Archive for blog marketing – Page 5

Content Marketing with Videos: Free Webinar

You probably already know you should be using video to attract readers to your website, but you might not know how easy and quick it is. Publishing video on your site is like a client magnet.

Trust me on this, you don’t need to buy expensive tools and hire a producer. It’s the best way to get new viewers to your website and blog. (And it’s really easy when you use a monthly production service like I do: iMotionVideo, who does it all for me!)

But what if you want to do it yourself? What are the basics you need to know? How can you learn to use video quickly?

This week, when two of Tom Antion‘s people called me up with an offer of a free webinar on video marketing, I immediately saw the value in sharing these video tips with you.

I asked them to deliver this webinar exclusively for professionals who don’t have a lot of time for marketing tactics.

Join me, along with Colin Martin and Marc Bullard, in a free webinar next Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 5:00pm ET to learn the secret tactics successful marketers are using on free hosting sites such as YouTube that are bringing an avalanche of traffic to their websites.

Register to attend and get the recorded webinar here:

http://bit.ly/jfLTBt

Online video is THE most powerful tool on the Internet for driving traffic to your websites and services. Search engines are focusing on online video to deliver the content their customers are looking for and have even changed their search parameters to push video to the top of the search results. Read More→

11.5 Steps to Video Blogging in 30 Minutes

What’s the quickest way to use videos for content marketing? How can you shoot a video clip in your hotel room while at a conference? I’ll demonstrate here. I plugged in my Logitech Webcam, pulled up a previous post on my blog, and spoke into the camera.

It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough, and it was done start to finish in 30 minutes. Using video blogging, you can easily get found by clients who have problems you can fix.

  1. Set up webcam, test for lighting
  2. Used some content marketing text previously published about how to write a video script
  3. Spoke spontaneously into the camera, trying to be as sincere and relaxed as possible
  4. Reviewed the video clip, reshot it a 2nd time.
  5. Uploaded to YouTube, named it, described it, tagged it.
  6. Copied the embed code from YouTube and posted it into the html side of blog platform.
  7. Wrote 300 words to accompany the post
  8. Created a title, wrote a description into All-in-One SEO pack
  9. Hyperlinked keywords
  10. Ran Scribe Content Optimizer for an SEO analysis and tweaked it to 100%
  11. Published blog
  12. …Went to breakfast

Click here to watch the 1 minute video…. Read More→

Vote: What Makes You Read a Blog Post?

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.

Read More→

Punk Chihuahua Reveals 4 Secrets to Better Blogging

How’s your content marketing with blogs? Are you brilliantly blogging several times a week?

There comes a time when we all run out of things to say (or at least most of us!). The blog must be fed anyway. Treat your blog like a prized chihuahua… feed it well and it will do wonders to attract readers…

But if you don’t feed it and take care of it, it will turn nasty, and bark and growl for attention. All of which will end up biting you in your traffic stats.

It’s not that we run out of things to say. I’ve got plenty to say about most things. It’s that it’s hard to perform on queue. It’s hard to be creatively brilliant when you want to be, in the time you’ve got available.

But I’ve got a lot of cheat cards up my sleeve. Here are my favorite tips for coming up with a blog post when you’d rather be out playing tennis:

  1. Start with a picture. iStockPhoto.com has some amazingly creative photos and drawings you can use for just about any topic. An unusual photo, like a punk chihuahua, can be used as bait to draw readers’ eye into your blog post. Just be sure you can follow up with good tips or content that’s relevant to your readers.
  2. Start with a shocking title. Use the checkout stand at the grocery store to review the latest National Enquirer or other tabloid headlines: “5,000 Year-old Man Frozen in Ice Had Affair with Palin.” The idea is to use shock and humor and turn it into valuable content for your readers.
  3. Start with a video. Turn on your web cam and talk to your readers from the heart. Sometimes this comes spontaneously, other times it might require a little thought and scripting. Some people are better at this than others. (For myself, by the time I get my hair and makeup and the lighting right, I’ve forgotten what was so important to say…)
  4. Start with OPC… other people’s content. Go find a brilliant post by one of your favorite authors, say for example, one you can easily find on AllTop.com. Use excerpts but add your own opinion and perspective.

8 Blog SEO Tips for Top Search Results

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:

  1. Put your keyword phrases first in the title if you can.
  2. Spell out the key concepts in your first sentence, either by asking a question, or summarizing.
  3. Link to an important keyword in the first paragraph if you can.
  4. Link to definitions on Wikipedia of the most important keywords whenever you can.
  5. Write at least 300 words.
  6. Link to sources, other web pages, books, other experts as often as you can.
  7. Each post should have hyperlinks for every 120 words.
  8. Each post requires me to fill out the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin with title, description and keyword tags. Scribe tells me what I need to do to make this description better.

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.

A Simple Way to Get SEO Inbound Links: Be Nice

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→

High Quality Content Sites Is What Google Wants

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→

Feed Your Blog Automatically to LinkedIn & Twitter

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:

  1. Go to edit profile and scroll down to the bottom. You will see a link that says Applications- Add an Application.

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→

Connect Your Blog to Facebook Automatically

UPDATE: From Karen, January 21, 2012 

Unfortunately, Facebook has disabled this process as of September 2011 and it no longer works. We have to post a link to our blogs in the status or copy and paste as a rich text note.

From Patsi, February 2012: We apologize for not updating this post earlier, but things change constantly on the Web, and Facebook is notorious for it’s constant shifts. 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.

Guest Post from AnnaLaura Brown:

Are your blog posts fed automatically into Facebook?

The other day I was horrified to learn that a dear client was manually posting his blog articles to Facebook. Yikes! No wonder blogging seems tiresome and time-consuming.

I took my pencil and rapped him on the knuckles, gave him a virtual scowl and promised to write a post about how to do this. It had been so long since I set this up myself, I was a bit rusty on the steps required. So I asked Facebook expert Annalaura Brown to write this guest post.

How to Automatically Link Blog Posts to Facebook

Automatically linking your blog posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin can get you some great publicity and traffic but it can be challenging to figure out how to make it all work. Fortunately you have a couple of different options for each one.

Facebook

1.       Use the networked blogs application. This is my personal favorite.  To get started type in networked blogs into the search box and you will pull up the application.

You click on the ‘register a blog‘ link you see in the capture photo above and it will walk you through the process.  The first time you will have a few extra steps to complete to verify that you are the blog owner but after that you can register as many blogs as you own. Read More→

When Business Blogging Works Too Well…

Blogging for your business works like this:

  1. You blog about the problems you solve for your clients
  2. You get found on the Web by the people who need your services
  3. People get to know you, like you, trust you
  4. They email or call and hire you

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→