Blog Content Provider .com

With more than 40 million blogs on the Internet, how well can you do with your own business blog? Here are some questions you need to ask yourself if you are managing your own business blog.

1. How many visitors is your blog getting?

2. How long does each visitor stay on your blog?

3. Which of your blog posts is most popular?

4. Which links are your visitors clicking on?

5. What is your blog’s technorati rank?

6. Is your blog listed at BlogCatalog.com and other blog directories?

7. How many people subscribe to your rss feed?

8. Do you filter and advertise your feed through Feedburner?

9. How well does your blog rank in the major search engines for your targeted keywords and phrases?

10. What is your blog’s search engine saturation?

People say they don’t have enough time to write their own blog every day, but even those who do finally find the time to do that are still falling short because they don’t know all of the other things that go with running a professional business blog.

I’m limiting this to only 10 questions, but could have asked a lot more. If you could not answer all 10 of those questions, then you should be thinking of hiring a professional to manage your blog.

Hiring a Professional Blog Writer and Manager is not as expensive as you might think. For as little as $300 per month you can hire BlogContentProvider.com to manage your blog for you.

We manage blogs for many companies and our clients can answer all 10 of those questions because we provide them with the information they need. Call us today at 786-317-8774 for more information.

Sunday, Blog Content Provider talked a little bit about link strategy among network blogs. I want to elaborate a little more on that subject today. Specifically, I’ll quote a paragraph from our post that day:

Circle jerks, where you have blog a link to blog b that links to blog c that links to blog d and blog d links to blog a won’t work anymore either.

At one time, that was a popular linking strategy. I wouldn’t try it today. The circle jerk strategy came about as a way to circumvent Google’s reciprocal link algorithm. Because reciprocal links are not considered as valuable as one-way links, webmasters invented the the three-way link. Site A links to Site B, which links to Site C. Over time, that got a little more complicated and soon you had circle jerks that consisted of 15 or 20 sites. Well, Google has figured out the game and changed its algorithms to stop that from happening. Surprised?

Don’t be. It’s not the first time and it likely won’t be the last. But there is another type of funky link strategy that you don’t want to try any more and it’s for the same reason. Let’s make it simply by taking six websites lettered from A to F and I’ll illustrate the web-structured link pattern.

• Site A links to Sites B, D, and F
• Site B links to Sites C and E
• Site C links to Sites A, D, and F
• Site D links to Sites B and E
• Site E links to Site A
• Site F links to Sites B, D, and E

Let’s further complicate this by saying that none of the sites are related to each other in content or subject matter. The only thing holding them together is that they are owned by the same person or group of persons. You might as well just get rid of all of these links because they won’t help you, and they might even hurt you in the long run.

The reason is because Google is placing even more importance on relevance with its latest (re: last week) PageRank update. Over the last few months, I’ve noticed fewer and fewer links from some blogs that I own and that are a part of NameCritic’s network were being counted in my link popularity numbers from Google. I became suspicious at the beginning of the summer when I saw links that before were counted and then weren’t. My suspicions proved correct. Google was discounting these links from non-relevant sites with higher PR on the basis of their non-relevance.

What that means on a practical level is that you should link your blog only to other relevant blogs with similar content, or your own website. The practice of linking blogs that are owned by the same person or network of persons isn’t going to be allowed. That means it’s time to get creative, and I mean really creative, with your link patterns.

Well, Google finally came through with a page rank update for the Google Toolbar. Not everyone is happy with the update, but that is pretty much true with every google page rank update.

People work hard on their blogs and websites. They read Matt Cutts’ blog. They read the Google blog. And they read everything people are saying about how to get ranked well in Google. They are paying attention to Google.

So when Google does a page rank update, they expect good results from all of their hard work and studying. Inevitably some are happy and some aren’t after an update.

This time around paid links and websites that sell them took a hit. But so did blogs that appeared to be networking their links and groups of blogs that each pretty much have the same exact blogroll.

How do you decide who you will link to? It used to seem as if the low value of reciprocal links didn’t apply to your blogroll. This last update has me convinced that if you are trading links with other blogs, then they are definitely being treated as reciprocal links now even if they weren’t before.

