Improving Your Customer Relationship Management by with Blogging Technology

Before I address the following questions: What is a blog? and What can a blog do for your business?, let me pose a few "What if . . ." questions to you.

Keeping in mind that before your prospects and customers buy from you, they need to know you, like you, and trust you. In other words, they need to know, whether overtly or covertly, that they have a trusting and ongoing relationship with you. What better way to accomplish for them to get to know you, trust you, and like you than with a blog?

Now, here are my "What if . . ." questions:
* What if less than two minutes after creating and publishing your blog, it were to be promoted to thousands of prospects without any extra effort or cost on your part?
* What if your blog gave you immediate access to hundreds of international prospects?
* What if you had immediate access to hundreds of prospects in your city, state, or country who had interests and hobbies similar to yours?
* What if every time someone clicks on a hyperlinked keyword in your Profile that describes your hobbies, occupation, industry, favorite books, movies, music, or artist, your blog pops up?
* What if every time you left a comment on someone elses blog, you could leave a hyperlink to your website, blog, or email? (a mini no-cost commercial!)
* What if whenever someone enters your name or business name (completely or partially) into a major search engine, your website or blog pops up in their search results?
* What if every time you post content on your blog, it would bypass the spam filters and instantaneously appear on your subscribers desktop without any extra effort or cost on your part? (- an excellent opportunity to get your sales, special messages, or time-sensitive announcements into their hands, or actually in front of their eyes!)
* What if your satisfied customers had the opportunity to place their self-generated testimonies on your blog? (Although some will take the initiative to do so, others might need encouragement. That's all right. Just make an incentive opportunity of it! Offer some incentive for their efforts.)
By now you should be beginning to see the powerful marketing potential a blog offers you. These are just some of the powerful customer relationship management features a blog offers you.
But wait! There's yet more!
* What if you were to combine these powerful features with other online and offline efforts such as a blogathon, teleseminar, webinar, online articles, and others?
* What if doing so would enhance your customer relationship management?
* What if doing so would decrease returns and refunds?
* What if doing so would increase sales?

Think about it! I realize that successful marketing and sales are still high-touch entities; however, I also realize that when you combine your high-tech efforts with your high-touch efforts, you're bound to be successful!!!
Now to answer the original questions, What is a blog? and What can a blog do for your business?:

A blog, short of web log, is an interactive web-based journal that encourages participation from viewers. It looks like and does everything a website does and more! A blog serves as an excellent supplement to your website and other marketing efforts. Entries, called posts, are published by date on the page according to your predetermined quantity and are archived in the margin according to your predetermined frequency.
A blog offers your business countless marketing options. Specifically, a blog:

* gives viewers, prospects, customers, and subscribers who might have had difficulty in the past immediate access to you.
* helps to reduce your time spend distributing emails and other messages.
* improves your content delivery rates by 100%.
* improves your search engine rankings.
* publishes constantly fresh content.
* bypasses spam filters completely.
* improves your online visibility.
* enhances your web presence.
* generates more visitors.
and more . . .

So, if you don't already have a blog, I only have one question for you: What are you waiting for? !?

Don't let this cutting-edge technology, this powerful marketing tool, pass you by. Online companies are popping up all over the internet offering you free blogs. My recommendation is that you grab one, or two or more! Most, if not all, are extremely easy to create, but may be time-consuming, according to your already hectic schedule, to maintain.

If that's the case in your situation, you might want to call in outside help. Consider the high school computer techie next door, or the college-age computer-major son or daughter of a friend who could always use a few extra bucks.

I leave you with this wish: May you always be successful in looking for and using new and creative ways to maximize your earning potential.

Remember: When you maximize your potential, we all win! When you dont, we all lose.

Manage Your Business’ Blog

 

In the learning center today, we’d like to re-introduce a few business tips to help you manage your company’s blog.  As you know (or heard), an effective blog that is filled with high quality content can significantly drive website traffic and revenue into your business.  However, without efficient and strategic plans to manage your business blog, your target audience will not develop the relationship with your company that you truly deserve.
With all of that said, successful blogging has helped countless businesses develop an impressive and immediate line of communication between the employees and clientele (both current and prospective). We talk a lot about driving traffic to your blog and/or site with quality content and interesting topics. We have talked (and will talk more) about how to track your sites statistics. However, the most basic key to having a successful blog is effective management.
Managing a blog, in a lot of ways, is like managing a business – start with a solid base and branch out. Take a look at these 10 quick tips to manage your blog:

1. Make A Plan — It’s important that you start out (or continue) your blog that you establish a viable plan or schedule. Some things to consider as you create this organizational tool is: (1) how much time is needed to be consistent with the blog, (2) who is going to be involved in writing/editing the blog content, (3) what is the overall goal.
2. Be Flexible — As important as it is to stick to the plan, it is important that you can adapt that plan to achieve the same overall goal. For example, if you are getting lots of traffic and interest on a specific topic, stray from the original schedule to elaborate on that topic for your audience. Remember that this blog is not just for you to get your name out, but you are providing quality content that your audience/clientele want.
3. Categories and Tags — One of the biggest mistakes that bloggers make is using categories and tags inappropriately. Categories should be broad descriptions of what your blog post; think about them as a handful of navigational drawers for your blog posts. Along with this, only use one or two categories per post. Tags are additions to your categories, and you should always try to use the same tags repeatedly to help searches for specific topics. Typically, under ten tags are suggested per post to maximize search possibilities.
4. Use Your Blog Stats — It’s important for you to check your blog stats daily. I will, however, preface that statement with don’t just sit there and stare at your stats. You have great information in your stats through the blog as well as through Google Analytics. Take advantage of the reports and adapt your current plan to take advantage of the knowledge you have in front of you.
5. Create Time for Social Networking — The bottom line is that blogging isn’t just about writing posts; it is also about networking through other sites. Set aside some time for you to visit these sites (like Twitter), and spread the word of your blog by adding quality networking experiences with the rest of the blogosphere.
6. React to Positive or Neutral Comments — Obviously you are going to want to respond to your comments if they are positive…after all, it’s a pat on the back for you. However, let those positive comments build off of each other and you can respond to all of them as a group at the end of the day. The only time that I would suggest you respond to a comment immediately is….
7. React to Negative Comments — It’s almost inevitable that you will receive some sort of criticism during your blogging experience; you can’t make everyone happy, right?  Respond to this type of feedback immediately and efficiently. Make sure that you remain positive (don’t get defensive), clarify and unclear points that are pointed out by the comments, and assure the visitor that you will look into the issue and respond if you do not know the immediate answer.
8. Links to the Chain — Inbound and outbound links are some of the most important aspects of running (and managing) a blog. How you link things can significantly alter a visitor’s experience with your site, though. Make sure that all of your internal links (links that connect to other pages or posts in your site) stay within the same page while the external links (links that connect to other sites) open in another browser window. Allowing external links to open in a separate browser allows your visitor to easily maintain their experience with your site.
9. Spread the Word — As a blogger you need to stay abreast to the top industry blogs out there. They will show you all of the industry trends and deliver some of the most relevant up to date news that is pertinent to your clientele/audience. However, don’t try to reinvent the wheel – repost or post about the wheel and link to the source. I will emphasize this point – link to the source. Your audience will appreciate that you took the time to relay information that you have found to them. You have just made their lives easier.
10. Be Consistent — Managing a blog can be a very daunting task. Between sticking to the plan, altering that plan, reading other blogs, maintaining your links, and everything else you will have to be very consistent with your blog. This will also help you establish and maintain a solid audience that will keep returning for more.

