Saturday, February 5, 2011

Are We Having Fun Yet?

This guest post is by Justin P Lambert of Words That Begin With You .

Quick question: are you having fun?

I mean, you’re sitting here reading Problogger, so you’re likely a blogger, or at least thinking about jumping in. And you’re likely interested in making some money from your efforts. There’s nothing wrong with that at all.

But are you having fun?

He looks happy to be writing...
Courtesy
of Douglas R. Witt (flickr)

Maybe you’ve been at it for a while, or maybe, like me, you’re just a babe learning to crawl at this point. Either way, there’s a universal truth of blogging you’ve probably already figured out: it ain’t easy.

A tough gig

If you’ve done what you’re “supposed” to do blogging is tough. Editorial calendars, social media, building a list, seeking subscribers, tweaking the theme, ads or no ads… Wow.

Back in the ancient days of online journals, (you know, like 1996) most of the folks who “blogged” before “blogging” was even a word did it for fun. They had a particular interest, or just a desire to share their thoughts and activities with the world long before status updates and tweets were even on the horizon.

These folks probably didn’t think about making money from their online activities at all, or at least not seriously. Not long ago, Skelliewag wrote a really beautiful post about the transition that happened later on.

Darren also shared a quote from his wise-beyond-his-years son: “tell the world something important.”

Together, these two uber-experienced bloggers taught me a valuable lesson, grabbing my metaphorical wheel just before I hit the metaphorical guardrail, if that makes any sense.

You see, I started my blog just over six months ago, and I learned quickly that it was hard work. But good writing always is. The payoff, for most of us any way, is that we enjoy writing. Or, at least, we enjoy getting our thoughts out there for others to read/see/hear and interact with. This is something I lost track of, somewhere around post #13.

I started getting so wrapped up in my posting schedule and my analytics, actually writing the posts became an annoyance. “Man,” I’d think, “I wish I could get this over with so I can get back to Twitter!” It got to the point, only four months into my blogging, where I burnt out and suddenly went from posting daily to three posts in a month!

I spent most of that month kicking myself and desperately trying to figure out what happened. The answer blew me away when it finally arrived: I had sucked every ounce of enjoyment out of writing a blog because I had gotten too involved in “blogging”.

So, I ask you again: are you having fun?

How to have fun

Now I’m not going to sit here and try to preach to you about how to fix this issue. I’m still trying to figure it out myself. But since I realized how close I came to giving up, I’ve done a lot of thinking about why things changed. And I’ve come up with a few items that I know are going to help me.

I’d absolutely love to hear your thoughts in the comments too, because most of you are far more experienced than I am in struggling with this issue, so I know you’re going to have more ideas to share.

Relax

You know what? While consistency is important and your readers deserve to receive what they’ve come to expect, no one’s going to lynch you if your post is a day late every now and then.

I had a tough time figuring this out, and when life got in the way and I missed a post or sent it out late, I felt the need to fire off apologies to my subscribers and wallow in self-pity.

Give me a break. Do your best. Then relax. It’s just a blog.

Converse

I quickly morphed from sharing interesting information that I thought would be of real value to my readers to slicing off chunks of pre-made content and stringing it out over weeks in order to ensure that a post on a particular subject would go out every Monday for the next four weeks.

This approach is kind of like inviting people over for a turkey dinner and then serving them Spam. I was short-changing my readers and my conscience was nagging me like mad, which is no fun. I lost the conversational aspect of my blog in favor of a series of mini-lectures that (not surprisingly) got little if any comments.

Make sure you give your readers what they deserve: your best every time. Even if that means you can’t post as often. Make sure it stays a conversation, not a choppy lecture. Who has fun at a lecture?

Focus … or not

I struggled for a long time with the question of niches and specializing, and felt like a failure from the start because I just couldn’t narrow myself down to a niche.

I created my blog as a means of sharing my expertise and engaging an audience in connection to my work as a freelance writer. But I don’t specialize on a particular writing format or project group, so how could I blog on just one niche? Yet the experts say I should. Oh woe is me!

It took me a long time to realize that my generalist scope is who I am. Anything less would be boring to me and that would automatically become boring to my readers. So if you’re like me, having a tough time finding a niche that satisfies you,

Get over it!

Think about what you want to write, then think hard about how to connect it all in an understandable frame that your readers can latch onto. It’s better for everyone involved. Like I said, I’m still learning. But I’m finally having fun with my blog, like I was back in June when I first started. I hope you’re doing the same. Because if you’re not, it shows. Believe me.

