The ultimate aim for a blogger is to create a really astounding content that will eventually draw lots of followers. But for this to materialize, one needs to work hard and master the art of blogging. You must understand that a blog can have a powerful impact on the success of an online business. Creating a blog will entail lots of activities like the design of the blog, its content, logo, tag line and the message. But the way to a successful blog is strewn with a number of obstacles which you must negotiate. We will discuss about the 5 such obstacles which you must overcome.

Mixing Topics

If you are publishing on many different topics, then you are unlikely to get any loyal audience. People will read just one blog post and navigate away from that blog with very little chance of a return. Only people who have a lot of time on their hands will read your other blog posts. The content of your blog must be focused and this will attract more serious readers. You will always find that specialized sites are ruling the web and this becomes more important if you are in B2B sector. If you want to speak on two issues, then it is always advisable that you open two blogs concurrently.

Irregular Publishing

This is a real crime in blogging world. The users must be in a position to anticipate the timing and frequency of the updates. In general, daily updates are always welcome but you may stick to weekly or monthly updates but that actually depends on the topic. But whatever frequency you choose, you must be regular in that. For example, if you are publishing on a daily basis and suddenly you do not write anything for a couple of months then there is a high chance that you will lose your loyal readers. But it also means that you should only post when you have something substantial to say.

Fear of Criticism

One of the biggest obstacles to creativity and a successful blog is the fear of being criticized. If you want to be a successful player in the blogging world you must not curb your thoughts, beliefs and ideas in fear as this will limit your expression in the blog posts. You can achieve success if you are always living in the fear of your posts being criticized harshly. Criticism is a part of human behavior and you will be subjected to it more in the cyber world as you can even do it anonymously. Always remember the more criticism you receive the more successful you will become. In the blogging world it is okay to be a bit controversial and critical of certain issues.

Absence of Author Biography

Many feel that only business blogs require a ‘About Us’ section. This is so untrue. Even in personal blogs you need a section which can be called ‘About Me’. Anonymous writings are popular for a brief period of time. People would always like to know about you when they start liking your writings. The most pertinent question that comes to the mind of the readers is “Does he has the credentials to comment on an issue like this?”

Not Being Interactive

You should always invite reader’s comments on your posts and respond to them. There is a common feeling that there is absolutely no need to respond to the different comments to your blog post. But you should remember that the ‘Comments’ section is not to decorate your web page, you must make it interactive and respond to at least 20% of the comments to let the readers know that you actually value their comments.

About the author: Claudia is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and luxury. Beside this she is fond of gadgets. These days she is busy writing tech related topics, such as her most recent ones on wireless usb adapters and  music stands  for her blog.

Not to be outdone Google also had some tricks up its sleeve. As of last week Google+, Google’s newest rendition of the social network, is now open to the public. Not only is it open to the public but Google is also prominently displaying the signup button on their main search page.

To say that this marketing strategy worked is an understatement. Google+ now boasts over 43 million users which is an astounding 1269% growth rate. The site also garnered close to 15 million US visits last week. While that still pales in comparison to Facebook’s 800 million users, it is still impressive growth for an extremely new service. Most industry experts expect Google+ to be in the hundreds of millions of users before the end of the year which would be mere months after it was released. This is a feat that took Facebook several years to accomplish.

Marketing Case Study

The Google+ case study presents really interesting information on how to leverage an existing tool as well as how to curate customer clicks to create wanted results. Initially Google+ released invited to a select group of professionals in the tech industry. The next batch of invites where handed out more loosely but still were not openly available to anybody that wanted one. This was to present a sense of exclusivity to the early adopter mindset that is so prevalent in the tech community.

The initial game plan was great and resulted in early buzz but the first set of users was made up of primarily one demographic. The plan was not reaching the general public like they had hoped. With Facebook on the verge of announcing a new set of features they decide to release the network to the public. No invite code needed.

Not only did they release it to the public they also made the Google+ tab easily accessible on all of its other properties. The service it was most noticeable was on Google search. One you navigated to the page a large arrow would point you to the Google+ tab. This undoubtedly increased signup and helped to make the general public more aware of the service.

Conversion Rate Take Aways

The recent Google+ growth explosion is a great example of how you can influence your potential customers to do what you want on your site. Simply pointing to signup page or making a particular product stand out more than the rest can help influence users or make them more aware.

Google used visual cues to increase their user base by almost 1300%. While you may not have a globally used tool like Google Search to leverage, you can still implement similar tactics to use on your website to increase your conversions.

Corey Rabazinski is the co-founder of Orlando SEO company SEOhatch. Along with SEO the company also focuses on conversion rate optimization and social media marketing.

