The all-new Blog Search Engine carries a cleaner, more modern and professional aesthetic, and makes sure to put the featured blogs in the spotlight by the use of prominent screenshots of their websites.

Since there was going to be a lot of images on the page, we thought it best to use solid blocks of color for everything else, including the social media icons on the sidebar. An important element to the design was grid alignment: we wanted to make sure that the boxes on the content area aligned with those of the sidebar, as well as the categories in the footer, so nothing looked out of line.

Another little detail was taking a featured blog’s category, e.g. “animal blogs” and using some regex magic to turn it into singular labels at the footer of each item. It was of course more important to highlight what type of blog it was than the usual date the post is published and using singular instead of plural description focuses on that single blog, instead of simply belonging to a group of blogs.

Check out Blog Search Engine today! Perhaps after you enroll in our blog design services you’d gain a wonderful citation on that directory.

Link Baiting

Link baiting is a short term blog marketing tactic.  Link baiting refers to the process of writing blog posts for the primary purpose of attracting incoming links and boosting traffic.  Link bait posts are typically written about hot topics, they might break news, or they could be controversial.  Sometimes a link bait post might not even be directly related to the blog topic on which it is published.

Link Building

Link building is a long term blog marketing strategy.  Link building refers to the process of writing shareworthy content and building relationships with people both on and off your business blog in an effort to boost organic links and traffic to your blog.  Evergreen blog posts (that stand the test of time) and pillar blog posts (your very best, most informative posts) are examples of  some of the best link building content you can publish on your business blog.

So how can you marry your short term link baiting tactics with your long term link building strategy in order to develop a successful business blog?

Link baiting helps to drive new visitors to your business blog who may not have found it otherwise, particularly if you are one of the first online sources to write about breaking news.  Hopefully, some of those visitors will like the content they find on your blog and return, eventually becoming loyal readers.  The key is to keep them on your blog and coming back again and again by offering value-added link building content as well as traffic-driving link baiting content.

Therefore, writing link bait blog posts that are directly related to your business blog topic are far more likely to drive new traffic to your blog that might turn into loyal readers than irrelevant link bait blog posts are.  Furthermore, you need to add something of value to the link bait topic if you want new visitors to be motivated to read more of your content than the link bait post.

Finally, it’s important to understand that link bait posts should enhance the conversation happening on your business blog rather than detract from it.  Building a blog is like building a brand.  Consumers develop expectations for a brand over time just as readers develop expectations for a blog over time.  Don’t confuse your loyal audience by publishing link bait contests that are meaningless to them.  In other words, don’t sacrifice confusing, frustrating, or annoying your existing audience in an effort to pick up new readers through irrelevant link bait blog posts.

Image: stock.xchng

I’m looking for business sites that look like Web sites, not like blogs, on the home page at least (of course, a blog can be attached to the site, and it should be).  The goal of the series is to not only show how flexible blogging applications like WordPress are, but also to show how great a business Web site can look when it’s built on WordPress (or another blogging application).

Plus, really cool submissions might even be featured in my upcoming book coming out in 2011, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to WordPress”, but the first priority is sharing the great work businesses are doing in leveraging blogging platforms to create awesome Web sites here on BusinessLogs.

To submit your business site for consideration in the series, just leave a comment on this post with your site’s URL. Chosen submissions will appear in a future blog post with screenshots of your site and links back to your site.

Note that the series won’t critique sites but rather provide an overview of the cool things site owners are doing with WordPress, etc. to build their businesses and brands.

Feel free to share this request with your own audiences via Twitter, Facebook, your business blog, etc.!  Let’s find some really great business sites built on WordPress, etc. to highlight here on BusinessLogs!

In my last post, I talked about guest posts as a powerful marketing strategy for your business blog. But if you’ve never done a guest post, you may wonder if other bloggers will actually publish your content. So today I’ll cover some fundamental tips to increase the success of your posts.

Observe the Target Blog First

Before you write a guest post, you should observe your target blog, or the blog where you want your post to be published. Read the last 10 posts of blog. There are couple of reasons to take this preliminary step.

First, you don’t want to write about a topic that’s been recently covered. There’s a good chance your post will be rejected if your cover a recent topic.

Second, you want to make sure your post will fit well with the existing content. This means your guest post needs to be related to the same industry as your target blog. Consider the tone and style of the blogger. Is he writing in a formal voice that’s suited for academic journals? Or does he write in a more informal tone? Also, keep in mind the post length. On average, how long are the blogger’s posts?

Third, you want to understand where the blog’s readers are coming from. Check out the comments and see what kind of readers the blog has.

Fourth, you can generate ideas for a useful topic. As you read the blog, you’ll see that certain topics are not covered or are not covered with a lot of depth. You can create a guest post in those topics. Also, you might come up with a topic while reading the comment section. For example, you find a question there that wasn’t answered by the blogger. You can craft your guest post to answer that question.

Some bloggers write their guest post without checking out their target blogs. Don’t be like them. The best guest bloggers always check out their target blogs first. This allows them to tailor their posts to fit well on those blogs.

Write the Post

Once you’ve checked out your target blog, you should have some ideas for a guest post topic. Go through your ideas and pick the best one based on your expertise and how well the topic fits the target blog.

Don’t forget to include your bio and link. Also, be strategic with your link. You don’t have to link to your blog home page every time. Oftentimes, it’s a good idea to link to one of your blog posts especially if that blog post would be useful to the target blog’s audience.

For example, if I was writing a guest post for a link building blog, I would link to this post, 7 Types of Posts That Attract Links, instead of the home page.

Pitch Your Post

Once you’ve finished create your post, it’s time to send it to the blogger. I use a simple email template like this one:

Hi [name],

I’m a fan of your blog. I especially found [one of their recent posts] helpful.

I wrote a guest post that I think your readers would find interesting. The post is below my signature.

I know you’re probably busy, so I don’t need a quick response. If I haven’t received a response in the next 30 days, I’ll assume it’s okay to send the post to another blogger. Thanks for your time.

Your Signature

Bloggers are busy people, so I like to give them 30 days to give me a response. If you’re targeting a very popular blogger, you might want to give them more time since they get a lot of email.

Over to You

Do you have any tips for getting your guest posts published?

For example, I could write an article about business blogs and then ask the bloggers of this blog if they wouldn’t mind publishing it. At the end or the beginning of the post, I include this bio and link:

Dee Barizo writes about business blogging at BusinessLogs.com.

6 Reasons to Publish Guest Posts

Here are a couple reasons why guest posting is such a powerful promotion strategy.

Increase in Search Engine Traffic

If you want to get a lot of search traffic, you need to get links. Modern search engines like Google base a big chunk of their algorithms on links.

The best links to get are links in the middle of content. Content based links are much more effective than links on the sidebar or footer.

Also, it’s not enough to get links from just any site. Search engines look at the quality of the sites that link to you. With guest posting, you can target quality blogs to publish your guest posts.

High Quality Traffic

As long as you target blogs related to yours, you’ll get traffic that’s a perfect fit for your blog. Not only are the visitors from guest posts interested in your industry, they are predisposed to like you since they just read your great content.

This type of traffic is more likely to become customers than most other types of traffic.

High Success Rate

You may be wondering, does guest posting really work? Do bloggers allow other bloggers to post on their blog?

Here’s the good news. Guest posting is part of the blogging culture regardless of the niche. Most bloggers allow guest posts on their blog. As long as you create quality content, you have a great chance of success.

Bloggers want content. They understand the pressure of keeping their blog constantly updated with new posts. So, you’re helping them out by providing free quality content.

Networking

In the offline business world, networking is one of the fundamentals to success. The same is true online since the web has become just a big social network with the popularity of social media tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

The old saying is true, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Guest posting allows you to build your network in an effective way since you’re providing value to your fellow bloggers. They will remember your helpfulness and be willing to help you in the future.

Reputation

As you guest post on quality blogs, your reputation and credibility will improve. People in your target audience will realize that you’re well connected to other bloggers. They’ll see that you’re a valuable part of the online community in your industry. They’ll respect your expertise.

Easy to Do

Guest posting is easy to do. You don’t need special marketing skills. All you need is the ability to write quality content. After you create the content, you simply contact bloggers and ask them to publish your content.

Tune In to My Next Post

In my next post, I’ll share step by step tips on how to actually get your content published on other blogs. Feel free to subscribe to our RSS feed so you don’t miss this next post.

In my experience with business blogging, certain types of posts seem to attract links more than others. If you want to get more links, it makes sense to publish these types of posts. Here are 7 of them.

1. Lists

If you look at any popular social voting site (like Digg, BallHype, Mixx, or kirtsy), there’s a good chance you’ll find one or more list posts on the front page.

We humans just seem to have an affinity for lists. Maybe it’s because we’re social creatures. Lists are a great conversation piece. We all have our opinions so it’s fun to debate the top 10 movies, albums, sports players, etc. I bet even our ancient ancestors talked about lists. Maybe the top 10 cave paintings or 12 interesting ways to start a fire.

Also, lists have the ability to attract our attention quickly. Glance at the covers of a magazine rack and you’ll see article titles like these:

• Many Happy Returns: 14 Tax Preparation Packages to Guide You Through Taxing Times (PC Magazine)
• 100 Most Beatiful People in 2008 (People)
• How to Build Big Arms in 5 Easy Moves (Men’s Fitness)
• 16 New and Sexy Hairstyles (Cosmopolitan)

2. Glossaries

A glossary is list of definitions for the jargon in your niche. Glossaries attract links because they are a necessary resource in every industry. Every industry has newcomers that want to learn more about the industry. However, these newcomers often get stuck in the learning process because they don’t understand the common terminology.

Bloggers often get asked these type of questions, “What does [industry term] mean?” If you create a glossary, they can link to you and help their readers understand the jargon.

3. Images and Videos

Posts with images and video get a lot of links because they stand out from the crowd. Most bloggers only use text. This leaves a lot of traffic on the table because most people on the internet are visually oriented. Surveys show that most people don’t like to read. Instead, they would rather watch TV or a movie.

I wrote about images and video in the following posts, so check them out for more information.

• Drastically Improve Your Blog Posts By Adding Images
• 5 Reasons to Add Video to Your Business Blog

4. Tutorials

One SEO expert stated that her favorite method for getting traffic and links was to create an in-depth tutorial and then promote it in social media.

Relevant tutorials get lots of links because many internet users are looking for content that shows them how to do a certain task. They want the content to show them step by step how to accomplish their task.

5. Metaphors

When I say “metaphor”, I’m talking about posts that connect two seemingly unrelated topics. Here are a couple examples:

• The Kurt Cobain Guide to Startup Success
• It’s Like Finding Mr. Right: 7 Things I Learned in the Search for the Perfect Jeans
• The Ultimate “Lost” Field Guide to Writing a Better Blog

Metaphor posts are attractive because they jar our mind into making unique connections. We get curious and check out the post to find out how the blogger combined two seemingly unrelated things.

6. Humor

If you’ve got a great sense of humor, try showing it in your blog posts. Historically, humorous content has done a good job of attracting traffic and links. Glance at any social media site and you’re likely to find a lot of humorous pieces.

Also, humorous content often spreads virally because people like pass it around through IM, links, and email. For example, think about all those funny email messages that get forwarded multiple times.

7. Stories

The best-selling book Made to Stick gives six ways to communicate your ideas so that they will survive and spread. One of those ways is to use stories.

Everyone loves a good story. Since the beginning of time, we’ve told each other stories. Stories entertain, touch our emotions, help us understand and remember ideas and concepts, and connect us with each other.

Observe any group of people hanging out and you’ll find them telling stories. With the internet becoming more social, it’s a good idea to find out the compelling stories in your industry and then communicate them on your blog.

Over to You

Have you written any of these types of posts? If you have, feel free to leave a link of the post in the comment section.

In a previous post, I wrote that one of the sites in which I have some ownership, MidoriLei.com, would be getting good press coverage. I finally got notification of the article about us. We were part of a giveaway yesterday where we gave away one of our dresses.

I was definitely pleased by the result. As of right now, the giveaway post has almost 600 comments so I’m sure many people learned about our site. Yes, we did have to give away a dress valued at $200 but I think it will be worth it. Also, giving away your product to get traffic and links is usually more effective than traditional online advertising methods.

Practical Ways to Leverage Your Press Coverage

Now that we’ve been covered by a reputable high-traffic site, we can use that coverage to add perceived value to our business and attract other website owners to talk about us. Here are two practical ways to do that.

Make sure people know about your media mentions. Whenever you talk about your business to other people, don’t forget to tell them about your press coverage. This will improve the credibility of your business. Also, apply this principle when interacting with other website owners. For example, whenever you email a blogger with a link request, point them to other sites that have linked to you already.

Create a prominent section on your site about your press mentions. This could mean starting an “In the Media” page and giving it a prominent link on your home page. Or you could do what SEO Book does. On the sidebar of their home page, they have logos of the media outlets that have covered them. I wrote about our press coverage on our home page.

In my last post, I wrote about the proven marketing strategy of giving away a free ebook. One of the common debated questions between online business people is how to give away your ebook. On one camp, some people say you should never give away your ebook without asking for an email address in return. There are variations to this method. Some people ask for an RSS subscription instead of an email address. On the other hand, many internet marketers say it’s better to make your giveaway truly free and not ask for anything in return.

Ask For Email Addresses or Not?

I think the answer to this question depends on your goals and your industry audience.

If your goal is reach the most number of people, you should not ask for email addresses. Many people are reluctant to giveaway their email address because they think businesses might spam them. Also, since you’ll reach more people, this means you’ll get more links and that will lead to a better SEO ranking. For example, David Meerman Scott currently has the fifth ranking for the term viral marketing with his ebook, The New Rules of Viral Marketing. He doesn’t ask for email addresses whenever he releases his free ebooks.

However, if your goal is to gain a powerful communication channel, then building an email mailing list is the right call.

Basically, it boils down to the old “quality versus quantity” dilemma. If you don’t ask for email addresses, you’ll get a lot more leads and you’ll spread word about your business and blog farther and wider across the net. But, those leads won’t be the highest quality since you won’t have a way of keeping in touch with them. If you collect email addresses, you won’t get as much traffic or as many leads, but your leads will be higher quality since you can repeatedly contact them through their email address.

Also, consider the audience of your industry. Some audiences are more receptive to giving away their email address. Other audiences like younger ones don’t even check email on a regular basis.

If you don’t know your audience well enough, it might be worth it to just test both methods. Use one method for your first ebook. After that ebook launch, wait a couple weeks and then release your second ebook with the other method. Then, compare the data and see which method brought more sales.

Also, look around your industry. What method seems to be having more success?

Both Methods Work Well

One great thing about choosing between these two methods is both methods work well. The action of giving away a free ebook puts you way ahead of most online businesses. Your task is to figure out which method is better for your business, but don’t worry too much about making the wrong choice. As long as you have a quality, relevant ebook and work hard to promote it, you’ll get great benefits with either method.

There are successful online business people and social media experts that disagree with other about the methods. Compare David Meerman Scott and Rich Schefren. Both are successful business men. They are also considered social media experts within the internet marketing community. Yet David gives away his ebooks without asking for anything while Rich uses his free ebooks to build a list.

Feedback

Which method do you think is better for your online business?

One of the proven methods for building your brand and reputation is releasing a free ebook.

Basically, you write about a relevant topic in your industry. You don’t even have to come up with something new. Many bloggers take their best blog posts and use them as the basis of their ebook. Also, you don’t have to make your ebook long. I know of a popular ebook that was less than 20 pages. I think you should aim for at least 15 pages. If you can write more, that’s great.

The Advantages of an Ebook over a Blog Post

If you’re going to base your ebook on blog posts, what is the advantage of repackaging your content in ebook format?

First, an ebook has a higher perceived value than a blog post. This is especially true if you make your ebook look professional. You can do this by getting a nice looking ebook cover, adding images where appropriate, and using other design elements like fonts, eye catching formatting, headers, footers, and icons. If you don’t have design skills, find a professional designer. Check out ChangeThis for examples of well-designed ebooks.

Second, some people like to print out what they read. Sure, they can print out your blog posts but your ebook will be formatted much better for print.

Third, free ebooks are relatively scarce in many niches. It will be a big deal whenever you release your ebook. You can accompany your ebook launch with a press release. And if you tell other bloggers and website owners about your ebook, you’ll probably get a lot of links and traffic, since you’re provided a ton of value to your industry. Because of its uniqueness and perceived value, the potential for a free ebook to spread widely and rapidly through word of mouth is much greater than a blog post.

How to Give Away Your Free Ebook

There’s some debate over the method to give away ebooks. Some people say you should get email addresses or RSS subscriptions in exchange for the ebook while others say you should give it away with no strings attached.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the pros and cons of each method.

Over to You

Have you ever created and give away an ebook? Have you ever read a free ebook?

I recently learned about HelpAReporter.com from my sister. I co-own an online dress store with her. I don’t know anything about fashion so she creates the dresses and writes the blog while I do the promotion and marketing.

I was surprised when she told me that our dresses were going to be covered on a popular site for women. She doesn’t like to do marketing so I asked her how she got this great buzz. She told me she found the lead through HelpAReporter.com.

How Does HelpAReporter.com Work?

HelpAReporter.com works very simply. Basically, you sign up with your email address and then you’re added to a mailing list. You’ll get 1-3 emails a day with queries from reporters.

Many of these reporters are website owners looking for content. If your content fits what they are looking for, your content will be published on their site and you’ll also get a link back. Some of the website owners are even looking for products to feature.

Here are a couple queries from a recent email:

• A major news company is looking for a story about regional banks.
• A career site geared for women wants business people to share their opinion regarding women’s fashion in the corporate office world.
• A blog about moms is looking for tips and products that can help families get control of their finances in 2009.
• A mainstream health magazine is looking for anecdotes about yoga and fitness.
• A health care site wants to interview a networking expert about common networking mistakes.
• A regional publication wants your opinion on the play of a high-profile college basketball team.
• A city magazine is looking for recommendations on local art galleries.
• A foodie podcaster wants to interview professional cooks, chefs, cookbook authors or food industry insiders.

As you can tell, each email will cover many different industries. Unless you’re in a totally obscure niche, you should be able to find a query (or two) that fits your business within a week.

Who Will Benefit From HelpAReporter.com?

I think any business can benefit from HelpAReporter.com. It’s especially a great tool for business owners that don’t like to do marketing. Marketing is usually all about getting out there and promoting your site. However, HelpAReporter.com is different because the reporters are coming to you with their requests.

Relevant Details

You’ll get up to three emails a day. Each email will have around 15-30 queries. The title of the emails will start with “[shankman.com]” so you can easily tell which emails are from HelpAReporter.com.

Over to You

Have you used HelpAReporter.com before? If you have, what did you think of it? If you haven’t and want another channel for promoting your site, check it out and please let me know what you think. Thanks!

If you want to get traffic quickly, I can’t think of a better way than publishing an article on EzineArticles or posting a video on YouTube.

These two sites get a lot of traffic because they both have great rankings in the Google search engine. Google looks at the title of the article or video, so the key to using these sites is having good keywords in the title. I wrote about finding traffic generating keywords in this previous post (second section of the post), so check that out if you don’t have experience with keyword research.

To drive traffic back to your blog, EzineArticles lets you have a link to your blog at the end of each article. And with YouTube, you should display your blog URL at the beginning and end of your videos. Also, you can leave a link back to your blog in the description of each video.

Photo by sundstrom

Links from quality sites are the currency of the web. They directly send you traffic and they improve your search engine rankings, which increases your traffic even more.

However, link building can be a frustrating process. Most search marketers will tell you that it’s one of the most difficult parts of their job. Quality links are not easy to get, so here are 5 principles to help improve your link building efforts.

1. Target sites that link out.

Much of the frustration from link building can come from targeting sites that don’t link out often. If you target sites that historically have not been generous with their links, you will have a hard time.

Before targeting a site for a link, I look at their content and see if they regularly link to other sites. I check to see if they have a links section. For blogs, you can look to see if it has a blogroll. If a site doesn’t have many links to other sites, I don’t target them.

If a site does have outgoing links, check to see what kind of content their links point to. If you can create similar content, you have a great chance of getting a link from that site.

Also, I like to target blogs because blogs usually link out more than other types of sites.

2. Have a long term mindset.

Link building is relationship building. And relationship building takes time in the real world and on the internet. So, don’t expect too much too fast.

Profitable online relationships take time and effort to cultivate. But if you build these relationships, you won’t have to resort to risky tactics like “begging for links”. These tactics don’t usually work and often end up hurting your reputation.

3. Write quality content on a consistent basis.

If you want your blog to attract links, you’ll need to write quality content. Quality content can come in many different forms.

You can publish something unique and interesting. That’s always a good way to get links. Or you can cover a relevant issue in your industry that everyone seems to be talking about. A useful guide or tutorial is another type of quality content that works.

Also, consistency is key. Most website owners don’t like to link to blogs that haven’t been updated in a while. You should publish at least one blog post every 7-14 days. That makes your blog look alive instead of dead.

4. Get noticed.

Much of link building is just getting your blog out in the open. But you have to figure out how to do this without being overbearing.

Try contacting webmasters directly to start a conversation or give them something they would find interesting. Savvy business people have been doing this in the offline world for a long time. They will send an executive newspaper or magazine clippings. These clippings might be of an interesting article or a news item about the executive’s company. Or they’ll mail the executive a letter with useful feedback about his products.

To apply this online, find the website’s contact page and email the webmaster. If the webmaster is on Twitter, I would interact with them there by replying to their tweets.

With blogs, I would recommend leaving many quality comments. This will attract the blogger’s attention. They in turn will probably visit your site and hopefully, they’ll find something to link to. If you don’t get a link right away, you might get one later as the blogger might subscribe to your blog.

I talked about linking out as a link building strategy in my previous post. This strategy works because webmasters often visit sites that send them traffic.

5. Ask for a link.

If you’re applying the other four principles, you’ll have good success with this one.

But don’t ask for a link to your blog home page. Instead, write a quality blog post and point webmasters to that post.

Also, don’t be afraid to ask for a link. If you’ve gotten a webmaster’s attention and you’re pointing them to a quality blog post, they won’t be annoyed. Remember, you’re doing them a favor by giving them something good to link to. At the same time, you don’t want to overdo this as webmasters don’t like getting too many link requests. I wouldn’t send more than one link request per month to the same webmaster unless you know them really well.

Recently, I got a link to one of my blogs that surprised me. I had not really targeted the blog that linked to me. All I had done was leave a couple of comments. Also, I had linked to him telling my readers to check out his blog.

I checked out the post where he linked to me. On this post, he welcomed my readers and gave an overview of his blog.

This event reminded me of the effectiveness of linking to other sites to build links to your own site.

I’ll Scratch Your Back If You Scratch Mine

Linking to other sites, or “linking out”, works because of human nature. If you do a favor for someone, they’ll often return the favor.

Many bloggers understand the value of links. They know how hard it is to get links especially in the beginning, so they are appreciative whenever they get one.

Also, the web is now a social network instead of just a place to get information. The new PR for businesses is personal relationships instead of public relations. In this environment, a link is the equivalent to a compliment or a personal recommendation.

And just like in the offline world, if you compliment someone, you’ll probably get one back (at least in the long term).

I Thought Reciprocal Linking was Not Effective

You may have heard that reciprocal links are not as effective as one-way links. This is true, but what many people don’t realize is that a reciprocal link is better than no link at all. I’ve had one site that got a good amount of traffic and 95% of its links were reciprocal links.

Also, in the long term, reciprocal links lead to one way links because of the traffic and exposure you receive. Each reciprocal link is going to send you some traffic. Some of the people who follow the link to your blog have their own blog. If they like your blog, they may link to you in the future.

And don’t underestimate the power of word of mouth. Each person that visits your blog may know a blogger. If you have good content, they will probably tell their blogger friend about your blog. This often leads to a link from that blogger.

With traffic and exposure being the key, you’ll want to link to sites that get a lot of traffic. I use these two simple methods to evaluate a site’s traffic volume.

If it’s a blog, I check to see if they have a consistent stream of comments (an average of 5 or more per post).

Looking at the site’s Alexa Rank also helps. Any site with a rank of 500,000 or lower will probably send a good amount of traffic. Alexa Rank is not the most accurate measure of traffic, but for the most part, I find that the lower the Alexa Rank of a site, the more traffic it will send.

Finally, reciprocal links are definitely easier to build. This goes back to my first point. If you link to a site, that site is much more likely to link to you than if you didn’t link to it.

Other Sites in Your Industry are Friends not Competitors

Think of other sites and blogs in your niche not as competitors but as friends.

Why do car dealerships build next to each other? Why are the food shops in a mall located in the same place? To share traffic.

The same principle applies for linking out. There are no physical food courts on the internet. However, if you link out to the blogs you want to be associated with, you can setup a “virtual food court” and share in their traffic as they link back to you.

Over to You

How often do you link out? Have you received any links?

Just to clarify, I’m talking about leaving blog comments on other blogs with a link back to your site. You’re looking for blog comment forms like this:

However, if this tactic is done ineffectively, you can wind up with less than 5 visitors per comment.

Increase Your Traffic

Here are 5 ways to improve on this marketing tactic and receive more traffic.

1. Comment on high traffic blogs.

I think the most common blog commenting mistake is to comment on low traffic blogs. You can launch a huge commenting campaign, but if you’re targeting low traffic blogs, you won’t get a lot of traffic.

Many internet readers don’t read the whole post. This means a big percentage of the post’s visitors won’t even see your comment. To combat this, comment on high traffic blogs. The more traffic a blog receives, the more people will see your comment and the more people will visit your site.

This leaves us with the question: how do you estimate the traffic a blog receives?

I like using these three sites.

• Compete
• Quantcast
• Alexa

Compete and Quantcast give traffic estimates. Alexa doesn’t give specific traffic numbers but it does give traffic rankings. Also, Alexa seems to have more sites in its database than Compete and Quantcast.

Also, if a blog averages over 10 comments a post, it probably gets a lot of traffic.

2. Comment early.

Some high traffic blogs get over 20 comments a post. This can be a problem if you’re one of the later commenters. The later your comment is, the less likely an internet visitor will see it and visit your site. I try to leave one of the first 5 comments.

Luckily, many high traffic blogs have predictable publishing schedules. Look at the time stamps of their posts and see if there is a regular pattern for when they publish.

Also, you can try software like Comment Sniper (found via Internet Marketing Sucks) that notifies you whenever a new post is published on a blog.

3. Comment with high quality.

High quality comments get noticed and often lead the reader to visit your site. Leave useful information, not the short “Great post, I agree” type of comments.

I advise on writing longer comments – something over 3 sentences. Longer comments allow you to add more value. Yes, you can leave a high quality comment in 2-3 sentences, but that takes writing skill that most of us don’t have. So, write as many sentences, even paragraphs, as you need to make your point(s).

You can reuse your longer comments as blog posts. For example, I recently wrote an 800 word comment that I’m sure will get some traffic. I slightly rewrote that comment and made a blog post out of it too. This saved me blogging time and allowed me to kill two birds with one stone.

Writing a high quality comment can mean several things. You can provide your expert opinion by delving deeper into the post topic. You can share your personal experience. You can ask a question to get other people to comment or to get the blogger to clarify a point.

The basic principle is to set yourself apart from the other comments. Many comments are not high quality, so you have a great opportunity to get noticed by leaving high quality comments.

4. Comment on current posts.

The current posts will usually have more traffic than the older posts. This is because the home page of a blog has the most current posts and the home page is one of the highest trafficked pages.

Even if an older post receives a lot of traffic, it probably already has many comments. This means you can’t be an early commenter. However, you can leave an early comment on a current post if you act quickly.

5. Comment a lot on the same blogs.

Finally, a key to getting traffic from blog comments is to comment many times on the same blogs. This is a long-term branding move. As people consistently see your high quality comments, they’ll become interested in you. They’ll click over to your site and probably read a couple posts.

These visitors are what I call “pre-qualified” visitors. They’ve seen your comments and they’ve liked what they’ve seen, so they are predisposed to think highly of your blog before they even visit. They have pre-qualified themselves as a great visitor. These visitors oftentimes subscribe to your RSS feed and/or mailing list.

There is power in repetition. I don’t usually click on the comment link. However, if I keep seeing the same person comment, I get interested in them and check out their blog.

Over to You

Have you tried blog commenting? If you have, how has it worked out for you?

What other suggestions do you have for increasing traffic from blog comments?

There are technical aspects to SEO that are complicated, but luckily, the fundamental SEO principles of SEO are not rocket science.

To learn SEO, you should first understand the most weighty factors that search engines use to rank pages.

These following four elements make up a big chunk of the search engine algorithm. If you can nail these elements, you’ll be ahead of most bloggers and webmasters.

1. Title tag

Search engines look at the keywords in the title tag. If you have relevant keywords in the title tag, you’ll automatically rank better for those keywords.

In html code, the title tag looks like this:

The keywords in the title tag show up at the very top right of a web browser. Here is a screenshot.

For the popular blog software WordPress, the words in your post title will be included in the title tag.

2. Quality links from other sites

Search engines also look to see if quality sites are linking to your site. If you get a lot of links from quality sites, then you’ll see an increase in search traffic.

3. Anchor text

Anchor text are the words contained in a link. For example, I can link to my home page with the anchor text business blogs to rank better for that search term. However, it’s much more effective to get anchor text on links from other sites.

4. Body text

Finally, we have body text. With people using keywords to search, it makes sense that search engines would check out the text on a page.

Now you don’t want to mindlessly repeat keywords and make your blog posts spammy and hard to read. That’s called keyword stuffing and can get you penalized or even banned by the search engines. My guideline is to insert the keyword 1-2 times for a short post and 2-3 times for a longer post (500+ words). But don’t worry too much about this. As long as your content is readable, you don’t have to worry about keyword stuffing.

The Importance of Keywords

With three of the four factors above having to do with keywords, you can see that keywords are very important to search engines.

So, one of the first steps to improving your search traffic is doing keyword research.

For many people, keyword research is the most tedious part of the SEO process. However, most of your keyword research only has to be done once. Once you’ve generated a keyword list, you probably won’t have to do it again unless, of course, you start a new site in a different niche.

Also, keywords research is made a lot easier with keyword tools. I like to use these two keyword tools: SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool and Google AdWords Keyword Tool. They are free to use.

I would type in the name of your industry. The keyword tool should then give you a lot of keywords. Next, simply look through the keywords and collect the ones that are relevant to your business. Then, begin to write blog posts that target those keywords.

If you have existing search traffic, it’s a good idea to check your keyword logs to see which keywords are already generating traffic. Oftentimes, you don’t have content that directly targets those keywords.

For example, my sister runs a dating blog where she plans to sell a dating ebook. One of her most popular keywords is “questions to ask girls”. She has an article entitled “Best Questions To Ask A Potential Love Interest” gets traffic for that keyword. I told her that if she wrote an article with words “questions to ask girls” in the title, she would even get more traffic.

Well, that’s it for this intro post about SEO. For more SEO and blogging tips, subscribe to our RSS feed. Also, feel free to email me at deebarizo ATT gmail DOTT com with your questions.

Many business bloggers have gotten great traffic by participating in forums and including a link back to their blog on their forum signature.  Whoever reads their forum posts are exposed to this link.  And as these bloggers have built a reputation as active forum members, many of the other forum members have clicked through and come across their blog.

Increasing Your Clicks With One Simple Step

Instead of linking to your blog home page, you can increase your clicks by linking to your timely, relevant blog posts.

For example, let’s pretend your online business is selling financial products – maybe ebooks and software – and your URL is financial-products.com.  You could make your anchor text your URL.  Or your anchor text could be “Great Financial Products”.

But to get the most clicks, I would link to a timely, relevant post and make your anchor text the post title.  For example, if you’ve written a blog post about Obama and McCain’s economic plans, you should link to that post in your signature.  The U.S. elections are coming up so many people would be interested in your post.

Consider these three signatures.  Which do you think will get more clicks?

1. financial-products.com
2. Great Financial Products
3. Who Will Heal the U.S. Economy, Obama or McCain?

I’m willing to bet option 3 will get more clicks.

Yes, it takes a little bit of time to continually change your forum signature to something relevant but the increase in traffic makes it worth it.

The reason this method works is because people are attracted to specific, relevant, timely information.

Furthermore, if the first post they read is relevant, they’ll have a great first impression of your blog and be more likely to subscribe, bookmark, and come back to your blog.

Maile Ohye, a Google employee, advised website owners to “create unique and compelling content on your site and the web in general.”

More specifically, Maile gave these two bullet points:

• Start a blog: make videos, do original research, and post interesting stuff on a regular basis. If you’re passionate about your site’s topic, there are lots of great avenues to engage more users.
• Participate thoughtfully in blogs and user reviews related to your topic of interest. Offer your knowledgeable perspective to the community.

The first bullet point highlights the importance of blogging with a passion for your industry.  This will generate more traffic because, over time, passionate people stand out from the crowd and attract other fans of the industry.

However, if you don’t have a lot of existing traffic, you’ll have to do some promotion.  Don’t fall the trap of “build it and they will come.”  The web is too crowded with billions of websites to just start a blog and hope people find you.  This is what Maile’s second bullet point is all about.

You need to find out where your target audience is.  Then, go to one of those sites and become a valuable contributing member.  Your reputation will grow as an expert.  Many people will become interested in you and visit your site.

After an extended period of promoting yourself, maybe a year to two years, you can scale back on promotion because you’ll have a critical mass of repeat visitors that will drive traffic for you through word of mouth.

But that initial marketing push is critical to gain traction and brand yourself as an industry expert.

Recently, the founder, Jason Fried, did an interview.  In this interview, Jason talked about his advice not to use a PR firm. Instead, he advocates teaching.

Tim O’Brien: Now, you don’t have a PR firm…

Jason Fried: We don’t.

TO: …unlike a lot of start-ups, unlike a lot of companies.

JF: Right.

TO: And that’s something that you’ve said, “Don’t hire a PR firm.”

JF: Right.

TO: Could you tell me, you know, in hindsight, what were the pros and cons of this?

JF: Sure. Just to come clean about that, we did work with a PR firm once for three months. So I just wanna make sure that I’m not burying that. That was more of an experiment. It worked out pretty well, but it wasn’t really something we wanted to continue to do.

We’ve always chosen to teach to get the word out. So we think that, you know, you can spend a lot on PR firms. Good ones are $10,000.00, $20,000.00 a month, which just seems like a lot of cash to spend on something that isn’t really guaranteeing a whole lot. So we’ve just chosen to teach and to tell a story about who we are and what we believe in. And I think when you teach people, you get a lot of attention. And when you share things a lot of companies wouldn’t share, you get a lot of attention, and the media seems to have liked that a lot.

In every industry, there is an opportunity to teach through a business blog. I’m sure many of you started a small business because you were passionate about your industry. You know things about your industry that the average person in your target audience doesn’t know.

Share those things. Let your target audience know your passion and expertise. Tell them about your views on industry issues.

This teaching strategy will personalize your business and build your reputation as an expert. As you can probably guess, over the long term, this will lead to many repeat visitors, subscribers, and ultimately, more sales.

The temptation is too join all those sites.  However, this is usually a bad idea.

Less is More

For the majority of business bloggers, participating on 1-3 social media sites is enough.  You don’t want to overextend your social media efforts.

1. Social media marketing takes more time than you probably realize.

If you join a social voting site, it takes time to round up votes.  Also, you’ll need to submit content that’s not your own.  (This keeps you from looking like a spammer. )  Finding content takes time.

If you join a forum, it takes time to respond to other forum members.

Plus, unexpected opportunities will come up, but you’ll need to spend extra time to take advantage of them.  For example, you meet someone with whom you can create a profitable partnership.  But it will take time to send the emails/private messages/IMs to make the partnership a reality.

Social media marketing can easily become a full-time job if you focus on too many sites.  But as business bloggers, we can’t spend all that time.  We still have blog posts to write and a business to run.

2. It takes time to understand a community.

We’ve all met someone and had an initial impression about them.  But as we got to know them, we’ve often been wrong on our impression.

This type of experience also happens with social media.  You may think you understand the members of a social media site.  However, as you participate on the site, you’ll learn many new things about the members and the culture they’ve created.

Much of the benefit in social media marketing is knowing a community well.  This knowledge allows you to promote your business in such a way that appeals to them.

The more time you spend on a social media site, the faster you will understand that community’s culture.  Therefore, participate on fewer sites.  This lets you spend more time on each site.

3. It takes time to build a reputation.

Building your business’ reputation (or brand, in traditional marketing terms) is very important on the internet.

To improve your reputation with a community, you’ll need to earn their trust.  Trust, like in real life, takes time to earn.

On forums, it’s the members that have hundreds – maybe even thousands of posts – that wield a lot of influence.  On social voting sites, it’s members that make thousands of votes and hundreds of submissions that drive a lot of traffic.  On blogs, it’s the commenters that comment regularly that get click-throughs to their site.

You will need to be a prolific participant to become an influential member.  This means adding value consistently to the community for a significant time period – at least a couple of months.

With consistent participation being an important part to building your reputation, it makes sense to participate in a few social media sites.  If you participate in too many sites, you won’t have the time to be consistent.

Today we’ll look at how to actually do this. Here are some practical ways to locate your target audience in the social media sphere.

Use the Search Box

Most social media sites have a search box.

I would start with these following social media sites because of their popularity.

• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Propeller
• Reddit

For each site, enter a couple keywords and/or phrases of your industry in the site’s search box.

For example, if you’re in the computer repair industry, you can type in words like:

computer repair
fix my computer
desktop repair
laptop repair
hardware problems

If you get a lot of search results, your target audience is participating on that particular site. If you don’t get many search results, you should move on to the next site.

By the way, Twitter’s search box is hard to find. Here is the URL for their search engine: search.twitter.com.

Also, if you run into a site that doesn’t have a search box, you can use Google to search the site. Type

site:socialmediasite.com your keyword

into Google and Google will search the site with your desired keyword.

Monitor the Front Page of Social Voting Sites

Sites like Reddit, Digg, Propeller, Mixx, and Yahoo Buzz have a front page that shows the most popular content.

You can monitor the front page content for a couple days to see the type of content that is popular with the site’s users. If you can create content similar to the front page content, you have a good chance of driving a lot of traffic to your blog.

Gauge the Participation Level of Blogs and Forums

Many businesses have had success promoting their site on blogs and forums.

To use this strategy effectively, find blogs and forums related to your industry. You can do this by searching and browsing through blog directories and forum directories. Also, try searching on Google using these phrases:

“your industry” blog
“your industry” forum

However, not every blog and forum is worth participating on.

For blogs, you’ll want to check the comment section. How many comments does the blog generate per post? You’ll want to comment on blogs that have at least 5+ comments per post.

There are a couple reasons to do this.

• An active comment section allows you to not only interact with the blogger but also with their commenters.
• Blogs with many comments usually have a lot of traffic.
• People using RSS readers to read blogs are more likely to check out the comment section if they know that a blog consistently gets a lot of comments. (RSS readers don’t show comments.)

For forums, the main thing to look for is how often the forum users post. Frequently updated forums attract more traffic.

For example, here is a screenshot of an active forum:

Compare that forum with this less updated one:

Ask Other Bloggers

This is one of my favorite methods because it kills two birds with one stone. You get social media sites to target and you network with other bloggers.

Basically, ask other bloggers in your industry for recommendations of social media sites. This strategy works because, for the most part, bloggers are willing to help other bloggers.

Don’t Forget Niche Social Media Sites

Niche social media sites are Digg-like sites that focus on a more specific industry. For example, BallHype is about sports and Lipstick is about celebrities.

Here are two great lists of niche social media sites:

• 10 Excellent Niche Social News Sites
• 50 Successful Social Media Sites You’ve Never Heard Of

It may be worth it to go through the list to see if your industry has its own social media site. Also, you can do a search for

“your industry” social media site

Evaluating these sites is similar to evaluating forums.  Check to see how often the site is updated.  And stay away from sites with spam on the front page.

Over To You

I’m sure there are other ways to locate your target audience on the net. What other methods would you suggest?

You may think, that’s pretty obvious. But some business don’t do this crucial first step. They pick a social media site to participate on, but they don’t research that site first to see if their target audience actually uses that site.

An example of this is a wedding blogger trying to promote her site on Digg. Digg is a very popular site but the vast majority of Digg users are not interested in weddings.

Another example is joining a social media site because it’s the “next big thing”. Right now, Twitter is growing in popularity and some social media experts are saying you need to join Twitter or you’ll get left behind. However, much of this talk is hype. Many industries still don’t have a big presence on Twitter.

So, how can you find out where you target audience is hanging out? How can you discover which social media sites they are using?

In my next post, I’ll give some practical ways for locating your target audience on the internet. You can subscribe for free to get updated whenever I publish my next posts.

This is the problem I’ve always had with articles about “how to blog”, “how to get more traffic”, and “how to boost your RSS subscribers” — so many of these articles are written by blogs that have no business writing about these topics. Heck, even when I’ve had a blog with thousands of RSS subscribers I didn’t quite feel qualified to write on these topics because I knew I was still low on the totem pole. Of course you don’t have to be qualified to talk about a specific topic on your blog — you can talk about whatever you want — but I never wanted to do a potential disservice to my readers.

Opinions are like a**holes, everyone’s got one. Some people like to spam forums with links to their blog to gain traffic, and others like to write cohesive and witty comments. Obviously in that scenario you can figure out which is the better method, so why is the spammy tactic the one that so many people write about as an effective method for promoting your blog? One reason is that bombing forums with links is a common talking point on lists that give you “Top 100 Ways To Promote Your Blog” which are taken to heart by newer bloggers. Just because people include it in an article doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, so don’t take these lists at face value since many of them are created just to get traffic to their blog.

Blogs about blogging, articles about writing articles on your blog, when does the meta craziness end? Well just because information on blogging is abundant doesn’t mean that you should read one blog, one article, one author, and then call it the gospel. You need to fact-check your information, read a dozen lists and articles, create your own best practices, and then create strategies that work best for who you are, what your blog is about, and who you’re trying to reach. The same moral rules that apply in the real world also apply online, so whenever you come across a “tip” that seems a little shady, just ask yourself, “would doing this technique/method make me annoying to someone else?” and you’ll figure out what’s a bad idea and what’s not. It’s actually pretty simple, but sometimes the goal of having a check get mailed to you once a month is more alluring.

Don’t take tips from just anybody, in fact, don’t take tips from me at face value either. Read many things, decide for yourself, and then create strategies that still uphold your moral values. Doing everything that someone puts on a Top 100 list is a fast-track to nowhere. Doing a few things really well (like leaving smart comments, emailing authors that you appreciate, writing accurate & interesting entries) will get you well on your way and you didn’t even have to sacrifice your morals during the process.

The most common way of finding information on the Internet is search. Google Adwords, and Adsense, are an extremely successful example of putting your advertising precisely in the laps of your target audience. But ads, being what they are, are only marginally successful. There are other ways each and every company doing business on the Web can utilize their own assets, to help advertise their company.

I recently did a small project with a client that sold books. They had snippets of audio for each book available online. They were thinking of allowing full digital downloads of each book, in audio form, at some point in the future, but for now they had small segments of the book broken down into MP3 files. Those files, could be the key to a portion of their success online.

Podcasting is gaining steam with each and every day. How long it will last, what podcasting will become in the future, and how much value is in actually advertising within indy podcasts – are issues that will be debated for some time. Nevertheless, there is huge potential here for almost any company to parlay off of its success.

My client, had the files (enough to publish a podcast once a week for well over a year), and just needed a way to publish them. Although this specific project is not completed (hence no link showing you how it was implemented) I’ll tell you what we did. Using Expression Engine, or WordPress, or Moveable Type, it is possible to schedule posts. Setting up 52 posts, with 52 enclosures, scheduled to publish themselves each Monday at a specific time – and you’ve got yourself an automated advertising service. A 1:30 audio clip, that links back to a way to buy the entire audiobook, or physical book, is really a simple way to generate revenue.

To see something similar in action, take a look at Wine Library TV. The Wine Library is an online, and offline, “wine store”. Wine Library TV is a video cast where the owner of the company takes a few minutes to taste test a few wines. It has built up quite an audience (I have been one since very early), and has made their business go from successful, to booming, online.

Does your company have any assets it can use, online, to help advertise your business?

9rules Ad Network

Paul was interviewed the day of our big 9rules launch by well-known marketing site ClickZ News, and in that interview Paul happened to drop the bomb:

“Our framework allows for a number of possibilities, but most importantly it is helping us lead into the ad network that we will be launching this year for our member sites,” Scrivens told ClickZ News. “In everything we do, we have our members and readers in mind first and foremost. These changes will make the 9rules Network even more useful for our readers. For advertisers what this will mean is targeted advertising on a number of blogs that they can count on being high-quality.”

It’s true, we’re indeed launching an advertising network. This platform will allow advertisers to reach out to our highly influential 9rules community, and target the very best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. This next step has been in the works for awhile now, however we didn’t want to divulge our plans until 1) 9rules Communities was launched, and 2) our members were fully aware of our intentions. Now that things are moving smoothly ahead, we thought it the right time to tell people of our plans.

Other marketing sites that picked up on the story include MarketingVOX, AdJab, Buy it or DIE!, and a few others. We’ve already been approached by some large ad purchasing companies to see what the dealio is. Things are definitely off and running.

Already they had created a wonderful service that easily would have grown through word-of-mouth advertising, but instead they only allowed a certain number of individuals in at a time. Surprisingly, they probably did this more for testing and load balancing reasons than for advertising, but it seemed to help enormously on both fronts.

On the web almost everything is free including web-based email services, so when the most popular technology company today offers an email service that gives you 1 Gigabyte of storage for free you are going to be interested. Along with the storage aspect, the rave reviews that the service has received — even while still in beta mode — only helped to increase the service’s popularity. Add the fact that the only way to get one was through an invite and you probably have yourself the best marketing scheme of the first half of 2004.

However, as companies must notice though, it wasn’t the invite only scheme that worked for GMail, it was the product itself. Without an excellent product that would generate buzz the invitations would have been useless and probably placed just above spam in annoyance level. In any case, whether they meant to do it or not, Google has hit a homerun with both their product and marketing that has caused all the other major players (Yahoo, Hotmail…) to take notice.