After Google’s mood swings, also known as the Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird updates, you really have to work a little bit harder to make money with your blog content. You have to go the extra mile and think in a very systematic and methodical way for you to make money online. There are no two ways about it. You have to be very efficient with your resources. The reason why you need to be more efficient is because the Google Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird updates really impact the different aspects of your content. They require you to do the following: attract natural backlinks, produce higher quality content, and draw social mentions. To many online publishers, this might seem too demanding. After all, doing any one of these things is a cold order. How can you cope? The good news is by simply following the list of activities below, you can increase your chances of success with your content. By making sure you do the following tasks for each piece of content that you publish on your blog or on your website, you increase your chances of getting more traffic from google and other search engines.

Post conversational content

I’m assuming that you are posting quality content. If you are like any other responsible blogger, you should leave out a post if it doesn’t lead high quality standards. I’m assuming you already do that. However, if you are like the vast majority of other bloggers out there, even if you post quality content, you might be posting materials that don’t engage your readers in conversation. You have to post your content in such a way that there are parts that asks your readers to do something. You have to ask a series of questions or you tell them to share their comments. Regardless of how you face it, you have to pull your reader into the picture. You have to give your readers some signals that it’s his or her turn to continue the conversation. While this part of the text might not work with most of your readers, all that matters is that it works with at least some of your readers. As long as there is some amount of conversation going on in the comments section of your content, you have won. The key here is to push your readers to some sort of content-generating action. This content can be as simple as leaving a comment on your blog or it can be as awesome as them actually blogging about the stuff that you blog about. The bad news is that this won’t happen most of the time unless you grow out of your way to converse with your reader. Don’t blow this opportunity. Always reserve a paragraph or a few sentences with every piece of content that you publish on your site for conversation purposes. The great up-side of this is to build a genuine  community around your content. You need to get readers emotionally invested in whatever it is that you’re going. The more emotionally invested they are, the more they would want to promote you. This can help you in terms of SEO. Why? You’re drawing natural links from the internet. This is precisely why Google wants you to do. Google doesn’t want you to create artificial back links, but draw natural links. By conversing with your community, you also encourage them to spread a word with your content. There’s just so many positive things that could happen when you have an engaged community. This is not going to happen unless you make it habit to engage your content readers in a genuine conversation with each piece of content you publish.

Don’t forget to share on social media sites

Many bloggers think that they are already sharing on Twitter and Facebook if they install the right plug in. There are many powerful auto-publication plug ins that immediately posts a snippet of your content onto Twitter and Facebook the moment your post is published. This doesn’t push the ball forward when it comes to effective social media marketing. This is not an effective social media mention. If you do this automatically, your social media presence will be quite flat. Why? Everybody’s doing this. Anybody can do this. This doesn’t separate from your competition. Moreover, if your blog post gets published at the time of day when there are very few people on social media, there would be nobody around to see your tweet or check your Facebook fan page update. You would have wasted your time. Avoid the temptation of using auto-publishing on social media sites. Instead, use tools like Hootsuite or Buffer to create special links to your post. Take the time and effort to write engaging headlines and trigger emotions or trigger conversations. Also, make sure to include the relevant hashtag when publishing on Twitter. Finally, research the most influential people on Twitter that covered your niche. You can easily do this by using Moz.com’s social authority detection tool Followerwonk.com. Followerwonk takes your keywords and looks for people on Twitter that has that keyword in their bio. This is quite lifting, but the real value of Followerwonk is that it assigns an authority ranking to these people. Not all people on Twitter have other people following them or are credible in their niche. You only need to target a small group of people that have a lot of crowd and credibility. Followerwonk lets you zero in all these people like a laser. Once you have a list of these people, follow them, and when you are publishing content, always put an @ message to these people in your updates. Try to send @ messages to a bunch people with a post you make. Use Buffer and Hootsuite to publish your posts only at the times that your target audience is going to be awake and active on Twitter and Facebook.

