5 Marketing Lessons from Online Dating

Whether it’s an online profile or your website, visitors usually don’t know a single thing about you – and they’re pretty skeptical. After all, everyone’s been burned by reality that didn’t end up matching the hype. Double-Duty Tip: Being authentic and real will go a long way in winning them over.

>> Follow Tracy Needham

Do You Have a Conversation Strategy?

You still need two things to succeed. Even when you become really smart about the tools and implement repeatable processes that allow you to track interest, and get people to your business, you still need two things to succeed with sales. You need:

2. a conversation strategy to make that interaction helpful and memorable

>> Follow Valeria Maltoni

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: conversations, social media, Tracy Needham, Valeria Maltoni

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Blogirific Blog Directory has a stated mission that differs from most.

A huge part of blogging is engaging with your readers/visitors. We at Blogirific.com want to be a facilitator in this. We aren’t interested in creating our own community, we want our visitors to engage with you, the blogger. Besides, once a community like Twitter, Squidoo or a site like BUMPzee.com gets too big, spammers tend to move in…and boy oh boy do they ever move in! Spammers won’t be a problem here at Blogirific as we have decided we want people to engage with you and other people on your blog(s) rather than here. Therefore, we have closed commenting, registering and other things that may keep traffic here and not on your blog.

To make sure Blogirific only lists great blogs, we intend to only “let in” original blogs. Not everyone will get in. If your blog gets accepted into Blogirific.com, you will be part of an exclusive club.

This goal of sending traffic and conversation back to your blog, rather than trying to keep it on their site is the first thing that gives Blogirific extra value. But it doesn’t end there.

Your profile page goes far beyond the URL/Title/Description of most directories. Your page can include links to your social network profile pages, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Frienfeed, etc.

In addition, you can list 4 125×125 banner ads to affiliate products – using YOUR affiliate code – and display Adsense ads, again using your Adsense ID.

In effect, your profile page is designed to engage visitors directly with YOU, and give you Adsense and affiliate revenue on top of that.

I’ve had some conversations with Rick, one of the owners of Blogirific, and I can tell you that he’s a really nice guy who truly wants to help bloggers. So instead of basing his revenue model on hoarding traffic so he can earn from the traffic, he prefers to turn the model around. Instead he charges a ridiculously low submission fee (how does lifetime inclusion for less than $5 sound?). In return, Blogirific works hard to direct the traffic and traffic revenue back to you! Wow. I love that revenue model!

Below is a screenshot of my profile page, but you can also just go see it for yourself.

Blogirific’s mission of directing traffic to you and making it, in effect, all about YOU rather than them, is one that impresses me more than I can describe. It’s not often I get so impressed by something that I take the time to really dig into it. Who has that kind of time these days, right? But this one was special enough to do just that. I spent time really digging into the site, and came away thinking that this was something I just had to tell you about. I hope you tell others about it as well. We need sites like this who are eager to give back to us, so let’s support them when we find them.

One other thing: This is also a great way to find other bloggers within and related to your niche. Interacting with these bloggers goes a long, long way in creating mutual and beneficial partnerships. So after you submit your site, be sure to spend time (I’d say at least once a week) looking for bloggers and discussions that you can interact and converse with. Each time you make the effort, the value to you adds up. Just sayin’.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog directory, Blogirific

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

SEO 101

The 5 Goals Of A Search Optimized Page – SEO 101

The most common question I see on SEO forums, primarily from SEO newbies, is something along the lines of “How do I get my site to rank well?” You have 5 goals when optimizing any of your site’s web pages. Your goals are to: Help search engines find the page, index the page, understand the page, evaluate the page and rank the page. We cannot control the search engine algorithms, so we must do what we can to help those algorithms find, index, understand, and evaluate our pages. If we do that well, we stand a much better chance of helping search engines properly rank our pages.

Long-Term Content

Create At Least One Resource Collection

Even one highly successful post can consistently bring you a substantial amount of traffic. The key is to make sure you have at least one of those, and the best way I’ve found is to work hard at creating at least one resource collection. What is a resource collection? It is a collection of “things”, related to your niche, that others want. For example, let’s say your niche is horses. Your visitors are horse-lovers. What collection of things would a horse lover be interested in? A series of high-quality pictures of horses? A collection of videos of a particular race horse? The “family trees” of each of the Kentucky Derby winners from the last 20 years?

