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8 Reasons Why You Need Audio on Your Website

02 2008 Friday

By Bjorn Brands in Blogs & Podcasts

In the past, audio was typically used on websites as background music to increase the “WOW!” factor, but it didn’t really help in communicating with customers.

These days it’s a different story. With broadband becoming ubiquitous and streaming audio technologies getting more advanced, you can now easily convey spoken word over the web. Well crafted audio messages can help you add a personal touch to your website which will make customers feel closer to you.

The presence of your voice welcoming customers, answering questions, or describing the benefits associated with your product or service can boost customer confidence in ways that text and images alone can’t.

Most people have computers capable of playing streaming audio and will find it a refreshing change from boring text. Increased use of the internet along with improved technology now make it easy for you to add streaming audio to your website and create that personal bond with your customers.

Reasons Why You Should Have Audio on Your Site

Customers remember what they hear more than what they read. Did you know that people remember only 20% of what they read while they remember an astonishing 70% of what they hear? That’s three and a half times more! Your audio message will help you to stick into the minds of your customers longer.
Audio boosts your credibility. The sound of your voice adds personality to your website and helps customers identify with you. Customers buy from people who they feel they know and trust, and using audio can help you achieve this.
Audio keeps customers on your site longer. Audio can keep customers on your site longer and you give you more time to make the sale. It can be used as an additional resource or tool for customers to familiarize themselves with your product or service while browsing your site.
Audio increases your subscription rate. Using a personal audio message to get customers to sign up for your newsletter can raise subscription levels by up to 400% more than using traditional subscription marketing techniques. You can also use audio as a part of an online course that people can subscribe to. The lesson that includes an audio in our free online meditation course gets opened most, leads to the largest number of sales and receives the best feedback.
Audio enhances newsletters, ezines and blogs - which leads to profits. You can spice up your newsletter, ezine or blog by using audio to provide special tips or product updates that keep customers interested and motivated to buy.
Audio puts you light years ahead of your competitors. Using audio successfully on your site gives you a competitive advantage. Most internet businesses overlook using this effective marketing tool so be sure you’re not one of them!
Audio is easy to use. Being able to put audio on your website isn’t limited to just techies - anyone can do it! Many of the programs available don’t even require you to know HTML or flash. They’re designed to be user friendly so you shouldn’t have any problems taking your website to the next level.
Audio is cheap. You can add audio to your site for as little as $19.95. More advanced audio solutions will only cost you around $97 - a small price to pay considering the many benefits it provides to your website and your customers.

In short, audio gives you an edge over your competitors and allows you to build a personal bond with your customers in a way that’s not possible with traditional websites. When customers feel they know you and can identify with you, they will be more likely to buy from you.

Bjorn Brands is a successfull enterprenuer who transitioned from having his own building company to a great online business. Check out his site and see for yourself how he can help you do the same at http://www.moneyacces.com

5 Steps to Planning Your Podcast

02 2008 Thursday

By admin in Jerry Bader's Blog

Podcasting can be time consuming and often frustrating, especially when you are under-prepared and ill-equipped for what you are setting out to achieve. In order to smooth out the bumps in the ride, it’s always a good idea to be as prepared as you possibly can before you sit down to create your podcast. If you’re too eager to get your voice recorded before you’ve laid the groundwork you can often get into a pickle and the show you had in mind just doesn’t come off as planned.

Get into the habit of following the 5 steps below so that there’ll be less time spent pulling your hair out and more time spent getting a great business podcast out into cyberspace.

Step 1 - Email participants and permission requests in advance.

You’ve had a great idea for a show where you’re going to interview some successful business owners and use a clip of one who podcasts himself. If you plan to record your show on Thursday afternoon, don’t expect you can get away with requesting interviews and permissions on Wednesday and still record your show, as planned, the next day.

People are busy and their time is precious. Always be one step ahead of yourself in thinking about who you’d like on your show and ask for permissions way in advance of recording. Always have back-up ideas too, just in case you just can’t get to people in time.

Step 2 - Choose clips and interviewees before writing the scripts/planning your links.

If you intend to take extracts from the interviews to add in between links or even extracts from other people’s shows, it’s a good idea to know which clips you’d like to use before you go ahead and write the script. This means you can then write the script in a way that introduces what participants are going to say or you could comment on what they’ve said at the end of the clip.

Step 3 - Have a script.

Lots of would-be podcasters feel 100% confident that they know what they’re going to say and intend to have a slick, fluff-free delivery. Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans of mice and men? It’s a really good idea to have a script of some description so that your points follow a rational and well thought out process and your listeners get maximum value out of your podcast. You don’t have to write a detailed script and then reel it off word for word if you think this will make you sound wooden (most non-professional broadcasters would have difficulty making it sound otherwise), it’s more about knowing what you’re going to say, knowing how your points are going to pan out and, if you have guests, having a few notes about them and the kind of questions you could ask them.

Imagine introducing your guest and their name goes completely out of your head. A set of notes or a script will stop this from happening and make you feel more comfortable, much in the way crib notes help you stay relaxed when giving a presentation.

Step 4 - Prepare yourself.

