Articles & Article Directory

By Roberto Bell

Once you understand how blogs can benefit your site, you might think that if one is good, two would be better. Or more. You would be right. However, it takes a little more than simply registering with Blogger or WordPress and throwing some verbiage into the void. You need to seriously think about what approach would benefit your company the most. If you take a well thought out planning process, your blogs will accomplish their mission-establishing you and your company as a useful, expert resource that motivates people to revisit your blogs and do business with you.

Remember, blogs can either reside right on your site, or they can be independent domains all to themselves. The advantage of having your blogs on your site is that it powerfully connects everything in them to you and your firm, which is a strong branding and ID play. Developing offsite blogs gives them a little more freedom, both perceived and real, and the “buffer” lets you be a bit more controversial or experimental than you normally might be. The blogs can be official or unofficial.

The executive blog
Every company, in every industry, can have at least two blogs. One, an “executive blog”-and a second, “news” or “insider info” blog. The executive blog should not be the CEO posting about where he ate lunch or his new Blackberry. It should show that the executive, and thus the company, is at the leading edge of the industry. This blog should cover industry and world news and events, items of particular interest to the firm’s industry or region, and company news-anything relevant, with the emphasis on relevant, not on anything-and offer intelligent, insightful comments.

Sharp analysis and insights will demonstrate up-to-date, intimate knowledge of industry trends and true expertise about the industry as a whole. This shows that your company has the sharpest people around and instills confidence in those who are considering doing business with you. All of this is accomplished in a way that helps the reader, so the value propositions of your firm come forth naturally, absent marketing blurbs or sales talk. Blogs are incredibly valuable communications tools, as people don’t automatically raise their defenses against your message.

News blogs and others
A news blog, obviously, will comment on news stories concerning your industry. It is probably wise to refrain from turning the blog into an op-ed. Just provide facts and figures-and others opinions. This way you can bring up controversial subjects without the risk of alienating readers. There are many other types of blogs that you can do, depending on your vertical and the defining characteristics of your target readers. By their very nature these are helpful and supportive, without the slightest risk of offending anyone.

Beyond executive and news blogs, many companies are at a loss for what kind of blog might help them succeed. Sometimes the solution is obvious, and other times it takes a little creative thinking.

For example, if you own a retail site that sells many products and you created a blog that just tried to sell a different product every day, it might come off as self-serving and clumsy. However, let’s say instead you created a pair of “cool product” blogs, one male-focused and one female-focused. Each could highlight cool, trendy products, but more from the approach of someone recommending something really great to a friend, or from the approach of an insider. It is a subtle difference, but if done right making them more recommendation-based instead of sales-based can come off much better and more successfully. On the other hand, retail sites selling few products could have a blog that discusses inventive ways to use the products, or invites third-party stories about unique, thoughtful product usage. Every site should consider blogs that offer insight into how different sub-demographics within their customer base can use or benefit from various products.

Unique firms, unique blogs
In the “B2B” universe, staffing companies could blog about staffing needs in various important times, like expanding, opening new offices, corporate transitions, planning for holidays or tax time, and so forth. Accountants could have a “tax tips” blog, or write about various issues of financial planning for executives and employees. Lawyers in virtually any law area could explain legal concepts and situations in their specialty in layman’s terms, comment on the legal ramifications of current events and analyze high-profile cases to give expert insights. Mortgage firms could target the many different demographics looking for refinancing or home equity loans, from newlyweds and couples with children to seniors, first-time buyers and people in mortgage trouble. Each group has different reasons for refinancing, giving you limitless fodder for endless blogging.

Companies in the food industry-from organic farmers and bakeries to the corner restaurant-can have recipe blogs that utilize the products they sell. A spice manufacturer could offer recipes using its ingredients, or an organic foods purveyor could offer tips on cooking and eating right in addition to a multitude of health-conscious recipes. Really, any blog could similarly tie into the company site and its products or services. Kitchen or cooking supply firms could offer cooking tips and processes that involve their products. Or they could answer technical “what is this?” and “what’s it for?” questions, and offer “stories from the front” relating real-life kitchen experiences, including important safety reminders.

Affiliates-and everyone else
Blogging is important for all firms, but can be enormously beneficial to affiliates. Every idea related above is just as relevant and powerful in the affiliate world, if not more so. Many affiliates keep their sites spare, just desiring to get the visitor through the site to get the sale. But by creating a highly informational and helpful blog in any industry, they can drive affiliate traffic and sales organically with high conversion. Anyone who wants to be a successful affiliate can use any of the above blog ideas as an affiliate to an industry.

Clearly, blogs are extremely valuable in the right hands. It may take a few tries to get your particular formula working smoothly and consistently, or to come up with just the right approach for your situation, but it’s time well spent and the ultimate results will be good for business. If you keep a service mentality and put yourself in the reader’s place during both the development and the writing phases, you will stay on track and your company will reap the benefits.

Dave Davies is the CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization, Inc. Beanstalk offers seo services, consulting, training and free keyword research services. Dave Davies has been involved in SEO since 2001 and shared his experience through articles, speaking at conferences as well as on his weekly radio show Webcology on WebmasterRadio.fm.

Article Source: ArticleCo.com

By Paul Marshall

You probably don’t need to read the latest advice from the online marketing consultants to figure out the basic idea behind link building. Without links, your site won’t develop authority. Without authority, it won’t move up on the search engines. But even the most savvy online marketing consultant would have to admit that doing that is just not as easy as it sounds.

** More is Not Better in Link Building **

Just going out and getting a bunch of links won’t necessarily help your site. You need quality links to get higher search rankings. But sometimes figuring out what makes one link better than another is tough. This is where you do need to keep up with what the online marketing consultants are recommending or you may just be wasting your time.