Exposure Expenses

Thought Leader Thursday – Donna Fontenot, DazzlinDonna.com

Sometimes, spending money is the only way to get real quality, but it should be spent only when necessary. When you do throw cash around, try to only use it on a product or service that has been recommended by someone you trust. Finally, after you spend the money, check the return on your investment. If it was worth it, and can be repeated, do it again and again – as long as it remains profitable. If it was a waste, drop it quickly and don’t throw more money down the drain. Count that as a mistake and a lesson learned.

Influence Buzz

Exhale Creativity: Inhale Buzz

Two types of people will be involved in most creative buzz campaigns – the performers and the audience. In some cases, the performers are all bundled into one person (you). In most cases, the performers will be the buzz starters and influencers; usually bloggers. The audience consists of the people who will market your product or service for you by talking about it, sharing it, linking to it, and promoting it. Start with a focus on your audience. If you know who they are (as a group), you will find it easier to locate the performers and influencers that they connect with and listen to. Which bloggers have the most influence over your audience?

One note: Don’t concentrate solely on the top influencers. While it’s great to be able to snag a top blogger as a performer in your campaign, it can be difficult to compete for the attention of most of them. Any contact you have with them may go unnoticed. It’s often easier and more productive to recruit a larger number of second-tier influencers to participate in your buzz campaign than it is to attract the attention of the top-tier bloggers in your niche.

>> Follow Donna Fontenot

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Buzz, expenses, resources, SEO

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

What is the SEO Dojo? It is a closed door, gated community which gives search professionals and those wanting to learn more about search engines a safe haven to study and collaborate.

There’s some serious educational material within the walls of the community (really, I kid you not, there’s lots of stuff there to fill your mind with). And of course, there’s a strong community of Seriously Obsessed Search Geeks (SOSG) discussing search issues.

The SEO Dojo is ideal for:

• Individuals who want to increase their SEO knowledge
• Professional SEOs looking for a quality community
• Webmasters and site owners seeking advice from top professionals
• Finding cross-site (and vertical) promotions and opportunities
• SEOs who want to learn more about how search engines work
• Anyone that needs to learn MORE about the world of search marketing
• Search geeks looking to interact with other SEO addicts

I recommend reading more about it here. It not only outlines more about the community itself, but it also tells you about all the extras you get – including free access to awesome tools (like Raven SEO tools, for example, plus tons more).

Another cool thing is that I’ve been given a special code that you can use to get 25% off of the price of membership (which is already reasonable) for the first 25 DD readers who choose to use it. Dave (the dojo leader) assigned my code to be “DonnaRocks”, so just use that coupon code to get your 25% discount. (Dave likes to embarrass me, I think).

If you are at all interested in search marketing, you should check it out. Dave’s done a bangup job of making a great community.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Internet Marketing, Search engine marketing, Search engine optimization, search engines, search marketing, search professionals, SEOs

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Even with stellar content to offer, obtaining links is a grind at best, and a massive battle for many. This post won’t cover everything you need to know about the fine art of link building, but it will present 3 tools that will make the chore much less difficult. So what 3 tools do I recommend for your link building arsenal? *

Solo SEO Link Search Tool

Free
The Solo SEO link search tool is nothing fancy and it won’t help you win any really tough link building battles. It simply gives shortcut links to various searches that help you find related pages that offer the ability to submit a URL to their site. This will help you cover the low hanging fruit of links – mostly by finding directories that allow submissions. These types of links are low value, but they are easy to obtain. It makes sense to start here, pick the low hanging fruit first, and then move on to the juicier links that are harder to find. Here’s how this tool works. First you enter a keyword phrase into the form shown below.

If you want to build links to your tube socks page, for example, you could enter “tube socks” (without the quotes). The result is a list of links. Each link is a special search performed at a search engine that will list relevant directories and sites that accept link submission requests or provide some means of leaving a link back to your site on their site. You just need to click on each link to run each search. It’s a fairly manual process, and rather boring, but it’s still a lot easier than typing out each of these searches by hand.

