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My apologies for the 3-week lull between entries. The holidays were here and I was busy being merry! I did, however, recently add a post about what makes a good blog entry that has to do with the content of your blog, rather than the structure and functionality. Anyways, back to business. Here’s tip #11 through 15 for marketing your blog.

For 1-5, click here.

For 6-10, click here.

11. Submit your blog to directories—This will provide more channels for new readers as well as build your credibility.

12. Submit to paid directories—Yahoo, BOTW, bCentral, WOW and JoeAnt are sites with high traffic and are great venues for attracting new readers. Submit to their paid directories with categories for blogs.

13. Build links—You can do this any number of ways, including finding suitable sites to link to you, adding a guest book or newsgroup, requesting links from other sites, etc.

14. Write a press release—Announce your blog to online and offline news sources to raise awareness. Optimize the content of online press releases for search engines to direct traffic to your blog via applicable search terms.

15. Request feedback and reviews—Ask people to talk about you. The best way to do this is to ask for their honest opinion. Reviews will provide links and expand the reach of an old-fashioned marking tool: word-of-mouth.

How do you get people to enjoy your blog and keep coming back for more? It’s all about the content! Here are some pointers about blog writing that should help you build readership:

Be real. This is the most important thing—take note of this before anything else that I list off. People can tell the difference between an honest blog and a blog with an ulterior motive. People read blogs for the same reasons they have conversations—it’s social, they learn, and they have an opportunity to share their own thoughts. It’s when you try to become a salesman that you scare the readers away.

Keep it current. Okay, so let’s say that very recently, there was a news story about alligator meat and how it’s the hot, new, holiday dinner entrée for 2007 (not really—although I can tell you from personal experience it’s really not that bad). Google searches for the term “alligator meat” will undoubtedly spike during the few days after the story. Why is that? Because it’s current! The news story piques people’s interest and they want to learn more. If you write about it, you’ll attract some of the Internet searches and gain readership.

Keep it relevant. Sure, you can write about current events, but make sure your blog entry is relevant. You can plant keywords all over the place and direct tons of traffic to your blog, but if what you’ve written isn’t relevant and engaging, you’ve done your readers—and your blog’s reputation—a major disservice.

Use pictures & videos. This one is easy. Think of it this way… are you going to buy the cookbook that has nothing but words, or do you want the one with pictures of the food that you’re making? Pictures and videos very easily engage readers. They break up the text and make your entry appeal to different sides of the brain.

Keep it short & sweet. Huge, multi-paragraphed blocks of text are frightening. This isn’t college—it’s not required for your readers to read what you write, so make your entries inviting.

Make it resourceful. If you’re writing an entry about your sentiments toward alligator meat as a delicacy, provide your readers with relevant resources via links on your in your content that will provide them with more information. In this case, you could link to stores that sell alligator meat, information about alligators, recipes that include alligator meat, cuisines that use a lot of alligator meat, etc.

So after writing a blog entry about writing a good blog entry, did I deliver? Well it depends. For those of you who found this entry via the “what makes a good blog entry?” search phrase, my answer is yes. It’s short—probably less than 500 words. It’s current and relevant—blogging is gaining in popularity every day, and there’s still confusion as to how people should use their blog. I added an engaging image (albeit, it’s a tad unrelated), provided you with links, and I kept it real, man.

I do apologize to those of you who got here by searching “alligator meat.” Here’s a link to a fantastic site that should satisfy your curiosity. I’ll even throw in a video:

Unless I’m heading out on a date (so, rarely), Charles Shaw seems to be the wine of choice at my household. There’s just something about being able to get tipsy off one $3 purchase that just makes you feel good. At least sort of…

Growing up the daughter of the ultimate locavore, and now being a pretty adamant one myself, it’s hard for me to justify buying some cheap (gasp!) California wine—especially when the Willamette Valley is home to some of the greatest vineyards in the country. But then I do end up buying it because I don’t have a lot of extra cash just lying around ready to be drunk up.

AdWeek recently reported that 26 percent of 21-to-30-year-olds spend their alcoholic beverage budget on wine. And, it’s just a fact of life, but 21-to-30-somethings really know how to take down the alcohol, in fact, they love it so much they make games up to consume more, meet for happy hours regularly, and post funny pictures on Facebook of their friends completely in the throes of it.

So, yes, while you may not call these youngsters the most desirable of all customers, the fact of the matter is that they have some disposable income and, as we’ve discussed, they like to imbibe.

Trouble is, some of these vineyards make it difficult for young people to get involved with the wine industry. We grew up in a time of designated drivers, and when only a few folks want to head out, this can cause a problem. We also don’t want to pay any ridiculous tasting fee (anything over $10-15 accounts for that), and being asked to be in the Cellars Club seems like a lofty proposition for those of us still paying off school and our car.

So, wineries, it’s time to reach us—I mean, who are you going to sell all those vintage wines to 20 years from now?

Some wineries have already started there own blogs, and that is a great step in the right direction, but what they really need to do is get out there. Just like in online PR, participation is KEY. Plan some events at the winery that are 30-and-under and include a reduced tasting fee and perhaps some snacks, and then shuttle people to and fro. Better yet, hire a band and set up an event somewhere in a large city where people can easily get home with a cab (or, more likely, public transportation—we are CHEAP), then focus only on them.

When those bottles are in front of me, I’m enjoying my time, and they are only around $20, I usually find myself buying a few. Just ask Sokol Blosser, I certainly didn’t let them down on my Thanksgiving-day wine trip.

