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There are thousands of blogs on the topic of “internet marketing”.

So why would anyone care to read BloggerJet?

And in fact…

Why would I care to WRITE at BloggerJet in the first place?

Here’s a quick backstory to set the scene:

I started learning online marketing about 7 years ago. And I did that by reading many different internet marketing blogs (like many other people actually).

Every day I opened my RSS reader and a few dozen articles promised to teach me:

• “the best way to get traffic to my blog”,
• or “5 effective ways to get traffic from Twitter”,
• or “3 simple tips to writing awesome articles”, etc

How can you not fall for these kinds of things?

So every single day I was spending a few hours of my life reading these shiny internet marketing tactics on dozens of different blogs.

But here’s the fun part:

When I tried to apply what I’ve learned – nothing worked!

THEY SAID I should put a “follow” button in the sidebar of my blog and I’ll get thousands of Twitter followers.

Didn’t work.

THEY SAID I should use the “Who Else Wants…” headline formula and my post will get viral.

Didn’t work.

THEY SAID I should post my social updates in the right times to get more traffic from social networks.

DID. NOT. WORK.

Believe me, I could continue this list like forever. If there were Olympic Games for trying marketing tactics that don’t work – I’d easily win a gold medal… twice.

I felt miserable. But I kept trying.

And it took me quite a few years to finally realise what was wrong with all these marketing blogs:

Most bloggers simply don’t practice what they preach.

Let me illustrate you how it usually happens.

Ever heard of Guy Kawasaki? (we call guys like him “influencers”)

So Guy Kawasaki says something like:

“Every post on Twitter should be accompanied by a 400-500 pixel wide image. […] I sometimes buy stock photographs to make my posts visually arresting.”

And he may even support his claim with a screenshot of how the CTR on his tweets went up and his traffic from Twitter doubled.

So what happens next?

Hundreds (if not thousands) of bloggers who listen to Guy Kawasaky immediately “steal” his advice and spread it all over the internet as if it worked for them just as good.

And there you have it.

I’m reading a blog post about “twitter marketing” that says that I should absolutely start attaching images to my Tweets.

I do that.

It doesn’t work.

I feel bad for wasting my time with no results.

Now wait a minute. Guy Kawasaki has like 1.5 million Twitter followers. What works for him doesn’t work for everyone else.

But these other bloggers don’t bother trying to replicate what he says and get some results before suggesting this strategy to you. They just rehearse Guy’s advice over and over again.

This is how you end up spending countless hours of your life reading marketing advice that will never work for you.

So speaking about BloggerJet…

Consider it a filter that separates things that work from things that don’t.

I’m not going to give you any generic advice that I’ve heard from someone else. I’m going to test everything myself and give you my honest numbers.

That is why you should care to read BloggerJet.

Use the email form below to subscribe to my blog updates + my free email course and get notified whenever I post something cool here:

Who is Tim Soulo

At the present moment I hold the position of the “head of marketing” at Ahrefs (which is a very well known toolset among the SEOs); I have founded two cool plugins for WordPress: TweetDis and Content Upgrades PRO, as well as this very blog – BloggerJet, where I’m sharing what worked for me in terms of content marketing and SMM (I will expand to more topics real soon).

But that didn’t happen in one day, so if you’re interested to learn more about me, read along.

Life as a music DJ

Back in my early 20s I used to be a professional DJ, spinning records in the biggest night club of our town and having some gigs in other cities now and then.

Being a DJ felt great – people recognised me on the streets, girls were messaging me on Facebook and my job seemed like I was having a birthday every weekend.

Here’s a nice music mix that I recorded back then:

But it didn’t take me too long to realise that being a DJ is not how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. It was a dream job for a youngster but an awful one for an adult.

First Steps In Marketing

I’ve heard from my friends that there was some cool thing called SEO and that people in this field were making good money. So quite shortly I landed a job of “junior SEO specialist” in a small local startup called FlashMint.

I wanted to learn all that “SEO thing” real quick, but reading SEO blogs did nothing but melt my brain. So I decided to just launch a website of my own and figure all the ins and outs of SEO along the way.

And since the only thing I was good at back then was “playing music in clubs”, I launched dj-case.com:

That blog didn’t take me anywhere, but it was a perfect testing ground for all my newbish SEO and marketing experiments.

Tapping Into SMM

Social Media Marketing was becoming the next big thing and so I left my job at FlashMint and together with my partner we launched fmbl-templates.net – an online shop with design templates for Facebook pages.

That project became profitable pretty much from the first month it was launched and within half a year I was making more money than I ever had.

That’s when I wrote my first ever guest article – “An Ultimate Guide To Facebook Marketing” – and submitted it to Moz, hoping to get some new customers to our site.

To my sincere surprise that post became a Top post of 2010 by the amount of “thumbs up”, unique visits & retweets:

And all that success eventually led me to landing a nice position at TemplateMonster.com, which is the world’s biggest online store of website templates.

BloggerJet Is Born

Working at TemplateMonster was fun, but I always felt that urge to write articles about marketing and share my experience with others.

So one day my friend Dainis offered me a bet:

We had to launch blogs from scratch and see who will get more traffic in 3 months from launch.

That was EXACTLY what I needed at that time!

To cut the long story short, I hustled like crazy and in 3 months I won that bet by getting 20k visits and a Page Rank of 4 (yeah, back then Google did update it’s Page Rank values).

Take a look at the “awesome” look of my blog back then (that’s year 2011):

Shortly after I got too busy with my job at TemplateMonster and had to abandon BloggerJet for a while.

But I was always coming back to it whenever I had something cool to write about.

TweetDis and Content Upgrades PRO

These were my latest projects before joining Ahrefs.

The idea of TweetDis occurred when I saw bloggers creating “click to tweet” quotes in their articles so that to give their readers something cool to share on Twitter.

These quotes looked super ugly and I knew I could create a plugin that would easily create beautiful quotes that would capture attention and make readers tweet them. And so I did that:

If you want to learn more about this plugin – visit the official website.

Shortly after I’ve noticed another emerging trend: Content Upgrades.

That was an absolutely ingenious email marketing strategy with never-seen-before conversion rates.

I really wanted to try it on BloggerJet, but the only technical solution at that time was LeadPages, that costs $37 per month for a basic package.

I tried them for a few months and realised two things:

• First – the “content upgrades” strategy was the most effective thing I ever tried for growing my email list;
• Second – I didn’t like my user experience with LeadPages. (NOTE: I’m not saying they’re bad – they’re awesome, I just like to do things my own way whenever I can)

That’s how Content Upgrades PRO plugin came to life.

I immediately used it on my own blog and quite easily got a 300% increase in email conversions.

To learn more about this awesome plugin – visit the official website.

La Fin

That was a super quick story of how I got my experience in online marketing.

I did quite a few cool things and I did tons of stuff that failed miserably.

And that’s exactly what I would love to share with you – show you things that work like a charm and keep you from things that are nothing but a waste of your time.

Subscribe to BloggerJet using the email form below and I will let you know whenever I publish something new here. Plus you will get my FREE EMAIL COURSE, which will help you grow your blog, as a bonus: