Archive for June, 2010
5 Ways I’m Using Facebook to Drive Traffic, Build Brand and Increase Reader Engagement
I was always a bit of a doubter when it came to using Facebook to promote a blog. I’m not sure why – but despite my best efforts I couldn’t seem to get Facebook to ‘work’ as well as I could with Twitter when it came to engaging readers, driving traffic and building community.
However in the last few months things have changed – Facebook has become HOT for me, at on my photography blog.
I’m pretty sure it’s more about how I’m using Facebook than any particular change at Facebook but I’ve started to see it become a lot more useful in a few ways including driving traffic (see chart below), increasing reader engagement and building brand. Here’s the traffic from facebook over the last 13 months (click to enlarge):
There were always a few days of spiked traffic (usually when we did a post that went a little viral) but the last 6 or so weeks we’ve seen a nice up swing in traffic).
All the action happens on the Digital Photography School Facebook page where the bulk of what happens is simply us pulling in new posts from the blog as status updates using the ‘Networked Blogs’ application – however in the last few months we’ve also started to try a little more reader engagement. Here’s what’s worked:
1. We Ask Questions
The best thing that we do (and I have my forum administrator help with dPS facebook page so it literally is a ‘we’) is simply asking questions of those who ‘like’ us on Facebook. Every day or two we pose a simple question that asks readers either for
- their opinion on some aspect of photography
- to share an experience that they’ve had
- to tell us something about the photography gear that they use
- to do something fun
These simple questions go crazy. Some examples include:
- What was the focal length of your last shot?
- Behind Every Good PHotographer there’s…..
- What did you photograph this weekend?
Interestingly when we ask the same questions on Twitter (where we have 1000 more followers than we have ‘likes’ on Facebook) we only get 10 or so answers to our questions where on Facebook we get hundreds (we’ve had as many as 700). The fact that Facebook allows our followers to see each others responses and that it’s less fleeting than Twitter is an advantage for this type of thing.
2. Promoted ‘Hot Facebook Status Updates”
When we have one of these question status updates/discussion going on Facebook we try to get more traffic to it from other sources. This largely happens in two ways:
- Weekly Newsletter – in our weekly email newsletter we’ve been linking to one facebook discussion a week as a ‘hot on facebook’ link.
- Twitter – because the ‘conversational aspect of facebook’ is so great I’ve started to tweet when there’s a good discussion going. It might seem odd to promote one social media account on another but it’s led to significant increases in interaction.
The benefit of highlighting what’s going on on our Facebook page has been two fold – firstly it boosts the numbers of responses to the questions we ask significantly.
Secondly it’s led to a big increase in the number of people who ‘like’ our pages. We’ve gone from several thousand connections on our facebook page to over 27,000 in a couple of months.
3. Reader Involvement in Shaping the Site
Every Friday morning as I’m scheduling posts on the blog for the weekend I ask the same question on Facebook. The question asks readers to suggest a theme for our weekend photography challenge (something we run each week on the blog where we name a theme and everyone goes away and takes a picture to come back and share relating to the theme).
We get a lot of great suggestions in this weekly thread of conversation and the added bonus is that it builds a little anticipation for the challenge itself.
Another thing I did last week was create a survey for our facebook friends that asked them some questions about the content that they’d like to see on dPS. Over 600 people took the survey from facebook giving us some amazing insights into topics for future posts.
4. Promotions
We recently launched a Travel Photography eBook on dPS and saw some really positive response from our promotional efforts on Facebook. I’ve never seen much success with ’selling’ on Facebook before but this time around we built some pre-launch buzz on the facebook page and released it to our facebook community before anyone else.
Our best conversions did come from email promotion but Facebook was probably our 2nd most effective place of promotion this time around. We did some status updates about it but also sent direct messages to all of those who have ‘liked’ our page.
5. Landing Page
This is very new – but I’ve recently added a ‘welcome’ landing tab for those arriving on our page who have not been there before and ‘liked’ it (I’ve also added it to the ProBlogger Facebook Page).
The idea here is to create a tab (using the FBML application) which is a customized greeting page for new people to your page. The page directs people to the ‘like’ button and sells benefits of making the connection. Next time they arrive on the page they are taken to the ‘wall’ tab and don’t see the welcome (Facebook allow you to set this up in the ‘page’ settings.
