Blogging to Fame!

When internet is flooding with get-rich-quick schemes, dubious products and effortless-business opportunities to make your dream come true, it makes it very easy for people not to trust you and your ideas and services you provide. You are regarded as a sales person who wants to force your visitors in buying some product from him, when your product is genuine and can help them. People tend to keep a suspicious eye on you, as if every time you talk to them, it is your own benefit. When you leave a related URL in a post’s comment which leads to your site/blog, you are doing comment spamming according to the owner to benefit from his blog to take advantage of his page-rank. It is not their or your fault, it is being happening on net over time.

What all is actually Spam?

Spam is forceful propagation of any content. In our world, it is excessive repetition: Multiple meaningless posts to forums and unsolicited mail are two frequent examples. For SEO experts it includes stuffing keywords in their blog/site, duplicate content, unnatural link structures and posting of irrelevant links in comments, forums, guestbooks and membership lists. Normally all onsite spamming is done to either gain links or traffic or both.

Kinds Of Onsite Spamming-

Wikipedia Spamming- Google is biased towards links from wikipedia. So how do bloggers and other website owners get this to increase their rank. Stuff wikipedia with their links because it is a user driven and edited resource. Normally such links get removed but some deeply placed links on the pages with fewer people visiting remain untouched. Others contribute to it just to get their links in the articles written by them.

Referrer Spam- This is the kind that is aimed at search engines.It manipulates search engine rankings by creating what are in effect fake inbound links. It is done by a spammer by making repeated requests to see your website using a fake referrer URL that points to the site the spammer wishes to advertise. For sites who publicize their access logs, end up linking to the spammers site which includes referrer statistics, which in turn would get indexed when search engines crawl these logs. This increases the incoming link count. Some sites/blogs are attacked so much by such spammers that their band width has no space left to handle real traffic.

Trackback Spam- It is again done to receive incoming links. Sites which support trackback are attacked by such spammers. They would either publish an article with no relevancy or usefulness what so ever just to ping to get a link back.

Comment Spam- The very famous and easy way to spam is comment spam. Leaving a comment just to provide a link to their own site whether it is relevant or not, to gain links from high page rank blog is one of the blog spammers favorite.

Everything is spam, if they call it spam

Now that everybody is so troubled and annoyed by spammers and wish to fight spam they have started considering every step you want to take as spam. Specially the big shots of the blogging industry would not include your comment if it contains a link to your blog or website whether it is relevant or not. So, from the next time you put a comment don’t include a link if you are not linking another A-list blogger or Google or Yahoo.

Digg is very conscious about getting spammed. They are by nature anti-marketing and anti-SEO, so the next time you might be writing a story on Search engine optimization beware, you might be tagged as a spammer. With all the earlier evidence they have against such stuff, it is hard for them to believe that you are sincere to your efforts.

The internet can offer an opportunity for companies to market themselves and their products inexpensively and effectively, but you need to exercise considerable care to ensure that your method, or your message, doesn't get you into legal or other difficulties.

The strength of the barrier that Anti-spam filters pose is so low that it can be over-powered by the sheer number of spammers. Spamming is so much economically viable and incur much less costs than advertising that anybody can be lulled into doing so. But beware even you can be termed as a spammer by the overcautious because of the overindulgent.

Divya Uttam
Happy Blogging.

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Technorati Tags:- Spam,Blog Traffic

Labels: Blog Optimization, Blogging Tip/Tricks

Viral Marketing and Search Engine Optimization have the same motive- and that is to bring traffic to your website/blog. Both work on the same goal but have a slight variation in their strategies.

There are three free ways to drive traffic to your site/blog- Organic(that is through Search Engines), Referral(that comes from your links that are on other websites), and Direct(where user types your URL directly into the address bar). How much traffic comes to your website organically depends on how well you have optimized your website for your keywords. For the latter two depends on how many people find your site useful, relevant and usable. Viral Marketing makes others link you extensively, hence increasing your Referral Traffic.

Search Engine Optimization is good for your website/blog’s overall ranking and placement in Search Engine Result Pages(SERP). But if you want to be in top slots of Alexa ranking, you should think virally. To be effective, you should put your viral stimulators at the main nodes, which have their own roots and ways from where your viral marketing propagates automatically. Search engine marketing is just one of the point, where every visitor you get from search engines should take you a step ahead.

This may sound offensive but sometimes you should think like a virus, and get inspired by the way it grows. Your growth should never be parasitic, but you should know how to multiply your results by putting in strategic efforts.

Search Engine Optimization on the other hand makes your site more spider likeable. Those tiny creatures crawl your site to check its relevancy so that it can pop up in the SERPs for the related search. Creepy but profitable. It increases your Web visibility, Theme based page rank, and the much obvious after all that traffic.

The title may suggest that either of the two will have a winning hand. At a certain level both are very interconnected, like link baiting is one advance or more refined way for your viral link building, which is also a part of your viral marketing for search engine.

For any business establishment, to be successful, it must carry the viral self propagating feature from the starting.

It all started from Hotmail, whose proprietors coined the term viral marketing.

It’s not just the buzz, but the hidden ingredient of benefit put deep inside your whole viral idea is what pushes it best. Viral feature is established from the point it started. It benefits the person when he forwards it. Each promotion should carry a direct benefit for the promoter as well as for the person he promotes it to.

Points to start your viral marketing:
Viral marketing best works when it starts from the time it s first contact of their prospects.

1. Freebies- “Free” is the most powerful word in a marketer’s vocabulary. All viral practices are mostly free of cost, inexpensive is good, free is better. Free reports, free “buttons”, free information, free software which have powerful features. Though Paid Stuff has better quality but free stuff is more useful for the first impression.
2. Be Creative- Innovative ideas in your ezine, will make your ezine more popular and wanted in your niche.
3. Have your very own affiliate system structured, so that promoter gets benefited for promoting you.
4. Getting to the nodes. Promote your Big Viral Idea through Pushed Press releases, doing worthy JVs.
5. Anything that is cool, tells how easy, how beneficial and profitable it is to be part of your business or being customer of your business.
   
