One of the best promotional strategies you can have for your blog is making perceptive comments on other blogs. Posting relevant comments on related blogs is like chatting at a networking event. By visiting related blogs and engaging others, you are networking with your peers.
Visit blogs where your targeted visitor is likely to visit. In other words… your competition. This also allows you to keep up with what is going on in your market or area of interest. Getting your name “out there” and participating in conversations is essential if you want to become an authority in your niche.
You want to look for relevant blog postings to comment about. Most blogging systems allow you to leave not only your name but also a link to your website or blog. When you leave a comment, you also leave a link back directly to a relevant blog post you’ve written. Good positive contributions will result in others clicking through to your blog to learn more about you.
Other blog networking tips
- Visit and comment on popular blogs that have good traffic.
- Subscribe to key blogs where you want to participate so you can be notified as soon as a new posting is made.
- Maintain a strong presence in each discussion.
- Be the first to comment. The first of second person to comment is more visible then the 10th.
- Quality over quantity. As you network you are building up your online reputation. Concentrate on making quality comments that add to the conversation.
- Blogging etiquette: On someone else’s blog, you are the guest and not the host. Focus on being more considerate than courageous.
This has been a controversial issue and the subject of much debate around the blogosphere. Some oppose all commercial advertising and others use blogging as a way of earning their living. This really comes down to what is the purpose of your blog?
If your objective is to brand your business as an authoritative expert in your industry and image is very important, then you probably will not add advertising to your blog. If your objective is to earn a living from your blog then adding advertising makes a lot of sense.
Pro: You should advertise if the primary objective is to earn income from your blog. The amount of advertising will be based on what your secondary objectives are. The more advertising on your blog, the more ways you are splitting up the attention of your visitor.
There are a number of advertising networks that allow blog owners to earn income. Google Adsense is one of the most popular. Advertising on blogs can range from a few discreet text ads to a garish mess of animated flashing banner ads all striving to get attention.
Con: If your business blogging objectives are about branding and positioning yourself (or your company) as the authoritative expert, then advertising interferes with this. Your goal is to keep your visitor focused on what you have to say. If you elect to allow a minimal amount of ads, are you prepared to allow your direct competitors to advertise on your blog?
The decision to advertise should be based on a balance between business image and income goals that you need from your blog. It is all about the results you need and your blogging goals.
Optimizing your blog for search engines is similar to SEO for websites but with some important differences. The goal is to bring more traffic to your blog. To do this, we need to increase search rankings on the regular Internet search engines such as Google as well as the blog search engines.
Selecting the correct keywords is the foundation for all search engine optimization for websites and blogs. These are the phrases that people will type in to do searches. There are a number of good keyword research tools, some free and some you will need to pay a subscription fee.
Keywords: The first step for blog SEO includes choosing up to 5-6 good descriptive keywords for your blog. This will serve as guide for the topics your blog will be covering. Use these keywords in the categories or labels in your blog.
Title: The title for each blog posting is what attracts readers and is very important to the search engines. Try to create an intriguing title that will catch a readers attention and include one of your keyword phrases.
Linking: Getting links from other blogs builds the importance of your blog in the eyes of the search engines. There are a few ways to get these valuable links.
- Use your Blogroll feature to trade links with related blogs that you respect.
- Write postings with interesting and original content that others will naturally link to.
- Provide some sort of tool or analysis that others will link to.
- Create some sort of controversy that will kick off a “buzz” among other bloggers.
Readership: Nothing is more important than creating great content that will develop a targeted readership. Make it interesting to your targeted customer and those in your industry. Participate in blog discussions with other bloggers to bring them to your blog regularly.
Link love is linking to blogs that you enjoy and admire. These links of “love” make these blogs more important in the eyes of the search engines. These links are important for pushing blogs up in the search engine rankings. Search engines see blogs receiving many links as more important and reward them with higher search rankings.
Link love leads to link popularity for blogs. These links not only improve the search positions, they bring a steady stream of visitor referral. The 80-20 rule says that 80% of your referral traffic will come from 20% of your links.
Search engines love links. In fact, they will only respect you if many others already link to you. Little links are good because they potentially develop into major refers over time.