This may sound like an obvious preparation step but it’s one that many neglect. Imagine getting up in the morning and everyone is out of the house; there’s nobody to talk to. You go into your office or studio and switch your mic on, ready to record your podcast. You clear your throat a little and then start. How do you sound ? A bit like a zombie from Night of the Living Dead? So, what to do instead? Talk out loud or sing to loosen up the vocal chords, do some stretches and breathing to loosen up the body. Have a warm drink (but avoid milk as it clogs up the sinuses) and, last but not least, put a dab of lip balm on your lips (yes, it’s so that they move smoothly over one another when you speak, reducing any unwanted noises).

Step 4 - Prepare your environment.

An essential element in making sure your podcast runs smoothly is to prepare your environment as well as you can. Turn off any phones that might disturb you, ‘dampen’ your room as much as you can (I know of someone who records under the desk with a blanket draped over it), make sure you have everything you need.

If possible, try not to time your recording to coincide your with the time the cats need feeding or your spouse will be home. Take care to ensure you will have as much peace as possible.

Following these 5 steps will go a long way to ensuring you get your voice into the heads of your target audience as smoothly and painlessly as possible.

Sarah Rourke: For help with creating podcasts and other audio resources go to http://www.AudioPodArtist.com Audio Pod Artist - get your voice into their heads.

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5 Steps to Planning Your Podcast

02 2008 Wednesday

By Sarah Rourke in Blogs & Podcasts

Get into the habit of following the 5 steps below so that there’ll be less time spent pulling your hair out and more time spent getting a great business podcast out into cyberspace.

Step 1 - Email participants and permission requests in advance.

Step 2 - Choose clips and interviewees before writing the scripts/planning your links.

Step 3 - Have a script.

Step 4 - Prepare yourself.

Step 4 - Prepare your environment.

If possible, try not to time your recording to coincide your with the time the cats need feeding or your spouse will be home. Take care to ensure you will have as much peace as possible.

Following these 5 steps will go a long way to ensuring you get your voice into the heads of your target audience as smoothly and painlessly as possible.

Author: For help with creating podcasts and other audio resources go to http://www.AudioPodArtist.com Audio Pod Artist - get your voice into their heads.

Ten Simple Tips for Successful Blogging

02 2008 Thursday

By Andy MacDonald in Blogs & Podcasts

Most successful bloggers can offer some tips for successful blogging. Some people develop methods based on experience. Others simply offer what they’ve been told—like post often, link often, and be yourself. What follows are my ten tips for achieving a popular and successful blog within your industry, whatever it may be.

Be Real

Knowing yourself and your audience are extremely important aspects of successful blogging. Too many bloggers start out trying to blog about everything that interests them and, in doing so, quickly burn out, largely because there is simply too much to blog about when you blog about everything. Identify who you are as a blogger, what you’ll be blogging about, and who your audience will be; these are key to a successful blog. Be Passionate

Passion breeds passion. If you aren’t enjoying what you’re blogging about, it’s difficult to be passionate, so blog about things you truly enjoy. Find a voice that you enjoy writing in and stick with it. The passion that comes from writing a blog and connecting with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of readers is contagious.

What are you passionate about, and does it help you with blogging? let us know.

Write Often

Writing often isn’t just good for the blog, it’s an absolute requirement for success. Anything less than once a day (during weekdays) is abandoning the potential of your blog. Updating your blog is often rooted in two major facets of blogging: search engine “juice” and the fact that readers love new and fresh content. Search engines love fresh content and will revisit your site more often the more it’s updated. The result is that your blog will get searched regularly and will carry more weight with the search engines once they trust your ever-changing content. Link Lots

Links are called the “currency of the blogosphere.” Most bloggers link for one of two reasons: either they are interested in the subject matter or they respect the blogger to whom they are linking. Links carry an inherent value, so providing links shows your readers and users what interests you—and the higher the quality of bloggers to whom you link, the more respect readers and other bloggers will have for you and your blog. Combine that with the ability for bloggers to find out who links to them via services such as Technorati and PubSub, and you can see how a link can be a great way to show who you know and to let people know that you exist. Many of the top bloggers I know have confessed that the way they most often find new blogs is after those blogs link to them.

Leave Comments on Other Blogs

Creating a community of interest is key to blogging successfully at the business or personal level. For most businesses, the community will be a mixture of existing bloggers, news sources, and influential people in the industry, combined with employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. Your community of interest is the community in which you are interested as well as the community that is interested in you. By commenting on blogs in your community of interest, you are letting existing bloggers, and their readers, know that your blog might be of interest to them. One of the most common ways that people find new blogs is through links in comments—get involved, and you’ll reap the traffic rewards and build relationships with other bloggers and their readers.

Try it out today. Leave a comment for this post, and you will almost certainly receive some traffic and interest as a result.

Have Fun

Blogging is meant to be fun. Yes, it’s serious business that will radically change the way your business is presented online while also changing the way your customers view and relate to you, but it’s also about having fun. Try new things and link to fun and interesting sites.

Do you actively enjoy and have fun whilst working and posting on your blog? how about promoting your blog? what do you enjoy about being a ‘blogger’?

Push the Envelope

One of the challenges with blogging is that it’s relatively new. Try something unusual, and if you do the “wrong” thing, it will get you some attention (bad or good). Any new communications tool that remains stagnant ultimately dies, so don’t be afraid to make changes and ask questions. Entirely new types of cutting-edge communication, such as podcasting and video blogging, were created when someone asked, “Why does blogging have to be just text?” Ask your own “why” questions and see if you can come up with exciting ways to use blogs.

