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If you’ve been to any of our seminars or met anyone from Generate UK, you’ll know how passionate we are about blogs. Particularly their importance when it comes to increasing your online footprint.
If you follow webmaster guidelines, it’s unlikely that you will be able to get your site to top rank for more than a dozen of your key phrases. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, but generally a site is pretty static and narrow in its focus. This is where blogs can really help in terms of widening the net.
This is fundamental to our approach to digital marketing and it really works for our customers. The blog post below provides some additional information about what it takes to build and maintain a successful blog.
The Birth of a Professional Blog
The 3 main ingredients needed to build a successful professional blog are the ability to supply quality content, the need to develop and maintain a base of loyal readers, and offering quality products.
Working together these 3 components can create a steady and significant online income for the right individual.
What does it take to for an aspiring internet marketer to create and maintain a money making blog such as this?
Let’s take a look at the 3 key components needed to be a successful professional blogger:
Quality Content
The origin of any popular blog is the quality of content posted to it. Whether your posts are shocking, interesting, or informative, you need to gain the attention and then the approval of new visitors with content that appeals to them. By doing so you’ve increase the chances of them returning. Another important aspect of your content appeal is its ability to motivate visitors to recommend your site to others. This ‘viral’ effect will help boost traffic to your blog and hopefully the recommendations will continue to spiral upward from that point forward.
Maintaining Reader Loyalty
First and foremost the content of the blog must remain consistent with the original theme or purpose for which the site was created. To deviate from the original purpose of the blog would create confusion and disillusionment amongst the readers. This would eventually lead to a decrease in the subscription base.
The content now needs to supply ongoing value to readers. The heart and soul of any blog is the ability to provide useful, thought provoking, entertaining, insightful, or informative content to its readers. Failure to provide this will reduce the reader’s loyalty or discourage them from further recommending your blog to others.
Quality Products
Now that you’re maintaining reader loyalty and attracting a growing subscriber base we can make a couple assumptions here.
1) Your readers have an interest in the theme upon which your blog is based
2) You command a certain respect from your readers pertaining to your knowledge of the blog’s subject matter.
It is at this point that you can passively start to make recommendations to your readers on particular products that would fit their needs or interest.
The way you introduce your passive promoting is up to you. It can be in the form of a post that reviews a particular product, a post where the subject may naturally lead into a product referral, or even banner ads.
Take caution here not to crowd your blog with advertisements or hammer your readers with sales pitches. Remember they originally subscribed just for your content and not to be sold anything.
In order to build a successful professional blog you’ll need to maintain your consistency with the reader base. Continue to supply them with the content they desire while offering to them helpful products using a soft sell approach. You’ve worked too hard to gain their loyalty just to drive them away with your ‘overselling’ them!
T.J Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of North Carolina.
For more information on succeeding in blog marketing and to receive a free guide that demonstrates how to find both profitable markets and products visit: http://blogbrawn.com
What do you think? Was this blog post useful? Please comment below or add to the debate. Please do not hesitate to contact Generate UK for more information and ideas about how to we can help you set up your own business blog.
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One part of SEO that is often hard to explain to people not familiar with search engine optimisation parlance is the importance of Nofollow and Dofollow links. Anyway, I was going to write an article on this, however after reading the one below by Kevin John Lewis, it’s pretty hard to top. So have a read and see what you think.
No Nofollow Here - Join the Anti Nofollow Movement
Many people aren’t actually aware of this, but many of the backlinks you’re creating to your website by replying to relevant blog posts, are completely pointless, thanks to the use of Nofollow tags.
(When I say this, I am assuming that you create good, valuable content in blog comments - rather than just blog spam comments - but the very fact you’re reading this says you’re probably not the blog spamming type, if blog spammers spent time reading about what they’re doing, they wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing - as most of it is completely pointless)
Nofollow tags simple tell search engine spiders not to follow links on a page - and they were introduced in order to help stop the motivation for spammers to plague blogs & forums with pointless, valueless spam comments just in order to get backlinks.
Personally I think it was a bit of a strange movement that most of the web marketing community have followed. The real value of spending time & effort creating valuable content by replying to blog posts, and other forms of content, has been taken away just to deter spammers!
If there is a link on your website that you don’t want there - you don’t want it there because it has no value to your reader, so you’ll want it deleting, not making nofollow. If you just make it nofollow & don’t spend the time to make sure that your visitors time isn’t wasted by following spam links, but you do spend the time making sure that these links aren’t followed by the search engines, what you’re saying is that you’re making your website for the search engines, not for your visitors!