Please, share in the comments your suggestions for having fun with your blog, how you overcame issues that were keeping you from having fun, or how you plan to do so starting now!

Justin P Lambert is a freelance writer who has been blogging for seven months and has enjoyed it for two. He’s working on it. Drop by Words That Begin With You to see how it goes. You can also follow him on Twitter.

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10 Marketing Strategies You Can Implement Today

If you run an online business, blog or website you know you need to be marketing. Maybe you aren’t sure where to start. These ten tips are things you can start implementing right away to grow your business and start getting the word out about your product or service. These tips should be used over and over to continually grow awareness of your blog/product or service. Use them weekly, but they are easy enough that you can start using them today.

1. Interact on related blogs & forums. Simply find blogs and forums that are in the same niche or category as your site and start interacting with people. You can leave comments, offer helpful advice and suggestions or just get to know people.

2. Write and distribute to article directories. Writing an informative article is something you can do today. There are many article directories that will allow you to post your article for free. Not only is this a way to give readers pertinent information but you also get a backlink in your bio or resource box.

3. Guest blog. You may not get a guest blogging spot today, but you can write the blog post and start contacting blog owners to see if they are interested.

4. Create a compelling email signature. You need to do this in your autoresponder signature as well as your personal email signature.

5. Create videos and put on Youtube. Videos are getting more popular every day. You can create several short videos, upload them to Youtube and then share the links with your readers, in your email signature, on Twitter and Facebook. Don’t like seeing yourself on screen? That’s not a problem, you can create Power Point Presentations for the visual and then read from a script so all that’s “seen” of you is your voice.

6. Write a review. You can write reviews on products you’ve tried, ebooks you’ve read, webinars, videos, books you’ve read, affiliate programs. The list is endless on things you can review to help your readers and give you exposure.

7. Tweet to your followers. You don’t have to get on Twitter every single day and bombard your followers with tweets, but you can use Twitter as a strategic source to build your following, set up your personal brand and reach out to others looking for your information.

8. Share your stuff on Facebook. You can set your blogs to post on Facebook through Networked Blogs, you can set up plugins that allow you and others to share your blog posts on social networks. Utitilize these tools for yourself too. Your readers aren’t the only ones who can use them–you can too.

9. Email your list. This one is pretty self explanatory, you can email your list once or twice a week with updates, promotions and other stuff. If you don’t have a list, start a list building campaign and start sending people to your opt-in page.

10. Create a free report. You can write up a report to give away that contains relevant information to your website, product or service. Brand it with your website address in the footer so people know where to go to find more information.

These are all pretty simple methods you can start doing immediately to grow traffic to your blog or website. Do you have any simple solutions not mentioned here that you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you.

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Friday, February 4, 2011

5 Steps to Captivating Readers with Your Secret Message

image of a young boy pretending to be a secret agent

Every time you publish a blog post or send a message to your email marketing list, your readers learn from you.

But they may be learning something entirely different from what you think.

Your headline might say “10 Tips for Amazing Azaleas” or “How to Change a Tire in 7 Minutes.” And your readers will get some information on that topic from your post.

But readers get more than they bargained for every time they read your content — they’re unconsciously getting an underlying secret message in addition to the more obvious how-to tips.

Each bit of content you write gives your readers a message about who you are.

It’s a hidden message … your headline isn’t “Here’s What I Want You to Know About Me.”

(At least I hope it isn’t.)

But every message in your content marketing is an opportunity to tell readers what you’re about — to convey your personality, your passions, your expertise, and your attitude.

More important, it communicates how all of those things are going to benefit your readers and customers.

Connecting with readers and helping them get to know and trust you is the primary reason for content marketing. You’re hoping when people read your work, they will want to take an action that brings them closer to you — to buy your products or services, subscribe to your blog, tell all their friends about you, or maybe want to collaborate with you.

That’s your secret message. It’s the undertone that permeates everything you write.

If you’re not aware of your tone, you may be sending unintended messages to your readers. Fortunately, it’s not hard to analyze and adjust your tone until it gives off the vibe you want.

