Blog Comments – Why You Want Them and How to Handle Them
Blog comments from your readers keep your blog exciting and energetic. They contribute to a discussion. They help you refine your posts until you come down to the exact message you are trying to convey and have explained it thoroughly. Blog comments make your blog more popular as well. Here is how you should approach the subject of blog comments.
1. Encourage blog comments.
Ask questions in the body of your post about your topic. Request opinions on the topics you are covering. People like to have their say, and they will jump at the chance. You can also add a wrap-up question at the end of your blog post to get people in the mood to interact with your material.
2. Comment on comments.
Read the comments on your blog and comment on them if you see fit. Some comments are so much fluff and contribute little or nothing to the conversation. However, if you find a comment that makes a good point or asks a question that you would like to answer, make an appropriate comment. People who know you are reading their comments often come back again and again to continue the conversation.
3. Delete unwanted comments.
You should leave as many comments as possible, but some comments are just not appropriate. They may be offensive in some way, such as obscene language or crude humor. They may be hurtful, such as racial slurs or slander. You really have to think about whether you want your blog associated with that kind of talk.
Other types of blog comments you might want to delete are those which add nothing to the conversation. They may say something as inconsequential as “interesting blog,” without saying what they found interesting or adding any new thoughts to the conversation. They may be off-topic altogether. It is amazing to see when people post blog comments that have nothing whatsoever to do with the subject of the blog.
4. Pick up ideas for new blogs posts.
Blog comments that bring up compelling questions might be fodder for new blog posts of their own. You may have more to say about the idea than you can write out in a short comment. Taking note of this information is a great practice because it sparks your creativity in coming up with new and interesting blog posts. Furthermore, when you use someone’s comment to base an entire blog post on, that reader will often become a regular visitor to your blog. Handling blog comments correctly increases the exposure of your blog each time, and increases the amount of marketing you can do with it.
Blog Letters by Kosta Kostov
Content or Keywords: Which Is More Important to SERP Rankings?
A very large emphasis is placed on keywords in search engine optimization, and rightly so. It is the keywords that the search engines pick up on in order to identify your webpage. However, there is one thing that you should never forget. Keywords are meaningless without relevant content.
If you have ventured past the first search engine results, you have probably seen entries that looked like gobbledygook. You read the description of the article under the link, and it is just a jumble of keyword phrases. Sometimes, the keyword phrases are related, and sometimes they are random.
If you have ever clicked on these links, merely out of curiosity, you have found that they are keyword dumps. You are lured to the page; sometimes the ploy is to get you to click on advertising there to make them money. There is no value added to your online experience. These websites are a waste of your time.
In years past, it was very common to see these pages near the top of the search engine results pages. Their keyword-rich structure attracted the search engines to them easily. However, search engines have become more discriminatory in their indexing practices more recently. They have changed their algorithms so that they catch these keyword dumps and banish them from the top results spots. In fact, if Google catches such a webpage in operation, they will ban them from the rankings altogether.
That is why it is important to keep content in mind when you are working with an SEO campaign. Keywords are fine, and the search engines cannot index your website without them. Yet, if you overuse them, they are more detrimental than helpful. Google is getting better and better at recognizing what is meaningful and what is not. You need real content on your website so your keywords are placed in a relevant setting.
Of course, you surely do not plan to set up a webpage with nothing but random keywords. You have a business to run, and that is not it. Where you do have to be careful is in the way you use the keywords you are going to use. Make sure to write in the same tone and by the same grammatical rules as you do when you are not doing SEO. There is an art to putting in the keywords unobtrusively, but you can do it with practice.
Just to make it clear, keywords and content are both important, and indeed they are essential to good SERP rankings. If you need any more incentive to write clean, naturally-flowing website copy, just remember that people who enjoy reading your words will stay on your site long enough to think about making a purchase. When you find the right balance between structure and substance, you will get all the results you want – both in rankings and in user interactions.
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Group Buying Websites – The Plus and Minus of Massive Coupon Sales
There is a new thing on the Internet called group buying or social buying, and it is changing the way many people find businesses new to them. Group buying offers a way to reach a large audience in a short amount of time with no upfront costs in most cases. Yet, you have to evaluate for yourself whether social buying is an avenue you want to go down.
Here is how it works:
You contact the group coupon service and work with their representative to set up an online ad. You choose a deal you want to offer to customers who opt in to your group coupon. It is important at this point to find out how much the group coupon service will charge you. It will be a percentage, it can be as much as 50 percent. Then, you supply photos and contribute to the text that will go into the ad.
