The Inbound Marketing Blog

Yesterday, I published a guest post on ILiveinDallas.com featuring 31 Fun Things to Do in Dallas. This is my M.O. for that site. I’m working on one for this site.

Entrepreneurs, SMB owners, publishers, creative-types, writers, citizen journalists and independent subject matter bloggers don’t make the same mistake I did. If you have been blogging a long time whether for business or personal publishing, seriously consider the points made in this article.  If your goal is to gain influence over others, demonstrate expertise, promote your business, make money, get leads and sales, make connections with others interested in similar topics, express yourself or a combination of these, you should stop spending all your time building others’ content. Content equals currency on the web and you are someone else’s user generated content if you’re not blogging on your own domain. Always start with the end in mind.

If you are blogging “just for fun,” but are passionate about certain subjects, why shut the door to making it a viable tool for other avenues of life such as: building credibility and gaining respect in a particular area,  landing the job of your dreams, making money, and creating invaluable relationships in the mean time? As they say in academia, “publish or perish.” You can either be a footnote in someone else’s biography, or create your own. It doesn’t take as much effort as you think. You just need to 1) Register a domain 2) Get hosting (affiliate link, seriously a great host) and 3) Install a CMS or website builder (Wordpress, Drupal). I will show you the easiest way to do this in a future post, but for now this post covers many of the reasons why you should primarily blog on your own domain, not a hosted ad-centric blog network.

I realize no website or blog is an island, and having supporting profiles and posts on other websites where there is already a huge existing network is highly important. This is especially true when syndicating your content. You should only do this AFTER the content has been published on your blog and indexed by Google. The name of the game is having a large targeted audience of people who care about what you have to say and for the search engines to see your blog as the ORIGINAL source of that information. Read the rest of this entry »

Are there other bloggers currently blogging with consistency which you feel have the same philosophy on the subject you write about? Another great way to garner more readers, get more backlinks from relevant websites, and ultimately have a highly read blog which gets republished and referenced is [inter]networking with what you might consider competitors or same-subject bloggers. The search engines give you more credit for your keywords when sites that are on the same subject link to your website verses on off-topic sites. Secondly, if other bloggers in your industry like you, he/she will promote your posts as well to a much larger audience than you currently have.

Who are the Big Daddies which have a huge readership?
Before wasting your time networking with every blogger on your topic, you need a rating system to let you know who is worth going after and who is not. When a blogger does not owe his/her blog (hosted on wordpress.com, blogspot.com or Livejournal), it’s a little harder to tell.

If the blogger does own their domain, there are a number of yardsticks in which one can get a better idea of how valuable the relationship. Traffic, backlinks, RSS feed subscribers, PageRank, Alexa, comments/audience engagement are all great measures.  Add Search Status to your Firefox browser and you will be able to quickly judge who’s hot, who’s not. Also, using a site like Compete.com will give you an idea how much traffic a specific blogger is capturing each month.

How to Get on the “Radar” of Big Bloggers

Mentioning and linking to their posts from time-to-time will put you on their radar. Linking off of your site to get more traffic may seem counter-intuitive, but you have to look at the big picture. Aggregations of highly useful links add value to your readers. A-List bloggers knew this secret on their rise to the top, and they do it for a specific reason. The Law of Reciprocity.

Don’t think of this as “losing traffic,” because you’re actually adding value to readers, and gaining respect from competitors as a thought leader and team player in the community. Before you can be seen as a thought leader, you have to get on their radar. In the beginning you must think in abundance, not scarcity. Trying not to lose the very little traffic and influence you have currently will only aid in keeping your blog down on the search engines and in front of less people.

Here are nine ways to make them notice you:

1. Link to their blog often in posts using a DoFollow link and anchor text you think they would like.
2. Put them on your Blog Roll.
3. Subscribe to their RSS feed & be the first one to comment on their blog posts and do it often without SPAMMING or leaving extra links to your blog besides the one automatically provided in your handle.
4. Quote them with a link to their blog.
5. Be patient and develop a relationship over time before asking for links.
6. Befriend him/her on Facebook and Twitter & communicate with him/her often (don’t be discouraged by lack of response).
7. Guest post on other blogs he/she reads, but are not quite as popular yet.
8. Meet him/her in person at a conference and tell them you are a fan.
9. Have an excellent blog on a similar subject, mention you are a big fan, and offer to guest post pitching them on a specific and compelling article using an outline.

For almost five years, Neil Lemons has worked behind-the-scenes to help create exposure, traffic, leads, and sales through major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. Calling upon his diverse background in copywriting, advertising, marketing, and sales, he has been learning traditional SEO and SEM tactics since 2004.  He is the lead SEM Strategist at MarketingZen.com, a Social Media Marketing company. For more information on online marketing contact The Marketing Zen Group for a free site evaluation.

Flickr photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/67307569@N00/

Google AdWords is the greatest direct response advertising medium ever created. This fact has been recognized by more than one national business magazine, newspaper, and marketing guru. Some business owners have Google AdWords to thank for their entire existence and growth, while others have replaced their traditional advertising budget at a fraction of the cost to advertise on search engines with better results. Since 2001 these classifieds-style, “Sponsored Links” seen above and alongside organic search listings have created millionaires, they have also lost advertisers millions.  With a low barrier-to-entry, many business owners  and marketing managers have tried their hand at Google’s pay-per-click system. Some have soared, while others have hopelessly wasted big bucks without knowing why. Having looked at dozens of accounts over the years and managed over a million dollars in clicks, I’ve seen the costly mistakes often made. Below are six of the most common with solutions.

1. Always Bidding to Be Number One -  Ego bidding can cause expensive click wars. Always trying to be #1 over your competitors on one specific keyword just to be #1 wastes time and money unless you know your keywords’ true value or cost-per-conversion. For high volume, competitive, high cost clicks, make sure you know your keywords’ cost-per-conversion.

Solution: Generally, positions 3 - 10 have higher conversion rates because they receive less impulsive and irrelevant clicks. In recent years relevancy has been playing a larger role (Quality Score), and being #1 is not solely dependent on maximum bid. Calculate how much a customer or lead is worth to you and don’t spend more than that per lead (excluding the first month of testing or so). Swallow your pride, mind your ROI, and let your competitors waste their time and money on bidding wars. The one exception being when the keyword is the name of your company. Get five more common AdWords Mistakes & their Fixes. Read the rest of this entry »