Spring is in the air and everywhere I look I come across spring cleaning blogging tips. I wonder, why wait for spring? I guess since that is when we do our spring cleaning.
All puns aside, you should regularly check your blog - call it spring cleaning if you like. I would prefer to clean it more often. The question is, what do you clean?
I have spoken in the past about blog plugins so I wont go down that track again. However one post I read recently suggested you go through your blog and delete any old post that are no longer relevant or no longer receive any traffic.
Sometimes it can be a good idea, however I think this can be fraught with danger. I can readiliy identify the following problems if you decide to delete old posts:
- Links 1: how many other posts have linked to that post. You will need to go back through those posts and edit all the links.
- Links 2: how many post has this post linked to and passed link juice
- Link Juice 1: what is the page you are about to delete worth when it comes to link juice
- Link Juice 2: have you capitalized on the pages link ability
The last point is important. Rather than deleting the post, can you use it to link into other posts that you want to promote? Can you revive the post by grabbing an excerpt and commenting or updating the information.
Perhaps I am being precious. However I don’t like the idea of throwing out something that is a part of me - particularly if I can still get some mileage out of it.
Spring cleaning is fine and a good idea - throwing out posts - I don’t think so - at least, not until I determine if there is more mileage to be had. Not all blogging tips are gems, at least, not until you have thought through them.
Most blogs have a couple of static pages, pages that don’t change, yet serve to fulfill a need. When considering your blog content, these pages should be used to advantage. Two pages in particular are often either ignored, or padded with some basic info and little else.
Blog content on these pages, if optimized properly, can even rate highly in search engines so think carefully before hitting them with a ‘no follow’ or ‘no index’. Two pages that can be optimized are the ‘About Us’ page and the ‘Contact Us’ page.
About us pages often display a brief history and that is it. Your about us page should provide basic information, however they are also a perfect place to sell your brand and your product range. If you have a product range that is constantly changing, then don’t include specifics. You can still produce keyword rich blog content related to your organization and your brand.
Contact us pages are so under utilized. You will often see a contact us page that just has an email address - nothing else. This is a total waste of a page. You can produce very effective blog content on this page that includes branding and product information. Even if you are a personal blogger, set up several email accounts (and then redirect them to all to one).
On your contact page you can then produce blog content related to various aspects of your blogging with a different email address attached to each aspect. Make sure each area is rich in appropriate keywords and let the spiders index it.
With careful use of keywords and links back to the appropriate areas on your blog, you can get plenty of mileage from what where once very unflattering static pages. Your visitors that read these pages will find them more professional. Blog content does not just relate to how, when and what you post. It relates to the blog as whole including effective use of all pages.
Social bookmarking is a popular way to get your blog posts out into the broader online community and StumbleUpon is one the most popular bookmarking sites available. However, if you occasionally thumb your own posts, be careful you don’t end up in the Stumble graveyard.
StumbleUpon can really provide your blog with a boost in traffic. When it comes to social bookmarking, get a couple of thumbs up and if your lucky, you will get a steady stream of traffic. However, to get that traffic the thumbs up or ’stumble’ has to be done the right way.
I have seen many good posts killed because they were not stumbled correctly. The person who ‘discovers’ your post by thumbing it has to also provide a review. If they fail to write a review, the stumble ends up in the graveyard. There are many theories as to why this happens but the general consensus is that for the first stumble, a review is required. If no review is offered then the stumble sits in limbo continuing to wait for that first review. Social bookmarking is fine, if everyone follows the rules.
If you get one of your social bookmarking friends to ’stumble’ one of your posts, make sure they also write a review. If you stumble it yourself, don’t be afraid to write that review. Some bloggers seem to shy away from writing reviews for their own posts, however this is the easiest way to kill the post.
Social bookmarking is a great way to meet people and promote yourself. It can also cause problems. I am waiting for the day that individuals start to abuse this stumble gliche to effectively kill posts from their competition. Perhaps the powers that be at StumbleUpon can find a way around the problem.
If you are running a business, whether it is online or the more traditional bricks and mortar business, running a web site and a blog may be too time consuming. Blog content services are growing and it can sometimes be difficult to find the best one suited to your business.