** Targeted Anchor Text is a Must **

When you start pursuing links on sites, you need targeted anchor text. However, you don’t want to use the same text everywhere. Google will notice that in a bad way. You want to use two or three different phrases and the proper name of your website. If you can’t get anything but an image link, make sure the site owner puts your anchor text or the name of your site in the ALT tag of the image.

** Pay Attention to Links In and Out **

Google looks at the site where your link appears and decides how much benefit your site gets back. A site with a lot of inbound links passes more authority to your site. At the same time, being linked on a site full of low-quality, outbound links probably won’t help you much.

** PageRank Isn’t Everything **

Don’t be one of those site owners who sees nothing but PageRank. A site with high PageRank can still have low link value. This is especially true of sites that sell links. Steer clear of sites that use phrases like “sponsored by” or “paid for by.” Google may not let that site pass PageRank at all. Move on. They’re not worth your time.

** Concentrate on Site Relevance **

Let’s say your site is about red widgets. You get a link on a site about purple doohickies. That link isn’t worth as much as one on a site about red widget management. Make sure you’re pursuing links in relevant places and look at how those places are optimized. If a site owner gives you a choice of having a link on a page titled “About Us” or one with the title “About Red Widgets,” which one do you choose? The link on the optimized page, “About Red Widgets,” has more value.

** An Online Marketing Consultant Checks What’s Not Obvious **

Take your cue from the pros and check sites in ways that aren’t obvious. For instance, in any search engine, you can type in “cache:” followed by a site url and find out if the site has been indexed and when it was last crawled. But what do those dates mean?

Chances are good that if the site hasn’t been crawled in 30-45 days, it’s not a good place for a link. But some domains have more value than others. For example, links from .edu domains are better than from a .com, but .info is worth less. All these factors should be weighed in judging a site’s worth in your link building efforts.

** Does Social Networking Matter? **

We’ve all seen the little link bars under blog posts and in forums asking people to Digg or Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. Do you need to try to get links in places where social networking can happen? Yes. Alone those links may not have a lot of value, but Google is increasingly looking at the “active Web” in determining site authority.

It’s time consuming, but participating in forums and social sites and getting blog owners to run your articles with your linked anchor text included can be worth your time. But remember, relevance is a basic rule in online marketing consulting.

** Are You Getting Clean Links? **

When you get a link on a site, do you go look at the page’s source code? Is there anything extra in the “href” tag on the link? Is the site using redirect code? Is there a “nofollow” in the site’s meta data? If there is, the link is useless to you. It won’t pass any authority to your site because that code tells the search engines not to follow the link. Make sure you’re getting clean links.

When you’re on a tight budget and trying to develop your site and get higher search rankings, it can be a tough decision to work online marketing consulting into your thinking. The Web used to be pretty much a do-it-yourself place. That all started to change in 2004 when people began talking about “Web 2.0.”

It’s harder than ever to judge quality link building in the new world of Web applications and social networking. You can do it, but try to stay up to speed on what the online marketing consultants are recommending as good strategies. The Web is changing all the time. Good link building takes time and effort; you don’t want to waste those any more than you want to waste money during hard times.

Marketing online since 2004, Paul Marshall can help you market on a budget.
He’s an Online Marketing Consulting expert offering marketing services (and d-i-y Coaching). He also offers href="http://strategicwebmarketing.net/search-engine-positioning.html"
>Affordable SEO services. You can learn more about Paul at Strategic Web Marketing.net.

Article Source: ArticleCo.com

By patrick mitsuing

There are so many tools and resources in the world to build your business, so why twitter? How can twitter help you make more money from home, give you more freedom to spend time with your loved ones, and help you towards the life you really want.

Well have you ever heard of the expression - “the income is in the list”. Well in marketing, every top earner knows that the income is in the list of prospects who subscribe to you, or in this case follow you. With internet marketing potential customers have squeeze pages, and drive traffic to their squeeze pages to increase the number of prospects they have in their “lists”. Marketers can than promote to their list with affiliate products, and their own products to make an endless stream of income. So why twitter, and how can you start making income with twitter.

Their are many ways to build your lists to huge sizes using twitter. I’ve studied many of them and came up with the two that win big when creating a huge list of followers using twitter.

One is with advertising, creating a community, and getting everyone involved. Celebrity Ashton Kutcher had international media coverage on his race to a million followers for twitter and won. News stations all over the world covered the story which gave him so much attention and an explosion of followers on twitter.

Now Ashton has well over 4 million followers on twitter, which gives mega power for free advertising. With a push of a button he can reach 4 million followers for free, which was only once available for companies with deep pockets.

Also celebrities and other entrepreneurs with huge lists are implementing paid to tweet. Which means they get paid to write a post on twitter. Each tweet being worth thousands of dollars, and an easy stream of income for people with a huge follower base on twitter.

The next way to build a huge twitter list is to always provide value. If you are going to post a website on your twitter, don’t send it to your affiliate link or website, send it to something with useful information, valuable information so your followers have a good twitter experience with you. If you are always trying to sell people will get turned off by you and unfollow your twitter account.

Proof that providing value works can be seen by viewing RevRunWisdom twitter account who tweets about life, love, self-help, and over coming struggles. He has a twitter list of 750,355 entrepreneurs who follow him and he never promotes a site or anything, just provides massive value. And people can check out his website by checking out his twitter profile.

By providing a value and making entrepreneurs feel better by reading your tweets will cause a viral effect and your twitter account will explode to a size where you can start making instant cash of your twitter tweets. So I hope your still not wonder why twitter and how to use it to build your MLM business or home business.

If you liked this article on why twitter and want to learn more follow Patrick Mitsuing the Internet Renegade by clicking here - follow pat

Article Source: ArticleCo.com