Tone problems

Here are a few common tone problems I’ve found on various blogs:

  • Schizophrenic — You’re mad as hell in one blog post, then try to be a rational authority in the next, and crack jokes in the following post. Your tone is all over the place. Result: Readers are confused and not sure which one is the real you. They’re not coming back for more.
  • Annoyingly formal — You sign your blog posts with your full name (including middle initial), company name, street address, and phone number, like you’re addressing a letter to the IRS. You use words such as “moreover” or “therefore.” Your sentences are five lines long. You’re blogging, but your head seems planted in 1897.
  • Speaking in tongues — Every third word you use is industry jargon or an abbreviation, which you never explain. Unless I’m your exact same flavor of tech dork, I’m not reading you.
  • Too cute — You’re using five exclamation points at the end of every sentence, and lots of all-caps and bolding. This makes your blog look like a note you passed to your best friend in high school. You could be an expert in nuclear physics, but with this tone, no one is going to take you seriously.

Tonal mistakes drive away the readers you’re trying to reach. Setting a consistent tone that invites readers in — because it fits both your personality and your blog topic — helps build your audience.

Here are two strategies for decoding and changing your secret message:

Decoder ring for your current tone

The first step to crafting your ideal undertone is to map what your tone is now. To do this, take several of your recent blog posts and extract all the adjectives and descriptive nouns from them. Look at them as a group. These words go a long way toward setting your tone.

Applying this exercise to my own recent blogs, I get a string of words like intuitive, strong, start, great, fearless, raves, “no biggie,” terrific.

Together, these help create the tone I want — empowering and positive about moving up to better-paying writing. My word choice keeps the tone informal and accessible.

If you have a list that repeatedly turns up words like: moron, freaking, weirdo, asinine … you’ve got a pretty rude, snarky tone going on. Maybe snarky works for you and that’s how you want to be known. But if it isn’t, you’ll want to change it.

By the way, if during this exercise you spot a lot of words like: somewhat, not sure, possibly, maybe, and kind of, you’re killing your authority, no matter what tone you’re trying for. Your unintentional secret message is that you’re a giant wimp. Just strike them out and say what you mean.

Decoder ring for setting your future tone

When I work with small-business clients on their blogs, we always do a short exercise before I write any posts. I ask them to describe, in five adjectives, the message they want readers to get about their company.

Maybe your company is smart, personable, efficient, collaborative, and customer-focused. (I could see web improvement expert Sherice Jacob using these terms.)

Maybe it’s irreverent, industry-leading, groundbreaking, innovative, and snarky. (This sounds more like Outspoken Media.)

Or maybe you’re goofy, funny, results-oriented, challenging, and passionate. (Sounds like Johnny B. Truant to me.)

If you can boil your essence down to five words, you can use them as a quick guideline when you’re writing blog posts.

It has an added bonus too: if you have a team blogging at your company or organization, it can help the blog maintain a consistent tone among multiple authors.

It’s usually a fairly easy exercise to do. You know, in your gut, who you want to be on your blog. Or you know your market’s core values. In my experience, it doesn’t usually take more than five or ten minutes to nail down the words that best describe the impression you want to make.

Once you’ve set your compass for the tone you want, implement it in all future blog posts.

Make a habit of reading each post one last time, just for the tone. Adjust any off-kilter words that express personality traits at odds with your five defining words.

Grabbing readers with an edgy tone

There’s nothing wrong with getting audacious, silly, or sexy with your tone — if it’s who you are, it draws readers, and helps your blog accomplish its goals. Actually, pushing the tonal envelope can be a great way to set yourself apart in the blogosphere.

For instance, over on the funny, frank site Toy With Me (their tag line is “nothing risqué, nothing gained”), the bloggers write just like they’re talking to their best girlfriends on the phone. Toy With Me’s sexually explicit, ultra-casual, confessional tone would be the death of many blogs, but for that blog, it’s a perfect fit.

This tone works for them because the site is all about sex toys (which they promote) and sexuality in general. There’s more to the tone, but I’m keeping it G-rated here.

Contrast this with the attitude over at the blog for the popular email marketing firm MailChimp. This company takes its tone from their chimp mascot, putting out messages that they’re frisky, easygoing, fun, friendly, and fast-moving. They’ve positioned the company as a small-business alternative to the industry leaders, so they say things like “Whew!” or discuss their new app, which they’ve named “Chimpadeedoo.”

For a small business that might be intimidated by a bigger, more “professional”-seeming email provider, MailChimp is sending signals with their word choices that they’re a friendlier sort of place. But their tone may also put off the corporate client looking for what they see as a “serious” provider.

