Everyone and their dog (yes, there are a few dogs out there with their own blogs) have started up a blog these days, but many people just aren’t taking the steps needed to optimize their blogs for both readers and search engines. While blogs can be business related (another blog about mesothelioma anyone?) they can also be personal where you talk about the great ham sandwich you had for lunch today or the crappy service you had at that trendy restaurant last night. 

But whether your blog is business or personal, you should ensure that you are optimizing your blog for both your readers (after all, you want to keep those readers coming back) and the search engines. Unfortunately, optimization is an important step that far too many blogs seem to be skipping over, even those that have a broad appeal to surfers and have the potential to be monetizable.

However, optimizing a blog is a bit different than your standard website search engine optimization (SEO), particularly because most blogs run off standard blog platforms, or worse, run as a hosted blog on someone else’s domain name. And there are design issues that can be unique to blogs which can impact your rankings. 

Let’s face it, when you commission a styling’ new blog template, most blog designers focus on making your blog look the way you want it to. But unfortunately for bloggers, not very many of those great blog designers are also SEOs by trade, meaning that the blog design you use could actually be hurting your search engine rankings. While you may have a great design that looks wonderful to readers, new readers might not find you if your blog isn’t ranking well organically in the search engines.

Also, when you optimize your blog for the user experience, you make it easy for users to return and engage in your blog without dealing with any of the hassles that can cause them to abandon other sites or blog entries. Repeat visitors are the cream of your blog, so by following these tips you have given them the tools they need to return as well as the user experience that makes them want to come back.

Fortunately, if you are on the case to make your blog rank well while not hindering your visitor’s experience on your site, there are definitely things you can check – and fix – to prevent any indexing issues from occurring, and ensuring your blog a happy and healthy existence in the search engines.

So here is advice on how you can optimize that blog of yours for both users and search engines without alienating one or the other.


1) Dump The Default Template – Looks Count!
I cringe when I see a blog using the “out of the box” WordPress or MovableType template. Hire a designer to create a unique look for your blog, or at the very least, take advantage of some of the free templates available and customize it a bit with a unique logo or a slight color upgrade. 


2) Just Say No To Bad Color Schemes
While a hot pink with lime green color scheme might be your favorite, consider what your readers will be expecting. That color scheme might work perfectly on a teenage gossip site, but would look extremely out of place as the corporate blog for a men’s suit company. Likewise, gamers would think nothing of a black background on an Xbox 360 blog, but it would look horrendous on a parenting or pregnancy site. So while you should experiment with colors to find a good mix for your blog, keep in mind user experience and their expectations.


3) RSS Me!
Make sure you have RSS available. Many hosted blogging solutions don’t have RSS automatically available, so you will need to add it. And when you do add it, ensure you have those RSS links in an obvious spot. Don’t tuck them away at the very bottom of your index page after your most recent 20 entries, or hide them on a separate “About Us” page. Place all those handy subscribe links in your sidebar, which is exactly where people will look for them. If you use Feedburner currently, have a look at their new MyBrand option which allows you to host your own feeds for a seamless user experience.


4) Offer RSS & Feed Subscription Buttons
Yes, when people want to subscribe to a blog, they will often look for that orange RSS logo as well as the logos of the standard aggregators such as Bloglines. So it is worth the time to add the most popular ones to your blog so visitors can easily do their one-click subscriptions to your feed without it require much effort on their part. If you make it hard to subscribe, most just won’t bother. FeedButton offers a service that allows you to offer multiple RSS aggregator and feed reader buttons with a single expanding rollover button.


5) Offer Posts Via Email
Some people just don’t get RSS. So cater to them by offering them an option to get your blog posts by email instead. The most popular service to do this automatically is FeedBlitz, although there are also many other tools available to do this.


6) Decide On Full Or Partial Feeds
Do you offer full feeds or partial feeds? This is a personal preference, and is often dependent on what market space you are blogging in. One option is to offer two feeds, one being an ad-supported full feed, with an RSS ad included, and the other being an ad-free snippet copy of the feed, where readers won’t see ads but will have to actually view your blog in order to read your full entry. But this will often come down to personal preference, and the preferences of your readers.


7) Write Compelling Snippets/Descriptions
If you do use snippets for your RSS feed, be sure to make them compelling or leave readers with a cliffhanger to encourage them to click and read the full entry. This will get you many more readers to your entries than just using the default option of including the first X number of words in the blog post as the snippet. Use your excerpts to generate interest and clicks.


8) Pay Attention to How You Write
One of my favorite bloggers has the unfortunate habit of writing detailed long entries… without a single paragraph break and with the double whammy of also writing with a font size smaller than usual. If I look up for a moment, it is hard to find my place again in her 1000 word entries. As a result, I don’t read it as often as I would like to, simply because reading it is such a painful experience.


9) Spelling Counts
Spelling is also worth mentioning. Add one of the many spell checkers to your internet browser and run a quick spell check before you publish your entry. Every word doesn’t have to be perfect, and I am certainly guilty myself of letting on occasional typo slip through unnoticed. But I also get annoyed when I am reading typo after typo after typo in an entry. And yes, if it happens enough, I will unsubscribe out of sheer frustration.


10) Fontography Counts
Make the font easy to read. Some bloggers think it is cool to have their handwriting turned into a customized font, or use a trendy font that would be better suited to a scrapbook layout. But not everyone has those wild and weird fonts installed, which means that those people will see a standard font such as Times New Roman, and it can really kill the look of your blog. So instead design the text of your blog entries to use a standard font in a standard size.


11) Don’t Forget Navigation
Is this blog part of a larger site, such as a corporate blog on a site for a major company? Don’t just link to the main page of the blog. Syndicate your recent headlines in the sidebar to encourage visitors on the main site to check out the blog too.


12) How Fast is Your Host?
Another one of my favorite blogs has such a slow response time when I click from the snippet in my RSS to the full blog entry that I only actually end up waiting around for it to load about 10% of the time. Don’t lose readers because your hosting company thinks 30 seconds is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to load up a page.


13) Avoid Widget Overload!
Yes, there are definitely some cool widgets you can add to your blog, such as MyBlogLog or a Flickr photo box tied to your photo gallery. But be aware that having a large number of javascripts can slow down your site. So don’t sacrifice timely loading time for nice-but-not-all-that-necessary widgets.


14) Have Descriptive Titles
Some blog software actually makes your entry titles seem pretty repetitious in the search engine result pages, and can result in a lower click through than you might have had otherwise with highly optimized titles. If your title’s say something like “Jason’s Tech Industry Rants & Ramblings Blog >> New Xbox 360 title announced for April release” you should change it to “New Xbox 360 title announced for April release”. Unless you are well known as an authority blog in that market, the blog name is simply wasting crucial space at the beginning of the title tag and causing the rest of the entry title to end up getting truncated in the search results. And make sure your titles actually enhance the entry and don’t leave the reader wondering what on earth the blog entry could be about. Ensuring you have great titles when you have a small readership and are depending on search engines to send you readers is one of the first steps you should take to optimize your blog.


15) Look at your Cascading Style Sheets.
Most blogs use a tremendous amount of CSS to create that custom look. And while most of the “out of the box” designs that come standard with the installed template include all CSS in an external file, there definitely are some blog designers who will put their CSS on the individual template pages rather than placing it all in an external CSS file. And when you don’t place CSS in an external file, it can clutter up your pages and result in the most important part of the page – the entry text – being much further down in the HTML code when it has to go after the masses of CSS coding lines.


16) Post Often
The more frequently you post, the more likely Googlebot and other bots will stop by on a more regular basis. If you only post once in a blue moon, expect that it might take a while for Google to stop by and see that you actually have updated again. Google loves updated fresh sites, so it make sense to feed the bot what it wants.


17) Spread the Link Love
If you are blogging about a story, link up the original story as well as other’s commentary on the same topic. When you do so, you will often make those bloggers aware of your blog’s existence (if they weren’t already) when people click from your blog to theirs. And it also increases the odds that they will either link to you on that story or on something you blog about in the future. 


18) Be Aware of Your Anchor Text
When you link to someone’s blog entry, or even a previous blog entry on your own site, make sure you link well. This means instead of linking to someone’s blog entry with the anchor text “click here”, you link to them using anchor text related to the blog entry, such as “Jason’s scoop on the new Widget Xbox 360 game”.


19) Create Unique Stories
Bloggers love to link to other bloggers. When you write original blog entries, rather than just rehashing something someone else has already said, you increase the odds that someone will find yours interesting enough to link to and talk about. And a reader of that blogger’s blog might read the entry and decide to write something about what you said as well, meaning yet another link as well. And if you are fortunate, it will go viral, meaning suddenly it seems like every blogger in your market space is talking about what you wrote. Rinse and repeat as often as possible for maximum exposure and link juice.


20) Use a Related Posts Plugin
Not only does this make sense to keep readers around for other articles on your site that are related to your current post, but it also allows you to deeplink from a current page on your blog to older entries. Often, older entries get buried several pages deep on an archive page, and this allows you to showcase entries written months or years previously and give those “oldies but goodies” an extra little kick in the search engines. There are several related post plugins available depending on which blog platform you use.


21) Ping Other Sites
When you add a new blog entry, you might want to ping site such as Technorati and FeedBurner to let them know you have a brand new blog entry on your site. You can also now ping Google’s Blog Search as well for faster indexing in their blog search engine at blogsearch.google.com. Automatic pinging is an option in the control panel of most blog platforms including WordPress and MovableType. And Ping-o-Matic offers a service that allows you to quickly pick and chose what to ping.


