2. Humanize Your Blog
Remember, it’s a blog not a white paper, and a key differentiator is personality. Show your first-time visitors who you are (literally and figuratively).

Include a photo of yourself on every page, and if it’s a group written blog, include photos of each author. Make links to your bio easy to find. And infuse your writing with personality and voice. (If your writing sounds like someone could be saying it to you face-to-face, you have a strong sense of “voice” in your posts)

It also doesn’t hurt to mix in a video post now and again, or to make a video post available on every page, as I do over there on the right hand side.

3. Add Context to Your Blog
Sure, you’ll give first-time visitors an idea of what the blog is about via the title or tagline, but how else can you help them go deeper? Remember that your likelihood of a first-time visitor coming back goes up the more content they consume on that first visit. The “one and done” visitors are probably going to drink your beer and run over your mailbox on the way out, never to return again.

So, make sure first-time visitors can access other content that may be of interest, convincing them that perhaps they should make a return trip. That’s why I recommend the “Similar Posts” plug-in below, and why I suggest you list recent posts and popular posts prominently on both the right side and bottom of every page.

Also, don’t be afraid to link to other posts or resources from within your posts. Not in an obnoxious way, but if you’ve written other stuff that expands on the subject at hand, link away. (Incidentally, these internal links are also a SEO positive)

4. Add Calls to Action to Your Blog
Other than hopefully come back again, what do you want your first-time readers to do? You MUST ask and answer this question, and develop appropriate calls to action accordingly.

If your blog is consistent enough that you believe RSS subscription is realistic, make sure visitors can easily subscribe to your RSS feed. (As mentioned in my post about blog success metrics, if you cover a very wide topical area, subscriptions are less likely).

Most blogs aren’t visually aggressive enough in the promotion of RSS, and very few do a good job at emphasizing the opportunity to subscribe via email (as 40% of C&C subscribers do).

Also, while I think it’s somewhat less likely that a first-time visitor will tweet or Digg or Stumble your work (I’d love to see a study on that), you should make that process as easy as possible as well. I’m a big fan of the “Sexy Bookmarks” plug-in you’ll see below, because it makes the sharing buttons large and interactive.

If you have complementary resources like an Ebook, email newsletter, events or otherwise, make sure those are easy for first-time visitors to find as well. Jacob Morgan does a nice job with this, promoting his book, events, and other resources on the right side of his excellent blog.

Pay attention to your statistics with regard to calls to actions. You should know if first-time visitors are disproportionately likely to visit your Ebook page, for example. One of the data points I track closely is the number of people who visit my speaking page, where they entered the site, and if they were first-time visitors or long-time readers of the blog.

by Kevin Gibbons

Although many businesses now recognise the importance of regularly updated content to their search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts, not enough of them understand the importance of quality content.

This is apparent from many of the badly-penned blogs, rubbishy ‘news’ stories and plagiarised or simply stolen articles that the web is gradually filling up with.
 
Many companies fill their sites with scraped posts, barely literate articles and keyword-stuffed nonsense in the hope of attracting Google’s attention, so I wanted to take a look at just what this sort of behaviour is doing to your brand; how it’s affecting the customer experience.

If you’d like some tips on writing well for SEO, you might want to read my recent post 21 On-Site SEO
Tips You Can Give to Your Online Copywriter. There’s some good discussion in the comments too.

Your content is for search engines, not humans

 
Google is clever, but it isn’t a person. Filling your site with utterly useless but unique and keyword rich content will sometimes drive traffic through the search engines and onto your pages, especially for less competitive terms.
 
However, lots of companies seem to forget that, after they’ve risen in the Google ratings, they need to actually appeal to the individuals who have clicked onto the site.
 
If the content isn’t useful, doesn’t immediately direct them to something useful, or is badly written then they will leave and your efforts have been wasted.

Don’t forget that well-written articles and interesting, useful content attracts inbound links, which will help you in the search engine results far more than keywords alone.

Your content is badly written

I hate writing this because it’s an invitation for people to start proof-reading my own work!
 
However, in the rush to publish frequent content, many companies lose sight of the importance of quality and simply churn out articles.
 
Obviously there will sometimes be typos, that’s true even of the national newspapers, but a shoddily written article will alienate the visitor and make the company look unprofessional.
 
