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In a forum the other day I had an interesting conversation with a couple of marketers. They believe somehow that content isn’t king. In fact, one of them went so far as to say that links are king. But if you try to build links to a web page with no content then Google is going to have a hey-day with you. My view is that links are just another form of content - off-page content.

Links are important, but on-page content should always be your starting point. Some people think that quantity of content is what makes or breaks your site or blog. Not true. Quality of content is far more important. But quantity does help. Especially on a blog.

Google will only rank one page on a website for a particular key phrase. Which blog post do you want that to be? Preferably, it will be your blog’s index page. But you won’t get your index page ranked highly on Google for popular key phrases without targeting that key phrase consistently over time. We’ve proven that you can do this. Yes, it takes time. And the more competition you have for your key phrase, the longer it will take.

At Blog Content Provider, we don’t discourage alternate ways of driving traffic and making money. But we do encourage using the search engines to take advantage of the natural, free ways you can rank your pages. Consistent daily blogging is one of those ways. We’ve done it time and time again, and we’ll keep doing it as long as it works.

Audio blogging hasn’t caught on yet, but it will. It’s just a matter of time. All it requires is a microphone, which is built into most laptops now, and the software to record your voice. Audacity is a free software that can take care of that for you. With WordPress and its podcast plugin, you can have your very own audio blog.

To create an audio blog all you need to do is set up WordPress the way you would an ordinary blog and install PodPress, the plugin. Download Audacity then take an article that you’ve written and record yourself reading the article. You should also be able to find some free music that won’t require permission or a copyright notice to use as an and opening and closing theme. After you’ve got your podcast edited to your satisfaction, upload it through PodPress and write a description of 50-100 words to give the search spiders something to feed on. Otherwise, they won’t know your podcast is there. Save and publish and you now have an audio blog post. That simple.

Need a blog consultant?

You set up a blog for your business, but you don’t see any visible signs of it making you money. Could it be that it is earning its keep, but you just don’t see it? Here are some ways you can make money on your blog without promoting the competition:

• Search Engine Optimization - SEO is a form of payment. Whether you are increasing your page saturation with the search engines or driving up your PageRank with links, you are indeed paying yourself with SEO benefits. By capturing key phrases in the search engines for your important keywords, you are keeping your blog in the limelight for years. Keep blogging and benefits will be there. Just remember, SEO is payment.
• Sell Advertising - But not to your competition. If you look around on your blog you will likely find some real estate that is just sitting there not earning a dime. Maybe you sell that space to a partner, supplier, or other industry player that doesn’t compete with you directly.
• Pay Per Click Advertising - It can be Google AdSense, Yahoo! Search Marketing, or one of the other PPC providers such as AdBrite. Contextual advertising is here to stay. Instead of selling ad space to industry players, just put up some ads that will pay you by the click. This is less lucrative, but easier to set up and less work. But make sure that this isn’t the main focus of your blog. You still want to drive traffic to your website and close sales.
• Affiliate Programs - Join a few affiliate programs and place affiliate ads on your blog. Again, these shouldn’t be your primary focus, but it doesn’t hurt to capture exit traffic and make money on them. They’re leaving anyway, right? Why not capture them as they leave?
• Sell A Digital Product - Create an e-book or a podcast and sell it through your blog. This can be an additional offering that you make through your blog posts and in your sidebar.
• Promote Your E-zine or Newsletter - If you publish a newsletter or e-zine, place your opt-in box prominently on your blog. Then you can use your e-zine to sell and promote your products, services, and affiliates. This is highly effective.

Keep in mind that the primary purpose of your business blog is to drive traffic to your website to close the sale. Anything else you do may run the risk of diminishing that goal. It is usually best to limit the exit holes on your blog and focus on driving traffic where it will be most effective in closing sales. But it’s your blog.