22) Buy Your Own Domain Name
Don’t always think your free blog hosting company will be around forever. What will you do if you build up a loyal readership then one day you discover yourblogname.examplebloghost.com no longer works because examplebloghost.com has gone out of business? You want to make sure the search engines have a URL they will always find your blog at, rather than have to worry about them re-indexing your previously well-ranked blog on am entirely new domain… that is if you are lucky enough to get your blog posts from your free hosting company. Both Google’s Blogger & WordPress allow you to use their hosted blog service while displaying it on your own domain instead of their own branded one.



23) Manage Your Trackback & Comment Spam
You don’t want Google or Yahoo to find masses of spammy links on your site to all manner of less-than-quality sites submitted to your blog by a blog spammer. Use one of the many tools on the market for your blog platform to manage both comment and trackback spam.


24) Use a Good URL Structure
Don’t use “permalinks” such as www.yourblogsite.com/?p=123 . Instead, use www.yourblogsite.com/2007/01/01/blog_entry_title_here. Most blogging platforms allow you to change from the standard numbered permalinks to this style of search engine friendly ones. And just in case the blog platform you use has funky dynamic URLs for each entry, you will want to ensure that the bots can crawl them easily or use a mod rewrite to create a good structure such as in the example.

25) Use Great Categories
When you write a post, place it in 1 to 3 different categories related to the post. For example, and article on the television show Grey’s Anatomy could go under “Grey’s Anatomy” and “ABC”. Avoid the temptation to add it to ten different categories though, such as including “drama,” “hospital,” “interns” and “Seattle” because that is just overkill. But if you wrote something great on Grey’s Anatomy, you have made it easy for your reader to find all your posts on Grey’s Anatomy because they simply have to click on the category link at the top or bottom of the entry. 

While some bloggers insist that search engine rankings will come naturally to those who wait, who really wants to wait for Google? A blogger can run into several unique challenges when it comes to optimizing for search engines, and it makes sense to get the jump on it now than simply hoping that if you write it, the bots will come. It is far easier to ensure you have a well optimized blog now than trying to figure out what the issue is 6 months down the road when only your blog’s index page is found in Google!
Does anyone else have tips they would have put in their own top 25 list of blog optimization tips? I had some that didn’t make the cut for the top list, but am interested to hear what others feel are the most important tips.

Do you use mobile marketing for business?
Are you wondering how to get started?

Mobile Marketing

Why marketers should pay more attention to mobile customers
Jamie states that 15-50% of the people who visit your website come in from a mobile device and this number will continue to grow.
When consumers visit your website from a mobile device, you need to be there to meet them, understand mobile marketing and know how to connect with customers on mobile.
You’ll have to learn how to use mobile, as it’s a way to build a bridge between you and your customer.

Make sure you're mobile-ready

You’ll discover how more people check prices on their mobile devices while shopping and what you need to provide them to make sure they buy from you.
And you’ll hear that when people buy a product on mobile devices, particularly tablet computers, their total ticket price is typically higher than it is via a desktop computer.
It’s important to be mobile-ready—not only for B2C but for B2B too.
Listen to the show to find out how many people bought a virtual ticket on a smartphone while attending Social Media Marketing World.
Is there a social media connection when it comes to mobile marketing?
Jamie sees email as a social media tool. Sixty-seven percent of all “C-level” executives check their emails from their mobile devices. The better-known tools being LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
We all need mobile websites. Remember when consumers visit your site, one of the prominent things you want to do is give them the ability to connect with you on social media platforms from their mobile device.
You’ll hear Jamie give a great example of how you can use LinkedIn on a mobile device in a business environment.

Use LinkedIn mobile to find out about future prospects.

Photography is easy on a smartphone. Look at how well Twitter and Facebook have integrated photos into their mobile apps. It’s a great opportunity to grab customers. You’ll find out how Ramon De Leon, a regional Domino’s pizza guy in Chicago, evangelizes his business with the use of Twitter.
Jamie explains what mobile websites mean and the difference between a mobile website and a mobile app.
You’ll discover what you need to do to make your website mobile and why the WPtouch plugin for WordPress is an awesome tool to have.
Listen to the show to find out why social is mobile.


The most common types of marketing when dealing with mobile users
Jamie lists 7 things businesses have to think about when it comes to mobile marketing.

1. Mobile websites
2. SMS
3. Mobile display ads/banner ads
4. Mobile paid search
5. Location-based marketing
6. Apps
7. QR codes

These are the primary tools out there. Jamie’s advice is to make sure you always start with a mobile website and then move into paid search or QR codes.
You’ll hear Jamie give an example of how a restaurant can use SMS to drive more foot traffic to their business. It’s one of the tools that’s been around the longest and is well-established. People are comfortable with it.
When you use SMS, you have to go through an SMS service provider. There are many different companies out there. One that has been around a long time is Sumotext. You’ll learn the benefit of carrying out proper research on SMS service providers.

