Blogging’s a Low-Cost, High Return Marketing Tool

"But by far the most successful blog, in terms of traffic, turned out to be Free Money Finance, a blog that has nothing to do with Denali’s business. Mr. Nardini’s plan was to create a blog with so much traffic that it could serve as an independent media outlet owned by Denali Flavors, where the company could be the sole sponsor and advertiser.

He chose personal finance because it is a popular search category on the Web and because he knew he would not tire of posting about it. And post he does, about five times each weekday."

We are always on the lookout for new ways to utilize Internet "features" to improve the marketing of our businesses. this article had a new twist described in it that I thought was really interesting.

In all of our classes about blogging, we have emphasized the idea of informing readers about some aspect of your principle business. This article, by contrast, points out how someone can choose a popular topic to blog about in order to attract traffic that the business can benefit from simply by being the sponsor of the blog. This strikes me as being the same approach as used in traditional advertising, where the shows that businesses sponsor on television and radio are not about the business, but attract demographics that are of interest to the business. Education about the business itself takes place only in the ads that the sponsor has attracted traffic to!

This is one of those ideas that seem so simple and obvious that I cannot understand why we have not seen it and talked about it before this time!

One other element of this story also needs to be emphasized, and that is the frequency with which the author of this blog posts to the blog. Note that he posts to the blog "... about five times each weekday." That is a lot of posting, but that is a big part of what makes it work for the author!

Google's “Query Deserves Freshness” or QDF

"QDF is clearly a very interesting model but what really interests me is how I can use it to drive traffic to my websites."

Some time ago in a previous post I wrote about Google tweaking its algorithm to place more emphasis on current information when search volume points to a particular interest in a topic. At that point, I didn't have a name for this feature, but in this blog post I found the name and a more in-depth description of that feature.

What this whole discussion is about, in short, is that if Google notices an increase in search volume for a particular topic, it will boost the rankings for new information that meets the search criteria so that newer information ear at the top of the rankings. Without this artificial boost, the basic algorithm tends to prefer better established pages, that is, older information!

This phenomenon can be quite relevant to sites that have something to do with something that might be mentioned in news stories that draw a lot of attention. For example (I know this seems like a bit of a stretch, but it is for real), if you sell equipment to monitor earthquake activity (how many people do?), you should realize that any reports of earthquakes will trigger a response on the search engines looking for more information. If you have a current posting on your blog about your equipment that would rank on the kinds of searches that people do to find out about current earthquake activity, you will likely see a surge in traffic as a result.

To take another example, the article says, "... what happens when cities suffer power failures. “When there is a blackout in New York, the first articles appear in 15 minutes; we get queries in two seconds,”. The quote is from a Google engineer named Amit Singhal, who was also quoted in the New York Times article about Google. That illustrates how quickly all this happpens and tells you something about how quickly you need to respond to news items in order to get the benefit for your site!

This same article (the main article referenced in the title link), led me to an interesting tool, which, unfortunately, I cannot seem to find my way back to at the moment. This tool was called "Hot Topics" and is something one can use to see what topics are "hot" on various locations.

What happened when I was on the page of this tool was that I typed in a phrase and hit "Search", and it began opening a series of windows for various other sites where it had submitted my phrase as a search. These other sites included Google, digg, Reddit, and many more. On the results pages, I could see an indication of what activity these was going on related to the search phrase I had submitted. This is a quick way to cover a lot of sites to see what is going on around the web in relation to a particular phrase, and to find what you might want to write about yourself to get your own 'buzz" effet going. I found the whole thing very interesting, but, unfortunately, closed the window before I had captured the link, and now I can't find it again. If anyone reading this comes across this tool, I would appreciate a referral!

6 Tips for Blogging in 2008

"... blogging is an excellent way to manage PR ..."

This is a nice piece on blogging with tips that we can all use. The key message that came across to me from this article was that you really need to pay attention to the small details of working your blog in order to get it to work most effectively for you.

For example, the author recommends hard coding keyword-rich links on the sidebar of your blog pointing to blog entries that are particularly important to your site. This kind of technique goes well beyond the concept of posting regularly to your blog to keep your content alive and fresh.

