Archive for the ‘blog’ category
Five Pieces of Blogging Advice
Here are five pieces of advice for your blog (you do blog don’t you?).
1. Go deep. Here’s what we mean – unless you’re the kind of writer who is so fascinating that people will hang on your every word no matter what you say – and it’s probably a safe bet that you’re not – the best way for you to attract readers is to focus on a narrow subject. Pick a niche and stick to it. Become known as a top expert in a very narrow field.
2. Establish relationships with other bloggers in your field. Now, I will admit, we are terrible about doing this. We publish this blog but do little posting of comments to other blogs, which is what we should be doing. My only excuse is that we’re so dang busy we do good just to get this blog posted. But YOU should do better. Spend some time reading and commenting on others’ blogs and you will help drive traffic to your blog.
3. Use traffic-generating keywords in your blog. Set up an account at Nichebot.com, then use it to find keywords that generate a lot of traffic. You might also want to go to some of the social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and look in the tag clouds to see what tags people are using for blogs in your industry. Using these keywords in your blog will increase your blog’s exposure and drive traffic to it.
4. Monetize your blog…subtly. Use in-text links to link to products or services for which you are an affiliate. You will probably have much more success with this style of link than a more obvious banner or AdSense-style link. Not only will you generate more clicks, but it will seem less like you are advertising than simply making recommendations. If your readers trust you, then they might just take your recommendations…and make you some money.
5. Blog a minimum of three times per week, and ping your blog out to various directories every time. If you don’t have time to effectively author and promote your blog, then you need to find someone who can do it for you.
Work Media offers a blog authoring and management service. If you need some help with your blog, feel free to give us a call at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Preparing for the Onslaught of New Business
Jerry Work here. I have no idea what to write about today. I’m not feeling very inspired. I have not had very much time the last few days to work on the AdWords management application, so there’s not much to talk about with that. I was up ALL night Monday night working on a proposal that could mean a very large piece of business for us. I got it sent out yesterday about 10:00 in the morning. So I was useless yesterday and got next to nothing done. But that’s what is beautiful about running your own company. If you need to work 24 hours straight one day and take the next day off, well, there’s nobody to tell you you can’t do it (although clients can definitely dictate such things).
Soon Chris and I will be bringing our other brother, Corey, into the business. He is currently working on his Google certification and working hard to get up to speed. Then we’ll be out of brothers, so whoever the fourth person is who comes into the company may have to come from outside the family.
Very soon, we are going to be slammed with more work than we can get done. Then we’ll really need to start ramping up our personnel. That will be interesting. I’ve been on the interviewee side of the table many times. And I hate it. But the time is coming when I’ll be on the interviewer side, which will definitely be a nice change. But will I be a hardass like some interviewers I have dealt with, or will I be cool and try to make the job applicant comfortable? I don’t know. I’ll have to find my style, although I will probably lean toward the laid back side.
I’m a huge fan of the eMyth books. One of the primary themes of those books is that a business needs to run like a franchise. Your business needs to run on systems, not people. You should run your business in such a way that anyone could be plugged into it and immediately take care of business. We’re not there yet, but we’re working on it. We have written several Internet marketing guides and are working on tools to automate much of what we do. It takes a ton of time doing that stuff – time that could be spent on generating business – but I think it’s critical that BEFORE we get overrun with work, we are prepared for it and have a plan for managing the workload.
Well, there you go. I’ve managed to crank out a blog by talking about every day stuff. This actually relates to a blog I posted a long time ago where I said that not every blog you post has to be substantial in length or quality. We always try to teach some kind of lesson in our blog, but sometimes you just gotta mail it in. The main thing is just to get it out. Somehow.
If you need help with your Internet marketing, please call Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Blogging for Search Engine Rankings – the Local Perspective
Work Media is finishing up our first month of providing blogging services for one of our clients. The experiment has gone well. We blog all the time for our own purposes (we’re up to post number 115 – whoohoo!). But to blog for someone else in a completely different industry…well, it’s a challenge. But we’ve pulled it off, and all honesty, it has gone very well.