Blog content providers do just that, they provide articles or content that can be published on your site. Some providers offer extra services such as managing your blog, submitting your blog to directories and submitting your articles to social networking sites.
There are cheaper ways of obtaining blog content including including using PLR articles (private label rights), these however are sold to hundreds of others so the content is not unique. The amount of time you spend reworking them into unique content is not too different to just sitting down and writing the content yourself. PLR generally is to generic to be used to sell products.
When looking for a blog content provider, look at what services they are actually offering; how frequently they will provide the content; what costs are involved (in total) and what experience they have in a providing blog content in general and more specifically to your niche.
Another option that is available is to share the blog content creation. This can be done using your own skills to create content together with professional content providers. This can be done to suit your needs such as every other day, or just set days each week.
One of the major benefits to employing a professional blog content provider is that the content itself is always going to be relevant to your keywords (and rich in those keywords), fresh, and carefully edited when it comes to spelling and grammar. If you can justify the cost, consider a blog content provider to turn your blog into a professional face for your business.
Let’s see … is social media about conversions, traffic, click though rates and sales; or is it more along the lines of conversations, authenticity, transparancy and building a sense of community? I guess it really depends on who you ask. My colleague at Intel, Bob Duffy, who works on my team came up with this awesome cartoon that illustrates my point precisely (his post also touches on this subject).
In Bob’s post, he talks about being “in” the conversation versus “at” the conversation. Clearly, being “in” the conversation means participating in online discussions; and “at” the conversation could mean buying a banner ad on Techcrunch or Facebook, for example. As someone who is passionate about social media and is responsible for driving conversations about Intel, I believe both approaches are important … as long as the end result is centered around the latter, conversations.
One way to think about it is the following:
Strategy = participate/facilitate conversations and community building
Tactical = buy a banner add on Techcrunch driving traffic to those conversations.
Thoughts?
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Tags: social media, conversational marketing
Scrappers are everywhere at present and often you will not even be aware of there presence. For those who are uninitiated, a scrapper is someone who copies your content and publishes as their own. These tips may at least help to thwart them.
My first tip, whilst it wont stop them, it certainly provides you with links back to your pages and advertises to the world that the content has been scrapped. The tip, include a least one link within the post to one of your pages. You can also use a second little trick which involves publishing your post, noting its url, then editing the post and including the url somewhere near the end.
Having you post covered with your links may not stop them, it will however provide you with some links. The second step is to actually determine if you are being scrapped. This can be fairly easy. Copy a paragraph of text and paste it into Google’s search engine. If your content is out there Google should find it.
If you have been scrapped, contact the owner and ask them to delete the post. If they don’t, contact the host. At the same time advise Google of content theft. If they are displaying Google ad units they will most likely be suspended.
Scrapping is hard to combat particularly some of the new smart scrappers. They are subscribing and using your RSS feed as a post. This is often only the first paragraph and they are smart. They will link back to your site to ‘read the rest of this article’ but use a written by fictitious name.
If you have been scrapped, and who hasn’t these days, get your feed published through Feedburner. This often gets your new page indexed quickly, faster than a scrapper can get it published. Together with your links in the content the search engines will generally assume yours is the original the scrappers dulplicate content.
You can try to sue but these guys are fly-by-night so it is rather pointless. The are many WordPress tip on how to stop these guys. The bottom line often is to just let them go, milk them for links, and notify Sheriff Google each time.
Big businesses are jumping on the blog bandwagon, what about small businesses, is it worth the effort or time to create a blog? Blogs are strange creatures. They are easy to start, easy to maintain and easy to create content. Perhaps too easy.
There are millions of great blogs throughout web. There are tens of millions of absolute garbage blogs as well. The problem is that creating a blog is easy. Grab a cheap dot com. Get some cheap or free hosting. Install WordPress and start publishing your life story. Or perhaps start creating the very best in solid content. Or perhaps take the lazy way out and scrape some RSS content. It can be very easily done.
If you are small business and wondering whether or not to start a blog, take a number of issues into account before you start.
The first of these is commitment. Once you start a blog and have your business associated with it, you need to maintain it. If you blog starts to look stale and dreary, it may adversly affect your business.
Do you have the ability to create content that will interest your readers. Content is one of the most important aspects to a creditable blog.