Ping

Pinging is something your blog software does to tell several services that you’ve posted something new. This quick note, or ping, is used to produce lists of the most recently updated blogs to let Technorati and PubSub know to come by and see what you’ve posted and generally to make sure the blogosphere stays connected. If you ping only one service, make it Ping-O-Matic. This neat, and free, little tool by the creators of WordPress allows you to ping Ping-O-Matic, which then pings all of the most important services for you, instead of you having to do it. This cuts down on your effort, but it also means you don’t need to worry about whether you’re pinging the right places. Ping-O-Matic takes care of it for you.

Use Feeds

Whether you choose to use full-text feeds or provide some of the text, make sure you are providing feeds. I’m a big fan of full-text feeds, because they create less of a boundary for your customers to read your ideas. Feeds make it easy for people to read your content on their own schedules—while travelling on an airplane, via audio as they’re driving home, or generally however and whenever they want to hear what you have to say. Feeds are all about lowering the barriers to getting at quality information, so do whatever you can to make sure you aren’t putting up any artificial barriers.

Create Meaningful Titles

Titles are absolutely essential to blogging successfully: good titles mean search engines find you and send you more traffic; attractive and useful titles entice readers to read your stuff, and this translates into more links. Every blog post title should give readers a reason to want to read the entire post. If you own a fashion company, for example, “Exquisite shoes” is probably a bad title, while “Ferragamo designs exquisite shoes!” is far more descriptive.

So what type of blogger do you want to be? A successful industry leader, who takes part in the blogosphere, links out to other blogs and has fun whilst blogging. Or a blogger who does none of the above, receives little traffic, and lacks direction. I’m still relatively new to blogging so I’ll let you decide. Leave us a comment telling us your thoughts, ideas and what you can take out of this post to make you’re blog more successful. Maybe we can all learn a little from the comments you leave.

Author: Andy MacDonald, CEO of Swift Media UK, a website design & search marketing company. For daily tips on Blogging, Marketing, SEO & Making Money Online, Checkout our SEO & Marketing Tips for Webmasters blog or Subscribe by RSS.

Business Blogging Tips

01 2008 Wednesday

By Julie Francis in Blogs & Podcasts

If you have an aspiring writer on staff you may want to consider promoting them to a blog writing position with your company. Both small and large companies spend money on advertising, varying from yellow pages directories and classifieds to full featured television commercials or radio advertisements. The cost of a blog is a drop in the bucket in comparison to the cost of television advertising and it can reach thousands of on-line users spreading your message and branding your company.

Your advertising managers may even have looked at blogging as an advertising medium before. The most common reason given for dismissing this approach is the large commitment of time required and the writing skills needed to come up with daily posts related to the company. It’s certainly true that with a low staff ratio, their time is better spent creating a quality product and running a store than writing a blog. Some companies, small or large, are especially suited to use a business blogging project to advertise their company and this business blogging tip is about taking a slightly different approach to a business blogging project.

When a business is providing a service that requires some expertise or gives professional advise, a business blog is a valuable publishing platform to display samples of what your company or service offers. Business tip articles are often highly sought after. Where there is a high turnover of new products or company events, a blog can use the unique features of RSS to quickly inform your clientèle of new items. Combined with an auto responder a blog is a powerful advertising method to encourage repeat visits to your company store or site.

Sharing industry related news on a blog is an easy method of communicating with a large staff and customer base. Blogs can have both public and private areas so you can use the same vehicle but require a login for the more sensitive information you might wish to share only with staff.

Don’t let your business blogging project concentrate only on selling or advertising. People are looking for information and entertainment, not to be sold to. They may not even be looking for your company so niching exclusively within your business topic may not be the best idea for your advertising campaign.

Business Blogging Tip Case Study

John Nardini does the marketing for Denali Flavors, an ice cream manufacturer. He found that his most successful high traffic blogging project was a blog on personal finance called Free Money Finance. After a little experimentation with other business blog projects, he chose personal finance because it gets a high volume of searches and because there is so much valuable information to add to the blog on a regular basis.

Denali, being the sole advertiser and sponsor of this blog gained great exposure for its logo on a totally unrelated high traffic site. For brand recognition this was an excellent marketing strategy. Ice cream is an impulsive buy and unlikely to be searched for on-line in high volume.

So think creatively about how to use a blog to advertise your business. Give it to the project managers and experiment a little with different ways to give something to your clients in order to gain them as visitors or subscribers. Once people are visiting you can display your messages, your logo and give a free sample. Do something that will stay in people’s memories so that next time they need a service or product that you can provide, they remember your name and go searching for you.

Make sure your company name comes up on the first page of as many different search engines as possible. Owning the domain name of your company name, showing your company name in the url of blogs and in bookmarked article titles are the best way to make this happen.Submission of your site to the directories is also helpful.

Our business blogging tip is to gain extra traffic to your company name blog by building a blog on one of the online hot topics and displaying your logo or advertising on all its pages by retaining sole sponsorship for this high traffic site. Niche your company business site but go where the crowds are for clients by creating a niche site on a hot topic.

