Terminology First!

Before we begin, let’s be sure we know what we are talking about. Bounce rate is a single page visit, either to your blog or your site, where a person comes on, looks at what you are, and leaves. Hence the term “bounce”. That is given as a percentage for your site or your blog – so the greater your bounce rate number, the less chance there is that your visitors are being influenced in any way by your content (that would be a hint for one of the ways to reduce your bounce rate, btw).

1: Design is Important

If your website looks rubbish people will leave it. An age old rule of web design that still holds. By “rubbish” I mean “anything other than what people expect to find” as well as genuinely awful. There are fashions in web design and you need to follow them otherwise you get labelled as behind the times.

2: Content, Content, Content

Content is still everything, no matter how many times I or anyone else tells you this. If you haven’t got focused, relevant content on your landing page, then people won’t hang around to find out why, they will just leave. Focused means that you talk about one thing and one thing only – and that it’s immediately obvious from your content what it is your are doing and why.

3: How Do Your Visitors Find Their Way Around?

Navigation is, was and always will be extremely important for website design. If your site user cannot find out how to get from where he or she is to where he or she wants to be straight away, he or she will end up deciding to be somewhere else instead. Keep it simple and accessible from every page.

4: Content (again!)

Update your content as often as you can – but bear in mind that updating one lot of posts with other posts that say the same thing as before is not god enough. That will just about fool a search engine but it will not trick a genuine human user. You need to keep things fresh and constant, which is a pain but there you go. If you have a dry spell, take all the dates off your posts so people don’t realise they are old.

5: Ads are Bad

Users hate ads. Side bars and header bars that do not move, or shout, or play music, are OK – but anything else, pop ups for example or all singing all dancing ads that distract from your content, are basic evidence that you are not really interested in letting your user find out what you have to say. My average length of time for staying on a page with pop ups is the amount of time it takes me to close the pop ups and go somewhere else.

6: How Quick Are You?

The length of time your page takes to load is extremely important to a visitor. If I am hanging around waiting for a page to load for more than around 5 seconds, I leave and find a different source of the same information.

7: External Links Are Evil

If you land on a page with an interesting external link – you’re gone. Bouncing off through the web to someone else’s site. The more external links you have on your landing page the worse it will be for you, unless of course those links go to other sites owned by you – in which case carry on!

8: Match Your Headlines or Watch Them Bounce Away

An attention grabbing headline is absolutely imperative for a click through. But the amount of times I have clicked on a promising link and been taken somewhere that has no relevance whatsoever still makes me grind my teeth in my sleep.

Basically: good housekeeping, good content and the ability to make your user feel like you care. They’re the Holy Trinity of keeping them on your page.

Some of the major benefits of a business blog include:

• Educate current and potential customers
• Define a company “voice”
• Increase online brand presence (each post can rank in the search engines)
• Generate links and grow traffic
• Build reputation as industry expert
• and more…

However, like just about everything in life, getting something of value means you have to put in a lot of work. One of the biggest complaints I hear from my clients is that they don’t have anything to write about. Without new, unique topics fueling your blog, it’s dead in the water. I’d rather a client never launched a business blog than create one and leave it stagnant!

Most of the time I can come up with half a dozen different topic ideas for my clients during our phone conversation, simply because I see every piece of information as a potential blog post! The trick to coming up with new content topics is to not over think it and use what you’ve got to your advantage.

One of the biggest assets any company can have is their “front line” employees. Your front line employees are the people who deal with your customers (both current and potential) on a daily basis. They are your sales team, customer service representatives, cashiers and floor staff—and they know your target audience inside and out. This makes them a veritable fountain of content topics.

Next time you’re brainstorming topics for your blog or guest articles, call in one of your customer service representatives. What questions do they routinely hear from your customers? Are they about your products, your company or your industry? These are questions coming directly from your target audience which means they are looking for the information and are unable to find it. You have the opportunity to become their go-to resource! For instance, do some of your customers call because they need help installing the latest version of your software? Write how-to post (or series of posts!) guiding them through the process.

Ask members of your sales team to keep a pad of paper at the ready when they are on the phone with a potential customer. How do they position your product as the solution to a potential customer’s needs and problems?  That’s a blog topic. What is your competitive advantage? That’s a blog topic. Who would benefit the most from your product or services? That’s a blog topic too!

In addition to your front line employees, every department in your company is going to have a unique perspective on the same situation. For instance, the members of your product development team are going to approach/describe your product in an entirely different way than your marketing manager.  Use those unique perspectives to your advantage and create blog posts that attack a topic from every angle. This will help make your content appeal to a broader audience and keep your blog from getting stale and repetitive.

