Outsourcing in online marketing

Anyone who is active on the Internet knows the problem: Too many construction sites that want to be served. Sometimes even the best team just can't keep up if you want to keep up with the latest technical developments. At least as far as the business with search engine rankings is concerned, there is professional help. If you do not want to take care of the topic of search engine optimization yourself, simply hire an SEO agency. This can be helpful and useful for many reasons. Problem: If you end the collaboration, the know-how is often withdrawn again. It is therefore better to hire a provider who will make the team fit on-site and thus ensure that you can continue with the SEO area even after the agency has left. That makes sense because search engine optimization has established itself in the marketing mix. Especially for shops or advertising-financed offers on the Internet, it is extremely important to be at the forefront of Google. If you don't end up with your offer at least on the first page of results, it looks bad. The “visibility” is simply not there and without “visibility” there are no visitors to the website. So if you want to make money on the Internet, you need search engine optimization.

How long does a blog post need to be?

People usually ask, “how long does a blog post need to be?” so I would like to share a few ideas with you.

If you want a post to be highly search engine optimized, then you will notice that there is a lot of conflicting information.  Typically, it seems SEO experts are saying you should shoot for between 3%/ 5 % words as a minimum.  However, on Jim’s marketing blog, I very often write posts that are apparently too short for SEO, yet the site gets a great deal of targeted traffic from Google.  This post is just around 70 words plus the title.

So, how long should a blog post be?
Here are a few ideas, based on some very successful bloggers and the approach they use.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg often writes posts that are just a sentence or 2 and some are just a few words and a link.  Marketing author and Squidoo founder Seth Godin, often writes posts on his blog, which are little longer than tweets, with other posts running to over 800/1000 words.  Other’s blog using photos, with almost no text and some use video.  My friend, the author and branding / social media expert Olivier Blanchard, writes excellent, detailed posts that are often a couple of thousand words long.

Each of those approaches are correct!

Blog post length and your desired outcome

Maybe a better question than “how long should a blog post be” is to ask how long a blog post should be, for your particular desired outcome?  If you want to share short, information-rich posts, then stick with the short format and focus on regularly updating your site.  This is what many short post format sites do and it works extremely well.  Short posts on infrequently updated sites get far less search traffic, as I found out for myself with my demo site.

If you are looking for posts that will score well for relevant key phrases, I believe it makes sense to shoot for longer, information-rich posts; 400 words plus.

Of course NONE of this matters, if the content is not high quality.  Content volume is far, far less important than content value.  High value content attracts links, shares and subscribers.  It draws people, creates conversions and makes things happen!

Bloggers: Are you making this common mistake?

Successful content marketing requires great, original content

Most of the content offered is poorly written advertorial blog posts; part advertisement, part editorial.  Successful content marketing is all about producing the best quality content you can, not these thinly disguised attempts to generate links.

The post you get offered is typically sent via email broadcast, to thousands of bloggers.  So, you will usually be using duplicate content.  One of the signals that search engines look for when ranking a site is duplicate content, as it is often used by content scrapers to auto-populate low-grade sites.

Think before you link

When a stranger emails you asking for links to their site, usually with the promise of a return link, (a link exchange) the best advice is to avoid them.   Similarly, when you get someone approach you asking for links to a site in return for a blog post, you should give it a very wide berth. Why?  Because Google is BIG on penalizing sites that link to what it calls bad neighborhoods.

Linking from your site, via a post someone wrote specifically to get link juice to a site you do not know, is a GREAT way to have your own site penalized.  Even if the links they put into the post they write for you point to a regular looking site right now, these are often switched later on, when enough links have been gathered and pointed to a bad neighborhood (see bait and switch.)

Google is always trying to get the most genuinely relevant pages/sites to the top of their results.  The most powerful way to improve a site’s rank in Google’s search results is to attract as many good quality links as possible (links pointing to your site.)  Link’s, according to Google, should be acquired organically.  People see great stuff on your site, so link to it.  That link is treated by Google almost like a vote.  As a result, Google regards link exchanges as a way for people to fool their system and get a better ranking than they deserve.

