Don’t Just Blog, Build an Online Presence

To add more readers to your blog, you’re going to have to show your face in a few other places besides your blog.  You’ll want to comment on other blogs, guest post, Tweet and follow other tweeters and drive traffic back through whatever means possible.  When people find you through other sites, there is a process of discovery that can help build them into long-term fans.

You’ve Got to Be Patient

When working on a new blog, you have to remember that it is hard to get started and readers will come in trickles and droves at the same time.  On one day you might have a few 100 visitors, but then not have any traffic to speak of for a few more days.  Hopefully, using the traffic strategies we teach you that won’t happen.

You don’t want to just read the current events within your industry, you also need to look at these people as competitors.  If people are reading other sites, then they aren’t reading yours.

If you have a killer article that is trending across the net, you might want to consider running a press release through PRWeb or one of the other press release organizations.

Also try to team up with other guest bloggers, who are basically just other authors in your niche.

There are two models that are successful in blogging.

1. On your blog you want to post one amazing piece of content every week.  Make it a fairly long post with a really really good content.

2. Post several times today, but cover things from multiple angles with multiple writers.  This is where guest bloggers and hired guns come in.

Those are the two models that you want.

Prices that you would want to pay someone for a guest blog on your site would be… $100 for 1500 words from a great author.  You also want to ask them to publicize your article to their list, blogs etc.

Why is this so good?  Because, you couldn’t pay this person $100 for a banner ad on their site for more than a week. But here they are writing a ton of content and also telling people about it on their blog.

Where you could probably get $100 article written for five dollars on fivver, you wouldn’t get the traffic. What you’re really paying for is the traffic in addition to the quality content.

Then if you’re going to get content from non-professional bloggers, that don’t have a following, you don’t want to pay more than $20 for a 500 word article.

• Redirect people from the Blog to your landing pages and/or direct to a sales page.
• Entice guest bloggers to submit content on your blog
• Stay on top of the comments

Syndicate your blog content to Facebook and Twitter, as well as notifiy subscribers when a new post is avail via email broadcast.  Aweber can do this for you.

RSS feed your latest blog posts and comments into the footer of your main company website, if that main site isn’t your blog.

Photos On Your Blog

Everyone of your blog posts needs to have a picture associated with it.  Perry Belcher is known for saying, you really are being paid to show people pictures.

Make sure that all of your pictures have alt text attached that is relevant to the post.  So for example, if your post is about universal remote controls, then your picture should be of a remote control and also have the alt text “universal remote control”.

A lot of times people do image searches when they’re looking for various terms. Google tracks how many times a picture is clicked on an image search and more importantly how many times it’s not clicked on.

You can steal photos to put inside of your posts, but I don’t recommend you do that.  Google has an advanced algorithm that can tell if the photo you are using is copyrighted, protected, watermarked or otherwise belonging to someone else.

So while you can grab other photos and simply put them on your site, the better way would be to change them up by at least 20% and then resave them before posting.

Normally we would list all of these in additional resources, but they are so important going to go ahead and go through them now.

Photo and Image Editors

Pixlr – Pixlr is an online photo-editing platform that allows you to change photos in multiple different ways.  You can do this by making them black-and-white, stretching, skewing or adding light, shadows, etc.

Ipiccy – http://ipiccy.com/ is an online retouching tool that lets you make changes to photos like a professional photo editor, with an extremely easy to use interface

Screenshot Apps

LightShot App – http://app.prntscr.com/  Screenshot software for PC and Mac.  You can make your own photos by taking screenshots from your monitor.

Glui – http://glui.me/ Screenshot software for Mac…saves to Dropbox

Puush.me – http://puush.me/ Screenshot software for PC

Royalty Free Stock Photos

Dreamstime – http://dreamstime.com/ royalty free stock photos for a fraction of the price of iStockPhoto.

Every Stock Photo – http://www.everystockphoto.com is a mix of paid and free to use photos for your website.  Just make sure to credit the source when using them.

So now that your blog is up, let’s talk about what you going to put on it.

You want to think of your blog as an entry point to your funnel.  There may be advertising pages, related content or other traffic magnets in front of your blog, but your blog is where people are going to really get to know you.

Your blog is where you will host your opt-in form that puts people on to your mailing list.  Your blog is where you will share personal stories, triumphs and losses with your readers.  Your blog is where you will tell people about your products and services.

Know Your Niche

As you build your blog, initially you will be sharing your personal experiences and opinions related to your niche or industry.  And that’s great, the human element is what people are going to really connect with.  But you also need to back up some of your opinions with facts and figures, and share that info with your readers as well.  It will also help you to cite this information if you decide to get into a debate with one of your commenters.  If people get the sense that you’re not truly knowledgeable on the matter, they may bail for greener pastures.

What About The Theme?

Using NicheBuilder, we have several WordPress themes available to you when you select your website.  After clicking Create Website, click the WordPress or Blog category across the top of the screen.  From there you can click the individual theme names to see what they look like.  Remember all of the plugins we discussed earlier?  Those plugins will come pre-installed on any of these themes.  But more importantly, we’ll also have installed a child theme so you can make changes and tweaks without risking your initial theme installation.  Child themes are a bit of a complex subject, but what you need to know is that when your theme updates, if you don’t have a child theme in place, then you’re going to lose any changes you made to the theme.

My recommendation would be to try and work with one of the available themes.  If you do decide to install a different theme, make sure to create a child theme for any changes.

Focus on your content, not on the ‘design’ of your blog.  Get lots and lots of content published, that is what readers care about.  That is what will grow your audience.  You can always update your design down the road.  And it becomes a whole lot easier to make good design decisions if your blog is kicking off a few hundred bucks a day.

Plan Your Categories and Fill Em Up

As you setup your blog, add a category for the major items that you’re going to write about.  But don’t just add thirty categories.  For every category that you add, make sure to have at least one blog post.  Imagine if they hit your site from Google and it’s a category page, with nothing there.  Fail.

Within those categories, you’ll want to create a SILO structure for your content.  That means if your main category is Weather, your silo’d content would be Crappy Weather, Awesome Weather, Freeze Your Tuckus Weather, and so on.

On each of those pages, you’ll want to add keyword related content to the pages within your SILO’s.  This builds the overall strength of your blog.

So now let’s get in to how we actually do some of these things.

H1, H2 and H3 Title Tags – Your posts should have specific title tags.  The H1 is your main title and is located at the top of your post.

Keyword-rich URL’s – The URL is the bar at the top of the page.  URL is an abbreviation for Uniform Resource Locator.  Each of your posts should have the keyword or keywords present that you would like to rank for.  This is accomplished by configuring the WordPress SEO plugin to show post titles rather than post number sequence.  That means your page will show a nice title at the top, as well as in google.

http://yourdomain.com/your-keywords-go-here

Meta Tags

Your meta tags are your keywords.  You are going to enter them in the “tags” section of your blog post.  This helps Google and other search engines decide what is relevant in your posts.

Meta Descriptions

Your meta description is the description of your post in Google.  It is usually limited to 160 characters and it should include your keyword as well.

Using the SEO plugin in WordPress, you should enter a unique meta description for each post.  A trick to this is to re-arrange the order of your keywords so as not to over-optimize your site.  This is helping us rank for difficult terms at the moment.

Those are the basics of getting your WordPress blog up and tweaked.  Follow these simple rules and you’ll be off to a great start.  Go ahead and start implementing a few of these strategies now.