Without a doubt, linking out to other blogs in your niche can help you attract some instant attention. But there are some tips that you need to follow to make the most of this free blog promotion strategy.

Here’re some of the most important ones that you can try.

#1. Link Out Only to Enrich the Value of Your Own Content
Selection of articles or blog posts that you want to link out to is the most vital part that you need to focus on. Remember, the internet is simply overflowing with low-quality content. While linking out, you should choose only those topics or posts that increase the overall value of your blog’s content. If you link to poorly-written content, outbound linking will definitely bring no results.

#2. Link Out to Build Relationships
Outbound linking is a powerful strategy to expand your professional network of contacts in a niche industry. Prepare a list of bloggers who you are planning to build relationships with. Focus on connecting with those niche bloggers who you think can bring you potential benefits in future. Link out to their posts or content so they can return the favor in some way or the other.

#3. Link to Active Commenters’ Blogs
This is yet another important tip. If you want to get maximum benefits from outbound linking, you should try to link to those who comment on your blog on a regular basis. By adopting this strategy, you can encourage those bloggers to participate at your blog more actively.

#4. Target Small Blogs
If you only link out to top blogs in your niche industry, you may not be able to attract those bloggers’ attention. Since popular blogs are linked out very frequently, you can easily lose yourself in the crowd. That’s why, it’s a good strategy to link out to smaller blogs from where you can expect some immediate favor in return.

#5. Make the Subject of the Linked Post Evident
Many times, people don’t click an outbound link simply because they are not sure where it will lead them. Of course, visitors are always interested in exploring more on a certain topic or subject. Therefore, it’s important to inform your readers a little about the posts you are linking out to.

#6. Become an Information Resource
You can also use relevant outbound linking to become an information resource in your niche industry. Once people know that they will find valuable links and resources in your blog posts, they will return for more.

Relevant outbound linking enhances the overall value of your blog. It doesn’t only attract the attention of bloggers you link out to, but also builds your blog’s reputation in the eyes of search engines. Linking out is an excellent way of rewarding the blog community, and the value it brings can surprise just anyone.

I would love to hear your thoughts and personal experiences about linking out to other blogs or website. Please feel free to talk back in comments.

Most search engines show 10 results per page.  Most people that are searching online tend to click on the top 3-5 results. You need to be above the fold to be clicked on for their search.  If you rank at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) then business is good.  If you are on the second or third page you might get about 2% of the search traffic that the top sites would receive.

Most people tend to think that Affordable Search Engine Optimization is complicated.  It is not so much complicated as there is a lot to know.  There are simple SEO Basics that we all should learn and understand in order to have our site optimized.  Don’t pay for something you as an online marketer really should know.

There are 10 main steps to follow in order to achieve Affordable Search Engine Optimization.  If you understand these main topics then you will understand how all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together.

10 Affordable Search Engine Optimization Tips

1- Keyword Research – what keywords are people searching for?  It is extremely important that you learn the statistics of your keyword or phrase that you want to use.  These words will be the foundation of your site.   To choose the right keywords I recommend Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

2- Market Research – look at your search engine optimization competition (SEOC) to determine what types of websites are ranking for the words you want to rank for and feel are important to the success of your website.

3- Site Structure – create pages to fit important keyword groups within your site.  SEO Basics for site structure are:

• The most important categories or pages are linked throughout your site.
• Link every page on your site to at least one other page on your site.
• CONSISTENT ANCHOR TEXT.
• Internal linking

4- On Page Optimization – If you don’t have the words on the page it is difficult to rank for them.  Organize each page from the Title, Pictures, Anchor Text and the Footer section of the posts; this will help the search engines know what your post is about so they will find you for the search results.  Plus when a visitor sees your page they will know what your article is about by the title, and then will see the keypoints of the post through the heading tags.

Ensure your content is original and you are writing for a human not a robot.  Far to often people are so crazy about getting the keyword density right or using a keyword that has good numbers that the article in the end does not make sense.

5- Link Building – link building is important because search engines look at links as votes.  The more votes means the more people like you, the more the search engines will like you.  Link building is the single hardest and most time consuming part of SEO.

SEO Basics to Link Building

• Link your most relevant page
• Anchor text; remember your anchor text is what links to other pages. You don’t need to link the entire title of the page just link the keyword you are ranking for that is contained within the title.
• Check out Yahoo Site Explorer to explore further your SEO.
• Reach out to other relevant high quality sites for a link exchange

Link Building Strategies

• Directory submissions
• Join trade organizations, forums
• Get links from industry hub sites
• Leave comments on sites in your niche

6- Brand Building – brand related searches are the most targeted, best converting, and most valuable.  If you build a strong brand people will have good things to say about you.  These positive interactions help reinforce your brand image, improve lead quality and conversion rates.