It’s too soon to tell what impact it is having but in talking to a few other web publishers this has seen significant increases in connections.
I’ve also seen others add other things in such a page including welcome videos, email newsletter subscription forms and other things that help them achieve some kind of ‘conversion’. The FBML application lets you add pretty much any html to the tab. I’ve so far just used an image file but hope to convert it to live html with links in it in the coming weeks.
What are You Doing that is Working on Facebook?
I feel like I’m still finding my way with the use of Facebook and am still experimenting with different aspects of it. We have a ‘tab’ for our eBooks which I’m not sure is overly effective, I want to find a way to get our readers sharing photos better and I’m sure I could be promoting our newsletter better – but it’s one of those things where I find experimenting with one thing at a time is best.
What are you doing with facebook that is working (or that isn’t)?
PS: I’m pretty sure that facebook is not a site that will work for every topic. For example on the ProBlogger facebook page we’ve not seen the same sorts of results – for ProBlogger Twitter seems better. I’ve heard from a few other bloggers mixed results including some amazing stories of increases in traffic.
Also worth noting is that earlier this year I made a significant change in the way that I used Facebook when I defriended around 4800 friends and made my personal facebook profile purely for personal friends and family and concentrated all of my facebook efforts on creating ‘fan pages’/’pages’ for each of my blogs. This was the best thing I’ve done on facebook and released me to develop the pages and use my personal account to build friendships and connections with real life friends.
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
5 Ways I’m Using Facebook to Drive Traffic, Build Brand and Increase Reader Engagement
Tatto Media Announces Huge Affiliate Contest
You’ve probably heard me talk about the guys from Tatto Media before. Here is why they rock. This summer marks Tatto’s 5 year anniversary and to celebrate, they are throwing a sick contest that ALL affiliate marketers can participate in http://www.tattomedia.com/anniversary/
Between July 1st and December 31st, they are running a sweepstakes for all Affiliate Marketers – the Grand Prize is a Lamborghini Gallardo. You choose: http://www.tattomedia.com/anniversary/
Now you might be thinking “I don’t do enough revenue to win the Gallardo.”
Well, let me break down the contest – it’s easy.
Prizes are separated to 5 items per level for a total of 5 levels. Winning affiliates choose their preferred prize within levels and there is no limit as to how much swag you can win.
Level 1: Revenue Reach of $1,500
- Limited Edition Tatto Media 5 Year Anniversary T-Shirt
Level 2: Revenue Reach of $15,000
- iLuv Stereo Speakers with iPhone + iPod Dock
- Bose In-Ear Headphones
- $100 iTunes gift card
- $100 Morton’s Steakhouse gift card
- $100 BestBuy gift card
Level 3: Revenue Reach of $35,000
- iPod Touch
- iLuv Portable DVD Player with Apple® iPod® Dock
- Flip MinoHD Camcorder
- $250 GameStop gift card
- $250 Apple Store gift card
Level 4: Revenue Reach of $65,00
- iPad
- Canon Powershot Digital Camera
- Logitech – Harmony 1100 Advanced Universal Remote with Color Touch Screen
- Samsung Blu-ray Home Theater System
- $500 JetBlue gift card
Level 5: Revenue Reach of $105,000
- Golden Ticket towards Lamborghini Gallardo Raffle
If you already have an affiliate account with them, get ready to drive traffic starting on July 1st to earn Golden Tickets. If you don’t have an account, visit the site: http://www.tattomedia.com/anniversary/ and sign up for one now. It takes 2 minutes. If you have additional questions, contact: Mike Cataldo, Michael.cataldo@tattomedia.com
Get a sneak peak at the all new ShoeMoney System
This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog
Tatto Media Announces Huge Affiliate Contest
The Secret Sauce to a Successful Information Product Launch
I used to think I was an expert at Internet marketing. Sure, I have credentials, having co-authored a book, built up a multi-national company, and sold it for a few bucks. 
But now I feel my world’s turned upside down. That’s because recently a friend of mine turned me on to the world of information products. Ever since then I have been a lot more humble. Why?
