Blogging for beginners kit Christmas promo

We are nearing the end of 2012 where people are winding down and getting into the holiday spirit.  For me, it’s the best time of the year because the holiday means spending time with friends and family. It’s also a time where great promo’s can be found if you know where to look for them. With that said, we are excited to announce our “Blogging for beginners kit” promo where you can get your hands on a great SEO optimized blog for low price so that you can enter 2013 with a bang for your business.

Blogging is a great social media marketing medium and with this promo you can start 2013 on a high note! This promo includes the setup of the blog, the theme, and an hour training (optional) to get you up to speed in the blogosphere. It’s really easy to get started with blogging and in my opinion, a must for every business that wants to take social media to the next level.

What are the benefits of taking this special offer?

Benefits of the blogging for beginners kit

• Search engine optimized blog – SEO;
• A simple and clean design;
• Hassle Free Blogging Start up;
• No Limit to your pages/posts;
• Low cost to maintain;
• Easily be found online by your clients or audience;
• Be viewed as an expert and a market leader by your readers;
• Improve your website rankings;
• Add a human face to your company and create a corporate personality
• Link to your Social Media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube;

Included in the blogging for beginners kit

• 5 Page Business Blog Content Blueprint;
• Hosting included for 6 months;
• Business Blog fully set-up;
• Dedicated links page;
• Keyword analysis;
• Blogging Tips;
• Social media bookmark buttons built in;
• Blog RSS feed submitted to 5 blog aggregators;
• Website analytics to view user statistics;
• Twitter account with automatic Tweeting of your blog posts (* optional);
• Up to 30 minutes training  (* optional);

If you require more information on this exciting promotion, visit this page Blogging for beginners kit or contact us for all the information.

Are We Addicted to the Internet?

The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature ofInternet marketing in terms of providing instant responses and eliciting responses are the unique qualities of the medium. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to be broad in scope because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media. Management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems are also often grouped together under internet marketing. Here’s an infographic I came across on flowtown.com.

Blog Design For Killer Search Engine Optimization

Online content that you publish is one of your most valuable assets on the web. By sharing your content online you can enhance your company’s brand, broadcast your message across the web and demonstrate your expertise to name but a few benefits. Here’s an infographic about designing your blog for SEO.

 

7 Editing Tips to Improve your Blog-Writing Skills

You can have hundreds of websites on the internet, but if nobody knows about you, you are invisible. A well-planned, creative online marketing campaign can put you out there for the world to see and instantly increase your sales. Now with that said, you will at one point need a blog in order to improve your online visibility. Take a look at these tips below fromsocialmediatoday.com.

Developing your blog-writing skills is a slow process. Work on your technique continuously and your work will attract readers. Take in readers critiques for they know best how well you are passing on your thoughts. Neglecting the editing aspect of blog-writing will deter your readers from your blog.  Here are the reasons why writers need to edit and how to edit your blog articles.

Let’s start at the basis of why writers need to edit.

• Inspirational chaos. Say you came across an amazing idea for a blog article that you know and feel will bring in traffic from the web. Then you start typing away with no end in sight. I like to call this ‘verbal/written diarrhea’ where your words just flow in every direction. Editing will help your thoughts come together in the end.
• Diverse ideas. Writers tend to get lost in their sentences or words and don’t take the time to double-check if their sentences would make sense to a reader. People may capture your writing differently than you had thought. In the creative process ideas get intertwined which can cause for messiness and a blog article that isn’t easy to read.
• Grammar and all that other stuff. Editing as you write never works out!  Take your time to edit your blog article after you have finished. We all miss one or two words when editing – sometimes we don’t even notice when we press the wrong key so spell-checking and revising each article afterwards is a must.
• Oh, you speak English, too? Even if you consider yourself an English-native speaker – edit your articles. Just because you were born into the English language and learned about it all your life doesn’t mean you won’t make any errors (it’s very naïve to think so).  