Working with a creative or edgy tone can be a tricky tightrope to walk. It’s easy to fall off that tightrope into off-putting crudeness or embarrassing goofiness. Make sure your tone works for the specific customer you’re working to attract.

How about you?

What five words sum up your blog’s secret message? Leave a comment describing the tone you’re going for on your blog. Be sure to include a link to your blog in that field for “Website,” so your fellow commenters can see if your self-description matches what we think your secret message is.

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10 Little-known Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog

This guest post is by Onibalusi Bamidele of YoungPrePro.com.

Getting traffic to a blog is the major challenge a blogger faces. Many have read about various traffic generation strategies, but they find it difficult to get traffic to their blogs because these tips are no longer as effective as they once were. For example, guest blogging used to be very effective, but now that a lot of people are doing it and talking about it, it’s no longer as effective as it used to be.

Here are ten little-known tips to get traffic that I’ve discovered from my own experience. Implementing all ten tactics at the same time isn’t that effective; the way to get the best from these tactics is to choose two or three tactics that you think you like, and focus all your efforts on them for a period of time. You will be amazed at the results you will get.

1. Secret blogging clubs

A major and underutilized way to get traffic to a blog is by joining secret blogging groups or clubs. Very few people are using this particular method, but it can be very effective if you focus your efforts on it.

Secret blogging clubs consists of a group of bloggers with one aim: to help each other spread the word about their blogs with a view to generating traffic for each others’ blogs. The concept is simple: you join a club with around 50 members, share each others’ post with your fans and followers (around once a week), and this will generate more traffic, since it exposes your blog to a wider audience.

You dont need to worry about spamming and the likes, because groups like these are heavily moderated. Also, it is not necessary to share every link that is posted to the group—you only need to share the links related to your niche, that you feel are valuable.

A great example of an effective secret blogging club is the DailyBlogTips Retweet Club by Daniel Scocco. A post of mine that went viral through a secret blogging club was my guest post on getting more blog comments—it presently has 97 comments and 87 retweets on a site that averages 15 retweets and 40 comments per post.

2. Social blogmarking sites

Another underutilized but effective way to get traffic to your blog is by making use of social blogmarking sites. Even though this concept looks similar to social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit, it operates differently.

A social blogmarking site can be useful irrespective of whom you are and your status on the network. All you need to do is write your best post and give it the best title. Submit it to your favorite social blogmarking site and, if it’s voted onto the site’s homepage, it will send a stream of traffic to your blog. The articles that make it to the front page are not determined by the authors who submit them, or dependent on the domain name of the author’s site. The quality and title of the article is all that matters.

I also respect social blogmarking because of the quality of traffic it sends. The visitors that come from the blogmarking site I’m involved with (Blokube) spend an average of ten minutes on my blog. Presently, this is one of my best traffic sources, as far as traffic quality is concerned.

3. Ning communities

Getting traffic to your blog through Ning communities is a great way to get traffic to your blog, yet few bloggers use this method. I learned this formula from Kim Roach and it keeps on sending me traffic, even months after I use it.

Like blogging, a lot of people have a version of themselves or their business on Ning.com. You can create a portal in the form of yourusername.ning.com, which can also be a great way to get traffic to your blog.

All you need to do is help community members with their questions, and reference your blog if necessary. There is also a place where you can submit your blog posts for the whole community to see—another great traffic source. If you plan on doing this, you don’t necessarily need to write new posts: you can submit some of your old posts with a link back to your blog.

Not all Ning communities bring results. Some communities will send you zero visitors, while some will send you hundreds, so it’s important to be wise when choosing a community you want to join. I have discovered that what works is to make sure you join a Ning community that’s related to your niche, and has over 5000 members.

4. Free, no-catch ebooks

This is another powerful but underutilized tactic to get more traffic to your blog. I didn’t use this strategy until recently, but when I did, I got awesome results.

To use this technique, write as many free reports as you can. A report is a simple, seven-to-ten-page ebook. Make sure you embed links to your blog in the ebook, and encourage readers to visit your blog. Then, distribute the ebook to free ebook directories, post it to your favorite forums, ask other bloggers to help you share it, and do as much as you can to spread the word about it.

What has worked best for me is sharing it on my favorite Internet marketing forums, like Digital Point Forums. After utilizing this particular strategy, I saw a spike in my traffic: I got an additional 60-80 visitors per day for some days, and over 100 new blog subscribers.