There’s a bit of a debate about whether or not it’s worth optimising for typos that are frequently made, for example ‘search egine optimisation’.
 
Personally, I tend to think this makes it less likely that people landing on your pages will move forward to use your services, as you’ll simply look too slapdash.
 
Your content is dull dull dull
 
To be honest, this is partly an extension of my first point. If you’re publishing articles simply to raise yourself in the rankings and without any concern for the hapless reader, then your content is likely to be tedious.
 
As an industry insider, you have the opportunity to create a trove of knowledge, guides, analysis and advice.
 
Such informative content would be naturally rich in your chosen keywords, it would be useful to your potential clients, it would attract inbound links and it would cement your position as an industry authority.
 
Dull or useless content will damage your brand in the eyes of the visitor. Take the time to create quality articles and they’ll work much harder for you.
 
Your content is irregular or non-existent
 
A couple of years ago, there was an eruption in blogging. Thousands of well-known brands leapt onto the bandwagon and it seemed every online firm in the world was battling it out for blogosphere recognition.
 
Then people realised it took time and stopped updating theirs.
 
Now, there are few things that put me off a website more than a blog that hasn’t been added to since 2007.
 
Subconsciously, I make all these assumptions about the company – it’s lazy, it’s not in control of its marketing, it’s cutting back on spending…
 
To be honest, I think it’s better to lose a blog entirely than have one that’s completely inactive.
 
Your content is just advertising
 
Of course I don’t mind advertising in the right place. A company’s website is where it advertises its products and services, nothing wrong with that.
 
However, sometimes a brand can be damaged by advertising in the wrong place. You can offend your reader by promising a certain kind of content and then failing to deliver value.
 
Oh, it’s fair enough to mention products and services, of course, but you need to offer something else.
 
For example, if I click on a guide to beating insomnia and all it contains is a relentless pitch for memory foam mattresses, I’ll be annoyed. I didn’t agree to be advertised to, I wanted useful information on sleeping aids.
 
One of the points could have mentioned a new mattress, even a memory foam one, but it needs to go beyond that, that’s why I’m reading a guide and not a brochure.
 
Failing to respect the visitors’ expectations and intentions is an easy way to gain a bad reputation.

By Jason OConnor

If your business website doesn’t have a blog, get one. A blog, if done right, can act as a direct and indirect mechanism that brings large amounts of qualified visitors to your site, many of whom may become customers.

This is mostly related to the way blogs interact with search engines and the traffic I am speaking of will come from search engines, mostly Google.

When it comes to optimizing your website (or blog for that matter) for search engines you must always keep in mind two things: on-page optimization and off-page optimization.

On-page optimization is the elements of a Web page that better optimize it to be found and ranked well in the search engines. These elements can include on-page content such as the actual sentences and paragraphs on the page, the headlines (or headers or Hx tags), the links, the links’ text, the title tag and much more.

Off-page optimization means the things that are done on sites besides your site, namely link-building. Off-page optimization is the process of creating links (or causing others to create links) on other websites that point to your site. Inbound links as these are often called have a major impact on how well you rank in search engines. Generally speaking, the more inbound links, the better. But the quality of the sites with these inbound links, or the way the search engines perceive the sites, is even more important.

To rank on the first couple of pages on the search engines requires work on both on-page and off-page optimization.

Two additional and important pieces of information that you’ll need to understand are related to site content and internal links.

Search engines also very much love new, original and quality content, and they like to see your website regularly adding this kind of new content. You don’t need to add pages every day, just add pages at the same rate over time. So if you add a page a week to your site, keep it at around that same pace, or increase or decrease gradually.

A website can be considered a living entity in a sense. It certainly shouldn’t be static. It should grow over time. And the fantastic thing about content is that the more of it there is on your site, the more chances you have of getting found in the search engines.

The idea that inbound links help your search engine rankings that I explained above can be extended to your internal pages as well. In other words, the more links to a particular page coming from other pages within the same site will boost that page’s rank as well.

Think of it this way. If you had a ten page site, including a product page and every page on the site contained a link to your product page and, if all other things were equal, your product page would rank higher than the rest of your site’s pages (besides the home page which is given a little extra weíght).