7- Viral Marketing – the beauty of viral marketing is creating one popular compelling idea that can lead to thousands of free quality links.

8- Measure Results – you need to see if your hard work is paying off.  What is working or not working for you.   On a weekly basis check Google Analytics to study your traffic and what your site is ranking for.  Check out your Google Webmaster account to ensure your site is being properly crawled by the spiders.  If you are running ads start to do split testing and see which ads will work better for the visitors that you are attracting.

9- Keep Up To Date – You always need to have fresh new content on your site.  Content is King and Quality is Queen.  People want to learn more when they go online, they want to be engaged.  You can use trending keywords to gain new traffic that you might not have had in the past.   Check out Alexa, Google Trends or Yahoo Buzz to find what’s hot online.

10- Don’t Stop – You need to keep the momentum going to keep the traffic coming to you.  All of these SEO tips only work if they are always done with each article or webpage you create.

But, how do you make your blog so popular that it attracts a huge audience? Well, given below are some of the coolest tips that you can use to stay ahead of the competition and achieve blogging success.

#1. Be Passionate
If you don’t like fashion, don’t start a fashion blog. In order to enjoy a more supportive readership, you should always choose to blog about a topic that you are really passionate about. Figure out a niche that you have fallen in love with. If you don’t enjoy blogging on a specific topic, chances are your readers won’t enjoy it either. So, find your passion, first!

#2. Make a Point
If you don’t make a point or have a unique view, you can’t be popular. If you really want your blog posts to be interesting, you should try to make a point. While you are doing this, you should also remember to provide supportive evidence for that point. You need to appeal to logic. In the form of evidence, you can use such potential elements as analogies, stories, questions, statistics etc.

#3. Be Helpful
Being helpful to readers can also earn your blog immense popularity. When you start a blog, you need to help people out rather than trying to hard-sell to them. If you have identified the problems your target audience is facing, you can use multiple ways to solve those problems. Offer to help at no cost. Soon, you will see readers spreading the word for your blog.

#4. Make Readers Feel Important
How can you make your readers feel important? There are multiple ways of showing your readers that you value them. One of the most important tips for making readers feel important is responding to their comments on a regular basis. In addition, you can reward the most active commenters on your blog. Don’t ignore emails that you readers send you asking for useful advice and suggestions.

#5. Blog Consistently
Don’t play with your publishing schedule. If you decide to publish at least 3-4 posts a week, commit to it. Irregularity in posting is the biggest obstacle to your blogging success. By publishing quality content consistently, you can expect to increase the number of repeat visits as well. If you want to make your blog more popular, stick to your publishing schedule.

#6. Connect with Professional Bloggers
The more professional bloggers you know, the more exposure you can generate for you blog. If you really want to enjoy your journey into the blogosphere, you should build good connections with bloggers who are already popular. Thanks to the wide emergence of social media platforms, you now have several ways to get in touch with influential people in your niche.

#7. Let the Blog Design Talk
Last but in no way the least, you need to choose a blog design which fully complements the quality of the published content. Whether it’s the colors that you pick, the font size that you select or the images that you use, you should compound all these ingredients with a view to enhancing the blog readers’ experience. In addition, you should leave adequate breathing space to make visitors comfortable.

While choosing a blog design, you should ask these key questions –

• What’s my goal?
• Who is my target audience?
• What functionalities do I need?

In short, let the blog design do the talking!

What are you doing to increase the popularity of your blog? Please feel free to share your views and tips in the comment section below.

Learn SEO

Whether you like it or not, if you really want to have a decent place in every leading search engine, you have to learn the basics of SEO. There are still bloggers who see no good about search engine optimization, but if you are into business and not just casual blogging, having at least the rudiments of it is an advantage. Nowadays, it really is hard to rank without knowledge of proper keyword research, sturdy link building network, and organized traffic management.

Also, having a knowledge of search engine optimization is like protecting yourself from ubiquitous Black Hats and spammers that may invade your site for harmful reasons. If you understand SEO, you’ll understand how this frauds work and you’ll definitely learn how to wedge them from invading your blog.