He also talks about writing keyword-rich titles for your entries, then, after posting them (and presumably, letting them get indexed?), returning to the entry and changing the titles to something that will be more eye-catching for readers. This reminds me of the difference between how newspaper headlines are written and how article titles or headlines need to be written for the web. Newspapers have had to adjust how their writers create headlines in order to make the stories findable on the Internet. I have even heard that search engines have made special adjustments to their search algorithms to accommodate newspapers' need for both kinds of headlines.

Overall, the message remains, the rewards go to those who pay attention to detail and have the persistence to apply good techniques to their work.

Make Your Blog Work Better!

"Google shows more recent results if a search query that wasn't popular before suddenly gets many searches. Google analyzes the search volume and the blog post volume to decide if a special search term or topic is hot or not."

A recent newsletter posting points to a way to make your blog perform better for your site. The key seems to be to stay aware of what is "hot" that might be relevant to your site, and make sure that you get a blog posted immediately. What this article says is that Google provides additional ranking emphasis for current blog entries for searches that suddenly take a jump in volume. What this means is that if there is a news item, for example, that attracts a lot of attention to a subject that is relevant to your business, it is to your advantage to put something up on your blog commenting on the event.

Suppose, for example, that you are selling coffee on the web. One day you see a news report saying that coffee has been determined to be good for your health in some way that was not realized previously (a story that was prominent recently). News stories like that attract a lot of attention to a topic for a short while, and you can anticipate that this will be reflected in search volume.

What you should do is to think about what people who hear about that story and want more information might search for, and post a blog immediately using those words to make some comment or observation about the story. You don't have to have anything earth-shattering to say about it, a simple article mentioning the story line and saying what you think about it will be sufficient. The point is to get something on-line immediately to take advantage of the boost that Google will give the topic for a short window of time.

If you are lucky and the story does attract attention, and if you have picked the right terms, you could get a huge boost for your blog in a very short period of time. This kind of short term volume increase for your site can also have a persistent, lingering effect on your rankings in searches over time.

As always, the advantage goes to those of us who stay on top of our field and are persistent in applying the right principles to our marketing eforts!

So Does Blogging Really Work? Here's the Proof.

An interesting post provides some insights to using blogs to promote your business. The first part of the posting is all about Dell turning around its attitude to blogging for businesses, and is an interesting story about the impact hat blogging can have on a company. It is not really too relevant to most small businesses except in that it shows that the wrong kind of attention can really hurt you! In most cases, small businesses don't have the visibility for that to be much of an issue. Attention is what they are trying to get!

To me, the more interesting part of this post has to do with the South African winery that took up blogging. If you read the details, they increased their business volume by more than a factor of ten! Yes, I did say ten! They state that they were selling some 40,000 cases of wine per year when they began their blog, and are now approaching 40,000 cases per week. Who would not like this result!

Their efforts in marketing through their blog go well beyond posting information on the blog, but that was the starting point. In their case, they began giving wine away to people on the blog, which is sure to get attention, but, for a tenfold increase in sales, it makes a lot of sense! The lesson here is that by using your blog creatively in your business arena, you can have a huge impact. You can be sure that these people are believers in the power of the Internet to promote business.

For more information about blogging and how to use the Internet effectively, browse some of our presentations that we have made in our free Internet Marketing Clinic at the University of Houston Small business Development Center.

Optimize Your Text for Search Engines!

"Notice that I also changed the sub-title of the book from “Fire Your Boss, Toss Your Alarm Clock, and Double Your Income With An Easy Transition Into Self-Employment” to “How To Work At Home With The Perfect Small Business Opportunity” for the Amazon copy."

Reading an excellent blog about how to start a business on the Internet, I came across this quote. I have often talked about how newspapers have had to change the way they write their headlines in order to accommodate search engines, and I thought this was a great illustration of the point I was trying to make.

Brian Armstrong, the author of this fine blog, goes on to say that "... very few people search for terms like “breaking free”, “fire your boss”, or “self-employment”... " so he rewrote his text to something that people would be searching for. In this article, and in several other of his posts, he talks about the importance of keyword research to determine what people are actually searching for. This is crucial to making your website deliver the kind of traffic you need to support your business.

I highly recommend this blog as a reference for great information about making money from the Internet. Brian's focus is more on how to make money from a blog than from moving product or services, but his writing style is easy to read and full of great information.