Now let’s consider what would happen if there were only you and your competitor in your industry (if only that could be true!) and your site still had those ten pages while your competitor’s site contained one hundred pages. Furthermore, your competitor set it up the same way as you where he added a link to every page on his site that pointed to his product page. If all other things were equal, his product page would outrank your product page every time. Why? Because he had 100 internal links pointing to his product page and you only had 10.

If you put all these pieces together now, on-page optimization, off-page optimization or link building, content creation and internal linking, can you begin to see why a blog may be a good thing? A blog helps with all of these.

A blog that is regularly updated is providing a mechanism for adding fresh content on a regular basis. Plus, it’s so easy to use a blog that anyone can use them, so even if you or your employees don’t know a thing about Web pages and HTML, you’ll still be able to add new content to your site.

Consider this. If you add fresh, quality content to your blog on a regular basis by writing posts, something the search engines love, and within each post you link to an important page within your site, let’s say your product page for instance, you’re now building links to help your rankings using your blog. With this additional link your product page gets that much more boost in the search engines.

Remember how I explained that links from within your site help your rankings? Adding links within your blog posts pointing back to your other important pages that you want to rank well is a great way to help your rankings.

And every time you publish a new post, you’re giving the search engines one more entry point into your site. Your site will quickly get bigger, and with each new page your site gets more visible.

Keep in mind that the links you make within your blog posts should be relevant. Only link to your product page from a post that has to do with your products. And also, blog posts ought to be useful to your site visitors. The less you talk about your products and instead offer useful, free information that people can use, the more traffíc and repeat visitors you’ll get.

Remember that people really don’t care about you, your website or your products, they only care about how you can help them. If you sell furniture, a blog post about how to find the best deals on furniture would be far better than a post about how your chairs are the best in the world.

One important thing to remember is that if you plan on creating a new blog for your business as a way to augment your website be sure you put the blog on your actual domain. This means that you would not use a remote service like Blogger.com. Instead, you must have the blog on your business website’s address (or domain). For example, if your website address is http://www.yoursite.com/ then your blog should be located at http://www.yoursite.com/blog or http://blog.yoursite.com/

By adding a blog to your business website you are creating a way to get additional traffic. You’ll get direct traffic from your posts, which get indexed by the search engines and drive traffic to your site from searches. And, you’ll get indirect traffic from your other site’s pages ranking well in the search engines because they have links pointing to them from your blog posts.

You’ll be regularly adding fresh content to your site, which search engines love, thereby creating more ways to be found in the search engines at the same time. And each post provides a new chance to create a link or two to other pages and blog posts on your site, thereby boosting those pages’ rankings.

Like I suggested at the beginning, if your business website doesn’t have a blog, go get one.

By Addme
I’ve been skimming through the latest Search Marketing Standard and have come across a very interesting article written by Eric King of Anvil Media, Inc.

Eric has written about using RSS to drive more traffic to a website, best ways to do it etc, after reading through this great piece I felt compelled to share these valuable pointers with you.
Eric starts off by talking about Google’s statement, telling webmasters all over the globe to make sure they’re keeping the content on their site fresh and up to date and how using RSS feeds is the simplest and most effective way of doing this.
To further enhance and promote your RSS feed Eric has kindly provided us with ten points, possibly golden rules on how a RSS feed can be optimized to promote and drive traffic to a website.

1. Title Optimization
Include popular, targeted keywords and search terms in the title, also include some branded terms, thus associating the feed with your brand.

2. Formatting
How much text is displayed within your RSS feed can affect the visibility of the feed. As you may know the feed can be formatted to include a snippet of the content, driving the user to click through to the full version of the article. Eric recommends including all the text in your feed. RSS feeds can also be formatted to show the last 10 posts / articles, it is recommended that this be increased to show minimum of 20.

3.  Multiple Feeds
It is recommended that a website uses multiple feeds if applicable e.g. an ecommerce website may want to break the RSS feeds up to “top sellers” and “new releases” thus giving the readers an option to opt in for the feed that most interests them.

4. Rich Media
Include multimedia files in your RSS feed such as a podcast enclosure, this is a simple way to subscribe to audio and video from the sites feed. This also increases the volume of directories and search engines the feed can be included.

5. Submission
Submit the site feeds to my.yahoo.com, my.msn.com and sites such as Technorati as these are some of the quickest ways of having the feed indexed.