Because I kept hearing incredible stories about all the money guys in information product marketing were making. The first story I heard was of Eben Pagan, who made $120 million solely from information products. And then surfer dude Frank Kern, who made something like $20 million in a single day! Unbelievable!
I realize now I’ve only scratched the surface. I’m like a babe in the woods compared to folks like Eben and Frank.
Eben and Frank aren’t anomalies either. I just keep hearing story after story of how people doing six and seven figure product launches. And these are all digital products — with minimal cost to create, with no inventory, no shipping costs. It all seemed so incredible to me, so I had to dig in to find out how this was happening.
Turns out the key is the Product Launch Formula (PLF), a system created by one of the pioneers in this space, Jeff Walker. The man who was the first to make six figures in seven days put together the formula that launched an industry. This is the system that Frank, Eben, John Reese, Andy Jenkins, Jeremy Schoemaker, and all the other big names are using. PLF is a like a sideways sales letter — you take your marketing and turn it into an orchestrated event spanning a particular number of days with key milestones and deliverables. And of course scarcity is a critical component to your success. This is genuine scarcity, i.e. when the product sells out, those who hadn’t acted truly miss out.
A prime example of this is when a product has a live event tied in to it as a bonus to the first who sign up. That’s exactly what Jeff is doing with his PLF 3.0 — which launches TODAY at 2pm Eastern. For the first 500 people to sign up for PLF 3.0, they get invited to a live event put on by Jeff. This provides you with a chance to meet the guru himself as well as other rock star millionaires.
The importance of making Jeff’s event can’t be overstated. You’ll get access to super-successful people. This will be one of the best ways to build a superstar peer group, not to mention powerful Joint Venture partners.
Since a big part of the PLF is co-marketing with JV partners, this is a can’t miss opportunity. According to Jeff, “You don’t need a list to do a launch, but you do need a launch to do a list.” With PLF, there are two primary types of launches: 1) internal launches (to your own list / social media followers) and 2) Joint Venture launches. It’s the second, the JV launch, that tends to be where the multi-million dollar launches are. It was through JV partners that Jeff went from a list of zero to 55,000 people in 2 weeks.
When I signed up for “List Control” from Frank Kern, I acted fast and got in to his live event, and it was AWESOME. One of the direct results of attending that event last month was getting to hang out over dinner with Jeremy Schoemaker; he then contacted me a week later asking me to star on his Shoemoney System as the expert for his SEO module. It’s those sorts of opportunities that just fall into your lap when you are in the right place at the right time.
Bottom line: don’t hesitate! Sign up IMMEDIATELY for PLF 3.0 and don’t look back. Just getting into Jeff’s live event will be worth the price of the entire program.
Be warned though – this product is not for everybody. It’s an investment of thousands of dollars. If you aren’t serious, don’t spend the money.
Regardless, you owe it to yourself to at least check out the free PLF blueprint and the free videos. Act fast, the blueprint won’t stay online for long.
This post was written by Stephan Spencer.
The 7 Essential Steps to Creating Your Content Masterpiece
In the UK, we have a derogatory term for newspapers: chip wrappers. No matter how good, today’s front page wraps tomorrow’s fish and chips.
Bloggers can relate. You slave for hours to write a stellar article that bursts into the limelight for only a few days, or even hours, before it’s forgotten. Readers who find you this week won’t know what you wrote last week, much less last year.
It’s tough to feel like even your best work is destined to become nothing but a chip wrapper.
You may find yourself longing for the good old days when artists had plenty of time to produce their masterpieces, and audiences took their time to appreciate them. Write a good symphony, novel, or sonnet sequence and you could dine out on it for years to come. If only the modern world weren’t in such a perpetual hurry, chasing after the next quick fix.
Tell that to Johann Sebastian Bach.
To us, Bach is one of the giants of classical music, having produced a body of stellar work that his fans never tire of listening to. His music has been performed and recorded countless times.
So it’s easy to imagine him taking his time to compose, treating his art with the leisurely respect it deserved. And when he was done, he must have had plenty of opportunities to bask in the admiration of his fans, as they implored “Play it again Johann!”
The reality was a little different.
