MASTERING BLOG MARKETING
HOW TO LAUNCH YOUR WEBSITE
TO THE TOP OF GOOGLE
eBook Edition
June 2011
DOUG WILLIAMS
DAVID PORTNEY
Copyright 2011 by Williams Business services, Inc.
Editors: Naomi Christenson, Deana Yoakum
Graphics and Cover Design: Naomi Christenson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any manner without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and articles.
First Edition June 2011
ISBN 978-0-9801307-2-0
Table of Contents
About the Author Doug Williams
Introduction by Doug Williams
1. Why Your Business Must Have a Blog
2 A Brief History of Blogs
3. Be the “Thought Leader” In Your Industry
4. Is Blogging For Big Or Small Businesses?
5. Blogging Basics Quick & Easy
6. The Best Way to Set Up Your Blog
7. Organic SEO Nuts & Bolts
8. Top 5 Best Blog Add-ons for “Push Button SEO”
9. Laying a Solid Foundation: the Right Keywords
10. Winning “The Link Popularity Contest”
11. Planning Your Blog & Blogging Your Plan
12. Revealed: Structure of a Power Posting
13. Stand Out with “Power Titles”
14. Top 10 Tips to Creating Compelling Content
15. Where to Get Endless Blogging Ideas
16. Easily Adding Video, Audio and Graphics
17. Join the Conversation: Blog Commenting
18. Cashing In: How to Monetize your Blog
19. Foolproof Strategies to Build Visitor Traffic
20. Use Blogs to Repair Your Reputation
21. More Creative Ways to Use Blogs
22. Push-Button Success Measurement
23. The MicroBlogging Phenomenon
24. The Social Media Marketing Obsession
25. What If I Don’t Have Time For Blogging?
References and Sources
Blogging Terms Defined
About the Author Doug Williams
In 2002, Doug Williams founded Doug Williams and Associates (DWA) with the mission to help businesses grow. That same mission was key when DWA was rebranded into Alesco Marketing® in 2009. The word “alesco” is a Latin term that means “to grow or increase.” In 2010 Alesco Marketing merged with ITX Corp.
Doug is experienced in designing and executing strategic plans and business systems. His key strength is the ability to originate and implement change. Doug has expertise in marketing, finance, operations and general management in companies experiencing rapid change in both high growth and start-up situations. He has also served on the Board of Directors for multiple companies.
Prior to becoming a consultant, Doug spent 26 years in management, 22 of these years in senior management positions across a wide range of industries. During this time, Doug defined and put in place many key business systems and improvement strategies to create profitable operations.
In 2008, Doug published his book Biz Blog Marketing. In 2010, his book Website Marketing Mastery was released. Both texts are available on Amazon.com.
Doug has an MBA from Pepperdine University and an undergraduate degree in Biology and Chemistry from CSU Northridge.
About Co-Author David Portney
David is the SEM Manager at ITX-Alesco. David got his start on the web and internet marketing in 1997 creating websites to promote various products and services. Over time, David developed a passion for the art of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and search marketing in general. As David’s passion grew to an addiction, he created an increased number of websites in a variety of niche markets, and over the past decade, he has put a number of websites into the top results of Google, Yahoo!, and Bing for competitive keywords and phrases. David is an accomplished speaker and trainer and has authored several books & audio books currently in publication, including “129 Seminar Speaking Success Tips” and “Get Your Money Where Your Mouth Is”. David is the founder of the American Seminar Academy, holds a 5th degree black belt in Karate, and enjoys playing guitar as a hobby.
Alesco Marketing
Alesco Marketing® was formed out of the original business consulting roots of Doug Williams and Associates and combined with the expertise of top graphic designers, database programmers and search engine optimization experts.
This has resulted in a top quality web marketing company with a difference. We first look at the business and marketing needs of our clients and then recommend a web marketing solution that meets their business growth plans. Our holistic approach yields powerful results not achieved when strategies are used separately.
Introduction by Doug Williams
For most of my career, I was a business manager in the corporate world. My experience grew with a variety of positions, from managing departments within large corporations to starting up successful new businesses.
In early 2001, I was managing 3 divisions for a large electronics manufacturing corporation. We assembled consumer electronic products for other companies in our factories in Oregon. I had 600 employees working for me, and sales were at record levels; the corporate office was happy, life was good.