6. Linking
As per a standard html page or blog post, link to internal resources on your website, make sure to include the full path and also use anchor text helping to increase page rank etc.

7. Validation
Check that your feed is free of errors, using tools like freevalidator.org.

8. Discovery
Adding a simple section of code known as auto discovery to the header of a webpage:

link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”INSERT FEED TITLE” href=”INSERT FEED URL”

This code will help search engines detect the feed also making it easier for visitors to subscribe to the feed.

By SEOBOOK – Aaron Wall

Here are some tips on creating webpages that other website will want to link to—to save you from having to do loads of legwork requesting links.

Buying Links is Getting Expensive
The Google AdSense program (which pays publishers for placing contextual links on their websites) and automated spammy “can I buy a link on your site” emails have made virtually every important online publisher aware of the value of links.

In mid 2007 Google began editing toolbar PageRank scores and rankings for many sites that were selling links. It is getting harder and more expensive to buy your way to the top through link rentals.

At the same time, more and more people are writing online. Setting up a blog only takes a few minutes. There are hundreds or thousands of people talking about every topic imaginable, so if you create something remarkable and capture the attention of a few thought leaders who like it, you are going to get links. But how do you create content that people will like?

Passion = Market Knowledge = Links

One of the easiest (and most effective) ways to predict a future and to predict what people like is to immerse yourself in your topic. If you are passionate about a topic, know more about it than anyone else, and openly share information, then eventually people will notice and link to you. If you know what people are interested in, rather than asking them to link to what you have, create something that they would be interested in linking at. Express your world view and your bias in a way that matches their world view.

Become a Platform

Each of us is the most relevant thing in our own lives. It sounds selfish but it is true. If you promote other people they will be more likely to promote you. Popular bloggers search to see what people are saying about them. If you want someone’s attention linking at them from a blog post on your site is an easy way to get them to notice you.

Though she hired a publicist to get her on Page 6 She never really talked about herself. She talked about other people. She would mention the designers of her clothes, the club she was going to, who made the sweater for her dog, all without any guarantee of any return. She just threw out links.

It didn’t take long for designers and club owners to realize that Paris Hilton was a walking billboard. So they embraced her. She paid attention to them, so they paid attention to her.

The most valuable commodity today is attention.

The Web is a Social Network

Social interaction of any type leads to links.

• Speak at a conference? Someone will likely blog about it.
• Want to get thought leaders to promote your site? Create a community project or contest and ask them to participate. Or give out awards.
• Lack the budget needed to go to conferences? Moderate forums, comment on related blogs, and build social relationships online.
• Track hot news in your space and try to get out in front of important trends.
  • As an example, when Google did a big update that promoted some big brand websites we were one of the first websites to analyze it.
  • Our blog post about that topic earned over 1,000 inbound links and brought in thousands of dollars in subscriber revenues.

Be Credible

But for people to take you credibly you need to make sure your website adheres to good web credibility standards.

• Is your domain name memorable?
• Does your design complement your copy?
• Is your content interesting and conceptually unique?
• Does your site have an editorial component and voice, or is it a boring low-value thin product database?
• Is your about page memorable?
• Is your site easy to use and understand?
• Do you have a brand people care about?

You do not need to “have it all” to get started, but the more credible you look the faster you will gain momentum.

Build on Your Success

Work to improve your site every day. Over the course of the year fixing or creating one thing a day will lead to a large advantage. Building up a leading market position can take years, but once you get at the top those years are the barrier to entry which prevent others from being able to replicate what you built up.

Markets Are Conversations

The Cluetrain Manifesto stated that markets are conversations. Blogs are the leading medium upon which those conversations happen online. If you are a blogger, read the Blogger’s Guide to SEO to get the most out of your blog.

Even if you are not a blogger, the Blogger’s Guide to SEO can help you understand the mind set of bloggers and why blogs quickly became a foundational part of the web. If you know a lot about blogs then getting links is a piece of cake.

How can a blog best compliment your current article marketing initiative? There are some quick answers, which I’ll break out first and foremost in this article. Secondly I’ll investigate how you should differentiate your blog posts from your articles.

4 Quick Tips for Integrating a Blog into Your Article Marketing Strategy

1) Put your blog directly on your main site. Put one of your business’s main keyword phrases into the title of your blog. Make the url for your blog the name of the blog itself. Frank’s Fish Shop’s blog url should look something like this, depending on how Frank architects his site: http://AquariumFishToday/FranksFishShop.com.