Follow these 8 simple tips to when editing your work that promise great writing skills for future blogs:

1. Take a breather after writing. The first mistake writers make is editing their post right when it’s done. Writer’s thoughts are fresh in their heads and when re-reading their article they might not pick up on the errors right away. Giving yourself time will put you in the reader’s seat without prejudice to your own work.  You won’t remember why you chose that exact word over another. This is the only time I recommend distractions: TV, music, Facebook, what have you. The key is to focus on unrelated things then come back to your article.

1. Divide and Conquer. Divide your editing into three processes: content editing, structure editing, and grammar editing. Being more specific while editing will help you focus on specific grammatical errors. Again, take your time.
   -Edit content. Review your article keeping an eye out for sections that don’t make sense. Look for unfinished paragraphs and fragments. After identifying them, work towards fixing the errors.
   -Edit structure. Write your articles in a way that the reader will be able to follow your content. Structure your content using bullets or bold headers.
   -Edit grammar. Lastly, edit grammatical errors. This shouldn’t take more than 10-15 minutes for a 800-900 word article.
2. Less is more. When it comes to words – less really is more. Don’t use complicated jargon unless your blog’s audience understands the lingo. Readers know when you have used the same words and are saying the same thing again. Remember the reader is smart – don’t underestimate their ability to understand your words. Adjectives and adverbs can confuse and distract readers. Keep overused words such as “definitely,” certainly,” “really,” etc. out of your article.
3. Don’t trust Spell-check. Trust your spell-check software lightly. These tools don’t “understand” your writing and don’t grasp variations of sentences or word usage.
4. Read at random. Choose a random paragraph from your article and edit it. Then choose anotherrandom paragraph and edit that one. Do so until you have finished editing them all. I know you’re asking yourself why? This tactic stops you from reading in “autopilot.” You wrote this article so you know what’s coming next and you may miss obvious mistakes.
5. Don’t overdo it. What’s harder than actually starting the editing process? Knowing when you’ve had enough. No sense beating a dead horse. If you find yourself rewriting the same sentence over and over then you should call it a night. Reaching the publishing stage is stressful, but don’t let your indecisive editing keep your article in the drafts folder.
6. Learn from your mistakes. After following the steps above, you will be closer to a perfectly written masterpiece. Learn from the mistakes you picked up in the editing stage. Analyze what you’ve done wrong and practice to get to your goal writing style. When you write your next article make a list of your mistakes along with your corrections. This will help you remember your mistakes and hopefully not repeat them.

I hope you find the above tips as useful as I have. There are free online tools such as After the Deadline to help with editing. This tool has helped me shift from writing in a passive tone to a more active tone. What actions to you take when editing a blog article?

Starting out with mobile social media marketing

We are all part of the continuous mobile buzz and it doesn't look like it will be stopping anytime soon. Everyday you find people sitting at their favourite coffee shop with their tablets and smartphones working. The new on the go office space is 100% mobile and it's no longer necessary to sit in a cramped office to get work done. It is now easy to get things done on the go.

People are slowly shifting away from reading traditional newspapers as all the latest news can now be accessed from mobile devices. E-books are changing the way booksellers are selling books like Amazon. When last did you go to a bank to do a bank transfer? Why am I asking this? It's simple - the times are changing and you should get your business on board.

Online you will find many digital marketing articles explaining that Social Media is the best route to take for Internet marketing. Even though I agree with that, I believe you should take your social media campaign further and integrate mobile marketing into your strategy. This will help boost your business to be visible in the ever changing digital business world. With a mobile marketing strategy, your customers will be able to have access to your business on the go, virtually from anywhere in their own comfort zone.

If you already have a social media marketing strategy and it is geared for traditional online users, I guarantee you that you are missing out on lots of valuable business. To start integrating mobile marketing with your social media campaign, find below a couple of tips that can help you with this.

Mobile social media marketing tips

Use mobile platforms: Create profiles on social media platforms such as Foursquare, Google Places, and other related local networks. Having an active presence on these mobile platforms will help your customers find you online.