6. Be first; be innovative by attacking the biggest problem brings in the best viral marketing features to your business.

Think different think viral.

Many case studies can be found on this. Hotmail with its first ever-free email just tagged “Get your free email” at the bottom of each email sent. Similarly when most music companies were under big losses, even Rhapsody and Napster were not making good business, Apple i-tunes made a record business by bringing viral features at their business i.e half a million songs downloaded in just two days.

Viral marketing can make your website optimizations more powerful, lot more effective, and is must.

Warning: Any Viral Strategy would fail if Search Engine Optimization is left behind. Search engines bring those first visitors to your site/blog, that will be the starting node of Viral Marketing.

So make it an ongoing process.
Happy Blogging,
Divya Uttam.

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Technorati Tags:- Viral Marketing,Blog Traffic, Blogging Optimization,Optimize Blogging

Labels: Blog Traffic, Blogging Tip/Tricks, Viral Marketing/Referal Marketing

The Power of Keyword Optimization for your Blog.

Page Rank defines your importance on net but it is very general overview of any webpage. Google’s Rank Analysis is far more complex than what you see in your Google Toolbar and it is definitely not all about 0 to 10.

Now a days even personal blogs have a high page rank. They have page rank because they are healthy and updated regularly and are recommended by many other personal blogs but from Search Engine ranking and visibility point of view they are found only by the name of author. Their ranking is not based on any specific keyword but it shows the overall structure of the blog.

Google Page Rank is the most generalized average of the various Ranking Factors. Your website ranking might be ‘six’ but it may not be found in the Search results related to your site theme, and a blog of page rank 4 might be on the top results. Sometimes you can find 0 page rank blogs on the top results according to their themed keywords.

So its not about Page Rank, its about Theme Sensitive Page Rank. It is web visibility, on your keywords.

With already available content and high paged ranked pages makes it practically impossible to start a blog. So how can you go for already existing competition or move ahead in business. The concept of page rank put forward by many search engine experts is far from reality. We have been discussing various trends in our previous posts. The extract from them is that the latest positioning of blogs/websites in Search Engine Results Page is based on Google’s new technology Topic Specific Page Rank, which can only be obtained through developing keyword relevance and keyword optimization of your blog/website.

Keys that indicate your Topic Specific Page Rank

• Focused and targeted niches in large market.
• The Title tags that are specific to each page and not common for the whole site.
• Targeted keyword optimized webpages.
• Inbound links from related authority sites.
• Inbound links from the very related categories of human edited directories like Yahoo Directory and DMOZ.

Keyword optimization is not restricted to only onsite factors but also to overall structure as well as offsite factors of your blog. It depends on how effectively your blog handles your business issues. It is the tool through which you can relate your visitors to your business. How effectively it is told to them about your blog and market you deal with, through your keywords effects your success invariably. Only a good marketer will tell you how important a well keyword optimized webpage can be to your online business.

Blog can be keyword optimized by usual routine activities

1. Developing focused category based folder and sub folder. http://www.yrdomain.com/index.php?action=resource to better ones like yrdomain.com/blogging/secrets.
2. Getting links only from websites and blog themed to your blog, otherwise those Links are discounted by Google and other search engines.
3. Getting various anchor text inbound links from websites related to your niche.
4. Providing theme based and targeted, specific tightly keyword based Feeds from your site.
5. Submitting your blog to multiple Search Engine Friendly Directories.
6. Overall Website Structure should be evenly divided on all your important keywords.
7. Use your keywords while you link to internal pages for more targeting.
8. You should address to the deep issues in your niche, and not just the general ones. This would help you to become an important site regarding that niche from SEPV.

For the people who are really serious about their online business and have long-term plans for their blog should look ahead than just blogging platform and move forward to Content Management System. We will be dealing on these issues in upcoming posts.

For now,
Happy Blogging,
Divya Uttam.

Related Posts:-
Keyword targeting and understanding trends.

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Technorati Tags:- Blogging,Page Rank, Blogging Optimization,Optimize Blogging

Labels: Blog Optimization, Content Management, Keyword Optimization/Relevance

Someone is stealing your content.

Over the time we had a lot about content. Content is important and owns a key-role in the optimization of our blogs and websites. Web has even evolved with the concept of user-developed content. Different formats of content have been evolved under same medium of Internet like never before.

Being in a pool of Internet content it is even more important for us to have it unique and fresh. Much of the content on Internet is not original, it is either duplicate content or near Duplicate content.

What is Duplicate Content?

We all know about viruses and how they propagate in web. Content propagates in web in the same way. In the mean time many copies of content are formed. User developed content on net with no special addition of information or value to the real information is known as Duplicate Content. Sometimes this is done giving credits to the original websites and sometimes it’s just ripped of.

What are different types of Duplicate Content?

• Content that is syndicated and re-branded for different users and different market like Private Label Articles.
• Websites/Blogs developed by just aggregating the content from different websites from around the web.
• Plagiarism: Copying from Public domain websites like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg.
• Web press releases are most often are duplicated in many blogs and other web media sites.
• Businesses in quest of building brand image and protecting their Trademark ownership, register all domains related to their main domain and build near duplicate, or similar websites with no new content.
• Auto generated content from different types of content extractor software.
• Many registered domains either containing keywords or optimized for different keywords, redirected to same website. This type of optimization is dangerous as content of the main website can be taken as Duplicate content.

