Level2wo

Drive Traffic to your Blog

Anyone who has ever written a blog knows understand that traffic is what it’s all about–or, at least, the eyeballs behind that traffic. But it isn’t easy building the readership that provides that traffic. Getting people to post a comment is even more difficult, but there are a few standard things you should do (or at least research), if you want to start building up that blog community of yours. Below you’ll find a few ideas to get you started.

1. Blog daily. Even if it’s a few short paragraphs (or one quick paragraph). You want your site to be active every day, as your site will be pinged by the powers that be out there, meaning feeds such as MyYahoo.com and other sites so your blog gets spidered by the search engines.

2. Use sites such as Ping-O-Matic.com to ping blog directories–and do so every time you publish an entry.

3. Invite everyone you know to subscribe to your blog. The more the merrier when it comes to your blog being read, obviously.

4. Link your websites (if you have any) to your blog.

5. Submit your blog to all of the relevant blog directories. See a blog you like that similar to yours in a directory? That’s where you should submit your blog.

6. Submit your blog to the search engines.

7. When you’re visiting other blogs, comment on another person’s blog entry. Make the entry a thoughtful one, because you don’t want to be seen as a rabid url poster. It’s the same as spamming someone if you aren’t really contributing.

8. Publish a newsletter as part of your marketing–and include the blog url within the content, or as a signature.

9. Make sure you have an RSS feed url that visitors can subscribe to.

10. Write articles on your particular subject matter, and post them around the web, making sure you include the URL to your blog.

11. Make lists (like this one).

12. Try to write articles that are relevant today, but that will also be relevant a couple of years from now. I know, I know, technology changes all the time, but there are truths that last.

13. Make your posts stick out somehow–it’s a blog, and you want to show your personality–just don’t get too crazy.

14. Try to use images wherever you can–people like images around the content that interests them, and it’s a great way to liven up the blog for your readers.

15. Include polls every so often, to get your readers involved.

Blogs can be a great way to generate traffic, as well as create yourself and/or your company as a thought leader in your industry. If you become a good source of information for readers out in cyberspace, you’ll continue to grow a following and, in the end, drive business–whatever business that may be, to your site and, eventually, your bottom line.

Optimizing your Website

There are plenty of things to do to optimize your website, and if you’re serious about driving traffic to your site, I’m sure you’ve been hacking away at it daily. A few things you can do to get traffic to your website kickstarted include:

1. Do A/B testing. A/B testing is a great way to improve what works over what doesn’t work. Making sure you continually try new things (read, improving the things you do well already, and nixing the things that aren’t working), will help drive traffic to your site. Maybe not overnight, but you’ll get there if you have some consistency to what you’re doing.

2. Do your homework. Before you begin testing of any kind, make sure you’re doing your homework in terms of what it is you will be A/B testing. Don’t start throwing stuff on the wall and seeing what sticks; optimizing your site means reading up on a good many website tactics and techniques will shorten the path to success.

3. Use Google Website Optimizer or any other testing platform to test your landing pages. Here’s what Google Optimizer will do for you, in Google’s words: “Small changes to your website content can sometimes yield big results. Discover what your visitors really want to see with Website Optimizer, Google’s free site content testing tool. Start experimenting today to optimize your web pages and improve your site’s conversion rates.”

4. Keep your testing to one change at a time. Altering various items on each page will dilute the accuracy of what you’re measuring. If you change 5 things on a landing page, how are you supposed to know which change is the one brining success? Or failure?

5. Get traffic. This may mean buying it through Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, but it’s how to best get that sample population in so that your testing is based on a decent size sample.

While these are just a few ways to optimize your site, or get you started on the right path to optimizing your site and your landing pages, they should help. Giddyup.

 Level2wo can help you optimize your landing pages and website in general.

Marketing and Technology

Marketing and technology go hand in hand for a number of reasons, and for marketers, technology has allowed for a great many expediencies, as well as scalability, reach, and a good deal improvement in terms of measuring ROI. Below are some general, not-so-random thoughts on using technology for your marketing activities, including tactics to use for your overall marketing strategy.

In certain places I will simply list a tactic and why you may benefit from it, but I won’t go into the ‘technical’ aspect as much as simply state the benefits. Feel free to pop an email if you want specific questions answered. So what are some ways to use technology to market your product or service (or even yourself)?

Website
Seems basic, but a lot of companies do not have websites because they either don’t understand the value, think they already have enough business delivered through their current channels, or because they ‘haven’t gotten around to it’. All three of these reasons may hold some truth, but these days technology and marketing go hand in hand. A website is crucial to at least having a presence online, where most research is done these days. You want to break down all of the hurdles that prevent your customers and prospects from finding you, and chances are that they will do a little research online about your company before initiating any contact.

Websites tend to be of two types–the business card online, and then the interactive type, which includes websites where consumers and business can make purchases, gather information, participate in web communities and social media sites, or do a host of things that add value to a user’s life in some form or fashion.

Websites are a great marketing tool because they allow prospects and customers to approach your business at their own speed, research and browse your offering(s), and take the steps necessary to initiate contact–all pull marketing activities that require little work on your end (at least after the site is already up and running).