Mobile website: By creating a website for your business that is mobile friendly with mobile friendly graphics, guick loading times, your business will be ready to tap into the mobile market.

Mobile app: This is very different from a mobile website. A mobile app for your business can help your users interact with your business. You can create a mobile app to allow users view your latest news and blog posts, schedule appointments, contact customer service or even place orders. The possibilities with a mobile app is endless.

QR codes: Create a QR code that you can use in your internet marketing strategy. One of the easiest ways to create a QR code is to use Google's URL shortner Goog.gl.

As more people are starting to use smartphones for business, make buying decisions, and to find information, it is important for your business to tap into this medium in order to reach customers.

Using your blog for search engine optimization

Using your blog as a Search Engine Optimization strategy for your website has many benefits on improving your organic website rankings and attracting targeted website traffic. Blog marketing  is a method of using optimized blog posts that provides value to your website.

When you publish a new blog post, Google sees this post as a new page to your website. By using keyword rich links in the content of your blog posts that links to the most relevant page on your website provides a powerful way to increase your links on the search engines.

How are you going to optimize your blog to have the best SEO benefit for your website?

SEO Optimization

Make sure that the structure of your blog is 100% optimized to support your website. To gain natural links from your blog, make sure to make it original and interesting. Other bloggers will link to your blog if they find it interesting or when they are referencing you on their own posts. Other ways you can optimize your blog is by submitting your blog feed to blog aggregators such as Technorati and adding an SEO pluging to your blog to help you with the optimization process.

Keywords

Create a blogging campaign by listing the keywords you will be targeting in your blog posts. These keywords can include all the phrases that are relevant to your business and that you want to use to be found for on the search engines. Usually this list can be anything between 30 and 300 keywords that you can use in the content of your blog posts. If you use a blogging keyword plan when writing your blog posts, it will be much easier to stay on topic when writing new blog posts.

When writing new blog posts, make sure to use a minimum of 300 words and posting new posts at least twice a week. If you don’t publish new blog posts on a regular basis, you will lose interest from the audience you are trying to reach.

Conversion Testing For Your Business

We all know how important “Word of Mouth” marketing is and with the power of the Internet it is even more important. You must have Internet Marketing integrated in your business. Web visitors are more inclined to buy your products, services or solutions when they verify your credibility. Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including: design, development, advertising, and sales. Take a look at this article from TopRankBlog.com about conversion testing for your business.

In the 1989, Greg LeMond overcame a 50 second deficit in the final stage to win the Tour de France by 8 seconds.  He clocked the second fastest time trial ever recorded in the Tour de France.  So how did LeMond secure a stunning victor after 3 weeks and 2025 miles?

Optimization.  The optimization of his equipment, including aerodynamic handle bars and helmet, allowed LeMond to shave crucial seconds from his time and ride to victory in front of his less well optimized competitors.

Optimization results had a big impact on this race and they can have a big impact on business as well. I recently attended a session by Mikel Chertudi, Senior Director of Marketing of Adobe on Conversion Optimization: From Strategy to Execution. He offered strategies for businesses to optimize their digital marketing, in order to move ahead of the pack and secure a victory.

Conversion Optimization: 3 Key Takeaways

1. Alignment & Strategy

The path to successful conversion optimization begins with linking optimization goals to your overall business strategy. This may seem like an easy one, but the fact is, not everyone is doing this.

In order to do so, think in terms of how conversions impact your overall business results. That is how you tie number the impact of more conversions to your sales and marketing budget, relevance and revenue. Create an optimization strategy statement which clearly states your goals and secure buy-in from key players within your organization to move forward. This ensures that conversion optimization is a focused effort for your organization and you have both the funding and buy-in necessary to support conversion testing and implementation.

2. Process & organization: Once you have aligned your strategy, the next step is understanding the processes, organizational design, and elements to create a true culture of optimization.