Respect Online Reputation

Since your blog operates in the online world, you should understand online reputation as well. If you want your blog to get a positive name on the Web, you should be extra careful in promoting it in social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, especially in replying to your follower’s queries. Remember that one wrong reply or wrongly conveyed message can lead to a massive online reputation downfall. Moreover, you can utilize the newly launched “Me on the Web” by Google to track the status of your identity on the Web.

Be mindful not only with your offsite interactions but also with your onsite moves. Your blog is still the most important part of your online reputation, so better be careful in replying to your commenter’s comments, posting your articles, and even commenting on other blog post as well. You should know by now that once Google has indexed a page ( a post, a comment, or anything) from you site, it would take months and years to completely make it unsearchable; deleting won’t even help. Therefore, you should always think before you click anything.

Write by heart

It sounds a bit off compared to learning SEO and respecting online reputation, but this is the most important thing in blogging. Blogging about things that don’t interest you is like doing a job that doesn’t fit your qualifications and skills. If you blog, always write about the things you like by heart. In addition, you should find your own voice and never copy some other else’s writing technique and style.

Before before I go into the different sins of content marketing, lets check out this survey done of what the biggest content marketing challenges are.

5 Tips on Content Marketing

Do not get Mad: Since promotion on social media takes less time and it is extremely cost effective, marketing professionals are increasingly shifting their attention from traditional SEO techniques. The greed to get more from social media campaigns drive many marketers crazy and they go on submitting almost anything that come their way, be it interesting or boring, into different social media platform in the hope of driving more traffic to their websites. But this is sheer wastage of time and effort.

Stay committed: Do you know what makes the difference between a good marketer and a bad marketer? It is just the commitment. Good marketer works hard to end and he never rests until he attains success, whereas a bad marketer takes things for granted and looks for short cut all the time. But believe me, there is no shortcut to success. You have to write different content for different social media websites and you need to have different marketing strategies if you are to see success at the end.

Do not be Angry: Since the concept of content driven marketing is still in its development stages, you might end up seeing the same rivals promoting their content on all networks. Now, do not get angry at the sight of this. You need to stay calm and never ever try to mock or defame others because if you do so, they will also follow the same path and your online reputation will go busted. Hate only begets hate. Love all and you will be loved by all.

Do Not be jealous: Do not be jealous at the success of others. Think this way – people are successful just because they have worked hard and the only way you can see success is by working honestly. The bottom-line is that unless you have great content, there is very little chance of making it big in the content driven marketing campaign. Another thing, you should not use content of others and promote it as your own, it will just be a clear case of marketing suicide.

Do Not be over Confident: If you think the quality of your content is great, this is good for your company and your marketing mix but there is no need to brag. Mortal people, as we are, we can’t help but boast at the slightest sign of doing better than the others. We try to undermine the quality of others and this is where downfall begins. We should stop bragging rather we should takes the gloves off and get ready for making further improvement on the quality. Think like Jobs and not like people standing next to you working 9 to 5 job.

Do Not Be Disappointed: Marketing of content is time consuming and sometimes it takes month to get the results. So, you should not get disappointed if you do not see any sign of success at the initial stage. Stick to what you are doing and you content driven marketing campaign will be able to tap the elusive success at the end.

Writing in your blog: Make sure to cover topics that need are most searched for. You have to ensure you have the content that the visitors would love to read. You can use the Google Ad-words to research on the topic and the tags for your blog.

Write in a first person narrative tone: That is, write like you are directly telling the person. The blog sphere likes humane voice and a more connected, honest and truthful blog has a very good chance.
Write in a way that the reader feels you have revealed all that you know and feel. This is an open source world and you have to make sure that you keep the reader in a close proximity. Connect with them and be a virtual friend.

Guest bloggers: Guest bloggers can be experts from your field or other experienced writers. You can bring in popular celebrities or a very well versed person. Just make sure that their post will increase visitors to your site. If you are popular, then you can invite guest bloggers to post an article in your site. Make sure that any content that they want to post in your website should be edited by you.
A good URL

A good URL should be short and contain enough information so that the educated people can find out what your blog holds by just reading it. A big URL is usually a byproduct of many CMS plug-ins.

Book marking your page: You can book mark your page in a lot of good bookmark websites such as delicious.com. This will help you lure traffic

Use high traffic period: When you have a linkbait in Digg, Reddit, etc. make use of that to drop 2 article of yours that show off all your writing skills on that time. This will enable the visitors to look into the blog. This will also ensure that the visitors stick around to get more from your blog.

Always go back and answer to comments within 48 hours. Nothing kills the linkbait like ignorance for a long duration.

Google analytics: Google analytics is a free software that allows the viewer to look on various facts about your site. Getting the Google webmaster tool that will also help you to analyze and work on your site.

