 2016 with only 300 followers.

And here’s my account in Oct 2016 with just over 8,000 followers.

And just since rediscovering my Tumblr and writing this article I’ve gained another 500.

Steps to grow your Tumblr account

Choose your niche

The very first step to growing your Tumblr blog is to narrow your niche. Blogs that have specific topics tend to do better and attract more attention.

Colorful Gradients and Ghost Photographs are both examples of a super narrow niche.

But you also want to make sure to choose a niche that you’re passionate about — I mean that’s kinda the whole point in the first place.

Your niche determines what sort of content you will be posting.

Also, you don’t necessarily have to use the same exact niche as your main blog or website (if you have one). For example, my main blog Launch Your Dream is about following your dreams and it’s mostly focused on how to start a successful blog.

My Tumblr blog, Eli Seekins, is also about following your dreams but is more focused on travel, adventure and lifestyle.

The trick is to find something narrow that you enjoy.

For more tips on picking your niche, check out my post: How To Discover Your Perfect Niche (the Blogging Wizard — Adam — drops a mega helpful tip over there as well).

Know your brand

Your Tumblr is an extension of your brand, whether you are just starting one or already have one.

You want your brand to have a clear message. You need an edge — something that other brands don’t have. You need to know your values, what you stand for, and your mission.

That way you will always know what sort of content to post. Your brand will be clear and thorough, and people will get it.

When people get it, they have a better chance of connecting. And when they connect, they have a better chance of engaging and even sharing.

Knowing your brand also means knowing your audience. Who are you trying to reach? What sort of content do they like most?

(My brand is about following your dreams, travel, adventure, and lifestyle. I’m reaching out to young people who want to do something big with their lives. I value things like working hard, taking risks, and making a difference in the world.)

Here are 3 brands that are crushing it on Tumblr:

Adidas

Sesame Street

LIFE

All three of these brands know who they are and who their audience is, and they do a great job of translating that over to their Tumblr.

For more help with branding, check out: 9 Tips for Creating an Awesome Brand

Follow popular accounts in your niche

A great way to find good content to repost, and to find out what people in your niche are responding to, is to check out the popular blogs in your niche.

It’s pretty easy to find them. Just look for the blogs who are posting a lot every day, who get lots of notes, and have a large following.

To get started just search for different keywords.

And check out the different accounts.

I’d follow anywhere from 50 – 100 blogs right away.

Reblog quality content 1 – 3 times a day (by using your queue)

One of the greatest tools in Tumblr is your queue.

You can fill it with up to 300 posts, and set a certain amount of those posts to automatically publish throughout different times of the day.

In my opinion, your queue is perfect for filling up with loads of content to reblog (reblog means to repost someone else’s content on your Tumblr blog). And I just schedule my original stuff. That way I’m always sharing content, and I can schedule my content to post whenever I want and at peak times.

I often experiment with reblogging anywhere from 1 – 50 posts a day.

For those 5 months that I didn’t log into my account, when I gained 8,000 followers, I had about 200 reblogs in my queue set to share 1 photo a day at 9pm. And I wasn’t even sharing any original content.

Typically the bigger your audience grows the more content you can post. I don’t recommend sharing more than 3-5 posts a day until you get your first 1,000 followers.

You can find good content to reblog on the popular blogs that you’ve followed, by searching keywords in the search bar, or just by checking out your dashboard feed.

Then all you have to do is hit the queue button.

You can change your queue settings over in the menu on the right.

Include relevant hashtags

Hashtags in Tumblr are the keywords that make your posts searchable. They’re very important for getting your content seen.

You can find popular hashtags by doing a search and seeing what people are looking for.

And by typing in different tags in a post to see what people are using.

Make sure that you use tags that are popular and relevant to your niche AND relevant to the content you are tagging. Just so you know only the first 20 tags that you use are actually searchable (source).

Use a call to action

I was surprised by how few people were using call to actions when I first started implementing these strategies. Since then, it seems like some popular accounts in my niche have caught on though.

That’s because call to actions are powerful. It’s how this post has gotten almost 15,000,000 notes, by simply saying “pass it on”.

It’s great if your posts get a lot of attention, but if your viewers aren’t doing anything after they see your content what’s the point? Don’t you want them to take action?

All of your posts should include some sort of call to action, whether it’s to bring viewers to your Tumblr blog, to your main site, or somewhere different — or even to just get likes and reblogs.