The point is this – if we can author a regularly updated blog (three times per week) for someone else…in an industry we really don’t know a whole lot about…YOU CAN DO IT FOR YOURSELF.
By the way, the posts we’re doing are not random pieces of meaningless crap. We have spent a good bit of time doing online research for material to write about it. But there is a lot of material out there for us to learn from and borrow ideas from. The blog posts don’t have to be brilliant. They just need to focus on some specific concept or piece of information related to your industry. And THEY NEED TO USE KEYWORDS RELATED TO YOUR INDUSTRY.
Now, if you are able to develop a loyal audience around your blog, then that is spectacular. It’s also difficult to do. But if you just do the blog regularly (and the blog is indexed in the major search engines) you will generate search engine rankings for various odd phrases that happen to be in your blog. It makes sense then to use keywords for your industry so you generate rankings for searches related to your business.
This approach is particularly useful for generating geographically-related search rankings. For instance, if you are a law firm, it will be very difficult to generate high search engine rankings for terms like “personal injury attorney”. But you just might be able to generate related searches that contain geographic modifiers – i.e., “Buffalo personal injury attorney”.
If you just don’t have time to publish your own blog, give us a call at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net. We’ll do all the work for you.
100 Blog Posts! And What We’ve Learned From It
This is our 100th blog post! That is quite a milestone. When we first started publishing a blog (originally under the domain name “icanbefound.com”), we posted maybe an average of once every two weeks. We just couldn’t get it going. It was only a few months ago that we decided to get serious about it and started posting an average of 4 times per week. And now we’ve reached blog number 100. Here are some things we have learned, both positive and negative:
1. Blogs generate search engine rankings. Once the search engine spiders (especially Google) became trained to the fact that our blog was a source of frequent new content, they started returning every day looking for content. As a result, we have generated all kinds of search engine rankings for keywords that just happen to be in our blog.
2. Communities don’t just form around a blog. This is an area we have been weak. To build a community around your blog, you need to be an active member of the blogosphere. You need to read blog posts of others in your industry and post informative, thoughtful comments to their posts, along with a link back to your blog.
3. There are lots of ways to come up with content for a blog. One technique we have used a lot is to write large blocks of text, such as a chapter or section for a book, and then cut that text up into smaller blocks that you can use for blog posts. Another common technique is to comment on articles or other blog posts related to your industry. We have stayed away from personal-style blog posts where you talk about your feelings, interests, or things going on in your life – but if that serves your purposes, go for it.
4. Blogs are repurposable. Blog posts can become content for articles. Articles can become content for books, etc.
All in all, our blogging experience has been very positive, and we definitely encourage you to try it.
If you would like help creating a blog for your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Finding Pockets of People – Strategic Use of Keyword Research Data
I have a friend who has a vegetarian recipe web site. It’s a blog in which he posts every now and then with a new recipe. He asked for some advice on generating traffic to it. My first piece of advice to him was to make more posts. For a blog to be an effective marketing vehicle, you must post often. I recommend a minimum of 3x per week. But at the very least, regardless of what business you are in, at least post once a week. That is the rock bottom minimum for your blog to be legitimate.
But while I was checking out his site, making suggestions for his title and whatnot, I decided to do a little keyword research just to see what kind of traffic there was related to vegetarian and vegan recipes. As was expected, there was a fair amount of traffic for broad terms like “vegetarian recipes”. Competition for those broad phrases was also fairly stiff. But what I found interesting is that there were a lot of less trafficked terms that had much less competition.
Our primary keyword tool is Nichebot’s Keyword Tracker. The main way it counts competition is the number of web pages with the keyword in the title. Search engines place much stock in web page titles. If you have a web page indexed with a specific keyword in the title that few other web pages have, that page will likely rank highly for that keyword, regardless of external factors such as the number of backlinks the site has.
So I found lots of keywords with just a few searches, but also just a few competitors. My suggestion to my friend was to use those “long-tail” keywords as the basis for future blog posts. As a hypothetical example, if our data showed that there were ten searches for the phrase “low fat vegetarian lasagna”, with eight competitors listed, then a blog posted with the title “Low fat vegetarian lasagna” would have an excellent chance of generating a first page ranking.