By late 2001, everything had changed. A recession hit the electronics industry full force after 9-11; sales evaporated, and I had to try and maintain profitability. Our large corporate customers moved assembly into their own facilities in an effort to keep their own employees busy. We had to lay people off and shut down one division completely. Pretty soon we had dropped our number of employees to just 80. When more demands for layoffs came from corporate, I decided to volunteer myself for layoff and save the jobs of my two remaining plant managers.
I decided to start a new career as a business consultant. I formed my business and hired a web designer to build my first website. I wanted was to be found on the first page of Google for “small business consulting” and my designer assured me he could get me there.
While eagerly waiting for my website, I immersed myself in learning about how search engines worked and something called search engine optimization. I was fascinated with the science involved and read everything I could find.
After a few weeks I had a chance to see my new website for the first time. I was happy with the visual design, but something was unsettling about it. My new search engine education taught me that there was a list of things that should never be done if you wanted to rank well with Google. I identified many of the items from the “NEVER DO” list in my new website design.
My designer, a 22 year old college student, refused to make any changes to HIS website. After weeks of asking for change without success, I took matters into my own hands. I purchased web design software and, with the help of my son, finished the site. I worked hard and after a few months I‘d successfully moved my website it to the first page of Google for my goal phrase, “small business consulting.”
Some of my consulting clients were very interested in what I was doing, and they asked me if I could do the same for them. Being a hungry and relatively new business consultant, I said “Of course.” I did this first for one and then another; they recommended me to their friends and my business grew. Then someone wanted a new website. With the help of my son, we built it. The business grew . . . at least the web portion did. I hired employees to build websites and taught them how to optimize for search engines.
My passion was helping small business owners grow their business. In 2004, I finally realized that to continue with my passion, I’d need to refocus my business. We became an Internet marketing firm. By late 2009, we’d grown to 16 employees, all in a single brick and mortar location.
Our business consulting roots gave us a different approach. Our competitors were owned by either graphic designers or aggressive SEO marketers, neither of which understood what it took to grow a business. This gave us a tremendous advantage because we focused on core business strategies as we formed these online businesses for our clients.
Why I wrote this book
In December of 1992, there were only 50 websites1 on the Internet. By June 2011, this has grown to over 340 million websites2. The World Wide Web continues to be more competitive. Most businesses have a website. . . or at least should. How do you compete and standout from the crowd?
The World Wide Web is like the largest trade show on earth. It is a marketplace that has 2.1 billion people attending globally3. It has over 340 million booths in the form of websites. This is 6 people for every booth (website). It truly is a place where every conceivable product and service is researched bought and sold.
According to a 2009 study by WebVisible and Nielsen Online, only 44% of small businesses have a website. Yet in today’s marketing landscape, every business today should have an online presence. Once online, each business needs a traffic strategy to promote their websites to Google. Blogs are the answer.
Creating your own business blog is a powerful way to build your brand as the industry expert in your market. Blogs, if used correctly, are the most powerful SEO tool available.
Blogs are the natural way to add keyword rich content to your website on a regular basis. This is a great strategy if your website is small (5-10 pages), or if it’s more graphical and lacks text content.
Blogs are a natural link magnet that attracts inbound links if you write interesting, original and engaging posts. Adding “linkable” content to your site is the natural link building method. Link building is the most important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) today. Experts have long said “content is king.” Blogs add content to your website on a regular basis and then they broadcast your message to the world via RSS.
This book will teach you how to use a blog to bring target website traffic to your site and how to naturally reach top rankings for your most important keyword phrases.
1. Why Your Business Must Have a Blog
Businesses have turned to blogging as their online marketing tool. Why? Because it gets results and gets results faster than traditional Internet marketing. Blogging is a great way to boost your online brand, to increase your website’s rankings on the search engines, to reach new potential clients, to communicate with current customers and to publicize information about their company.
So what should your business expect from your blogging efforts?
1. An increase in targeted traffic to your website
2. The perception that you are an expert on the subject
3. A chance to differentiate yourself from your competition.
4. A unique way to build your brand visibility
5. Improved search engine rankings
6. The opportunity to directly communicate with your targeted audience
7. A solid connection with new potential customers
8. The ability to reach new market demographics that traditional marketing can’t touch.
9. New methods of media and public relations
10. An inexpensive, fast way to begin building connections
More website traffic
Businesses that blog get more website traffic, more inbound links to their website and have more indexed pages on their website. All of these are powerful indicators of a successful business website.