Author: Visit Hot Topic Niches to get a free $97.00 report on high traffic niches. Visit Rich Niche Blogging or read our blog to find out more. We have a whole library of articles,videos and ebooks on blogging and niche marketing to help you

Podcasting for Profits

01 2008 Monday

By Maury Wilks in Blogs & Podcasts

A podcast is a collection of digital media distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players (such as iPods) and personal computers. Believe it or not, you can make a successful internet business out of podcasting. In order to do so, your podcast has to be innovative and informative in order to rise above the competition. You may also be able to get sponsorship for your podcast.

One of the newest forms of internet business is podcasting. Podcasting for profit involves making and distributing podcasts in order to generate revenue. Podcast profits can be made through actually selling the podcast, but they are more likely to be generated through donations, sponsorship and networking.

It is possible to make money through podcasts, but you need to think about how it will generate revenue. Podcasts that cost money to download usually only do well if they contain information that is popular, relevant, and insightful. Podcasts that people have to pay for face serious competition from all the free podcasts available. This doesn’t mean that podcasting isn’t a good way to make money; you just usually need to find other ways of generating revenue besides just selling the podcast.

One popular way of making money through podcasts is by providing a way of allowing people to make donations. Although many may not be willing to pay for a podcast, they may be willing to make a donation in order to keep your podcast alive. In order to receive money from donations, you will need to provide a link on your website where people can easily make a donation. Paypal is a reputable service that offers a donation button you can put on your site.

People are not going to donate money to a service that does not provide a quality podcast. In order to make money from donations, you will need to provide a podcast that people think is worth contributing to. Donations are a great way to generate revenue for newer podcasts that have not yet built up a steady listening base.

Commercial sponsorship is another good way for your podcast to generate revenue. It is not unknown for sponsors to approach podcasters that have a large base of listeners, but usually you have to approach the sponsors. Before approaching companies to try and persuade them to sponsor your podcast, you should have a good idea of the type of sponsors you want and the type of sponsors that would benefit from sponsoring your podcast. You should also have accrued a good listening base and show a good understanding of the business.

You can also profit from your podcast through the revenue generated by your website. Your podcast can direct people to your website, which will have its own ways of generating revenue. In order to generate revenue through the website, it is essential to have a quality website that provides pertinent and engaging information.

The information on the website should tie in with the subject of the podcast and provide information about it. A blog is one way to keep people coming back to your website on a frequent basis, in order to see any new updates. A newsletter can also direct people to specific items on the website and inform them of any new happenings regarding the podcast.

Another good way to get the word out about your podcast and attract listeners is to create an Apple iTunes account and submit your podcast to the iTunes directory. This is a very simple process that will allow a large number of people to find and listen to your podcast.

You don’t even have to be listed in the Apple iTunes directory to make money from your podcast, as there are other podcast directories that can direct people to your podcast. Your website alone may be enough to gain listeners to the podcast, but the iTunes directory will net you more listeners and subscribers, and is worth considering if you really want to make money podcasting.

Podcast profits don’t just happen, they need to be planned. You can’t create a podcast and expect the profits to just start rolling in. If you want to profit from your podcast, you need to spend some time thinking about how it will generate revenue. Proper planning and marketing strategy will provide a positive image of your podcast that people will want to experience. As a result, they will pay to watch it and you will profit from your internet business ideas!

Author: For more information on Podcasting and creating a successful internet business, visit http://TheInternetBusinessAuthority.com

20 Practical SEO Tips to Super-Charge Your WordPress Blog!

01 2008 Thursday

By John Lamansky in Blogs & Podcasts

First and foremost: make sure you’re not inadvertently telling the search engines to go away! Believe it or not, some WordPress installations block the search engine bots by default.

From your admin panel, go to Options > Privacy and make sure it’s set to “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone.”

Bonus Tip #1 - Are Comments Enabled?

Some WordPress users restrict comments to registered users, or disable them entirely. While this may be appropriate in some situations, in most cases comments are a very beneficial factor, and a defining mark, of a blog.

Comments engage your readers, help you get more “fresh content” SEO brownie points, and give search engines another reason to come back frequently.

Here’s how to fully enable comments:

Login to the WordPress administration center
Click “Options” on the menu bar
Is “Users must be registered and logged in to comment” checked? If so, consider unchecking it.
Click “Discussion” on the submenu bar
Make sure the following are checked: “Allow people to post comments on the article” and “Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)”

WordPress SEO Tip #19 – Does Your Blog Have a Topic?

Some of us would prefer to have a blog where we talk about anything that comes to mind: cars, movies, photosynthesis, dust mites, you name it.

In and of itself, such a blogging style isn’t wrong; however, you can leave search engines clueless as to what your blog’s about and thus for what search queries your blog should appear. And some of your readers might get annoyed in the process as well.

WordPress SEO Tip #18 – Ensure URL Canonicalization

If your blog posts are accessible from more than one URL, you could end up with:

Search engines confused as to which URL to display in the SERPs.
PageRank split between multiple pages.
Duplicate content penalties.

Starting with version 2.3, WordPress takes care of this and makes sure your content is accessible from only one place. So if you use an older version, either upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, or install the Permalink Redirect plugin.

WordPress SEO Tip #17 – Check for Valid XHTML

Most code errors are minor, but the more serious ones can cause content misinterpretation by search engines, lower rankings, and rendering errors.