The present day interest of audiences in “old” music is a comparatively new phenomenon. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, audiences were interested only in new music and kept composers busy producing new pieces for their next performance.
~ Robert Weisberg, Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius
Bach spent his career as an employee, composing music to order on a punishing schedule. One such appointment was as Cantor of St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig, a prestigious but demanding role, where he produced a cantata (a musical setting for sacred texts) every week of the year and extra ones for holidays — a total of 60 every year. He held that position for five years.
Bach spent several decades writing an average of 20 pages of finished music a day. Tyler Cowen points out that it would be hard for an experienced copyist to match this rate of production. In other words, it would be difficult to just copy out that much sheet music accurately, never mind composing it.
Yet far from being a hindrance to the great composer, this kind of productivity was actually an advantage. In Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius, Robert Weisberg discusses statistical research into the proportion of masterpieces to minor works among great and not-so-great composers.
The researchers concluded that the rate of hits to misses was pretty constant between major and minor composers. The truly great composers produce more masterpieces than the others, mainly because they produced more work overall.
What distinguished them was not effortless genius or leisurely perfectionism, but relentless productivity.
Bach wrote more than 1,000 musical works in his lifetime. We don’t accord them all the same reverence, but we should be grateful for every single one he wrote — because if he had cranked out fewer journeyman pieces, we’d have fewer masterpieces to enjoy.
We also wouldn’t have a handy role model from whom to garner some essential tips for producing masterpieces.
Here are seven lessons you can learn from Bach, to keep your content marketing from being tossed aside like used chip wrappers.
1. Aim high
Bach was a hired musician, but he approached his work as an artist. He knew that the best job security — and chance of immortality — came from having the highest standards.
Don’t think of yourself as a “blogger.” Think of yourself as a writer. And an artist.
Write articles, not blog posts. Never think “Well, I’ve been serving up good stuff for a couple of years now, surely my audience will cut me some slack this week.”
Write the very best you can, every time.
2. Get into productive habits
20 pages of music a day didn’t write itself. Bach didn’t have the benefit of systems like Getting Things Done and fancy tools like 37 Signals or Remember the Milk. But he obviously had a powerhouse approach to productivity.
Writing consistently well requires quality writing time. Make sure you’re spending the most productive time of your day on your writing.
That means getting into a daily and weekly routine that supports this. It also means having productivity systems in place that take care of all the day-to-day tasks, so that it’s easy to forget them during your writing time, and focus 100% on your work.
3. Create content strategically
Bach wasn’t an entrepreneur or a business owner, but he was very focused on achieving his career goals, financial as well as artistic. He wrote with his patrons and his reputation in mind, just as much as the listeners in the church pews. He knew where he was headed — and what he needed to do to get there.
When every article you write fits into the big picture of what your blog is about, and takes you one step nearer your long-term goals, then it’s easier to accept that that particular article won’t be in the limelight for long.
This means taking time out to (re-)evaluate the strategic direction of your business, and making sure everything you write for your blog is aligned with that.
4. Write material that’s strong enough to endure
The St Matthew Passion and Brandenburg Concertos are the ultimate cornerstone content. Bach wrote to a weekly schedule — but with his eye on immortality.
There’s a (brief) time and a place for newsy, topical pieces, but if that’s all you’re writing, you’re producing nothing but digital chip wrappers.
Write articles that will be valuable, searchable and relevant five or even ten years from now. That way your blog will continually grow in value over time. It also makes your job as a writer easier, since you can keep linking back to earlier pieces and reintroducing them to your readers.
5. Rework your themes
Musicologist Norman Carrell has conducted a painstaking analysis of Bach’s compositions, and concluded that more than 200 of his non-vocal works contain borrowings from his own earlier works; and 65% of his cantatas contain similar borrowings from his earlier choral works.
Clearly, he didn’t mind repeating himself — with variation.
Make a virtue of the fact that not everyone in your audience has read everything you’ve ever written. After you’ve been blogging for a while, look back at your archives and ask yourself what themes are right for revisiting.
Chances are your thinking will have changed a little since you wrote those early pieces. You won’t be regurgitating, but revising and extending your ideas. You can also link to those posts, which will both boost your traffic and give your new readers a chance to enjoy your previous work.