According to a Hubspot study1 of 1531 of their small and medium sized business customers, blogging shows some real benefits in the study, 795 businesses blogged and 736 didn’t. These results were received by the companies that blogged:
55% more visitors: Blogs broadcast their message via RSS rather than passively waiting for search engines to spider and index them. Regular blogging attracts new visitor traffic. More traffic arriving to a website means more visitors that could be converted to buyers or leads.
97% more inbound links: Blog naturally attract links because their content is new and original. Other bloggers will reference other blogs and websites with a link to support what they are blogging about.
434% more indexed pages: Each blog posting produces a new page. This is why adding a blog to an existing website is a great way to grow the size of a website with keyword rich content. Larger sites are usually rewarded with higher search engine rankings.
Blog marketing gives businesses other tangible results. Blogs build your brand awareness and build you as an authority in your market. Blogs build rapport with your audience as well as a relationship of trust. This makes you the natural person they turn to for help.
Blogs are where people learn and research. Allowing comments on your blog creates interaction and gives you powerful insight into your customer base.
With blogging, even a one-man business is able to compete head-on with a large company on the same level playing field.
Blogs provide interaction
The best reason for business-related blogging comes from the chance to generate relationships and awareness in your target market. Before they even look for your product, you’re building the basis of an association.
It is much more than a way to simply express your opinion. It is used to attract and interact with your targeted customer, and it is one of the most powerful search engine optimization tools that a business can use.
Blogging falls under the social media header. In fact, it is the most powerful and impactful of the social media marketing technologies. The approach in blogging is very different than website marketing. In website marketing, the purpose is to directly sell, to focus on conversion, to get the lead or the sale.
Blog marketing, though, is about influencing, and attracting an audience with interesting, original useful information. Business blogging brands your business as the expert and the natural “go to” partner for your readers.
Business blogging will dramatically improve your website’s search engine rankings in three ways.
Adding a blog to your website adds original keyword rich content. Each blog posting adds a new page. Larger websites do much better in search engine results than small websites. As a result, if you add 100 postings in a year, you have increased your website by 100 pages.
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is used by blogs broadcast your message in minutes across the web - no more waiting for search engines to spider your website. Your blog will regularly attract targeted visitors that are searching for what you have to say.
SEO writing methods will not only bring your blog to the top rankings in Google, but also your business website. Using keywords in blog titles and in link text is a new and little known SEO technique. This is the method that the best and most expensive SEO firms use to get their client phenomenal results.
A 2008 BuzzLogic / Jupiter Research study2 of more than 2,000 online consumers found that blogs were a prime influencer of purchase decisions. Results from this study included:
1. 50 percent of blog readers said they found blogs useful for purchase information. Blog readers trusted relevant blog content for making purchase decisions more than content from social networking sites.
2. For those who have found blog content useful for product decisions, more than half (56 percent) said blogs with a niche focus and topical expertise were key sources.
3. Blog readers make use of the information differently. Seventeen percent use it to discover products and services. Nineteen percent refine their choices. Twenty-one percent decide on a product or service. Nine percent get support and answers.
4. Twenty-five percent of blog readers say they trust ads on a blog they read. Nineteen percent say they trust ads on social networking sites.
Blogs act differently than websites
Blogs are today’s online magazine that more and more people are turning to for their information. Businesses have adopted blogs and are using blog marketing as a major strategy to build up their brand and attract new customers. Why?
Blogs are active while websites are passive. Blogs broadcast their content out to the web via RSS every time there is something new. Websites, on the other hand, wait to be discovered by search engine spiders. It’s like the difference between fishing and hunting. You can sit and wait for fish, or you can actively hunt and pursue.
Blogs are faster. Posting and syndication is almost instantaneous. Blogs distribute information very quickly and efficiently. Because blog feeds are similar to news feeds, information spreads very quickly. Blogs are a great place to kick-start marketing campaigns for new products and services.
Blogs build a readership. It is easy for visitors to subscribe to a blog so they can view new postings as soon as they happen. Blogs encourage repeat visits with content being delivered to your favorite reader or delivery by email. Compare this to bookmarking a website which depends on the visitor to come back.
Blogs have newer fresher content. By their nature, blogs have regular fresh content and they are more up to date. Blogs tend to deal with breaking events and technology insights.
Blogs invite participation and interaction. Blog conversations are encouraged providing multiple viewpoints and discussions. Comments can be made easily from each page.
Blogs make it personal. Blog writing is more informal and conversational. It allows the writer’s personality to make it more alive and interesting. Websites on the other hand are more formal and tend to be written in marketing speak.