Share your content with relevant forums

Regardless of what niche you’re targeting, chances are high that there were already an established forum that published that particular niche. These online message boards can be a gold mine if you approach them properly. The best way to publicize without getting bad is to create an original thread of discussion regarding the topics that you covered in your blog post. Don’t make a simplistic discussion like ‘check out this post’ or ‘check what I wrote’. That is the quickest way to get banned as a spammer. Nobody likes reading that garbage. Instead, time the controversy or the hot topic that you are targeting about and make a discussion that focuses on the different aspects of that topic. In your discussion, include your link among with maybe two other links from that credible news sites or big online properties. This way, you hide your name to prevent getting bad, but at the same time, drawing attention to whatever it is that you blog about. Your whole focus here should be to foster real conversation. It must be all about getting people interested in the subject matter and not just clicking your link. If you do this right, you can increase the amount of loyal visitors to your blog. Why? If your blog only publishes quality content and you are posting high quality conversations and forums, chances are high that more and more people will consider you an authority. Resist the temptation to spam and run. You’ve probably seen this done before through a number of forums. Some will join, drop a link, and never be heard from again. You don’t want to do that. That’s the best way to get banned, and more importantly, that’s the best way to erode the banned credibility of your blog.

Less is more

One of the big sequence of maximizing the effect of blog content is the power of influence. A lot of marketers make a big deal about the concept of viral marketing. They think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. They think it’s some sort of magical process that can take any piece of content and make it go viral, but the reality behind viral content marketing is actually very simple. First of all, a content becomes viral because it has quality content. The content has some sort of feature that triggers people to share it. Maybe it’s funny, maybe it’s informative, or maybe it’s shocking. Regardless, there is some sort of triggers that pushes people to naturally share it with their friends and family. You can’t just take any piece of crap content and make it go viral. It doesn’t work that way. Viral content only works when people buy the chain and get enough motivation to move further down the chain. Do you see how that works? The second component of viral content marketing is that study after study show there is no show as viral spread. In other words, the people that are sharing this content are not your bracket for internet users. The hubs of these huge sharers of content are actually influential people. Only when viral information gets into the hands of influential people does that content literally explodes on the internet. But if those influential people are cut out of the equation, chances are, the viral content might not have gone viral in the first place. Do you see how this works out? The key takeaway from all this is that you can achieve more with a marketing by doing less.

If you target the right people, you can put in less marketing effort and still achieve better results if you are to chase down a large number of individual audience members. By focusing on influential people in your niche, you can go a long way in exploding the reach of your blog post. This is why it’s very important to understand that reaching out to less people might produce more results down the road. Who are these people? These are authorities in your niche. The best way to reach out to them would be through Google Plus, Facebook or Twitter. Leaving email is a last resort. Also, you need to reach out in such a way that they benefit from it. For example, if they blog about the topic that you are blogging about, phrase your tweet or your Facebook message in such a way that you’re sharing news with them. Do you see what’s going on here? Instead of facing the conversation in terms of how they can benefit you, turn it around and position it as to how your content can benefit them. Let’s face it, the world is self-absorbed. People always think in terms of need, need, need.  Focus on that. Use it to your advantage.

Don’t forget to track results

After you have optimized the reach of your content by sharing on social media, posting conversational content, sharing on forums, and reaching out to influential people, you might think your job is done. After all, it seems that there’s a lot of work involved with the steps above. Actually, if you keep doing the steps above, the amount of time you take to do the steps above will continue to shrink. Eventually, you’ll start doing them out of habit. They wouldn’t take much of your time. The hardest part is just getting started. Once you get started, you will get better at it because you become competent. You know how things work and you become more efficient with time. It would be sad to do all that work not get much results from it. Why? You forgot to track. You forgot to monitor your results. Just because you do these things, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get top notch results. It doesn’t work that way. You have to do these things the right way. The only way you can do these tasks properly, efficiently and effectively is if you track your results. How many sales have you gained? How much capital have you gained? How many backlinks have you generated? How much search engine traffic improved? You have to keep track of your scores and most importantly, change your process. Change your way of doing things and tweet them around until you get better results. It’s all about implementing, tracking, and adjusting. Keep repeating this process until you get a conversion rate that you are happy with. The good news is, as mentioned above, the more you do these things, the faster you get and the easier it will become for you.  What’s important is to get used to the process of taking action, measuring results and taking action.

By engaging your visitors and engaging you authority figures and influential people on social media forums, and properly tracking and measuring success, you can write your own paycheck in the future. Seriously. You can turn your blog into a gold mine if you make your content an integral part of your-traffic generation activities. By creating high converting content that draws traffic, you can create a virtual money making machine. Obviously, this won’t happen overnight. Obviously, this will take a lot of time, a lot of patience and most importantly, an opened mind. If you have the mind of a continuous learner and you continually adapt and innovate your processes, chances are very good that you will achieve the success that you always dreamed of getting in your blog. Don’t expect it to happen overnight, though.