While effectively managing your business’ blog is a difficult task, it’s not unreachable.  In fact, if you implement the ten tips listed above, you can realize success fairly easily.  However, if you don’t have the time or patience to manage your company’s blog, make sure you hire the right marketing and branding partner that will enhance your online (and offline) image to your target audience.  In fact, contact us for more information on how we can walk with you hand-in-hand down the path to blogging success.

Blogging Goals : Specific Targets vs Sustained Growth

“When you started blogging for money, what amount of traffic were you aiming for?”
This was a question asked of me recently in conversation by a newer blogger. The reason they asked was that they were wanting to come up with a number to aim for, at which they knew they could become a full-time blogger.
As I reflected on the early days of my own entrepreneurial blogging, I realized that I never had a goal like that. My goal was never a certain amount of traffic, or even a certain amount of money.
My goals were always more about growing my blog’s readership (and income) by a certain percentage each month. The percentage that I was aiming for varied a bit over time, but the goal was sustained growth over a long period of time.
I realized early on that, even though my first blogs had relatively small readerships and income levels, if I could increase traffic and income by 10-20% per month over a year—or even longer—the idea of ‘exponential growth’ would take over.

The calculations

Here are the calculations that were behind my goals.
Early on I was earning $10 per month. It didn’t seem like a lot but I realized that if I could increase that by 20% every month over a year, I’d be earning $89.16 per month at the end of 12 months.
That’s still not a massive amount (as much as a part-time job in those days, perhaps), but do the calculations on 20% growth each month over another 12 months, and at the end of that time you’re earning $794.96 per month.
Do it for another 12 months and you’re up over $7000 per month.
Do the same calculations on 30% growth and after three years you’re earning over six figures a month.

Is it realistic?

I can only really speak for myself, but this approach certainly worked for me—particularly early on in my blogging.
Each month my goal was to see increases in my traffic and income. I never really set a specific monthly goal, but in the back of my mind, I was always looking for at least 10% growth as a bare minimum—though I was aiming much higher.
Some months I scraped in at the 10% level, while other months it would be a lot higher—some months early on saw my income jump up over 100% in a month!
Of course, there were also occasional months where things went pear-shaped, and for one reason or another traffic and income fell. The key in these months was to not give up—to keep aiming to get things back up to where they were previously.
Today, things are a little different. After a number of years of blogging, this kind of growth can get more difficult from month to month. I’m still aiming for growth each month but due to the nature of blogging, my income is up and down depending upon what products are being launched and what we’re promoting.
Having said that, over time my goal is still sustained growth. I’m just looking less at month-by-month figures, and focusing upon quarter-by-quarter and even year-by-year results to see that upward trend growth.

What’s your approach?

How do you approach goal-setting with your blog? Are you looking for specific amounts of traffic and or income, or do you approach it some other way?

How to Get Backlinks - 3 Easy Ways That Will Boost Your Search Engine Rankings

Easy Backlinks That Will Boost Your Search Engine Rankings

Ranking high in Google is mostly a matter of two things. A good title tag for your page and quality incoming links that have your keyword in the anchor text. Tweaking your titles is easy, but where do you get some easy backlinks that will boost your search engine rankings? Here are a couple of places to start.

1. Social Bookmarking
An easy way to make sure all your best content is quickly indexed and gets a few decent backlinks is to bookmarking via a few strong social bookmarking sites. As an added bonus, doing this regularly will also result in quite a bit of traffic.
For one of my niche sites, StumbeUpon is one of the top referring sites, right after Google and Yahoo, sending me thousands of qualified visitors each month.
You can start by submitting your pages to sites like Delicious, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Mixx, NewsVine, Digg, and Yahoo Buzz.
Whenever possible I also like to find a few niche specific bookmarking sites. For example, if you have a site in the finance niche, take a look at Tip'd.

2. Asking For A Link
Another great strategy to use is to simply ask for a link. Create a "link to me" page that explains to your readers that it is ok to link to your content and that in fact you appreciate it. If you have an article section, you may want to let them know that they are welcome to reprint your articles.
I also like plugins like "Sociable" that allow readers to bookmark, tweet and email your content with the click of a button. If you are using WordPress to manage your website, this is as easy as installing and activating the plugin.

3. Blog Commenting On Do-Follow Blogs
Another simple backlinking strategy is to find various blogs that do-follow the links in their comments. Blog commenting is always a good idea to gain traffic, expertise and a great way to connect with bloggers in your market. By intentionally looking for do-follow blogs, you have the added benefit of building a backlink with each comment you leave.
You can search for "do-follow blog" plus a main keyword for your market and will likely find lists of those sites for your niche.
Another option is to search for popular blogs in your market and then find one of their posts with comments on it and look at the source code. If the link back to the commenter's site includes "rel=nofollow", the link does not count as a backlink. If the "nofollow" attribute isn't in there the link does count.
Find a few do-follow blogs and make it a habit to comment on them a few times per week.
By implementing all three of these strategies, you can quickly build up quite a few backlinks without spending a lot of time, effort or money.

five Benefits To Guest Blogging

Blogging is becoming more and more popular as time goes by. What once started as somewhat of a fad has turned into a full fledged marketing technique. While blogging itself is extremely popular – there are currently over 112 million blogs being tracked, guest blogging is not quite as popular. There should be no reason for this, as guest blogging comes with a long line of excellent benefits. With the current importance of Social Media, SEO and other forms of marketing, more and more bloggers are going to realize all of the potential that comes when you guest blog.

Free Exposure and Increased Traffic

This could actually be the only reason you choose to guest blog, and it would be well worth it. Guest blogging not only allows you to gain free exposure, both to your blog and yourself, but it also allows you to build increased traffic to your own blog. While you won’t be able to turn-in huge site numbers immediately, the fact of the matter is that if you continue to guest blog on other sites, your own site will start to get more and more traffic.

Set Your Reputation

You need some sort of reputation online to be more successful. Whatever you want your reputation to convey can be accomplished by guest blogging. More and more people will see your stuff, and in turn, they will be able to judge what type of reputation you are building for yourself. This is even more important if you are trying to sell certain goods online, as what you say may directly affect what people buy (or don’t buy) from you.

Opening More Doors

Are you striving for your website, or something else in your personal life, to be more than it is? Guest blogging is an excellent way to not only mark yourself and your products, but to also gain a chance at other doors opening for you. Remember, it is all about building excellent relationships and always being willing to go the extra mile. Do this, and you never know what personal and professional doors may be opened for you.

Excellent SEO Benefits

Google continues to crackdown on keyword usage, as well as on paid click links. They also constantly change their algorithms, which make it nearly impossible to stay relevant 24/7. Guest blogging is a great way to build SEO relevance, even if Google (or other search engines) are severely cracking down on the way content gets distributed.

Social Media Standing

We were trying to get through an article without mentioning Social Media, but it is impossible. Guest blogging is even a form of Social Media, albeit not to the extent of some other Social Media and content related websites. You can use your guest blogging to bring visitors to your site, but you can also use it as a great tool helping you build all of your related Social Media content. The more you guest blog, the more content you have to play with and use.

Guest blogging is one of the very best ways to build online relevance. Whether you are new to the niche, or have been guest blogging for years, the benefits that come along with being a guest blogger are always worth any effort that you may put in.

Blog Updates by Email Wins By a Big Margin

The recent poll on email vs. RSS for blog update delivery generated quite a few votes and comments. As I mentioned in my previous post, I like to test the waters every year or so as Internet users become more sophisticated. Yet, with this sampling of savvy Web users, the results barely budged.

 

Email wins again with 75% of the vote. RSS follows with 23% and a new entry in the poll - audio (podcasts) garnered 2% of the vote. (Note: this is not a scientic poll by any means, but does give a good picture of how people are consuming blog content.)

You'll notice the poll looks rather odd with numerous individual entries. Something to note when you run your own Facebook polls is that you have the option of allowing or not allowing people to add more options for folks to select. I left it open and what happened is people put their comments in the options section instead of selecting one of my three options and then posting a comment in the actual comment area.

This really skews things and makes it a bit tricky sometimes to decipher what people are voting for. In the future I will disable the "anyone can add options" option so they stick with my poll and add comments in the correct spot.
If you click through to the poll and read the comments, you'll find a theme with the email users: most don't read or forget to check RSS feeds so they prefer email because they ALWAYS read their email.
What's the take-away?
Make sure your blog has multiple subscribe options so your audience can consume it their preferred way. Just because you're a savvy web user, don't assume that your audience all uses Google reader (or other feed reader) to get their content. Make sure you have an email option (check out Feedblitz, Feedburner, Aweber, Mailchimp for email delivery).
If you have an email subscribe option on your blog, what service do you use and why do you like it?

To Know Your Blog Audience

As a professional blogger, I would like to say that I know my audience well. I would like to say that I know their next move and can anticipate their every need. But the truth is: I don’t.

Most bloggers find themselves struggling to define who they are, what they stand for and what type of information they should provide. I’ve read that to know your audience, you have to put yourself in your readers’ shoes. That makes sense. If I’m writing for a shoe blog, then I know that shop-a-holic shoe lovers want to know the spring season’s newest trends, cheapest alternatives and comfiest footwear.

But, do you find that even when you mentally strain yourself trying to figure out what people want, you cannot come up with a single, original thought? That happens to me.

Some of the most successful bloggers around say that when you don’t know what your audience wants, just ask. Conduct a survey. Send out e-mails and tweets. Get feedback from your readers.

What if you don’t have a regular number of readers to ask? Then what? I asked the same questions.

The better way to know your audience

I started a new venture at the beginning of this year. The short of it is I am building an authority website. Gasp! It also has nothing to do with writing, blogging or business, the very topics I script and read regularly. Double gasp!

Why did I take on such a venture?

Because I am not only the creator, writer and designer of an authority website, I am a member of my own audience. I know what I want to see from other websites and blogs in this niche, and for the past five years since I have been researching it, I have not been satisfied with what I’ve found.

Why does this matter to you?

Because if you are a blogger, struggling in your niche, perhaps it’s time to shift to one that comes more naturally to you. Ask yourself:

• Do you have any hobbies you are currently pursuing?
• What kinds of blogs do you like to read?
• Do you have some hidden knowledge that would benefit others?
• Do you like to research a particular topic and share your findings?

There could be a hidden gem right in your own brain, and you’re not cashing in on it! When you are a member of your own audience, you inherently know what your audience wants to see, what they need and the best method to present this information. You know what you want. Then you can apply that insight to your blog.