Speaking of directories, some are free and some are paid. There are only a handful of directories I would pay to be listed in, and the one I consistently submit to is Best of the Web. BOTW is well known as a quality directory, and they frequently have sales that lowers the price. They are having one right now, in fact. For the month of September (2009), if you enter the promo code SINCE94, you’ll receive 20% off on all new directory submissions and sponsored ad spots. September is almost over, so get your BOTW discount while you can.

Majestic SEO

Free for your own site analysis; paid for competitive analysis

This tool isn’t for the faint of heart. Majestic SEO pours immense amounts of data into your analytical stash, so be prepared for eye-popping amounts of information. The real gem of this tool is the ability to find out where your competitors are getting their links from, so that you can do the same. Here’s how Majestic describes their tool:

Majestic-SEO is the worlds largest backlinks and anchor text database. Our proprietary robots have crawled over 96 billion webpages and found over 697 billion unique links and their anchor text.

This information is available in detailed reports, where links and anchor text are shown in order of importance, based on their backlinks. Each website’s backlinks can all be downloaded as ‘.CSV’ file.

Note: Anchor text is the link text used when linking to a site. Example: This is the anchor text of this link.

Now, you might think that the free version – which is an analysis of your own site – would be useless, but that’s not true. By analyzing the links pointing to your own site, you can find some ways to improve upon them. For example, if a strong site is linking to your tube socks page, but the anchor text is “click here” or something completely irrelevant, it would be worth your time to contact them and politely ask to have the link text be changed to “tube socks” or something relevant. By improving the links you already have, you can improve your search engine rankings for that phrase, and this can often be easier to manage than getting entirely new links.

The paid version is the most helpful though, in that you can see who has linked to your competitors, and you can hopefully acquire links from them as well. The fee is based upon the domain you want information on, so each one varies. The ones I’ve checked, however, are very reasonably priced, so this link building weapon is definitely worth considering.

LotusJump

Paid Only: $24/month for basic subscription; $99/month $49/month for Pro

LotusJump is the creme de la creme of link building weapons. Why? Because it doesn’t just supply you with a bunch of information. Instead it gives you actionable items – a road map of to-do’s for you to implement. If you want a strategic plan laid out for you that says, Ok, do this, and now do that, then you want LotusJump. This is perfect for everyone – beginners to expert. Here’s how LotusJump describes the tool.

1. LotusJump searches thousands of websites, blogs, Q&A platforms and news sources for your keywords.

2. LotusJump’s powerful algorithm sorts and filters these websites to find ones that will benefit you.

3. LotusJump turns these resources into actionable tasks that are delivered directly to your account. Each task includes detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to complete it, making tasks straightforward and easy to do.

You’ll be shown where to create social media profiles, which Q&A questions are waiting to be answered for your niche, what sites are buzzing about and mentioning your topic, and much more.

The beauty of this tool is that although you could manually come up with all of these tasks on your own – you probably won’t! LotusJump does all of the research for you, and lays out your road map for you to easily follow. That’s a huge amount of work you don’t have to do on your own, and it makes actually doing the tasks a breeze!

Now What?

These tools are the weapons you need to find the sites that might link to yours. Now your job is to acquire those links. That means you need to contact someone who has control over the links placed on each site you have an interest in. In most cases, you’ll be emailing someone. And of course, your next question is:

What do I say in the email? Is there a template I can use?

I’m not going to answer that. I’ll point you to a couple of answers instead. Why? Because those answers are perfect, so I see no reason to try to improve upon them. Here they are:

The Perfect Link Request

The Perfect Link Request Email Template

See? They both say they are perfect, right there in their titles. I didn’t lie.

Ok, ok, since you insist, I’ll add something to the mix. In your email, you may want to offer them something for their time and trouble. You might offer to give them a free sample of your product for their review. Or maybe you could offer to give them free content for their site. You could even offer to write a testimonial for their product, if they will agree to list the testimonial on their site with a link back to your site. Make your offer interesting and useful, and your chances of obtaining the link will increase.