A first page search engine ranking for a search phrase being used by a few people is way better than a page 23 ranking for a search phrase that lots of people are using. You have to think specifics. Think niches.
Think in terms of finding keywords you can dominate and serving content directed toward small pockets of people, rather than trying to compete for broad, general phrases against thousands of other web sites. Keyword research can help you find those small pockets of people.
Getting back to the vegetarian recipe example, if my friend were to use the long-tail keywords as a guide to what kinds of recipes to post, eventually he would have a large collection of blog posts (and corresponding web pages) that focused on keywords with little competition. And he would have some real nice search engine rankings to go along with it.
If you would like some help performing keyword research for your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.
Proof That Blogging Works as an Internet Marketing Technique
It took us a while to really get into blogging. Considering that our blog is not just personal musings on random topics but is instead meant to be an educational resource on the subject of Internet marketing, it took some discipline to get into the habit of thinking of a topic every day (or almost every day) and composing a halfway readable blog post. This whole thing has sort-of been our own personal experiment. You see, we’re from an SEO/PPC background – doing things like tweaking code and copy to emphasize certain keywords, and doing what we could to get links pointing to our clients’ sites. Or just outright paying for traffic. But a few months back we decided to shift to a more content-oriented strategy. So we set up out blog and re-worked our site to feed our own blog material into our main web pages. Now every time we update our blog our whole site gets updated. And then we started blogging, without doing anything else other than pinging some blog directories and Technorati.com. That’s it.
Interesting things have begun to happen. We’re getting top search engine rankings for, and traffic from, search phrases we never even thought of just because they happen to be in the title or in the copy of our blog posts. Most of these are Internet marketing-related, such as “target keyword density”. We never would have thought to try and specifically optimize a page for that keyword, and it probably would not have been worth it. But we picked up a little traffic from the phrase because we discussed it in a blog post.
Here’s one that is out of this world: www.gibsonguitars.com. We used this web address as an example in one of our blog posts, yet now we have TWO listings on page one of a Google search for this phrase. We wouldn’t even know about it except that someone actually clicked through to our site, so we saw it in our analytics.
So start blogging. Seriously. Become an information hub for your industry by creating original new content almost every day. It will take some time and it may be months before you really see the effect, but eventually you will start getting free traffic from completely unlikely sources.
If you would like help implementing your own blogging strategy, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or info@workmedia.net.
Internet Marketing: Here Are a Couple of Blogs We Really Like
Man, it is hard coming up with something original to write about almost every single day. With that in mind, we thought today we would just point out a few blogs we have been checking out that we really like:
http://www.copyblogger.com/
I think “copyblogger” is a take on the word “copywriter”, which is an interesting thought. Blogging is sort-of like the 21st century version of copywriting. The major difference is copywriting is done specifically for the purpose of influencing the reader to take an action, whereas blog writing can be done for any purpose, although in a business setting it is meant to influence the reader in a more roundabout way. It’s a very soft sell. Anyway, the point of the site is to give copywriting tips for bloggers to more successfully use their blogs as marketing vehicles. It’s a very good read.
http://blogmoneymakingmachine.blogspot.com/
The purpose of this site is to give advice on how to make money with your blog. While that is not really what we’re trying to do (and may not be what you are trying to do), you can’t make money without driving a fair amount of traffic to your blog. So that’s what this blog really comes down to – how to get people to your blog. There is a lot of good advice here.
http://www.netpreneurnow.com/wordpress/
This blog has lots of short posts that discuss various resources you can get for free or for cheap that will give you an edge in your Internet marketing. It’s definitely worth a look, and you may even discover some products you’d like to resell yourself.
If there is anything we can do to help you be more successful in your Internet marketing, please call us at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.