If we leave some business compulsions, most Duplicate pages are generated to develop content rich websites and generate a passive income, by placing contextual ads and manipulating search engines for high search engine rankings and optimizing their main website, taking the un-authorized credit.

Most times this is done without providing any valuable unique content for the visitor, neither giving credits to the real owner of the content, nor putting any useful inputs in it.

Duplicate content may be good for many big firms in the way that their name is attached with the content, and even though the content is duplicate, there is no harm to the real owner/source of content as it is providing inbound links to the main site of the real content owner. But this is not always the case.

Why should we be concerned?

Most often when we write even about latest news or info, chances are there its been discussed at many other websites. Search engines try to ignore or even sometimes de-rank the sites, which have very little original content.

Using 301redirects is also an important ways of telling search engines that page have been shifted instead of developing similar page. But using too many redirects to a particular page may make search engines take your website content duplicate.

Latest trend of Page Jacking is really getting furious for new and small websites. Sometimes owners of authority websites with good page rank take the content from smaller sites/blogs and use them in their websites. Being white listed they have more relevant content at their website, and this ripped content looks more natural to that website. Now this may make search engines think as if the original website have duplicate content and it may face consequences.

You, now don’t have worry about things like http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com

How do Search engines look for Duplicate Content?

Google, Alta Vista(now owned by Yahoo.com) have many patented technologies with them to find duplicate content and it’s not matching word by word content but finding similarities.

1. Google looks for subsets of other content sources. It checks the for how recent the information has been showed and also checks the previous authority of blog or website.
2. Yahoo compares the outbound links from the content
3. Public Domain websites and other high page authority sites are very well crawled by these search engines. Most of the content optimized websites have similar or just copied content from these websites are easy prey of the search engines.
4. Similar title tag, Meta tag description, with similar content are easily identified by search engines, are noticeable traces of content by automated systems.

How to find if your content is duplicated?

• Check by taking any 3-4 lines at random or taking important phrases from the article, and Google them by putting them in inverted commas.
• Use service called “copyscape plagiarism” provided by www.copyscape.com.

More information and protection laws can be found at CreativeCommons.org and also at DisclosurePolicy.org.

Its really important for us to make information easily accessible as well we add valuable content to the web. Sooner or later most attempts of stealing content would be countered by search engines with better evolving technologies.

To your Success,
Divya Uttam
Happy Blogging.

Further Reading on Google Blog:- Deftly dealing with duplicate content

Related Posts:-
Neither Content Nor Links
Blog Optimization- Is Content the Only Real King online?
Blog Optimization- Content and its Supremacy.


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Technorati Tags:- Blogging,Duplicate Content, Blogging Optimization,Optimize Blogging

Labels: Content Management

In the post Analytics for Better Optimization I told you that you can use Feedburner is a free service which also offers Feed Analytics, where you can track your traffic and other useful stuff. It would not create a feed from you from a scratch but would modify it and add it own services with it. One important point that I missed to mention was you can even use it to increase traffic to your blog, apart from just keeping an eye on it.

After you start using Feedburner you will yourself find the difference. People have almost doubled their traffic. Mr. Gary of Phoenix Realm SEO increased his traffic from 650 unique visitors per day to 1000+ unique visitors per day with doubling his RSS feed subscribers.

So now lets get to optimizing and publicizing your RSS feed to increase your Blog traffic.

Here are 11 easy and most useful ways of doing it.

1. Make you feed compatible- Some people or platforms have older version of RSS or Atom feed enabled, users of Blogger like me will be aware of this, where RSS is used more often. Don’t panic. Make your feed compatible with all feed subscription services using SmartFeed. Go to the optimize tab in FeedBurner, you’ll find a tool known as SmartFeed that will ensure maximum compatibility, and will convert it to any version the end user’s tool is asking for.

2. Explain what RSS feed is- Though it would sound odd but even today only a percentage of people who surf net know what RSS feed is, and how to use it. So, when new people click on your feed, without having one single idea about it, will know how to use it. Believe me a raw XML file is not very appealing to look at, if you are not a programming geek that is. FeedBurner knows that. All you need to do is to link the FeedBurner version of your feed rather than default. Use Browser Friendly option under Optimize tab to do it. You can even choose one of the different languages it provides and it is quite self explanatory.

3. What if your audience sends you more traffic- Nothing better than that I would say. Get your visitors spread a word about you using FeedFlare. Within the optimize tab, you will find this option. It will help you to create a community of your own around your content, and you’ll not have to touch a single line of code. Using it you will be able to provide your subscribers a way to act on your content. Now they will be able to Digg it, Del.icio.us it, email it and number of other things. Go on start spreading your content.

4.Notify all RSS and Blog tracking automatically with PingShot- Under Publicize tab, you’ll find the PingShot Service, which will save your time by automating the process and will ping all the top blog notification sites. This will be very helpful if your blog platform won’t let you to customize what services to get pinged.

5. Display your Headlines on other parts of your blog or other sites- Under Publicize tab you will find yet another cool feature, with the name of Buzz Boost. This will show part of your feed content on other parts of your site by posting a little JavaScript. This will be very useful if your blog is in a sub-directory of your site, and you want to put headlines on your Home page.

6. Catch the attention with your Headline Animator-This can again be found under Publicize tab. It is a Little Hypnotic button and it rotates headline which could be placed on your site or the forums you often visit. Clicking on the Headline will take you to the post. Something like this.



7. Get the RSS buttons for the sites of your choice- Chicklet Chooser under Publicize Tab is the way to do it. Provide your readers Feeds their way. You can find yours in my sidebar and subscribe for this blog’s feeds and be on the way of Blogging to Fame.

8. Feed Analytics- Though I already dedicated the last post about it but as I am talking about FeedBurner it would be hard to miss this point. Analyze your daily subscribers and daily click-through. This would help you know the time of the maximum visits of your audience to your blog and you can post accordingly.