On one specific day, your ad will be featured and will go out to the inboxes of all the members of the group buying membership who are targeted with your ad. The social part comes next. The point of group buying is to share the coupon news with others. Members are encouraged to share the group coupon through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, or through emails to friends.
People accept the group coupon and set up to buy it if it goes through. This is how group coupons keep you from spending money without seeing customers. The group coupon will not be functional unless enough people sign up for it. The numbers come in all day, and if they reach your goal, the deal goes into effect. If not, you pay nothing for the service.
If the coupon deal goes through, all those people get their group coupon for the agreed upon price, and you get a check or deposit for the price they have paid minus the coupon service’s take. Customers are soon at your place of business to present their printed-off coupon or show you the coupon on their mobile device. You get new customers quickly and easily if everything works the way it should.
The trouble is that the numbers do not always add up to an immediate benefit for you. Remember that percentage the group coupon company takes to set up the ad and send it out to all their membership? That is somewhere in the neighborhood of up to 50 percent of the cost the customers are paying you for your products or services coupons.
Take into consideration that you have already dropped the price of your products enough to make them worthy of interest on social networking sites, and the result is that you are giving away a large portion of the amount you would ordinarily get for the product or service. If the product or service has a large market-up, or is a service that costs you little to offer, you should be fine. However, it is important to take all the total cost to you into account before you start a group coupon campaign.
Is it easy to set up a group coupon ad? It certainly is. Can group buying bring you a large number of new customers? That is a definite possibility. Can group coupons get you in trouble on your bottom line? Be aware that this could be a consideration. You need to structure the price point of your deal so that you will be happy when the group coupon members are sending invites to all their friends and followers. Otherwise, putting out a group coupon may turn into a real nightmare for your company.
Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Email Marketing Strategy – Refining Your Auto Responders
Email marketing still has its place in the Internet marketing world. Within email marketing, one of the most effective types of campaigns is sending out auto responders. The idea is simple enough. You just send out 10 or so emails to each customer, each one in succession getting more sales-oriented. The customer always has the option to opt-out at any time, but if you use a refined strategy, he will keep receiving your emails until he sees it through to the end and gets your final marketing message.
The first thing you need to do is to make sure you have a brilliant overall concept. The emails should have a common thread running through them besides “buy my product.” If you sell clothing, you might have an auto responder series on a particular season of the year, for example. Your overall theme might be “winter activities” and all your messages would lean in that direction. This gives the auto responders the feel of an ongoing conversation.
Another step you can take to make your auto responders more impressive for the consumer is to do some research on your subject. Your messages, especially the early ones, should be chock full of valuable information. Dig a little deeper to find information that is surprising even to you and you can be assured that you will capture the interest of your readers.
You should strategize very carefully about how to introduce the sales aspect of the auto responders. In the first few messages, you should say very little about sales. You want them to know that you have something for sale, so you will definitely mention your business name and industry. However, you will have to be careful to avoid pushing the idea of buying too early, or the reader will drop out before you get to the actual marketing message. If she does, she will not be inclined to buy from you at all, and may even report you as spam.
Finally, craft the final marketing message before you start writing the first auto responder in the set. This is similar to the playwright who composes the last act before starting on the first lines of the play. It helps to know where you are headed. That does not mean that you rush to get there. In fact, just like the playwright, you want to engage your audience and bring them along for the ride. Yet, in the end, you want everyone to arrive at the destination of your choosing. In other words, you want them to purchase your products and become customers. With the right attitudes in your writing, you can make that happen.
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Gleaning from the Social Networks – How to Use Google Realtime
Going on the social websites is like wading through mud sometimes. People just get on and do updates and Tweets about things that have nothing to do with anything that matters. At least, it does not matter to you and your business. It would be so much easier if you could weed out all that nonsense and only listen to talk that relates to your company or products. With Google Realtime, you can do just that.
Google Realtime is a fairly new service that allows you to glean the material from the social networks that is most relevant to you. The results show up on a constantly updating stream of content from social networks, the latest blog posts and up-to-the minute news.
Your first step is to choose a keyword phrase to search for in the social websites. Remember that people do not converse on social networks the same way that they choose keywords for search engines. They are using the words and rhythms of natural speech, so forget about cumbersome long-tailed keywords.
If you do use several good, descriptive words, put them all in one set of brackets for Google Realtime if you want to limit your results to those that use all those words. The best choice is to choose something fairly distinctive that someone would actually say in a normal conversation. For instance, if you sell curtains, “window treatments” might not be the best keyword phrase because it might not be a casually mentioned phrase on a social network. A better phrase might be something like “new curtains” or “buy curtains.”