5. Content syndication

I’ve noticed that a lot of people are not using this particular strategy, but it can be highly effective to syndicate your blog content to big online portals in your niche. Most of these portals are visited by countless people every day, and syndicating with them will go a long way to give your blog a traffic boost.

Great examples of some of the best content syndication sites I’ve found are Alltop and The Daily Brainstorm.

6. Blogging collaboration

It pains me to see that this particular traffic strategy is not better utilized. In 2010 I collaborated with a lot of well-known and respected bloggers to give my readers some entrepreneurial advice.

I was able to work with 24 successful online entrepreneurs, who contributed to the post, and shared it with their Twitter followers and Facebook fans when it went live. This sent me double my usual number of daily visitors and, eventually, more subscribers and followers. It is also one of the most shared posts on my blog.

Collaboration is a great tool and every wise blogger will use it sometime. Try to get some of the top bloggers in your niche to contribute to your blog; once the contribution is live, encourage them to share it.

7. Online podcasts

This is another great and underutilized way to get traffic to your blog. Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income is very popular for his podcasts, and has been able to build a successful blog based on this and other methods.

While the podcasting technology is not new, very few people utilize it. Yet you can get more eyeballs to your content by creating a great and informative podcast relating to your blog. Submit it to the iTunes podcast directory and as more and more people search for podcasts relating to your topic area, they will end up discovering yours and, if it’s good, might end up visiting your blog.

8. Online groups

This particular approach is almost as old as some of the biggest websites on the Internet, so I’m amazed to see that very few people use it. I didn’t realize the power of this tactic until the day I woke up to see a spike in my website traffic generated by a LinkedIn group.

A lot of people still congregate and look for solutions to questions in online groups; many of these groups are also highly respected by Google, so they are indexed and ranked quickly. Thus, you have a great potential of getting traffic to your blog by utilizing good groups. The post I published to the LinkedIn group I mentioned attracted over 200 visitors from that group in the week it was published.

Two of the most popular online groups are Yahoo groups and LinkedIn groups—check them out.

9. Authority sites

I didn’t realize how powerful authority sites were until I interviewed successful entrepreneur Raymond Lei. He wrote a Wikipedia page in which a link to my interview with him was listed as one of the resources. This link sends me continuous traffic from Wikipedia even today.

You can use this strategy with some of the biggest websites on the Internet; since most of these sites find it easy to rank for competitive keywords in the search engines, you may find it easy to get traffic from them. For example, you can read and review some of the top books in your niche on Amazon while including a link back to your blog. Or interview the top bloggers in your niche, then include your link as a resource in their Wikipedia page.

10. Webrings

This is also a very effective traffic generation strategy that many people overlook.

A Webring is a collection of websites that are linked to each other. A major advantage of using a Webring is that it also helps you get high quality links which means both short term direct traffic and long term search engine traffic for you. Probably the most popular Webring is Webring.com.

These are my favorite little-known traffic tactics. What are yours? How have you got traffic to your blog? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Visit YoungPrePro.com to learn how Onibalusi makes over $3000 online monthly and how he gets over 10,000 visitors to his blog every month. Download his guest blogging guide to learn how to get thousands of visitors from guest blogging. Also, make sure you follow him on twitter @youngprepro.

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Let a Launch Buddy Help Boost Your Blog

This post was written by the Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Curious? So are we!

While I write blog posts, I don’t really refer to myself as a blogger. I’m just someone who likes sharing my experience to those who want to listen (or read), hoping it will help you in some way. My real passion is in sales and marketing, online and offline, and in all honest.y I’d prefer working with a designer to craft a set of optimized landing pages, or spending an entire morning massaging some email copy, than figuring out how to best communicate the result to the world.

I know that it’s a bit of a contradiction, but I write because I like helping people, and more than that, I like helping people I trust and respect. I don’t get paid for these posts; I post under a veil of secrecy so there’s no impact to my personal brand; and, most importantly, I don’t expect anything in return. And as a result of my willingness to help, I discovered something last week:

When it comes to launches, two heads are so much better than one.

Two heads…

A friend of mine—let’s call him Bob—was preparing to launch his first product of the year: an ebook. He’d reached out a couple of times to get my feedback on things like the title, cover, and interior design. A long time ago, I’d offered to help out where I could, to help him build a framework for his product launches. So as the launch loomed, we caught up one evening and went through the plans. We were able to cover a fair bit of ground in a short period, and we didn’t change the entire approach—just tweaked things here and there.

