Author Archive for Allen

What’s The Most Important Aspect Of Blogging?

What’s most important when it comes to writing and marketing a business blog? Is it brand? Traffic? Design? Social media? SEO? Or none of the above?

Actually, it could be all of the above, but there is a deeper answer. When it comes to business blogging, there are a lot of factors to consider. But the most important aspect of your blog is your audience. Who are you writing for? Think about it for a minute and when you’ve defined your audience, write it down. Because that’s who you should write every blog post for.

Don’t write for the search engines. Yes, make sure your posts are SEOd, but don’t focus so heavily on SEO that your forget your human audience. Instead, write with your audience’s needs in mind and market your blog, write your blog, design your blog, and promote your blog with that audience in mind. It’s the most important thing about blogging.

There’s Still Room For One More Blog

Technorati is tracking more than 1.5 million blog posts daily. Since 2002, Technorati has tracked 133 million blog records. That’s quite a stretch in seven years. But there’s always room for more.

According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere report, half of all male bloggers are professional business bloggers and 38% of female bloggers blog about business. But we think there may be more. Not every blog is listed with Technorati. The website only tracks those blogs that are listed in its database. So there are likely millions more out there.

No matter how many business blogs there are, however, there could be more. And your business could probably benefit from having a blog. But don’t buy the hype about the “blogosphere”. Not every blog has to be connected to the social web. Yours can be, but there are different purposes for a blog. If you’d like to know more about business blogging and how your business may benefit from a blog, contact a professional blog manager today.

Why You Need A Guerrilla Blogging Plan

While not getting into the nitty gritty details of guerrilla blogging (because if you click the link you’ll get them on the other side), I would like to discuss briefly why you need a guerrilla blogging strategy.

Guerrilla blogging is a term I use to describe a method of blogging based on technical SEO tactics without ruining your content for human readers. It’s a difficult thing to master, but essential (and becoming more essential every day).

So why do you need a guerrilla blogging plan? Because you want to beat the competition in the search results. Plain and simple. The Web is a very competitive environment and you need to start thinking of everyone online as your competition. The basis of guerrilla blogging is the assumption that anyone can target any key phrase at any time and try to rank in the top positions of the SERPs for that key phrase. Whether they are successful or not is another matter. But the fact that they are targeting that phrase makes them a competitor if you are also targeting the phrase.

In order to succeed at guerrilla blogging, you’ve got to blog in such a way that your own SEO benefits are maximized while everyone else’s are minimized. And if you do it right, you’ll see your web pages rise in the search engine rankings while everyone else’s falls. Guerrilla blogging works for those who use; it doesn’t for those who don’t.

What’s A ‘Bad Blog’ Anyway?

Spend any time at all online and you are sure to run into someone recommending that you start a blog for your business. Stick around any longer and you’ll encounter someone warning you not to start one if you are going to have a “bad one”. But what’s a bad blog? It’s almost never defined.

The implication is that if the content isn’t a pleasure to read then it’s a bad blog. But what is a pleasure for one person to read is not necessarily a pleasure for someone else. Have an interest in reading about badminton tips every day? No? Well, maybe someone else does.

But it isn’t all about the nature of the content either. You also have to consider blog design and the quality of the writing. Sure, you want your blog to be attractive. And, yes, you want the writing to be high quality writing. But understand that not every blog has to be of the same caliber as a blog on the A-list. If they all were then there’d be no A-list.

So what’s a bad blog? Let’s start by defining a good blog. A good blog is one that:

• Informs your readers about topics of interest within your niche
• Sets itself apart as unique from other blogs in the same niche
• Drives traffic to important landing pages on your website (the job of closing the sale is on those landing pages
• If your blog is a sales blog then it closes a decent percentage of sales or converts and adequate percentage of traffic to sales, or leads, or whatever your goal is
• Adds optimized content to your website often
• If an offsite blog, builds back links to your primary web property
• Gets people interested in your niche talking in the comments section
• Provides you with information about the needs of your target market

Not every good blog does every one of these, but a good blog should do many of them. It seems to reason then that a “bad blog” is one that doesn’t do any of these or that only does a few while neglecting the most important elements of a good blog. The problem is, a blog may have many different purposes or your standards for a good blog may not match what someone else’s idea of a good blog is. What every blog owner should refrain from doing is allowing your readers from defining what is “good” and what is “bad” based on whether or not they enjoy reading it. That’s not necessarily the judge of a good blog.

Assuming that readers must enjoy reading the blog presumes that the purpose of the blog is for readership, i.e. enjoyability. But simply having readers enjoying your content won’t necessarily lead to sales. You want your blog to make you money, right?

Of course, not all blogs are sales tools either. You can have a blog simply for SEO purposes. The point is this: Define the purpose of your blog and live up to that purpose. That’s really the only measure of blog quality. Don’t do that and you’ve got a bad blog.