This has got to be the easiest way to know your audience. No, it isn’t some earth-shattering secret you never heard before. It isn’t some mega-scheme guaranteed to get you thousands of followers. For me, it is a sure-fire way to build and promote a successful website and blog. It was an epiphany.

4 Ways Images Enhance Your Business Blog

I'll be the first to admit that I was slow to start using images consistently on my blog. Mostly it's because I'm busy lazy and didn't want to spend the time finding just the right image to illustrate my point. However, images are a powerful addition and help tell your story...sometimes better than the words you write.
When you add images - a photo, illustration or screen shot - you enhance your message and keep your reader's attention just a bit longer...
4 Ways Images Enhance Your Blog...

1. They break up text. Facing a page of black-and-white text is daunting. Images can give the eye a place to rest, breaking up the flow of an otherwise monotonous page.

2. They lead into the text. Since people look at them first, the images provide a starting point for the rest of the blog post. Good images are like flashing arrows that say, “START HERE.”

3. They introduce the topic. Picking an appropriate, related image gives the reader an idea of what to expect from the post. For instance, a photo of a street sign that says “Bumpy Road Ahead” lets the reader know that the post is about challenges or change.

4. They support the post content. A diagram, graphic, or other image can further illustrate the post’s content. A flow chart of a sales funnel, for instance, gives you another way to explain the concepts you’re presenting. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that’s true, you can’t afford NOT to use images in your blog posts. They may be the most powerful tool you have.
I've created a short, free (no opt in required) report that covers:

• Why it's a good idea to add images to your blog
• Avoiding mistakes with images
• Where to get images for your blog
• Incorporating images in your posts
• Optimizing images for SEO
• How to use Flickr to find photos for your blog
• How to use PhotoDropper to add Flickr images to your blog
• Plus links to all the resources and sites

5 Simple Font Changes to Boost Readers, Comments, and Shares on Your Blog

This guest post is by Bnonn of Attentionthievery.info.
You may not realize it, but the font settings on your blog can have a huge effect on how many people read your content.
And how many people read your content has a huge effect on whether a post goes viral.
How huge? Well, by some accounts I’ve read, just one common mistake with colors could reduce readership by a factor of five. And if you’re not making that mistake, you’re probably making at least one of four others. So in this article, I’ll give you the five most important best practices for presenting text to keep readers glued to your content, and away from the old back button.

Font size—16px minimum

At the very top of the the pile of legibility problems is font size. Back in 2005, Jakob Nielsen reported that in a survey of web design problems, bad fonts got nearly twice as many votes as the next contender—with two-thirds of voters complaining about small font sizes.
Sadly, nothing has changed since then. A random sampling of new blog designs at SiteInspire (a web design gallery showcasing the best of the best designs) shows that the average font size for body copy is 12 pixels. Some as low as ten pixels. None over 14 pixels. Similarly, if you randomly sample offerings from the popular Elegant Themes or ThemeForest, you’ll find that every single theme sets post content at 12 or 13 pixels.
And of course, other theme creators tend to follow the lead of the bigwigs.
But as usability and typography expert Oliver Reichenstein of Information Architects points out, 16 pixels is the font size that browsers were intended to display by default—and it is not big. 16px text on an average screen looks about the same size as 12-point text in print. That’s the default size for most magazines, as well as all word processors, because it’s the size people find most comfortable to read. Many people—especially those over 40—find it very difficult to read smaller text. As Reichenstein observes:

There is no reason for squeezing so much information onto the screen. It’s just a stupid collective mistake that dates back to a time when screens were really, really small … At first, you’ll be shocked how big the default text is. But after a day, you won’t want to see anything smaller than 100% font-size for the main text. It looks big at first, but once you use it you quickly realize why all browser makers chose this as the default text size.

Use dark on light text—reversed is no good

Fortunately we’ve pretty much moved past the days when content authors thought that fuchsia on blue text was cool. But white on black text, known as reversed type, is still pretty common. As are variants like white on some other dark color.
Reversed type reduces not only the number of people who’ll bother to read your content, but also their comprehension of it. This is because it strains the eyes. Staring at reversed text for an extended period tends to create a kind of “glare” effect, where you feel like the letters are too bright to look at. Depending on what research you consult, studies show that light on dark text reduces your readership between 50% and 400%.
Why risk losing so many readers? Black or very dark gray on white looks clean, and there are plenty of great themes that use those colors.

Line width—45 to 75 characters

Here’s another little-known rule that a lot of blogs break. In order for your eye to easily follow one line to the next, you want no more than 75 characters in each line. This is called the line measure. Beyond a measure of 75 characters, it’s hard to track the end of one line to the beginning of the next without getting lost.
On the other hand, if you have a measure of less than 45 characters your eye will get fatigued quickly, because you’ve barely started to read one line when you have to jump to the next. You feel like you never get a chance to rest.
For this reason, your ideal post content area will have lines of text about 60 characters long. Of course, you do also have to take aesthetics into account. On many blogs, the “ideal” measure leaves a huge gap on the right margin, or makes the text seem squished into a tiny area. I use a measure of around 70 characters on my own website for exactly that reason. But if you’re pushing past 80 characters, you’re reducing your readership—guaranteed.

Line height—130% or more

Fortunately this is a less common mistake. If you’re using a professional theme, you probably don’t need to worry.

To give you an example, I’ve set this paragraph at the default line height (also called leading, after the strips of lead used to separate lines of text on old printing presses). It feels cramped and uninviting to read, and it’s hard to follow the lines from one to the next because they blend into each other.

On the other hand, this paragraph is set with a line height of 200%—equivalent to double spacing in a word processor. I’m sure you’ll agree that the lines here feel way too disconnected from each other, and unless you’re submitting a research paper this is not the way to go.

Finally, this paragraph is set with a line height of 150%. That means that for every pixel of font size, there’s one and a half pixels of distance between the lines. This turns out to be pretty reliable sweet spot for most fonts you’re likely to use on a blog—but feel free to experiment between about 130% and 160% to see what works best for your own content.