Jamie shares how there are some really cool opportunities when it comes to mobile banner ads and explains how you can do mobile display ads that are targeted on a house-by-house level, based on their purchases.
The advantage is that a mobile device can be identified at a residential location through geotargeting.
Listen to the show to learn how geotargeting works when it comes to statistical data.


How to get started with mobile marketing
Once you have a mobile website, the next step is to get into QR codes. You can search on Google to find out how to do a QR code.

QR codes are easy to do

Next, you can move into mobile paid search, which is low-cost and easy to get into. You can then start to spend a little more money when you get into SMS and mobile display.
Listen to the show to find out why mobile app development can be complex.

Typical mistakes marketers make with mobile
Jamie states that when marketers at typical small- to medium-sized businesses read about social media as a marketing tool, they embraced LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter very easily.
However, when it comes to mobile, they think it sounds too technical and difficult. They believe that they have to hire someone to do this for them.
So the #1 challenge is that people are afraid of mobile marketing. Jamie says that it’s not that mysterious—it’s just another channel to use to connect with customers.
Listen to the show to hear why you shouldn’t be afraid of mobile marketing.

Survival Tip: Getting Out

I’m a Fitbit fan. It’s a pedometer, calorie counter and distance counter all in one. I try to walk 10,000 steps a day and as the weather has started to improve, I’ve managed to get more serious about it.

Fitbit is great for accountability.

If you want to get more exercise, the Fitbit is great for accountability. It will allow you to see your progress over a period of time and connect with friends to see what kind of progress they are making.
So let’s get outside and start walking more.
Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how this works for you.

This Week’s Social Media Question

Stan Dubin from Hiring Tips asked, “If you were going to start over from scratch, which social venue would you concentrate on first, and why?”

Hiring Tips

Stan also said,”My area of focus is helping people to make better hiring decisions. We provide employee testing and a hiring tips newsletter. We’ve got a lot going with social media and we’re making progress, but a number of our clients are pretty new and I wanted to give them a good starting point.”
You’ll learn why I advise Stan to start on LinkedIn.
Here are some steps to take when deciding which platform to choose for your first social media marketing efforts:

• Ask your customers where they hang out
• Master that domain
• Measure and track what kind of progress you make
• Come up with some metrics
• Measure on a weekly basis
• Start to expand to second- or third-level social networks

 By Michael Stelzner

Do you blog? Feel like you’re trying to reinvent the wheel time and again?
Looking for some ideas to simplify your content creation process?
What follows are 26 tips, from A-Z, to help you create optimal blog posts every time you sit down to write.

1- Anatomically Correct

A blog post contains several areas that require our attention and care. Pamela Seiple refers to six parts of the anatomy of a lead-generating blog post:

• Eye-catching title
• In-text links to landing pages
• Sidebar/banner calls to action
• Social sharing buttons
• Call to action at the bottom
• Relevancy—making sure the post is relevant from top to bottom

 

2- Blogging Platform

By knowing the ins and outs of your blogging platform, you’ll ensure that your posts look as good as they can. Take the time to master the visual editor (or raw HTML, if you prefer) so that you know how to format a post, insert an image and embed a video or podcast.
Whether you’re working in platforms such as WordPress, Tumblr or Posterous, it’s good to stay up to date on the features and new versions.
If you’re not comfortable with the more technical aspects of blogging, try to find someone who can be a resource for you to answer questions as they arise.

3- Categories

Whether your new blog post is a stand-alone article or part of a series you’re writing, it should fit into your blog categories as well as your overall corporate content strategy. Meaning that you want to stay on topic and have your posts fit into the categories you’ve established.
For example, HubSpot has nine categories on their blog. Posts are written to fit in with each of these categories. Writing about category topics such as analytics, blogging, email marketing, HubSpot TV, etc., allows both readers and writers to stay focused on what they can expect to see on HubSpot’s blog.
When you choose your categories, ask yourself, do they make sense, and do they fit into the objectives of my business? Having clearly defined blog categories will help you continue generating meaningful content and topics for your blog.

4- Description

Most search engines will use a maximum of 160 characters for your post description on their results pages. If you don’t create a meta-description (defined as a “…concise summary of your page’s content”), a search engine will often take the first 160 characters it finds on your page instead.
Note too, that when you create a meta-description that is fewer than 160 characters, you’ll see the full description in the search engine. Otherwise it will be cut off.

5- Editorial Calendar

Bloggers find editorial calendars helpful for scheduling and organizing topics for posts. Some people use their calendars to track more elaborate details.
Michele Linn suggests using specific tabs in a spreadsheet to track info for each post such as: post date, author, tentative title, keywords, categories, tags, call to action and status. She says “By tracking more than topic and date it will help to make sure the key elements you need for SEO, digital optimization and conversion are accounted for.”

6- Fine-Tune and Revise

Like other forms of writing, a blog post is rarely completed in one draft. Many writers find it helpful to take a post through several revisions and fine-tune the post as you go along. Check grammar, spelling and punctuation, and make certain that all of your links are working.

