Call us 0800 088 7486
Thanks to tools such as Blogger and WordPress it has become very easy for SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) to set-up and create a blog to increase their exposure.
However, it is much more difficult to make that blog successful and draw in an audience.
Writing on the SEOmoz blog, Rand Fishkin, has produced a list of 21 tactics that can be used to increase the amount of traffic a blog receives.
Here are just two of those tactics in a summarised form:
Get involved in the communities where you audience is – Forums, social media pages and other blogs that are focused on a similar topic to those featured on your own blog should be targeted.
Fishkin states that when you’ve determined where your audience is, start getting involved.
Set up an account on a forum or social media site and use it to get involved in the conversation; however, only involve yourself when you feel you have something useful to say, otherwise your comments could come across as being spam-my – which isn’t something you want to be associated with.
SEO-friendly content – SEO is fantastic for getting your blog more views if done correctly. Make sure your content is rich in keywords as this will increase its visibility to search engines.
Fishkin also adds that: “SEO, when done right, should never interfere with great writing,” and that spammers and bad press should not deter you from putting an SEO strategy in place.
News brought to you by ClickThrough – a provider of SEO Services & Pay Per Click strategies.
With over 24million WP blogs already in existence, and over 50,000 new blogs being added daily, it was only a matter of time before Wordpress helped its users monetise on those and helped itself to a share of the lucrative ad market. The launch of WordAds this week sees WordPress taking on Google AdSense with a partnership with Federated Media after announcing late last month that this was on the cards.
The observation on the WordPress blog that many of the AdSense ads aren’t always “terribly tasteful” is of course, sadly true, in that this is one of the areas where the algorithm has not always been very accurate, and has meant occasions where inappropriate ads are shown. Which when this is next to your content can reflect more on you than on a faulty algo. Visitors are more likely to remember, and link to, your site where the bad taste ad appeared than to blame the algorithm, which may not be a good thing for PR.
WordPress have not yet announced the revenue split with bloggers, and there are certain provisos when applying to be part of the program such as a custom domain, level of traffic and engagement, content and language, but for anyone with a WordPress.com blog, it would seem to be worthwhile to apply and see if your blog is accepted.
Are we likely to see more competition to AdSense and other Google services? Yes. It is unlikely that the Google bubble is bursting, but there is definitely an appetite for alternatives; although WordPress was always the most likely competitor, there are opportunities for Tumblr, Posterous etc to help bloggers raise money through displaying adverts.
There are other monetisation options for bloggers such as Flattr.com who ran Pay a Blogger day this week. 
Whilst Flattr is still a small network, it highlights an opportunity available for businesses – advertising with blogs.
Whilst using Google’s display network is one option, the targetting can never be as accurate as looking out niche blogs whose readers fit with your target audience for your products and services. Many bloggers are keen to take an ad or two, or will write reviews on your products, offer giveaways and so on, so it is worth discovering which blogs your customers and potential audience look to for information and getting in touch.
Finding this info will lead you to interesting content, engagement with your audience and possibly exciting new joint ventures. So, take 2 minutes today to craft a tweet or status update for your social network and ask for recommendations of blogs that your followers and friends enjoy.
The addition of the +K feature on Klout has seen a flurry of activity on the social networks as everyone rushes to court favour with customers and contacts by scoring a +K for specific topics as requested by the recipient. “K farms” is the term being currently used, and one wonders how these farms will fare compared to all the other farms which have been stomped on over the years for artificially raising rankings etc.
But getting involved in dubious techniques such as offering to add a +K to your loyal customers’ Klout scores, despite it being the hot trend amongst social media folk, would seem unwise.
Do you have Klout?
However, the lack of involvement by the big brands in many aspects of social media activity highlights an ongoing problem for brands, corporates and businesses.
How to use social media or so-me to engage with customers, build brand and reputation and see that necessary evil – return on investment.
The problem is that learning about your audience by conducting conversations with them is a time-consuming affair. The ROI is not always clear, although the benefits of such engagement may be more apparent when metrics such as influence, reputation, authority, and the increase in social signals are considered. However, these are ‘nebulous’ metrics which are often difficult to assign £ signs to.
The problem for businesses is comprehending that a lack of engagement will have a far more negative effect on reputation etc that can carry a sting in the tail for a long time. If you switch consumers off by failing to engage at all, it is likely that the negative association with your brand in consumers’ minds will continue into the future, however much advertising and marketing budget you throw at the problem.
There are some clear examples of brands failing to engage at any level, who just seemed to have misunderstood entirely what so-me is about. The clue really is in the name!
Social media is not a one way mechanism, and it most definitely is not about broadcasting and then failing to listen. Monologues are not social! Establishing a dialogue with those you are targeting is vital; yet it seems to be one of the major problems that companies are struggling to come to terms with.
One of the red herrings that has caused this problem is “the need for followers”. Yes, you need followers, and numbers may keep the management happy. However, if this is at the cost of building customer relationships and creating quality dialogues, then it is a crash and burn technique. However large your social media team, there is a limit to how many conversations can be successfully carried on.
Whilst the vast majority may be one-time conversations eg “How do I get a refund on this faulty product?”, there will be other conversations where you are building a relationship that will help turn a single purchaser customer into a loyal evangelist of your brand. It is those dialogues which are possibly most important as they permit you to enjoy the benefits of customer retention vs customer acquisition.
The K Farms episode should highlight for all brands and companies the importance of developing strategies which can make the most of short-lived trends, where appropriate, whilst focussing on long-term engagement using the right tool for the jobs the company needs to undertake to succeed.
Empire Avenue
Whether it is Twitter, a Tumblr blog, social bookmarks, or adding +Ks to your followers as a goodwill gesture, it is important to realise that each action you carry out will build on those of the past and it is necessary to consistently add to those actions on a daily or at least weekly basis to maintain the conversations.