Instead of describing the what, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the why. Why did this collaboration help shape something good into something better?

  • I was able to take a first-impression viewpoint of the product and promotional messages.
  • I was able to read at the copy as someone who might buy the product, not someone who’s intimately involved in it.
  • I was able to add layers from my own experience to the launch, from a foundation that was already strong.
  • Collaboration on thoughts and ideas resulted in progressive, actionable outcomes.
  • We were able to validate or question each others’ unsubstantiated opinions.
  • We were accountable to actually put things into a documented plan.

I hope the launch goes well for Bob, and that in some way, my contributions will help him achieve his goals.

Break the isolation

One thing I’ve learned from being closer to bloggers than ever before is that while you’re a well-connected group, when it comes to launches, product development, and money, a lot of bloggers work in isolation. I’d like to see that change.

To me, launching a product is a critical step in your blogging journey—one that turns all your hard work into your reward. Having a buddy who not only brings objectivity to your approach, brings fresh ideas so something you’ve been probably obsessing over for months (or years)!

It doesn’t need to be a money thing—it’s a favor thing. You help them, they help you.

Finding a launch buddy

Finding your launch buddy is not about finding the most experienced marketer or product launch expert you can. It’s about finding someone you trust, and are happy to open up to.

All your challenges, your strengths, your weaknesses, all your commercial agreements, targets, traffic, audience, your ability to pay expenses—you need to be able to share them all. You also need to find someone who’ll respect that as the product owner, you get the final say, and someone who, when your opinions differ, will let you both move on quickly.

My anti-technology Mum, given the full picture, would be able to help you more than the best product launch expert in the world if you only gave them half the story.

So if you don’t have one already, for your next launch—or perhaps your first—consider adding a launch buddy to your team. Or have you already used a launch buddy to help perfect and finesse a product launch? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments.

Stay tuned for more posts by the secretive Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger.

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Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Niche Travel Blogging Demystified

This guest post is by Matthew Kepnes of Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site.

If you look at all the travel blogs out there, you’ll notice many common themes. People tend to write a blog that falls into an overarching category like cruises, backpacking, solo travel, or digital nomad travel. They don’t refine their offerings any further. What readers are left with is thousands of blogs about the same thing, and a crowded field where no one really dominates. There are no leaders, no experts, and the bloggers’ voices get lost in the crowd.

For some bloggers, that’s fine. They simply blog because they like blogging. They want to interact with others and have no intention of ever making their blog into a business. If they make three hundred dollars selling an ad, they’re probably ecstatic; if they never make any money, they’re probably not fussed.

Yet there are a lot of bloggers out there who do want to make money. Some of them want to make a living, and most would just love for their blog to pay for their travels. In a sea of sameness, though, it’s hard to get the traction you need to become an expert, distinguish yourself, and gain traffic. And as we all know, it’s only then that you can make money from your blog.

The worst mistake

A few weeks ago, a travel blogger I read said that we travel bloggers should look to companies like Lonely Planet and be like them. “Copy the big companies,” he said.

I think this is the worst mistake you can make. You can’t be Lonely Planet, Boots n All, Orbitz, or the like. These companies have decades of experience and money that you don’t have, as well as huge budgets that allow them to stay ahead of the game.

Moreover, there’s no way you’ll be able to get ahead of their brands. Google didn’t wake up saying they want to be Microsoft. They said, “we want to be a new tech company.” That’s what you should aim for. You should aim to be something new. Don’t follow. Lead.

Leading a niche

To be a leader, you need to be niche. That word is thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean?

In simple terms, being niche means that you focus on a narrow topic. For the purpose of this article, I am going to talk a lot about backpacking as a niche. If you look at most travel blogs, you’ll notice that they all focus on backpacking or long-term travel. It seems to be a trend. How do you make yourself different when everyone is writing about the same thing?

Recently, I gave some advice to another travel blogger. He had just come back from a long-term trip to Central and South America, and he wanted to make his website bigger and earn some money from it, so what did he do? He followed the conventional line of thinking and turned his site into a general backpacking blog, and in the process he made his blog just the same as all the other blogs out there. They offered the same tips, advice, and stories that everyone on the Internet does.