The left margin—don’t break it

This last tip isn’t exactly a font issue. But it fits into the same general category. Bloggers routinely include images in their posts. Whether or not that’s really a good idea is a topic for another time—but for now, let me just give you one piece of advice.
The left margin is sacred. It’s how we track text down a page in the Western world. It’s the “ground” out of which the lines grow (often to quite different lengths), and it’s the foundation for our eyepath as we read down the page.
But if you break the left margin, that all goes to hell. Your eye has to scan around to try to pick up the new margin, so you can keep on reading.
In other words, every time you left-align an image, you put a speed-bump in your reader’s path. And you’re compounding the problem by dragging his attention away from the text with your visually dominant image. Needless to say, readers who keep being distracted and having to relocate the left margin often don’t read to the end of a post—so they often don’re share it or comment on it.

Bonus tip: drop caps increase readership

By “drop caps” I mean initial capitals, where the first letter of the first word of your post stands out much bigger than the rest. According to research conducted by Ogilvy & Mather, this increases readership of a piece by an average of 13%.
Drop caps aren’t built into most blog themes, and they can be tricky to do on the web, but if you’re up to a little coding, check out this tutorial on how to create them.

Five mistakes: which ones are you making?

Now is the time to head on back to your own blog and see which of these five important best practices you’re not practicing. Then, fixum! But don’t forget to share the changes you’ve made in the comments below!

Bnonn is the author of 25 free video lessons on how to turn visitors into customers—part of his conversion-optimization course ‘Attention-Thievery 101’. Known in the boroughs as the Information Highwayman, he helps small businesses sell more online by improving both their copy and design. When he’s not knee-deep in the guts of someone’s homepage, he is teaching his kids about steampunk, Nathan Fillion, and how to grapple a zombie without getting bit.

How Offline Promotion Landed 300 New Blog Visitors

This guest post is by Kyle Taylor of The Penny Hoarder.
I’ve been blogging for six short months and I’m bored.
I still love writing new content, but like many of you, I have spent so many countless hours commenting, tweeting, and begging for backlinks that I’m simply too bored to keep it up.
What makes the situation worse is that I have spent months establishing myself as a unique brand in my niche, yet I’ve been employing all of the same marketing strategies as my competitors. My marketing is the first impression I give potential readers and, by reusing old strategies, I have been leaving readers with the impression that I was just another personal finance blog. Sure, the traffic has grown, slow and steady, but I decided that I needed to do something different this summer; not only to grow the site faster, but to make marketing more enjoyable for myself.

My experiment

My first move was to step offline. Offline is a scary place, but there happens to be millions of people out there that have never heard of my blog. And these are the kind of people who aren’t trolling comment threads and message boards like the rest of us. I wanted to reach them and I was confident that once they found me, I could hook ‘em.

My bumper sticker

I once read in a ProBlogger article that when advertising online, you shouldn’t necessarily send people to your homepage. Rather, you should sent them to a page deep within your blog. I decided to run with that advice and apply it to my offline endeavor. Instead of promoting my entire blog, I picked a popular article on my site titled, “I Get Paid to Buy Beer,” bought the domain iGetFreeBeer.com, and permanently redirected the domain to the article hosted on my blog.
Maybe it wasn’t quite what Darren had in mind when he shared that advice, but what the heck?
It had all the makings of a page ready to go viral offline:

• A rather juvenile web address. Check.
• An article that represented my blog well. Check.
• And, well … free beer. Check.

My hope was that some of the new visitors would like what they saw in the article and start exploring the rest of the blog. The downside of promoting a separate web address was that we wouldn’t be promoting our actual brand or website. However, I was hoping the novelty of “free beer” would successfully launch our regular website to stardom, or at the very least, bring about world peace.
Naturally, this type of article and domain address was perfect to market to the under-30 demographic. To promote the new domain, we had simple bumper stickers made and hired willing college students from Craigslist.com and Fiverr.com to put the stickers up around their college campuses, apartments, and hangouts.

Results

All told, we spent about $120 dollars. The printing cost us $45 for 250 bumper stickers. And five college students were paid $15 each to put up 50 stickers in their towns.
The campaign is only in its second week, and we have already had more than 300 new visitors come from our bumper stickers. At $0.40 per visit, our costs are certainly cheaper than an AdWords campaign, and there is no telling how many more visitors we will get in the coming weeks.
It’s also easy to track our campaign using Google Analytics, because the visitors show up as a “referring site.” Plus, using the Advanced options, we can look at our visitors’ cities to see if word-of-mouth has found us readers in locations other than the ones we targeted with our stickers.

Get creative

Start brainstorming ways you can promote your website that you haven’t seen done before. Get crazy. Have fun with it.
Maybe you could make a video of yourself planking and post it on Youtube? Maybe you could give out free lemonade at the beach and put your blog’s logo on the cup? What about passing out flyers at the farmer’s market?
The strategy you choose will largely depend on your site’s niche, but if you want to be different then everybody else, you are going to have to start thinking differently about your marketing.
Have you ever completed offline marketing—or done something completely outside the box? Let us know how you went in the comments.
Kyle Taylor is a personal finance blogger that blogs about weird ways to make money at The Penny Hoarder. Connect on Facebook or join the newsletter and get our “5 Wackiest Ways to Make Extra Money.”

Getting Started with Webmaster Tools: Fixing 404 Errors

This guest post is by Dave Taylor of DaveTaylorOnline.com.
Whether you’re writing about changing diapers, improving your bowling score, finding a job in the travel industry or how you get pictures off your cellphone, I think it’s a universal truth that if you’re writing online, you want better search engine results placement.
Most likely you’ve installed some SEO plugins that promise to improve your results and they might even be working, but if your site’s been up any length of time, it’s quite probable that things have started to break behind the scenes and hurt your results without you ever being notified. A scary prospect, really, and if it’s dramatic enough, you can start to really sink down the search results without any further explanation.
That’s why Google has its Webmaster Tools and while they’re primarily designed for people who have complete control over their Web site it can even be useful if you’re on blogger.com, wordpress.com or typepad.com. in fact, you don’t need to be a blogger to find it helpful: problems hurt any site, regardless of its structure.