Circle jerks, where you have blog a link to blog b that links to blog c that links to blog d and blog d links to blog a won’t work anymore either.

Google is looking for links they know are relevant to your content and links that were not achieved in any unnatural way.

They won’t get it right all the time and some legitimate blogs will suffer a drop in google page rank even though they do everything right.

So don’t panic. Just keep building real one-way inbound links to your blog and watch that you only link to blogs and websites that really are related to your content.

When you write your blog posts, do you write your title first or do you write the blog post then the title? You might think this is a silly question, but it’s really not. I’ll tell you why.

Many times, bloggers make the mistake of writing their blog post title first then start writing the blog post and end up going off on a tangent. It’s like they just started writing and went stream of consciousness. I’d say the single most important thing to keep in mind when writing your blog posts - especially for business - is to stay focused. Writing your title first can do that, but I say you should write your title last.

The reason you want to write your title last is so that you can write a descriptive title using your keyword that accurately tells what your blog post is about. If you haven’t written the blog post yet then you can’t effectively do that. If you have some time, make an outline of your blog post before you write it. What points do you want to make? Think about how long the blog post should be and want points you want to bring out in it. The outline will keep you focused.

If you don’t have time to write an outline then at least have an idea of what you want to write about before you start writing. Write with the end in mind. If you know how the blog post is going to end then you can better write a powerful beginning. After you’ve written your blog post, go back and read it again. What’s the most important point you make? Take that and make it your blog post title, rearranging the words to produce the same thought and ensuring that you use your important keyword.

If you are prone to writing long blog post titles then you’ll want to shorten the permalinks that represent them. The reason you want short permalinks is to improve your SEO. Keyword density in your URLs affects your SEO much the same way as keyword density in your blog posts and web pages. The difference is that keywords in your blog posts and web pages carries more weight with the search engine algorithms, but keywords in your URLs are still counted to a degree. The problem with long permalinks is that the search engine spiders have all those words to slither through to get to the meet meat.

Then there are your human readers. Long permalinks are awkward. If someone wants to copy your permalink and place it on a website or send it through e-mail to a friend then the long permalink can be intimidating. That could scare some of them away.

Back to the spiders. When a searcher makes a query for your keyword then a carefully placed keyword in your blog post title will give you an edge. That keyword also appears in your permalink because WordPress takes your blog post title and turns it into your permalink exactly as is. If it’s too long then all those other keywords are watering down your keyword density.

Correction: On the right side of your admin area on the write page in WordPress you should see several blue tiles. One of those tiles is your Post Slug. Just below Post Password and above Post Status. Open up that box and you’ll see a place to enter your slug. It should be blank, but once you click “Publish” WordPress will automatically fill it in with the words in your blog post title and will add hyphens between each of your words. WordPress will do this unless you enter something in that box. Take your most important words (make sure one of them is your keyword) and enter them in that box separated by hyphens. Just one three words, four at most. If you have a long blog post title, your post slug will produce a shorter permalink and that will go a long way with your human readers and the search engine spiders.

There is seldom just one way of doing something. But there are principles to blogging that can make your blogging experience more rewarding. First, you should keep in mind that your business blog is just that, a business blog. It is not a personal blog - unless you’re John Chow.

A business blog is not meant to be a personal journal. It’s OK to share some personal information with your readers if you want them to know you better, but you don’t have to discuss every aspect of your personal life. That could run into some safety issues for you if you get too personal. But the primary thing that makes a business blog a business blog is its emphasis on developing business relationships with your readers. You want your readers to view your blog as a relationship -building and pre-sales tool without it being a blatant advertising message through and through.

What that means is, you want to sell your products and services, but your blog doesn’t have to be a hard sales tool to be successful. In fact, it’s better if you use a soft sale. In other words, don’t stress closing the sale on your blog. Use the blog, instead, to drive traffic to your website where you’ll close the sale. While this isn’t the only strategy that you can use with your blog, studies show that it is the most effective. And I think you’ll see much better results.

Because you don’t have time to do all the things necessary to make your blog successful is the most common answer to that question.

The second most common answer is that you don’t know how to do everything it takes to make your blog successful.