You can also choose a location for Google Realtime, so that your results are limited to one geographical area. Sometimes this will reduce your results to zero, but sometimes it will give you some very valuable information. You will want to know where the nearby demand for your products or services is, especially if you specialize in one location.
Of course, there is a goal to all this searching through social networks. Once you find conversations that revolve around your products or services, you can jump into the conversations if it is appropriate to do so. Always remember that your expertise and information is more valuable to others than your sales pitch. However, you will reach a more targeted group by narrowing your search through Google Realtime.
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Search Engine Optimization Language – Why You Need a Fluent English Writer
Assuming that you are building a website for an English speaking audience, you will probably use an English speaking writer to do your website content. Most people put their resources into making their website look and read like a polished production. Yet, many people do not give all their content the same attention. If you are outsourcing, there are several reasons you need to use fluent, native English speaking writers for your articles, blogs and social media marketing.
1. People who do not speak English fluently make mistakes that are obvious to English-speaking readers.
Some words are completely misused. Some sentences may make some sort of sense if you think about them, but they are not phrased in the way a native speaker would say them. When you hand over control of your content to a writer without great language skills, your content looks bad and you look bad by association.
2. With writers who do not know English well, each keyword will stick out like a sore thumb.
A foreign-speaking writer who does not have a good grasp on the English language will struggle to fit your keywords into your content. This makes your material sound very stilted and unnatural. People will not want to read it and they will click on to the next article or the next website in the blink of an eye. Your readers are not there to read mindless content punctuated by irrelevant, misplaced keywords. They want to read something interesting and informative. Ideally, they should not even think about the fact that keywords are present.
3. Readers will not gain confidence in your expertise unless you give them content that earns their respect.
For the reader who is looking for solid information in your articles and other content, your expertise is a valuable commodity. Do not let someone who does not express himself well in English write about your industry or products for you. Poor writing does more than give an impression of sloppiness; it also tells your readers that you did not make the effort to give them your information in a clear format. It may make your readers question whether you really know what you are talking about in the first place. Poor writing lowers your status as an authority in your field.
It is always important to make a good first impression when a reader begins to read your content. Just as important is getting the chance to communicate your ideas clearly and succinctly. One of the main goals of online marketing today is the soft-sell technique of establishing yourself as an expert. Without excellent English speaking writers, you will never receive the respect you seek.
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Blogging with a Passion
Blogging can become a chore if you are not careful. You set up a routine for your blogging. Being a responsible individual, you stick to your schedule and try to write something worth reading each time. That kind of thinking will get you just so far. To really break out with your blog, you need to pour your passion into it.
Chances are that you are passionate about certain aspects of your business. The best way to get in touch with your passions about your business is to take note of what you like to talk about with your colleagues. People who work in the same type of business as you will be interested in the same things. You will not always find the same things important, but you will probably have enough common ground to discuss relevant topics easily.
This information from your chats with like-minded colleagues is raw material for your best blogs. You would not talk to the general public the same way as you did in those conversations. When you talk to a member of the same profession or business group, you have certain shortcuts to your speech. You can say things to each other in few words that would take a bit of explanation for a general audience.
Do not be afraid to use the topics you are passionate about just because they might require a little more clarification. What is fascinating to you about your business will inspire passion in others. You will talk about the subject with vigor and excitement, and your audience will notice the difference.
At the same time, there may be topics within your business area that have lost their luster for you. You have used them or worked with them so much that they have become a part of the scenery. Brainstorm to find topics that seem mundane to you, but that your customers might like or need to hear about.
You might now be asking how you can write with passion about mundane things. The answer is that you have to find your passion for these things. If you are a construction company, you might decide to blog about safety. It may not be the most interesting thing on your plate, but it certainly is important.
Look for your hot buttons when it comes to safety. Figure out what emotionally affects you about day to day safety. Think about how safety affects your overall business, and how it would affect your targeted audience. In short, find what makes you passionate about daily safety.
Then, you will be ready to write your blog with the right attitude. You will be excited and ready to share your interest with others. They will see your enthusiasm, and they will be drawn to it. If you repeat this idea with all your blogs, your blog will become more popular. Before long, your blog will have more regular readers than you ever thought possible. With links back to your company website, you will have more visitors than ever before.
Using a Blog to Show Your Value to Consumers
Your company should be very valuable to you; do not forget that it is valuable to consumers as well. If it were not valuable to anyone, you would never sell anything. What is more, no product like yours would ever have had sales if your product was not worthy of the consumers’ attention. Making money may be your highest priority, but you can still contribute to society with your products. You just have to spread the word that your company has an important place in the world, and you can do that through your blog.