6. Riff on other people’s themes
Carrell’s analysis found borrowings from other composers in 80 of Bach’s nonvocal works, and melodies from Lutheran hymns in more than 200 of his cantatas.
This would certainly not have been considered plagiarism, since it was accepted practice for composers to compose variations on themes from past and present composers.
Blogging thrives on cross-linking and cross-fertilization of ideas. It’s one big conversation, right? Other bloggers love it if you pick up one of their themes and riff on it, offering complementary thoughts that extend them in a new direction. You’ll also get the side benefit of seeing other people link to your own best blog posts.
Make your feed reader your Muse from time to time. Just don’t forget to link!
7. Repurpose your blog content
When he sat down with his quill and paper, Bach could never have dreamed of lavish CD box sets stacked up in music stores, or of people downloading his sonatas from iTunes and listening to them on their morning commute.
A great way to repurpose your content within your blog is to create cornerstone pages. But don’t stop there — blog articles can become the basis of e-books, books, videos, podcasts, live seminars and e-learning programs.
I’ve lost count of the number of people who have paid me good money to tell them things in person that are available for free on my blog. Each time you change the format of your ideas, you make them fresh and relevant for a new audience.
Remember why you’re doing this
The historical record shows that Bach was very focused on earning money and building his reputation.
But I defy anyone to listen to his work and tell me that he didn’t love music for its own sake, or that once he sat down to write and got into the flow, he wasn’t transported into another dimension.
Goals are important, but set them aside for a moment. Forget about “why you’re blogging” in terms of outcomes, and focus on why you chose blogging writing as a means to achieve your goals.
Surely it was because you love to write, and the idea of writing for a living is a dream come true? Well if that’s the case, remember how lucky you are to have this opportunity to do what you love, today.
Make the most of it.
About the Author: Mark McGuinness helps artists, entrepreneurs and other creative people achieve remarkable things at Lateral Action and Wishful Thinking. For bite-sized inspiration, follow Mark on @markmcguinness Twitter.
Where newspapers get traffic & how long are search queries?
For anybody interested in news sites the interactive graphic below is an interesting breakdown and shows just how powerful some of the social news sites are. The Drudge Report especially sends a huge amount of traffic as does the BBC at nearly 2m per month.
Interestingly the BBC has committed to increasing the traffic they send to other sites:
BBC Online will be transformed into a window on the web with, by 2012, an external link on every page and at least double the current rate of ‘click-throughs’ to external sites.
Adding links to content is a time consuming business so we’ve contacted the BBC with an offer for some of our SEO team to help placing these links but we have yet to hear back from them.
UK Newspaper Website Visitors 
In other news, Chitika has found that the most common search phrase length is 3 keywords. This is not to be confused with long tail SEO which is about search volume rather than phrase length.
To determine the optimal word count, Chitika looked at a sample of 41,103,403 impressions of search traffic coming into their network between June 13th and 19th. Within the sample, 10,710,579 impressions – some 26% of all search traffic – came from three-word searches. The next top word counts were two-word (19%), four-word (17%), and finally one-word (14%). Any query beyond five words will see dramatically lower traffic, throwing into perspective just how fragmented traffic from long queries really is.
Not getting the rankings you want? Hire us for Search engine optimisation
Where newspapers get traffic & how long are search queries?
WordPress Podcast: The Secret Sauce, Pete Cashmore Explains How to be Mashable
Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of one of the world’s most popular blogs – Mashable.com, which happens to be powered by WordPress! Since 2005 Mashable has been a leader in social media and technology news coverage in addition to hosting events like the recent media summit and social media day. In tip-packed show, Pete shares with us:
- Why he selected and continues to use WordPress,
- The secret formula of success for blogs,
- How to work with and develop teams,
- How to develop communities,
- How to measure growth and monetize,
- How to build a brand
In news:
3 Essential Small Business Search Marketing Trends
“Qualified”, “showing intent to buy”, “high conversion rate” and many other phrases are used to describe search engine marketing. As a $16 billion industry, Search Marketing including SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC ads (pay per click) represent a substantial opportunity for small businesses to connect with customers at the moment they are looking for products and services to buy.