At first, I felt kinda weird putting call to actions on other people’s content that I was reposting, but it’s ok to do if you do it right. And it can make a big difference. Just make sure to be genuine. For example, don’t repost someone’s original photo and use it to promote your ebook or video course. That’s kinda sleezy. But leaving a call to action on reblogs to like, reblog, or check out more of your posts is totally ok and can increase your engagement and get you more followers.

Editorial Note: always ensure that the creator of images you share retain credit. It can sometimes be difficult to to figure out who originally shared something on Tumblr – reblog’s usually link to the person who you reblogged it from. But we recommend trying to credit the original author if you can. And whatever you do, never remove a credit link. And try to share original content when you can – you’ll get more traction if you do.

For more tips on how to write good call to actions check out these posts:

Use keyboard shortcuts to supercharge the speed of your workflow

I’m gonna be honest, filling up your queue with hundreds of posts is a lot of work — it eats up your time. I even considered quitting Tumblr for good because of how much time it takes.

One of the things that bothers me the most is that you can’t copy paste hashtags. You have to type each one in individually. And if you’re using 5 – 20 tags per post and have 300 posts in your queue…. that’s a lot of typing hashtags.

It took me a little bit of time to figure out, but I have my Tumblr workflow down to a system. I can’t even imagine how much time it saves me.

It’s all based on Mac Mastro (I use a mac, but if you’re a pc guy check out AutoHotkey or Quick Macros). This app allows me to save multiple different presets of titles, tags, and call to actions into keyboard shortcuts. So all I have to do is press a button combination on my keyboard and everything is automatically typed out for me. That way I don’t have to keep typing the same things over and over again hundreds — even thousands of times.

I’ll show you what I mean…

Here’s an example of my workflow, hotkeys, and scripts that I use.

1. Find a post to reblog

2. Add a call to action with a hotkey

Mac Mastro allows you to save multiple different actions to one hotkey, that way when you press the hotkey you can just click whichever one you want to use, then it types it for you.

3. Format your CTA and add a link if appropriate (again using a hotkey)

4. Add tags (using a hotkey)

5. Add to queue and you’re done

The whole process takes a matter of seconds and dramatically decreases the amount of time it would normally take.

To create a new hotkey with Mac Mastro:

1. Go to File and then New Macro.

2. Add a new hotkey trigger. And then press whatever keys you want your hotkey to be.

3. Add a new action

4. Search for and click “ Execute an AppleScript”

5. Insert your script

Keith jackson

Jackson was also known for epithets like “Hold the phone!” when a penalty was called, or “fum-BLE” if a player dropped the ball.

He attempted to retire at the end of the 1998 season, citing his nearing 70th birthday. He called the first BCS National Championship Game between Tennessee and Florida State as his apparent last game.

The retirement was not to last, however, and Jackson returned to ABC the following season, though with a much more limited range, keeping mostly to the West Coast, near his home in California. He finally retired for good in 2006, calling the 2006 Rose Bowl game with Texas facing Southern California in the BCS National Championship Game.

Jackson received numerous honors throughout his career, including a Gold Medal Award in 1999 from the National Football Foundation, and a 1994 induction into the ASA Hall of Fame. He was also inducted into the NSSA Hall of Fame in 1995, winning its National Sportscaster of the Year award five times in a row.

A native of Roopville, Ga., Jackson was best known for calling college football games for more than 50 years before retiring in 2006. He was a fixture on baseball broadcasts, too, serving on the set of the 1977, '79 and '81 World Series, splitting play-by-play duties with partner Al Michaels.

"For generations of fans, Keith Jackson was college football," said Bob Iger, Chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company. "When you heard his voice, you knew it was a big game. Keith was a true gentleman and memorable presence. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his wife, Turi Ann, and his family."

Jackson was a part of ABC's coverage for several Midsummer Classics and postseason matchups, including: the 1978, '80 and '82 MLB All-Star Games; the '80 NL Championship Series; the '76, '78, '80 and '82 American League Championship Series; the '81 AL Divison Series; and the '78 AL East tie-breaker game between the Yankees and Red Sox.

Jackson also called a number of Monday Night Baseball and other various regular season games for ABC throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s.Jackson was awarded the Gold Medal Award by the National Football Foundation and was inducted into the Rose Bowl Hall of Fame in 1999. He was inducted into the American Sportscasters Association Hall of Fame in '94, and the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame in '95.

A resident of California, Jackson passed away in Los Angeles. He is survived by his wife, Turi Ann, three children, Melanie, Lindsey and Christopher, and three grandchildren, Ian, Holly and Spencer.

Jackson’s sportscasting career began in Washington in the early ’50s, and covered a variety of sports events, including minor league baseball and hydroplane races. His coverage of NCAA games, however, gained him the most notoriety, particularly for the colloquial phrases he employed, such as referring to linemen as “big uglies.”

He was well-known for his supposedly signature phrase, “Whoa, Nellie!” although Jackson repeatedly denied over the years that the phrase was a catchphrase of his and stated he had learned it from earlier television announcer Dick Lane.

“This ‘Whoa, Nellie!’ thing is overrated,” he said. “There were all kinds of stories going around.

(Reuters) - Sportscaster Keith Jackson, who brought a folksy, excitable demeanor and down-home exclamations such as “Whoa, Nellie!” to 40 seasons of play-by-play calling as the authoritative voice of college football for ABC Sports, died at age 89, his employer ABC reported on Saturday.

The legendary sportscaster died late on Friday surrounded by family.

“For generations of fans, Keith Jackson was college football,” said Bob Iger, chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Co, which owns ABC.

“When you heard his voice, you knew it was a big game. Keith was a true gentleman and a memorable presence. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his wife, Turi Ann, and his family,” Iger said.

Jackson’s work for ABC covered a wide range of sports and included 10 Olympics and 11 World Series but college football was his domain. At his peak, he was associated with the sport almost as strongly as any player or coach.

He presided over games with a rumbling baritone, a distinctive speaking rhythm, a trace of a Southern accent and a string of colloquialisms that made a Keith Jackson broadcast sound like no other.

In Jackson-speak, a talented player was a “hoss” and an even more talented player was a “hoss and a half.” Hulking offensive linemen were “the big uglies down in the trenches.”

He would describe an especially rough game as a “slobber knocker” in which the players were “rockin’ and a-sockin’ and a-whackin’ and a-crackin’.” He referred to the prestigious Rose Bowl game as “the granddaddy of them all” and when a player dropped the ball, Jackson would roar, “Fum-buuuul!”

The phrase he was most associated with - and the one used by anyone who ever did a Keith Jackson impersonation - was “Whoa, Nellie!” Jackson said he did not know why the exclamation was so closely tied to him.

“I never did use it that much, just a couple times ...,” he said in an interview with the website www.lostlettermen.com. “I don’t know how that thing got hung on me. The media likes to hang things on you and that was my bad luck, I guess.”

Some said Dick Lane, a Los Angeles sports broadcaster, was the original source of “Whoa, Nellie” but Jackson told the Los Angeles Times in 2013 that he borrowed it from his great-grandfather.

Jackson’s style evolved from advice he was once given - never be afraid to turn a phrase.

“The older I got, the more willing I was to go back into Southern vernacular because some of it’s funny,” he said in a 2014 interview with “Fox College Saturday.”

Jackson grew up near Carrollton, Georgia, picking cotton and plowing his poor family’s farm. After four years in the U.S. Marine Corps, he studied broadcasting at Washington State University and covered the school’s football games starting in 1952.

After graduating, Jackson worked both news and sports beats for a Seattle television station before joining ABC Radio in Los Angeles in 1965. The next year he moved to the network’s television branch and joined ABC’s college football broadcasting team.

Jackson switched his focus to the National Football League in 1970 as part of ABC’s “Monday Night Football” crew when it made its debut. Frank Gifford replaced him the next season.

But Jackson’s major interest was always college football.

“I think college football is a reflection of Middle America,” he told Sports Illustrated. “You go into a college football town and you will find three generations of a family sitting together. It’s a rallying point for the university, the community and the families.”

Critics said Jackson went too far as a booster of college football, looking past its scandals and controversies, such as not compensating players for the money their play brought in for their schools.

Jackson retired from ABC in 1988. But just a few months later the network coaxed him back with a schedule that would allow him to stay relatively close to his home in Sherman Oaks, California.

He retired for good at age 77 after calling the 2006 Rose Bowl in which Texas defeated Southern California for the national championship. “I don’t want to die in a stadium parking lot,” he told The New York Times.

Jackson met his wife at Washington State University and the couple had three children.

In 2014 Washington State renamed its broadcasting building after Jackson.

Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency is an encrypted decentralized digital currency transferred between peers and confirmed in a public ledger via a process known as mining.

Below, we take a simplified look at how cryptocurrencies like bitcoin work. First, let’s review the basics and essentials of cryptocurrency, and then we will do an overview of the other properties that have made cryptocurrency what it is today.