I asked him, “How many sites do you see about backpacking in Central and South America?” That made him stop and think. He couldn’t think of any blogs that covered these regions, and he had just spent two years living, learning, and traveling that region of the world.

I told him that he is an expert on that area, and I asked him why he’s trying to cover the whole world. “Cover the area you know about!” I said. “When people ask other travelers where they look for information on a specific region, you want your name to come up first. Be the backpacking site for your area of expertise.”

Your niche matters

One of the greatest things the Internet has done is that it has made all niches marketable. With millions of people on the ‘net at any second of the day, even the smallest hobby or niche has an audience. You may think you are the only one with a passion for photos of horses doing stupid things, but with the Internet, you’ll find that you aren’t. You can bring all sorts of people together with your niche site.

The same is true in travel. No niche is too small. There are blogs covering RV travel, consumer issues, cruises, seniors’ cruises, gay cruises, gay seniors’ cruises, backpacking, long term travel, couples travel, and Asia travel—you can always find interested followers within your area of expertise.

Look at the “top travel blogs.” Out of the top 20 blogs, the majority deal with backpacking, independent travel, or families. Everyone is talking about the same thing.

When you looked at the numbers of those sites, did you notice something? There are a few with really high numbers, but the most are simply in the same area. They are talking about the same general topic, and thus they all share the same traffic.

Now take a look at the site Travel Fish. This is a destination-based site. It’s not really a blog, but it focuses on one thing: Southeast Asia. What kind of traffic does it get? It has an Alexa rank of 33,000 and a Compete rank of 144,000, which averages 88,500. That puts the site at #5 on the list of blogs.

Why does being niche help?

By going super-niche, your blog gains a single purpose. Everything you do focuses around one central theme. It helps focus your content, your marketing, and your audience. Don’t be everything to everyone. Be the best at one thing to some people. You want people to reference your name when people ask where they need to go for help. Travelfish’s single-minded nature allows that site to be the expert, and dominate one field. The owner doesn’t compete with anyone. People compete with him.

There are many travel websites out there. If you don’t go niche, you won’t be able to create a name for yourself. If you really want to make a stellar travel blog, monetize it, and be successful, you must pick one small genre of travel or location in the world, and be the expert on that. Otherwise, you’ll never break out of the crowd.

Matthew Kepnes has been traveling around the world for the past four years. He runs the award winning budget travel site, Nomadic Matt’s Travel Site and has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian UK, AOL’s Wallet Pop, and Yahoo! Finance. He currently writes for AOL Travel and The Huffington Post For more information, you can visit his Facebook page or sign up for his

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Tuesday, February 1, 2011

SEO Tips and Search Ranking Questions Answered

seo tipsSEO isn’t for everyone, and honestly… it’s a huge pain in the butt to manage if you are currently working on ad campaigns, writing new content and handling everything else for your business. Over the past few months I’ve been working with RankPay, and they have a really amazing setup. In short, you pick the keywords you want to rank for, and you don’t pay anything until you see results.

After seeing some great results, I wanted to sit down with Justin from RankPay and have him answer some important SEO questions and provide a few seo tips as well. Please keep in mind that Justin’s answers to my questions are based on the question themselves, but with SEO there are so many different moving parts and dynamics that not every questions answer will work for each and every website. Let the learning begin!

SEO TIPS & FAQs ANSWERED

How effective is article marketing for web sites, in terms of seo rank and keywords? (ie: using backlinks as keywords and submitting one article vs. weekly for the same site)

Backlink building is one of the most important things that you can do for your Search Engine rankings. While article marketing is a great strategy to build highly relevant backlinks to a website, it must be executed properly to see results from a rankings perspective. When backlinking you want to make sure that you have links from a variety of websites and not only a single one. Therefore make sure that you are submitting articles to more websites than just Ezinearticles. Next you want to make sure that your links include your keyword, also known as anchor text. Anchor text helps the search engines better understand the content of the item that its linking to.

Obviously the PageRank of a web site is very important, but let’s say we have a few sites/domains that all have the same page rank and links to the site, but one domain is 10 years old, another is 5 years old and another was just recently registered, how will the age of a domain/site effect it’s results in search engines?

The age of the domain can have an affect on search engine rankings if the link age that were pointing to those domains are nearly as old as the domain itself. If all things equal, and one domain was registered last week and another registered ten years ago they will both have an equal opportunity to rank. Again, the only thing that would influence something differently is if the ten year old site had been indexed by Google years ago and has backlinks that are older than the new website.