So - what is the point of nofollow? In my opinion there’s absolutely no need for it, spam links should be deleted, or prevented from appearing in the first place with the use of anti spam tools - of which there are many, especially for the more popular blog packages - just setting all comments to nofollow so that spam links don’t effect your website negatively in terms of SEO, is saying that you don’t care as much about your visitors than you do about search engine ranking.
So why is everyone still using nofollow? Well, firstly not everyone is using nofollow, there is now a strong movement away from nofollow, there are growing numbers of people who share this same opinion as I do.
Having said that, the vast majority of blogs use nofollow and many large websites, including wikipedia.
Most of this is due to the fact that most blogs are set to nofollow as standard, and most people don’t realise there is a need to change this.
The easiest way to see if links are set to nofollow, is to use the seobook SEO for Firefox addon, which is a simple plug in for the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Just download the plug in, go to options, and select for nofollow links to be highlighted - you’ll then be opened to a whole new world of nofollow links - and you may notice some interesting things.
Firstly, check if your own blog is set to nofollow the comments - if it is, then I encourage you to join the movement, bring the value back to blogs by saying no to nofollow. You can do this by downloading add ons for your blog package. If you use wordpress, as I do, there are a number of nofollow remover plugins you can use.
Personally I use two plugins - one called Nofollow case-by-case which allows you to be selective in your use of Nofollow, rather than setting is as default, and another plugin called Nofollow Reciprocity, a very clever plugin which allows you to automatically nofollow links to those larger websites who are known to be using the nofollow attribute in order to help them to sculpt their pagerank.
You see, although most people use the nofollow attribute now because it’s set as standard in blog packages, there are a number of people who’re using it in order to help them to get a better link popularity.
The idea many people have is that the link popularity coming in to any page of your site, known as “link juice” is set out through links, so by getting as many links as possible into your site, and letting out as few as possible - your juice will rise, and your Google page rank will increase.
The truth is that it doesn’t quite work like that, you don’t “lose” link juice by linking to other pages, it’s simply that the amount of link juice that goes to the page you’re linking to is divided by the number of links on the page. Yes, if you only have three links from a page then each of these links are going to do a lot better off from the link than they would if you linked to 100 pages from the same page - but it wouldn’t do your site any harm either way.
The link juice you share with other sites isn’t lost.
Many people have the idea that if you keep all your links in your blog pages internal links, you’ll keep all the link juice passing back in a loop through your own site, instead of sharing. In practice however this isn’t the case, and link juice hoarding isn’t a great long-term strategy - for many reasons.
Firstly - Google and all other search engines, do not like tricks, cheats & shortcuts - anything that they feel is being abused, will be changed so it can no longer be abused - and may even be reversed so that sites that were benefiting from such a strategy may be penalized for continuing to use it. We’ve seen this happen with many strategies in the past.
The use of the nofollow attribute to hoard pagerank, is now basically being used to show visitors one thing, and show another thing to the search engines - to the point that entire websites are full of links to websites that they are not allowing the search engines to follow. Google are very clever, they employ a lot of very clever people - they will already be onto the fact that the nofollow attribute is being abused in this way, and they will already be finding a way to filter out the effects of this strategy.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to start to see websites with very low numbers of outbound links, being penalized for hoarding link juice in this way - at the very least the effectiveness of this kind of strategy will diminish, as do all strategies of increasing results without increasing value to the visitor.
Secondly - outbound links are important! A website with good content will always include links to interesting & relevant websites. Google do not recognize nofollow links as outbound links at all, so if you show google a site with virtually no outbound links, you’re showing them a website which isn’t giving as much value to the visitor as a site that does have outbound links. Outbound links to relevant, quality websites, using anchor text (link text) relevant to your topic or industry, are good for your website. Yes, we do need to be careful not to allow spam links to bad neighbourhoods, and we do this with the use of good housekeeping & clever antispam tools, but we don’t need to make every link nofollow.
There are many other reasons not to attempt to hoard link juice in this way.
· You risk making enemies of past & future allies.
Many people are not aware of nofollow links, and give content in forms of blog content, forum posts, and other forms of content, thinking that they’re gaining something in return - give & take. If you’re using the nofollow attribute to get without giving, while allowing contributors to believe that they were actually getting something in return, you’ll find that people stop giving you content.
As more & more people are becoming aware of nofollow, many people are checking this before giving content, in the form of blog replies, forum posts, whatever it may be - so you will probably find as time goes on, less & less people will be visiting your blog who do actually have the ability to add good content. Think about it, if someone can spend their time contributing somewhere that does give something back by allowing a backlink which does count - or they can spend their time contributing to somewhere that will not allow backlinks which count, where are you going to contribute?