Proving your own site

The first thing you need to do with Google’s Webmaster Tools is verify that the site you want to analyze is your own. This is typically done by adding a special line of HTML to the head of your home page, as I detail here.
If you can’t change your header, there are some alternatives that Google offers, but if you have zero administrative rights on the site, you might well be out of luck. If so, check with your hosting company to see if it offers alternative administrative tools that let you know about broken links, etc.

Key elements of a Webmaster Tools report

Once you have verified ownership of your site, you’ll see on the left side that the major areas are Site configuration, Your site on the web, +1 Metrics, Diagnostics, and Labs. Below it there’s some help that really highlights what you can glean from the Tools: Crawl errors, Search queries, Links to your site and Sitemaps. All good stuff.

Google Webmaster Tools overview for APparenting.com

There’s good analytic data that appears to be somewhat of an overlap with what you can get from Google Analytics (or your favorite analytics package if that’s not your particular cup of tea) and sometimes it reveals things that perhaps you didn’t want to know, like “sexy girls” is the #1 search for people who get to my Attachment Parenting Blog. Yikes. Not what I write about on my site nor anything I want people to be seeking when they arrive on my blog.
The heart of the Webmaster Tools, however, are the diagnostics because it’s the primary way we can learn what Google’s search spider finds broke on the site. Go to Diagnostics and it further breaks down into Malware, Crawl errors, Crawl stats, Fetch as Googlebot and HTML suggestions.
All good stuff, but let’s go into Crawl errors as it offers great bang for your proverbial buck.

Crawl errors Webmaster Tools reports for APparenting.com

Not too bad. This blog has a few hundred pages but I’m only seeing 36 of the hated 404 not found errors. Look closely and you’ll see that the format is bad link, error encountered, linked from and date detected. The first one is illustrative:
Link: http://www.apparenting.com/cosleeping-cpsc.html
Error: 404 (Not found)
Linked From: 10 pages
Detected: Jul 30, 2011
The real value is that if you click on the link that shows how many pages have a link to the bad URL, it’ll show you exactly what pages need to be fixed on your site and, sometimes, on other sites too. Here’s an example:

Specific crawl errors for APparenting.com

The first link is from another site called bubhub.com.au but all the other pages that link to this bad URL are on my own site. That’s something I can fix immediately.

Where to go from here

You can see we’ve just touched on the tip of the iceberg with the Google Webmaster Tools. It’s deep, it’s complicated, but even if you just poke around and look at the 404 errors generated for your own blog and fix as many as possible, you’ll be pleased to see how your ranking improves and, perhaps even more importantly, you’ll be happy to know that you’ve just improved your readers experience. And in the end, there’s nothing more important than happy readers, is there?
Dave Taylor has been blogging since the tools first appeared online. This is his 31st year online. His primary blog is the popular Ask Dave Taylor! offering up free tech support on a wide variety of topics including blogging and SEO. You can find him on all the major social networks through DaveTaylorOnline.com.

A Blog Traffic Strategy: Quality vs Quantity

When it comes to blogging, there are different mentalities around both the quantity of traffic and the quality of traffic. At different stages in a website’s development, we tend to focus on one or the other, but when we start a new blog, we primarily want to get traffic to it. Even if you are a famous celebrity, your new website isn’t going to get anywhere without some effort.
If you write quality content, eventually the traffic will come. Check out this great post from John Burnside to get a better understanding of site traffic in general.
I am a day trader that has forayed into travel blogging and I’ve been able to start generating $1,000 in revenue off my travel blog in six months. My approach has been to try to become an authority online before I start focusing on anything else. Without having a legitimate blog, trying to do anything else in your niche is pointless. So becoming a legitimate source of information online should be your first priority. This will enable to you attract organic Google searches more quickly—with or without focusing on SEO.

Why you should focus on quantity first

You want to give your site a jump-start. When you have a group of friends, you don’t let them drive your car, or come to your house right away. You want to see them a few times and have a conversation. Eventually, over time the new people gain your trust, and you become friends.
The Internet is very similar to a new friend joining a group. Google isn’t going to automatically start sending people your way if you just started writing about a topic. Who are you to Google? Similarly, President Obama did not run for President before he ran for senate. You don’t get a high-paying job unless you have extensive experience in the field or in school.
By focusing on quantity first, you can build an audience and spread the word that you’re an authority in your niche. Google will start to peek into your activity once you have an audience of some size. Once Google finds you, and is able to prove that you have an audience alongside quality content, your site will be able to grow traffic organically. Without any traffic, Google and other big online entities aren’t going to take you seriously. How do you expect to get the word out if no one is coming to your site?

How to focus on quantity

There are several different ways to build traffic to your site. The best way to immediately get new visitors is by focusing on StumbleUpon and Reddit. What these two sites do is provide a surge of new visitors to your site to provide you with exposure, and start legitimizing your site in the eyes of Google and Alexa.
However, the quality of the visitors that come from StumbleUpon and Reddit is absolutely atrocious. Bounce rates are over 80% and the page views are normally one or under. This means that out of all the people that come to your blog from StumbleUpon and Reddit, over 80% of the traffic immediately leaves once they see your site and look at a page. These numbers are derived from the stats of seven travel bloggers that I personally know, who have over 15,000 unique visitors on their sites.
Why would you want anyone to visit your site if they’re only going to look at an average of one page and leave? The answer is because that traffic really does count overall. I have personally tested traffic levels that correlate directly with surges in traffic from both sites. Once I get a surge in visitors, my keywords hits have immediately gone up, my Alexa score has dropped, and I have instantly gained hits on Google for that specific post.
The reason why you want to start with this technique is because by getting a surge in traffic, the major search sites, as well as your visitors, will see you as a legitimate blog much faster. Plus, what advertiser doesn’t like you to have more traffic? Not only will these sites provide you with short-term and long-term benefits, it’s also easy to get started on both sites, and it doesn’t take up much of your time. StumbleUpon will generally continue to send traffic to all your posts, while Reddit will usually give you a surge that stops after a few days.
Once you have a consistent flow of traffic, you can start focusing quality. With all those visitors coming to your site, thanks to your focus on traffic quantity, you might attract the eyes of someone important. You may get direct traffic the next day and possibly another surge from another person.