2) Link to your articles from your blog, even though they are on your site. Don’t publish your articles directly in your blog however. Write a little commentary about the article, why you wrote it, what inspired it, who it’s for (thx to SEM wiz bw).

3) Link to and mention those who publish your articles. Not the article directories, but rather the websites or newsletters or even other blogs that publish you. Especially if they are useful resources and if you have a decent relationship and or dialogue with the publisher.

4) Discuss responses to your article, whether good or bad in blog posts. Show the impact your articles have had on your readers. Show, more importantly, that you’re engaged with them.

Differentiating Your Blog Posting and Article Marketing Strategy

A blogging strategy differs significantly from an article marketing strategy, and positions its author differently.

Many writers/marketers simply post entire articles in their blogs. I do, on my article marketing blog, but that’s just because I’m not being particularly strategic at the moment. This is not the ideal method if you’re looking to maximize the benefit of your blogging and article writing efforts can have on your site’s conversions.

These are my opinions about blog posts:

• Blog posts, as a rule, should be shorter than articles and provide bite-sized nuggets of information, usually accompanied by a link.
• Blog posts are great for your quick, from-the-hip reactions/thoughts/opinions to news that affects your industry.
• Blog posts can be chattier in tone, more informal, and perhaps show a bit more of your personality (though your articles should certainly have personality).
• You can write several commentary or “check-out-this-cool-industry-news” blog posts in a tenth of the time it takes to write a decent article.
• Blog posts keep you more regularly in the awareness of your readers/RSS subscribers. Articles are the foundation of your expertise. Blog posts are your constant reminders to others of your expertise.
• Blog posts show your involvement in your industry’s conversation, whether you’re disagreeing with a colleague’s recent article, or lauding an industry player’s recent acquisition.

In short, blogs are better for news, commentary and quick analysis while articles are better for establishing your expertise.

This is not entirely a hard and fast rule and should only be followed as a general guideline, especially for those who want to differentiate their blogging efforts from their article marketing efforts.

Executing Your Blogging and Article Marketing Strategy

A dual blogging/article writing strategy is best, as it enables the marketer to position himself as both an industry thought leader by writing great articles and as someone who follows closely the happenings in his industry.

The execution is up to you. Now get writing!

by Clay McDaniel

Twitter may be the all the rage, but it’s not yet time to pull the plug on your corporate blog and stop monitoring all the blogs where people talk about your brand. The emergence of Twitter as a hyper-popular social-media tool for marketing is not the death knell of the conventional blog; if anything, it highlights just how necessary blogs still are.

Communicating in short, 140-character bursts has its own advantages—namely that brands can get their point across quickly and efficiently to a key group of followers. But classic blogs offer a different, and still important, medium for marketers looking to connect with customers, partners, and the wider public.

In fact, every marketer today should be using a two-pronged blog strategy: creating and maintaining a fresh and engaging corporate blog, and third-party blog monitoring. Creating your own content is important, but so is monitoring—and responding to—the conversations taking place about your brand on blogs and forums across the Web.

The first part of your blog strategy—your corporate blog—is all about relevance and discoverability.

As every marketer knows, the biggest risk with blogs is a lack of relevant and timely publishing. If you don’t post timely, punchy, informative posts, your blog will likely be poorly read and won’t be found by search engines.

Your goal is not to obtain momentary awareness but to maintain relevancy over the long term for your target audience. You need to use buzz-monitoring tools to find out what customers are talking about—what interests them right now—and then use your blog to write about these subjects. (And don’t hesitate to incorporate a few important keywords aligned with your search engine discoverability goals.) This quest for prolonged relevancy, and deeper interaction with your customers, is what your corporate blog can still help you accomplish.

The second part of your blog strategy—third-party blog monitoring—is all about community engagement.

Recent research finds that trusted information sources, offline and online, are given greater credence by decision-makers than paid advertisements. People online are likely already talking about your brand, your clients’ brands, and your competitors as well.

