You are browsing the archive for SEO.

Successfully Marketing Your Blog: An Overview

6:36 am in Blogging, SEO, Social Media, Traffic, marketing by ClubBlogger

This is part 1 of a 4 part series on marketing your Blog.

So, you have decided to get serious about drawing traffic to your blog and hopefully making some money in the process. If so, you probably already know that marketing is the first major step toward building a successful income with your blog. At the same time, understanding how to successfully market your blog is a completely different animal. In fact, it can be downright frightening and even costly if you don’t know how to go about it the right way.


There are three major ways you can go about marketing your blog. These include:


  • Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

  • Social Networking

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques


Within each of these categories, there are numerous techniques and methods you can use to successfully draw more traffic to your blog. At the same time, it is important for you to complete some market research before you begin using any of these methods. Otherwise, you can waste a great deal of your time and money on marketing techniques that do not yield any real results.



Conducting market research involves getting to know your target audience in order to provide your audience with what it needs. In other words, you need to “get inside the heads” of those people you are hoping to reach with your blog. You can accomplish this by conducting surveys and polls on your blog as well as by visiting other blogs and forums that are frequented by your target group.


During the market research stage of marketing, you should not focus on participating in blog and forum discussions. Rather, spend some time as a “lurker” who simply reads the posts of the community members. This way, you can get a better idea of the personalities of your target group as well as the problems they are facing.


Getting to understand the needs of your target audience is the key to building a successful marketing campaign. After all, if your blog will only be successful it is able to fulfill a need. This need may be social in nature or it may provide information to the reader that helps the reader in his or her relationships, career, hobbies or other area. For example, if you are writing a blog about being a single father, it is important for you to understand the concerns and problems that single fathers face. That way, you can gear your blog posts toward addressing those needs.


Once you have successfully created a profile of your target audience, you will be able to better determine how to market your blog in a way that will bring targeted traffic to your site. In that way, you will be better capable of monetizing your blog or simply creating a meaningful community for your target audience if that is your goal.

The Power of Outgoing Links in SEO

12:05 am in Advertising, Links, SEO by ClubBlogger

It’s no secret Google use the number and quality of incoming links to help rank web pages in its search algorithm. In fact, this is a significant factor in goggles’ bizarrely accurate search results and something that other search engines are keenly developing. What is less well known though is that Google also uses the quality and quantity of outgoing links to learn even more about each website it visits. What is your website saying about itself with each outgoing link?

You can do a little experiment to demonstrate the power of this Google feature. Set up a page on an obscure new domain, but don’t advertise it. Instead, put a single HTML file with a plain list of links to a group of similar sites. The first thing to note is how quickly the bots notice your website, and then how surprisingly high your Google page rank will be for a website with no incoming links or SEO content.

So how can you take advantage of this new SEO device? Be creative with it! No one is really sure exactly what does and doesn’t work yet, even more surprising results might be possible than have been discovered yet. A good place to start though is in considering how you want your website to be classified and linking out to similarly classified websites. This will help to re-enforce the purpose of your website, increasing goggles’ confidence in its content.

Then there’s the regional trick. If you are running a local book store, make sure Google knows that it’s a physical store, and its location. Now use lots of outbound links to websites like Amazon and even to national book retail franchises. When someone searches for a book store in your local area, Google will return yours with significantly more confidence in the quality and size of the store, because of its inferred association with the big retailers.

It’s a fun and simple SEO method, which might result in significant gains for particular websites . Let us know if you discover something amazing!

Tips for Free Business on the Net

6:23 am in Advertising, Content, SEO, Web Hosting, marketing by ClubBlogger

The internet is the most democratic arena available for new business, intellect and service providers to show what they have got. If you’ve got something good to share with the world, the internet is the only place that will do it justice. The challenge is getting that good or service onto the web in the first place. The beauty if the internet is that you hardly need a single penny to get your product in front of millions of people. But you’ve got to know how to do it!

The first rule of making a free business is, open source software: The open source community has been around for as long as closed source development and open source products are comparable, if not better quality in some cases. Name a bit of software your business needs and it’s very likely that an open source version is available, in some cases making a choice to use open source software can save you thousands of dollars in licensing for single programs.

The second rule to free business on the net is: Cheap web hosting! There is simply no need to maintain or buy dedicated or virtual hosting if no one knows your website is there. Open a cheap account with a high quality service provider like godaddy and they will be very glad to quickly and painlessly upgrade your hosting as and when you need additional power, storage and bandwidth. There is simply no need to pay for a vastly overpowered service before it’s needed. A few adverts will bring in enough revenue to pay for your website hosting, making it free!