Creating an optimized organization and process is vital at this stage. Focus on process design, change impact, organizational design and end user training. Also consider the roles and responsibilities of the people who will be involved.

In addition to process, you must create a culture of optimization. Not only do you have to have buy-in from your executive team, your organization must be willing to invest in people, training and technology in order to facilitate testing. In order to ensure ongoing impact, create processes to perpetuate culture, like weekly optimization update emails.

3. Tactical Execution: Now that you have laid the ground work for conversion optimization it is time to get started.

Our recommendation is test, test, test! Testing is the only way to truly know what is working and what is not when it comes to your digital strategy. If you are wondering where to get started, here are top five areas which offer the most impact.

Top 5 Conversion Opportunities for Maximum Impact

1. User Experience Design and Site/Page Layout:  Design and site layout out are huge opportunities to impact the overall user experience. Page layout can impact what content is read, clicked on, and how much time the visitor spends on the page. Try testing these aspects:

• Auto-sizing/movement of content: The size of the browser window and design can impact how content moves around on the page.  Try testing moving around certain page aspects to determine if conversion rate goes up.
• Pop Ups vs. Static content: Test offering value added content, like a download, on the page instead of through a pop up.

2. Lead Form and e-Commerce Process Testing

• Lead form: Once a user has clicked on the lead form, the form itself can have a huge impact on whether or not they fill it out and submit or simply exiting the site. Test the pre-population of certain fields based on IP address in order to determine conversion changes.

3. Headlines and Bullets In Body Copy

• Question versus Statement: While a question may seem more engaging, test leveraging a statement instead.
• Bullet Points: Summarize copy using easier to read bullet points to determine impact on conversion.
• One Offer versus Two Offers: Create a test leveraging multiple versus a single offer to determine which is most successful. Although a single offer is more targeted, multiple offers may win out.

4. Relevant Images

• Beautiful versus Easy to Read Images: The look and feel of your images can be highly influential on conversion rates. Test the preference of your audience for images which are beautiful, compared to easy to read  when it comes to conversions.
• Call to Action with Marquee: Try adding a call to action within your Marquee image rather than next to it. This small change may have a big impact.

5. Calls to Action

• Button versus Link: Testing switching a link to button. Buttons tend to be more attention grabbing and easier to read.
• White paper versus guide: Finesse the wording of your call to action to determine what works best for your target audience. For example, update ‘download white paper’ to ‘download guide’ to test the psychological impact of wording.

You can use these tests to get you started but one of the most important ideas here is that you can and should test everything.  Every audience is different, so try testing some best practices you assume are true. You may be surprised on the impact conversion optimization can have on your business results.

What type of conversion testing are you doing in your business?

Why you have to do keyword research for your SEO campaign

Keyword research for SEO is one of the most neglected parts of the search engine optimization process. Many new internet marketers are under the impression that you only have to do keyword research once and be done with it. That is the wrong way of doing keyword research. In all essence, most internet marketing methods revolves around keywords. Keywords are used for search engine optimization, social media marketing, and even for social media optimization purposes.

Once you have done keyword research and you have a list of all the keywords you are targeting, don't see that list as set in stone. Make sure to revisit your keyword list often. This doesn't mean everyday, but at least once every few months. If you are targeting an industry with a lot of changes happening often, then you will most likely have to visit your keyword list often.

The goal of keyword research

The main goal with doing keyword research is to find the keywords and phrases people are using when doing a search on Google. This doesn't mean that you should only use the keywords that has the most search volume. If a popular keyword doesn't relate to your business, don't use it, but take note that search queries usually changes over time. What people search for a couple of months ago regarding a certain topic will most likely not be the same thing they are searching for right now. To make sure you are using the right keywords what people are searching for, keep an eye on current trends.

Look at search trends at least once a month. Measure these trends on Google and the popular social media channels. If something catches your eye as a trending topic that you can use for the keywords you are chasing, start using those keywords and phrases with your campaign.

