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How to help friends get started in world of online marketing ?

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 06.05.2007 | Category Blogging, Internet Marketing, Search Industry, Wordpress

We have all had friends who ask us for help getting into the world of online marketing and search engine optimization, wanting us to teach them everything we know so they can make just as much money as us while working in their pajamas from home all day… but without really wanting to put in the effort to do it. Not to mention the fact that you often feel you “have” to help them out if they ask because of that guilty complex you have of always being there for your friends. Now combine that with the fact you can almost guarantee that certain friends who ask you this will never actually be serious enough about it to make it work after you do help them out. So you don’t necessarily want to invest a huge amount of time or effort into it in case he decides he hates it!

Anyone else have some disastrous stories from helping friends get into the business?

How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 08.04.2007 | Category Blogging, Link Building, SEO, Wordpress

Thanks

Blogging Is About Writing

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 08.04.2007 | Category Blogging, Wordpress

When you visit Google, do you click a picture to begin your search? Do you face a screen full of images like in a grocery store self-checkout? Click fruits, then apples, then scroll through pictures of apples before you find the Jonagold Apples you want to buy, and select those?

Of course not.

The web is about words. No matter how visual and audible it becomes, it continues to be about the words.

Blogging is about writing. Many claim that content is king. If content is king, then the army that protects and defends the king is the written word.

Here are some things to think about next time to put your army to work on your blog.

Don’t Just Show, Show and Tell: It’s time to get back to show and tell. Blogs offer amazing ways to present multimedia information, but you still have to tell us about it. You must show and tell in order for your point to be fully understood. Words may not do it alone, but a picture is not worth a thousand words when fed through feeds and search engines. You must have the words.
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords: With the recent public release of the Google Patent for Blog PageRank, your keywords are more important than ever as the algorithm applies multiple content matching, content relevancy, search relevancy, and link-to-content relevancy tests to determine if the keywords match the content. Learn how to write keyword-rich content to increase your page ranking. More importantly, write with keywords to help your reader know exactly what you are writing about.
Write Clickable Titles: The keywords you use in your post titles tell potential visitors what your post is about. If they don’t get it, they won’t click it. If they do click, and the content doesn’t match, they won’t be back.
Make Your Point in the First 200 Words: You have less than a second to capture your reader’s attention. If the user on your site, feed, or search engine summary doesn’t “get the point” in the first two or three sentences, you’ve lost them.
Blog Writing Is About Editing: A great idea does not translate automatically into good writing. It’s the editing that clarifies your writing so the idea comes through. It’s as much about the words you add as the words you take away to increase the post’s clarity and power.
Make Your Words Timeless: Blog writing isn’t like words you throw out into the air and expect them to vanish. The words you fill your blog with tend to last. Make sure the words you use and the things you say are worth reading twenty years from now.
Don’t Waste Words: A powerfully titled article drew me from my feed reader and I was greeted with this first sentence: “I still have to take a shower, and I’m late for work, but I wanted to tell you about this because I think it’s important, so I’ll just rush this off before I jump in the shower and head to work.” Don’t waste words. Don’t tell your readers things they really don’t want to know. Get to the point and stop wasting your time and theirs.
Explain Jargon: We get so caught up in our little world of acronyms and industry jargon, we forget few outside our clubhouse know what we are talking about. Stop once in a while and explain to us what these terms and letters mean. It doesn’t have to be a paragraph, just a few words. Don’t assume we know what you are talking about.
Use Descriptions in Images and Links: Blog writing isn’t limited to just the words. If you aren’t using titles in links and alt in images, you are missing out on a very valuable use of keywords and content building. You are also not in compliance with web standards.
Use Descriptions for Flash, Podcasts, Videocasts, and Screencasts: If you are using any audio or visual multimedia on your blog, help us understand what we are going to see and hear. Convince us to click to play. A picture may speak for itself, but you have to do the writing for it.
Present a Problem, The Solution, and The Results: Don’t present a solution before the reader understands there is a problem. Present the problem, give us the solution, and then lead us through the results and the benefits of the results. When readers follow along with the process, they better understand how it works and why it works for themselves.
Just the Facts, Ma’am: Everyone has an opinion. What makes your opinion different from other opinions is that yours is based upon the facts. Wild accusations, suggestions, and analogies do not build trust and respect. Make your opinions be based upon valid facts and identifiable references and citations. Be prepared to back your word up with the truth.

If You Have 100 Top Priorities, You Have No Priorities At All: If there are 40 topics you want to cover in one blog post, all unrelated, what are you writing about? As a guide, write on three points, all related, and publish that. Want to write about 40 different unrelated topics? Don’t stuff them all into one post. Publish one for each topic.
Originality Will Always Win: Original content will always win over redundant, blockquoting, and echo chamber content. Even if you can’t write well, the attempt to say it in your words is always appreciated and welcome.
Move The Reader Through the Story: A blog post or article has something to say. It begins, has a middle, and ends. Move the reader through the content, as well as into it. Let each word lead to the next word and the next. Make each sentence lead the reader to the next sentence, and each paragraph draws them into the next. They want to “turn the page” and consume the words as they read along. Make them want to scroll down for more.
Blog Paragraphs Are Short: Blog writing lends itself to shorter sentences and paragraphs for easier reading on a web page. Web readers want information fast and in small digestible chunks. Huge bulky paragraphs make reading online very difficult, however single sentence paragraphs can make the reader uncomfortable.
Use Command Verbs to Teach: If you have something to share, a lesson to teach, advice, or guidance, use command verbs to energize your “how to” words. Words, like “make”, “do”, “write”, “take”, and “build” are active instruction verbs. When people are searching, they like to be told “what to do”. Tell them.
No Wishy-Washy Passive Voice: Avoid wishy-washy passive voice instructions like “If you would like to maybe you should think about checking the spelling of your post before you think about publishing it because…” Write with authority, like you know what you are talking about: “Check the spelling before you publish your post.”
Use Nouns and Synonyms: When you are writing about it, you can add some of this to it to help it along. Huh? What’s “it”? If you are going to name something, name “it” what it is. Call it by its name. Use nouns and synonyms to help the reader know what you are writing about and increase the keywords in your content.
Comments Are Content: Make sure comments speak well for your post, your blog, you, and your readers. Edit comments for misspelled words and obvious flubs. Your commenters will appreciate it. Clean out trash and inappropriate comments, and definitely get rid of comment spam.
Visualize Who You Are Writing To: Writing to the “air” is fine for some, but most people need to know “who” they are writing to, and for, in order to begin. Visualize a person or small group and write as if you are talking directly to them. If that’s too formal or uncomfortable, imagine you are writing to a friend.
Clean Up Old Posts: As your blog writing improves, go back over your old posts and clean them up. The fresh perspective will help you edit and improve the content. You might find new life in your old posts and direct more traffic their way.
Write Kinda Like You Talk: It’s important to write in a conversational style because your readers will relate to you, the person behind the blog. Your writing should give the illusion you are speaking directly to the reader without including all of the stutters, “ums”, and “likes” we hear in every day conversation. Don’t write like you have a dictionary or thesaurus sitting next to you. Match the writing style with the content.
Mind Reading Writing: Do you have a friend or co-worker who starts a sentence in the middle of a paragraph? Don’t leave your reader wondering why she is on this page. Make your point early. Make your point obvious. Back it up with the details.
Avoid Screaming: Writing with CAPITALIZED LETTERS INDICATES SCREAMING, so don’t do it for the length of an entire post. Learn the basic rules of capitalization. The beginning of sentences and proper names are capitalized. Just because you Like a Word doesn’t MEAN you have to capitalize Every Important Word. That went out of fashion a couple hundred years ago. and writing all in lower case may look cute for a young girl’s diary or personal blog, but it is old. out of fashion. people think you are a girl under 16. stop it. now.
Punctuate Properly: Use commas, quotes, and apostrophes in line with the grammar rules of your language. In English, there is no space at the end of a sentence before the period or question mark . Learn the difference between “its” and “it’s”, and while you are at it, learn “their”, “there”, and “they’re”, along with “your” and “you’re”. People will condemn writing for less. Don’t give them a chance with careless grammar mistakes.
Blog Writing Isn’t About Smiley Faces: Write emotions, not emoticons. Too many smileys are :\ annoying and distracting.
Teach Your Readers: Share with us your thoughts, feelings, experiences, and knowledge. Teach us, oh, great blogger, how to live and function in this crazy world.
Make Me Think: If you make your readers think, you’ve succeeded in interacting with them. If you make them write, you’ve succeeded twice over.
Write With Conviction and Passion: Even if you write badly, if you write with conviction and passion, then we will read you.
There are two ways to hold your reader’s interest. Show them something they’ve never seen before, or show them something in a way they’ve never seen it before.

Blogging that gets noticed and linked to is all about seeing things in a new light. A university advertising professor once told me there are “no new ideas, only new ways of presenting old ideas”. Present information from a unique perspective and writing with a fresh angle and you will attract attention.

20 Best Practices for Launching a Corporate Blog

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 08.04.2007 | Category Blogging, Internet Marketing, Wordpress

Having a corporate blog is a great way to connect with your customers, but unfortunately, not all companies get it right when they first launch their blog… and not knowing how the blogosphere works is a public relations disaster in the making. While a blog can enhance and build your relationship with your customers, doing it wrong can have the opposite effect. Do you really want your company’s blogging faux pas to wind up all over the blogosphere? Not really, but corporations have stumbled repeatedly when trying to find their blogging voice, not to mention blogging policies to deal with problems that will pop up along the way.

Is your company ready to take the seemingly big and scary step into the world of blogging? This advice will help you make sure you and your company get it right the first time around… and you will soon discover that starting a corporate blog really isn’t as scary as your PR department (and maybe your legal team too!) is making it out to be. Here are twenty best practices for starting your corporate blog.

Designate or hire someone whose role within the company is blogger. If no one is designated, the blog won’t get updated. If it is someone’s job, that person can be responsible for updates, monitoring comments (if necessary). And I cannot stress enough the importance of hiring someone who already has an active blog. He or she will know the ins and outs of blogging etiquette that will save you headaches later on when your brand new blogger makes a major gaffe that ends up being talked about on the blogosphere.

Does your blogger have celebrity potential? It is even better if your chosen blogger is comfortable dealing with the public, as corporate bloggers often become the celebrity’s of the company, the personality that visitors or customers recognize. So it is even better if that blogger is someone who can “meet and greet” at events and conferences.

Update regularly, at least once a week, preferably more. And if you will be away for any length of time, stockpile some entries that will go live while you are away. Your readers don’t need to know you are sipping margaritas on the beach, and when you still have blog entries being published, they will assume you are hard at work!

Don’t rah rah yourself. A blog is not a platform to tell everyone how wonderful your company is. If you are constantly talking about how great your company is or what fantastic products you have, people will stop reading because no one likes a sales pitch disguised as a blog. Look at things related to the industry, tidbits of news, or other things your readers would find of interest. Resist the temptation to talk about your company in every entry.

Find your voice. Most popular corporate blogs have an easygoing tone to them, very different from sales copies or press releases the same company sends. Entries should be written in the first person and should reflect personality and opinions. Don’t be too wishy washy on any topic.

Read other blogs in the industry intensely. Follow at least 30 blogs (more if they are updated once a week or less) and get a feel for how the other bloggers handle the topic area. Not only will this help you see what others are talking about, but it will also give you the opportunity to become much more familiar with blogging as a whole, even if you have never blogged a day in your life… yet!

Proofread! Yes, most people assume bloggers proof read, but reality is that most of us don’t before we hit publish. But when it comes to corporate blogging, you are creating an image, and you don’t want your image to be one of misspellings, typos and grammatical errors. And you don’t want the grammar police bloggers to stop by and comment on it!

Do “insider” pieces. This could include “a day in the life of” a certain employee or job within the company; some little known fact about the company or something in the company’s history; look at an employee who does something phenomenal in off-time, such as training for the Olympics; or the group of employees that knit preemie baby hats for hospitals during their lunch hours. This helps give a human face to your corporation.

Write your own perspective on stories in the news related to your company or product. Did someone use your product in a unique way that ended up saving a life? Did an astronaut take one of your products into space? Make sure it isn’t all rah rah, but more look at interesting news your customers may not have seen in the press.

Enable comments, even if they are moderated. You will need to develop a comment policy, but be forewarned that deleting negative comments can actually lead to worse publicity than if you simply allow the comments to go live. You might decide to remove “Your company sucks” but allow negative comments that have facts behind them, such as a customer explaining a poor experience with your product or company. But be sure to follow up any negative comment as quickly as possible with a company response… readers will be able to tell very quickly if it is a case of sour grapes or if the commenter had a legitimate issue.

Respond to comments to keep the flow. If you respond to many of the comments, either providing answers or more details, you can easily keep the flow of conversation going, and encourage those readers to come back to the same entry multiple times. And a lively blog with plenty of comments will attract many more readers than a slower blog with no comments.

If an entry is related to a certain area within the company, be sure to get input from that department before posting. They might have something interesting to add to the blog entry that is worthwhile adding. And with a little encouragement, they will be much more likely to keep an eye on it when it goes live and maybe even post a comment or two in response.

Post length doesn’t really matter. Not all blog entries need to be wordy with 1000 or more words. In fact, it is better to do a series of short entries that keep your corporate blog active than doing one large one every couple of weeks.

Make sure people know you have a blog. Link to it from your site navigation. Announce it in your newsletter. Tell your employees about it. Include mention of it when you send press releases. Alert analysts, industry watchers and journalists that you are now blogging.

When news hits the fan. When you start your blog, develop a policy in place of how you will handle any negative press. Did an executive get caught doing something bad and it’s being splashed all over CNN? Did share prices drop? Did a product result in a death? If the unthinkable happens, it is best to have a plan of action in place so you know what to do and time isn’t wasted deciding on how to handle it. Will you address it head on? Ignore it? Deflect it with something good about the company? These are all things you should consider so if something does happen, it is being handled in accordance to the company vision, not the knee jerk reaction as it happens.

Ask the legal team what topic areas they would like to review before you go ahead and blog it. This will save a lot of headaches in the future. Likely topics that fall into this category include lawsuits, anything related to earnings, particularly for public companies, and posts about anyone leaving the company where the situation is not so amicable.

Don’t let the PR or legal team write for you. If legal or PR writes your blog entry, it will be dry, high level and boring. And if it’s boring, the readers won’t return. So make sure you stick with your voice and avoid letting PR or legal put words into your mouth.

No smack talk allowed. If you smack talk your competition, or anyone for that matter, you are just handing out the invitation for many more bloggers to talk smack about you. And if enough bloggers are discussing the fact you publicly dissed a competitor, the media sniffing the story out won’t be far behind and the angle they will go for will make you – not your competitor – look bad. A few mottos apply here – if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all and if you play with fire, expect to get burned.

Watch your referral logs. Who is talking about you? If someone blogs about you today, you will want to know no later than first thing tomorrow morning, if not today. When you know almost immediately that someone new is linking to you, it gives you the opportunity to potentially discuss it in your next blog entry.

Be link happy. Too many corporate blogs have rules than only allow them to link to their own site, or perhaps other sites or companies owned by the same parent corporation. But when you link to others, then they notice you talking about them in their own referral logs, and they might just take notice of you when they might not have noticed you or known about you before you placed that link on your blog. At the very least, get approval to link to specific sites, such as the top dogs in your industry. If you fail to link to the important players, people will notice and you could potentially lose credibility.

By following these twenty best practices for corporate blogging, you have made your journey into blogging much easier for your company.
I think So

14 Plugine To Optimize Your Wordpress Blog SEO

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 10.03.2007 | Category Other, SEO, Wordpress

Having a blog is more than just posting everyday. It’s about being seen, not only by people but by search engines as well. Most people use social bookmarking sites to drive traffic to their blogs, but after a few weeks the traffic dies and the blog posts are never seen again. With a few simple plugins and tweaks to wordpress, you can help keep traffic to your blog by optimizing it for the search engines while still writing for your visitors.