Link Building Weapons Summary

So there you have it. If you can’t find links using one of the link building weapons I’ve listed, then your battle is probably already lost. Good luck in your quest to obtain links!

P.S. This post is strongly related to SEO, but marketing is marketing. There are many ways to attract attention and traffic, so make use of every option available to you. If you want to learn more, I recommend starting with a post I wrote on SEO Scoop that should definitely get you heading in the right direction.

*

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

You’ve all seen them. Those awesome images that show you at a glance how many people are doing some activity all across the world. Or the ones that show show an interactive timeline, and as you hover your mouse over a year, detailed information is presented for that period of time. Or those colorful pie charts that shows whether or not your opinion is like that of most other people, or shows that you are in the smallest minority of people surveyed.

All of these wonderful graphics have more than just their awesome coolness in common. They all create buzz, and get talked about, shared, and linked to.

If you create a cool infographic for your site, you can almost sit back and watch as it gets shared on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and social networks, and then smile as you see the links to it rise. I hear you thinking to yourself, “Well sure, those fancy graphics would definitely attract links to my site, but I’m not an Infographics Geek. I don’t have a clue how to actually make one of those things! And I definitely don’t have the money to hire one of those geeks to make one for me.”

Well, of course, I wouldn’t be suggesting you do something unless it’s either free, or easy, or preferably both. So, below are 5 tools to turn you into an Infographic, Link-Attracting, Geekazoid. (Please note that the resulting infographics may only be viewable on the sites that created them. In order to make sure your site gets the buzz and link glory, take a screenshot of the infographic, make a thumbnail out of it which is not too small, and build your announcement or post around that – on your site. Encourage others to link to this announcement. Of course, the thumbnail, when clicked, can open a popup window which shows the infographic in all its glory).

ICTA – Create an interactive graph that analyzes blog posts, forums, chats or social network text surrounding your topic of choice. Maybe you have a hot product that’s being talked about online? Want to share that info in a creative, interactive way, and earn links back as an added bonus? The Internet Community Text Analyzer can do that for you. I recommend watching one of the demos to see how this works.

GeoCommons Maker! – Map it! Everyone loves a map mashup, and Maker! gives you the resources to do this. There’s not much to say about this. Plot data on a map in various ways. Share with the world. Enjoy the social love you receive from it. A good place to start is the User Manual. It’s really easy to do, so get your map mashup on!

ManyEyes gives a wide array of options for visualizing data, from graphs to maps to word clouds. You can use their data sets or upload your own, then just choose which type of visual graphic you want to use, edit and publish.

Exhibit – I can’t describe this widget any better than they describe the tool themselves. lets you easily create web pages with advanced text search and filtering functionalities, with interactive maps, timelines, and other visualizations. This tool is the best of the bunch, but it comes with a price – not of the monetary kind. Exhibit is free and open source. By “price”, I mean you have to do a little HTML coding, but most of it is copy/paste. So the labor involved is slightly more intense. It’s not hard (here’s the getting started guide), but it’s just something to be aware of. Still, it’s well worth it for what you end up with – awesome infographics!

There are probably lots of other infographic mashup tools available that will allow you to create buzz-worthy, link-attracting content for your site. Don’t assume you have to be an infographic geek to make it. Just use the tools that other geeks have already provided for your use!

Be watching for more buzz and link building tips coming here in the near future. And, of course, I’m always available to be hired as your eBuzz Coach.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Samir describes the course as:

Social media lessons to empower your marketing, guaranteed!

Left the Box Membership is a premier program to teach you how to best utilize social media. Learn how to engage with your consumers, build customer loyalty, and create buzz around your brand. Social media is the future of marketing, are you ready for it?

Ok, fair enough, one of the very best ways you can create buzz for your site is to intelligently engage in social media marketing. And to be honest, so many people do social media marketing completely wrong that a good, solid education in this method of marketing is definitely needed. I had no doubt that Samir had the qualifications to teach such a course. What I wanted to find out was whether or not he could pull it off in such a way that it would accomplish two things:

1. Is the material presented in such a way that everyone can understand it?
2. Is the material comprehensive enough to really cover everything someone needs to know to effectively manage a social media marketing campaign?

