Big Foot Web Marketing

One of the biggest challenges is I have is convincing a blog owner to link out to other sites. It seems counter intuitive. Why do I want to encourage my readers to leave my site? Why do I want to steer them to a another blog that has more and better information ?Why do I want to help other blogs? Aren’t they my competition?

To really get why it is key to link out you need to grasp why exactly you are blogging. I tell people the reason they have set up a blog , any blog, is BRAND YOURSELF AS AN EXPERT. If you are using your blog to promote your business or online presence . If you have set up to make money. If you are simply sharing your vast knowledge for the good of mankind. You are the centre of your niche news hub and and an expert.
To back up your statements, to have others regard you an expert, to have a healthy and thriving blog you must link out.

1. I would be helping my competition.

#1 reason site owners go ballastic is when I link out from their site to “competition” . It goes against everything we know in marketing to mention competitors. Groundswell has good bog post Should you talk about your competitors? when blogging. Blogging isn’t just about “advertising” how great you are. You need to be a part of the loop. You can’t ignore your competitors if you want to be a part of the loop.

Being an expert or centre of your niche news hub means you are all knowing. Discuss your competitors latest goings on- their successes and failures. Figure out how to use to your advantage. Match them or do better.
Pointing out their successes makes you a part of the “conversation” as well as further branding yourself as the expert. By judging you become judge.
Ignoring your competitors is short sited. Sometimes a competitor does do it better. If you are to be an “expert” in your field then you must show authority all all things within your niche. Give credit where credit is due. Post why you disagree with their idea or concept. Talk about what they did and why it worked. Talk about how you would do it differently or what a you learned from it- or expand on it and take the idea on as your own. You will engage your readers and encourage “conversation” or buzz as well as cement yourself as the expert.

Tips for linking out to your competition- use their company name in anchor text and not choice keywords. If your competition has a big enough online present the company name itself may be a keyword for search engines. i.e. Google would see FTD on a page as a “flower” related term. For the very nervous use “click here” in your anchor text.

Tags: Blogs and Blogging by Lisa Stewart
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Using Predictive Analytics For Long Tail Search

If you are working at building your blog traffic you have to have a solid understanding of how people are finding you. You can use that information to develop content, generate more traffic and make more money. There are many tools that try and take the pain out of analytics for you. One tool is HitTail which not only reports your top search terms goes one step further and predicts what terms people will use to find you.

Analytics are fantastic for coming up with ideas. When I am stuck for blog post idea and realize then playing Peggle endlessly is just avoidance I will often do is turn to my analytics. When you look at your stats using analytics program like like Google Analytics, webstats or MyBlogLog ( I use Clicktracks ) you will start to see patterns. You can use those patterns build a better site.

If you are blogging for money then you will find that a handful of your posts make you the most money. With a closer look at your revenue you find that while some post make you a lot of money they do not make up ALL of your income stream.
It is also true when you look at your stats that you may have a handful of keywords that are always at the top. These are your prime keywords- you rank well in search engines and you may even think they are the bread and butter of your site. You could be wrong.

Look at your earnings. If you have you are an Adsense publisher you probably have a page or post or blog that does really really well. The shining star of your blog revenue. I suspect the amount still only accounts for less than half of your total blog income. I have a blog that outpaces all my other sites- however my other blogs combined still make more money than that one blog.
The same will be true with your keywords. You will have terms that bring about 20% of your traffic. You may focus a lot of time and energy on those terms. If you run an AdWords campaign you may be dumping all your money into those terms – however- its the other 80 percent you should be looking at. You will get more traffic for less effort and/or less money.
Do not bend over backwards chasing after the hard keywords- go after the ones that are easy. If you write blog posts using keywords that are based on user behavior and current content and you may get more traffic and make more money.

I have been using HitTail from Connors Communications for about a year on all my blogs. They have both a free version and a pro version. For most users the free version is more than adequate. You get search results for your site in real time and find out which keywords people use to find your website. Based on the keywords people are using right now to find your site- it will suggest what other keywords you could be using. I found this to be extremely useful.

How To Use HitTail

You need to put a script in your pages. You can add manually in your body tags or use plugin to do it for you.
When you login you can look at multiple blogs and various windows. At a glance I can see my top performing keywords in graph form. It will tell you what percentage of searches come from your top 10 keywords and what come from long tail search. All of my blogs have a split of about 20/80. Interestingly my worst blog is 10/90 split and my best is a 25/75.