Blogs are easier. You don’t need to understand HTML to publish your thoughts and opinions. The content management systems on blogs allow you to type, format and add pictures as easily as you can in a word processing program.
Blogs are replacing newspapers
Blogs, online news and social media have replaced printed newspapers and magazines. Printed newspapers and magazines are dying, while online sources for news and opinions are flourishing.
Do you get your news online or from the morning paper? Fewer people are reading the printed newspapers today. After all why would you want to see day old news? People go online or listen to broadcast radio or TV to stay in touch.
1. Speed: Printed news and information is outdated. It takes a day to prepare, print and distribute newspapers. Magazines can take a month. On the web, news stories can be found just minutes after they happen.
2. Space limitations: Space is limited in newspapers. Each page in a newspaper must be paid for by advertising revenue. When advertising revenue falls, the number of pages must decrease. There are no space limitations on web publishing.
3. Cost limitations: Newspapers are much more expensive to produce and distribute than online news. Distribution costs for newspapers continue to escalate with fuel and labor costs. These same barriers don’t exist for web.
4. Browse vs. Search: In printed newspapers and magazines, you browse to find what you want to read. It is a slower and more relaxed way to get your news. Today people want to Google their questions and get instant answers. The web allows this, printed news doesn’t.
5. Environmental: Printed newspapers and magazines have an environmental cost and cast a measurable carbon footprint. Even with extensive recycling efforts, there are high costs of fuel and labor with paper recycling.
The web has the advantages of being almost instantaneous, offering a flexible or unlimited amount of space and providing a free source of news. We are seeing the end of an era for printed news as we continue to move into the Internet Information Age.
New business start-up strategy
Combining business blog marketing and traditional website marketing is especially effective when you start a new business. Blogging is one of the fastest ways of announcing your business and spreading the word quickly about what you do.
You can rapidly gain a following on the Internet. There are an ever increasing number of people who regularly read blogs as their source of news and information.
New companies should look at launching a blog and a website for maximum exposure. A combined approach using a website and a blog is usually the fastest technique. You will gain a much broader reach by using both. The website and blog have different functions.
The website is the advertising and marketing piece. Your new website should be the marketing focus that touts the advantages, benefits and conveniences of using your business. The new website should bring in traffic with both pay-per-click advertising and organic SEO.
The blog should provide interesting reading and resource materials to your targeted customers. The blog will gain a readership following much more quickly if the content plan is good, and your blog should allow interested readers to find navigation links to your website. This will provide direct referral traffic and valuable link popularity for your website.
The website and blog will reach different audiences, have different focuses and different conversational tones, but still strive to reach the same targeted customer. The blog and website reinforce each other and magnify the results.
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72% of bloggers are hobbyist, which means they receive no income from their blogging. For the remaining 28%
54% are part time
32% are self employed
14% work for organizations or corporations
Source: Technorati 20093
2 A Brief History of Blogs
So what is a “blog” anyway? Blogs can be personal or business related. Business blogs or corporate blogs are one of the hottest growth areas for blogs, and they’re opening new markets for business. Blogs allow anyone to quickly post text and images to the Web without any special technical knowledge. This opens the web up to more publishing and distribution of information.
What is it?
Blog is short for weblog. A blog is a regularly updated journal published on the web. Wouldn’t it be nice if the readers of a website could leave comments, about a specific article? With blogs, they can! Posting comments is one of the best features of blogs. Blogs generally represent the personality of the author or the Web site.
Some blogs are intended for a small audience; others have a readership of national newspapers. On a blog, the content consists of articles — also sometimes called “posts” or “entries.”
A blog is a web site that contains dated entries in reverse chronological order (most recent first) about a particular topic. A blog has unfiltered content — some feel that the second somebody filters or edits the author it’s no longer a blog.
Figure 2-1 Author’s blog showing the major elements of a typical blog posting.
Blogs are influential, personal, or both, and they reflect as many topics and opinions as there are people writing them. Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, politics, sports, or mobile technology. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all manner of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author’s daily life and thoughts.
The Origins and History of Blogs
So when did blogging begin? Although blogs are a recent invention, the idea is not new. Blogs evolved from online diaries that people kept from the earliest days of the Internet. Blogs, as we think of them today, are a combination of a personal journal, a message board and a news site. Let’s look at the milestones of blogging.
1994 – It is uncertain who started the very first blog. Justin Hall is credited by some to be the “founding father” of blogging for starting his “Proto-Blog” in December 1994 while still a student at Swarthmore College. Justin maintained this online journaling for 11 years.