WordPress itself produces valid code, but errors can crop up from two other common sources:

Poorly written plugins or themes
User-created coding errors (in the blog posts themselves, or through theme customizations)

First check your site for errors. If an error is found, look at the surrounding content to determine the source of the error.

If a plugin is the culprit, fix it if you’re good at that sort of thing (the beauty of open source!), or send a quick email to the plugin developer and let him or her know.

WordPress SEO Tip #16 - Don’t Leech Link Juice!

One characteristic of WordPress blogs is the sidebar, which is typically present on every single page. Do you really need to be passing link juice from every single one of your pages to every single one of those links? If the answer is no, consider adding rel=”nofollow” to the less important ones.

WordPress SEO Tip #15 – Use Images in Your Posts

Not only do they increase visitor attention and retention, they give you an opportunity to use keyword-rich “alt” attributes, “title” attributes, and filenames. Plus it’ll give your blog visibility in image search engines.

WordPress SEO Tip #14 – Does Your Theme Use Header Tags Correctly?

The blog title, or your main keyword should be in an <h1> tag.
If your subtitle is keyword-rich, you can put it in an <h2>; otherwise I recommend putting it in a non-header tag like <div>.
The post titles should go in <h2> tags.
Sidebar section titles should be <h3> tag or non-header.

Unfortunately, some themes (including the WordPress Default Theme) put the sidebar section titles in <h2> tags. Although this makes sense from a strict structural point of view, it also gives irrelevant sidebar headers (”Categories,” “Archives,” “Meta,” etc.) equal weight with your SEO-important post titles.

To sum it up: Use a theme that utilizes header-tags properly, or try fixing the theme you have.

WordPress SEO Tip #13 – Use Pinging

A ping is a “this site has new content” notification that invites bots to visit your blog.

WordPress pings one website called Ping-o-matic by default, which in turn pings others. You can also add additional services by going to Options > Writing in the admin panel. (For example, the pinging URL for Google Blog Search is http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2)

Another Bonus Tip: Once a post is published, WordPress issues pings whenever the post is edited. Try to cut down on after-publishing edits to avoid being considered a ping spammer.

WordPress SEO Tip #12 – Install the Google XML Sitemaps Generator Plugin

XML Sitemaps are search-engine-friendly directories of your blog’s posts and other pages intended to help search engines spider your site. Though pioneered by Google, they’re supported by Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com as well.

The Google XML Sitemaps Generator for WordPress makes creation of these sitemaps easy and automatic. It also lets the engines know when you post new content.

WordPress SEO Tip #11 – Avoid Sponsored Themes

There was a debate in the WordPress community not too long ago on the topic of sponsered themes. These themes include paid links (usually in the footer) than can suck PageRank and possibly result in a Google paid links penalty.

Stick with WordPress theme directories that don’t include sponsored themes, like the WordPress Theme Viewer.

Bonus Tip #2 – Write Right Post Titles

SEO isn’t everything: once you’re high in the SERPs, you need action words to prompt clickthroughs.

Put keywords in your title if at all possible, but not if it’ll compromise the click-trigger action title.

WordPress SEO Tip #10 – Use Traditional SEO Techniques

A WordPress blog is a website too, so the traditional SEO techniques still apply:

Use important keywords in the title and throughout the post, but don’t overdo it.
Bold your keywords when it makes sense.
Develop links to your blog.

WordPress SEO Tip #9 – Use the Power of the Slug

Ever wondered what the “Post Slug” on the “Write” page was? It’s the text that goes in the URL when you have “Pretty Permalinks” enabled (see tip #2).

By default the slug is a “sanitized” version of the post title. However, if your title is overly long or keyword-sparse, you can change the slug through the Post Slug box.

Yet Another Bonus Tip: The SEO Slugs plugin can take out common words like “you,” “is,” etc. out of the slug for you automatically.

WordPress SEO Tip #8 – Use Timestamping to Stagger Fresh Content

Search engines and visitors love fresh blog content on a steady, regular basis. But for a lot of us, creativity comes irregularly: 10 post ideas one week, none the next.

Enter timestamping. When writing a post, click the plus sign next to “Post Timestamp.” Set a date and time, and the post will publish by itself whenever you specify.

Search engines will keep coming back, and visitors won’t be inundated with a ton of new posts all at once.

Hint: If you’ve timestamped a post, don’t click the Publish button, since that’ll publish your post immediately regardless of your timestamp. Instead, select “Published” under “Post Status” and click the Save button.

WordPress SEO Tip #7 – Use Tags for Free Keyword Boosts

WordPress 2.3 and above include a tags feature that lets you assign keywords to your blog posts. Once you start using them, then since each tag gets its own webpage, you’ll be generating a ton of your own themed, keyword-oriented internal backlink pages.

WordPress SEO Tip #6 – Integrate Social Media

Adding social media links/buttons like the ones above makes it easy for visitors to promote your quality content (hint, hint). Social media is a great way to build links naturally as well as drive targeted site traffic.

Share This is a very popular “social media all-in-one” plugin.
If you’re a FeedBurner user, you can use FeedFlare to add action links, including social media ones, to the bottom of your posts.

