Breaking Down Barriers in Your Niche Blog
One of the best ways to reach your online brand marketing goals is to create and maintain a niche blog related to your product or service. But the explosion of blogs in the blogosphere has made it more difficult to ensure that readers notice your blog amid a sea of millions, or even billions, f blogs. We will be offering a number of tips in the coming weeks to help you set your blog apart from the others and attract notice on the search engines.
Today’s tip for creating a more noticeable blog is this: Be Significant.
Those two words can bring your blog to the forefront of the blogosphere and increase your chances of drawing attention. Now here’s how you can make your blog significant:
• Generate a reaction among the readers
Reactions lead to comments. And comments lead to interaction between you and the readers. Comments also increase visits because readers who make comments will often return to see if anybody has replied to their comments.
• Be concise
New readers lose patience if they see a lot of long paragraphs. In fact, some will skip a blog altogether if it looks wordy. Say what you need to say in as few words as possible. If it turns into a longer blog, create some breaks so it appears easier to read at a glance.
• Sound passionate
If you don’t believe what you’re saying or you’re simply uneducated about it, your readers will know. Blog readers are looking for new information when they come to a blog. And they want somebody to be passionate about the topic.
• Build links
Search engines favor blogs that have inbound and outbound links. Create links to other articles and blogs in your post (see below) to have a better chance of getting noticed.
According to the blogger Skellie, there are also four ways to tell if your blog is at risk of getting lost in the midst of the millions of others:
• It doesn’t get submitted to social media websites like Digg, StumbleUpon or others.
• Visitors don’t usually comment.
• Few, if any, other blogs link to your blog.
• Few people subscribe to your blog.
Search Engine Optimization: Ten Years Later
If you’ve done any work at all with SEO, you might’ve wondered about the history of the concept and some of the changes it’s made since it began. I know I’ve wondered about that several times. Here is an article that explains some of the big changes in the last decade, but I’ve pulled out some of the highlights for quick reference.
• Minor changes in the SEO market have taken place over the years, and they often escape the notice of those in the industry. Taken as a whole, howver, they constitute major changes between today’s techniques and those from ten years ago.
• In the year 2000, Google had just over one billion pages indexed. Today, there are about 10 billion pages indexed. Of course, that figure is ever-growing. The only way the article writer could find the number of pages was to type “the” into the search box and see how many results came back.
• There is now about ten times more competition in the search engine optimization industry than there was in the year 2000.
• Search engines still look for things like keywords, key phrases, body text, title tags and frequency when indexing pages. The article writer suggests not wasting time on meta keyword tags, though, as they are of less importance today than they were years ago.
• Submitting your URL to a search engine is no longer necessary, as the spiders take care of that for you.
• Yahoo and Google are generally the two accepted search engines today, whereas there were several more popular and widely-used ones ten years ago, including Infoseek, WebCrawler, Excite and Lycos, among others.
Luckily, the fundamentals of SEO are still a major part of online marketing and other Internet-based industries. We’ll continue to see changes in the near future, but the basic concept will likely remain the same.
Three More Steps for Achieving Social Media Success
There are so many steps and possibilities for achieving social media success that it’s hard to narrow them down to just one or two blog posts. Following is the second installment of three more tips to help you be successful in the ever-important world of social media networking and online marketing.
Digg in
Digg is one of the best ways to get your website and online company noticed. That’s why it’s so important to build relationships with the people using the Digg network. Usually, the users have their information listed on their pages, even their instant messaging screen names. Try to create relationships by contacting a few of these people each week to add to your network. By investing just a few minutes each day, you will spread your networking efforts over many social media websites .
Use Google’s many services
Have you ever thought about making a video relating to your company or services? With the popularity of YouTube, this could be a huge advantage in helping you reach your goals. Post your video and then build links to it through the other networking that you’re doing. It might be time-consuming at first, but the benefits will definitely be worth it.
Go global
It’s great to have your company’s message all over the World Wide Web in English. But you’d be surprised how much better you can network by posting the same message in different languages. With simple online translators like this one, you can make your content available in several different languages and then submit it to a broader range of networking sites. It only takes a few extra minutes, but it pays off very well for your networking goals.
