Posts tagged Blogging
5 Website Essentials for Most Effective SEO
Nov 10th
SEO is an essential tool for the success of your website (unless you’re Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg!). Yet while SEO ‘gets them there’, your website has to ‘keep them there’. If your ultimate goal in undertaking an SEO strategy is to make more money for your business, make sure that your site has these five essentials in place while you’re undertaking your SEO campaign! More >
Another 4 Ways to Supplement Your Main Business Income With Your Website
Feb 1st
Yesterday we looked at a few ways that you can make extra money from your regular business website, without destroying its look or reputation in the process. Reading back over the post, though, having only 4 ways to get a return on your website and SEO investment was a bit of a tease! Today we explore 4 more of those ways. Remember, we are only looking at ways to do this that all business websites can use, without looking like a spam and virus factory.
1. Create and maintain a private forum
This can be a pretty big earner for your business if you have a way to provide real value to your customers! If you sell a product that often requires ongoing support or training, why not offer this at a fraction of the cost of phone support, via an online method? Someone will have to pay attention to the message boards, but people LOVE getting customized answers from experts.
2. Host a Job Board
Again, this depends on the type of content you have on site for suitability. If you are a marketing-copy-oriented site, it will seem out of place. If you have created a significant information resource, built yourself up as an expert and created a small community around your site, it will work perfectly. The easiest way to monetise is to charge a tiny fee for both advertisers and applicants.
3. Run a paid survey
Again, only for the info/expert/community sites. There are quite a few sites that will pay you to run polls on your own website – market research is big business. Just don’t overdo this one, or you’ll scare visitors away.
4. Sell an ebook on site
This leverages all that knowledge, and all that expert status that your site has built up. Having an ebook written usually doesn’t cost very much – provide a few resources that only you have access to, and give information via phone interview to the author to make sure that content is exclusive.
4 Ways to Supplement Your Main Business Income With Your Website
Jan 29th
The internet is split along a line … I hesitate to say “roughly equal lines”, because I’ve no idea if that is true! On one side of the line are the businesses who simply use the web as another marketing and promotion avenue for a business that already existed pre-WWW. On the other side are the businesses that would not exist without WWW and internet marketing – businesses like online freelancing, sole-purpose ad revenue sites and affiliate marketing sites, etc.
What many traditional businesses don’t realize is that there are plenty of way to combine the two approaches to making money online – we explore 4 of those today. Of note, we are only looking at methods that detract little from the actual corporate identity of a site.
1. Hosting banner advertising
The suitability of this strategy depends on the setup of your site. If you have substantial information sections, then it makes sense to offer links to other sites that people might find useful. If your site is purely marketing copy, it makes less sense to dilute your message. Still, consider that a site that hosts a banner ad with a $1CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and gets 100,000 page views a month will generate $100 monthly …pretty decent!
2. Affiliate marketing
Find a business that is complementary to your own,, and also has an affiliate program. Mention them and link to them in your own copy (only where appropriate), and you have the potential to be earning commissions from your website, without changing the perceived quality.
3. Sponsored reviews
If you are able to, or already have, built up some kudos in your industry community, people may ask you to do paid reviews – either of their site, a book, a product, etc. If they don’t ask, send out a letter to let them know! Alternatively, use sites like Pay Per Post.
4. Host Premium Content
As a business, you have lots and lots of expert knowledge. Given the quality of most content on the net (!), anything that comes from the expert’s mouth is highly regarded! Have some content on your site as free, and some paid. Offer a range of payment options – subscription, per-per-article, etc.
How Long Should a Blog Post Be for Best Internet Marketing?
Jan 27th
Travelling around the far corners of the world wide web, you’ll find as many different lengths of blog posts as there are numbers between 1 and 20,000 
. Unfortunately, there is no optimal length for a blog post … but there is definitely value in having some consistency in your corporate blog. If you have started a blog for SEO, there are a few things to think about when creating a strategy for maintaining and marketing it. Length is one of the most basic, and most important. So, how do you tell how long to make your posts?
Consider … Google’s preferences
Considering that the reason your blog exists is as an SEO tool for your website, and you can see why somebody’s idea of perfection other than yours and your customers star to creep in. It seems that pages under around 250 words, and over about 1000 words, aren’t ranked as highly in Google. If you want people to come to your site through natural search, keep this in mind.
How often will you be posting?
If you want to gain a regular readership, your readers need to feel that you care about the blog. This is one of the major reasons (alongside SEO) that you should post regularly. However, if you only put up a 250 word post every fortnight, your readers don’t get the impression that you care about the blog. Also, there is less good content for them to pore over! If you will be posting infrequently, make your posts longer. If you are posting daily or multiple times daily, make them shorter.
Note on short posts and frequency
Some people believe that the enormous amount of regularly updated content is what has allowed sites like Engadget and Gizmodo to get to the top of the blog list and stay there. However, your readers and their preferences should really be in the forefront of your mind.
Be comprehensive
Blog posts that skim the surface of a topic are usually of little value to readers – they are a dime a dozen on the net. If you want to write shorter posts, choose ‘narrower’ topics, which you can cover comprehensively in fewer words.
Blogging as Web Marketing Strategy
Mar 13th
Blogs are actually software, a Content Management System (CMS) in simple form. With this software, adding new pages are made easier. Thus, integrating the new added content into the navigational structure of your site is also easy. As a result, search engines would tend to crawl on the site more frequently because of fresh contents. Especially Googlebot, it treats newly added contents as freshly cooked bacon and egg for breakfast.
Web marketing such as SEO is all about playing games with search engines. Since blogs are search-engine friendly by nature, SEO experts integrated blogging or blog posting into one of the internet marketing strategies. By the way, what make blog posts search engine-friendly are the rich links and text plus the frequently updating web pages. Aside from that, blog pages use CSS instead of HTML because the latter is extraneous. Extraneous HTML codes would have the spider a little bit confused what the page is about because of those codes.
If optimizing a site is through internal and external links, optimizing a blog is just the same. However, frequently updating the blog with new contents is already enough to have it cached by search engines and eventually get ranked. Once you frequently update the blog, it is more likely to be crawled more often and your posts would get more visibility in search engines such as Google.
Since blog posts can be seen more often in search engines, there are great chances that the links that you create in the write ups would be clicked by internet users. You are not just generating links for your site with blogging, but you are also driving traffic.
If you are thinking of the most effective web marketing strategy, just blog.