Remember deep linking is natural in blogs. These are links to individual postings. They funnel link popularity to the home page as well as all other pages of your blog. This gives the entire blog the ability to rank well on hundreds of medium and long keyword phrases.
Here are 5 ways to build link popularity in blogs:
- The basis for ranking well with a blog is to have original and interesting content that people want to read and link to.
- Try word-of-mouth marketing or viral marketing. This is where you post a funny video or something so interesting or valuable that people instantly link to it.
- Link Baiting: This is similar to viral marketing. There are a number of approaches that are used to get people to link back to your blog. This can include providing website or analysis tools or running some sort of competition or awards. Another approach is to take a controversial position or attack a prominent blogger hoping to attract links from other bloggers.
- Trade links with other bloggers that you respect on your Blogroll.
- Get links from directories where you can list your blog. Some are free such as DMOZ.org. Some are paid such as Dir.Yahoo.com or JoeAnt.com.
Technorati is an Internet Search Engine that is dedicated to blogs. They closely watch the blogosphere and report all types of blogging trends and statistics. They post a tag cloud on their home page that shows the hot topics of the day.
Founded in 2002 by David Sifry, Technorati was originally a set of web services focused on the newly forming blogosphere. They have grown and developed into one of the major forces in blogging. Their name is a combination of technology and literati (Intellectuals). As of December 2007 they are tracking over 110 million blogs.
Technorati is an important place to have your blog registered. Once your blog is “claimed,” Technorati gets information from your blog whenever you post. They are continually indexing the live web. Blog postings are incorporated into search within minutes of being posted. Technorati is one of the best traffic sources for blogs.
Technorati introduced tags as a method for categorizing posts. A tag is really a simple category name that describes a posting. By using tags, you can bring people to your blog who are searching for certain things.
Technorati Authority: is the number of blogs (not links) linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Authority the blog has.
Technorati Ranking: Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far your blog is from the top. The blog with the highest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. Technorati has a list of the top 100 most popular blogs
Neilsen NetRatings is a great source for Internet trend and usage statistics. They are an Internet media and market research firm that conduct studies for private firms that want to understand consumer attitudes and behavior. They publish regular public reports on subjects such as search engine trends. They provide BlogPulse which is a blog search engine along with research tools.
Many of us grew up hearing about the Nielsen ratings on television shows. Neilsen NetRatings is a branch of the same organization. Neilsen has been around for over 50 years and provides marketing research statistics for nearly all types of media.
So why is Neilsen NetRatings important to business blog marketing? They supply publicly available information that helps understand our customer behavior and how they spend their time online. By going to their website (www.nielsen-netratings.com) we can find out all sorts of interesting bits of information.
Did you know that the average Internet user (October 2007) spends 55 minutes in a surfing session and will spend an average of 46 seconds on each web page? For September 2007, Google was the top brand with a total unique audience of 112 million people. Nextag was the top advertiser for the same time period by delivering 24.4 billion ads.
Nielsen also publishes the BlogPulse website which tracks blog trends and statistics. BlogPulse is a blog search engine and it contains tools such as:
- Trend Search: Create your own graphs about specific search terms.
- Featured Trends: Identifies the topics and subjects being discussed in blogs.
- Conversation Tracker: Creates a threaded view of conversations based on posts.
The social bookmarking website del.icio.us (pronounced as “delicious”) is an extremely popular web 2.0 website. In September 2007, it was announced that the website name would be changing to Delicious.com. Today, both domain names will get you to the same site.
This is a free service. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in September 2003, and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005.
Del.icio.us allows individuals to quickly bookmark new and relevant websites to a central online database. These are sites that they find valuable. At the same time, users enter tags or keywords that describe the bookmarked site. This allows people to search their bookmarks by keywords. These bookmarks can be accessed from any computer. This is great for people who use multiple computers between work, school and home.
What makes Delicious.com a social bookmarking website is that anyone can go in and see which sites are being bookmarked by others. These bookmarks are searchable because each person has entered a brief tag that describes the bookmarked website.
What I like best is that it is a very effective research tool for business blog marketing articles. By using the search features on del.icio.us , you can quickly get a list of relevant high quality sites that others thought important enough to bookmark.
