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

Be The Go-To Blogger for Topical Event Curation

Your blog can become the “go-to guide” for event news curation in your niche. When an event occurs, you can be the one to build a collection of content that is worth a reader’s time. Here are a few tips on becoming a great event curator.

SEO Dojo Radio – the totally Dazzlin edition!

In the second half hour of this SEO Dojo Radio Podcast, I talk shop with David Harry and Terry Van Horne about SEO, making money online, marketing, and various things as we hold an informal industry discussion.

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.

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
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.

Let’s handle the last doubts first. You don’t know anything about either the sport of football or the game of Fantasy Football. That’s perfectly fine. Perhaps with some knowledge, you could hope to actually win the game at the end of the season, but for our purposes, winning isn’t really one of the goals. One of the goals is simply playing the game and learning to make decisions based on value judgments and risk factors. Another goal is learning how to deal with competitors so that you actually end up cooperating with your competition in an effort to help each of you further yourselves in the game. Simply participating in the game, regardless of your previous knowledge, will be of benefit.

So now that we know you don’t need to have any in-depth knowledge of either football or Fantasy Football, let me explain why I suggest you play Fantasy Football if you are starting to work from your home.

• Working from home does involve a lot of solitary time, however, if you don’t put together a team of people that you can rely on to help propel you towards the end goal, you will find it extremely difficult to get there on your own. You will be the one responsible for choosing who those people are, based on their skills and proven abilities.
• You’ll need to make decisions based on risk factors and you’ll need to be ready to reverse those decisions and take a different path if things don’t work out as planned.
• You’ll need to keep an eye on your competition and make adjustments to your own plans based on what your competitors are doing.
• You’ll sometimes need to cooperate with some of your competition in order to collectively compete with the strongest teams in your niche.

Playing Fantasy Football is usually free, so there’s no risk involved other than a little of your time. There are plenty of leagues available for sign up. I play in a league through Yahoo! but where doesn’t matter. I’d suggest asking some of your football-crazed friends if they are involved in a league that has open spots for new teams. Once you find a league to join, create your fantasy team and get ready for the draft.

What’s the draft? That’s the day all the teams in the league get to choose players for their teams. You are choosing from the list of all of the real players in the real NFL football league, and creating your fantasy team (your pretend dream team) from those players. Of course the other teams in the league will be hoping to snag the same great players as you, so there’s a bit of luck and skill involved. You each take turns making a choice, so that’s where luck comes into play. There’s always a bit of luck involved in business as well, so you may as well learn how to deal with both the good and bad luck that comes your way. The skill involves deciding who to choose in the first place, and in what order. Should you grab your favorite quarterback first, or get the best running back possible? Or maybe you should grab the best defense before someone else does? Even if you don’t know anything about the game or the players, you can use the vast amounts of stats and information available to make your choices. This gives you good experience in making decisions based on past performance and future possibilities.

Draft day is exciting, but the game lasts all season long. You’ve ended up with a team of players who, in reality, are playing for different teams. As each player finishes a game each week, his stats will help determine how well your fantasy team ends up in your fantasy league’s rankings. In the real world, some of your players may get injured or have some other complication that would render them useless for your fantasy team. You’ll need to be able to adjust when those situations arise. Do you have a backup player? Do you need to court one of your competitors and see if you can arrange for a trade? Maybe your competitor has a spare player in the position you need, and you have someone he’d love to trade for. This is where your negotiation skills come into play, and your ability to create win-win situations even with your fiercest competitors.

Fantasy Football is a lot of fun, but it also develops skills that are needed in the real world for your home-based business success. In the future, I’ll talk more in detail about building a team of people that will help propel your success, but for now, go play Fantasy Football and get a taste of what’s to come.

Good luck and have fun!

© Donna for DazzlinDonna, 2007. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: backup player, business lessons, competition, fantasy football, Fantasy Football league, favorite quarterback, football, Football league, National Football League, NFL, player, risk factors, running back, spare player, value judgments, Yahoo
This feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this in your news aggregator/reader or on DazzlinDonna, then the site you are looking at is probably infringing upon my copyright.