Even though Search Marketing presents an attractive opportunity to grow online sales, many businesses are too busy running their companies to stay on top of future trends. To that end, here are three search marketing trends worth paying attention to:
1. Online & Offline Marketing Integration - Forrester Research estimates $917 billion worth of retail sales in 2009 were “Web-influenced” in contrast to $155 billion of consumer goods sold online in the same year. Small businesses must pay attention to customer search online influencing offline purchases as well as the influence of the in-store experience on searching and purchasing online.
2. Mobile Device and Local Search – Companies must recognize consumer trends towards mobile search with the proliferation of smart phones. The web experience has definitively extended beyond the personal computer to mobile devices such as iPhones, Blackberries and iPads. Marketers must understand their customers’ use of mobile search and what the marketing opportunities are.
Companies that serve customers in specific regions or with geographically specific needs must be present in local search results, map results and specific geo-location queries. Segmenting potential customers through geo targeting with paid search advertisements will help focus the right ads on the right customers.
3. Social Media Advertising – Savvy small business marketers are increasingly realizing that the opportunity to reach customers extends beyond traditional paid search into the booming social media space. Having surpassed Google as the most visited website for the week ending March 13, 2010 and with over 400 million registered users, Facebook offers a significant audience that shouldn’t be ignored. Social networks like Facebook can provide online marketers hyper-targeted advertising opportunities that can tap into new customer segments and serve as a complement to other paid search programs.
Whether it’s incorporating online and offline influences with search marketing, diversifying PPC advertising networks, leveraging local and mobile search marketing or extending advertising programs to include social media, small business marketers that capitalize on these trends will gain a competitive advantage. Of course, if they hire an online marketing agency like TopRank Marketing, that advantage may come even faster.
This post was excerpted from my article that was originally published on American Express OPEN Forum. Be sure to visit 5 Search Engine Marketing Trends That Impact Your Business for the other 2 trends.
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6 Ways PRO Can Add Value in 15 Minutes
Posted by randfish
As many of you who read this blog know, I’m a terrible self-promoter. I actually feel guilty writing about, linking to and promoting the products and services that make payroll for the amazing SEOmoz staff and allow us to conduct cool research, produce awesome guides and build out spiffy office space. But, every few months, I manage to crawl out from under that shell. This time, it’s by request.
I’ve been hearing from a lot of our PRO members that they feel both overwhelmed and confused by all the offerings in PRO. I know it’s tough when there are 30+ pages on which unique types of PRO content exist and even the dashboard doesn’t link to all of them (that’s our fault for bad organization – I promise it’s getting better by the end of summer). Hence, this post is all about what to do in your first 15 minutes inside PRO to get lots of value that can actually move the needle on your SEO actions and search traffic.
Step 1: Find Your Big Missed Opportunities via Top Pages
When you run a report in Open Site Explorer, click to the "top pages" tab and browse through the list of the most-linked-to pages on your domain. You’re looking for two things – any troubling codes (302, 40x, 50x) and pages that have lots of links, but aren’t targeting competitive keywords for relevant search traffic. In the former instance, you want to get those pages up and pointing to the right place. In the latter case, you need to run that page through OSE, determine who’s linking to it and with what anchor text (there’s a tab for that, too), then see if you can put together good content to match the links & ranking ability. You can do all that, later – for now, just export the list to CSV, or make a note to revisit.
Elapsed time: 3 minutes
Step 2: Crawl 3,000 Pages on Your Site and ID Potential Errors
The new Custom Crawl Prototype will mimic a search engine spider and crawl up to 3,000 pages on any domain, then email you with a CSV of the results in 24 hours. It identifies duplicate content issues, HTTP headers, missing titles & meta descriptions, and many more potential SEO pitfalls. Get a report on a site or two and dig into the results tomorrow.
Elapsed time: 3 minutes 30 seconds
Step 3: Run Keyword Difficulty Reports for Your Top 5 Keyword Targets
How tough, relatively speaking, are the keywords you’re chasing and where might easy opportunities exist? Keyword Difficulty can help answer this question and provides a terrific CSV export of the top 25 sites/pages ranking for any query with metrics for each. Often just a report or two can help you identify keyword targets where small quantities of links or optimization effort can take you a long way. They’re also ideal for showing management/clients exactly how far you have to go to catch up with the competition.
