Subscribe to

A couple of weeks ago, I listed the first five steps to effectively market your blog. I went over choosing a URL, blogging software, design, keyword research and optimization, and now have a few “more technical” steps to add.

For 1-5, click here.

6. Enable automatic trackback and ping functionality—A trackback is a way to notify a website when you publish an entry that references it. This is a great way to spread the word about your blog. Pingbacks allow you to notify a blog about an entry when you link to them in the content.
7. Enable feed tracking—Use an application such as Feedburner Pro to publicize your content and make it possible for readers to subscribe. Feedburner can also tell you a lot about your readers, such as where they are coming from and what they read when they’re on your blog.

8. Link to authoritative blogs and the sort—Linking to similar blogs and websites as resources to your readers is not only a great way to position yourself as a great resource, but also to attract the attention of these other blogs and sites that may be able to reference you. Great link bait.

9. Keep it organized—Organize your blog entries by categories and keywords. If a reader enjoyed something that they read months ago on your blog, you want them to be able to easily reference it.

10. Keep a watchful eye—Use web applications such as Google Analytics and ClickTracks to keep an eye on your readers. These applications can tell you what pages they are reading on your blog, how long they spend on pages, and other bits of information that can help direct your content. This is the best way to find out what your readers want.

As the college football season comes down the stretch there has been the annual talk about whether the Bowl Championship Series is a good thing for the game or not. As I listened to coaches and players talk about where they might fall in the standings I began to think how close the BCS is to search engine rankings.

Every season each team starts out with a clear slate, much like when a new website is created. Sure, there may be preconceived notions about how a team will do, but it’s really up to the team to prove itself over the first few weeks before the first BCS rankings of the year come out.

When a new website is created at a new URL, Google generally will not display that site in its search results immediately. It will wait to see what other sites link to it and what kind of updates it gets before including it in results. With sites that already exist it’s much like a team that was ranking high the previous year. They will have a high ranking right after the updated site is launched, but Google is always watching to see if the updates have changed the content and value of the site—much like a team that loses all it’s seniors to graduation.

Sites can work with partners or post on blogs to get as many incoming links as possible, but at the end of the day it really boils down to having quality content on the site that people find useful. I’d throw the “If you build it they will come” quote in here, but that’d be mixing my sports analogies.

Players and coaches across the country are talking about just winning their games and letting the rankings take care of themselves—just like building a solid website with info people want.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I did wear a different T-shirt for last Thursday’s Ducks game. That’ll teach me.

There are thousands of blogs—probably hundreds of thousands—on the web nowadays. It seems almost impossible to build readership on a new blog when you’re in the same arena with more long-standing, well-established blogs on the same topic, but I have 25 tricks to the trade that one person or company starting a new blog should always keep in mind. Here are the first five:

1. Choose a unique domain name. For example, if your blog—let’s call it “How to Peel Oranges”—is set up on Wordpress, the default URL will be something like www.HowToPeelOranges.wordpress.com. Shelling out about 15 dollars a year can buy you a unique domain name like www.HowToPeelOranges.com (same URL, sans the “wordpress” bit), which has a certain sense of legitimacy about it. It becomes its own standalone site and is more likely to appear to be the ultimate blog for discussing methods of peeling oranges.

2. Use blogging software. I may have jumped ahead a bit with #1, so first things first is choosing software with built-in blogging functionality. WordPress and TypePad are two popular ones. They are essentially the same product, but WordPress has one major bonus—it’s free!

3. Make it pretty. And make it your own. The more professional and relevant your design, the more appealing it’s going to be to those who visit your site. If HowToPeelOranges.com has a generic blue header with “How To Peel Oranges” bolded at the top of a block of black text, it’s gonna be much harder to engage your target than if it had an engaging layout, color template and design.

4. Do some research. Without researching keywords, your blog is nothing more than an online diary. A blog is a source of information, and the number one way people seek out information on the web is through search engines. Use Keyword Discovery, WordTracker or any other keyword researching software to discover the keywords that people are searching to find the information you have to offer.

5. Optimize accordingly. It’s important to have your blog target specific search terms that would draw readers that would benefit from your site as much as you would benefit from them going to your site (that applies more to company blogs than personal blogs). So, for HowToPeelOranges.com, I’m going to want to target keywords and phrases such as “oranges,” “orange peel,” or “peeling oranges” in order to direct relevant readers who don’t just land on the site by accident. I’d be sure to insert these search terms into the content (without forcing it—the quality of the content is equally as important).

The AP is carrying an article about sports fans and their superstitions.

“It didn’t take Heather Pate long to figure out why her beloved Auburn University football team had begun losing. It was the pink toothbrush.

Pate, a lifelong fan of the school, has long refused to own anything with even a hint of red, the color of archrival Alabama. That puts her among the one in five sports fans who say they do things in an attempt to bring good luck to their favorite team or avoid jinxing them, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday.”