4 Blogging Tips to Double Your Site Traffic

Did you know that you can use yourbusiness blog for branding and it also establishes you as the authority in your niche? Blogging is an interactive method that will allow you to reach your target audience. This can include using the blog for website traffic, reaching new customers, branding, and it can be used as a communication medium. take a look at these tips below from SocialMediaExaminer.com.

Jason Crawford, president of the Parts and Service division of Block Imaging, was upstaged by his six-year-old daughter.

In her ponytailed debut on the Block Blog, Crawford asked her, “Madeleine, do you know how to fix a laser aimer?”, to which she confidently replied, “Yes!”

The pair then demonstrated with charming aplomb a simple troubleshooting tidbit for Block’s medical imaging equipment customers.

The video was one of a slew of ideas that came out of a two-day retreat aimed at kickstarting a company-wide commitment to content marketing through their blog.

Since then, Block has seen an increase of approximately 150% in organic search traffic to their site, which has translated to more and better-qualified leads and shorter sales cycles.

Sales volume has increased significantly enough since September that the company—which had been in a slump—hired 13 employees, including 3 additional salespeople.

Organization: Block Imaging International, Inc.

Social Media Handles & Stats:

• Website — Block Imaging International Inc.
• Blog
• LinkedIn
• YouTube — 12,591 views

Highlights:

• Organic search traffic increased from 4,000 to approximately 10,000 visits per month
• A single post was the impetus for a $70K order
• Three new salespeople hired since the company-wide commitment to blogging
• Over 250 downloads of The C-Arm Buyers Guide in its first 3 months

Block’s search traffic increased significantly after a September 2011 company retreat focused on content marketing.

Block Imaging, a 70-person company in Lansing, Michigan, provides preowned and refurbished medical imaging equipment, including machines for MRI, CT, X-ray, C-Arm and mammography, to a worldwide market.

Their sales growth over the past year is to a great extent directly attributed to theirfocus on content marketing through their blog.

Four factors have contributed most to their blog’s success.

#1: Buy-In From the Top

The atmosphere at Block Imaging in summer 2011 was fearful and distrusting; sales were down and every department had scaled back.

Vice President of Marketing Krista Kotrla articulates that they had two options: “Are we just going to accept this not being a good year and cutting and scaling back on everything, or are we going to go all-in on something to try to grow this business?”

She had experimented with getting a blog going the previous December, but participation and results were spotty. “It was kind of relegated to the marketing department trying to get an article from the company president maybe once or twice a month,” she said.

Kotrla proposed a two-day company-wide retreat with a content marketing specialist to launch what she calls a “culture of content marketing.” Response to the retreat was extremely positive, generating a host of ideas for blog posts and videos such as the one Crawford made with his daughter.

“I had never written a blog before, and I had never done a blog video before, but I figured we’ve got to start somewhere,” Crawford said. “It really came down to being willing to be a little vulnerable and a little real with people.”

Block Imaging employees in a team blog-title brainstorming exercise at their company retreat.

“It was a definite intentional shift from leadership saying that this is the way we are going to go, this is the wave of the future,” said Product Manager Chris Sharrock.

#2: Make it Easy for Everyone to Contribute

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy at Block for coming up with content. Sharrock dove in wholeheartedly, and has no problem consistently cranking out two to three blog posts a month, but some others have needed a little more help and encouragement.

Some people can take a list of keyword phrases that marketing has gleaned from Hub Spot and run with it; others work better with a specific blog post title. Others are more comfortable verbally. “Some salespeople feel much more comfortable standing in front of the backwall we set up in the conference room and filming a short video,” Kotrla said.

And if there is someone who hasn’t sent any submissions in a while, “We pull them aside and in a one-to-one meeting, try to figure out what they need,” she said. “Is it more keywords, specific titles? Sometimes they just need permission to stop the daily grind and sit down and talk it out. Other times, they feel more comfortable if they know it’s being reviewed by an engineer, so we’ll take a salesperson and an engineer out to lunch and flesh out a few outlines.”