The third is that it’s actually less expensive to outsource your blog to us than for you to hire someone to do it for you.

The fourth and most important reason is that we get results for our clients.

Blog Management Services

Updating Your Blog on a Regular Basis: All websites, including blogs, are indexed by the search engines. However, blogs have the advantage of also being indexed by search engines and directories that only index blogs.

These blog search engines and directories do not work the same as regular search engines. They list the most recent blog post that is related to the keywords typed in. So in order to be found near the top for your keywords, you need to post to your blog on a regular basis.

Many people with an online business just do not have the time to do this. Our professional blog writers can post to your blog one, two, three, or more times per day to ensure that your blog is found at the top of blog searches more often.

Optimizing Your Blog for your Key Phrases: Each blog post becomes a webpage. Each of those web pages needs to be optimized for the search engines. Our Professional Blog Writers are trained well, so they know how to optimize each post for your key phrases.

Your Blog Linking Strategy: How links are created from your blog posts to your website is as important as the keywords used in each blog post. Our Professional Blog Writers are trained to use the right anchor text and on how to drive traffic to specific pages within your website based on what they are blogging about each day.

Getting Your Blog and Website Indexed: We manage an entire network of our own blogs and a large number of client blogs. This gives us the ability to add your links on other blogs that already have high page rank, traffic, and search engine placement. We can add your link to a few blogs and get your website indexed in search engines in less than a week.

Blog Setup, Installation, and Design: We install Wordpress for you. We host your blog on a fast server. We assign your blog it’s own IP Address. We install a theme for your Wordpress Blog. We configure the backend and admin functions for your blog. We handle everything.

Click here to contact us for a free quote on managing your blog.

Google “Recover Lost Documents” and what do you see? The No. 1 website is a blog. I think that proves something.

Not that standalone html websites can’t rank No. 1. They can. But the Web in 2007 is a lot different than it was in 1999. Back then Yahoo! looked like this:

and Google was virtually unknown, just a blip on anybody’s radar screen outside of Stanford University. It was much easier to rank a web page back in 1999. There weren’t as many competing for rank at any of the search engines. Since Google was barely getting off the ground, it wasn’t even the top search engine targeted by most Internet marketers. But it quickly came to be.

Since 1999, things have changed dramatically. Google’s algorithms have changed thousands of times. Yahoo! has purchased its own search engine crawler technology (Inktomi). Many of the search engines that were popular then are no longer alive or have migrated into something else, and the Internet itself has lost its innocence (if it every had any).

Allow me to modify that last comment: Porn kings no longer control the pace of SEO, though they remain the innovators in new ways of marketing their products. The Internet, while still a research tool primarily, has grown into a huge business enterprise. Folks are making money online, and lots of it.

Why Blogs Are Marketing At Warp Speed
All a blog is really is a glorified web page. Anyone can build a website now without knowing any html. In 1999 that wasn’t so. If you didn’t know html then, you were SOL. Now, you can throw up a blog and just start writing. In fact, your website could be nothing but a blog.

The reason blogs are special tools is because every blog post you write is treated like a separate web page by the search engines. In 1999, if you wanted a 100 page website you had to build 100 separate pages using html and a text editor. Today, all you have to do is write 100 blog posts. That can be 100 days at 1 post per day, 50 days at 2 posts per day, or 25 days at 4 posts per day. You can work it at your own pace. But at the end of 100 blog posts you’d have as many chances at ranking No. 1 for your search term as a webmaster in 1999 would have after spending hundreds of hours building web pages from scratch.

I’d say that’s an improvement, wouldn’t you? But there’s nothing saying you can’t do both - build a static website and a blog. In fact, that’s what most people who have blogs are doing. Your website might have 25 or 30 static pages on it (or more, if you wish) and your blog will just keep adding content to that every time you blog. So if you really want your website to increase its chances of ranking well in the search engines, add a blog, blog to it every day, and SEO every blog post like your life depends on it. Within one year you’ll have so many pages on your website you can’t keep track of them.

A very simple strategy for building more inbound links and getting new traffic to your blog is a thing called trackback. A trackback is a blog post that you actually make on your blog. But instead of just writing a post and publishing it in a vacuum, you trackback to another blog, which causes your blog post to appear as a comment on the other blog and links back to your blog.