It will also show you search hits from major search engines and what keywords strings were used and most valuable information for me has been suggestions which give suggested keywords based on current search results. Admittedly some of the string are odd , however often there is a little gem of an idea or a combination that works very well.

The best ideas for your blog posts I believe still come from instinct- watching news or seeing trends and writing about what you know or what your are working on. The best advice I ever heard about writing a blog came from Greg Jarboe- he talked about a blog in terms of a news source. That you need to brand yourself as an expert in your field and become the “news hub” for that niche. Wonderful advice. Using your expertise along with stat tools can be a powerful combination.

Writing for search engines is a a slippery slope and getting tangled in keywords can cause more problems than it solves. NOT looking at your keywords and seeing what keywords are performing is a huge mistake. You must use the information you have stored in your logs to build your traffic and to make your blog more profitable.

Tags: Blog For Money, Blogs and Blogging, Internet Marketing and Blogs, Tuesday's Tool by Lisa Stewart
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At first glance you don;t realize just how useful this will be. Copy as HTML Link 1.1 by Justin Watt may well be one of my favourite finds this year ( right beside picnik image editor). It sort of took me a minute to think it through and realize just how much EASIER my blogging life would be using it.
Here is what this little extension does. You are on a page, you can highlight some text and right click , the choose ” copy as html link” With as simple click of a button you have your anchor text and link done and ready to paste into a blog post. WOW do I love this plugin!
You can still tweak your anchor text.. but no more writing my text, going to site , highlighting URL and going back to blog tab , blah blah blah. adding adding the link in WordPress. A times saver that will also make it less of a hassle to post links. ( Did I mention I am EXTEMELY lazy?)

Tags: Blogs and Blogging by Lisa Stewart
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Got five minutes? Take five minutes to make your blog better, faster and more user friendly. Here are 5 things you can do in less that five minutes that will make your blog better instantly.

1. Add a Favicon To Your Blog

Not sure what a favicon is? You see them all the time and probably never knew they had a name.

Its that little icon that show up in favorites, address bar and tabs. Not having one could hurt you. Read Stoney deGeyter’s post, A Little Favicon Goes a Long, Long Way to find out how NOT having one can actually be hurting you.
Making and installing a favicon for you blog takes minutes.
How to create a favicon for your web site or blog.

2. Make Your Blog Load Faster

Install wp-cache WordPress Plugin. This powerful plugin store your WordPress pages as html and make load times WAY faster. Not only will this be a boon to your site visitors who will leave if a page takes too long to load but you may see an increase in your Adsense Revenue and CTR.

After install you have to go to WordPress –> reading—> options and uncheck compress articles (gzip) if browsers ask for them and then go to Options—> Wp-cache and check “enable”. You are ready to roll! You will notice an immediate difference in your page load time.

3. Personalize Your Site

Add a photo of yourself to sidebar or “about page” . if you don’t have a “professional” photo find one that is not too bad. Pick a photo where you are looking into the camera.

Humourous is okay, however I would re-think using a pic of you and your buddies doing tequila shots or choosing photo with anyone in a bathing suit on a professional blog . if you can’t find anything get someone to take a picture for you. A tight closeup is best. Try and look natural. Say “cheese”

4. De-Clutter

Hard code your pages and/or category pages. Use an html editor to grab the code or simply “view page source” and copy in notepad. Find your “pages” section. Copy the code into a text widget or put straight into your sidebar.php. . Take an extra few minutes and add nofollow tags to links that lead to pages that really don’t matter i.e disclaimer type or image maps. read more about why you should be hard coding your sidebars.

5. Best Foot Forward

Get your footer to do some of the heavy lifting for your blog and use it for more than sticking various tracking codes. Add anchor text using keywords to your footer. Chances are you all ready have copyright info in there- add an active link with some choice keywords. You can edit footer information in Presentation—>theme—>footer.php or in ftp edit.

All of these 5 minute tweaks for your blog are easy to do for bloggers of all skill levels and will leave you with a better blog- one that is faster, more search engine friendly and will give your visitors a better experience on your site.

Do you have any 5 minute tweaks to share? Lets here them and how they impacted your site.

Tags: Blogs and Blogging, Internet Marketing and Blogs by Lisa Stewart
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