7- Guidelines for Writing for Search Engines

By following a few tips and best practices, you can increase the chance that your blog post will be found by search engines—by Google in particular.
The State University of New York at Plattsburgh offers these helpful writing tips:

• Google likes text
• Google likes formatting
• Google likes freshness
• Google likes accessibility
• Google likes outbound hyperlinks
• Googlebot isn’t psychic, so remember to link your pages
• Google likes you to tell it where you are
• Google likes experts

 

8- Headings

Joost de Valk offers some good suggestions regarding blog headings. He writes, “The heading structure of your pages is one of the very important aspects of on-page SEO. It defines which parts of your content are important, and how they’re interconnected. Because they have different goals, a single post needs another heading structure than your blog’s homepage or your category archives.”
He offers five basic principles about heading structure:

• The most important heading on the page should be the H1
• There is usually only one H1 on any page
• Subheadings should be H2s, sub-subheadings should be H3s, etc.
• Each heading should contain valuable keywords; if not, it’s a wasted heading
• For longer pieces of content, a heading is what helps a reader skip to the parts that he/she finds interesting

 

9- Images

Blog posts are made up of more than words and headings.
Judy Dunn recommends five ways the right photo can increase readership and blog views:

• Convey the overall feeling or emotion of your post
• Illustrate a metaphor or analogy that is part of your main idea
• Evoke surprise or curiosity
• Complement your headline
• Make your reader smile

Judy points out too that readers are visual learners and images can help people take in and retain information better.

10- Journalistic Approach

Bloggers can learn a lot from traditional journalists and the ways that they approach their news stories.
Mickie Kennedy offers five things that bloggers can learn from journalists:

• Get your facts straight
• Trust has to be earned
• Give credit to your sources
• The inverted pyramid works (basic overview in first paragraph and then delve into more details in subsequent paragraphs)
• Editing and proofreading are essential

11- Killer SEO and Blog Design

Cyrus Shepard makes an important case for having a beautiful blog. He says, “…the overall design of your site is the first thing visitors see and it significantly influences bounce rate, page views and conversions.”
Cyrus suggests that certain elements on the page will add to a blog’s success:

• Search box
• RSS feed
• Breadcrumbs (helping users navigate),
• Flat site architecture by minimizing the number of clicks it takes to reach your content
• Images
• Keep your best content above the fold
• Link to your best content
• Don’t overdo links
• Watch ad space
• Encourage comments
• Add sharing buttons
• Test the blog for speed
• Check your blog in different browsers
• Pick a powerhouse blogging platform (e.g., WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr)

For a resource that will help remind you of these killer SEO suggestions, check out Cyrus’ infographic, Blog Design for Killer Search Engine Optimization.

12- Lists

Lists have become a very popular type of blog post.
Nate Riggs offers three types for bloggers to consider: brief, detailed and hybrid lists.
The brief list has little description but can entice readers to bookmark the post to use the list as a resource down the road or to share it across their own networks.
In a detailed list, each bullet is a complete thought and serves as a good way to communicate complex information.
The hybrid list combines the elements of short and detailed lists, often with descriptive narratives or explanations in paragraphs between the actual lists.
Nate’s post has a lot of useful information about lists as a powerful content marketing tactic and is a good example of a hybrid list.

13- Metrics for Blogging

Magdalena Georgieva identifies five metrics to keep an eye on to know how your blogging is going: visitors, leads, subscribers, inbound links and social media shares.
As Magdalena says, “Measure the performance of your business blog regularly to identify weaknesses in the content you’re producing, what topics your audience truly cares about, and what blogging tactics work for you.”
When you find topics and approaches that work particularly well, try to replicate those efforts and be willing to let go of features that aren’t performing well. Magdalena recommends looking at your five most successful blog posts and asking, “What do they have in common?”

14- Names, Titles and Bio

Not only are readers interested in the content in your blog post, they also want to know who wrote the post and their role at your organization.
Sometimes you’ll come across a thoroughly researched and well-written post only to find an attribution of “admin.” Even if the blog is only written by you and you’re the administrator of the blog, be sure to include your name, title and a way for readers to contact you.

15- Original vs. Curated Content

The type of post you write can contain completely original content or can consist of content that you’ve curated.
Pamela Seiple addresses the issue of curated content and makes an important point when she says, “There’s a misconception among marketers that curated content is lazy and unoriginal, but we think it’s the complete opposite. It takes time and careful evaluation to create quality curated content and the result is oftentimes a very valuable piece of content that helps people seeking information on a given topic to cut through the clutter on the web and save time.”
The 26 tips series here on Social Media Examiner is an example of curated posts, pulling in the expertise of others who have written on the topic. As a curator of this kind of post, I love the journey of the research and find it especially rewarding to see the content pulled together in a way that hadn’t been previously available. Curated posts can be incredibly gratifying!