9. Brand yourself through your feeds- Use Feed Image Burner under Optimize tab for this. Branding is so very important now a days and it is indeed fruitful to build your brand through your feeds. Include a smaller version of your logo, or even a special version just for your feed.

10. Include Media RSS Information for Yahoo Podcasts- Podcasting is the in thing today, and ofcourse if you are providing feeds for it you need to convert them to 2.0 instead, in order for the SmartCast option to work instead of the SmartFeed we talked before about. FeedBurner wi;; remind you which to pick.

11. Provide Summaries of your feed so that your subscribers visit your site to read more- Providing either full-feeds or a summary is totally upon your discretion. Providing just a summary sure will drive subscribers to your site to read the rest. You would ask that they may not- leave a teaser at the end of this summary so that they are bound to come to get the whole story and yes the first 200 words of your posts should be hypnotizing enough to drive them curious.

FeedBurner has lot more options, so go sign-up and explore them to bring traffic to your Blog.

Till then Happy Blogging,
Divya Uttam.

Related Posts-
Optimize your blogging and blog for more traffic and profit
Give the power of RSS to your Blog

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Technorati Tags:- Web Analytics,Blog Traffic,Blogging,Better Blogging, Feed Optimization, Blog Optimization,FeedBurner

Labels: Blog Traffic, Blogging Fame, RSS/Feeds, Web Analytics

After we had all the talk about how the blogging technology is evolving, content overload and getting traffic to your blogs/websites, it was inevitable to tell you that you have to track your conversion rate, your most efficient traffic source and keywords that are clicking with your audience. Remember, you cannot improve what you cannot measure and blogging is no different. This is about how to let others in the blogosphere find you and promote your content with you keeping a track of it.

Analytics have its own real advantages. Good practitioners always go for establish business models and this comes only from experience and a proper testing of different methodologies and business appeal. For business is becoming more of becoming type of open source, where improvements come from interaction and others experience, web analytics can surely boost your business than imagined if information available there is used as your business education and just not just mere facts.

You have two kinds of audience, your online readers/visitors and your subscribers. In order to measure analytics, you have to keep a track of both. A software that allows you to keep a track of your audience and analyze them is called an “Analytics” package.

Web analytics implementation strategy-

• Improving Keyword optimization.
• Developing keyword specific landing pages. Identify those keywords, and which appeal of your business goes with which keyword.
• Track repeat visitor information and look for keyword or places, which provide maximum repeat visitors.
• Getting visitors may not be the problem over web. Its getting targeted visitors which will improve conversions. Tracking the information will help you in getting information which source is providing you targeted traffic and which just chucks your bandwidth.

There are different packages for both websites/blogs and your feeds. It is very easy to find these on internet. You can find one dedicated to either of the above not both. A few company’s offer paid services, but not everyone can afford them. Fortunately, Google Analytics is a good tool for web analytics is a free service and Feedburner also offers a free service for feeds analytics, which can be upgraded by paying a nominal cost if needed. Alternatively many other sites offer free and upgradeable versions of such software.

Google Analytics-
It is free and very easy to implement. Sign up for your account and you will get a JavaScript to insert in your website or blog coding. After this you’ll need to click on the “Check Status” button to see if the JavaScript is installed properly and Congratulations! You are done with integrating your website/blog with Google Analytics. It helps you track:-

1. Daily Number of visitors and page views- In the graph you will easily able to figure how many visitors came to your website as well as the number of pages they saw, within the given time frame. It will not only help you find the traffic but also the page views will help you to know there how much content they consumed from your blog/website.
2. Geographical positioning- In what parts of the world are your visitors situated.
3. Returning/New Visits- That’s quite self explanatory.
4. Visits by source- Now that’s very important, the source of your traffic.

Google Analytics also helps you to know the bounce rates, conversion and the content summary. On which keywords did visitors searched for and came to your site/blog. You can know the placing of your site in the search engines this way. It gives you option to view as an executive, a marketer or a webmaster and has detailed options as per your choice. It also gives option to know the top entrances, top exit points and top content consumed. You will know about the sources, campaigns and last but not the least keywords, that make your blog visible to people. You can also do Goal tracking and watch your conversion rate.

Feedburner-
It is also as easy to implement. Don’t believe me? Go to Feedburner.com and tell them I have sent you. No they don’t have any idea who I am, and guess it does not matter till you benefit and be sure you will do. You can find:-

1. Total no. of feeds- In given time the total no. of feeds consumed by the readers. This can be found in the dashboard option.
2. Subscribers are using which aggregator to subscribe your feed.
3. Live hits will tell you last 25 visitors visited your site in how many hours, with their location, time of visit and user agent.

In my upcoming posts I’ll soon be taking up how to increase your traffic using Feedburner. Apart from the above you can also find how many email subscribers you have.

These software will together help you know the major metrics you need to measure to analyze your blog’s exposure. It is important to check daily trends and create reports to optimize overall campaigns.

There could be a trend you can probably check like you are getting traffic even from free SERP but they are not converting well, instead those keywords which are getting fewer placements converts well. Therefore testing is important. This could help in identifying keyword that convert well and it will help in your pay per click campaigns.

Testing is always a winner’s tool and web analytics makes all this a lot easier. With such powerful tools in hand you will always have competitive edge

Happy Blogging,
Divya Uttam

Related Posts-
Optimizing Blog by Developing Keyword Relevance
Optimizing Blog by Developing Keyword Relevance-II


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Technorati Tags:- Web Analytics,Blogging,Better Blogging, Business blogs, Blogging Optimization,Optimize Blogging

Labels: Blog Optimization, Web Analytics

“Blog Optimization”- Understanding the blend of quality content and link building.

