Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
Some people see business blogs as a big waste of both time and good money. This is because so many people just think of them as marketing tools. But that doesn’t by any means make them less effective. They are truly one of the most useful and successful tools that a business website can utilize. They can help to pull in massive amounts of targeted traffic to your main business website.
Whether viewed as marketing tools or not, people still read them and get a glimpse of the blog’s writer. This gives the company a very important voice that relates to their public and to their customers. The general public has always liked companies with a distinct personality that can connect with them. It makes them seem more like the people next door than some far away conglomerate.
These blogs give people a feel for what the company is truly about. They feel as though they have a voice and a say-so about the goings on, being able to give feedback and suggestions. They feel more like participants than just someone who comes to leave their money.
Aside from the benefit of giving your company a voice, there are more advantages to be had. One is having an industry authority in regards to your business blog. If your blog shows that your company can change and grow with your industry, then by sharing this with your visitors, they will gain you respect for your professionalism. This really enhances a company’s reputation. Once the public catches on that you’re on top of things, it snowballs, word gets out, and your business grows.
Because of this, your company is able to gain public trust, and they’ll find your products more appealing. Let’s face it, if you thought your products were sub-par, you wouldn’t be selling them.
A business blog can really reap big benefits for any company, and for your main site as well. By regularly keeping fresh updated content on your blog, the search engines will constantly index the site, giving it a higher page rank in the results pages. If you do some SEO work and optimize your blog for keywords that you add to your contextual links, you could see a massive surge in your page ranks. Using these things along with wise choices of domain names can give your website quite a boost toward success, and this is why so many businesses are adding blog to compliment their sites and business.
Guest post is written by Thomas Alling, the owner of the successful make money online niche blog. His blog features reviews and a free home business classifieds section.
We have come across an amazing tutorial that outlines how to build a basic portfolio wordpress theme. The tutorial runs through the full design and covert process.
Check out the full tutorial here.
Every blog needs to have goals. Without goals you are just shooting in the dark, trying to succeed without knowing what success really is. The problem most bloggers have is that they have very general goals that cannot be quantified. They say their goals are to make money, to never have to work a 9-5 job again, or to go on a big vacation every year from the money they make on their blog.
But there are 2 problems with that mindset:
1. Those are not really goals but a result of reaching set goals.
2. There are no numbers associated with those goals.
In this article I will show you some goals you need to start setting with your blog. Anything worth doing is worth doing right, and you will never hit a target if you are not aiming at it. Having no target in your blogging is like using the lottery as a retirement plan. Yes, some may hit the jackpot, but most will just end up losing money.
So what are some quantitative goals you can start setting?
Remember your goals need to be real numbers– something subjective and not objective.
Your goals can be to reach a certain number of…
1. RSS feed subscribers
2. Email subscribers
3. Twitter followers
4. Unique visitors in one month
5. Rank in Google for a given keyword
6. Indexed backlinks
You will notice that none of these goals have anything to do with money– at least not yet. You see, when all of our goals have to do with making money we lose focus on how to actually DO it. But when we focus on getting more email subscribers on our list and getting more targeted traffic to our blog then we will most certainly see a rise in our income levels as well.
One trap bloggers fall into is worrying so much on monetizing their blogs that they forget about the people that will be coming to their sites with the money. These are the people that will allow you to quite your day job, so your focus needs to be on them. What content are they looking for? What questions do they have? What will make them want to buy a product that you recommend?
Once you have determined what your goals are in real numbers you can set up a game plan. How can you reach that level of email subscribers? What do you need to do in order to get more quality backlinks to your site?
Your goals also need to have time frames.
Without a dead line for your goal to be reached you might as well not have a goal at all. For instance, I can say I want to have 20,000 Twitter followers as my goal. Then 3 years go by and I am still sitting at 5,000. There is no urgency to reach that 20,000 goal if I have until the rest of my life to reach it. The whole point in having goals is to reach them, and to make them a priority. A dead line will put some fire to your feet to get things done.
You cannot succeed in reaching a goal if you make it impossible to fail. It’s the chance that you might fail that makes reaching a goal so rewarding. You may not reach every goal. You probably won’t. And if you find you are reaching every goal you set in a short period of time then you are probably not aiming high enough. Set the bar a little higher and give yourself a challenge.
Set that time frame for those 20,000 followers. Try to reach that goal in 3 months, 6 months, or a year. Allow yourself the opportunity for failure, and then work as hard as you can to avoid it.
So to sum it all up:
1. Set goals with numbers.
2. Have deadlines with your goals.
3. Setup yourself for failure.
4. Will yourself to succeed and avoid that failure.
Guest Post by: Jonathan Souza is owner of CashCoach.net where you can find daily tips on internet marketing, social media, blogging, SEO, and more creative marketing techniques to get more traffic to your website.
Unless you are lucky enough to have thousands of links pointing your site, you will have to do everything possible to make sure that you are making the most of the link juice that is flowing towards you. The Internet is full of resources about how to optimise your site, so I thought I would talk about some of the overlooked methods and tactics that can help squeeze the most out of your link juice.