16- Publish and Promote

Kristi Hines speaks about the publishing and promoting stages of creating a successful blog post. Kristi says that one thing you want to do during the publishing stage is to ensure that your post has some kind of call to action. “Think about what you want people to do once they’ve read the post….”
Promoting a blog post can involve a fair amount of thought and strategy, as you’ll see from Kristi’s approach. She has a different plan in place for “averagely awesome posts, awesome posts and killer awesome posts.”
What differs for the three types of posts is how many social networks she shares the posts with, whether she includes the post in her writing portfolio and whether it’s included in her custom RSS feed or utilizes blog commenting promotion and direct messaging partners in social media to see if they’ll help spread the word.
Kristi describes promotion as taking from a few minutes to a few hours, and recommends taking the time to build a good foundation before you expect to execute a successful blog promotion.

17- Questions

What are you going to write about post after post, week after week, year after year? Sometimes thinking about content for your blog can seem daunting.
Lee Odden offers a great piece of advice: “One particularly effective way to get content ideas for blogging comes from reviewing web analytics for the kinds of questions people type into search engines like Google or Bing that deliver visitors.”
In one example, Lee said that he noticed that numerous visitors each month were typing in the question “What does a community manger do?” and search engines were sending them to one of his posts about that topic. He used it as an opportunity to explore other related questions about social community managers and providing content in the form of answers.
What questions are your web visitors asking before they arrive on your pages? How can you maximize your content to answer readers’ questions?

18- Research

Well-researched blog posts can differentiate your content from your competitors’. Being known as a go-to source in your industry will help make your blog stand out. Where do you go to research posts?
I find that utilizing a variety of sources helps me gather the information I’m seeking.
For example, while I can often find a lot of useful content via web-based searches, sometimes there’s nothing like a visit to the library or a bookstore where I often will discover a helpful book on the shelf that I wouldn’t have known existed if I hadn’t been standing there physically eyeballing them.
Oli Gardner makes a good case for using social media research for your blog posts. He suggests ten social media research strategies:

• StumbleUpon
• Infographics
• Twitter real-time searches
• Facebook events
• Experts who are using LinkedIn
• Uncovering quotes with Delicious
• Letting users tell you within the comments section of your blog and others
• Creating roundup mega-lists with Delicious and StumbleUpon
• Apps on Facebook
• Delicious and Google Marketplace
• YouTube and the UrbanDictionary

 

19- Stand Out

When you’ve been blogging in a competitive marketplace for a while, chances are good that you’ll see other bloggers writing on topics similar to yours. It doesn’t mean that you have to stay away from the topic completely; rather you can use it as an opportunity to see what worked and didn’t work in their post and write yours in a way that will help you to stand out in the topic area.
By reading the comments on similar blog posts, you will get a great view of what questions and thoughts people had after reading the post and you can take a slightly different angle by making sure you cover those areas in your article.

20- Title

How important is the title of your blog post? Simply put, very important!
Brian Clark writes that the title is the first, and perhaps only, impression you make on a prospective reader.
He says, “Without a headline or post title that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist.
But a headline can do more than simply grab attention. A great headline can also communicate a full message to its intended audience, and it absolutely must lure the reader into your body text.”

21- User-Centered Content

Possibly one of the worst mistakes a blog post can make is missing the mark of its readers, forgetting who they are and their needs and interests.
Georgy Cohen goes as far as to say that content can serve as customer service and that to be helpful, content should be user-focused (asking what our users’ problems and priorities are), communicated clearly and presented in succinct language.

22- Valuable Content

In the perfect blogging world, creating valuable content would be at the top of every blogger’s list for their post objectives.
While our definitions about valuable content may vary, Ahava Leibtag has created a very helpful step-by-step checklist that reminds us to ask five questions:

• Can the user find the content
• Can the user read the content
• Can the user understand the content
• Will the user want to take action
• Will the user share the content

She suggests:

• Findable content includes: an H1 tag; at least two H2 tags; metadata including title, descriptors and keywords; links to other related content; alt tags for images.
• Readable content includes: an inverted-pyramid writing style, chunking, bullets, numbered lists, following the style guide.
• Understandable content includes: an appropriate content type (text, video), indication that you considered the users’ persona, context, respect for the users’ reading level, articulating an old idea in a new way.
• Actionable content includes: a call to action, a place to comment, an invitation to share, links to related content, a direct summary of what to do.
• Shareable content includes: something to provoke an emotional response, a reason to share, a request to share, an easy way to share, personalization. 

 

23- Word Count

How many words should you have in your blog post? Some blogs have set parameters for optimal length and put a value on whether a post is short or long.
Corey Eridon has an interesting perspective on word count and suggests that focusing on blog word count might not be as important as you think it is. “Some topics take 100 words to explain, some take 1,000, and that’s okay.”
Corey suggests that writers focus instead on whether posts are optimized for mobile, use effective formatting, communicate in a clear manner and that outlining the points you want to cover may ultimately be a better use of your time and energy.
If you’re restricted to shorter posts by the parameters set up in advance for your blog, then you could also follow Corey’s advice to link to longer-form content you’ve developed around the topic.
Bottom line: Don’t let the quantity of words dictate the quality of your post.

