In this compelling article, Derek Halpern shares his reasons as to why bloggers dont get the types of readers that they desire. Of all the different tactics to get readers to come to your blog, people rarely use the one fastest method; convince another blog that has readers to send readers your way. 

The most important thing to keep in mind when you are asking other bloggers to send you traffic is that you are targeting the right blogs. Evaluate the mission behind your blog, what is its purpose? Be specific, all the way down to the target market. Only after you have found an answer to that question can you begin to understand what types of blogs should you be targeting. 

While developing his hypothesis, Derek quickly realized a problem - some blogs are creating content that is tailored to the wrong audience. This misleading information happens even when the blogs intention is to attract a different type of person. Derek cites different types of cases, one of whom is his personal lawyer. His lawyer uses a blog to attract leads to his legal firm. The lawyer writes quality content but its written in such a way thats only appealing to other lawyers. If a potential client were to land on his blog, they would likely feel detered. 

So here we have two take away points. 

1. Understand your target audience and make sure that your content is actually targeting them. 

2. The fastest way to get readers is to simply ask competing blogs for readers. 

Derek does a great job exposing a real problem for many bloggers all over the world. I applaud his efforts to educate those that are simply underachieving in the blog-o-sphere. 

Aaron Strout’s not kidding when he asks us to bear another set of marketing predictions. Since the inception of smart phones and tablets, marketers have been gazing deeply into their crystal balls in an attempt to be the next authority on the direction of mobile marketing. This has resulted in a lot of deceptive and misleading information for business owners, marketers, and others who have interest in this industry.  

However, I do believe Aaron has some really solid predictions grounded in solid statistics. My pick of the bunch is that mobile devices aggregated nearly 25% of the total amount of online shopping done on black friday. This is a good indicator of what the current picture of mobile eCommerce looks like. 

Of the five bold predictions he lays out I was especially keen on the marketing potential of the mobile application Passbook for iOS6. Passbook is essentially Apple’s version of Groupon. Commerce and location based marketing has finally arrived on the iPhone.  

I rate this article a 7/10