TIP: If the page below feels overwhelming, check out: “how does cryptocurrency work (for beginners).” Meanwhile, if you are mainly interested in trading, investing in, or using cryptocurrency, check out “how to trade cryptocurrency (for beginners).” This page provides an overview of the mechanics behind cryptocurrency.

The Cryptocurrency Basics

In order to understand how cryptocurrency works, you’ll need to understand a few basic concepts. Specifically:

Public Ledgers: All confirmed transactions from the start of a cryptocurrency’s creation are stored in a public ledger. The identities of the coin owners are encrypted, and the system uses other cryptographic techniques to ensure the legitimacy of record keeping. The ledger ensures that corresponding “digital wallets” can calculate an accurate spendable balance. Also, new transactions can be checked to ensure that each transaction uses only coins currently owned by the spender. Bitcoin calls this public ledger a “transaction block chain.”

Transactions: A transfer of funds between two digital wallets is called a transaction. That transaction gets submitted to a public ledger and awaits confirmation. When a transaction is made, wallets use an encrypted electronic signature (an encrypted piece of data called a cryptographic signature) to provide a mathematical proof that the transaction is coming from the owner of the wallet. The confirmation process takes a bit of time (ten minutes for bitcoin) while “miners” mine (ie. confirm transactions and add them to the public ledger).

Mining: In simple terms, mining is the process of confirming transactions and adding them to a public ledger. In order to add a transaction to the ledger, the “miner” must solve an increasingly-complex computational problem (sort of like a mathematical puzzle). Mining is open source, so anyone can confirm the transaction. The first “miner” to solve the puzzle adds a “block” of transactions to the ledger. The way in which transactions, blocks, and the public blockchain ledger work together ensures that no one individual can easily add or change a block at will. Once a block is added to the ledger, all correlating transactions are permanent and a small transaction fee is added to the miner’s wallet (along with newly created coins). The mining process is what gives value to the coins and is known as a proof-of-work system.

The Anatomy of Cryptocurrency

Although there can be exceptions to the rule, there are a number of factors (beyond the basics above) that make cryptocurrency so different from the financial systems of the past:

Adaptive Scaling: Adaptive scaling essentially means that cryptocurrencies are built with a number of measures to ensure that they will work well in both large or small scales.

Adaptive Scaling Example: Bitcoin is programmed to allow for one transaction block to be mined approximately every ten minutes. The algorithm adjusts after every 2016 blocks (theoretically, that’s every two weeks) to get easier or harder based on how long it actually took for those 2016 blocks to be mined. So if it only took 13 days for the network to mine 2016 blocks, that means it’s too easy to mine, so the difficulty increases. However, if it takes 15 days for the network to mine 2016 blocks, that shows that it’s too hard to mind, so the difficulty decreases.

A number of other measures are included in digital coins to allow for adaptive scaling including limiting the supply overtime (to create scarcity) and reducing the reward for mining as more total coins are mined.

Cryptographic: Cryptocurrency uses a system of cryptography (AKA encryption) to control the creation of coins and to verify transactions.

Decentralized: Most currencies in circulation are controlled by a centralized government, and thus their creation can be regulated by a third party. Cryptocurrency’s creation and transactions are open source, controlled by code, and rely on “peer-to-peer” networks. There is no single entity that can affect the currency.

Digital: Traditional currency is defined by a physical object (USD representing gold for example), but cryptocurrency is all digital. Digital coins are stored in digital wallets and transferred digitally to other peoples’ digital wallets. No physical object ever exists.

Open Source: Cryptocurrencies are typically open source. That means that developers can create APIs without paying a fee and anyone can use or join the network.

Proof-of-work: Most cryptocurrencies use a proof-of-work system. A proof-of-work scheme uses a hard-to-compute but easy-to-verify computational puzzle to limit exploitation of cryptocurrency mining. Essentially, it’s like a really hard to solve “catpcha” that requires lots of computing power. NOTE: Other systems like proof-of-work (such as proof-of-stake) are also used.

Pseudonymity: Owners of cryptocurrency keep their digital coins in an encrypted digital wallet. A coin-holder’s identification is stored in an encrypted address that they have control over – it is not attached to a person’s identity. The connection between you and your coins is pseudonymous rather than anonymous as ledgers are open to the public (and thus, the ledgers could be used to glean information about groups of individuals in the network).

Value: For something to be an effective currency, it has to have value. The US dollar used to represent actual gold. The gold was scarce and required work to mine and refine, so the scarcity and work gave the gold value. This, in turn, gave the US dollar value.

Cryptocurrency works with a similar concept in regards to value. In cryptocurrency, “coins” (which are nothing more than publicly agreed on records of ownership) are generated or produced by “miners”. These miners are people who run programs on specialized hardware made specifically to solve proof-of-work puzzles. The work behind mining coins gives them value, while scarcity of coins and demand thereof causes their value to fluctuate. The idea of work giving value to currency is called a “proof-of-work” system. The other method for validating coins is called proof-of-stake. Value is also created when transactions are added to public ledgers as creating a verified “transaction block” takes work as well.

Learning More on How Cryptocurrency Works

If at this point, you feel a little bit confused, don’t worry and don’t give up! Wrapping your head around the foundational concepts of cryptocurrency can be a challenge! One explanation works for some people, and a different explanation works of others.

The trick with cryptocurrency is not getting worried if you don’t understand it at first – each new video, explanation, or article that you learn from will make your personal understanding of cryptocurrency clearer and clearer until, eventually, it clicks.

To learn more, visit some of the other, more technical pages on our site to dive deeper into the inner-workings of cryptocurrency or watch informational videos about the how cryptocurrency works such as the one below.

[Superb] Affiliate Program

1. Clickbank

Clickbank is huge. And it’s been in the game for over 17 years. ClickBank’s focus is digital information products. As one of the largest online retailers, ClickBank has a vast library of over 6 million unique products in order to reach 200 million customers around the world.

2. Rakuten

Formerly Buy.com, Rakuten.com has grown into a monster. Rakuten ranks among the top three e-commerce companies in the world with over 90,000 products from 38,500 shop owners and more than 18 million customers. Among its numerous online properties, its flagship B2B2C (business-to-business-to-consumer) model e-commerce site Rakuten Ichiba is the largest e-commerce site in Japan and among the world’s largest by sales.

3. CJ Affiliate by Conversant

Formerly Commission Junction, CJ Affiliate by Conversant reaches millions of consumers shopping online through their affiliate marketing network. The Conversant, Inc. companies include Commission Junction, Dotomi, Greystripe, Mediaplex, and ValueClick Media.

4. Amazon Associates

Amazon.com needs no intorduction. Amazon is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company with headquarters in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest Internet-based retailer in the United States. It’s affiliate network, called Amazon Associates, allows you to tap into over a million products
to advertise to your customers.

5. ShareaSale

ShareASale has been in business for 15 years, exclusively as an affiliate marketing network. Their technology receives accolades for speed, efficiency, and accuracy – and their reputation as a fair and honest business is well known within the industry.

6. eBay

Many marketers don’t even know that eBay has an affiliate network. eBay has now been online for over 20 years. The ebay Partner Network provides first class tools, tracking, and reporting.

7. Commission Factory

The purpose of Commission Factory was to make performance-based marketing available to everyone and not require a steep learning curve in order to get involved and be successful. The platform has been designed to foster a spirit of collaboration between Merchants, Affiliates and Agencies in order to grow mutually beneficial and prosperous relationships. Because they have little to no barriers to entry Commission Factory has an enormously fast growing user base that enables companies of all sizes to discover the power of performance marketing.

8. Avangate

Avangate is a player in digital commerce that you may not be familiar with. Avangate, backed by a cloud platform, focuses on online commerce, subscription billing, and global payments for Software, SaaS and Online Services companies. More than 4000 digital businesses in over 180 countries trust Avangate including Absolute Software, Bitdefender, Brocade, FICO, HP Software, Kaspersky Lab, Telestream, Spyrix and CleverControl.

9. Flexoffers

FlexOffers.com is a premiere affiliate network that builds mutually profitable relationships between strategic, skilled, and trustworthy online publishers and a robust portfolio of 5,000+ popular advertisers spanning all verticals. With over 10+ years of experience in the affiliate marketing industry, they offer unparalleled customer service, an array of optimized data delivery tools, and fast and dependable payments– proving that flexibility is the key to affiliate success. FlexOffers.com was recently ranked the eighth overall affiliate network in the Revenue+Performance Top 20 Affiliate (CPS) Network 2015 Blue Book survey.

10. Avantlink

Avantlink is the industry-leading technology platform for affiliate referrals. Avantlink works hard to remain on the cutting edge with constant upgrades and updates to the their platform, rapid implementation of new tools and technology, and an unyielding emphasis on quality over quantity.