When it comes to commercial blogging, there is more than one way to skin the mountain lion. Here are a few types of blogs that others have set up in the past:

• Made For AdSense - A Made For AdSense blog is a blog that you set up specifically to showcase AdSense ads. The content is there to attract organic search visitors for specific keywords and doesn’t really have to be that great. In fact, most of these blogs do not have good content at all because the owners really want their visitors to click the ads.
• Affiliate Blogs - An affiliate blog is set up to specifically promote one or more affiliate programs. You do want the content on these blogs to great content. You are not really selling the products that you are affiliates for. You are pre-selling. Your goal is to spark an interest in the product and drive traffic to the affiliate program’s website. When a visitor from your blog makes a purchase then you are paid a commission because your link has your own special affiliate ID code embedded in it.
• Onsite Company Blog - Your ownsite company blog is designed to be the face and voice of your company. You want good, solid content on this blog because every post is a separate web page that gives organic searchers a chance to find your company. Great for SEO, these blogs add fresh, daily content to your existing static website and that invites the search engine spiders to your site to crawl it more often.
• Offsite Promotional Blog - This type of blog is similar to a company blog, but it has a standalone web address. You definitely want to update this blog every day and add fresh content daily. Best used as a link building tool, the offsite promotional blog is very effective in driving traffic to individual pages on your company website. Through each blog post and through sidebar links, you can drive traffic right to where you want it to go.
• Product Promotions Blog - This type of blog is designed to promote one specific product or suite of products. You want the blog to have a name associated with the product that you are promoting. It can be “sponsored” by your company or be disassociated with your company, but its main goal is to promote the one product or family of products that you wish to promote. It can be on your company’s static website or have its own standalone web address.
• Industry Dialogue Blog - The Industry Dialogue Blog is designed to address important topics within your industry. The focus can be on your competitors, partners, and/or suppliers, or it can be on the industry itself. You can encourage dialogue within your industry or simply use the blog as a platform for addressing important topics within the industry.
• Customer Service Blog - A customer service blog is usually a part of your company’s website, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s primary focus is on delivery timely news on aspects related to your customers. It should communicate items of interest that any customer or prospect would be interested in and be used to provide better service and to solicit feedback on your service from your customers.
• Department Blog - Sometimes you have a department head who wants to address issues related to his department. In today’s complex, global business environment, you may have people within your department in different geographic regions who need to receive the same information. You can communicate that information through a department blog.

A blog can be used for any purpose, really. The important thing is that you communicate with the right audience in the right way. Need help setting up your blog? Just let us know.

If you’ve been blogging and bookmarking for any time at all you’ve likely heard that social media traffic receives a high bounce rate. I have seen that in some cases, but I recently checked my traffic at some of the social media sites that I frequent and I’ve found that just the opposite is true. The following statistics represent traffic from popular social media sites within the last month for a blog that I write for poetry, a popular blog within that niche.

Reddit = 20% bounce rate
Delicious = 25% bounce rate
Furl = 26.67% bounce rate
StumbleUpon = 36.62% bounce rate
LitMixx = 50% bounce rate
Mixx = 57.14% bounce rate

All of these bounce rates are well below the average for blogs, which tend to have high bounce rates by nature. Most blogs are around 80% bounce rate due to people just reading one post and moving on. It’s interesting to note that my bounce rate from Technorati and BlogCatalog are both considerably higher - 71.43% at each site. Likewise, at forums targeted specifically to the poetry niche market, I have higher bounce rates (75% at one), and my bounce rate from other poetry blogs are also high, some of them reaching to 75% or 80%. What gives?

I’d also like to note that my bounce rate at Digg is 100%, but I’ve only had one visit from Digg in the last month (I’ve concluded that Digg is not a good place for bookmarking my poetry site).

Traffic Figures Unveiled
Before moving on, I’d like to point out what my traffic numbers at these sites are (you’ll see that some of them are quite low):

Reddit = 5
Delicious = 8
Furl = 15
StumbleUpon = 822
LitMixx = 2
Mixx = 7

You could argue that the sampling from most of these sites is too small to be really analyze the data effectively, but I disagree. One would expect that the higher the traffic number from any traffic source would increase the bounce right, but that hasn’t been the case at StumbleUpon. In fact, I’ve historically received high traffic numbers from the StumbleUpon community. But I’ve seen my bounce rate get lower and lower. I think that’s very significant.