1997 Jorn Barger first used the term “web log” to describe a simple website where people post interesting links that they found while surfing the net.
1998 Open Diary launched their website which would grow to thousands. Open Diary is credited with adding the ability for readers to make comments
1999 Peter Merholz jokingly broke weblog apart into “We Blog.” This was quickly adopted and shortened to blog. Blog became adopted as both a noun and a verb. LiveJournal and Blogger.com were launched as the first hosted blog tools.
2002 Heather Armstrong was fired for discussing her job in her personal blog which was named “Dooce.” Dooced becomes the term that means “Fired for blogging.”
2004 Merriam-Webster, the prominent dictionary publisher, announced that “Blog” was the word of the year.
2004 marked a turning point where blogging became adopted into everyday life.
2007 There were over 100 million blogs being tracked. Millions of people look to blogs as their source for information, news or just a good laugh.
Blogs have become a driving force in the grass roots breaking and shaping of news stories. An example is “Rathergate” where Dan Rather presented documents on 60 Minutes that conflicted with accepted accounts of President Bush’s service records. Bloggers declared these documents forgeries and applied extreme pressure to CBS. This exposed reporting irregularities that lead to a public CBS apology.
RSS (Real Simple Syndication)
RSS is at the heart of what makes a blog work. Remember, a blog is a special website that allows easy web publishing with a content management system (CMS) and notifies the web each time a new article is posted (RSS). So how does this work?
Once you create a new article or posting, you can make it public by publishing what you wrote. When you publish, three things happen.
1. What you wrote immediately becomes visible to your blog visitors.
2. Your blog creates an RSS-XML file that is easily read by search engines and blog engines. These XML files are really a simple text file called a feed.
3. A ping is sent out to notify that you have something new on your blog. This invites blog engines and subscribers to look at your new content.
The blog ping that is sent out is a small XML file that contains the blog title, a brief description and a link to where the new content can be found. This ping is received by the major services which notifies search engines you now have new content.
The blog and search engines will either display the XML feeds they received or will send their own spiders back to retrieve more information. The results are that what you write is being indexed and available on the Internet within minutes of being published. This is a similar process to the way news stories are released to the Internet.
Subscribers to your feed can either be notified by ping or their feed readers will regularly go back and check your RSS-XML files to see if anything new has been posted. When the reader finds updates, it makes them available to the recipient. The readers usually display the information from the XML files with a link to the content.
RSS can stand for “Real Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary.” Either way, RSS is an important technology that makes your blog postings available to be read across the Internet. RSS is what makes news articles available for searches almost immediately after they are posted.
RSS are simple text files that are submitted to feed directories. These allow subscribers and search engines to see content within a very short time.
Blogs generate a behind-the-scenes text code in a language called XML. This code, usually referred to as a "feed" (as in "news feed"), makes it possible for readers to "subscribe" to the content that is created on a particular blog. This way the content comes to you instead of you going to it.
Your blog automatically notifies popular update services that you've updated your blog. In turn, update services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Your blog has been set-up to notify more than 30 different update services each time you make a change. It can take as little as only a few hours to appear in search engine results.
RSS enables users to subscribe to data feeds easily, which lets them control the rate and amount of information coming to them online. They receive your updates by either email or via blog feed. Blog reader programs typically have the option to show the full article or just a summary (or the beginning) to syndication feeds. Readers can then come to your site to read the whole article.
CMS (Content Management System)
A CMS, or Content Management System, is software that provides a method of managing your website. They provide the features required to create and maintain a blog, and can make publishing on the Internet as simple as writing an article.
All blogs run on some type of CMS. A content management system is a web-based application connected to a database that allows writers to create and update blog content without having to know HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or any other programming language.
CMS allows writers with no special web technical knowledge to write and format their thoughts and publish to the web in a few minutes. Blog writers can create their postings as easily as typing a letter and then publishing with a single push of a button.
Using CMS, blog content can be created using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editor. When a blog posting needs to be altered in some way, you just open up the blog posting, make the changes, and upload the new file.
Blogs are just another way of using browser-based tools for creating, managing and publishing your thoughts, opinions, or activities directly to the web. The technology behind blogs is basic CMS functionality that originated back in the mid '90s.
Using CMS, writers can format their work as well as add photos and images just like they would in their favorite word processing program. These changes are made directly on the web server from any computer that has web access.