One thing about folks who have hard-core superstitions is their devotion to the superstitions. People usually don’t say from the beginning “the Ducks won’t lose as long as I wear my Yell-O shirt every game-day.” It takes someone being very observant to the fact that for four weeks they wore the same T-shirt on days the Ducks won. Then, the one day they wore a different shirt the Ducks lost, but when wearing the original shirt on two more game-days resulted in Duck wins.

Wearing the same shirt every Saturday may seem a little obsessive compulsive to some people, but noticing the trends between a change in shirt and a team losing is just solid analytics.

There are all sorts of analytics programs available for tracking visitors and their actions on websites. Just collecting the data isn’t enough, though. These programs don’t do any good if you don’t have someone looking at the trends to match up changes in usage with what the causes may have been. This often can take a fair amount of detective work to figure out.

Many times companies have designers changing graphics on the front-end, user interface folks moving links and buttons around on a page, while programmers and system admins are making updates to code and servers on the back-end all at the same time. Nailing down the item that most effected the trends can take someone who’s able to really drill down and figure out what had the catalyst was.

I always find the best place to start is matching your T-shirts with the trends your seeing. I’ll let you know if that continues to work after the USC-UO game this weekend.

Here comes the last post in my series on how to build a web presence. Some of you have been eagerly awaiting this, while others are just glad that this series is coming to an end. Either way, here are the links to my first couple of posts in this series:

1. How to analyze your web presence
2. How to optimize your web presence

Now that you have analyzed your web presence to identify and understand ongoing conversations, and have optimized your existing web presence; it’s time for the last step in building a successful web presence. The third step in building a successful web presence is to actually participate and publicize or as I like to call it, particize. Here are some tactics that we frequently employ to help our clients particize:

• Encourage and reward current costumers who contribute to online conversations and reviews
• Establish a board of customers (heavy users, fans, bloggers, partners and journalists) to engage in product development and marketing efforts
• Plan and implement an online PR program
• Answer questions relevant to your business on Yahoo Answers
• Film quick little instructional videos about your products and upload them on YouTube
• Upload high quality product images on Flickr
• Set-up and manage topical discussion groups about your category on networking sites
• Implement a blogger relations program
  • Point bloggers to content that would interest their readers
  • Leave comments on other blogs and point back to resourceful content
  • Communicate!

As you begin to build your own web presence, please keep in mind that there are many more opportunities to explore that might be specific to your industry, products or services. If you have any questions, shoot me an email and I’d be happy to help you get started.

After analyzing what’s going on in your sphere of the web, the second step is to undergo a series of (mostly onsite) optimizations. Your goal is to make your site easy to locate and navigate. Valuable content is probably the most important aspect here. Search engines find your site because of text content. Don’t just clutter your page with words, but rather think about how to use it most effectively. Create a PDF guide about a much-discussed relevant topic or industry, then use it as an incentive to get people to sign up to your email newsletter.

• First and foremost, ensure that your website is build with user experience best practices in mind. If you don’t know where to start, shoot me an email and I will send you a list of best practices to get you started
• Optimize your website for search engines. Improve your content, linking (in-links and incoming links) and navigation.
• Create a PDF guide and use it an incentive to get people to sign up for your email newsletter
• Set-up an email newsletter
• Develop a blog to communicate with prospective/current customers and all stakeholders in an authentic fashion
• Optimize press releases with relevant keywords, then publish through newswires

After you have analyzed your web presence and made some on-site optimization changes, it’s time to start publicizing your efforts and to start participating.

I spend most of my time either explaining the importance of or helping corporate America build a true web presence, rather than just having a website. Really, just building a website gets you nowhere quickly. In order to be successful online, you have to build a web presence. In the next few days, I will be posting a series of steps on how to capitalize your web activity to get noticed by your consumer. The three steps needed to successfully build a web presence are to analyze, to optimize and then to particize (formerly known as participate - this stuff needs to ryhme).

Today I will start with what you can do to analyze your brand’s and category’s web presence. Before you make any changes to your web strategy, or spend a single dollar on focus groups, here are a few ideas that should garner tremendous immediate learning for you:

•  Set up automatic feed searches for your company, products and competitors names on sites such as Google News and Feedster

• Stay up-to-date on what customers are saying about your products and services on popular review sites such as Amazon

• Analyze your web traffic and figure out what keywords people are using to find your website, products or services

• Read relevant posts or comments on blogs

• Monitor popular forums relevant to your category

• Are people uploading videos relevant to your products or categories on You Tube?

• Are people uploading pictures of your products on Flickr?

There are many things that you could, and should be doing, that might be specific to your category. The trick is to just get started and begin learning. My next entry in this series will be on how to optimize your web presence.