Block’s ambitious goal of one post every weekday means managers must keep on top of department quotas, but they find that an atmosphere of inclusiveness and flexibility has far better results than reprimanding people for not participating. To date, over 40 people from the 70-person company have contributed to the blog.

#3: Empower a Content Officer

One strategy that has helped tremendously is to have a single point of contact for all blog drafts, someone they have taken to calling the “Content Officer.”

Jordan Batterbee, originally from engineering support, emerged as a natural writer who can take a draft, outline or even a list of bullet points from another team member and craft it into a well-edited, SEO-keyworded post, injecting some humor and personality along the way.

Jordan Batterbee, Block Imaging’s Content Officer

Having him as the conduit for all posts has been “hugely significant,” said Kotrla, “Because it made it a lot easier for people to contribute very little and turn it into a post that they get recognized for. It makes it easy and comfortable for people to participate.”

Batterbee has increased his contribution to the point that he is about to move over to marketing full time. “I wish we had invested sooner in developing a dedicated person to carry more weight in helping to oversee our blogging machine,” said Kotrla.

#4: Make it Fun and Rewarding

The one factor that ties everything else together is consistently celebrating and rewarding contributions to the company’s content marketing, creating an environment where employees are intrinsically motivated.

“Every two weeks at the staff meeting, we reward two content superheroes who have contributed something significant to the blog. We have a Spiderman mask and a Wolverine mask that they put on and we take a picture that we share in the next all-team PowerPoint presentation,” said Kotrla.

Two of Block’s biweekly Content Superheroes.

“We also have a really cheesy Plinko board with gift cards at the bottom, so they get a gift card, too. But it’s not really the gift cards, it’s the fun of knowing that you contributed. We try to inspire in the team that all of their efforts arecontributing in a significant way to the overall company vision.”

But besides the chance to unleash their inner superhero, the biggest motivator for Block’s employees is success.

Said Crawford, “When we get feedback when someone says, ‘Your answer to a common question helped me make a better decision,’ or when people begin to see that they helped someone get a better result or find an answer to a problem they were having, that’s a great feeling that people want to experience again and again.”

What do you think? Does your company have a blog? What strategies are succeeding or not succeeding in your content marketing? Leave your comments and questions in the box below.

Business blogging for lead generation

Businesses blogging has become the heart and soul for many business Social Media Marketingcampaigns. A business blog marketing strategy can get faster results than traditional online marketing and many businesses online are taking advantage of this opportunity to use this method as their main online marketing strategy.

How business blog marketing works is that it uses blog posts to advertise their services, products, and website to the online world. In plain English: business blogging is simply a way to market your business on the social web using your blog. Many businesses has a website, but not all of them are using a blog for marketing purposes.

Blogging for branding

Did you know that you can use your business blog for branding and it also establishes you as the authority in your niche? Blogging is an interactive method that will allow you to reach your target audience. This can include using the blog for website traffic, reaching new customers, branding, and it can be used as a communication medium.

Business blogs are the newspapers of the future and has become quite an important medium on the web. In my experience, blogging is also one of the best ways you can use to publish new news that can be spread like a virus online. More and more people are reading blogs everyday to find out information and if they are looking for an answer to their problems. This shows that blog readers are early influencers and adopters. People who read blogs are more likely to take an action when they have found what they are looking for.

Using business blogging for lead generation is a very similar to marketing with an enewsletter. With both you can build relationships with your customers and credibility. Do you have any success stories with blogging?

Blog Marketing Strategy: 7 Steps to Social SEO Success

Content marketing should not just be seen as placing random articles of text on your website and blog with the hopes of getting attention. If you can create quality content for your target audience that catches the attention of interested people, and they decide to share the content with their own community and network, you have succeeded in creating good content that will work for you. I found this article below on toprankblog.com, have a look.

All marketing efforts should start with a goal and means for measuring success, so I do not get into specifics on those tasks in this list, but focus more on the content and promotion.