Elapsed time: 7 minutes
Step 4: Uncover Some Easy Link Targets with Link Intersect
Tom Critchlow and I call the Link Intersect Tool "cheating," because it’s just too easy to find good link opportunities. Plug in your site and at least 2 (up to 5) competing sites (or just sites that you think have relevant/acquirable links) and it spits back a list of sites, pages and metrics that link to 2+ of the competitors but don’t link to you. It’s like shooting links in a barrel! (that’s a thing, right?)
Elapsed time: 11 minutes
Step 5: Sign Up for a Webinar (or Download a Past Presentation)
I’ve personally run a dozen 60-90 minute webinars for our PRO members on topics ranging from "reverse engineering the SERPs" to "competitive link building" to "actionable analytics" and more. The feedback we get on these is overwhelming positive and we’re running two each month (one with a specific content focus and another reviewing members’ sites). The webinar archives contain video+audio downloads of the presentations plus a link to register for upcoming ones. If you like a more interactive/participatory learning environment, these are a great option.
Elapsed time: 12 minutes
Step 6: Track Rankings on a Few Dozen Key Terms/Phrases
My recommendation is to Track Rankings for 10-20 key terms you’re targeting, a handful of mid-range "nice-to-haves" and a healthy helping of long-tail keywords to help give a sense of how you’re performing across the keyword demand curve. When traffic fluctuates, it’s great to be able to see if rankings were the cause, or if other factors (demand, downtime, errors, analytics capture problems, etc.) could be the culprit. The best part about the current rank tracking system is the ability to choose between multiple engines on any TLD (and to select "entire subdomain" so it catches any page from your site in the top 50 results).
Elapsed time: 15 minutes
OK, your quarter-hour is up, but so are your chances for a lot more search traffic in the next few weeks and months. When you’re ready to devote some more time, you can install the mozbar, check if any deals in the Discount Store are relevant/useful, distribute some PRO Guides to your compatriots, give Trifecta a spin, watch some PRO Whiteboard Videos, ask a question in Q+A, review the hundreds of PRO Tips, leverage the Link Acquisition Assistant to find some sexy new link opportunities, dig around in Labs, well… you get the idea.
And, as a tease, here’s an early comp of what we’ve been busy with in 2010:
ETA: Late this summer 
How Preparing A Sermon is Similar to Writing Blog Posts
On Sunday I preached a sermon at my local church. I used to do this weekly when I worked as a minister years ago – but it’s been a while since I had to do it (funnily enough I find it a lot more nerve wracking getting up in front of a couple of hundred people to speak than writing a post for tens of thousands!).
As I was preparing for preaching last week it struck me how similar my ‘workflow’ for it was to putting together a blog post (although a blog post is usually a lot quicker in my experience).
This video identifies some of the stages I went through last week that are similar to how I go about writing many blog posts.
Notes: See the full sized video here. Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff) – here’s why I use that camera.
Video Transcript
I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.
Hi. This is Darren from ProBlogger. Welcome to another video post. Over the last week or two I’ve been doing something that’s a little bit out of the ordinary for me, but something that I used to do all the time. Those of you who know me and have been reading ProBlogger for a while who’ve read the book will know that I used to work in churches as a Minister and as part of being a Minister I was delivering Sermons every week or two to a few hundred people in a church. Whilst things are a little different now in that I’m speaking to a lot more and I’m writing using text rather than voice, there’s some similarities that I’ve noticed this week in preparing a Sermon, a one off Sermon, to the way that I write blog posts and so I thought I’d share some of the process that I go through in creating a Sermon which I think transfers fairly well over to writing a blog post or preparing a video post.
Selecting a Topic
The first thing that I noticed I was doing last week was just selecting a topic. Actually that was a bit easier for me with this Sermon that I was, I was preaching in the last day or two, because I was given the topic.
The Minister of the church that I go to said, “Darren I want you to speak about work and faith and how they intersect together”.