24- (E)xcerpt

On the heels of our discussion about blog word count, a shorter blog post can also be an excerpt or summary of what readers will find in your longer-form content—e.g., eBook or white paper—but it needn’t be restricted to words.
You can also use an excerpt of the transcript or a brief description to demonstrate what information the users will learn if they watch your video or listen to your podcast

25- Your Story

Readers like to get to know how writers tick and often appreciate hearing a few personal details and insights from the person who has taken them on a journey through a post. While business blogs shouldn’t be thought of as personal journal entries, you can tell your readers a little bit about how you operate.
For example, I stated above that writing curated posts like the 26 tips series here on Social Media Examiner is one of my favorite types of posts to write. (Truth be told, curated posts are also some of my favorite types to read.)
In the description of “research” above, I also shared how research is one of my favorite parts of blogging and how I enjoy researching both online and offline by doing the footwork of visiting libraries and bookstores in search of materials.
What parts of yourself are you willing and able to share with your readers?

26- Zone for Writing

Ideas for blog posts come at all times—when you’re driving in your car, sitting at your desk, and yes, even in the middle of the night!
Chances are good though that the actual writing of the post will happen in multiple drafts and revisions, and depending on how you work, it may take place over a period of days.
What can be helpful is to create a time and place where you can get into the zone for writing and allow yourself to go with it, with as few interruptions as possible.
What do you think? How do you keep your blog posts consistent and dynamic? What tips would you add? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

By Debbie Hemley

When thinking about website, Google Adsense is probably the first thing that came to the mind of many people. Created in 2004, Adsense is the easiest way to make money online. Making real money with Google Adsense is not as easy as it seems, but if Adsense wasn’t an efficient way to make money online, people would stop using it.
In this article, I’m going to show you 10 efficient tips to really make money with Adsense.

1- Understand on which sites Adsense works

 [tweet]Is it possible to really make money with Adsense? The answer is definitely yes. But not on all kind of sites. For example, I own a blog in French about visiting New York City (it is called Visiter New York) and Adsense works very well on it. On the other hand, my most popular site, Cats Who Code always had terrible results with Adsense, because tech-savy people will not (or less) click on Adsense ads.
One of the best Adsense tip I can give you is to know which niche are good and which ones are to avoid.

2- Avoid “Smart-Pricing” like the plague

Smart pricing (which is everything but smart…) is when Google automatically gives the advertiser a discount based on the perceived value of your web site. Certain types of sites supposedly generate more sales so get a higher cost per click while others are typically more lookers and get paid less per click.
If Google placed your blog in the second category, no luck for you. In fact, for the same click on the same ad, a website can earn $1 while another will get on 10 cents!
In order to avoid getting “Smart-priced” by Google, you have to try to keep your CTR high. Low CTR sites (under 1 or 2%) generally ends up by being smart-priced.

3- Place Adsense ads on old posts only

In order to avoid smart-pricing, a great idea is to display Adsense ads on old posts only. Why? Because the vast majority of your regular visitors don’t click on ads. By showing Adsense on old posts only, you’ll definitely keep your CTR high.
The following function have to be pasted in the functions.php file of your WordPress theme.

function is_old_post($post_id=null){
   $days = 15;
   global $wp_query;
   if(is_single() || is_page()) {
      if(!$post_id) {
         $post_id = $wp_query->post->ID;
      }
      $current_date = time();
      $offset = $days *60*60*24;
      $post_id = get_post($post_id);
      $post_date = mysql2date('U',$post_id->post_date);
      $cunning_math = $post_date + $offset;
      $test = $current_date - $cunning_math;
      if($test > 0){
         $return = true;
      }else{
         $return = false;
      }
   }else{
      $return = false;
   }
   return $return;
}

Once you successfully inserted the code into your function.php file, you are now ready to call the functions in your single.php template as shown below:

<?php if(is_old_post()){ ?>
INSERT AD CODE HERE
<?php } ?>

4- Identify high paying keywords

To appear on Adsense ads, advertisers have to bid on a specific keyword. Some keywords, such as “mortgage” have a way higher CPC than others.
A great way to maximize your Adsense income is to identify those high paying keywords and use them in your blog. Several lists of high paying keywords are available on the Internet, some are free and some aren’t.
A good list to start with is this one, which is completely free.

