Monday, 29. March 2010
A Successful Blog Starts By Defining Your Audience and Niche
A successful blog can be measured in a number of different ways. The easiest way to measure a blogs success is analytically. How many visitors in the demographic you are targeting are visiting your site? The second way is revenue; how much money, duckets, dollars, chavo, or pesos. And finally, user interaction; is your blog truly Web 2.0?
Successful Blogs Define Audience and Niche
For instance, let’s say you have about dating. There are 180,000,000 pages that relate to “dating” indexed by Google. The chances of someone finding your site by searching for dating are pretty slim. But when you narrow the scope of your blog to free dating, the number of competing pages drops to 41,500,000 pages, about %23 of the total number of matches to dating. And if you take this one word further and make the search absolutely free dating, the total search responses drop to 2,060,000 indexed pages, about %1 of the original search.
So let’s say you are a dating expert, and want to start a blog about free dating. To bring in traffic from search engines, you’ll need to narrow your focus to article or pages with 3 – 6 keywords, often referred to long tail keywords. For example, the following are the top longtail keywords for “free dating”:
- Free dating online
- Free dating site
- Free dating service
- Free online dating services
- Dating for free
These different niche keywords all have to do with your defined audience, people looking for advice on free dating. If your blog has an advertising network showing relevant ads, the chances of increased revenue are maximized from the relevant ads being shown. If you have are looking for interaction with your visitors, the likelihood of people making contact are greater now due how specific each page is.
Now that you are writing your article topics for your target audience, you’ll want to breadcrumb your site. Simply put, if you are writing an article, and you mention a key word that is developed in a different page, use that keyword to link to the page in question. You can even use that keyword to link to a category or tag page. This will help your readers find the articles they are looking for, but as an incidental bonus, your entire site will start to rank better in the search engine results page.
If your site is already written, don’t worry. You can go back and make minor edits to individual pages to better optimize keywords, keyword density, and intrasite linking strategy. By employing these tips you can turn a broad keyword into longtail keyword magic.
Posted in Content Writing, Search Engine Optimization by -
Monday, 8. March 2010
Old Blog Posts Still Have Relevant Information
Old blog posts often have relevant information. But it is quite common that after the blog post reaches its first birthday, it might only garner %1 of the page views from 1 year of age forward. How do you get visitors to read these older articles?
If you haven’t done anything to promote these pages, then chances are the majority of the traffic that these article receive are from search engines. And there is nothing wrong with this. But to capitalize on these older blog posts, you’ll need to be proactive about Search Engine Optimization and Internet Promotion.
Before you start linking to old posts, you need to reread the blog posts to remember the flavor of the article. Next, go through your current articles and find the two most related and add the link as textual links. At the bottom of the post add a small sentence that says. “If you liked this, I recommend this Search Engine Optimization article.”
Another great way to get traffic to these older posts is to have a recommended reading list in your blog roll. This is simply a links section using your targeted keywords and pointing the links to the articles you want people to read. I recommend changing up your recommended articles on a bi-weekly or monthly basis.
One last way is internet promotion through social media. When you comment on other blogs, use a targeted keyword in the name section, and then place a link to the article in the website section. Another way is to post a link in Twitter. Finally, add links to your Facebook and Myspace pages.
Armed with these tools, you’ll be able to get more traffic to these deep links and also offer your visitors great articles at the same time.
Posted in How To..., Search Engine Optimization by -
Saturday, 6. March 2010
Marketing Strategy For Small Businesses In A Recession
Recession… The word brings shudders to most business and stock owners. But investors see opportunity in a recession. Why, because investors know that during a recession they can get goods and services for less money than during a growth period. They also know that most companies will look to decrease their overhead during a recession. Many of those companies decrease their advertising and marketing amidst the recession.
The savvy investor do not decrease advertising and marketing funding level during a recession. The savvy investor takes a contrarian action by maintaining or increasing advertising and marketing funding.
What A Small Business Manager Or Owner Can Do In A Recession
The most cost effective advertising and marketing avenues are direct marketing through emails, flyers, post cards, and phone calls. Indirect marketing measures that are cost effective are paid to read emails or other online marketing strategies, traffic exchanges, social networking sites, and viral marketing ebooks.
It is absolutely vital that you increase market share in a shrinking market! While this sounds like a daunting task, it really isn’t. While the competitors are cuttng advertising and marketing funds and thereby shrinking their visibility, the savvy manager/owner is increasing their visibility.
Even though profit margins are shrinking during the recession, branding visibility has increased. The goal is to have a profit margin higher than your competition. While you may take as big of a hit as the rest of the businesses in your market segment, you will rebound quicker and be stronger when the market starts to grow. You will have positioned yourself to begin growing earlier than the competition!
I spell opportunity RECESSION!
Posted in How To..., Promotion by -