Plugins for Search Engines

A blog needs loving from the search engines too. Since a wordpress blog is created dynamically, it is harder for it to rank on the search engines. This is because the coding is meant to be customized and read by the designer, rather than a search engine. The following plugins will help increase your ranking by utilizing simple SEO tactics. This could be the difference between your blog being on the third page of Google or the first page.

It is best if you use some sort of analytic software to track traffic. I prefer Google Analytics because it is a very powerful tool and best of all it’s free.

1. SEO Title Tag
Gets rid of the “blog name >> archive >> post title” and puts the post title as the title of page. This plugin will show the search engine a unique title for each page and with the right keywords, you can keep your traffic going long after the social bookmarking website’s traffic is gone.

2. Head Meta Description
Allows you to add a brief description about each post which will be included in the Meta description. This is a basic SEO tactic.

3. Google Sitemap
Creates an XML sitemap that is automatically submitted to Google and updates it every time you make a new post. This plugin requires you to make an account with Google. Google webmaster tools allow you to see when the last time Google bot has crawled your website.

4. Jerome’s Keywords
Allows you to add keywords for every post, which will be included in the Meta data. This is another basic SEO tactic.

5. WP-Cache
Will make loading time for your blog much quicker, so that visitors don’t have to wait.
Note: Activate this plugin last, because it is very difficult to test the look and feel of your blog with this on since it does not allow your browser to refresh.

Plugins for Visitors

So you have good content and tons of traffic, now what? Keep your visitors entertained by having them interact with your blog. With the help of these plugins and good content, your visitors will never want to leave.

6. WP-Post-Rating
Allows the visitor the rate your post. This will tell you what topics are popular with your blog’s visitors. So now you can write better content on topics that your visitors enjoy.

7. WP-Contact Form
Allows you to add a contact form almost anywhere on your blog, this gives your visitors a quick and easy way to contact you. Some visitors might have an idea for a good topic, some might want to become writers on your blog and some visitors might want to spam your site or write you nasty letters on how much they hate your blog. All this feedback will help you be more in tune with your audience. Remember to have a reason why you want people to contact you.

8. WP-Related Post
Shows other related post (i.e. if your post is on weight loss and you wrote another post about low fat diets, this plugin will show a link to the low fat diets post). This will help raise your pageviews. After all you don’t want visitors to just look at one page and then leave.

9. WP-Email
Will put “email this post” link on the bottom of post. This makes it easy for your visitor to share this post with their friends (that friend could fall in love with your blog and could be your number one fan).

10. Permalink Rewrite
This will change your url to include your category name and your post name (which should include some keywords). To do this go to the “Options” tab then the “Permalink” tab, click on “Custom Specify Below” and change it to this: “/%category%/%postname%/”

11. Add Title Attributes and Alt Tags
For every picture or file you upload, add the “Title” and “Description” (Use keywords).

12. HTML Validator
When you are done modifying your blog be sure to run it through a html validator, this will tell you if your site has any errors in the coding. If it has errors fix them.

13. RSS Feed
Make sure to have an RSS feed and a bold icon that is above the fold.

Customize Your Theme

There are hundreds of thousands of free themes out there, there are also millions of bloggers. That means the free theme you are using is probably being used by tons of other people. So customize the color scheme of theme. It is quite simple to do and it will make a big difference on the look and feel of your blog.

14. Remove Commented Coding
Once you are done with all customizations to your theme go back and remove all commented code. All the coding behind “/*” and in front of “*/” are commented code. This code is just there for the webmaster/designer.

Note: please do not try to install these plugins if you have no knowledge in html or php.

WordPress 2.1.1: The Poisoned download

Autor Internet Marketing & SEO | 05.03.2007 | Category Internet News, Wordpress

If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker (…) It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. (…) They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.

http://wordpress.org/development/2007/03/upgrade-212/
The patched version, 2.1.2 is available for download now from the WordPress site, and according to the developers, version 2.0 files were not affected.

WordPress 2.1.1 was released on February 21st 2007, so if you installed WordPress between then and March 2nd, you should upgrade without delay.