What are you thoughts on the millions of autoblogs that are simply replicating content? How long of a life span do these sites usually have, and how does article replication effect both the original content creator, and the ones stealing it?

We aren’t fans of autoblogs, stealing isn’t right and copying another persons content is the same as stealing. It is disappointing to see the recent explosion of autoblogs and their popularity in the internet marketing community. Matt Cutts just posted today about how Google has rolled out algorithm changes that deal with this very thing: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-change-launched

There are millions of old sites that were built in plain HTML, but still rank very well in the search engines. What is the best method for these site to convert their HTML sites to WordPress sites, while keeping SEO and prior links in tact?

Great question Zac and critically important for most long time internet marketers. When transforming a website from legacy HTML to WordPress there are a few methods that you can do to keep and retain backlinks. Keep in mind though that both methods are very time consuming but worth while in the long run.

First, take inventory of all your websites URLs and indexed pages in Google. There are tools that can expedite this process, or if your site isn’t that big you can go to Google and search “site: http://www.url.com” This will show you an index of all of your pages from your domain in Google.

After taking inventory of the pages, you’ll need to replicate those same URLs in WordPress. You can change the permalink structure to reflect your old page URLs by adding .html to the end. For example, /%postname%.html. This will change any of your post names to have .html at the end, matching your old legacy html website.

Finally, you need to make sure that you copy your information architecture of your old website. That includes directories and how your site had its linked laid out before. While this method is extremely time consuming it will help save your site from experiencing a tremendous loss in rankings or PageRank.

The easier method to converting a legacy HTML site to a WordPress website is to use 301 redirects for all old pages to the corresponding pages on your new website. You’ll want to make sure that you don’t miss any links, so do a backlink check in Yahoo Site Explorer and verify that all links that pointed to your old HTML website are redirected using a 301 to your new similar page.

Backlinks, Page Content, Sitemap and Image Tags… can you rank and give a quick explanation of each in order of their importance when trying to make the most of your site for seo ranking purposes?

#1 Page Content

Page content is the single most important ranking factor for all websites. By having great content on your site, that is also relevant and keyword friendly, you give yourself the possibility of attracting quality inbound links. Do yourself a favor and make sure that the content is unique, and that each page has keywords corresponding to it which you are trying to target in the search engines.

#2 Backlinks

A great backlinking campaign can work wonders on a website’s search engine rankings. It’s one of the strongest ranking variables in Google’s and other search engine algorithms. Not all links are made alike, so don’t try and go get as many links as possible, it’s all about building a great backlink portfolio by first and foremost creating great content that your readers want to read.

#3 Sitemap

A Sitemap allows your site to be indexed and crawled properly. It also helps the search engines crawl and identify pages that may not be linked from any pages on your website. Be sure that your site has a sitemap that’s built in an XML format and is located on your root directory (http://www.url.com/sitemap.xml). If you use WordPress there are many plugins that can help you automate this process.

#4 Image Tags

While image tags can slightly help a websites rankings they are not significant enough to waste a tremendous amount of time on. The biggest benefit about having proper image tags is the traffic that a website may receive from Google Images. By having proper image tags, and file names, Google could rank your websites well in Google Images. Although from an SEO perspective I would not recommend wasting a lot of time on Image Tags.

What is the fastest way to build up page rank for a web site?

The single best way to build up PageRank for a website is by having excellent content. Build great content and watch the backlinks naturally come in. By building your site for your reader you’ll be surprised by how many natural links will begin appearing. Another strategy is to have and work with a great PR company. Landing a review on a reputable newspaper, website, or magazine can help your sites credibility and rankings.

Using RankPay for Keyword Placement & SEO

seo tipsI hope you’ve enjoyed this Q&A session with Justin from  RankPay on seo tips and how you can improve your web sites search engines rankings. I highly recommend using RankPay to improve your seo rankings, as I have been using them for the past few months now and with many different sites. You will never pay for RankPay services until you see a Top 30 ranking for your specified search phrase, and each campaign is limited to a minimum of only 6 months. In addition to providing a quality service that works, you will also have a full support team that can provide you with advice on choosing the best keywords, setting up new campaigns, seo tips or just any questions you might come up with.

Try RankPay now and use promo code “SAVE” for a $50 credit towards your account!

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