1.  Social SEO Personas

While blogging evolved out of personal expression, business blogging is less about corporate egocenticism and more about empathy with customers. Customer centric content for blogging is more relevant and does a much better job of engaging. In the way that direct marketers segment customers by key characteristics, online marketers that blog can create buyer personas to create more relevant experiences for their readers.

Personas are customer profiles (preferences for information discovery, consumption & sharing) that represent groups of customers that a brand wants to engage and do business with.  Information from Personas drives keyword research & optimization, content plan and promotion. More about persona creation here. So one of the first things a blogger should do after defining objectives and general audience, is to understand who they’re trying to reach by developing personas.

Collect data through reader / customer surveys, analytics, social monitoring and other tools to form a profile. That profile represents topics, behaviors and preferences that can translate into search keywords, social topics, social channels, editorial calendar and promotion plans.

2.  What is your unique selling proposition?

When people (or search engines) visit your website, is the primary topic crystal clear? With the increased competition in search and for attention in social conversations, it’s essential for blogs to stand out.  Being able to articulate your Unique Selling Proposition helps distinguish your content the value of your blog content for people and search engines. The screenshot above shows a blog that is crystal clear in it’s focus. The result is reflected both in popularity and search visibility (#1) for highly competitive phrases like “digital photography“.

Developing a Unique Selling Proposition for your blog (h/t SEOBook) is pretty straightforward: Identify the key benefits of your blog’s content and how you will address customer/reader pain points. As you communicate your USP, be specific, concise & show proof. It’s also important to live your USP so that it’s a key component of your messaging.

3.  Search & Social Media Keywords

Personas and your USP represent the intersection of customer interests and the goals for your blog. In order to activate your blog content for effective discovery via search and social media channels, it’s essential to create a search phrase keyword glossary for Search Engine Optimization purposes and a social media topic glossary for Social Media Optimization.

SEO Keywords: Resources like Google’s keyword research tool are a great start for finding which words and phrases are in demand, relevant to the content you’re publishing on your blog. It’s tempting to be egocentric and use whatever language you want, but if there is an expectation to attract significant search traffic and an interest in using language that resonates with a community in search of what you have to offer, keyword optimization of content is very appropriate.

Social Topics: Social topic tools that work like a SEO keyword tool are very rare and a to really get into useful source information, there’s a lot of manual research necessary. However, to get started, tools like socialmention.com offer a list of social keywords (bottom left of search results page) that can be downloaded as a CSV file for use in your Social Topic Glossary. Social keywords represent topics of interest to the people your blog is intended to reach and engage. By researching these topics and the specific language the community uses to express their interest, your blogging can be more effective at being relevant and shared on the social web.

The SEO Keyword and Social Topic glossary provide guidance towards editorial plans and specific phrases/topics can be mapped to content for search and social media optimization. It’s a great management tool that keeps SEO and SMO efforts accountable.

4.  Create a Content/Editorial Plan

Keywords inform content and documenting an Editorial Plan for your blog can ensure that content is true to the goals of the business and interests of the community that reads it. An content plan also offers ideas and guidance, months in advance, which is priceless when bloggers hit creative roadblocks. This is inevitable, and after 7+ years of blogging myself, I can’t vouch enough for the guidance of an Editorial Plan.

Keep in mind, such a plan is a guide – not a set of hard and fast rules.  It’s effective to schedule recurring themes with posts, like “Thought Leadership Monday”, “Practical Tips on Tuesdays”, “News Roundup on Fridays”. But it’s also important to allow for wildcards, because opportunities will come up spontaneously based on events within your company or the industry that require blogging. And you don’t want to delay publishing important news or a reaction to news, just because it wasn’t planned for that day.

The Editorial Plan defines the application of keywords in topics to be covered, categories, titles, tags and how/where/when the posts will be promoted. It also allocates for the future repurposing of appropriate blog posts.