LitMixx is a new social community that I started within the Mixx umbrella. It’s focus of course is on literary bookmarking - poetry, fiction, journalism, nonfiction, etc. It’s only about a week-and-a-half old so the data is very fresh and I don’t have a full month of data to analyze, but what I do have is significant, particularly since there are only 6 members in the community right now. I’ve only just started promoting it.

My big surprises are with Reddit and Furl. I really did not expect to get as much traffic from Furl as from other sources such as Delicious and Mixx. I consider those communities much more interested in arts and literary topics. I guess not. But Reddit is the real surprise because it’s mostly a news site and if I got any traffic from it at all I’d be happy. What I sense from these numbers is that Reddit users will only click a link to visit a site if they’re really interested in the topic, but if they click on a link and read the material then they are more likely to stick around if they like something. Reddit users, in other words, are more conscientious. I’m going to have to do more experimenting with Reddit.

Critical Factors For Social Bloggers
I believe my lowering bounce rate at StumbleUpon can be credited to just one thing: Consistency. I have been a consistent poetry blogger for almost a year now. And during that 11 months I have Stumbled blog posts on a regular basis. I have attracted the following of several of my friends who vote on and comment on many of the posts. Even people who are not regular readers of poetry blogs like my blog because

• It’s attractive
• I write interesting posts
• Though I write on literary topics, I do not write “stuffy” literati stuff that is over the average layperson’s head
• I write every day, but only Stumble posts occasionally (in other words, I don’t spam them)

I think these are critical factors. If you have an attractive blog with interesting writing then you’ll attract more followers. Social media users in particular care about the writing style of your blog posts. I’m talking about people are interested in more than just “share yours and I’ll share mine.” I’m talking about people who care about real content that is interesting, lively, and well written. The StumbleUpon community is largely made of people who are there because they like the interaction with other people who care about good content. The same with the Mixx community; that’s why I’m excited about the new literary community I’ve created in LitMixx. I’m anxious to see how well it does.

New Visits And Average Time On Site
A study of the new visitors and the time they spend on my blog is just as interesting as the traffic and the bounce rate are. Consider these numbers:

Reddit = 0% new, 5:21 average time on site
Delicious = 12.51% new, 2:56 average time on site
Furl = 6.67% new, 9:04 average time on site
StumbleUpon = 90.39% new, 1:23 average time on site
LitMixx = 100% new, 1:52 average time on site
Mixx = 28.57% new, 6:20 average time on site

Again, I’m surprised by Reddit. All five of my visitors from that site within the last month had visited the blog before. Either they are subscribers (which I have no way of knowing), or they are friends of mine from another social site, or they have visited the site before from a link saved to Reddit. Whichever the case, they spent a lot of time on the site. Only one of them bounced (left the blog without sticking around to read more than one post) and the average pages the five visited was 3.0. Incredible!

Note that these numbers only reflect a modest number of bookmarks at each site. For instance, since July 9, I’ve bookmarked at each of the above sites this many times:

Reddit = 2
Delicious = 4
Furl = 3
StumbleUpon = 3
Mixx = 4

While these numbers represent how many times my poetry blog has been knowingly saved at these sites by myself or someone else, they do not represent how much time I’ve spent voting for other sites submitted by others or making friends and networking. The time I spend at StumbleUpon on those activities is far more than what it is at any of the others, though this may change since the start of LitMixx.

StumbleUpon, I’m convinced, is the best place to go if you want new visitors to your website, but be prepared for those visitors not sticking around very long. I see StumbleUpon as much like sending out a direct mail piece. You might send out a lot of mailers and get just a meager response. But from those who do respond, if your content is solid then you’ll see some fabulous results. That’s been my experience.

Looking at the bounce rate of the poetry-related forums and blogs that I comment on, I’d say that the small amount of traffic that I get from those is due to the trust that other bloggers have with their readers. But the high bounce rate can be attributed to a higher degree of discrimination with regard to tastes among those who have a higher interest in the topic. In other words, poets tend to know more about what they like and don’t like with regard to poetic commentary whereas non-poets who read about literary topics may enjoy reading an in-depth analysis of a topic even if they are not as familiar with it because they’ll have less to disagree with.

