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

Popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing ranks websites as to their relevancy and authority, which are judged based on the links contained in your website.  Look at this way, in Facebook and other social networking sites, your popularity is ranked based on how many “likes” and comments your status message or your photo gets.  The more ‘likes’ and comments you get, the more popular it becomes, and the more chances that other people will see it from RSS feeds. So putting it on SEO perspective, the more “clicks” you get from unique domains links to your website, the more your popularity increases, and the better your chances are at increasing your ranking and site traffic.

But are all links created equal?  The new search engine algorithms say they’re not.  The quality of both inbound and outbound links makes more impact to your rankings than the number of links.  Quality in this case means that inbound and outbound links have to be rated high in trustworthiness and authority.  These would be .com, .org, .gov and .edu.  However, we cannot discount the power in numbers.  The number of links contained in your website also rakes in points for ranking, but you have to remember that link diversity is important.  No matter how many links you have, if they all come from the same URL, they’re only good for one point.

When you have link diversity, it means that you are getting inbound links from a variety of unique root domains.  And as far as unique root domains go, Bing offers bonus points to other root domains like .biz, .info and .us.  That means more diversity in the unique root domains that can link back to your site, thereby; more points for higher ranking, and subsequently, more traffic.

With one more SEO trick up your sleeve, you can now design a more optimized website. Remember, build links from unique root domains: diversify!

It’s basically like having friends…you do free people search, find new people, reconnect with old ones etc. A new link tells Google that you know someone new that has some level of trust in your site.

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.

This is a guest post by Alex, who runs a site called The Business Nomad providing internet marketing techniques and other marketing advice.

Whether you are blogging, running a website or even an online busines; you know – selling stuff, or offering a service or whatever; you have almost certainly considered adding social media to your armoury of internet marketing techniques.

Thing is though, I don’t think you neccessarily should. In fact I think it might be a bad idea for your site. Here’s why:

How do you get started?

Good question, if you don’t already know any of the social media platforms pretty well, you’ve got a big learning curve to contend with. There is a lot to learn, and you really need to invest the time to learn it.

What are you giving up?

Managing a social media campaign is time consuming, so if you are going to put in the time, what else has to give? How important is that thing? There are lots of other ways to market yourself online…

Are you going to do it right?

This is what it all comes down to. To make social media work for you, you need to work for it. If you can’t fully commit you will just waste your time and become yet another business at the bottom of the social media pile.

Is it right for you?

Before you decide to dedicate the necessary efforts, you should really figure out whether social media is a good fit for your business. Remember when I asked what you were giving up?

Unless you have deep enough pockets to fund a fully fledged campaign in every type of marketing out there, you are going to have to pick one and run with it. Because no matter what your choice, it is better to do one thing well than several things poorly.

So if your business is very focussed on young, trendy people, then maybe social media is the best way for you to get traffic. But if you are trying to attract middle aged professionals, perhaps not.

Summary

There are plenty of ways to build an internet income, and plenty of ways to build your traffic and your brand. The reason I wrote this post is because I constantly see the relics of failed social media campaigns scattered around the web. It is important to plan how you can best spend your marketing resources to get the sort of traffic that you want to get.

With the vast amount of data that the search engines have gathered from indexing the web they have what is probably the largest ever repository on how language is used. This enables them to understand what words are related and apply this in the ranking process.

A lot of tools are out there for keyword research, but one of the most often overlooked tools for semantic research is Google’s wonder wheel.

Enter in a term and Google will provide you with a selection of keyword that it deems to be semantically related. By including these phrases on your website where relevant you are helping to reassure and educate the search engines about the topic of your website.

A quick search for relevant terms in your niche, along with a phrase such as “no longer available” can sometimes uncover a whole load of webpages that once offered valuable information but now cease to exist.

Say for eample you sell model cars, a quick search for “model cars “no longer available””

Using variations on this theme you can locate websites that used to offer a service but not longer do for whatever reason. This usually results in a lot of websites still linking to that page as they are not aware the service is no longer available.

A quick check on the backlinks of these pages will provide you with a list of websites which can be contacted to ask for a link.