· You risk your reputation
More & more people are becoming aware of - and annoyed by, the use of the nofollow attribute. There is even an uprising against large websites such as Wikipedia, who now use the nofollow attribute on all outbound links - and with tools such as Nofollow Reciprocity which publish the details of all of the larger websites which use nofollow for outbound links, and with a growing movement away from nofollow, wesbites which use nofollow for all outbound links are going to start being seen as lesser quality websites, and their reputation may be at risk over the next few years.
This is certainly the case for large websites - but for smaller websites in niche markets, the damage to a websites reputation could happen a lot quicker, as news travels a lot quicker in smaller niche markets. It only takes a few people within a market to start talking about a particular website that was well respected in that particular market, to start to be seen in a dimmer light once people realise that the indiscriminate use of nofollow tags is being used in order to selfishly hoard link juice.
SO - in conclusion, I recommend that you do not use the nofollow attribute in blog comments in order to hoard link juice. If there is a link on your blog that you do not think adds valuable content that you would like to link to - then why allow your visitors to waste their time visiting the link? If you think it’s a link to a lousy site, delete it all together.
Visit my SEO Blog, as long as you’re contributing to my blog posts with decent replies, and your website appears to be a genuine website with unique content, that is relevant to web marketing, SEO, online business, then it will be left where it is - spam posts won’t even get on thanks to the use of decent anti spam tools.
Based in Cheshire, UK (Close to Manchester) - SEO Consultant Kevin John Lewis delivers effective SEO services, and SEO web design and Re-design and prides himself on the increases in the quantity & quality of search engine traffic that he achieves for his clients.
What do you think? Was this blog post useful? Please comment below or add to the debate. Please do not hesitate to contact Generate UK for more information and ideas about how Dofollow and Nofollow links affect your business.
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We’ve been involved in a number of projects recently talking about email marketing with our clients. As a form of marketing, email can be very effective as it is quick, cheap and completely measurable. However, the often not spoken reality is that many companies do not possess good enough email data and lists. As a result, the campaigns are no way near as successful as they could have been. Today’s blog post is by Menno Spijkstra; and explores the process of how to build your email list for great results.
Do List Building Now to Produce Results
For your online business to grow, you need to do list building and create a database of all your target customers. List building will enable you to further expand your market by sending special offers or promotions to your clients. It is considered to be important in making your online business easier. You have to be creative and resourceful enough to make it work for you. The foremost thing that you must have in mind is your subscribers. Identify who are your target customers who may have a direct interest at your niche market. Their interest to your products or services is very important so that you will get results in the end.
Otherwise, they will just be ignoring your emails if what you offer is not something that they are interested in or not in need of. List building should neither be stagnant nor slow moving; you have to keep on working on it by taking good care of your existing subscribers while adding more people to your list. You have to send emails regularly to your subscribers and make sure that you are giving them valuable services all the time. Experts believe that the bigger your list, the more sales you can generate.
Every email address of people visiting your site is very important and it is quite important that these visitors leave their email addresses with you. List building is very important for every serious online marketer because it is a big contributory factor to ones’ success. It is suggested that you do not use a general opt in form on all your pages. Instead, the opt in form must be on a different list based on where the opt in originated. This can be quite tasking. You need a special list-building manager to split and manage your list according to different projects for different sales pages.
Furthermore, this list manager will help you to identify the appropriate list for your product. In which case, you will avoid sending email offers to the wrong market. Many experts would recommend that you automate your online business so that you can cope with competition and trend. If you are automated, then it is easier for you to work less but get paid more. As the famous saying goes ‘no man is an island’, it also is true in online business. To improve your list, you need to exchange offers with your fellow marketers, too. This way, you will get more people to your list.
By using a simple method in list building, you can make a follow up to the visitor who visited your site. Make sure that your emails will be able to answer possible questions your prospective customer has in his mind. This system is easy to use and employs proven tactics in promoting your projects. Apart from it will be consistent in building your list; your follow-up campaigns can also guarantee an increase in sales. Therefore, having a new page manager, you can be assured that your list will continue to grow with quality subscribers listed in it.
The author of this article Menno Spijkstra is an Internet Marketing specialist who has been successful with several affiliate programs for many years. Menno finally decided to share his knowledge and experience through his website http://www.AffiliateDistrict.com. You can sign up for his free newsletter and join his coaching program.
What do you think? Was this blog post useful? Please comment below or add to the debate. Please do not hesitate to contact Generate UK for more information and ideas about how to grow your opt-in email marketing lists.