The issue, then, becomes whether you’re listening and responding—thereby demonstrating your commitment to the community that surrounds your business on the Web. Are you using monitoring tools to find and monitor all the blogs where people talk about your brand, so you can engage in the conversation, post responses, and build relationships with key influencers? Are you digging through that immense pile of Twitter noise to find opportunities to engage your followers further on your own corporate blog or forum?

Using Twitter to listen and instantly engage and respond to conversations about your brand online is great, and for some businesses it can be an effective communications tool and customer-engagement opportunity. But at some point you have to take off the Twitter goggles and realize where the potential for deeper, more “durable” and long-lasting interaction lies.

Your own blog-publishing efforts and a blog-monitoring and commenting program offer unique opportunities for a richer connection with key influencers, and each post will last much longer in “Internet time” than any one tweet will within Twitter’s fast-flowing public timeline.

So you want to take your blogging program into the new age? Here are five tips to help you use blogs to engage customers, build your brand, and, ultimately, drive sales.

1. Find out exactly where the conversations about your brand are happening

Use social-media monitoring tools to find out which blogs and forums are hosting conversations about your brand. Take the time to know where your brand is being discussed and research the groups that are talking about it. Doing so gives you a better chance of relating to users and creating a relationship, rather than just talking at them in your own blog and when responding to their posts.

2. Find out who is talking about your brand online

Interacting with only the people who fully support your brand isn’t going to win any hearts and minds—nor make a lasting impact on branding and revenue. Use social-media monitoring tools to find out who is talking about your brand, what they are saying, and what they like and dislike about your brand.

Understanding the key positive and negative voices discussing your brand will enable you to even better engage your fans, as well as to reach out to detractors to try to win them over. (If you take a blogger’s criticism or suggestion and use it in creating a better product or service, not only will you have won that user over, you’ll have shown that you are taking your customers’ opinions to heart.)

And remember, online interactions are a two-way street. While you might gain valuable product, marketing, and segment knowledge from the interactions, remember to treat all of your blog-based interactions like a true relationship, with both sides giving and taking. Offer your key influencers special promotions or give them a say in product design or development. That’s how you create true brand ambassadors.

3. Get your corporate blog up to speed

Take a good hard look at your corporate blog. Is it boring? Are the posts too infrequent? Does it speak to the conversations you’ve uncovered with social-media monitoring tools? Does it invite engagement by making it easy to post responses and to share posts via email, social networks, and Twitter?

The person responsible for writing content for your blog should have full access to the social-media monitoring data you uncover on a daily or weekly basis—so they can write posts that touch on those subjects. In addition, your social-media marketing team should work hand-in-hand with your corporate blogger to promote posts via Twitter and other social-networking platforms, as well as to reach out to external bloggers to invite them to read and comment on your corporate blog.

4. Don’t bite off more than you can chew

It doesn’t cost much to (a) write posts for your corporate blog; (b) use free or inexpensive monitoring tools to stay abreast of conversations about your brand; and (c) participate in the Web-wide dialogue taking place about your brand. But it does take a lot time. Make sure to map out your objectives based on the available bandwidth of your marketing team.

Many blogging programs fail to be relevant and drive engagement because marketers take on more than they should and then the blogging programs languishes due to lack of time. Start small—just a corporate blog and a simple monitoring program—and then grow the program from there.

5. Avoid common pitfalls

The pitfalls are many: failing to post regularly on your corporate blog; posting only text and no photos, videos, or links; failing to create a cohesive voice on your corporate blog by allowing several people to post; and neglecting to use all the methods possible to drive traffic to your blog (SEO, SEM, Twitter, social networks, email campaigns, etc.).

These pitfalls are easy to avoid, and doing so will result in a blogging program that does what you want it to: drive customer engagement, build your brand, and boost sales.

* * *

Twitter hasn’t killed the blog, just as the short story hasn’t destroyed the novel and the compact car hasn’t eliminated the pick-up. There are different tools for different purposes, and in this case the goal remains the same: knowing which blog tools are right for the job and, more importantly, how to use both blogging strategies harmoniously to create a lasting relationship with your customers and broader stakeholder communities online.  

Most bloggers start by their blogs by writing about business or personal things hoping that they will attract an audience from their day to day musings. With each post they hope to pick up more and more readers who like what they have to say. For many, this works. Usually it’s because they are good writers or have a clever take on whatever topic they choose to opine about.