Dollars. Blogging can be a cheap form of advertising however you need to have the time and commitment to make a successful blog. Either that or spend money to have professionals do it for you.
Small businesses often don’t have the resources to pay for professional blogging services. However, often the money spent could result in a small business gaining a strong growth spurt that elevates them from the small to medium size business.
Blog and website services are growing at a steady pace with competition bringing down prices. Small businesses into the future will need to ask whether or not they can afford not to blog. Blogging can be effective in increasing your business online.
Last weekend my laptop crashed. When I restarted it, it said that the systems.32\hll.dll file was corrupt and that I need to reinstall it. I called Dell, they couldn’t help me. I stressed about it all night because I have some really important data there. So Sunday morning, I brought my laptop to Best Buy/Geek Squad so they could at least save my data. Someone had told me that they were awesome and can fix anything.
I got a call this morning from the Geek Squad and they told me that they couldn’t retrieve my data; and that they could send my laptop to their offices in Kentucky and use advance data retrieval techniques but it would cost me anywhere between $400 - $1600. Ugh.
So I posted my no-so-rant on Twitter.
A few hours later, I get an email from Robert Stephens, the Founder and Chief Inspector of the Geek Squad. He asked me what my issues were and that he would look into it. Let’s see if he lives up to his promise of personally resolving the complaints of those who read the The Consumerist(lol, not really a consumerist reader though).
Nonetheless, this is a great illustration of how a company can use social media to track conversations and (hopefully) take action. We will soon find out if the Geek Squad is going to create a loyal customer, with lots and lots of friends, family and acquaintances. ; )
UPDATE (6:30 PM): Got another email from Robert. He did follow up with the local technician at Best Buy and confirmed that my issue could not be resolved at that facility. While I am a little disappointed that I don’t have my data; I take my hat off to Robert and team. This is exactly what conversational marketing is all about! Good job Geek Squad.
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Tags: social media, conversational marketing, the geek squad, twitter, Robert Stephens
From the beginning of March this year Feedburner introduced a new system that allowed feed owners to transfer their feed to another user.
This is of particular interest to those who are buying or selling blogs that have a Feedburner account. The ability to transfer feeds is not new, in the past it was done manually. The process is now fully automated and very straightforward with instant results - unlike the past where delays could drift into days.
To transfer a feed, the Feedburner account holder enters the information related the feed being transferrred along with the recipients email address. The recipient responds to the email and either logs into their current account or creates a new account.
That’s it. Job done. Nothing could be easier. The transfer feed link can be found on the dashboard just below your sites name. It attached to the Edit Feed - Delete Feed - Transfer Feed line of links.
Now there is no excuse not to use Feedburner to send out your RSS feeds each time you create a new post.
Blog metrics is an inexact science at the best of times. You can however give your Blog SEO strategies a real boost if you know how to read the Google Goldmine (aka Google Analytics) - the deeper you dig - the more gold you may find buried.
Google Analytics provides a wealth of information and sometimes it can be fairly daunting to try and wade through it all. However if you can try to learn how to use it, one section at a time, you will the information is not only useful, but information you can act on.
If you look at the visitors section as an example. Google Analytics provides a nice graphical representation of how your visitors arrived on your site. Where they referred, did they come from a search engine or did they come directly? Dig a little deeper and you can get a breakdown of those statistics.
For example, you can see which sites have referred traffic to your site and in what numbers. You can also see which search engines are referring traffic to you. Dig a little deeper again and you will see what search terms the visitors are using to find your site. Now you are starting to get to the meat.
By identifying which search terms are being used, you can gain a greater understanding of where you need to concentrate your keywords optimization. If you are using a list of a dozen or so keywords yet only getting hits from half that list, perhaps it time to review your keyword strategies. Are the keywords still relevant? Do you need to concentrate on some keywords a little more?
Most blog metrics packages allow you to look at these statistics. With a little thought you can turn this raw data into valuable information that will enable you to fine tune your blog SEO strategies. Tweak a keyword here, remove another keyword and replace it with a longtail that is more appropriate; suddenly your targeted traffic starts to increase.
As your traffic grows from search engine referrals you will be able to refine your strategies even further. Blog metrics are often ignored or only looked at with a passing interest. If you spend a little a time, you find they are little gold mines, the further you dig, the more valuable the information can become.