Usually, your trackback comment on the other blog will appear as a paragraph or three or four lines of text. If readers want to read the entire comment then they have to click on the link to visit your blog. Then they can read your entire blog post. The other blogger benefits because the trackback links to their blog from yours and they get additional content on their page, giving them - and you - SEO benefits.

I like trackbacking because it usually drives additional traffic to your blog. These are readers you likely will not get any other way. But you have to keep a few things in mind about trackbacking before you do it:

• Don’t do it too often
• Make sure your comments are relevant to the blog you trackback to
• Make useful comments that will prove valuable to others
• Be interesting
• Don’t just do it for the link

How Often Is Too Often?

If you trackback to the same blog every day then that’s too often. I’d say don’t trackback to the same blog more than you have to. If you constantly trackback then people will get tired of seeing your posts and just ignore them. Moderation is in order here.

Make Relevant Trackback Comments

Don’t trackback to a blog about mechanics from a blog about flower arrangements unless your blog post is specifically relevant to the specific blog post at the mechanic’s blog. In other words, as a for instance, if the mechanic posted a blog about sending his wife flowers for her birthday by having the florist deliver them to the mechanic’s shop and place them in the driver’s seat so she would not miss them then you can trackback from your florist’s blog. Otherwise, don’t just make a bunch of irrelevant trackbacks.

Use And Valuable Trackback Comments

What is a useful and valuable comment? It’s one that others can benefit from. The benefit can be emotional or serious. It can make them laugh or cry (good tears). But it must convey some information that they would find useful. Otherwise, it will be considered spam and might get deleted by the other blogger.

Be Interesting

In other words, don’t be boring. Make interesting comments that people will respect. They want to like you. Give them good reasons to.

Don’t Just Trackback For The Link

Link juice is good. But link juice for the sake of link juice is spam. It annoys people. If you make useful, valuable, and interesting comments then your trackbacks will be received more cheerily. People will like you and they’ll return the favor.

I’ve seen a lot of people writing posts about autobloggerpro being used as a scraper tool for stealing content. They are right. There are people using autobloggerpro to steal content.

But does that mean the software itself is bad because some people use it in a bad way? I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, I have two blogs that have autobloggerpro software installed in them.

I don’t use it to scrape content from anyone. But there are some features in the software that can really benefit you with your wordpress blog.

Here are some of the things you can do with Autobloggerpro.

1. If you own or manage multiple blogs, you can manage all of your feeds into one place. You set your feed to summary on all of your blogs and add the feeds to your autobloggerpro blog. Now every post you make will put a summary into your autobloggerpro blog with a link back to your blog post on your other blogs. It becomes an online newsreader.

2. it comes with relinker software built in. That means you can go into the admin panel and put in links to your affiliates, websites, or blogs and associate each link with a specific word for anchor text. Every time a post contains the word you associated with a link, it automatically links that word to wherever you assigned it. Your own contextual ad program.

3. It has it’s own sitemapper built in that will update as often as you want it to automatically.

4. Rewriter is built in. To help with seo you can put in specific words and associate them with the words you want to replace them with automatically. So you can make all synonyms change to the exact phrase you are targeting.

5. Header and Footer Customization for each post. You can put whatever you want into the header or footer of each post one time and every time you post it will add those automatically.

6. AutoMeta Plus; This module runs entirely on autopilot when it is enabled. It compiles a list of unique keywords from each article and places them on the top of the page in the meta keywords list. This optimizes your page daily for the keywords that are in your articles and search engines love this. A list of common words (known as ’stop words’) is included with AutoMeta Plus from which keyword are excluded.

7. Autoposter: You can upload your articles into the queue and schedule your articles to post whenever you want. Related to timestamping, but for posting articles.

Of course if you use autobloggerpro, you should still add original content every single day. Building the link popularity of your autobloggerpro blog means the links to all of the blogs you pull feeds from carry more weight.

So Autobloggerpro is not a replacement for writing your own blog. It has built-in tools that help you optimize your blog and make some tasks easier.

Autobloggerpro can be found here.