Focusing on quality

Once you have a consistent flow of traffic, you can then start to focus on the quality of traffic. If you have good content, over time, traffic quality will build on itself as you become an authority in your niche.
Speeding up the process is time-consuming, especially when you have to go out and find that quality traffic. Think of it this way: if you are looking for quality then you are going to have to provide quality. Engage with other people in your niche by thinking out of the box. If you are focusing on travel, for example, and you’re living in Buenos Aires, then consider searching for expat communities in Buenos Aires. My Argentina tourist attractions post didn’t get any traffic until I posted it in a forum. Now it’s sitting on the second page of Google for that term. I get random visitors to my blog all the time for people who have included links in forums related to travel and day trading.
In summary, once you have established your authority on the Internet with both companies like Google and Alexa, and visitors to your site, you can focus exclusively on traffic quality. It’s a love and hate relationship for me because I hate to receive such low-quality traffic to my blog, but in the end, it’s worth it, because it helps with Google rankings. Once you combine that with other factors like link-building, you can create a powerful three-punch combination of tactics to reach new heights with your blog.
What’s your traffic strategy? Share your experience in the comments.
Day Trading from 7 different countries Marcello Arrambide has begun to chronicle his travels around the world on his Wandering Trader Travel Blog. He has traveled to over 40 countries in his lifetime and is currently exploring South America. You can find out more about Marcello on his Facebook Page. or RSS Feed.

8 Desktop Blogging Clients To Manage Your Blog More Efficiently

Writing new entries online using your weblog’s control panel can be complicated and time-consuming, especially if you want to format your text or insert many images. Even though most modern blogging and cms systems have great WYSIWYG editors they are simply not as responsive and efficient to work with as a good old desktop style application. This post provides a list of desktop client blogging tools that have potential to make your blogging easier, more fun and faster. If you’re serious about blogging and haven’t checked out any desktop clients yet this is the time to do it!

Windows Live Writer

Live Writer is awesome, free and really can speed up your blogging. The interface is simple and user friendly and the program even supports downloading themes from your blog for providing instant realistic preview on the desktop. (I had problems making this work though…). Still I have to say that this tool is well integrated with WordPress that I tested with. It is easy to format the text with headings, insert images etc. You can copy paste text with links etc. from web pages. This is important and not all blogging clients allow this. You can also manage multiple blogs, and it is clear if you simply upload or upload and publish…while testing other clients I found out the hard way that this is not always clear. Spelling support also seams to work very well. Thispost was created entirely in Live Writer (My first desktop edited post. I really enjoyed working this way!).

• Platform: Windows Price: Free
• Supports: Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress Type
• Website | Download

BlogDesk

BlogDesk is free and really simple and easy to use but it does far from offer the same number of features found in Live writer. BlogDesk does not support pasting text where html markup is preserved. This is a feature I could not live without. It also seams to be lacking a feature to allow authors set style on text like headings.

• Platform: Windows
• Price: Free
• Supports:WordPress, MovableType, Drupal, Serendipity and ExpressionEngine
• Website | Download

Ecto

Ecto is a commercial tool with a good editing interface, except for the html view that I experienced didn’t format the html very well. Blog management is a bit slow in my opinion. It seams like it downloads all posts fully every time you refresh. This makes it impossible to have a list of all posts downloaded for finding a existing post fast.

• Platform: Windows, Mac
• Price: Free Trial / $17.95
• Supports: Blogger, Blojsom, Drupal, MovableType, Nucleus, SquareSpace, TypePad, WordPress, and more
• Website | Download

BlogJet

A popular Windows blog client for your WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Drupal, etc. blogs. This tool is commercial but price is acceptable for most people if they like it. Post and page management seams good and you can easily filter on names to locate a post. Unfortunately it only allows you to download 100 posts making it hard to manage old posts. The tools supports pasting in text keeping markup. On the other hand I have not been able to find a way to set style on text like headings. Going into the code view to add h2 tags is not efficient.

• Platform: Windows only
• Price: Free trial / €29.95
• Supports: WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger, MSN Live Spaces, Blogware, BlogHarbor, Squarespace, Drupal, Community Server, etc.
• Website | Download

RocketPost2

RocketPost2 is commercial if you want to use it with most blogging platforms. This tool is really feature rich easy to work with. The blog administration window is good and gives good control of downloading posts, and actually support updating multiple posts in batch (did try this though..). The editor has many features but I miss good support for pasting from web pages. You can do basic styling like adding headers. The tool also allow you to do a lot of additional styling but normally you will not change color or text size directly but use CSS…

• Platform: Windows
• Price: Free Trial / $29-49 (free for use with Blogger and Live Space.
• Supports: Tightly integrated with Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress, TypePad, MSN Spaces, BlogHarbor, Drupal, dasBlog, BlogEngine.NET, .Text and SquareSpace
• Website | Download

Deepest Sender

Deepest Sender is running in your browser and it is as simple as it gets. There’s not a lot of features and blog management in the box but you can use this for creating fast posts as you surf around. It is actually quite simple to drag stuff from a web page into a post.

• Platform: Firefox, SeaMoney, XULRunner
• Price: Free
• Supports: LiveJournal, Blogger, WordPress, MSN Live Spaces, meta Weblog
• Website | Download

Flock Blog Editor

Flock Blog Editor is like Deepest Sender a program that is bound to a browser. Flock Blog Editor is part the Flock Browser. I never used Flock Browser before but having played with it for a few minutes makes me think it is worth investigating further.

• Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux
• Price: Free
• Supports: Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, WordPress, Xanga, Moveable Type
• Website | Download

ThingamaBlog

Thingamablog is a cross-platform, standalone blogging application that makes authoring and publishing your weblogs almost effortless. Unlike most blogging solutions, Thingamablog does NOT require a third-party blogging host, a cgi/php enabled web host, or a MySQL database. In fact, all you need to setup, and manage, a blog with Thingamablog is FTP, SFTP, or network access to a web server.