Mastering Both Kinds Of Link Building - Authority & Reputation

"... presence builds presence - simply being present in more channels will lead to you getting more links, more authority, more PageRank."

Here is a nice article outlining several important points about successful link building approaches.

The author makes a distinction between pursuing links based on page rank versus links based on anchor text. I have never made that sort of distinction in my own campaigns, but it is an interesting perspective.

What I like about this article is that he talks about the importance of getting good anchor text on internal links (those on the same site) as well as on external links (those on other sites that point to yours.) He also emphasizes the benefits of LOTS of promotion, that is, getting your presence out on the web in as many ways as you possibly can (see the quote above)!

Many of our classes have addressed such tools as article sites, press release sites, and blogs. These are all valuable tools for increasing your visibility on the web, and part of their appeal is their residual power once you have gotten them out there! With this residual power, the placements are also accumulative, that is, they all add up to more and more power for your site.

For effective marketing, the lessons are still, "Content, content, content" and "persistence" in pursuing good techniques for your site.

Setting up RSS feeds from your site

In our last class, the question came up about how to set up others to subscribe to an RSS feed from your site. I have prepared a short presentation that outlines a few steps for enabling someone to establish your feed on three different portal pages, MyYahoo, Google and Start. Click on the title link above to go to the presentation (a PDF file, which may load slowly!)

This presentation does not address how to create the feed, which is covered elsewhere in our class materials, but assumes that you are starting with some kind of blogging software that sets up the feed for you automatically.

Here is a link to the Yahoo instructions for setting up the feed on someon's MyYahoo page, which they will have to have created prior to using this process. In similar fashion, Google instructions will enable someone to pull your feed into their Google Portal page.

Other portals will have similar arrangements that you should be able to find by going to those sites and searching them for something like "add to ...", where they will show you the setup like this.

These instructions all presume that the persons pulling in the feeds will have established the pages that they want to pull the feed to in advance of utilizing these buttons. That will require (in the case of Yahoo or Google) setting up accounts with them first, but those are free accounts.

For a presentation on how to set up the RSS feed from your site (not from your blog, which will have its own process built-in to the blogging software, we have a class presentation (another PDF file) on "Setting up an RSS Feed".

How to Use RSS on Your Site

RSS, accoding to this author, is "... this decade's answer to business-to-consumer (B2C) e-mail; ..."

There are various creative ways to utilize RSS feeds on your site. A few suggestions from this article make the point. They include:

• Blog and article comments.
• Errata sheets.
• Shipment tracking.
• Newly released and sale items.
• Updated user agreements, policies, and practices.

In our clinic, we have discussed use of RSS primarily in the contextof the first item only. As with any marketing on the web, it pays to be thinking of the client and what the client needs, wants, or can use. Each of these suggestions points to a different kind of value that RSS can provide for the users.

Remember the lesson: "If you help your clients, they will help your business!"

Blogging for Business

Blogging has many faces! We have talked many times about how to use a blog to add content to your website, but, like most things we discuss, it is not a cakewalk.

This article is focused on using a blog to create income for the creator, but the points about the effort involved pertain to the kinds of blogs that we discuss in the Internet Marketing Clinic.

"The cost of building a readership for a blog, by contrast, is nil. ... For people like Ms Armstrong, who has about 1m visitors to her site a month, this makes blogging worthwhile. But it is not for everybody, she notes. She works about seven hours a day on her site, and continues to work while on holiday. Mr Malik concurs. “It's not easy,” he says. Building his audience has “taken me five years, and a lot of sleepless nights.”

Sphere: A New Approach to Blog Search

A new blog search engine is coming out in beta which has generated some favorable comment in several notable locations.

"Sphere takes a new approach to blog search, looking at three critical variables to understand both individual blog posts and the nature of the blog they appear on. As with web search, Sphere attempts to understand link structures, who's linking to whom, and what are the quality of the links. Crucial to this analysis is an attempt to understand who's starting or leading discussions in contrast to those bloggers who are simply commenting on existing conversations.
Sphere also looks at meta data, things like posting frequency, lengths of postings, and other non-keyword related data.

And finally, Sphere's algorithm content does some heavy lifting with semantic analysis of blog postings."