Internet Marketing: Using Link Bait to Generate Traffic
Link Bait is content on your web site so interesting and compelling that others want to link to it and discuss it. Examples of different kinds of link bait include free books, free tools or downloads, and contests. To give you a better idea of what link bait looks like, I thought I would highlight a couple of examples that I like:
http://tools.seobook.com This site is intended to market a book about search engine optimization. But what’s great about the site is that it provides a ton of free information about SEO as well as providing free access to a very useful set of SEO tools. The design is very clean and easy to navigate, so this is a good site to study all around.
http://www.deanguitars.com This is a very dynamic, exciting site that caters to a very specific market – primarily young men who like to rock out. The site has lots of original content about music artists, new models of guitars, contests, sexy women – everything boys like.
http://tools.marketleap.com/publinkpop Another site with free SEO tools. This particular one, the Link Popularity Checker, lets you check the number of links for the major search engines pointing back to your site all at once.
Now think about your business. What tool or content could you give away for free that would be of great value to your prospective customers? If you can think of the idea, you can probably get the item created for cheap by posting the project on elance.com. Or if it’s a book and you have some writing skill, you can easily do it yourself.
However, just creating the item or content is not enough. You have to tell the world about it. Make sure you ping the blog directories with your blog update about it. Contact web site owners or bloggers who might be interested in it. Do an online press release. These things will get the word out and hopefully cause an avalanche of exposure and new links pointing to your site.
For help creating link bait for your web site, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or info@workmedia.net.
Internet Marketing: Time to Get Your 2007 Plan Together
If you’re in business for yourself, you know the importance of having a written business plan of some kind. If you have no written plan, you need to do one, regardless of the size of your business. It doesn’t have to be a complicated, 50 page plan. It can be as simple as you want, but it needs to be done. The process of writing out some kind of business plan will force you to think about your business.
And this is also the time to plan out your Internet marketing for 2007. Don’t just wing it. There are many facets to Internet marketing, and you should write down what areas of Internet marketing you plan on utilizing. Ask and answer questions such as:
- What am I going to do? Search engine optimization? Pay-per-click? Blogging?
- Who is going to do it? Am I going to do it myself or hire a third-party firm?
- How much money am I going to spend on each? How much time?
- How often am I going to do these things? For instance, am I going to blog every day or every week?
There is NO better investment you can make in your business than Internet marketing. Unlike expensive mass advertising such as TV or most print, you can aggressively target very specific markets. But if you just throw money at it or try things hapharzardly, you are less likely to be successful than if you think things through and write down a plan.
It doesn’t have to be perfect. And it doesn’t have to be written in stone. It is very likely that your plan will change as time goes on and you discover what works and what doesn’t.
If you need help creating an Internet marketing plan for your business, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or info@workmedia.net.
Research Proves That Information-Seeking Consumers Online Are Big Spenders: How to Take Advantage of It
Scarborough Research has released a new research report about the buying habits of online newspaper readers based on data from newspapers in five markets: Sacramento, Houston, Providence, Orlando, and Kansas City. The data proved that online newspaper readers tend to be avid online purchasers. This supports our belief that people who are going to do business online tend to do other activities online, such as reading their newspaper.
If they are already reading a newspaper online and buying online, chances are very good that they are also reading blogs and other content-oriented web sites. So if you engage in a targeted blogging campaign, combined with periodic targeted online press releases, you will have a very good chance of getting your message directly in front of the people who are seeking information about you.
The interesting thing is that online blogging + PR works irrespective of how well optimized your web site is, and the traffic is free (except for the cost of distributing your press releases).
However, even if your web site is not optimized, your blog should be, and your press releases can be (sorry). You still need to do your keyword research. You need to target a very specific set of keywords, and you won’t really know what those keywords are if you don’t look at the traffic numbers behind them. You also need to keep in mind SEO principles such as keyword density.
And while you’re at it, you might as well optimize your web page because you are going to be sending traffic to your web site. Remember from an earlier blog that you want all of your links pointing to your home page to maximize your buildup of Google Page Rank. As you distribute press releases, you are going to have the opportunity to create lots of new keyword-rich links pointing back to your site.
The single most important thing, however, is to be consistent. Blog 3 – 4 times per week, if not more, and ping various blog directories every time. And do an online press release every 2 – 3 weeks.
You will absolutely drive a lot of targeted traffic to your site. And as the Scarborough report proves, this traffic will spend money.