• Platform: Windows, Mac, Linux
• Price: Free
• Supports: N/A
• Website | Download

Google +1 Button Gives Your Blog Posts More Visibility

Have you heard the news? In online marketing circles it was hard to avoid news about the Google +1 button finally being available to add to websites and blogs. By way of introduction, here's Google's video introducing the +1 Button:

There have been dozens of detailed blog posts written about how to install Google's +1 Button on your site so I'm not going to go into that here. I'll link to a couple posts that are well worth your time to read and study.

What I will say is that this is an important element to add to the social sharing options on your blog. You're giving your audience a way to tell Google that your content is worth recommending and the more recommendations you have the better Google likes it. It's like a peer review of your content. 

The +1 Button is Google's answer to Facebook's Like button. Both are forms of word of mouth recommendations and social proof. The more likes and pluses, the better the content must be and the more likely that others will click through to check it out, right? More targeted traffic...got to love that!

On the other side of the visibility coin, the more you use the +1 button to recommend blog posts and websites you like, the more your image and name appears on Google's search results pages when your friends are doing searches. You do have to have a public Google profile (which I've been recommending for a long time) in order to use +1 and have your name, image and link to your profile show up.

How Do You Manage Your Blog?

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a number of people asking me for information on how I manage my time as a blogger and as someone with a number of different aspects of business running side by side.
Here’s an example of one of the questions (from a reader who asked to be anonymous):

“Darren, I’ve been blogging for a year now and I’m starting to get swamped by the admin of it all. Between answering emails from readers, deleting spam, keeping track of the growing number of RSS feeds in my news aggregator and promoting my blog I’ve hardly got time to write any posts. How do you manage to keep your blogs running? What’s your secret? Do you have any tips or tools for me to try?”

This question is typical of the sort of thing I’m being asked more and more so I thought I’d have a go at putting together an answer.
Time – Firstly it’s worth saying that I work full time as a blogger. I’m able to put extended hours into it and as a result can manage a number of blogs at once and am able to be involved in a number of other related projects (a blog network and e-resource for example).
Constant Challenge - Even with the ability to work on my blogging full time I find the administration around blogging an ever increasing challenge. Like the questioner above has experienced – the longer you blog the more admin that seems to come along and the more blogs you have the more it multiplies. I’ll be honest enough to say that there are days I don’t keep up and have increasingly considered taking on an admin assistant or intern to take on some of the tasks that mount up.
Priorities – One of the things I’ve had to work on increasingly over the past few months is the setting of priorities. This has included ending blogs, cutting back the posting rhythm on blogs, changing the type of posts etc
Sharing the Load – I’ve already mentioned my temptation to take on an admin assistant but I have taken on others to help me on a couple of my blogs as bloggers. This has been really helpful to me (and I hope they’ve enjoyed it too). It’s definitely a challenge to find the right person but once you do it’s well worthwhile.
Tools – I rely heavily on some great tools in my blogging that help me manage the different aspects of what I do. I’ve mentioned them all numerous times on this blog so won’t go into them all and how I use them but among the most useful time savers are Akismet (for comment spam), Bloglines (for RSS feed management), Ecto (desktop publishing), Backpackit (I use it less and less – but it’s good for managing some of my data), Entourage (my email/calendar client) and Skype (for IM and VOIP communications with partners and readers). I don’t feel like I use the most ‘Web 2.0′ kind of applications to manage what I do but it seems to work reasonably well with just the basics.
Practice – With time and repetition at blogging I’ve gotten reasonably quick at blogging. I guess I’ve developed a rhythm of posting that works reasonably well for me. Standard ‘newsy’ type posts take me as little as a few minutes to put up and longer posts (like this one) have a workflow that has emerged over time (I talked about some of it here). I guess practice makes perfect (or at least speeds things up).
So ultimately I don’t have any ‘secrets’ to share. It’s a lot of hard work and is largely about time management and doing your best. There are days where things work really well and I feel on top of things – but then there are other days where it feels a little like I’m going backwards.
I’d really appreciate if others would share their experience of this. Perhaps you could help me improve what I do and help others who I know are asking similar questions to the one above.
How do you manage your blogging administration? What tools do you use? What lessons have you learned?
Update: As Michael suggests in comments below – another important tool in my blogging that is a massive help in keeping on top of things is tabbed browsing. I use Firefox and the ability to open new windows all in the one browser via tabs changed my life when I discovered it. Instead of having 20-30 windows open I now have one window with multiple tabs open. I keep things open as a reminder of things to do at times.
While I think of it – another thing that has changed my blogging in this way is to move away from using a 15 inch laptop as my primary blogging machine. 6 or so months back I moved to a desktop with a 23 inch LCD and also got a smaller 19 inch secondary monitor. I use the secondary monitor to run email and instant messaging and the larger screen for browsers and blogging aps. I find that this helps me to be much more orderly in my workflow.

Manage Your Blog with Content Delivery Networks

In order to lessen overcrowding on the network and jamming of the server, divide the website’s most commonly accessed content with the help of Content Delivery Networks (CDN). Many famous and large-scale online businesses such as Level 3, Amazon, etc, make use of Content Delivery Networks. Although the average blogger would not have much use for a CDN, blogs which have a substantially large amount of traffic could consider the assistance of Content Delivery Networks.
In general, CDNs utilize numerous servers which are strategically located worldwide. Visitors on the website are able to connect and gain access to the blog depending on propinquity to the server. This improves the rate at which content such as images, cached pages and videos may load.
It is not just websites such as Blogger and WordPress which provide blog hosting services. Many web hosts also assist you in initiating a blog whereas some are even willing to install it free of cost by employing an automated installing method -the cPanel package. Such tools simplify installing Blogger and other blogging methods with just one click.
After the blog hosting has been created and the blog has been installed, configuring admission to a Content Delivery Network is very straightforward, particularly, when a plugin exists that operates the CDN selected.
The advantages that can be availed by employing a CDN are that the blogger can simply offload photos, videos and other types of media content on to the CDN; can maintain the cost of the bandwidth; and load on the server at a moderate level. It also helps reduce load time on the server for visitors on the website. The only drawback of adopting Content Delivery Networks is the additional fee which needs to be paid each month. In order to make a suitable decision, one has to estimate the cost of employing CDN and to assess whether the blog is worth it.