Canonical
I love this term, but I think it can confuse many of us when we come across it for the first time. The canonical tag deals with duplicated content and pages, when you are using a canonical tag you are telling Google that whatever page the tag points to is the most important version of that page and it should be ranked as such. The canonical tag can be used almost anywhere and this is because if Google sees any difference in a URL it will see that page as being different, even if they have exactly the same content Google will still see these pages as being different and as such may choose to rank one over the other. Using a canonical tag can help to make sure that Google is ranking the pages you want it to.
www to non www
Like I suggested already if Google sees any variation in the URL it will count these as 2 different pages, this goes for the www version of your site and the non www version of your site, as Google sees these as 2 different pages your page rank can then be split between the 2 versions. Adding a canonical tag here can help but the best thing to do is instigate a permanent redirect from one to the other, you may lose some page rank but it is better than having your juice split between 2 versions of the site. Also be careful of trailing slashes (/) as again these will be considered as a different pages.
Nofollow and java links
This is where things move into the grey area of onsite SEO, If you are using Nofollowed and java script links you are trying to funnel link juice from one section of your site to another. So you have 2 options, adding nofollow will mean Google will see the links but won’t pass any juice through them. ( there is an on-going debate about whether or not Google will still follow these links). Using a java script link will mean the spider won’t see these links at all. There will be sections of every site that you won’t want to leak any page rank to, sections like your terms and conditions and your privacy policy. But I think it is also important to show Google that these pages exist so in these circumstances I would use a no follow tag. Java script is usually more useful if you are trying to conserve as much juice on one page as possible while still offering your visitors a user friendly site that they can easily navigate through.
Silo
Silioning a site is a tough concept to try and get across especially in a paragraph or 2, if you want find out more check this post out ( be warned you could read this post 5 times before it will make sense). The shortened version is, you build your site around themes and you categorise each page or post under a specific theme. Your goal is to send a clear message to Google about what each section of your site is about, cross links between themes may confuse Google and blur the message you are trying to get across about the different these of your site. You want to keep your site as regimented and structured as possible if you are randomly linking between categories you won’t be able to do that. If you want to link from a post in one theme to a post in another them, if possible link to the main theme page of the other post.
I guess you are probably asking, what about Meta tags, and Url structure. Well a quick search will provide you with all the answers you need to these topics, hopefully the ideas I have mentioned are not covered quite as much as some of the more common methods. Using these tactics won’t give you instant success but if you can add them to your current strategy they may help just a little.
This is a Guest post by Neil Jones, who Specializes in launching ecommerce sites, he is currently plying his trade as head of marketing for eMobileScan. With 18 websites based all around Europe they are on course to be one of Europe’s largest online retailers of Industrial handheld computers like the Datalogic Memor and the Symbol MC70. Neil has been an online marketer for the past 6 years and in that time he has owned and run a range of sites all built around the ecommerce platform.
WordPress Core UI team member John O’Nolan is currently running a bit of an experiment with the WordPress backend. Over at his blog he has released a new testing plugin which will make a very small change to the WordPress UI.
Within the plugin O’Nolan will be running a lot of different experiments to see if the WordPress community like the UI changes.
“If everything always fitted the current UI then nothing would ever change. If they fit exactly into the current WordPress UI then this would just be a patch on a core ticket and not a plugin.”
So far there is only one experiment running on the plugin, but I’m sure that will be increased over the next few months. So do you want to be a WordPress guinea pig?
It seems like the next version of WordPress is all about adopting new technologies and killing off old ones. The new version of WordPress will now require PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5 at a minimum. Additionally, support for IE6 will be removed and users will be asked to update to a new version.
It seems as though most of the changes will be performance based, but there are some great interface changes like full screen post writing that will also be improved.
Here is a great free icon set from Coşkun Deniz, a web and interface designer. The icon set is a free set of 41 Android Icons. All icons come in Photoshop custom shapes (.csh) files. Icons are completely free to use in personal or commercial projects.
WordPress has started bringing WordPress.com features to WordPress.org sites. Jetpack is a new plugin for WordPress.org sites that provides some amazing features. We have decided to start testing out Jetpack on Crenk and it has been great so far. Jetpack is completely and will always be free.
The Jetpack plugin includes:
- Stats
- Twitter widgets
- Hovercards
- Shortlinks
- Shortcode
SimplyBiz is a great new free WordPress theme for a business portfolio. The design comes with a professional design, navigation supports dropdown features as well as adding short description to parents menu, has portfolio slider which built on custom post type that wordpress 3.0 comes with, has 3 services panel page, featured video on sidebar and a lot more.
The theme is completely free and can be downloaded now at WPcrunchy.
Cloud hosting is becoming more popular by the day. At the moment we are looking to move Crenk and our other network sites over to the Rackspace Cloud. I had a little bit of trouble moving over WordPress to the Rackspace Cloud Sites, so I went looking to help. Here is a great tutorial on how to install WordPress on the Rackspace Cloud Sites, which really helped!
Click here for the full video tutorial.
Cloud hosting is becoming more popular by the day. At the moment we are looking to move Crenk and our other network sites over to the Rackspace Cloud. I had a little bit of trouble moving over WordPress to the Rackspace Cloud Sites, so I went looking to help. Here is a great tutorial on how to install WordPress on the Rackspace Cloud Sites, which really helped!