Selecting a topic can be one of the biggest problems for bloggers, just trying to work out what to write about on a day by day basis. I, what I do is have a folder on my desktop on my computer which just has lots of different text files which have, have titles or main points that I might write. Really what, what those text files are is just identifying big problems that my reads might have. So whether it be my blogging readers on ProBlogger, how to start a blog, how to get traffic, how to monetise a blog, the big sort of picture problems that people have.
On my photography blog it’s, it’s more about how to choose a camera, what lens you might want to add to that camera, how you might hold that camera, how to compose a picture. These are sort of big picture topics that I write about and I identify.
Refining the Topic – Break it Down into Smaller Problems
Then it’s about refining the topic and beginning to think about what you can say in it, and for me this is about breaking the topic down into smaller problems that people might have, and so in the Sermon that I was writing about this week which was on the topic of work and faith, I began to identify some of the key problems that people might have in that area, you know, when their, their work and the choices that they are, are making in their work, clash with their values for instance. Thinking about those sorts of issues within the larger topic, and the same thing’s true when I write a blog post. I try and break it down and identify, you know, maybe two or three or four problems that people have when it comes to that larger problem, larger topic, and what I find is that if you can identify two or three problems, small problems that a reader might have is that you then have your points that you can then work through in the post.
Identify What People Already Know
After that what I then try and do is actually try and work what does my reader already know. A lot of people skip this type of thing but I think it’s really important to acknowledge what your readers already know, because then you can build upon that. They may already know it because you’ve written about it previously and then you can link back to that so that you can build a little a, extra depth into your post, but then, then you can then identify what they don’t know.
Put the ‘Bones’ into Place – Your Main Points
Then what I do in the preparation of a Sermon is start to put the bones into place, I then look at it almost like a skeleton, I try and put some main points in place. It may not be very exciting points at this point, it may not be interesting yet, but they’re main points that I want to make through the preaching of that Sermon or the writing of that blog post. So as I’m writing a blog post I try and break it down into four or five points that I might to communicate over that post.
Flesh it Out – Add Interest and Depth
Once I’ve got that skeleton in place, once the bones are there, you then flesh out and this where it gets fun, this is where you can add illustrations, this is where you can add metaphors or analogies or you can tell a story, this is where you can use pictures so for me this is the part in the creation of a Sermon where I’m, I’m thinking about my PowerPoint and how I can make it visually interesting.
This is where I’m thinking about, you know, bring in Bible verses or quotes from people, this is where you’re fleshing it out, you’re adding muscle, you’re adding depth to your sermon or your blog post. For me as I write blog posts I’m looking at what other people are writing in this area and trying to add quotes, or I’m trying to find a famous person’s quote, or I’m trying to add a photo. This is where you’re trying to make it interesting. Quite often bloggers just communicate their main points but they don’t actually go to the trouble of making it intriguing, making it enjoyable for your readers to, to read.
Refine, Focus and Cull
Once you’ve started to add that depth, what I usually find, particularly when I’m preaching a Sermon is that I usually have too much stuff. Yesterday I preached the Sermon, I had 22 minutes to speak. Once I got the bones and then added flesh to it, I had 45 minutes worth of content, so this is where I began to practice it, I began to actually verbalise it and I began to refine and cull it. This is where I started to remove some of the things that I’d added to add interest because they were actually distracting from the main points and they were making it too long.
So as I’m writing a blog post quite often I do a similar thing. I start to add content to it and then I get to a point where I’m about to publish and then I, I read through it with quite critical mind and look for things that I can take out, things that might be distracting from the main point, things that might be making the post too long. You want to be useful with your posts but you don’t want to actually go over the top with it.
So then you’re at a point that you’re able to deliver it and hopefully if you’ve been practising it, if you’ve refined it you’re able to do that, you know, in a good way on your Sermon and hopefully as your blog post, you’ll have something that people not only can learn from but they also find interesting and intriguing to read. I hope that gives you a bit of insight into how I go about it. That’s the type of blog that I write, I write how to contents so that probably applies a little bit more to that type of content than some other types, but I’d be interested to hear about the processes that you go through in, in the creation of a blog.
Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.
How Preparing A Sermon is Similar to Writing Blog Posts
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LoyaltePays “Pays” You To Build Your List
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