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Blogger, WordPress, Sub-Domain, Sub-Directory, New Domain - Oh My!!

10 2008 Friday

By Jennifer Horowitz in Featured

When it comes to setting up your Blog, there are many options and it’s enough to drive you crazy.

Here is some information for each option…

Blogger Versus WordPress

WordPress offers a lot more customization and has more marketing and SEO power.
Some people think since Google owns Blogger it gives you a boost - that is not true.
Blogger has more rules you must follow and it could potentially limit a marketing technique or tactic.

Blogging and Traffic: Create a Blog to Get Traffic to your Website

09 2008 Thursday

By Peter Nisbet in Featured

Blogging is a great way to get traffic to your website, and if you create a blog for no other reason than that, you are practically certain to get positive results. Blogging and traffic are made for each other, and there are several ways of using blogs to promote products on your site.

How every blogger can be a blagger

08 2008 Friday

By Mike Essex in Featured

Although my day job is working for design agency The Studio 4 (http://www.thestudio4.co.uk) I also have a secret pastime: I’m a ‘blagger’. Not a blogger, but a blagger, i.e someone who attempts to get products for free. The two may not seem linked but there’s no reason every webmaster can’t get something for free. This article explains how:

The Secret
First of all, shed your preconceptions; Companies do want you to have free stuff. Whether it be to increase brand loyalty, get closer to key decision makers or simply to one-up the competition. The trick is making them realise that you, and your site, offer something viable that makes it worth their while, and that key to doing that is your unique offer.

Mastering Your Unique Offer
Each webmaster has something about their site that they can offer a company simply by having a voice online. The simplest form of this is to run product reviews about anything you have an interest in. Make sure the content is honest to keep your readers loyal, but at the same time write about products that you currently use and enjoy to get you started. Then you can approach similar manufacturers for a free product.

Become a Source of News
If reviews aren’t your thing you can always go down the much easier option of reporting on news in the sector you want to ‘blag’ from. Ask a few companies for press releases, run each piece with a few edits of your own and before you know it you will have key contacts with companies in your target market. After this, work your way in to any press screenings or events they have, meet the key people in person and you’ll be fixed in their mind.

After that it’s a simple case of deciding on a feature you wish to run “Top five MP3 players, new beauty products for 2009″ etc and asking if they have anything you can try for the feature.

Use the Media
Likewise companies are desperate to try and understand new media options such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. So if you can find a way to leverage these tools as promotional outlets for your website, you then have the potential to encourage companies to send products for you to expose in this format. Run a video blog? Offer to showcase new products. Got a lot of Facebook friends? Set up a group praising a type of product. Like Flickr? Photograph products in unique settings.

Dr Pepper’s Cherry Chocolate Rain (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2×2W12A8Qow ) and Blendtecs’ ‘Will it Blend’ series (http://www.willitblend.com/) are just two examples of the type of brand exposure you can carry out.

Become a Reporter
Anyone with a website is only seconds away from becoming a journalist. You don’t need a special qualification just the balls to brand yourself with such a title, and a website to write about products. Once you realise this you can talk to companies in a different way. Ring them up, brag about the stats on your website/ the products you’ve featured by their competitors and what you can offer them if they send you something. A product being featured on a website is no different to a newspaper so you should be able to command the same authority.

For an even quicker option use Peter Shankman’s HARO (http://www.helpareporter.com/), an email list that connects journalists to sources, and market your site as a product portal. In doing this I received 23 product for free by simply writing a 50 word pitch.

Submit Articles
The last option is to establish yourself as an authority on a particular subject, and the best way to do this is to become a niche site. Look for gaps in the market and make a site focusing there. There’s a million video game review sites but none for ironing board covers. Set one up, and suddenly you have the authority to attract companies that need such an outlet.

With these ideas in mind you should now feel comfortable to leverage your site. Although there’s no such thing as “something for nothing”, if you are willing to give products a little bit of time on your site you can expect plenty in return.

Mike Essex is the author of “Blagman: Don’t Buy it, Blag it”, a guide to how just about anyone can get just about anything for free. He regularly shares tips from the book at Blagman.co.uk (www.blagman.co.uk) and has received everything from a diamond encrusted organiser to a kitchen sink for free.

Why You Should Host Your Own Blog

08 2008 Thursday

By Martin Malden in Featured

Q: With all the big, easy-to-use, well established free blogging services that are available why should you go to the trouble of hosting your own blog..?

A: Better SEO, total control, more traffic and more sales - although those reasons won’t apply if you’re not blogging for business!