For me, those two things make all the difference between a good course and a bad one. It must be easy to understand, and it must be comprehensive enough to be useful. Does Samir’s course pass both those tests?

Let’s start with the first test; is it easy to understand? Samir passed this test with flying colors. The lessons are well laid out, in easily-digestible sections, with each one flowing to the next logically. In addition, the writing style is clear and concise, and there are plenty of supporting resources included to supplement the content presented. If for some reason, however, you are left confused about something, the private members forum is always there to clear things up. Just ask for help, and you’ll get the answers you need.

Great, but what about the total scope of the course? Is it comprehensive enough to cover everything we need to know to effectively start and manage a social media campaign? I’m going to have to make some educated guesses on this one. You see, I can’t answer it fully. Why? Because the course is an 8-week course, and I haven’t gone through the 8 weeks yet. However, I do have enough information to make some well educated guesses.

1. If all of the lessons are as comprehensive as the first, then it should be enough to accomplish the goal. I say “enough” because I don’t think the course will cover every single aspect that could possibly be covered based on what I’ve seen. So, no, it may not have every fact available on the subject. However, if it did, it would probably be too overwhelming anyway. From what I can tell, it looks as though it will have enough information to keep everyone on the right track, allowing them to make wise decisions, without overwhelming them and confusing them along the way.
2. If the supplemental resources, templates and tools of each lesson are as useful as the ones I’ve already seen, then they will go a long way in rounding out this course’s full complement of information.

So is something like this worth doing, and is it worth paying for? I’d say that depends upon how you value your time. If you’ve got lots more time than you have money, then you can probably figure everything out for yourself by trawling through lots of blog posts and forums, and weeding out the good information from the bad for yourself. That’s how many of us learned what we know over the years (and it can take years doing it that way). Of course, we didn’t have access to courses such as this either, way back when we began. Membership sites and classes are a "relatively" new phenomenon, but they can be very useful if they are done well. I think Samir has created one that has the right information, for an important topic, at a good price point, so I’d say this one is worth paying for. And of course, he offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so even if you disagree, you aren’t left feeling as though you’d made a mistake.

By the way, I have to commend Samir on creating such a well-designed course. I’ve often considered creating a few of these myself to supplement my eBuzz Coach service, but I just honestly haven’t found the time to do it. I know it would be a huge undertaking and would require a massive amount of my time, so it’s been put aside many times. Since I haven’t created a social media marketing course of my own, then I’m glad to be able to tell all of you about Samir’s instead. Without taking the entire course first, I can’t guarantee all the lessons will be exactly what you need, but luckily Samir guarantees it, so that’s what really counts.

I also see that he has a form on the site that you can fill out to sign up for the waiting list. By doing so, you’ll be among the first to know when they go live and get a discount too. I don’t know what the discount is, but as far as I’m concerned, any discount is a good discount! LOL.

The membership page gives specifics on the course, so I won’t repeat them here. But basically, if you’re looking to understand how you can best use social media, Samir’s membership program could take you from zero to marketing hero in 8 short weeks.

*This appears to be no longer available.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: eBuzz Coach, Samir Balwani, social media, Social media lessons, Social Media Marketing, social media marketing course, social media training course

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Transcript:

[Two Places You Might Not Have Thought To Brand Yourself]

Hi my name is Dave Dugdale and I wanted to thank Donna for letting me do another guest post.

I have been doing lots of videos lately so I thought instead of writing this post I would create a video.

I am going to run through two places that you might not have thought to brand yourself on your site.

To help yourself standout from whatever niche you in you really need to use every chance you get to help people remember your name and what you look like.

I try to place my picture just about everywhere I can on my sites, like on my SolarDave site even though I know it is the right thing to do I am still amazed when I go to solar conferences or other events when people walk up to me and say, “Hey are you SolarDave?”

Contact Form Page

So the first place to increase your branding is on your contact form page. On my contact form I ask them what my first name is, which is pretty obvious since the site is called SolarDave. This also helps me weed out emails that make it through this first filter because when I get an email from someone and they do not use my first name and I have it plastered all over my site, I pretty much know that it is going to be spam.