Experience and self-practice are the best tools that you can develop. All marketing strategies and black hat techniques can only work in your favor if they are meant to help end user. Focus on this point and nobody will have a problem with how much profitable it turns for you and it’s all your praise.

Present scenario:

There is far more content and information available on the net today, than we had a few years back. It is the time, when distribution channels are overloaded with content, which is also known as information overload. This makes even more important to develop a more proper mechanism to get this content consumed.

Readers and visitors have lot less time to read your content because they have other options to find the information they need and in an easier way. They want to move forward. They are looking for instant salvation. But before we move to improving visitor experience at your business blog or website, we take the obviously important: “get visitors to your blog”. This point was also touched in the last post when we were talking about Accessibility.

Have a clear focus on what you want from your blog/website and what your reader needs!

Which is more important to you?

Alexa ranking or Google ranking, traffic or relevant content.

This makes it even more important for us to use every channel for getting visitor to our site/blog– organic search engine traffic, traffic from ppc search engines, and contextual ads, traffic from websites linking to yours.

Get innovating viral techniques to get readers in your blog. If it is effective enough they are the ones who will carry it forward for its quality. A few more linkbaiting ideas will be required here. Then again, this will only work when they will reach your blog. The biggest question for average website/blog owners is whether or not would they ever going to get any audience to their website, and optimizing the worth of each visitor.

Keys to improve your web-presence for your blog:

• Developing content, which is for direct benefit of user.
• Syndicating the latest developments, and how user can be benefited from it.
• Developing Link structure. It should look more natural, look like recommendation and not like advertisement or sponsors for maximum advantage. It is also lot more beneficial if your links are coming from varied sites with varied page rank pages.
• Using Press releases for getting inbound links from authority sites. You can use it for your website launch, for any development, if handled properly, can give your business a real boost.
• Improving social worth of your blog.
• Providing only outbound link when required. Just linking to other sites could make your blog to be taken as hub site and search engines would stop displaying your pages on search request.
• Never leave your free traffic, and this is all the more applicable for the paid traffic, without getting them in your list. You might be leaving lots of money on the table, there. With the blog and other conversion channels on your website, your ROI would be much better, than it would have been otherwise.

It is very important to give more reasons as well as ways to the people to come to your website. After getting them there, a proper strategy would be required to funnel those visitors into your conversion funnel.

You will have to keep a check on the future changes in search engine ranking algorithm as well their way to provide search results, and how your business is going to be affected. If you are Blogging to Fame and considering Internet as place where you want stay, you better develop clear strategies to contour these long-term problems from day today.

Linking has been crowned the present king by the search engines. It has come over ages. From links just from any website back in time to the consideration of relevant and quality links today, their importance have been maintained throughout. But, something changed in the strategies of search engines. They have become more aware of how and from where you get links from. They focus on providing useful search results to their visitors. A link from a high ranking gaming site will have no relevance for an internet marketing or a news site. So buying links from any site would not work for you now as it had been once.

Linking and its importance cannot be discussed without dedicating a full post to it. But, in short people will link to you, only if you have something important or interesting to share with their visitors. They have their image at stake when they refer you. So, how will this be achieved? By providing them good content. Your visitors decide whether to link to you or not, or whether they want to subscribe to your feeds by reading the first 200 words.

So the key is to get valuable content at your website. We have discussed in some previous posts on how to write content, one of them is Blog Optimization: Content and its Supremacy. Build some web2.0 features for your website, and make it sociable. Give proper updates through your blog. Content is an Emperor, because it helps you gaining links. Alone it will have no value till you work to get it consumed and use its power.

Divya Uttam,
Happy Blogging

Further Reading from Google Blog:-Building link-based popularity

Related Posts:-
Blog Optimization- Is Content the Only Real King online?
Blog Optimization- For Everything you should be concerned about
Blog Optimization- Content and its Supremacy.
Optimizing Blog by Developing Keyword Relevance
Optimizing Blog by Developing Keyword Relevance-II


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Technorati Tags:- Blogging,Better Blogging, Business blogs, Blogging Optimization,Optimize Blogging

Labels: Better Blogging, Blog Optimization, Blogging Fame

One of the biggest myth people are told or made to believe is “Content is the Only King Online”. Well I agree its half truth. But by just putting content on to your website, will it start working? Do you suppose everybody on net has all the time to read what you have written? You might put in every bit of your knowledge and originality in your posts but would not be able to convert visitors to readers.

Some website owners and even bloggers do not bother to write on their own and would straight away copy A-list bloggers word by word. They just fall for so many means, developing all kind of content from crap to recycling of others information to the content of little use. Their content is meant for the search engines. As for my understanding of search engines, I can expect easily that if your content is not consumed or absorbed by the visitors, your staying up with search engine traffic would be doubtful. Sooner or later.

What is content?

Content can be text, pictures, and any thing, which can be consumed here on web by your visitor. Types of content in general:

Traditional Content- Content generated by media people, niche authority, and researches.

User driven Content or User-generated content- After all we are in web2.0 world it’s the user who drive content. When Ms Dewey search engine started it was not introduced with a big launch. People started talking about it in their blogs, forums and where ever they could, and made it popular. So it was the power of User driven content that made it in vogue. Pod casting, video casting and all the blogs suffice because it is user driven and easily consumable.

Usablitiy and Accessibility-

The old saying that customer is your God is the basic truth on Internet. Usability and accessibility is to be tightly focused and is key to the success for any blog or website. If my blog is about business blogging and I keep on telling you what it is all about, all the time, you would soon loose interest. You wont other times have the time to read every word I write even if it a treasure of knowledge.

Everybody is searching for something when he accidentally lands on your blog or site, through search engine result pages(SERPs). You would say blogs exist because of their content, I will say you are perfectly right, but how much your content is consumed depends upon its usability. The information you provide is apt, that is why you appear in SERPs, but will your visitor stay to read it and click on what you want him to click and get into your conversion funnel.