The final step to free business on the net is: Free promotion! Google the term ‘SEO’ and check our SEO blog category on the left. There is a wealth of free information available on this topic, which will teach you exactly how to configure and write your website to be search engine optimized. Custom SEO services are expensive because they usually come with guaranteed results, but these results are within your reach given enough time and understanding of the topic.

If you follow these three simple rules, you’ll get your business online for almost zero cost. Website builders and promotions agencies might try to sell your expensive packages and hosting services, but remember these basic rules and you’ll be fine.

The Danger of Low Quality Traffic

9:20 am in Advertising, SEO, Traffic by ClubBlogger

There are two kinds of traffic on the net, quality and… Well, not such high quality. Quality traffic represents a target demographic who may actually be interested in the product or service you are providing. These people are likely to return to your site if they like what they find, and there’s a distinct possibility that they will generate you significant revenue over time. Low quality traffic will usually make up the majority of your visitors; these are people who landed from search engine links, from reciprocal linking programs and random news sources. These people are unlikely to tour your website, and will have little interest in anything other than the exact reason they landed on your website.

What’s so bad about low quality traffic? Well, there is nothing inherently bad about low quality traffic if you are prepared for it, but there are a few things that it might represent:

  1. Search engines don’t understand your website very well and are sending the wrong people

  2. You are over extending your marketing programs. Untargeted marketing is next to useless.

  3. Quality traffic might not be able to find your website as a result of the first two points!

In addition to all these, low quality traffic costs you money! Though you might expect to offset your bandwidth and hosting charges with advertising revenues, low quality surfers are unlikely to pay for themselves, leaving your high quality traffic to pick up the bill.

Low quality traffic might look good on your monthly statistics, but a low quality surfer isn’t a tenth as valuable to you as a high quality one. Retarget your advertising campaigns, cut down on low quality referrals and slim down that hit count statistic. If you can remove ten low quality surfers, and replace them with just one new high quality surfer then you’ll improve the profitability and overall popularity of your website considerably.

Tips on Building Incoming Links

12:31 pm in Links, SEO, Traffic by ClubBlogger

If you are interested in optimizing your web site or blog so that it does well in the search engines, one of the most important factors will be how many incoming links you can get pointing to your site. While other things are important, such as on-page optimization and filling out the various tags with the keywords that you are targeting, without receiving ample links to your web site, you won’t do well in the search engines.


There is a lot a competition for high rankings. This is because high rankings provides individuals and businesses with free advertising. Therefore, you will need to be prepared to play the game. In order to win, you must have a good number of quality, incoming links. We will be discussing various places where you can pick up good links for your web site. Some of the common and most effective ways include using articles, social networking and bookmarking sites, related blogs, forums, press releases and even Google and Yahoo groups.

Articles continue to be a great way to get incoming links and also to pick up some extra traffic. If you write a good article (one that is not a sales pitch), on a popular topic you can expect to get hundreds of page views just from one very good article directory, such as Ezine Articles. To ramp up the amount of traffic that you get from article directories, it is best to submit them to more than one article directory. You can attempt to go big and submit your articles to hundreds of article directories or you can simply submit to the top 20 to 25. It is important to note that if you’re using articles for building links, then you will want to submit different versions of your articles at the various article directories. You can spin the article yourself or you can use a service such as submityourarticle.com, which will spin the article for you and then send them out to a number of article directories.

Social networking and bookmarking sites are also a very good  way to create incoming links. You simply need to write a short, news blurb about your website and add the link. If you use social bookmarking sites, you can simply add your link.

Blogs on related topics are also a very good to use for back links. However, don’t comment spam. Leave a comment that shows that you have actually read the blog and have gotten something out of it and want to give something back through your comment.

Forums are another excellent way to build links. Simply create a hyper link that includes the keyword that you are targeting. Press releases work similarly to articles. Some of the very top press release sites will likely get you included in Google News. Other webmasters may pick up your release, place it on their site, resulting in incoming links and hopefully an influx of traffic.

Google and Yahoo groups are another way to get links. Again, you don’t want to spam. If you find a topic that you are interested in, post something of value to the group and then leave your link.

These are all various ways to build links to your web site or blog. They have all proven to be very effective in building links and should also help you pick up some extra traffic along the way.