Using Social Media because search engine traffic is not guaranteed

Social media needs to be incorporated into online marketing strategies adopted by businesses for the simple reason that it can spread the name, fame and brand in a short period of time to thousands of potential customers worldwide. It differs from search engines which keep changing their algorithms which in turn influence the search results, and many sites lose their rankings. For instance, the recent inclusion of the Farmer algorithm by Google impacted the ranking of many websites. This translates into loss of potential business and traffic, which websites cannot afford. Hence banking on search engines alone is not the best strategy and alternative sources of traffic have to be incorporated. Social media is one such lucrative source, and if websites can use the right approach, the name of their business will spread virally.

Exposure to a larger audience – current and prospective members with recurring benefits

Social media networks are more popular than most other sites and the average time spent on these sites is worth noticing. Such sites are showing better growth and increasingly people are suing these sites for searching for new links for products and services, since recommended sites on social media are preferred to search engines. Thus a business can cash in on current memberships, potential members and those using social media to search for links.  Additionally, social media links and connections are no a one-time episode, and people keep returning, thus establishing a continuous connection. Members follow businesses and updates on Twitter, and join as fans on Facbook. Businesses in turn, can take advantage of members by staying in touch, sending updates and keeping their presence alive in public memory.

Social media provides references which add credibility

Every search places thousands of results at the user’s disposal, and selecting the best one is bound to be time consuming. Most times, the top few results are randomly selected, and very often, the sites are disappointing and not offering what the person is looking for. This has led many people to look for known sites, known material and save time-this is where referrals come in. getting a reference through social media, helps people get exactly what they want. Such connections click sooner and are remembered for future use as well.

Social media comes free of charge

While search engines post advertisements and use pay per click and Google Adwords to promote businesses, all of which come for a price, social media allows free interaction and communication between business websites and members. Such free marketing initiatives must be used to the fullest especially when they have the potential of reaching millions of people across the globe.

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 barcode scanners and Industrial handheld computers like the  Motorola MC75. 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

After being a pro member of My Blog Guest for a while now, it has become a staple of our SEO diet and an essential tool for getting maximum benefit out of our online marketing efforts for both ourselves and our clients.

The results have been fantastic in terms of both time saved and return on investment and it has helped increase the effectiveness of our business processes to no end. As a result of this, we have put together this post to give you an insight into how the community can be leveraged to enhance most aspects of your online marketing activities, from community building, to search engine optimisation and social media marketing.

Overview

To start with here’s a brief overview of the site:

My Blog Guest has been around since the end of 2009 and was started by Ann Smarty as a way to allow people looking to guest post to connect with blogs that were looking for interesting content. The idea has been around for a while, but there hasn’t been a way of scaling the guest posting process, so kudos to Ann for spotting the potential.

The forum allows users to connect with each other and let the community know if / what they are looking to post about, or if they are looking for some quality content to host on their sites. The site also offers premium users the option to post content they have created into the articles gallery where blog owners can make offers to host the content. If you want to learn more about the site go have a look around

As far as the community goes, it’s great. The people here are very welcoming and will take the time to explain things, it also helps to build great relationships between bloggers and webmasters. The level of quality in the forum is also high due to the fact that everyone is knowledgeable about the processes and how to utilise guest posting. There’s no shady activity going on due to the open nature of the community, and I often find that guest post offers that I receive through My Blog Guest are often of much higher quality than those I receive from general email enquiries.

Now to move on to the benefits that come from joining the community and getting involved. These are things that will benefit your business directly:

Time saving

First off is one of the most important points. The process of guest posting isn’t wasn’t easy. Locating webmasters and contacting them for potential guest post opportunities is a time consuming process. My Blog Guest takes these steps out of the process saving you time to focus on other marketing activities.

Direct contact with the people that matter

Because you get straight through to the webmasters, you get directly to the people that matter. This means you get quicker responses to questions, and your posts get published a lot quicker. You are also part of an opt in community, with everyone being there to connect – you no longer have to keep chasing people up just to see if they are even open to the idea of hosting any of your content.

Scaleable

If you are in the marketing business and work for multiple clients it can be hard to create a scaleable process to follow. The community allows you to centralise the majority of your networking, and while it won’t provide you with unlimited resources, it’s a great hub to start from.

Networking

The community offers a valuable chance to network with some very useful and interesting people. Connections can be made easily through the forum and relationships with webmasters can easily be built.

Social Media

As well as providing you with great content for your site, the forum also offers support when it comes to promoting this content across social media networks. We all know how important social media is becoming and this is a really great way of getting decent exposure and tapping into this market. I tend to see a noticeable increase in traffic after getting some help from the My Blog Guest guys.