Lots of social media sites provide code you can use to generate buttons like those above. Grab your own code from:

WordPress SEO Tip #5 – Implement Deep-Linking

Here are several great ways to implement deep-linking on your WordPress blog:

Within your posts, link to other posts on your blog and use important keywords in the anchor text.
Install the Similar Posts plugin, which inserts a list of related posts you’ve written to the bottom of each of your blog posts. This process will create aged deep links and increase visitor retention.
Display your most popular posts in your sidebar using the Popularity Contest plugin. Gives your most popular posts tons of internal links, and helps your visitors find your best content.

WordPress SEO Tip #4 – Make Scrapers Work to Your Advantage

Most of us would probably be upset if someone used scraping (automated content stealing) to publish our laboriously-written posts as his or her own.

But with a little work, you can make the scrapers work for you, not against you.

Here’s how to do it, courtesy of EarnersBlog.com:

If you use Wordpress it’s very easy to take full advantage of these sites linking to you, all you need to do is create links back to your content within your feed.

What you’ll need for this:

Cave Monkey’s Full Text Feed Plugin

Solo Technologies Add Related Posts to your Feed Plugin

These plugins simply show your entire post in your feed & also add some related posts in your feed only (which will also increase the amount of people in your feed reading more than 1 post).
Now, everytime anyone scrapes your blog via your RSS feed & republishes it they’ll be deep linking to 5 or more of your existing posts. Bingo.

WordPress SEO Tip #3 – Install the All-in-One SEO Plugin

Like the name implies, this plugin covers a lot of the bases.

Puts the blog name after the post title, giving your keyword-rich titles more prominence.
Allows you to override title and meta tags on your homepage as well as your individual posts.
Lets you add “noindex” to your category and/or tag pages to avoid duplicate content.
And more.

A must-have for serious WordPress SEO.

WordPress SEO Tip #2 – Use “Pretty Permalinks”

Sure, you may already use Pretty Permalinks, but are you using the best possible permalink structure?

For those of who don’t use Pretty Permalinks, it’s a must-do for WordPress SEO. Permalinks, in essence, are the URLs of your WordPress blog posts. “Pretty Permalinks” put slugs (which should contain keywords — see tip #9) in your URLs instead of the default numbers.

To enable or change them, first login, then go to Options > Permalinks.

The two options you do not want are “Default” and “Numeric.” Here are my suggestions for picking a “pretty” permalink structure:

Date and Name Based: The problem with this is that your posts are several extra directories deep, which can decrease relevence in some search engines. However, such a permalink structure can nevertheless be desireable if your blog is news-oriented or date-sensitive.
Post Name Only: If your blog covers one topic that has no subtopics (which, though possible, is unlikely), select “Custom” and type /%postname%/
Category Based: If your blog covers multiple topics, implement category-based URLs. (You have to look into the Codex to find information on category-based URLs, so many WordPress users probably don’t realize that this option exists!) To implement it, select “Custom” and type /%category%/%postname%/

WordPress SEO Tip #1 – WordPress Secret: Use Category-Based Permalinks for SEO Siloing

Here’s the big finale. Problem is, this tip is so important (and lengthy) that it really merits its own post.

Here’s a teaser: it entails implementing the powerful siloing technique on your WordPress blog through a combination of plugins, settings, and strategies.

Conclusion

Okay, so it was actually more like 23+ tips instead of 20. I certainly hope you gleaned a useful strategy or two in your quest for WordPress search engine optimization. If you enjoyed this post, please social it, email it, link it, or leave a comment!

Author: WordPress Expert John Lamansky, who we managed to extract from the lab just long enough for him to compose this brilliant WordPress Top 20 SEO Guide. Article Source: SEO Design Solutions

How To Build a Multimedia Blog

01 2008 Monday

By Gobala Krishnan in Blogs & Podcasts

Have you toyed with the idea of a building a multimedia blog? Well not to be rude, but it’s about time! Admit it - a text-based blog is boring. No matter how information-rich your posts are, they’re just text and the last time we paid attention to any of it, text didn’t exactly throw us into any sort of exciting frenzy!

With today’s technology, there’s really no reason why you can’t turn your blog into a virtual entertainment center complete with video, audio, instant messaging, and more. This article describes a couple of the multimedia tools we’re talking about just so you can get an idea of how you can turn a Plain Jane Blog into a screaming wild ride of thrilling exhilaration.

Internet Video

Online video takes multimedia to the max and quite often, making it available from your blog can be a simple matter of installing a plugin or pasting in a small piece of javascript code. YouTube offers thousands of free videos like this for example, but if you want to make your presentation truly unique, you’ll need to make your own little movies. Most of today’s cameras (and some cell phones) can turn anyone into an instant movie maker and if you’re not camera shy, you can record yourself using a product that you’re selling, you can record yourself explaining a particular technique, or you can simply record yourself giving a speech.

If you **are** camera-shy however, you can record your computer screen instead. Thanks to a sweet and free screen-capturing program called Camtasia, you can make videos of yourself using software like Microsoft Excel or Word with or without audio and text bubbles. If you’re a software developer, you can make training videos and teach your users how to use your programs while you’re sleeping!

Internet Audio

Offering audio on your blog is another great way to satisfy today’s multimedia-crazed society — especially since we’re all naturally attracted to sound more than we’re attracted to text. With audio, you’re presented with a couple of options. You can offer streaming audio, which is live audio broadcast from a radio station or even from your own home. Or you can offer recorded files. Many blogs will play a recorded audio file as soon it’s loaded while others let visitors download a collection of files.