Conclusions
Bottom line conclusion: I think social media bookmarking works if you do it consistently long-term. Most people still only bookmark their content occasionally. I bookmark my content somewhere every day, though I don’t bookmark it at the same place everyday (and I think that is vitally important). Another thing that makes a big difference is the number of friends you make at the social sites you frequent. At those sites where you have fewer friends, you’ll likely get less traffic and higher bounce rates. At those sites where you have more (and more loyal) friends, you are more likely to get more traffic and lower bounce rates.

These results may reflect what literary blogs are capable of, but one other aspect to consider in bookmarking is making sure you approach the right target. Where you bookmark makes a huge difference. Diggers have less interest in poetry, for instance, than Mixxers and Stumblers. They have a greater interest, however, in technical topics. And I’d always consider that.

The latest trend in blog marketing is guest blogging. It’s really nothing new. Newspapers, magazines, websites, and publications of all kinds have featured guest writers for hundreds of years. Now, you can promote your own website and blog through someone else’s by becoming a guest blogger. Here’s how:

• Read a lot of blogs in your niche - Subscribe to every blog within your niche that you can find. At the very least, read the top 10 or 20.
• Take note of the latest trends - Know what people are interested in.
• Comment on blogs - Become a commenter, but not an annoying one. Don’t just comment for the sake of commenting. But when a topic comes up that piques your interest, comment on that blog post. This will give bloggers an idea of who you are so that when you express an interest in being a guest blogger then they will already be familiar with you.
• Respond to queries - Many blog owners who plan to use guest bloggers will run a notice on their own blogs first. It makes sense to start with your own readers. When you see a notice asking for guest bloggers, toss in your name.
• Be courteous and professional - Always be nice. You’re on someone else’s property.
• Don’t wait - Don’t wait for an invitation. If you have something to say and you’ve already been a regular reader for some time who has left comments and participated in the community, send a short, friendly query to the blog owner asking if they use guest bloggers. Don’t be pushy. After sending the e-mail, sit back and wait. A blog owner may be on vacation or be busy and can’t get back to you in a few days. Be patient and your answer will come. Be prepared for “No” and don’t be disappointed if you are told “No.” The blogger may decide to use guest bloggers in the future and you could be their first choice.

Many blog owners use guest bloggers. Usually, you’ll get an author bio and a link back to your own blog, a real meaningful benefit that often leads to new readers, more traffic, and higher conversions.

Interested in guest blogging for Blog Content Provider? Send an e-mail to allen at articlecontentprovider dot com. You might also ask about guest blogging opportunities for the Article Marketing Blog.

My favorite social website is StumbleUpon. I like it because it is so easy to use, especially if you have the SU toolbar. I can save a website that I like with one click and share it with a handful of friends very seamlessly. Plus, it’s fun to see what others are bookmarking too. Unfortunately, StumbleUpon has limited its users to only 200 friends. If you want more, you can’t have them so you’d better choose your friends selectively. This policy favors those who are less popular at the expense of those who are most popular. Is it fair?

Well, that’s a question for others to answer, but I’m happy to see that StumbleUpon has changed its policy. StumbleUpon is nixing its 200-friend limit.

Other changes are occuring at SU as well. I like the fact that StumbleUpon is deleting useless friends, known as “ghosts.” I blasted Propeller last week for making changes to its site and dropping half of my friends. In this case, if I lose a few friends at StumbleUpon, I’ll be quite glad. There are some users of SU who are just there to promote themselves and it’s really annoying. But it’s a time consuming process to go through all of your friends and delete the undesirables. So SU has offered to do that for me.

I’m anxious to see how the new changes at StumbleUpon will affect my experience there. I have high hopes and big expectations. Here’s to hoping StumbleUpon doesn’t let me down.

I still talk to people who are sold on Blogger.com being a great place to host a blog. Just because it’s free. I hate to be the party spoiler (actually, I quite like spiking the punch, thank you!), but the reason Blogger.com is not a good place to host your blog is precisely because it is free.