The benefit for researchers is to see which sites are most popular. This eliminates the low quality results that you get with typical searches. The tag system used makes it easy to find highly relevant results for what ever topic you are researching.
Digg is a community-based popularity website that ranks articles based on popular opinion. Anyone can join and influence these results. News stories and websites are submitted by members, and then can be promoted to the front page through a user-based voting or ranking system. People can ignore or bury bad stories and promote good ones.
First launched in December of 2004 as an experiment, Digg was created by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne and Jay Adelson. Digg started with the idea to use online polling as a way to know which news stores are the most important to readers and the idea has grown from there.
How it works
Any registered Digg member finds an article, video, or podcast online and submits it to Digg.com. As of March 2007, there were 1 million registered Digg members. This story immediately appears in “Upcoming Stories” where other members find it and if they “Digg it,” the story moves up in popularity.
Top stories move to the website front page. When it moves to the front page, there is a enormous surge in traffic as people go and see what the buzz is all about.
On the front page of Digg.com there is a list of postings and news stories where members can easily follow links to the postings, make comments and if they like it they can Digg it, or if they don’t, they can bury it.
Adding a “Digg” button to your blog makes it easy for registered Digg members to submit your blog posting and possibly turn the story you wrote into the next major breaking story. This can quickly reward business blog marketing posting with a large amount of large visitor traffic.
Understanding traffic sources is an important element in blog marketing. Blog traffic can come from direct sources, RSS feeds, from other referral sources or from blog search engines.
In terms of blog search engines, Google and Technorati are the largest players. There are quite a number of other blog search engines and directories in use today. Directories are a great place to submit your blog and receive a valued link which will help promote your blog.
Where will your blog traffic come from? For me, I receive about 40% for search engines and 60% from all other sources (direct and referrals).
The following resource list is a great list to research and can be valued sources of traffic for your blog. This is a current resource list sorted by alphabetical order.
Name ……. Description
- Amatomu South African Blog Search engine
- Blog Catalog Blog Directory
- Blog Pulse Blog Search Engine and Statistics
- Blog Rate Directory Blog Directory and Blog Rating site
- Blogdigger Small search engine
- Bloggernity Bog search engine and directory
- Bloghop Small search engine
- Bloghub Blog Directory
- Bloglines Search and aggregate RSS feeds
- Blogrunner Blog search engine
- BlogScope Blog analysis and visualization tool
- Blogsearchengine Blog search engine
- Blogstreet Metasearch
- Eaton Web Blog Directory
- Google Blog Search Blog search engine
- Ice Rocket Blog / Internet Search Engine
- Read A Blog Blog Search Engine
- Sphere Blog Search Engine
- Technorati Blog search engine and listings
Spam in all its forms is a costly problem to business. Spam is considered to be unsolicited junk messages that are usually designed to sell or promote something. Spamming can mean using unethical tactics to get high search engine rankings. Spam continues to plague the Internet in the forms of email spam, spam blogs (splogs) and comment spam.
Email spam is a time waster to businesses. Most use extensive filtering software to eliminate email before it arrives. As an example, at our web servers, out of 25,000 incoming emails, 20,000 were tagged as “definitely spam” and deleted before being delivered. Secondary filters identified and filtered an additional 3500 spam email. This means 94% of all incoming email on our server is actual spam and only 6% was legitimate emails.
Spam problems have made traditional email newsletters much less effective. They either don’t make it thru to recipients or people are overwhelmed with spam and don’t read them. Business Blog Marketing is now a much more effective way of reaching and communicating with your audience. They can either find you thru searching or subscribe for delivery by email or their feed reader.
Spam blogs or splogs, automatically extract information from RSS feeds and re-publish the posting. These are low-cost automated sites that usually make their money by getting viewers to click on ads on the splog site. These damage the original blog poster by stealing content and they are a problem to blog readers because they contain random links and content that turn out to be junk and a waste of time to visit.
Comment spam is a major problem like email spam where automated bots place promotional comments on random blogs in an effort to promote a product, service or website. Much like email spam, spam filters remove a high percentage of this nuisance.
Spam is the scourge of the Internet. Filters, blacklists and penalties from the search engines help keep this in check, but these are still major issues we must deal with.