RSS Reader

If you are like me I read blogs from my RSS reader and hardly ever go to the site (like Donna’s site for instance). I use a plug-in on my blog called RSS Footer from a guy I can never pronounce correctly – that works great.

What you do is not only include your name and a link your site but include your photo (or logo if you are not branding just yourself but your company.) This also helps when people scrape your feed, so your brand follows you even on the scraped sites.

Well that’s it, I hope you enjoy these two tips and have a great day!

Thanks!

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Dave Dugdale (SolarDave)

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

One of the most crucial activities when crafting a marketing and branding plan is to get a logo for your company. A well-designed custom logo communicates a message to the public, conveying what your business is all about. Although Google’s logo is well-known and well-designed, Google often changes its logo for holidays and anniversaries. By portraying a more dynamic feel, their special occasion logos are able to actually “speak” to the public on these occasions.

Case Study: Google Doodle

According to Google:

At Google, we like to reflect the ever-changing world of our users through the logo designs on our homepage. These ‘doodles’ celebrate different people, events or special dates and are designed by our original Doodler, 30-year-old Dennis Hwang. (from Doodle 4 Google)

If we look at the history of Google, the first ever dynamic Google logo (they call it Doodle) was designed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin themselves. It was designed for the Burning Man festival in the summer of 1999. They created the Doodle in case their site crashed, and to explain why their phones weren’t being answered. The logo would convey the message to users that they had gone to the festival.

Later, they hired a graphic designer named Dennis Hwang, who has now become the official doodle maker of Google. He draws the designs by hand first and then computer graphs them. Dennis has designed nearly 150 Doodles to date. Presently, Google designs Doodles for many events and places them on their website for a limited period of time.

The most recent Doodle was displayed on May 10, 2009 to give tribute to Mother’s Day. The logo was predominantly pink in color, with a flower vase replacing the letter “L”.

Google’s use of Doodles that change for each event is a branding tactic that reflects Google’s image as a more advanced and up-to-date company, and also shows their affection for the events. This not only catches the eyes of their users, but also helps Google position its brand dynamically.

You can also use this tactic to brand your company with a dynamic logo on your website for each event. A good idea is to develop an event calendar so you can plan to have your logo designed before each event arrives. Then let your logo designer know what special message you want your logo to convey for that occasion. Upload it for the designated time period, and let your logo speak!

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Dennis Hwang, Doodles, Google, graphic designer, logo designer, Mother's Day, official doodle maker, Sergey Brin

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

UPDATE: I’ll try to update this post occasionally as time goes by.

Discover What Google Really Thinks Of Your Pages

What does Google REALLY think of your site’s pages? Determine the rate of importance that Google places upon each of your pages, not by PageRank, but by analyzing crawl rate. Grab a free tool that tracks Googlebot and learn how to massage the data so that you can focus attention on those pages that you think are important, but Google apparently doesn’t.

Exhale Creativity: Inhale Buzz

Sometimes you jut get lucky and buzz spreads about your company, product, or service seemingly out of thin air. While it’s truly exciting when that happens, I wouldn’t sit around waiting for it. Sometimes you have to make your own luck. Buzz usually requires an excellent product or service that just knocks the socks right off everyone. If yours can generate that WOW factor simply because it is so great and solves a problem that everyone has, then you’re definitely ahead of the game. However, even WOW products can be overlooked in the daily stream of our lives. That’s when you need to help get the buzz started, and creativity is the best way to make that happen.

Streamline Your Content Creation Process With Time-Saving Systems

I run sites that are mostly informational in nature, and since informational sites need lots of actual … well … information, that means I spend a good deal of my time creating content. Creating good content takes time, and like most of you, I have very little time, so over the years I’ve created a “system” that helps me shave off as much wasted time as possible during the process. Here’s a glimpse at the content creation system that works for me. Feel free to use any parts of my system to streamline your own content creation process.