Either way, audio gives you the opportunity to offer an earful of business-related speeches, lectures, or interviews and increase the interactivity of your blog at the same time.

Instant Delivery vs. Archived Delivery

If the truth must be known, immediacy is what makes multimedia most effective. Streaming video and audio is much more exciting than their recorded forms because they’re LIVE. It gives visitors the feeling that they’re “right there” inside the action and that they’re part of an important event.

If offering your own streaming information isn’t a feasible option for you right now, offer some of the free streaming videos and audios that are already available. You’ll find a ton of relevant subjects ranging from software and computer topics to sewing and fishing hobbies. Just be sure that you keep your visitors’ capabilities in mind when offering these tools.

You don’t want for example, to overburden your visitors’ computers by forcing unwanted downloads. Always give your visitors the choice of listening to an audio file or watching a video. Believe it or not, a significant portion of the Internet community still connects via dial up.

These users for instance, won’t appreciate having to download a ten megabyte audio file before your blog completely loads — especially since it can take dial up users up to half an hour before that download is even finished!

Author: Gobala Krishnan is the author of the best-selling “Wordpress Adsense System” and also a niche-blogging specialist. Discover how you too can master Wordpress as marketing weapon now at http://www.EasyWordpress.com

WordPress, Feedburner & MyBlogLog “Oh My!”

01 2008 Monday

By Darren Dunner in Blogs & Podcasts

WordPress, What is Good for, absolutely everything!

The internet is inedited with blog sites, these blogs are popping up all over the place. I will not be surprised if we change the “www” to “wwb” “world wide blogs”. Wouldn’t that be funny! Well, we know that there are 100’s of blogs, 100’s of writers and yet some of you reading this article have yet to test out the power of a blog.

There are many great blog software programs, but I am a creature of habit and like to stick to what I know best, which is WordPress. Is this the best blog software out there? I really couldn’t say, but every site I use it on Ranks in top 10 of Google for specific keywords that I target. What I am about to explain here is how to take a power tool like wordpress and explain how you can start to turn this thing on!

There may be some aspects of this article that are confusing so feel free to contact us to get those questions answered. My attempt is to be clear, but I may throw a few things out there that will leave you wondering.

Let’s just say that as a reader you are interested in making money online and you have a great idea or you have re-invented other ideas in such a way that you know it is better then what has been done before. Now, you want to expose this idea of yours and turn it into money. How will you do this? Where do you start? You probably already have a website and can’t figure out why no one is hooked in yet.

Well, you need a blog and again my suggestion is WordPress blog. Install this on your site directly and then either you or someone qualified can change the design theme to match your own site. This is not easy and requires that you understand PHP, CSS and Xhtml.

Now you need to choose some topics to write about. This can be confusing too right? Because how would you know what kind of topics to write about that will capture the interest of the search engines and readers? I mean, this can be really tough to think of topics within your business industry to write about as I am sure everyone is well informed about your products or services and understand the benefits of all you have to offer right? Okay, I am being sarcastic here! Of course this is easy, who is a better expert in your industry then you are? You only need to choose a few topics.

For example, let’s take this article. If I decided to sell blog services based on what I am detailing here, then I can create a blog and have these 3 topics:

Using WordPress
Setup Feedburner Today
All About MyBlogLog

Based on these 3 topics I can write up blog posts for days, weeks, months, etc. There is always something new and since this is my niche I can always have something to talk about.

Because of the power of Wordpress every time I post a blog here, it pings a blog server. This means that a link back to my blog is noted and the search engines can now follow this new link and crawl my blog. Every post, I get a visit from the search engine bots.

So think carefully on your topics and don’t over do it. Try to stay with 3 – 5 topics unless you have a team of writers or ghost writers helping you out, this will be too much and you can loose the interest of your potential readers.

Another reminder here is to always leave a link back to your main site, service or product page. Every post gets a link back to your main site of business. In case this point is not clear… Link back to your main site on every single post! Just 1 link is all you need.

Connect Your WordPress to Your Feedburner!

What is Feedburner you ask? It is one of many ways to add a subscribe feature to your blog so that people can subscribe and be notified of the latest posts from your blog. Are there other means to accomplish this? Yes, there are many. So why choose FeedBurner? The first thing I consider here is that Google has acquired them and they make adding subscriptions to your blog super easy.

In order to use feedburner you would need to have a blog and an rss feed. To find your rss feed you need only add the words /feed after the URL of your wordpress blog. If you have a blog at: www.mywordpressblog/blog then you would input into FeedBurner this urls: www.mywordprssblog/blog/feed

After that, just follow the prompts and after you feed is set there is an option in FeedBurner called “Publicize” and on the left after you click this is “Email Subscriptions” click that and now you have a code to put on your wordpress blog.

In your wordpress blog software there is a file called “sidebar” it is located in wordpress/wp-content/themes/default/sidebar.php and this is the file you can open and insert your code. You may want to customize it a bit as you have some freedom with the script to add tables, borders, etc.

An example of this can be found at: www.glamatopia.com which is a customized wordpress we setup using the techniques I have described here in this article.

There are many other features like ping options, feedcount, etc. For the purpose of this article we will not go into those at this time.

Your advantages for using FeedBurner are:

You can build an audience that will receive updates on your new posts
Since Google owns FeedBurner, you blog will now be pushed into Google’s search engine
If you take the time to learn more about FeedBurner you will find many other ways to advertise your blog

You Might Be A Member Already Of MyBlogLog.com!