Content cramming: Google crawlers crawl to find HTML code. Therefore too much JAVA and CSS inside the html code deteriorates the crawl rate. Any java or CSS code should be written as an external file. More the merrier does not apply to this and too much code just increase those silly coding errors that although does not affect SEO, surely affects the Google crawlers.

Unique unplagiarized content: Plagiarism is a suable issue, and make sure that your content in original. There are many credible plagiarism checkers online that help you with this problem.

Avoid self plagiarism.

Separate pages for every keyword: When you want to rank the KW, we create a separate webpage for each KW and include that KW in the title tag. This will enable the crawlers to indentify thetag and rank the KW accordingly.

Use title tag intelligently: Title tag must be used to help the crawlers. Include your primary KW in the title tag and nothing else. A title tag should be able to help the crawler understand what the page is about.

Unfortunately for the rest of us, we occasionally have to write for topics or industries that are, to put it bluntly, boring. You (like me) may find it difficult to turn keywords like “industrial office supplies” or “toaster ovens” into engaging 600-word-or-so blog posts. The task is often made more complicated by time constraints that allow little time for thorough research.

Here are four tips that have helped me turn “boring” into “brilliant” (or, at least, “not sleep-inducing”):

1. Find a Way to Interest Yourself

Figure out some way to relate your boring subject to something you are interested in. On the topic of toaster ovens, for example, why not write a blog post about unusual ways to use an oven? What can you do with it besides, well, toasting things? Even if you don’t have that much creative freedom, you could write about “green” ovens—what can someone do to use their oven at maximum efficiency with minimal effect on the environment?

Granted, this technique might take a little forethought and is sometimes easier said than done, but if you can make a connection with the thing you are writing about, you’re almost guaranteed to write a more passionate, and thus a more interesting, article.

2. Ask (And Answer) a Question

Sometimes you are asked to write about a subject that you know little about. In this case, I find that I can usually write a good article by answering questions that I, myself, may have about the subject. What does it do? How is it used? What is the market? Other times as I answer these basic questions, new, more complex ones spring up. Chances are if you have a question about something, others will too, and you’ll be able to write an interesting post with a strong call to action. 

3. Write a Killer Headline

Sometimes all you need to send you in the right direction for an article is a great title. Look at examples of strong marketing headlines. Pay attention to what titles entice you to click. Look at whether you can modify any of these headlines to fit your topic. What about “5 Essential Industrial Office Supplies” or “Industrial Office Supplies that Can Save Your Life” (whether that’s a literal or figurative “saving” is up to you).

With these headlines typed boldly at the top of your page, you now have a framework from which you can write an attention-grabbing article.

4.  Tell a Story

Turn your article into a story. Maybe not literally (though if you can find a related narrative about how someone actually did use a toaster oven to build a robot, that’s great, too), but if you can find a way to connect the dots for people and tell them a story about an otherwise boring subject, you’ll turn an everyday article into something that people can’t help but read.

The next time you find yourself needing an article about a less-than-riveting industry try some of these ideas to make your task a little easier.

Do I Need to Be a Great Writer?

Not everyone is a great writer, even with years of experience, some just do not have it in them to create postings that will magnetize readers, and keep them wanting more. For example if you are chef by trade and write about all the wonderful recipes that you create or how adding certain things to traditional recipes brings them to life, you can always put a teaser paragraph in at the bottom of the current post to get their curiosity going for the next installation of the “Gourmet Blogger”. Doing quick little one or two minute videos about those recipes, then posting them on Youtube.com will help greatly, especially if the person is entertaining.

You can then insert those videos on your blog. There is a woman in Austin, Texas that has a blog and weekly online video show called “Hilah Cooking”. This woman is so entertaining in her videos that you cannot wait to see her next one. She is not the most reserved Internet personality, and she will let the occasional expletive fly right out of her mouth while showing viewers how to make her tasty recipes. She is providing great food information, and making her subscribers laugh each week.

Keep Your Posts Easy to Read

Keep your blog posts to about three hundred words, and each paragraph around one hundred words or less. This will make for quick and easy reading. People want a weekly or daily dose, but do not have time to sit down and read a twenty-five hundred word blog post about Quiche Lorraine. They want a quick way to feed their family in 30 minutes or less, and just print out the recipe to take to the supermarket.

Think of the monologues that late night talk show hosts perform, like George Lopez, Or Conan O’Brien, as their little ten to fifteen minute diatribes are much like a perfect posting. They are quick, cute, or funny, and provide just enough to keep viewers coming back for more each night.