5.  Search & Social Media Optimization

Optimizing content for search on websites like Google and optimizing social content for ease of discovery and sharing within social channels is essential for reach and engagement of blog content. Optimizing for search & social media is the one two punch of blog marketing. If SEO efforts are initiated with an existing blog, then a SEO audit would be completed, including a review of the blog templates and configuration, existing content, internal links and links from other websites. If you’re starting a new blog, then SEO would be baked in to the editorial plan via the keyword glossary.

Optimizing for search is about helping search engines do a better job of connecting readers with your content. It’s not about tricks or manipulations. It’s about providing search engines and people what they need to find, consume and be inspired to share your blog content.

Optimizing for social media is about search as well, as in the search that’s possible within Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc. But SMO is also about optimizing content editorially to resonate with social audiences. It’s about ease of discovery and sharing through things like feed distribution and widgets that make it easy to ReTweet or post to the reader’s favorite social sites.

SEO and SMO are about making life easy for both search engines and people to connect with, interact and share your blog content.

6.  Links: Internal and External Acquisition

Links between pages and links acquired from relevant websites in the industry provide a good user experience and strong signals for search engines when they crawl, index and rank web pages. Following best practices for internal linking is one of the most impactful things a blog can do to help website realize SEO benefit.  For example, a tips blog that cross links the keywords relevant to specific products being sold gives readers and search engines a quick and relevant way to move from editorial about how to use and get benefit from a type of product to a page that actually sells the product.

Attracting links from other relevant websites as pictured in the diagram above is essential for attracting new visitors to your blog, directly and indirectly because of the effect relevant links have on search engine visibility.  What’s important to remember is that links to your blog home page are important, but relevant links into specific category or individual blog posts is essential  External link sources that are relevant to broad topics that link to your home page or category pages provide the user (and search engine) with a very relevant connection.  Links from niche sites to your specific blog posts do the same.

There are myriad ways to attract links for blogs ranging from commenting and guest posting to creating content that attracts links from other bloggers and the media.

7.  Content Promotion

Content isn’t great until it gets shared. A lot. That doesn’t mean a blogger should aggressively promote every post. It does mean that when a particular post is especially promotable (you would know this because you planned for it in your Content Plan) then it warrants special attention.  Blog content can be promoted in a variety of ways and effective promotion is tied to the quantity and quality of the networks you’ve built. That includes readers and subscribers of your own blog, an email list, Facebook Fan page, Twitter, LinkedIn and other relevant sites where people with common interests interact and share.

Some content promotion is automatic, like RSS feeds, syndication of blog posts to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn or content syndication partnerships. Other content promotion might be tied to the content itself, like using industry thought leaders to crowdsource insights into a topic (your keywords) of importance to your readers. Those participants will often help you promote the post. You can also reach out to your network and suggest or share relevant posts they might be interested in. Commenting and being social on/offline are also effective promotion methods.

The bottom line with content promotion is that great content that isn’t promoted vs. mediocre content that is promoted in a relevant way, will often lose in terms of traffic and therefore meaningful engagement with a greater number of readers. The amount of content being published on a daily basis creates levels of competition never before experienced, so promotion is essential to stand out and get noticed. But it has to be content that’s WORTH promoting.

Summing it all up.

The implementation and refinement of these steps is a work in progress. The web continues to change in terms of technology and how people use it. It’s essential that companies follow an adaptable online marketing strategy when focusing on the social web and search engines. Opportunities will reveal themselves in web analytics and social media monitoring and the promotion efforts outline above apply to those real-time marketing situations just as well as tasks included in a Content Plan. Hopefully these guidelines are useful to you and if you need more specific information, you’ll likely find it in blog posts we’ve published in the past. At TopRank Marketing we do this kind of consulting on a daily basis so there’s a lot of rich information published in our archives.

What other types of insight about blogging and blog marketing would you like to see? What are some of the biggest obstacles you’ve had (and maybe overcome) when it comes to implementing blog marketing tactics like those mentioned in this post?