As AdWeek also says about this age group, “Though few claim to be knowledgeable about wine, 34 percent are ‘interested in learning more.’” Time for some innovative marketing!

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.

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).

For the last three years, it seems that every web marketer within earshot has been saying the word “blog” about 15 times a day. And yes, your crotchety system administrator (that’s me) is embarrassed when people use phrases like “technological innovation” to describe blogs, spouting other things like “this has never been done before.” How exciting!

But step back a bit, haven’t we been doing this for a while now? Really, we’ve had these tools on the World Wide Web in place for at least 12 years. There have been sites that are functionally equivalent to blog sites up since the beginning of the web. Before that we used Gopher, and before that, folks typed log entries into whatever flavor of BBS software was popular. Were there non-computerized, distributed, often-updated journals even before computers? Of course there have been, for hundreds of years.

Some people are turned off by the puffed-up, self-aggrandizing notion of publicly distributing one’s own journal. Even more folks just chuckle at bloggers as being a hopeless part of the population that still reads “Wired,” the lonely folks with MySpace pages who waited in line for iPhones. Many techies snicker when people say the word “blog”—it’s because they’re still thinking about the technology, and not the people using it.

Blogging isn’t really about the technology, it’s about a social movement. It’s about economics, and it’s about where people are willing to spend their spare time. It’s like drive-time in radio, and it’s like a commercial during the Super Bowl on television. I don’t want to sound too “woo-woo Web 2.0″ here, but suddenly there are a whole lot more people reading and writing logs. We should be paying attention.

As consumer educators, of course we should be blogging. We need to be there. We should be writing our little hearts out, duking it out in the blogosphere, protecting our customers’ reputations and bringing their solutions to light. Check out some of our cool blogs at the top of this page for some great examples of this. These blogs are non-invasive, entertaining and frequently informative ways to connect with customers and send highly qualified web visitors to our sites. All good.

We need to use this tool while we still can. Blogging as we currently know it won’t be around forever. The behavior we call “blogging” will keep mutating, so the time to get started is now.

And yes, I still think the word “blog” is silly.

I was almost entirely unsure of what exactly it was until I watched the video below. Twitter is a free social networking service that acts as a personal micro-blog. Through SMS, instant messaging or email, users can send updates to their account that are automatically sent to other users who have subscribed to their Twitter feed. Updates are sent to subscribers’ Twitter page, instant messaging, SMS, RSS or email or can even be directly posted on the users blog via third-party applications. User’s can dictate who updates may be sent to; whether it’s just their circle or friends or open to the public.

How does it change communications? It’s instant, often more candid than a blog and let’s you update all of your friends (well, those who are subscribers) on the fly. From a social marketing standpoint, Twitter is a brand new medium. Sports entertainment companies can use it to update subscribers on game times and scores, publishers can use it to announce new book releases or signings, web vendors like Amazon.com or eBay can announce special offers, etc. The list is endless and virtually every industry can benefit from it.

Most of our team members have personal blogs and we spend the majority of our days managing blogs and building web presences for our clients. Our r2morrow blog was created for the some of same reasons we believe that blogging is right for our clients, as well as some rather unique ones:

Here’s to many smart, insightful and blog entries to come; and to me not losing all my hair quite so quickly.

We build a lot of blogs around here at Respond2, most of which run on the fantastic and free Wordpress Content Management System. As a result of building a few Wordpress themes—and viewing even more—I’d say I’m pretty familiar with the visual style that is typical of most themes, and the structure of the information Wordpress spits out. It’s always refreshing to see CMS skins that escape the ‘look’ of their architecture, and there are plenty of impressive examples out there (http://www.welovewp.com).

My main qualm here is that blogging software tends to encourage linear display of content, so you end up with long pages, full of links and repetitive content across pages. This article will give some suggestions for escaping that linear structure, making your blog look less like a blog and more like an online publication, which may be a worthwhile goal both in terms of user-friendly navigation and the legitimization of your brand.

(more…)

When I open my RSS feeds or read the latest AdWeek column, I constantly stumble upon yet another new social network. The new sites all have the same promises; easy to use, innovating, exciting, resourceful and free! I would agree that these new sites deliver content; however, I would also argue that the consumer does not have the motivation or perceived payoff for using these start up sites. The problem is that marketers are not thinking about people’s most valuable asset… our time!

Corporations such as Wal-mart and Coca-Cola have both tried recreating the wheel by generating their own social network sites. They have all fallen for, what I call “If you build it they will come” syndrome. Their intentions are understandable; build a site that’s fun, interactive and social. The result will be positive buzz about the company and an increase in sales will follow.

The problem, however, is that the modern consumer does not have the time to adapt to a new site, participate in the features, and then tell all of their peers. Steve Rubel from the blog “Micro Persuasion” calls this problem “The attention clash.” Like most people, I work full-time, have many friends, partake in hobbies and already participate in three social network sites. For the time being, adding another network to my portfolio of bookmarks and “must check” websites would not be an efficient way to allocate my time.

On the positive side, there are ways for marketers to participate in the blogosphere without cloning other sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Technorati. Instead of competing for peoples’ time, they should start adding value to existing popular networks— to add value is to comment on the site, build friends, use the features and participate in the network. Further, generating exciting features and making the sites more user-friendly will increase chances of consumers noticing your company. So forget, “If you build it they will come.” Try, “If you help build, participate, and create, they will recognize and respect you!”