Not only are you helping make their website more user friendly by pointing out dead-links, you are also offering them an alternative page to point the link to. It’s a win-win situation.

This is a guest post from Pete Handley, an SEO consultant and expert. He writes article and blogs for Vertical Leap UK.

Content marketing is an effective strategy in so many ways for companies; it is highly economical, can boost traffic to a website, helps build authority and credibility for clients, and works efficiently with SEO efforts.

However there are four key challenges content marketers face in fully optimising their well-written and authentic content.

Find the most appropriate outlet for the content

Firstly, content that is relevant and written by a professional journalist is great – but if it isn’t published in the right places, then it won’t be able to achieve what it was set out to do.

Marketers must work hard to identify the most appropriate outlets for their content, and establish a community or network of followers – fellow industry professionals who are genuinely interested in, and willing to comment on, the most-common subjects of the content.

Stay Committed

Secondly, many start up their content marketing campaigns, but don’t stick with it. It is a commitment, and requires ongoing work in order to make it as effective as possible. There should be several integrated channels – such as social media content, blogs, evergreen and news, each of which serving its own purpose – and all need to be properly managed in order to form a cohesive campaign.

Make as much use of the content as possible

Thirdly, many marketers find it difficult to repurpose content effectively. However it is really relatively easy; for example, video content can be transcribed, and published as an interesting interview on a different source.

Another way in which to repurpose is to create an entirely ‘new’ article from previous information; for example, taking the results of 10 interviews with industry professionals, and creating one large ‘how-to’ article, incorporating each of the specialists’ advice.

Integrate it with SEO

Lastly, the partnership between content marketing and SEO is an important one; that can often get overlooked, thus making marketing the content much more difficult. In order to optimise content for SEO purposes, specifically-chosen keywords are generally used, and the content shaped around them.

These keywords are usually phrases searched for by Joe Public, and as such, when a search is made using them, the content appears in search results. This can help to increase the audience of the content, and help to market the company for which it has been written.

This is a guest post from Ryan, an SEO working for stickers company AJS Labels.

More often than not you will find that SEO’s are working against Social Media experts rather than alongside them. The whole VS argument has been going on for a while now but where does it come from and what are the reasons why they are often pitted against one another, is it all down to the SEO?

Money

It’s the stuff that drives the world right? Arguments over pay is often the reason that SEO’s dislike Social Media. According to most people social media takes the least effort to pull off effectively yet it pays a lot more which of course doesn’t sit well with an SEO Engineer.  If this is the reason you are annoyed at your Social peers then you need to take it up with the boss of the company and not the person sitting there trying to do their job.

Arrogance

Most SEO’s and Social Media experts are incredibly arrogant (I am far too good for it) and you will find that this often has a negative effect on the way that they see one another. An SEO thinks that the work that they are doing is much more beneficial to a client than simply driving “pointless” traffic to a site that has a low conversion rate. On the other hand a Social Media expert will target the markets that the client represents and only target the appropriate niche, driving relevant traffic to a site.

If a client is having both SEO and Social time then you will find that often an SEO is annoyed because a lot of the creative part of the job is taken from them and given to the Social expert to handle.

Arrogance is a disgusting thing and in all seriousness I would like to think that none of my colleagues in the agency I am in are in any way arrogant.

Short Term Effects

Another misunderstanding that SEO’s tend to have when thinking about Social Media is that the campaigns that are run are all short term which is the opposite of what tends to happen as part of an SEO campaign. This really is a massive misunderstanding as the best Social Campaigns will have an extensive plan that won’t just stop after a month but will be carried out over a period of months and even years.

Lack Of Understanding

Another reason that SEO’s don’t tend to get along with the social experts is simply because they are not fully aware of what they do. It explains the previous 3 points and you will find that is where the main haters lie. All it takes is an afternoon of training full of social media and the results it can bring and they will be sold.

In reality (certainly in my office) there is no hate between the two parties and in fact you will find that we get along very well and completely understand what each other does and why. You will also find that in our agency most SEO Engineers are also pretty good in the social sphere as well!

Choose the right SEO/Social Agency and you will find that no hate exists between the parties.

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