Intelligently Crafting Content

I could start off this article by saying that to succeed with SEO, you should create high-quality content, but if I did that, you would immediately think, “same old ‘content is king’ blah, blah, blah”, and you’d probably not read any further. So instead, let’s just start off by stipulating that creating great content is a given. So often, however, no one really goes beyond the phrase “good content” to discuss how to create that content, and just as importantly, how to plan it out, and effectively create a flow throughout the site.

Analyzing Your Text Content from a Graphic Point of View

“You can’t see the forest for the trees” is an old saying that holds much truth when we are trying to analyze our own content. You’ve looked at your own content so much you probably no longer see it the way your visitors do (or the way search engines will). Sometimes I find it useful to look at the words on my site in a completely different way. By viewing your content differently than you’ve ever done before, you open up the possibility of seeing the individual trees within your content forest again. Here’s a little exercise I like to use now and then.

Link Bartering

Link bartering is NOT the act of trading links (reciprocal linking), but is the act of trading services, which usually results in acquiring nice links and recommendations.

Creating Subliminal Connections Between Your Site and Hot Trends

What if you could associate your site, your niche, or your product with a hot new trend? What if the search results showed your site for that popular new gizmo or movie? What if I told you that you can create a subliminal connection between your site and any hot new gadget/movie/song/toy/etc. no matter what niche your site or product is in? And what if you stood a good chance of ranking well for that hot trend?

The Swirling Vortex of Social Networking

Social networking is increasingly becoming a vital aspect of our search marketing efforts. The connections we form amongst our online social communities can provide ever-expanding avenues of awareness of our sites, brand recognition, and ultimately buzz and link-love.

Sadly, however, there is a dark side to social networking. This dark side is one that we’d rather not talk about because we are afraid we might see it within ourselves. What could possibly be so scary? I call it the swirling vortex of social networking.

Using the Science of Social Proof in SEO

I’ve written about Robert Cialdini in the past and how his six persuasion principles can be used in search marketing. Briefly, the six principles are Liking, Reciprocity, Social Proof, Consistency, Authority, and Scarcity. All six are worth spending some serious study time with, but today I want to focus on just one – Social Proof.

Tracking Site Page Importance Via Crawl Cache Dates

A discussion centered around the realization that Google cache dates were the new PageRank and that crawl frequency is an excellent indicator of the importance of a page, which leads to an explanation in how to track this metric.

How To Create No-Fail Hot Content

Would you like your site content to rank well? Would you like your content to draw links like nails to a magnet? There is one strategy you can use to make sure the content you create is almost guaranteed to be a hit – and in the process it gathers backlinks and ranks well. This strategy isn’t some secret ninja tactic that would get your site banned if the search engines found out about it either. In fact, it’s a tactic that the search engines would be happy to recommend to all site owners.
And while the actual creation of the content may take some time and effort, the concept is extremely simple. So what is this awesome strategy?

Blueprint of a Successful SEO Campaign

The surest way to successfully construct a building is to follow a blueprint. A blueprint contains detailed plans and designs that enables skilled personnel to build the structure just from the blueprint. In the same way, a detailed set of plans is the surest way to build a successful search marketing campaign. And just like construction blueprints, while each SEO blueprint may be unique, each will also contain similar details to ensure success. What details should a search marketing blueprint contain?

SEO – Vital Inclusion to the Overall Marketing Mix

Companies are beginning to embrace SEO as a legitimate means of marketing, but they often throw a paltry amount of marketing dollars towards it, or they allocate most or all of the search budget to PPC only. That is a mistake, even for companies that don’t sell products or services online. Let’s take a look at some interesting statistics that will help show how important it is for companies to concentrate significant resources towards ranking well in the search engines’ organic rankings, which are the natural listings returned on the left side of the search results page.

When A Good Idea Goes Wrong – SEO Oopsies

If you search the Internet, you can find at least a few dozen lists that outline the common mistakes a newbie SEO might make. Just to make sure I don’t leave out the obligatory list, I’ll present it below. After that, however, I’ll detail what really happens when a beginner starts to see results from his or her first search marketing experiments.