If you are not familiar with http://www.mybloglog.com you may want to check this out. It has web 2.0 community features and allows you to publish your blog and rss feeds at no cost!

The great thing is you may already have an account to login and activate and not even know this. Yahoo has acquired MyBlogLog.com and if you already have a Yahoo account you can login and start creating your profile and adding your blog today. It not, the sign up process is very simple.

I will write up an article dedicated to the “How To Use MyBlogLog.com” but will give a couple useful tips here.

After you have your account click on “My Home” and you will see on the right side of the site “Account Tools” and then under it choose “Add site/blog I Author” Start to enter in the details it requires and follow the prompts.

You will discover that all members are search able, that this site is very search engine friendly and the back links you can receive from this site is amazing.

Another cool feature is the E-mail Signature that you can create from each site you list here on the site. You click on “My Account” then “Email Signature”. Follow the prompts there and create a really simple to make and simple to use email signature.

There are some paid features on MyBlogLog.com. After you add a site you can preview and edit these and see the options for these paid services. These only increase your web presence and are very affordable.

I highly recommend playing around with all the features and seeing how these can help put your blogs presence on the web.

Let’s Wrap This Up

By building your blog properly, creating a subscriber base using FeedBurner.com and promoting your blog using MyBlogLog.com you are just starting to tap into the power of social media marketing. Though there are many other methods this is a great way to start building a smart and long lasting business online.

If you have any questions about this article please email “editor at sitepronews.com” and I will be happy to assist further.

Author: Darren Dunner, Editor for SiteProNews your best resource for SEO concepts, web development ideas and online marketing. Darren has been in the web industry since 1999 and currently customizes and brands blogs for marketing purposes along with offering multiple ways to creative backlinking.

Promoting Your Blog For Better Results

01 2008 Wednesday

By Anirban Bhattacharyya in Blogs & Podcasts

When you decided to have a blog and or you already started one, the time is now to promote it. Though I am very new to blogging, yet I got some handful of information to share with you and trying for myself.

First of all, what you need to decide if you are at all interested in promoting it. If your blog only caters to a certain number or type of people then you shall not devour effort to promote it. Promoting not always means spreading your blog name and content wide across so that it reaches every nook and corner. Promoting can be specific target oriented or general. If your target audience is a group of people like if you have a blog on news for your local area, the way you will promote it should be altogether different.

A few ways to promote your blog.

If your blog is audience oriented or meant for local news, events etc you can try these methods. I am not sure how effective these are but definitely the ideas are unique and make sense.
Aaron Brazell in one of his posts stated how effective is his Guerrilla Marketing Techniques. Guerrilla Marketing is promoting your blog in some unique, powerful and aggressive way. Like Darren Rowse in one of his articles gave an example of such marketing.
I met a blogger recently who had a blog with a very local focus. His Guerrilla Marketing Tactic was to do a deal with three internet cafes in his area to make his the home page on all of the computers. In return for this he gave them some free advertising on his blog. The same blogger made a similar deal with the local library who also made his the home page of their public internet computers. This worked particularly well for him as his was on his local area.
You can use local newspaper to promote your blog. I am doubtful if it will succeed, but there’s noting to lose in trying.
Distributing leaflet, wallpapers or encouraging local shop owners to display your blog poster can add traffic to your blog. Because some people just out of curiosity will definitely check your blog at least for once. And if they like it, they will be committed readers.

If your audience is global or general then your promotion should be online and offline promotion will not be a big success. Here are some golden rules.

Content is king. So you must first concentrate on your content. If content is not good then you can draw visitors to your blog but cannot retain it. They will come and will leave and will think twice before re-visiting.
Use a good blog software. There are certain features which a blog must have. Auto pinging, trackback URL, good WYSIWYG editor, should include in the blog features list. In my opinion wordpress, typepad are very good softwares which you can use.
Search engine friendly url: Your URL at any point of time shall not look like domainname.com?blogtitle=xxxx, instead it should be like domainname.com/xxxx.html or domainname.com/year/month/date/xxxx.
Submitting your website to various search engines will be your next step to index it properly. There are free tools in the market which you can use.
Pinging various blog. If you are using any popular software, then these software automatically pings your RSS/Atom to various blog listing websites. If not then you can try Ping-o-Matic.
Joining any blog community or creating one is very useful. Because in this community you will get readers who are really interested in reading blogs and all of them are regular bloggers. You can read this article for further insight.
Promoting in myspace, xanga, orkut can add some traffic to your website but it cannot be very high, I bet.
Putting your website address in your email signature is a good idea as this will keep promoting your website to the section of people with whom you communicate on regular basis.

Once you have completed promoting, the next thing you should think upon is how you should earn money(obviously if you are a professional blogger or looking forward to a blogging career). I will come up with another article on this topic.

Useful Links

Author: Anirban Bhattacharya is an open source programmer and has almost 8 years of industry experience. For the past 5 years he is an active coder in LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) technologies. He has wide knowledge in project management and software development life cycle. He spends his free time in writing technical articles for his blog http://www.wertex.org. His past experience has enabled him to gather knowledge on various open source technologies, PHP frameworks and other related areas. He can be contacted at anirban76b@gmail.com

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