Learning from past

When we are pondering about the usability of the content, the first point to keep in mind is to make it accessible. It is very obvious you’re your content won’t be consumed till it is accessible. Generation of high quality content cannot be underestimated and becoming source of high quality would be always benefited. The point of concern is generally is traffic and on that targeted traffic, and creating more ways to get your content consumed.

Many content sites and blogs become an important hub by providing the quality content or even links from over the web through varied websites and blog by the power of syndication. This cannot be said to be very qualitative but many times the information/content is repackaged or scripted for better accessibility by the end viewer or to the consumer. It can even be seen in the growth of building quality directories (main reason why directories are rated so highly and this is why DMOZ is so highly rated.) People who are around here in web from time, do have an un-doubtful benefit of having quality content but even then they just have to make it more accessible in this era of content overload.

Infinite Content and Choice = Overwhelming confusion.

Work to remove these confusions by providing a clear picture of your business, creating as well providing more channels for accessibility to your content. You can get more qualified visitors and hence more targeted traffic to blog as well to your website. After making it accessible to the visitor you have to make it consumable, to convert him/her to your customer.

So how new startups can be benefited with and structure online presence.
It’s more than just important to have web presence. Its 2nd phase of Information revolution and establish business online is getting very essential.

Growing naturally and found in the appropriate places search engine develops more credibility for your website or blog and hence show you on more of their results. Search engines never reveal the vital information, and even keeps minute details of yours, you even might not be aware of it yourself. This makes us think more deeply on key issues of blog optimization like Link building or buying links from high Page Rank sites.

Still then who is the Real King as for now?

I would take that in next post. Few things for now-
Make your worth, Make your business Interesting, Make it viral (and it is only if your business is consumer benefit centered).

A word of caution: “If your Business model on web is boring and your website sucks, you are already out of business.”

For you success,
Divya Uttam,
Happy Blogging

Related Posts:-
Blog Optimization- For Everything you should be concerned about
Blog Optimization- Content and its Supremacy.
Optimizing Blog by Developing Keyword Relevance
Optimizing Blog by Developing Keyword Relevance-II


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Labels: Blog Optimization, Business Blogging

Hook your reader so much that they start a blog to talk about you. This might not always be the case, but atleast they can link to you. Linkbaiting (link baiting, linkbait, link bait etc) is a term that has increasingly being used around the blogosphere, and I have already dedicated my previous post to it.

You can see in the following technorati graph the increase in its use. (source)
Posts that contain Link Bait per day for the last 30 days.



The quantity and quality of inbound links are two of the many metrics used by a search engine ranking algorithm to rank a website. Linkbaiting is a way to build high quality links which should be relevant to your site. So this would solve any questions of it being good or bad. It is considered to be a white hat optimization method almost universally. Part of successful linkbaiting is devising a mini-PR campaign around the release of a linkbait article so that bloggers and social media users are made aware and can help promote it.

Ethical Linkbaiting

When I was defining hooks in the last post, you would have realized that you can devide them in majorly two categories, the nice and the naughty(I would not call it nasty, as it solves the purpose). Lets talk about the nice here.

Learn about your subject so much that you could easily be termed as expert in your field. Though it wont be easy but if you are successful in doing so, everything you say will be termed as a link bait. Here are some ways which will be helpful to you in doing so.

1. Build a good content site related to your niche. Write articles- 101 ways to do [insert topic here] and a 10 ways to help you with [insert topic here], 25 myths about [insert topic here]. These have been going on for years and is still effective and easily dugg and bookmarked.


2. Be innovative. I know that’s not easy as well. People have been innovative enough to invent a button that does nothing all and yet being linked extensively.


3. Use quizzes and contests- Quizzes, surveys and tests have long been popular and interesting with web users and if you’re smart about the way you design them (giving people a button to place on their site for example) they can be quite viral. People are willing to participate in and you’ll find that some will if you organize some contests. Give a worthwhile prize like a free membership of your site, a free e-book or a free report which normally sells at $25 and above or the course you are about to launch.This will add a competitive element inceasing the participation rate and obviously the incoming links.


4. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links.


5. Swap some links- Oops! What did I just say? Swapping links with other blogs will not only increase your visibility but also increase your Technorati rank way up.
6. Develop some ethical tips and tricks about your niche that are a rare knowledge. Talk about them and be authoritative. This knowledge will come with experience I agree, but experience comes when you start doing it. So start sooner.


7. With the above point, there goes one more advice. Be a pioneer to say or do something about a common problem, or just anything useful and you would be linked heavily. You can even gain some links from authority sites. Being second, third or fourth will drown the effect.


8. Be generous while reviewing other blogs. People would not only link happily, but also recommend you.


9. Tools make a good link bait. Text link ads have set up a good example through their Blog-juice calculator. See, I just linked it. It made authority blogs like Problogger.net link it. They also provide widgets along with it to announce your blog juice to the world and secretly link back to it.;-)


10. Humor adds interest to anything. Like I talked about in last post, whether it be a cartoon (Hugh does this well - I’ve seen his blog linked to numerous time today alone), a funny photo, a story or even a title that gets a laugh - people enjoy humor and like to pass it on (it’s something we’ve been doing for centuries in the stories/jokes we tell).
11. Freebies- Apart from giving something valuable through contest prizes, you can even give useful freebies to download through your blog/site. This attracts others to link you and talk about you quite easily. (Do not forget useful here though.)

The Not so ethical or Unethical Linkbating-

I cannot imagine why do you want to know them. Here are a few link buiding methods that may destroy your brand or get your site banned/penalized/filtered from major search engines, or both.