Are you spending time worrying about SEO? Or worse, spending untold money trying to move up the search engine results pages only to find that for no good reason your website has vanished from the top 100 pages?
If you find your days and nights are haunted by keyword research, writing META tags, hunting down keyword density tools, aching over whether the copy is sufficiently optimised……
Then, STOP!
Open your website right now and ask yourself these simple questions:
1. Does my website look good?
2. Does it tell a prospective customer everything they need to know about my products and services?
3. Does it include useful, helpful, valuable, content about my products and services eg how to manuals, articles, links to other resources and so on?
4. Does it include full contact details that are easy to find from every page?
5. Does it sell? Or, from a customer point of view, is it easy to buy?
6. Have I recently added some fresh content for regular visitors?
If the answer to all of the above is “Yes”, then you do not need to keep worrying about SEO. What you need to do is find who your customers are and where they hang out – in forums, in blogging communities, on Twitter, in social networks, etc – and go and talk to them. Network. Socialise. Share your experience and help people out. Build your reputation as a good person to deal with and you will find that on its own will encourage people to check you out, remember you, recommend you.
When you are asked questions and can give a great answer, add it to the FAQ on your site to help someone else.
There is far more that will attract your target audience to your website than just SEO. Word of mouse is far more effective in finding your target audience. Think beyond the search engines.
If your answer to any of the above is “No”, then you need to resolve some very basic issues with your website before anything else.
And when you feel you have got enough customers from being social, then you may wish to have a look at your needs for SEO again. And you may find it is no longer required because satisfied customers and people you have met in your ’socialising’ are doing more than a little on-page SEO could do by linking to you, recommending you in blogs, on Twitter, to their networks and so on.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=054c18c0-7717-4992-8192-76d9324a0db2)
Take a look at your website.
On every page, and every piece of great content, how many ways of sharing that content do you have? None? One? Many?
Do you make it easy for a site visitor to send out a link to that content? Can they tweet it, add it to Digg, Facebook, delicious? Is there a retweet or reblog button? Is there an RSS feed to syndicate the content not just to RSS readers, but also to sites that accept RSS feeds? Have you added your RSS feed to sites who cater for your target audience? Is your blog RSS feed listed everywhere it can be? Are you on authoritative blogs’ blogrolls? Can your video content be embedded in other people’s sites?
Do you make all of the above as easy as clicking a mouse?
Take a look at this video (which is quite amusing!) and note the simplicity of sharing the video, embedding it on your own site, tweeting, adding to facebook, digging etc.
Is your content this easy to share? Or are you still manually seeking out valuable links rather than letting your users do it for you?
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4125ccf4-7bbe-4cfe-967e-48afc06a4951)
As some may have noticed, we have been experimenting with some of the Twitter tools available for clients and SEO agencies alikes.
For those with a blog, there are multiple options for ensuring that the information posted to your blog is automatically added to your twitter account, thereby saving a job. However, some tools only work with specific blogging software eg WordPress, whilst others offer a variety of useful functionality across multiple platforms.
This post is to check out what happens with Wordtwit (a WP add on) as against Twitterfeed, which works somewhat like Feedburner (now in the Google stable) and potentially is of more use to a wider audience.
Let’s hit send….!
Just before we do though, a salutory lesson to others. If you try to post in different places, eg blog, facebook, Twitter etc, and automate distribution of the content between those places, be very careful not to create an infinite loop!
For instance, if you set up Twitter to feed into your corporate Facebook page, and for your FB page to feed new content into Twitter each time a member of staff posts there, you will end up with a constant re-posting of the same content between the two places. Test and think out such processes before applying them live….
Update: you can use the Feedburner Awareness API to see your stats from Twitterfeed to Twitter and compare stats for clickthroughs between your traditional RSS feed distribution and your social media distribution.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=63353aff-d1e8-43fe-b0b3-862f8c9b4ad7)
RT @unmarketing Look at all these freaking soc media icon sets for blogs! http://bit.ly/1501rg just awesomesauce!
If you use social media tools such as Twitter etc, take a look at these icon sets which you can use to gather followers and grow your community / list through your blog or website. Neat!
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=650039fe-0ab7-4fc5-84b3-745e5edf08ff)
One of the great ways of getting link juice and promoting your website is to find blogs and forums and comment on the posts, discussions and articles. For maximum effect, you need to post on blogs with a high page rank, and with dofollow tags, but just posting can bring you targeted traffic from those who read the blog and comments.
Obviously, for this, your comments need to be valuable, not just “Great post” or “I agree” or the moderator of the forum or blog will probably just delete it!
Blogsearch from Google is useful for finding blogs that have recent posts, and there are a variety of search terms that can be used within the search engines to track down blogs and forums etc. eg inurl:forum, inurl:chat, intitle:bulletin etc.
However, finding blogs with a decent PR, recent posts, and preferably dofollow comments can be quite a time-consuming process. We have trialled the free version of FastBlogFinder and have now purchased the full version and can recommend it wholeheartedly.
It makes it a doddle to find blogs with a high Page PR as well as site PR, as well as indicating which are nofollow or dofollow. It does occasionally throw up old posts rather than the latest post on a blog but it’s just a matter of looking for a recent post to comment upon. The search facility is pretty sophisticated offering all the usual Boolean terms, plus a few others, which are listed on a cheat sheet in the tutorials, and make it easy to find sites on specific domains, find synonyms for your keyword search, with a certain number of comments or more, and so on.
This is definitely a useful resource for anyone looking to find blogs to help increase backlinks to the site. Try Fast Blog Finder for free today.