Increased efficiency and effectiveness

This point is really a result of all the others mentioned here. Working with My Blog Guest you can expect to see much more effective results from your time than without it. The benefits it provides can really step your campaigns up to the next level and provide results you never thought possible.

Hopefully this has given you an insight into some of the benefits of being part of the My Blog Guest community. There’s no reason not to get involved, the more people that are part of the community the more effective it becomes. Pro membership is well worth the small monthly cost for what it provides but even without it, it’s still one of the most effective marketing tools around and a vital tool for any serious marketer’s arsenal.

For those of you who don’t know what a blog is, take a minute to read our article what is a blog?

Along with social media, blogs have become a way of keeping people updated and letting them interact with your business. Although they can seem like a lot of work, there is often a good return on this investment in time, even for the most unlikely websites.

By keeping an up to date blog you can communicate with customers, give them an opportunity to provide feedback and also help broaden your reach in the search engines. Covered below are some of the main ways in which a blog can help your website.

Crawl rate

A blog will provide your website with a section that is regularly updated with fresh content, which search engines love, and can help increase the overall crawl rate of the main website also.

Long Tail Keywords

More blog posts mean more pages. With more pages comes more of an opportunity to target different keywords in the search results. By writing a blog posts about a specific topic, e.g. a new product release, you are also giving the website an opportunity to rank on terms relevant to the product. This can be a very effective method of driving targeted traffic to the website, think about the amount of people that will look for reviews/specifications of products online before buying them. If you can provide this information for them you are one step closer to converting them into a sale.

Links

Links are an important part of SEO. Having a blog helps to get your website involved in the online community focused around your product or service. If you can get referenced on other relevant and authoritative websites, this will usually mean a link to your website or page.

Customer Interaction

If you provide relevant and regularly updated content, not only do the search engines love it, but you will attract people who have an interest in your product or service. Although these people may not be direct customers, the influence they can have on your business both online and offline can be huge. By also offering customers the opportunity to interact with you via the comments on the blog you can gain a lot of valuable information about your product or service.

It may still seem like it is a lot of effort to integrate and maintain a blog on your website, but if traffic helps your business grow it’s definitely worth it. Setting up a blog shouldn’t be too difficult depending on what you want to do, you can either integrate a blog into your website like ours, or you can use a free or paid blog hosting service. There are pros and cons to each depending on how you are going to best use the service.

In cases like these, there are a few things you can do to make sure you are not falling foul of any duplicate content penalty and missing out on any potential traffic.

• referencing where possible
• Adding no index meta tag to page
• Posting duplicate content after original piece has been indexed

Referencing where possible

If possible you should try and credit the original article by linking to it, preferably with the title of the post. This will help the search engines to discover the original and should also pass on a bit of weight via the link helping the page to rank better.

Add a no index meta tag

This one is a bit more tricky as you have to have access to the page to do this yourself, but if you are sending out multiple copies of the article it would be wise to request that the publisher places this tag in the header.

Get your content indexed first

Search engines will tend to treat the first copy of a page they come across as the original and this can sometimes be a nightmare with the amount of scraper bots around. If you are going to republish an article you MUST wait until the original has been indexed or you will be causing a lot of unnecessary grief for yourself.

Making sure these three steps are followed will make distribution a lot easier and should also help to make your original page rank better, with it being referenced so many times across the web.

The interview has been covered (smothered) by pretty much everyone, and here’s my link (possibly a perfect piece of link bait.)

I’m not going to go into the interview, you can do that yourself. I just want to cover the alternatives available for people who have just heard about the loss of pagerank and the potential loss of value from the anchor text and want another way of doing things. Unfortunately this probably isn’t going to be what you were looking for.

The 301 has always been favoured for its simplicity and because it’s pretty much the only method of redirection that the search engines actually liked. With the pagerank decay filter unknown, it’s hard to tell the effect this will have on the links. The only other viable option for someone looking to keep the pagerank when moving the page is to get all of the backlinks changed to point to the new page.

Depending on the amount of backlinks the site has this may be a daunting task, but take comfort in knowing the really hard part (getting the link in the first place) has been done already.

Of course the best approach may be to get the most valuable links, in terms of anchor text , trust and pagerank, and do your very best to contact the webmasters and get them to change these. The rest you can 301 redirect and hope for the best.

Sorry if you came here looking for a quick fix, for the time being I don’t think there’s going to be one.

Apple have recently announced that Bing will now be included as one of the options on it’s safari browser, which is currently used on the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and both the Mac and the PC.

This will no doubt help increase Bing’s share of the mobile search market which is continuously growing with the increase in portable internet devices. With the iPhone being a major player when it comes to mobile browsing, it’s an important step forward for Bing, who currently only account for a very small percentage of UK searches.