How To: Evaluating Competition for New Site Niches

Think you have a great idea for a new website? One thing I always consider when I come up with the next idea is: How hard will it be to compete? The competition level will determine if I have the timepower and manpower to make the effort worthwhile for me. If the competition is so tough that it would require a massive amount of time, energy, personnel, or money, then I may decide that it’s just not worth pursuing. If it’s still worth pursuing, even with a huge amount of competition to face, then at least I know what an uphill battle it will be – and I can prepare for it accordingly.

This next batch is a series of posts I’ve done for SEO Chicks. Keep in mind that the SEO Chicks blog is a sometimes serious, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes just plain goofy look at the search world, so if some of these posts seem a little “less than professional”, that would be why.

Behavioral Based Ads Bad for Publishers and Scary for Users

Google just announced that it would start providing interest-based Adsense ads. I have a bit of experience with being a publisher that serves ad based on past user behavior and interests. That experience isn’t a very good one. If you are in the mood, follow along as I tell you my little tale of how behavior-based ads can be bad for everyone. (*names changed to protect the guilty and the innocent)

Dr. Phil Would Tell You That Stubborness Won’t Get You Higher Rankings

(A semi-fictional tale)

Despite the many changes, some folks just refuse to let go of the things they long to hold onto. Let’s consider the case of someone I like to call “Mr. Stubborn”.

If Google Is Unable to Remember Its Own Rules

Google, really, you just can’t expect everyone in the universe who owns a web site to follow your rules. You’ve just proven that by not following your own rules.

Finding SEO Inspiration

To be successful with your SEO campaign, you need to see beyond the simplistic ABC’s of search – looking past the typical optimization rules to get inspired. Find inspiration outside of the (chiclet) box, and you’ll likely find ways to improve both rankings and conversions!

Lets Call This Hypocrite Day Shall We?

There’s nothing new about this post. It’s been said before. But for those who still confuse ethics with believing whatever line of bull the search engines might be throwing out for their own betterment, I wanted to just put out a little reminder on this fine April day.

Link Building Ideas for the Link Building-Challenged

Since link building is about as fun as ripping off your own toenails with pliers, I thought it might be useful to spark some creative ideas into the heads of poor, depressed link builders. You know who you are. So without further ado, or maybe with lots of further ado, it depends on my mood …

The Evolution of a Newbie SEO

All the stages a noob goes through while learning SEO

SEO Conferences: Good Deal or No Deal?

I love SEO Conferences, but there’s a good possibility I’ll never attend another one. Why? Well, for one thing, after I tick off all the conference hosts today with this post, the SEO bouncers might block me from entering. But in reality, I may never go to another conference because the prices are just too freaking high. (please bear with me on this long rant, because really, you’ve GOT to read it all – seriously)

The Long Cold Wintery Days of SEO

The long, cold wintery days hold the same lures for SEOs. Trapped inside, bundled in warm, fuzzy pajamas or long-johns, the SEO prepares to strut his stuff. The goal: to seduce a bot into believing he holds the key to its spider-heart. Unfortunately, his mastery of the SEO process can be broken down into the same three primary stages as the lover.

Also, since most of these are SEO related, I thought I’d throw in a few posts that I wrote on my old SEO Scoop blog that might interest anyone interested in the above…

The 5 Goals of a Search Optimized Page

“How do I get my site to rank well?”. Start with understanding these 5 goals of a search optimized page, and then expand your knowledge with the resources compiled in the Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Blogging post.

Beginner and Comprehensive Guides to SEO, Link Building, PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing and Blogging

A quick roundup of ebooks and guides, both free and paid, that would be useful for anyone wanting organized how-to info to study on SEO, affiliate marketing, etc.

SEO for WordPress

The HTML version of a presentation I did at WordCamp Birmingham in 2008 which was all about, well, SEO for WordPress.

Finally, you might want to check out some of the back issues of Personal Branding Magazine to read my articles that focus on combining personal branding with SEO, along with fantastic articles from lots of other writers as well. Hope some of those are useful to some of you.

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ABC, Birmingham, energy, Google, HTML, king, Link Building, online social communities, player, Robert Cialdini, search budget, search engines, search marketing, search marketing blueprint, search marketing campaign, search marketing efforts, search marketing experiments, search results, search world, SEO, SEOs, social media attention, social networking, Vital Inclusion

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh