What do you find is the most important thing about a blog post? What makes you read? Mark Schaefer over at {grow} blog asked this question and gives his opinion.
Here are the choices:
Take a few minutes to decide, then leave a comment about the top blogging elements that get you to read a post.
Why should a professional or small business give away free consulting? I’ll tell you why. Here’s what’s happening…
I recently launched a new version of articles to my executive coaching clients and as a bonus, offered a free 20-minute phone session.
I’ve been spending more than 20 minutes with each person, and I’m loving it. Since I charge $200/hour for consulting sessions, why would I do this?
What’s the best way to write a script for a video? Content marketing with videos is a key marketing tool, and it’s getting easier to do.
Here’s a new video the folks over at iMotionVideo Studios produced for me. I just love this service. Left to my own devices, I’d probably make one video every few months. But with a low-fee monthly subscription for a year, I know I’ve got a one-minute video commercial coming every 30 days. This is key for content marketing.
Why would I want that many? I don’t really, but for content marketing to work you need as much content as you can, in all forms. I use them to submit to video directories, post to YouTube, and it all counts to get found in Google searches. Some content marketing things have to combine quality AND frequency.
Most of the time I focus on how important it is to write quality online content for your readers, and teach my clients to achieve maximum results, they have to be writing things that are relevant and important to their readers: how do you solve their problems. Read More→
What are the most important SEO tips for your blog to get good search results? It may be easier than you think to start getting onto the first page for keyword searches.
Most of what I’ve learned about search engine optimization techniques I learned from Scribe SEO Content Optimizer. This honey of a software tool tells me how well a post is going to be understood by those search robots.
Since search engine spiders are nothing but algorithms, I don’t understand how they work, but Scribe sure does. I just follow what the Scribe report on each post tells me. I don’t have to understand it, I just follow the blog SEO tips and I get better search engine results.
I can tweak the title and the keywords before I publish. Once I get a Scribe score of 100%, I can pull the publishing trigger with full confidence.
Here are a few things I’ve learned:
I don’t publish unless I get a 100% score. If I’ve used my keywords too much, it tells me and I can go back into my post and use synonyms.
Sometimes this happens when I write about topics that don’t really have synonyms like Facebook, or “search engines.”
When I first started blogging in 2004, I did it intuitively. I wrote for my readers. I knew nothing about search engines, keyword indexing, SEO. I just wrote what was most important to me, and what I thought was most relevant to readers.
I was lucky. Blogs are naturally search engine friendly. I got good results without knowing what I was doing. I don’t leave that to chance and luck anymore. Competition is much more than it was back then.
I use Scribe for my own blog and won’t work on a client blog who doesn’t have it. I am an affiliate and encourage everyone to use it… and not because I get a few pennies for referrals. I don’t think anybody should be blogging without Scribe.
One of the important ways to keep your search engine rankings up is through building quality inbound links. For those of you less familiar with SEO-talk, backlinks are when other sites link to the content on your site. It tells the search engines you’re important.
Here’s what Mike Phillips writes on Website Magazine:
Solicit quality inbound links. High-quality links will remain a pivotal factor in search engine rankings. Be diligent about networking with like-minded content producers and work to get links – quality links, including those with keyword-rich anchor text. In no way is it recommended to purchase links.
That means your blog and website need to encourage others to link to you, through quality content that provides solutions to people’s problems.
One way to do this is through blog outreach. When you form relationships with other experts and point them to information that can be helpful to them in their work, you are extending a hand and creating possible reciprocity opportunities.
Ah, that’s not very clear. Let me give you an example, in fact, a great illustration happened to me the other day from a nice reader and a very smart person, Richard Hawk.
I got an email yesterday, it said:
Thank you for the recent e-zine with the tip about including your blog on Linkedin. I just finished adding the app.
Your messages are helpful. I don’t get to read every one but I do give most of them a quick view. You’ve given me other ideas I’ve used and I mostly wanted to thank you.
This is a new habit of mine to thank authors and other writers who have helped me. I know that the feedback I get from my work keeps me energized, especially when things aren’t going the way I hoped.
I’m a professional speaker, author and musician who has an exceptionally popular weekly e-zine “Safety Stuff.” I just celebrated my 500th issue.
Thank you again Patsi. You’ve made a difference in my life.
‘till next time.
Richard
www.makesafetyfun.com Read More→
There’s been an important update to the way Google runs their search algorithms, designed to weed out the number of junk content farms. You and your pages shouldn’t be concerned, except if you’re trying to game the system.
But you should always be alert for how such changes affect your site and make corrections when needed. If your search results have changed lately, this may explain why.
For professionals who use online content to market their services, you need to keep an eye on your analytics, and continue to follow good advice for content marketing. Here’s an excerpt from Website Magazine, an article from Mike Phillips that constitues good search marketing advice:
From the Official Google Blog: “Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.”