I will still make a good use of them by providing you, how you can use these by making them ethical.

1. Comment Spamming-
Unethical way- Commenting on blogs just to get a link back. Start marketing your own site hard on your first blog comment. Add no value to the comment section. Mention nothing other than you recently posted on the same subject at _____ and everyone should read it. Carpet bomb dozens of blogs with this message.

Ethical way- Comment on blogs related to your niche and give some good advice on the comment. People will find you and will link you back if you are regular to their blogs and add value to it.

2. Using trackbacks for nothing atall-
Unethical way-Just linking to a blog which uses trackback to gain a link back without saying anything useful at all.

Ethical Way- Same as above, advice bloggers on how they can improve their blog or provide some other useful links related to the subject, and then pinging for trackbacks. They may like to talk about you and some of your reader may write about you as well.

3. Weird headlines-
Unethical way- Saying something just to attract linking for eg. Why Google is a monster and copying and pasting somebody else’s article in it.

Ethical way- Why Google is monster is a good headline, only when you can justify what you are saying. Providing strong reasoning for your statement will not only make it ethical but will make you popular and it will sure be a good linkbait.

4. Sue somebody-
Unethical way- Something like what RIAA did. You can read about it in RIAA Lawsuits Hit 71 Year Old Grandfather, 12 Year Old Girl and then writing about it in your own blog.

Ethical way- No ethical way to do this. You can sure be the first one to break out such a news to the world, if some else does it, through your blog.

5. Letting the cat out of the bag-
Unethical way- Talking about your company secrets, in your posts. This may bring you fame but it will take away your job for sure. Find out how Dooce word got its meaning.

Ethical way- You want me to suggest ethical ways to do that? You can instead read Blogging fame for a common employee.

6. Talk nuisance about somebody famous-
Unethical way- Just doing the above is unethical. It will gain you pretty good links for sure but could land you in hot waters. People despise big mouths which talk without realizing what they are saying.

Ethical way- You can present your own opinion by posting "Why [insert prominent blogger name here] is WRONG about...". You will again have to quite particular of what you say and very cautious. The ethical way here can still not be foolproof.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with link baiting. If you are creating Link Bait for no other reason than to attract links in hopes of also attracting search engine rankings improvement via those links...well, good luck. That’s what EVERYONE is doing. And those types of links wont help you long if at all. But go ahead and try it. While you do, why not also add some really useful content and tools to your site that will help your users accomplish something?

These are only sweet 17 ways of linkbaiting but you can keep coming back for more. I’ll soon be talking about it again in future.

Till Then,
Happy Blogging,
Divya Uttam

Related post:- Blog Optimization-Make your Blog a Linkbait

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Labels: 5S' of Blogging Success, Blogging Fame, Linkbaiting, Viral Marketing/Referal Marketing

Ever gone fishing? Oh a poor joke indeed!

What is a Linkbait?

Linkbait as the name suggests is doing something on your site to attract incoming links voluntarily. Just the right mix of content, information about what’s popular and getting links from others and creativity on the rocks will give you a perfect cocktail of linkbaiting and fizz for your readers. People have been in love with the subject and you can find articles on it all around the net. When we talk about relevant incoming links to be a vitamin to all our SEO related weakness, linkbaiting is the powerhouse of vitamins.

If you want your links to grow naturally, be patient. Today, you have 10 incoming links, 20 tomorrow, 21 the day after, and then 25, the needle sticks there. You try harder, and you have 50 other links. Can you imagine the time it will take to get a 100,000 links or more? Maybe even more than a seed to grow into the tree. When you want to make a fortune on internet, you better be quick.

It took me full two days going through every possible and relevant article on net about the subject (You don’t expect me to be dreaming about it one night and coming up with a post, do you?). I read about the different hooks(came up with that bad joke from here), and 101 ways to do linkbaiting(which itself was trying to do so). All of it made sense and most would be effective.

Telling you to make your site good would be so vague that I should rather say nothing at all. It would not solve anything. We can talk about content here, but aren’t you aware of it. If not you can read it in Blog Optimization: Content and its Supremacy. It can certainly gain you links, but the only difference here is that your content has to be viral. And you can add the Fame ingredient in it.

Lets talk about the various linkbaiting hooks -

In order to bait a fish, you need a hook. Here we will do it for incoming links.
Hooks come in variety of flavors, some of the more popular would include:

• Informational/Resource Hook
• News hook
• Creativity Hook
• Tool Hook
• Evil/Contrary/Attack Hook
• Humour Hook

Spice it or mix it and you can easily get newer flavors. Linkbaiting really means providing something that end-users enjoy, for whatever reason. There are literally thousands of ways to go about creating something that hasn’t been done before and making sure others find out about it.

Informational/Resource Hook

Some rare Tips and tricks or any personal experience through which your readers can benefit. Link exchange with a good list of blogs in your niche would help gain visibility. If you manage to get one good link from a popular blogger, rest soon will follow. Review other blogs, appreciate and advice them. A Free How To report based on your niche, can also help you getting one way incoming links.

News Hook

You will have to do some journalism here. Like every journalist will like to get the News first hand you also need to get a genuine scoop. Get to the news first, if you are not the news. A compilation of news and presenting it with your own analysis will give it a personal touch and bring it fame. Its a resource as well as a news hook. You really have to know your subject to do that, but links flow like water. If you can expose a fraud or popular spam, nobody else had noticed, you are going to make it big.

Tool Hook

Give other website owners a useful, fun or cool tool that they can use on their blog that points back to your own. A prime example of this was the blog worth tool that Dane from Business Opportunities developed that tells how much a blog is worth based on Technorati’s API (used by thousands of bloggers (google shows 27,000+ links pointing to it) - most of whom posted the button that the tool provides (with a link back to his blog).