5- Work with keywords

Although you can’t directly control which Adsense ads appears on your site, you can work with keywords in the hope that Google will display related contextual ads.
For example, if you’re writing a post about Javascript, the keyword “javascript” has strong chances of being used in Adsense ads. If you want Adsense to display ads based on high paying keywords, you have to put these keywords on your document. Don’t abuse though; you may be penalized by Google.
To check your keyword density, here is a great tool : http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

6- Use section targeting

As I said before, in order to maximize your revenue you have to work on keywords. But what if Adsense is displaying ads based on a keyword you don’t want to be used? Using section targeting, you can emphasis some text as well as asking Adsense to ignore some other.
The following example shows how to use section targeting in your posts:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
    Content you want to emphasize.
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
    Content you want to be ignored by Adsense
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

7- Display Adsense to search engine visitors only

Another way to avoid being smart-priced is definitely to display Adsense ads only to visitors who came from search engines.
The following WordPress hack will do that job perfectly. To apply it to your blog, insert the code below in your theme functions.php file.
Note that the $SE array is where you specify search engines. You can easily ad new search engines by adding new elements to the array.

function scratch99_fromasearchengine(){
  $ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
  $SE = array('/search?', 'images.google.', 'web.info.com', 'search.', 'del.icio.us/search', 'soso.com', '/search/', '.yahoo.');
  foreach ($SE as $source) {
    if (strpos($ref,$source)!==false) return true;
  }
  return false;
}

Once done, open the file where you want to display the ads and paste the following code:

if (function_exists('scratch99_fromasearchengine')) {
  if (scratch99_fromasearchengine()) {
    INSERT YOUR CODE HERE
  }
}

Save the file, and you’re done. Thanks to Stephen Cronin.

8- Go Large!

Adsense ads can be displayed in various formats, but they don’t provide the same results. Although it depends of many factors such as your blog niche and layout, the large rectangle (336×280) has proven to be the best paying Adsense format. It is also one of the few Adsense block which can display video ads.

9- Use a personalized Google search engine on your blog

Many people don’t like the way WordPress search works, and I must admit that this is not the best feature of my favorite blogging engine. In order to have better search results for my readers, I decided to give a try to a Google custom search engine. You can try it, search form is located on my blog sidebar.
The tools works very well, and you can start monetizing it using Adsense. I found out that on Cats Who Blog, the search engine is very profitable. For those who’d like to learn how to add Google search to their blog, a very old post from Cats Who Code explains how to do it.

10- Don’t break Adsense terms of service

At last but not least, one of the best bits of advice I can give to anyone who’d like to make money online using Google Adsense is to be careful with the terms of service. For example, if you click on your own ads, or display incentive messages on your site, Google will quickly finds out and they will consenquently ban your site from Adsense.
You have to play by their rules, so don’t thing you are smarter than them. Respect the terms of services, optimize your ads using the tips I just gave you, and write great content so people will visit your site and click on your ads.

by Jean-Baptiste Jung

If you have a killer idea for a start-up, but lack the time, resources and budget to develop a business plan, a business plan-generating app can help you get your plan on paper and, ideally, off the ground.
A number of apps simplify the often tedious, complicated process of crafting a thorough bank- and investor-ready business plan. You provide the information, they organize it into a plan, and hopefully soon you'll be in business. 

Here's a look at three apps that can help get your business plan rolling:

1. Enloop. This is an all-in-one web app that walks users through every step of creating a traditional business plan. Here's how it works: Based on the data you enter into the app, Enloop automatically generates sales, profit and loss, cash flow and balance sheet projections for you, complete with explanatory graphs and other compelling visual elements. Enloop also provides standard, yet customizable business plan text for each section of your plan, including portions focused on key company information and financial data.
Enloop's Free & Easy option includes a single custom business plan packaged in a clean, professionally formatted PDF file that you can download, print and share. More fully featured paid versions range from $9.95 a month to $39.95 a month and allow you to make multiple business plans. Enloop is only web-based and not yet available for mobile devices.

2. StratPad. Alex Glassey, who designed this iPad-only app, describes it as "a strategic-planning app that helps entrepreneurs with the thinking and decision-making process." StratPad can be a smart choice for people who are writing their first-ever business plan. It is packed with several free how-to tools for beginners, including a 58-page business strategy tutorial, view-on-demand training videos, email-based customer service, and more.
A free basic StratPad edition is available for students. Paid, one-time fee plans range from $9.99 to $54.99. The more you pay, the more advanced business plan options you get. The easy-to-use app guides users through a series of simple questions and prompts. Your answers are used to develop a summary business plan, complete with revenue projections and full-color graphs and charts.
3. Business Plan Premier. This $7.99 iPad app does double-duty for users who are eager to have their business plan backed fast. Not only does Business Plan Premier help you organize and write your business plan at an extremely detailed level, it also enables you to present your finished plan to more than 3,000 high net worth potential investors, who are also members of investment research firm Ben Stein & Accredited Members Inc.
Business Plan Premier leads you through writing your prospective company's vision and mission statements, product descriptions and marketing plans. You can also use it to complete competitive and SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis, outline your management scheme, identify your startup expenses, define your target market and more depending on your needs.

Your completed business plan is exported as a Microsoft Word document that you can edit, print, email or upload to Dropbox. Business Plan Lite is the free (but much less functional) version of the app.

BY Kim Lachance Shandrow