Email Marketing
Email marketing campaigns are a great way to market to a great many people quickly and at a very reasonable cost. The beauty of email marketing (besides reach and cost) is that measuring the ROI is much easier than it would be if you had sent out DM (direct mail) pieces and waited for the phone to ring as a result. Email marketing campaigns allow you to reach broader audiences sooner, and they allow you to make edits and changes in almost real time (try doing that after your DM piece has been printed).

Blogs
Blogs are a great way to communicate on a more frequent basis with your prospects and customers. Blogging allows you to provide resources and valuable information to your prospects and customers directly over the internet, and with the great many blogging tools currently in existence, it’s also a relatively painless process on your end. You just have to make the time to write, and have the ability to offer your audience something worth reading.

Online Advertising
Everyone has heard of google and Yahoo! (search engine marketing) and many of the other search marketing tools you can use to drum up business using keywords and search, but online advertising is much more than throwing some money on a google adwords campaign. Banner ads are a great way to build your brand as well as generate leads. Of course, you have to make sure your banner ad is a ‘good’ banner ad, and you have to make sure you’re advertising on the ‘right’ sites where your target market hangs out, but banner ads allow you the opportunity to compete with the big boys in your industry that have budgets much larger than yours.

Webinars
Webinars are another great way to draw attention as well as educate your audience while building yourself as a thought leader in your industry. These days it’s pretty simple to create a webinar, and vendors in the webinar business make it pretty easy to execute.

Hope the above has given you some things to think about. If you have any specific questions about how any of the above may be able to help kickstart your marketing program, give Level2wo a call, or shoot us an email. We’re glad to help.

Writing for SEO

To continue on yesterday’s entry, I’d like to run through some quick guidelines for writing copy that you want to be SEO-friendly. I’m not going to touch too much on the more technical aspects of SEO–such as tweaking the meta tags, title tags, description tags, or having Google Sitemaps or anything like that. What I am going to do is run through a list of things you should do as normal practice when writing copy for your website, blog, or someone else’s website or blog. They’re pretty simple, but require getting used to if you want to write effective SEO copy.

I’m going to separate topics in a loose fashion here, so bear with me if I start rambling a little–I’m trying to let the creative spirit come out so you understand how I go about writing copy that I want to rank in search engines. Remember, there are technical things that also go with the content, but I’m going to focus primarily on the actual written words as opposed to ‘what’ you do with those words by making them hyperlinks, etc.

Keywords and Keyword Strings

Let’s face it–unless you’ve been doing this for a number of years, it’s pretty hard to rank for single words or your more common search terms. An entire industry has blown up around SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and it’s no longer a secret. That means it’s harder for you to rank faster for certain keywords. Part of writing copy that will get crawled and ranked means incorporating the keywords you want to rank for (or show up in SERPs, or search engine results pages). But you want to make sure you’re going to be able to compete for those keywords, and eventually rank for them. How? Well, by doing your research. There are a few sites out there that you can use, some of which have free trial offers, but that aren’t all that expensive anyway.

Sites to do Keyword Research
1. wordtracker.com
2. keyworddiscovery.com
3. Google’s keyword tool
4. addme.com/keywordsuggest.htm
5. gorank.com/seotools/ontology/

You can use the above keyword resources to also search for keyword strings (meaning phrases that you would like to rank for), which will likely prove more fruitful in the short term than trying to rank for single words.

Readability

Now that you have your keywords and keyword strings, it’s time to write the actual copy around those keywords. One of the most important things that you want to remember is that the days of tricking the search engines is pretty much over, if it isn’t over already. If you’re trying to rank for the term “website design“, for instance, then you want to write clean copy that is easy to read and that provides a good deal of relevant, new and informative information for the reader, incorporating the term “website design” as appropriate. What you don’t want to do is repeat the term “website design” a thousand times, the idea being that it’s a numbers game to beat the competition. Search engines are smart–probably a lot smarter than the smartest one of us. They know when you’re trying to trick them, and while keyword density is important, the magic number of keywords within content is not known to you or I, so don’t drown your content with your keywords. Make the copy ‘readable.’

Consistency

Once you’ve decided on your keywords, and have written the copy so that normal people can read it without wondering why every other word is the same, make sure you’ve done so with consistency. You want to have no more than two or three keywords per webpage that you’re trying to rank for. If you have another keyword you want to rank for, go on to the next page that deals with that keyword or keyword phrase. Don’t try to jam everything onto the same page. If you simply have to include a keyword on a page that already has a few keywords, then just hyperlink it to the page where you go into more detail on that keyword or keyword phrase (which, by the way, obviously helps with the internal link structure of your SEO).

Headings

Use keywords and keyword phrases in headings
Search engines like Google and Yahoo and the rest are similar to human beings in that they look at headers to know what’s in the rest of the content. Including your keywords and keyword strings within the headings will help the search engines better understand what they will find within the copy, which will make their lives easier and your pages more relevant and better ranked.

I know, seems basic enough. But the reality is that making sure the copy is written for the search engines is crucial to actually showing up in the SERPs. Again, I have not touched in this article on the need to use other technical tactics to ensure your pages are ranked; I have only touched on the copy. There’s much more to maximizing your optimization efforts…so stop on by for future updates on search engine optimization.