Blogging Posts from the Internet Marketing Blog
Why Blog? Three Good Business Reasons to Blog
Richard Kraneis, a longtime WordStream reader, recently left a comment on our blog questioning whether a certain post would "drive qualified traffic to our website." This brings up an interesting question: Why blog? What are the goals of blogging?Of course the answer is different depending on whether you're talking about a personal blog or a corporate blog, but this is a business blog, and we wouldn't devote resources to blogging if it didn't make good business sense.
Here are three reasons that might motivate you to write a blog post for a corporate blog. In my opinion, every blog post doesn't need to fulfill all three purposes, though it's great if they do. The important thing is that every post fulfills at least one of these purposes, and that you don't focus only on one of the thr... > Read more
5 SEO Recommendations for Better Business Blogging
Corporate blogging is a great Internet marketing technique for multiple reasons. Not only does a company blog give the search engines more content to index (growing your trust factor), a business blog can be instrumental in building your online brand. Blogs are inherently social in nature, which means they are also a great way to connect with current and potential customers.
In short, a well-written blog can help all aspects of your web marketing campaign, including SEO. Here are five simple ways to better optimize your business blog for SEO: Write naturally It may sound like a “duh!” thing to say, but you’d be amazed at how many blog posts out there are crammed with keywords and anchor text. It’s the number one rule of any content marketing campaign: you have to wr... > Read more
Top 5 Ways to Monetize a WordPress Blog
Many people start a blog with one intention: making money. While this is not a good sole reason to start a blog, it is a nice added benefit that comes with building up your blog with quality content and maintaining a decent amount of traffic.It’s not a mystery that you can make money from your blog, but many users often struggle with it and end up giving up altogether.
You cannot expect to make a lot of money when first starting out. You have to create a name for yourself and prove that your blog can stand on its own. While these five methods to monetize your WordPress blog are sure to come in handy, you’ll also want to take note of the essential tips for building and maintaining a successful blog.Pay Per ClickThis is one of the most popular methods used to monetize a blog and one of t... > Read more
Launching My First Blog: Learning from My Mistakes
What’s the old saying? “One definition of crazy is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results”? Are you “crazy” when it comes to online marketing or do you adapt and learn from your mistakes? After 12 months, I’m adapting. Around March 1 of last year I began my Online GED Site blog.
I never expected it would make tons of money. I hoped it would teach me about blogging, WordPress, Google Analytics, keyword research, and using some of WordStream’s free tools. Here’s a graph of my visitor traffic for one year. It took 8 months to attract my first 1000 visitors. Now, during this last month, I attracted 1000 visitors in 30 days alone. What were my mistakes? A failure to build backlinks, building an email opt-in too... > Read more
How to Build a Blogger Outreach Campaign, Part 2
This is a guest post by Erin Everhart. Erin is the marketing associate for web design company 352 Media Group, a certified Microsoft Surface developer and leader in web marketing. She specializes in social media marketing, search engine optimization and content management, developing web marketing and blogger outreach campaigns.
She’s a frequent blogger across multiple sites and holds a B.S. in journalism from the University of Florida. She has an unhealthy addiction to salt, EM dashes and the Gators. Follow her on Twitter: @erinever. Traditional advertising is so 2010. It shows too: People just aren’t trusting and are learning to tune out those banner and video ads that pop up. So why spend your money on something that may or may not get you results, especially when there are ample su... > Read more
Using Google Insights for Search to Fight Blogger's Block
If you write blog content with any consistency, you've stared at a blank page anxiously as time winds down on a deadline. But one of the great things about being a blogger is the wealth of keyword tools available online. Rather than being left to your own brainstorming devices, you can use any of a number of tools to come up with great blog ideas.
One such tool with a lot of great features for blog ideation is Google Insights for Search. Getting Started: Using Google Insights for Search Terms & Filters We'll start at the beginning and look at some different ways to seed our search for great blog ideas. We have some great options at our disposal for filtering the types of insights we get from the tool right out of the gate. If we're running a local blog we can use time range in the... > Read more
Be Nice to Bloggers & They'll Be Nice to You: How to Build A Blogger Outreach Campaign, Part 1
This is a guest post by Erin Everhart. Erin is the marketing associate for web design company 352 Media Group, a certified Microsoft Surface developer and leader in web marketing. She specializes in social media marketing, search engine optimization and content management, developing web marketing and blogger outreach campaigns.
She’s a frequent blogger across multiple sites and holds a B.S. in journalism from the University of Florida. She has an unhealthy addiction to salt, EM dashes and the Gators. Follow her on Twitter: @erinever. AP officially recognized blogs as credible news sources in September 2010, but people have trusted blogs a lot longer than that. In fact, due to an over-saturated, price-driven advertising market, blogs — and the recommendations and sharing of inf... > Read more
10 Great Corporate Blogs and What Makes Them Work
This is a guest post by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant to iAdvize, a live chat support tool. Corporate blogs have a reputation for being nothing more than another way of distributing press releases. This is because most companies just don't understand how blogging is supposed to work, and they view it as a way to talk to the public rather than with them.
While corporate news, sale announcements and product launches are all important things to have in a corporate blog, they don't have to be the focus. A good corporate blog offers readers a reason to subscribe and can keep customers connected and interested in a company, even when nothing in particular is happening. But while creating an engaging corporate blog is not complicated, very few companies seem to have mastered it. However, som... > Read more
Blog Strategies: How to Build Relationships with Bloggers
I've been blogging now for a little over three years now, and one of the important lessons I've learned during that time is that, to have a successful blog, you need to build relationships with other bloggers. Now, smart link builders have long understood that "link building is relationship building," and you will get more links by forging friendships than you will cold emailing strangers and begging for links.
The same holds true for "blog building," and developing relationships with your contemporaries is something that should be part of every bloggers' strategy. Networking with other bloggers in your niche allows you to: Develop mutually beneficial connections Generate more awareness for your own blog Establish credibility and cache for you and your blog (via a recommendation from an ... > Read more
How to Get Deep Links with Optimized Anchor Text from a PageRank 6 Website
On-page SEO just isn't enough to secure great rankings. You also need incoming links, which signal to search engines that people value your content. You'll get the best results if these links are: From high-authority domains Relevant to your marketspace Deep, i.e., not just to your home page Optimized with targeted anchor text So how are you supposed to get these links? Write great content and hope for the best? Yes, to some extent, that's a strategy, but unless you're very patient, you'll probably want to be more proactive about getting good links.
One way to do this is by writing guest posts for prominent blogs in your space. The WordStream blog invites proposals for and submissions of guest posts that cover topics of interest to our audience (including SEO, PPC, keyword research ... > Read more