Human error has a way of killing good grass. Sure, you can pull out the weeds one by one, but the more “free” something is the more weeds you can expect to see. And pulling out all those weeds takes time. So to make it go easier and more quickly, you have to create something to automate the process - something like an algorithm, which is a fancy word for a mathematical equation that is supposed to search out and find the weeds in a big field of grass. In this case, it’s the free blog host Blogger.com and the weeds are spam blogs.

Big problem. Google’s algorithm actually flagged legitimate blogs as spam blogs. Thousands of them. And some of them were rather high profile blogs that had been hosted at Blogger.com for a long time. If it could happen them, do you think it could happen to you?

For every day that your blog is down that could potentially be thousands of dollars slipping through a hole in your pocket. It may be just a few pennies a day, but if you don’t sew up that hole then you could lose thousands over time. That thousand dollars over the course of one year represents hundreds of thousands over time. When you consider what you could have that $1,000 do for you, earning you more in an interest-bearing account, for instance, the problem is a lot bigger than it at first seems. You can’t afford to lose even a dime to someone else’s error.

It’s better, if you can, to own the property. And since you can purchase a web domain for as little as $10 per year, why not do so? Imagine opening up a storefront on the busiest street in your town for $10/year. Would you do that? Or would you opt for the empty warehouse across the railroad tracks that gets graffiti spray painted on its face once a month just because it’s free?

Sorry for the graphic image, but that’s how serious this is. Don’t use a free host. You’re much better off paying $25-$30 per month for a secure host and $10 per year than you are using a free host that could flake out on you at any time. It’s a business blog, man. Run it like one.

Chris McElroy made a plug for BrowseRank on yesterday’s SEO Service Provider blog. Like many people in the search business, I believe that search is ready for a major innovation, but I’m not altogether sure that BrowseRank is the answer. At least, not the complete answer.

In the early days, before the Web went commercial, web pages were ranked according to how many academics thought the page was important. It made sense to do it this way because the Internet was largely a research tool for universities and the military-industrial complex. Since the majority of users were academics, more weight was placed on what academics considered weighty or important.

The second wave of what search engines considered trustworthy came when Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented BackRub, a tool that analyzed backlinks and use that information to rank web pages. This was a huge innovation. It was based on the previous incarnation mentioned above, but expanded on that to include links from non-academic websites. Shortly after, the Web was Google-ized and that algorithmic innovation became the norm for most search engines. New innovations that have been tried since then have tried to counter the importance of backlinks, but those innovations - every one of them - have failed to catch on popularly.

The State Of Search Today
The problem today is that many webmasters have learned to manipulate search results through uncanny backlink practices. Plus, the more-than-10-year-old algorithmic interpretation of results has made the Web a bit of a wild west due to an unprecedented increase in the number of web pages to be ranked, and a huge volume of link data to analyze, as well as a wide variety of types of websites and intent with regard to user interaction. Google’s algorithms tend to favor older sites with a lot of backlinks. That’s a problem because many newer sites are worthy of trust and recognition, but there is something to be said for longevity. So where is the balance?

The answer is, there isn’t any. Blogs and other temporal information can achieve high rankings on a short-term basis, but to achieve long-term success you’ll need to optimize your blog completely, not just each individual post. Still, there is a huge difference between the nature of a blog and the nature of a static website. So too there are huge differences between the nature of social sites like Facebook and MySpace and sites like Amazon and eBay where users may just show up, make a purchase, and leave.

Why BrowseRank Will Hurt Blogs
On the surface, BrowseRank seems like a good idea. The problem is it will tilt the weight of trust and reliability to sites where users are encouraged to remain for a long time. That doesn’t include blogs.

It is a statistical conclusion that blog readers typically read one post then they are gone. The bounce rate for blogs is very high. Many social bookmarking sites have the same problem as many bookmarkers will show up just to submit a story then leave. That this wasn’t the original purpose for bookmarking sites is irrelevant. The point is, that’s what users do. Should the sites be penalized because users don’t stick around long enough to make them more credible and “trustworthy”?

This phenomenon, of course, wouldn’t apply to Facebook or MySpace since users of those sites tend to stick around longer and use the tools available - creating applications, making friends, approving friends requests, etc. But what about auction sites and consumer sites where users just show up and buy something then leave? With BrowseRank, those sites might penalized and consumer review sites could end up ranking higher than consumer purchase sites for the same search term. Consumer blog sites would fall to the bottom.