When I started out blogging I opened a blogger.com account. That worked fine for me at the time because I was new to blogging. In fact, I knew so little about it at the time that I didn’t even realise that I could host my own.

Even if I had realized that, it’s not something I would have given a moment’s thought to. I was too new to working online. I was (still am) totally non-techie and it would have been too daunting a task.

So I happily blogged away on my blogger account until I logged on one day to find that Google had translated all the admin pages into Chinese. I live in Hong Kong so Google, thinking they were being smart, used my IP address as the basis on which to make the decision to translate it.

Not being able to find the help link (because I can’t read Chinese) I logged into my Google account (Adwords, Gmail, etc,) to raise a request for them to translate my blog back to English.

After a week nothing had happened. I hadn’t received a reply, I still couldn’t read my admin screens, and I was seriously frustrated that Google should unilaterally decide to translate my blog, so I kissed the big G goodbye and shifted my blog over to Wordpress.com.

By this time I had learned enough about blogging to have heard that Wordpress was the place to be. So with some anticipation of great things to come, I imported all my blogger posts and set about learning the new admin screens.

One thing I noticed immediately was that my posts were suddenly figuring much more quickly in the natural search results, so it looked as though at least some of what I’d heard was correct.

And I happily blogged away until…

…one day I tried to log on to be met with a notice telling me my blog had been suspended for infringing Wordpress’ terms and conditions.

DAMN..!! Twice inside a month I’d been blind-sided by my blogging platform and the second occasion was even more damaging than the first. (It doesn’t give a great message about your professionalism when your visitors are met with a message that you’ve infringed T’s & C’s and had your blog suspended).

So, finally, I was pushed into the realization that I had no option but to set up my own blog and host it myself.

So off I clicked to Wordpress.org to see what I could find out. And I was pleasantly surprised.

Firstly - the instructions they’ve set out for downloading and installing a WP blog are delightfully clear and easy to follow.

There are a few minimum requirements set out, which pretty much every hosting provider meets. You can always check with your provider if you’re not sure. Mine does, so I printed off the instructions and got going.

First step is to set up the database. Easy to do - the instructions are very clear, include screen shots for every step of the way and are written in simple, non-techie language.

I then downloaded and unzipped the blog files, entered my newly created database details into the config file, (just followed the instructions), uploaded the files and accessed the installation screen via my browser (the URL is provided in the instructions). That kicked off the installation script and I was all done.

It was, literally, a 5-minute exercise.

However, the majority of hosting providers now give you an even easier method than that:

One click installation.

I’ve never done a 1-click installation so I can’t confirm whether it really is one click or whether a few more are involved - but it’s definitely very easy and it doesn’t involve any downloading, unzipping and uploading of files.

So what are the benefits of running your own blog on your own server?

You have total control. You can write what you like, you can drive traffic to affiliate programs, no one is going to translate it into Chinese, and no one is going to lose your database.

You can customize it as much as you like. Customization is done through plug-ins, and there are plug-ins for just about anything you can think of. You decide what you want to do with your blog, then you can either go to the Wordpress plug-in directory or do a Google search for a plug-in for the function you want.

Download the plug-in, unzip it, upload it and activate it through the blog admin screens. It’s that simple. Really.

But of all the sexy things you can do with your self-hosted blog, probably the biggest benefit of all comes from the SEO elements.

This really turns your blog into an incredibly effective way of figuring strongly in the natural search results.

Optimizing your blog for the search engines is simply a question of installing and activating the appropriate SEO related plug-ins. And you can find probably the best list of these in Jack Humphrey’s Authority Blackbook.

If you’ve gone to the trouble of setting up your own, self-hosted blog then you should absolutely download this book and follow the guidelines in there for optimizing it properly for the search engines.

Firstly, it’s free and secondly, if you don’t set up your blog properly you’re wasting an enormous portion of its SEO potential.

It would be like buying a Ferrari but never taking it out of the city centre.

I’m now using my blog as my primary means of drawing in traffic. I haven’t (and will not) spend a single penny on promoting it.

And yet my blog is now attracting a little over 50% of the total traffic I’m getting on a weekly basis - that’s traffic to my blog plus traffic to all my other sites - and that’s almost totally due to the SEO effectiveness of my plugin-rich, self-hosted blog.

Within the next year I’m aiming for that to be well over 80%.

Martin Malden writes a blog covering tips, techniques and resources for small- or home-business owners. For more information check out his blog here:http://www.wealthydragon.com/blog/