This article by Chris Sherman, an always reliable and authoritative source, goes into much more detail about the featues of the new engine and how it is intended to solve parts of the relevance issue. In following up on this story, I also went to the home page of Sphere and found other links to comments in other search engine blogs. I was not able to explore the engine myself, as their server is presently overloaded by the response they have received, and they have closed off access temporarily. I did learn a lot by following the other links, which I recommend to all who might be interested in more detail.

What I found interesting about this whole discussion in these various locations is the insight that it provides to how search engines must approach the problem of determining relevance for their search results. All search engines are wrestling with this problem as the Internet continues to expand, and the solutions that this talented group of developers come up with will be echoed in the solutions that other search engine developers employ in their engines. No one has the complete answer yet, of course, but, as we progress up the learning curve, the steps that one group finds to be successful will be copied by all the others.

For webmasters and business owners trying to keep up with effective marketing on the web, understanding the direction that developers are moving with their algorithms is the best route to success in the competitive Internet arena.

As always, the basic message is to provide good content to the audience on the web. Remember that what all the developers are trying to find and deliver is the best content that they can locate to deliver to their users. If you consistently provide that, the search engines developers who find the best algorithm will be more and more likely to prefer your content to other content offered by less effective marketers. All the techniques that we teach in our Internet Marketing Clinic are simply ways to communicate more efficiently with the search engines to let them know that your content is truly the best they will find!

"Add to My Yahoo" now available!

The "My Yahoo" button is for the use of our customers who have established their own access to MyYahoo by creating a Yahoo account and setting up their portal page on that service. Look for these buttons on the header of any page on our site and use them to ensure that you always know immediately of the latest announcement of tips concerning Internet Marketing that we have made available.

Technorati Profile

89 percent of companies currently blog or plan to start in the near future.

"Over half the respondents have launched one or more blogs within the last year, and 10 percent have blogged for over three years. The study finds a higher adoption rate among smaller companies. Fifty-eight percent of corporate blogs represent companies with less than 100 employees, while companies with over 1,000 employees take up 16 percent of the blogosphere's corporate segment. The same trend rings true from a revenue standpoint; companies with under $100 million in revenues account for 45 percent of corporate blogs. "

Here is a trend that is really amazing. Blogs have caught on so fast it is stunning!

It must be that the technology is so easy that it encourages people to adopt it who would otherwise shy away. Since these blogs are generally easily syndicated, this makes a very easy means of spreading information across the web, allowing users to keep in touch with information sources who provide content of interest to them.

The message for your business is three-fold. First, you better get on board this trend, or you will be left behind. Second, you need to make sure that your blog is RSS-ready. And, third, as always, you must pay attention to the quality of what you put up on the web, as your content must be enticing enough to attract its proper audience. If you do this successfully, the rewards will accrue to your site and to your business!

Retail importance of search continues to grow!

"Dieringer noted that 114.1 million adults searched for product information on the web last year, and that 98.9 million of this group went on to make purchases either online or offline. By comparison, 106.7 million adults made purchases through catalogs, direct-mail and telemarketing, it added."

According to this information, the web has overtaken several traditional avenues of marketing.

'Our research shows that the Internet now influences the purchase decisions of as many shoppers as mail order catalogs, direct mail, and telemarketing combined.' "

This information reinforces again the fact that the marketplace served by search engine marketing is a significant and growing part of retail activity around the world.

Going beyond web stats

We have talked in many of our clinic sessions about the value of studying and using your web stats to improve your site operation. This article discusses a technique for going beyond the activity stats to try to identify what is going on in the minds of the visitors to the site.

The article is a case study of how one firm used a commercial opinion-gathering tool to collect feedback from users. There is a particularly interesting chart included that illustrates where this information gathering fits into the evaluation scheme. The stats reviews that we have discussed account for about half the elements in the evaluation cycle.

MarketingSherpa.com : Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR"Avaya execs wanted to know much more than how many visitors a page received. Marketers had questions like:
o How satisfied are visitors with my site section?
o What problems or frustrations do they encounter there?
o Is the content effective -- is it meeting visitor's expectations?
o How could I tweak the site to encourage visitor loyalty?
o Are there design changes we could make to improve marketing campaign results?"