While PageRank has its problems, I can see that BrowseRank will also have its issues. Those issues include, but are not limited to, favoritism of one type of site over another, the ease of gaming the results, and lack of human analysis since algorithms will do most of the work. Those are the same issues we have now with PageRank, but the difference will be that the problems will tilt the balance of favor from one type of site to another. Instead of older sites being favored as with PageRank, sites with lower bounce rates would be favored, but a low bounce rate is not always a bad thing.

Is There A Middle Ground Between
PageRank And BrowseRank?
I favor a combination of backlink analysis with on-site user behavior analysis. I do not necessarily mean the length of time that users remain on a site. There are other factors that are important for judging user behavior. For instance, do users tend to click internal site links or site exit links such as AdSense and display ads? If an algorithm favored the former then that might kill all those Made For AdSense sites that showcase useless keyword-stuffed content. On the other hand, it would also kill legitimate sites where the owners did a poor job of optimizing the content to encourage users to stick around longer instead of clicking the sidebar AdSense ads. That might be a good way to encourage better content.

What it necessary, I think, is a way to analyze the intended nature of a site and give weight to factors that are important to that nature. For instance, what is important for a successful blog is completely different than what is important for a successful static website. Perhaps one could be judged by the number of backlinks while the other is judged by the length of time users remain on the site. But if that static website is a consumer site where users are likely to show up and buy something then leave then perhaps it would be judged by another set of criteria entirely. This is somewhat what Google already does. Since Google analyzes over 150 search factors for any website on any given day, there is always a chance that a particular site is judged by what it does successfully AND by what it does half-heartedly or not successfully at all. It is the aggregate of the algorithmic analysis that is important, not the specific criteria.

I think we can all give kudos to MSN for attempting to take search in a new direction. MSN is certainly in a better position to challenge Google’s dominance than a new startup. The problem is that BrowseRank, in it’s current form, is incomplete. MSN could be on the right track, but before they commit to BrowseRank, they’ll need to put more thought into the nature of websites and the purpose for interaction in the first place.

From time to time we get a contact form from somebody who just wants us to consult with them. We’re always happy to help someone who wants to learn how to blog, even if it’s just on a short-term basis. If If you have a small budget and can’t afford the monthly blogging service or you’ve tried the monthly blogging service and found that your sales cycle is longer than you’d expected or your ROI isn’t what you thought it would be then we can consult with you to help you write better blog posts. Here’s what a consultation will cover:

• Setting up a blog - If you want to set up your own blog then we’ll spend some time going over the set up process with you to help you get a good start.
• Choosing a template - Choosing a template involves more than just going through the list of what is available and selecting one you like. You aren’t picking curtains for your living room. A good template must be optimized. We’ll teach you how to go about discovering whether you’ve got the right template or not and how you can fix it if you don’t.
• Setting up your link structure - The link structure between your blog and your business website is very important. We’ll show you how to set up your link structure properly for the maximum SEO benefits.
• Optimizing your blog post - Properly optimizing a blog post is more than tossing in a few keywords here and there. We’ll show you the elements to look for and how to incorporate them.
• Writing effective blog post titles - It’s an art. Anyone can write a blog post title, but not just anyone can write one that gets attention. We’ll show you how to write blog post headlines that get people to read.
• Social bookmarking - Social bookmarking is a new social tool that bloggers can take advantage of to spread the word about their blog and business. We’ll show you to get the most from your bookmarking efforts.

There’s a lot more we could teach you too. There is so much to learn about effective blogging that it would be hard to put it all into one blog post.

When it comes to blogging for business, expectations can get the best of you. I’ve talked to business owners who thought that after two months of blogging they should be getting more business than they can handle. Would you have the same attitude if you opened up a hardware store on the busiest street corner in your neighborhood? If so then you may not understand business. There is more to it than simply throwing up a sign and opening the doors. There are certain things that have to take place and many of them require time to fully germinate.

For a blog consultation, call 786-317-8774 or visit Blog Content Provider.