Evil/Contrary/Attack Hook

Write about something that you did not like about a product or a popular blogger. Be sure to have strong reasons for it. You do not like something is not attention gaining but a WHY can do wonders if people seem to agree with you. Be sure to be unique, though. You can get much ruder, but it may attract strong opinions which are against you. It can pull in traffic but if it goes against you, the annoyance of your audience can be killing. They may abandon your blog forever.

Humor Hook

These kinds of hooks are just too easy. Search flickr, or photoshop a bizzare pic of your subject. Funny thing is, those things always get links, it's like people never seem to tire of them. You can visit Blaugh.com and check out the page rank as well as the cartoons posted there. People love it and even I do. It also provides a widget where you can display its daily cartoon on your own blog. A tool hook is used here.

Use your story as a bait. If the fish doesn’t bite it, it does not mean the fish is lazy or greedy. It means your bait is not tasty enough. You have to hook your readers up and reel them in. Be hypnotic, be creative and be innovative.

One more thing to keep in mind is, there has to be fish in the pool where you are. No traffic means no effect of these techniques. The next article would deal with the ethical and not so ethical ways of link baiting.

Till then Happy Blogging,
Divya Uttam

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Labels: 5S' of Blogging Success, Blog Optimization, Blogging Fame, Linkbaiting, Viral Marketing/Referal Marketing

A Word of Caution:- Core and serious bloggers might find the information in this post disgusting.

In many of my post like exact mindset of blogging, I said that it’s your part and your job to make your readers read your content. But How to get your blog content more consumed?
Blogging can be done for many reasons, like for improving visibility of your website, for improving Adsense revenue, making yourself more known by improving your feeds distribution and building incoming links.. All these are the reasons why most of the people start blogging.

It is more for providing more relevant information, more instantly who subscribe to those blogs. This is best handled by technology blogs who actually do have most frequent updates, this makes people more and more attracted towards starting technology blog. The game is simple for many who know how the direction of the tide and the way to ride it.

How do bloggers earn Adsense income using blogs without even writing posts, most simple but effective way?

Though this is not my favorite way and neither do I recommend it, but bloggers do follow it and earn in thousands using adsense.

If you simply want to earn good Adsense income and revenue by just putting ads in your blog, it can be done by using the given in these steps:

• Look for best content blogs who owns the fresh content as well can be trusted source of information.
• Subscribe to their feeds and put them into your blog. Its important to give link back to the websites/blogs from where you are taking the feeds. You can very easily manage a blog by directly feeding your blog using “RSS to HTML”
• Put your Adsense ads between these feeds. Bloggers generally match them and many quite questionably put their ads before their content, on the top. Put your some brains, a little bit of innovation, no breakthroughs required and you are done.

Writing posts is a very obvious way to create good name on internet. You can even follow both methods using your niche related RSS feeds and writing good and relevant posts. Optimize your blog. Publicize your own feeds, ping quite often, even twice a day if you have that many updates, and if you already own an optimized blog, which show up in search engine results, it could turn into a money machine.

For most people its fine but there is a totally different group of bloggers who are into totally different plan.

Almost every blogger wants to be an Authority blogger but in order to do so a few loose their track by making their blog too complex. They try to be far more idealistic than realistic.
They lag in most important concept of civilization i.e. Communication. Blogs are for communicating which should be in a simple and an effective way. Things, which are very successful, are very easily acceptable by the community. So many times on the Internet anything appearing to be complex from outside are of no use when thoroughly explored. Most carry Hype and then turn out to be a total waste of time and effort it took to create all the hype and seriously out of business.

I was into a good read few days back where I learned how communities in Digg and in similar sites are created by just building democratic groups. Most people vote for each other stories so as to gain position on their desired keywords or tags. Many bloggers keep on trying to make their post more diggable. Many have written and most people keep on writing about how to get your post dugg.

Here is a crude truth and should be known by all new bloggers, who want to create good income through proper blogging.

1. Your blog Page rank should be really good. It should be at least 6. You need to already have a big fan club or big community and you have already build reputation among all your readers and even among new visitors. You need to know how you should write your content so that readers should read it and hypnotically vote it or bookmark it.This is pure Blogging, as an opportunity, and cashing it to its max without any core business behind it. After all we are part of Information Revolution and where you can actually resell or even Upsell information.To get here you have an obvious solution, which do require about 6 months time.It’s your blog design, SEO and usability of your blog.
2. Building a circle of bloggers that votes for your blog. You vote for their blog and they return the favor, this will put you in top of your niche keyword and tags. Many people oppose this idea and take this as spamming. Though it cant be regarded as purely illegal as everybody has a right to bookmark and vote for their desired posts. It effects that lot who don’t use it or who cant build these kind of circles.
3. Technorati doesn’t discount reciprocal links. So you can very easily exchange links from as many blogs as possible and get your blog to the top position for your technorati tags. This may not be very valuable from search engine point of view. But it does benefit being at top of technorati as it give your blog a much needed exposure.

So if you find these methods ethical, go forward and use them. A point I would like to mention here is that people use them and it also helps them to make them popular. If you totally believe in being an Authority Blog, it is sure to increase your reach, But I would still mention DON’T COMPROMIZE THE QUALITY OF YOUR BLOG, and try being a long term player. Use these methods if you wish to apart from your quality blogging to increase your visibility but don’t just use these forgetting about what information you provide to the world. Your blog is meant for other people to benefit from. Don’t give them crap. It would degrade your blogs appeal and then you can forget about returning visitors.

To your Success,
Divya Uttam
Happy Blogging to Fame

Related post:-
So You Are A Wanna be A-List Blogger, Ugh!
Does your Blog carry Blogging Sense?

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Labels: Better Blogging, Blog Monetization/Adsense/Adwords, Blogging Tip/Tricks