But for every beautiful woman who takes her top off at the beach and gets the drooly-mouthed stares of the men in the vicinity, there are dozens of fat, beer-bellied men that make the kids giggle as they walk buy and attracts the incredulous stares of those who just can’t turn away. The question is–if we relate these images to blogging–which are you?

Actually, the better question is, which audience do you want to attract. Some blogs are out there looking for the little-boy giggles. Others are trying to attract the same element that pays to go peek behind the curtain at the freak-show. If you’re a business blogger, looking to speak to other professionals, you may not even want to be the gorgeous woman taking her top off. The point here is, before you can really know who or what you’re going to be as a blogger, you need to know who your intended audience is.

If you start blogging without this knowledge then who ends up coming back to your blog may not be who you intended it to be. If you’re blogging for fun, this won’t matter so much. But if you’re blogging for professional reasons, then you really want to make sure you know your intended audience well.

Target Audience

Every grouping of people will have a different set of interests and needs. Sometimes these groupings overlap and you can attract people from multiple audiences, but knowing who your primary audience is will help you keep your blog focused on those that will matter most to you. Don’t try to be all things to all people, as you’ll more likely end up being nothing to most.

However if you can focus on one primary audience and perhaps one or two secondary audiences, you can keep your blog focused on delivering the type of content that your audience craves.

Areas of Interest

Once you have a firm grasp of your audience then find out what it is they are interested in that you can provide. If you’re writing a blog for small business owners, they could be interested in any number of things. Some might be looking for ideas on how to run their companies more effectively. Some might be interested in how political developments will effect their bottom line. Others might be looking for how-to information on a particular topic.

While the audience is the same, the area of interest can vary widely. It won’t do you any good to talk politics when the business owner who just wants how-to information. Similarly, the business owner looking for the ramifications the most recent vote in congress has on their business isn’t looking for 12 management techniques that create a better work environment.

In cases where areas of interest are the same within multiple audiences you can focus your blog posts on your primary audience while throwing in references that will benefit the others as well. For example, a student might be looking for the same information as the business owner, but for entirely different reasons. If you reach out to students as your secondary audience then feel free to throw in some examples that they can relate to.

Needs to be Met

Finally, you want to better understand the needs your audience have that isn’t getting met from other places. Some blogs can promote strategy, others just provide information. They guy interested in how politics affects his business may just want some basic information on the topic while another may be looking for tips he can employ to lessen any negative impact. Some may be looking for a community they can be engaged with about the topic, while another might only be looking for some input on how they should cast their vote to better serve their own personal needs.

Knowing the needs of your audience, or which audience it is that you want to attract, can help you focus your blog posts to more effectively meet those needs. It’s possible that one blog, focused on a specific audience with specific needs, can meet a variety of needs. There is no reason that you can’t create multiple blog posts on a single topic addressing the various needs of your readers. It’s knowing these needs that’s most important as this will give you fodder to write about that your audience will want to read.

By focusing on your audience, knowing who’s looking for you and what they want to read, you’ll be in a better position to attract that audience through random searches. As you write your posts you’re more likely to use words that your intended audience searches for in Google, Yahoo or Bing. This will result in more targeted traffic delivery through the search results.

Unless you know who you’re writing to then you really won’t be writing to anybody at all. Before you start your blog, do a bit of research and get an idea of who’s looking for what. This will help you better focus your blog on content that impresses those who’ll be looking for what you blog about.

by Stoney deGeyter

If you want to get someone’s attention you have to have a good opening line. “Hey, baby, what’s your sign?” isn’t going to close the deal, much less even open the door.

When writing a blog post the title of the post is your pick-up line. That’s your first opportunity to make a first impression. Deliver a poorly crafted pick-up line and there is a good chance your blog post sit there alone and unread. Craft a strong pick-up line and you at least have a shot of pulling them in to see what else you got going for you.

The headlines below headlines all come from search engine marketing blogs. These headlines may not be “sexy” like what you might see fronting the gossip mags in the checkout line, but for the industry, these turned out to be some attention-getting headlines. In fact, while the headlines themselves didn’t win any awards, the articles that followed certainly did.

The question becomes, would the articles have won awards if the headlines were less attractive? What if they read “Web Marketing Checklist,” “12 Search Engine Marketing Strategies,” “New Link Building Tactics,” “Recover Your Reputation,” or “Get Visitors to Convert to Leads.”