Be aggressive about building your user base. Search is powerful but it’s not the only way to ensure visitors to your website. Build a strong following on social networks and work hard to increase email sign-ups and newsletter subscribers.
Solicit quality inbound links. High-quality links will remain a pivotal factor in search engine rankings. Be diligent about networking with like-minded content producers and work to get links – quality links, including those with keyword-rich anchor text. In no way is it recommended to purchase links.
Produce varied forms of content. Search engines like a little variety. In addition to a company blog, consider producing video for a YouTube channel, a photo log on Flickr, or a podcast on iTunes. Read More→
Update From Patsi, February 2012: We apologize for not updating this post earlier. I no longer update any social media automatically, but am posting manually (read why here, Say NO to Auto-Feeds: Your Blog & Facebook, Social Sites). This is time-consuming and may require a virtual assistant for some of you. I recommend SerenityVA.com.
How do you get your blog posts to feed into your LinkedIn profile and Twitter automatically? I asked social media expert AnnaLaura Brown to write a guest post. This is the 2nd part of her post Connect Your Blog to Facebook.
For LinkedIn you have a couple of options as well.
Your first option is to add the WordPress blog option to your Linkedin profile.
To do this:
Click on that link and you will see this page of options. There is an option to add your blog link with Typepad or WordPress.
Click on the link and you will be taken to a page where you can add in the RSS feed for your blog. From now on your new posts will be automatically posted to this section of your LinkedIn profile.
The second option is to add your Twitter stream to LinkedIn and then by default as long as your blog posts are appearing in Twitter they will also appear on LinkedIn.
You do this by going to the same page where you added your blog and clicking on the tweets application.
Twitter Read More→
Why is content marketing and persuasion so difficult, and what can you do to set people on fire? When it comes to writing content for a business blog, most professionals start from their point of view. Of course, who wouldn’t?
“We’ve got a state-of-the-art 128-bit secure site, offering the best rates on the Web.”
While this business understands that its customers want security and low prices when ordering services online, they fail to ignite passion or spark action in readers.
Stories of real people connect with readers in a way that data and words on a screen can’t. In his best-selling book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, published in 1997 by Harper-Collins, master screenwriter Robert McKee argues that stories “fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living—not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.”
There are two ways to persuade people.
The first is by using conventional marketing rhetoric, which is what most professionals use. It’s an intellectual process in which you write, “Here’s our company’s biggest advantage, and here is what you need to do.” You build your case by giving statistics and facts and quotes from authorities. But there are two problems with this rational approach.
First, the people you’re talking to have their own set of experiences. While you’re trying to persuade them, they are arguing with you in their heads. Second, if you do succeed in persuading them, you’ve done so only on an intellectual basis. That’s not good enough, because people are inspired to act by emotions.
The other way to persuade people—a more powerful way—is by uniting an idea with an emotion. The best way to do that is by telling a compelling story.
In a story, you not only weave in a lot of information, but you also arouse your reader’s emotions and energy.
Persuading with a story is hard. It demands vivid insight and storytelling skill to present an idea that packs enough emotional power to be memorable.
In the sample quote I used about a “128-bit secure site,” wouldn’t it be more interesting if the business blogged about a client who had a bad experience using an unsecured website? Or, better yet, what if they featured a video clip of a client who saved “X” amount of dollars by coming to them instead?
Stories connect us to what really matters most in ways that rhetoric and facts can’t.
Blogging for your business works like this:
But then your business grows, you get busy, and what happens to the blog? I’ve seen hundreds of blogs written by smart professionals that haven’t been posted since last November.
Here’s my own example. I think I enjoy blogging for other people more than I do for myself! The more work I’m getting ghost blogging for executive coaches, the more interesting my writing becomes, and the more fun I’m having. It’s all good, really, except for a few problems…
I am quite simply more excited about creating content that markets for other professionals than I am for myself and my own business. I have long since stopped worrying about being “normal,” so that doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
But here are some problems… All the while, my ranking on the Top 42 Content Marketing blogs is slipping. I went from #4 to #10 to #17…to #45. I may soon be off the list entirely. Yikes! Read More→
I’m curious… what web tools could you absolutely not live without? To make money online, you need systems and software helpers. I don’t try them all out, it tends to drive me nuts to have too many distractions and things to learn.
As I got on the computer this morning, however, I’ve got to say that I couldn’t live without Roboform to keep my passwords easily accessible for various sites. I used to keep a word doc listing them all, yikes! Impossible to keep the list updated or alphabetized.
Roboform stores them all for you, and is right there in your tool bar. Check it out. (Not an affiliate!)
Here are my top 3 tools:
I know that’s 4, but I can’t live without the Cart either! Read More→