Your blog is your chance to show your readers and subscribers why your industry and products are so important. In a blog, you do best to talk about your subjects from an informational standpoint. However, you can still express the way your type of products fulfill needs.
One way to do this is to have a blog in a teaching format based on doing a task. The blog might be done as steps in a process or an outline to be followed. When you tell your reader how to do the task, you can suggest how different products can be used to complete the steps.
The task might not be directly related to your industry, but it should be one that demonstrates the need for some of your products. For example, a paint store might give a demonstration on how to do interior decorating on a high end dog house. A paint store probably does not provide this particular service, but the paint itself could be mentioned and used as a subject in the description of the project.
Paint, though, is something everyone knows is needed. What about something that is a less obvious want or need? You just have to find the value in it. Maybe you sell little pink, fluffy and glittery hair doodads; you think they make you some money but they are frivolous. The truth is that those same little hair decorations serve many purposes if you just do some explorations. They may increase little girls’ self esteem. They may improve the girls’ sense of belonging with their social group. They may help their relationship with parents who give the items to them. They are really not a minor item at all.
You can go through the same process with any product you might sell, and you should. Even though you are not blogging to do a hard sell push of your products, you need come from a perspective of pride in your products. When you know where you stand, you do not have to be aggressive. Your feelings about the product will come out in the ways you describe issues surrounding the products and how-to’s relating to the products. You will gain an audience and potential customers.
Coin by Peter Griffin
How to Serve Your Niche in Blog Marketing
When you are marketing your business through your blog, it is important to serve your niche with your posts. Basically, all that means is that you should stay on the general subject of your industry. It may sound like a no-brainer, but many bloggers have fallen into the trap of commenting on anything and everything, whether it pertains to their business or not. Stay true to your niche, and your readers and subscribers will appreciate your consistency.
One way to do this is to get organized. If you have several general subjects under the main heading of your business and industry, you might set up a rotation of these subjects to make sure you cover them all. It is better to shift focus within your niche than to get sidetracked altogether out of boredom.
It is important to stay excited about your industry. You will be a better blogger if you keep up with educational opportunities in your business niche. If you run a small business that has a larger parent company, you might get that education at a convention or company school.
If you are an independent small business, you might go to local classes or meetings on your type of business to renew your interest. An Internet business can always find online resources for learning more about their business. The more you know, the more you will want to share.
Stay focused on the overall theme of your blog. It is one thing to educate your audience on your products and services. It is quite another to slip into discussions of subjects that have nothing to do with your business. For example, the theme of your blog might be about tools, how to use tools and where to find tools. You could make a very interesting blog about that subject, especially if your business was selling tools and you knew all the tips and tricks of the trade.
However, your tool blog is not the place to rant and rave about political issues, legal matters or anything else outside of tools that is on your mind. If you want to run a weblog that is filled with your observations about life in general, make it a separate blog. For your business blog, stay on the subject of your industry. Your readers and subscribers come to your blog to profit from your expertise on your subject, not to get your take on unrelated matters. Serve your niche for more faithful followers.
Start Keyword Research Only After First Clarifying Your Marketing Objectives
It is important to do keyword research before you attempt search engine optimization of your website, blog, articles or other content. Without knowing what people are looking for, you will not know what keywords to supply. However, there is one step to Internet marketing you need to do even before you take on keyword research. That is clarifying the purpose of your marketing campaign.
You need to determine what you want your customers or potential customers to do when they get your marketing message before you will know how to construct it. Some of the possibilities are visiting your website, signing up for a newsletter, purchasing one or several of your products, sharing your company information with others, opting-in for marketing materials and subscribing to your blog by RSS feed.
Your keyword research will revolve around the choices you make in establishing the motives for your marketing campaign. For example, if you want to do campaigns for the purpose of getting people to interact with you over a long period, you would lean towards keywords that have staying power over a long period of time. If you just want to run a blast campaign to get people to buy a product to boost sales over the short run, the focus would be on the latest keyword trends instead.
Your objectives might be best suited for a particular age range in terms of keyword research as well. If you want to get people to sign up for a newsletter, you might be more likely targeting people in an older group than those who would sign up for an RSS feed, for example. When you do keyword research, you can break it down to age and other demographic groups in some cases, to get an idea of what different people type into the search engines as opposed to people in other groups.
Use everything you know about your intentions relating to your marketing campaign when you go to the keyword research sites and software. You will come up with the most winning words and phrases to reach your objectives if you take some time to think ahead before you get to those helpful tools.
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