None of these alternate headlines is particularly interesting, and are in no way as compelling than those actually used. The content may still be top-notch, and may still have gotten a good amount of click-thrus, but there is a far greater chance that the articles would be passed over by any reader skimming through dozens of headlines at a time.

A boring headline will tell the reader that the content is boring, even if it isn’t. The headline already provided the first impression of what the reader can expect to read if they click through to the article.

To get your audience to read your content, you need a solid pick-up line that is going to compel them to want to read it. You don’t have to go for sexy, but you do need headlines that give an indication for what’s in store, dressed in a way that is appealing and increases desire to know more. Asking someone if they want to sit in your old car will get an entirely different response than if you ask someone if you can take them for ride in your fully restored ’66 Dodge Charger.

Think of the headline as the packaging. The stuff inside the package will only be seen if the package is appealing enough to get picked up and opened. Your blog post title–your pick-up line–is about presenting your content in a way that your audience want to see what more is there.

by Stoney deGeyter.

You have a good idea for a blog post, but getting people to keep coming back and reading day after day takes more than a good idea. You have to execute that idea in an appealing way.

Ever wonder why so many commercials we see on TV revolve around sexual appeal? Because sex is appealing. At least when it’s packaged properly. Commercials using fat, bear-bellied men or “average” looking women are few and far between. Everyone is nicely toned, handsome or strikingly beautiful.

Blogging is no different. The best titled “pickup line” in the world is only going to get you so far. To get anywhere you have to prove that you’ve got the goods that go with it.

While I won’t provide a step-by-step tutorial on on how to write great content here, I will provide a few points will make what you have to say more appealing and more readable. The key is to draw your readers in and give them a way to enjoy the content, whether they are reading every word or performing a quick scan of your blog post.

Compelling Content

Each blog post must start with a compelling premise or something of interest. Not every post will be compelling to every person, but each post should be interesting to at least a portion or segment of your audience.

Speak the language

One of the reasons why it is so important to know your audience is so you are able to write using the words that appeal most to your audience. There are two parts to this. The first is using the keywords that your audience is searching for. We addressed that back in step 2.

The second is to write for the education level of your audience. You want to find the right balance so as not to speak over the heads of your lesser educated readers while also not talking down to those who are more knowledgeable.

If your blog targets a very knowledgeable audience then you want to keep the “basics” down to a minimum. If you are always explaining basic concepts your educated readers will feel that you’re talking to a lower-level audience. At the same time you can’t assume that your audience knows as much as you do. If they did you wouldn’t need to be blogging. If you assume your audience knows too much then they won’t be able to follow what you are saying because they are missing key components of information that have not been shared.

If you know your audience and their knowledge level on your blog topic, you’ll be able to write in a language that they understand and appreciate. Speaking to them, not above or below them, is essential to keeping them engaged in your content.

Scannable

Not everybody reads word for word and most people will at least scan the content before they commit to investing the time to read. Making your content scannable is crucial to keeping your audience engaged.

Scanability is all in the visual appeal of the content. Visually, your audience needs to be able to look at the post and see the important concepts and main takeaways . If they find those appealing then they may go back and read the content word for word. If they don’t have time for that then you’ve given them some valuable information just at a glance.

Bullet points: If possible you should break out pieces of your content into bullet points. This doesn’t work for every post but you should do it where and when you can. Bullets catch they eye and provide a nice list format that the brain can more easily remember.

Bolds and italics: Make key concepts stand out using bold and italics. This isn’t something you have to plan out, but once a post is completed you can look for things that you think should stand out. Anything that’s important enough that you want your readers to see without having to read every word can be either bolded or italicized. Don’t just use this strategy for keywords, look for key concepts instead.

Using bolded paragraph headings (or hx tags) also helps with the optimization of your posts, provided that there are some keywords being called out. Your first priority in your blog is to your readers so make sure anything you do with keywords is relevant and non-intrusive.

Presenting your content in a way that appeals to the reader both visually and intellectually will help you establish yourself as a knowledgeable author on your topic. With enough time, and the continued production of quality content you’ll earn a reputation as an authority. Your readers will trust that your headlines won’t just be good pickup lines, but they’ll be just the taste of what will likely be a body of content they want to devour.

by Stoney deGeyter