It can be a great idea to have people you know and trust, writing guest posts on your blog; however, using posts from total strangers is a very dodgy strategy, with little if any actual benefit for all that risk.

Removing dates from your blog posts: Why bother?

It started with me asking Brian Clark and Sonia Simone from copy bloggers if they would add dates to their posts.  Posts on copy blogger have no date; either in the post itself or in the URL.  So, if you land on a page on a copy blogger via a search engine or a social media link/bookmark, you have no idea if the information you are reading is 5 minutes old or 5 years old.  To get an idea of the date, you need to scroll down to the comments section and see when the first comment was left.

A number of people agreed with me, that dates were useful.  However, Brian and Sonia don’t just play around with copyblogger.  I knew there was a slight SEO benefit to removing post dates, but not much.  There had to be a far better reason why they were leaving the dates out, so I decided to remove the dates from the posts on this blog for a month and measure the results.

I quickly received some amazing feedback!

More shares and more comments

I quickly noticed posts getting shared more often on social networks.  It seems people look at the date of a blog post before determining if it’s recent enough to read, share, or comment on.

It appears that the date then acts as a filter, with each person holding a different threshold. So, some people may not worry reading a post that’s more than a week old, others may have a 6-month threshold, whilst others will be fine with posts that are years old.  If the date is not there, it seems more people start reading the posts and then make their minds up, based on the value of the content rather than the date it was published.

In short, well written, older posts started getting shared, “liked” and retweeted a lot more often.

With Google and Bing, both using signals from social networks as part of their algorithm, any extra shares, likes, and social bookmarks are of real value.

Lower bounce rates

Immediately, people started reading more posts on each visit to the site.  The bounce rate dropped from 74% to 59% over that 4 week period; starting on day one!  Although 4 weeks is a smaller dataset than I would use when working with a client, a consistent drop, the day on day for 30 days, is relevant.

In addition, as the bounce rate dropped the same day the date was removed, and stayed down every day thereafter; I believe there’s a real link between the number of posts a person reads as they navigate through this site, and those posts having a date on them.

I will keep you updated with my results over the coming months, as 30 days is still a relatively short test period.

Dates in blog posts: No one rule applies

blog post dates you are considering doing something similar with your blog, this is not a universally good idea.  Those date filters I mentioned earlier are there for a good reason; they stop people reading out of date information and believing it’s current.  The dates really matter, if your blog is in a time-sensitive niche, such as; news, politics, technology, automotive, fashion, music, sport, gadgets, etc.

But for blogs that provide evergreen content on less time-specific topics, such as; marketing, personal development, cookery, copywriting, body language, yoga, crafting, martial arts, etc, the post dates are far less important.  A 5-year-old post can be just as relevant and valuable, as a 5-minute old post.  For example, many of Seth Godin’s oldest posts are also his best, most relevant insights; even though he wrote them 6 or more years ago.

Date free with a caveat

I have decided to carry on without dates on posts here for now, but with an important caveat.

Any posts that reference time-sensitive data, will have the date included in the actual post copy.  For example, at the time of writing this, Facebook has 750million users.  That number will increase, or maybe even decrease, over the coming weeks and months.  So, if I were to mention it, I would say that as of June 2011, Facebook has 750million users: Rather than just quote the number. I will also be leaving dates visible in the comments section, so anyone can scroll down and see when the posts were published.

This blog is still fairly new, so it’s easy to adopt the date free approach from here on.  It’s a harder job on more established blogs.  For example, I will not be removing the dates from Jim’s Marketing Blog, as much of the content there would need rewriting, re-editing and there are close on a thousand posts there.

6 tips to help you BOOST your results!

Blogging, frustration and getting rich quick

The Internet is littered with blogs, which have been left to rot.  Worse still, some of these blogs have REALLY great content on them, from gifted writers.  But the blogger decided to stop.

Often, the decision to quit comes when the blogger decides he or she isn’t seeing the results they hoped for.  They thought that after 4, 5,
or 6 months of blogging their tail off, they would be seeing a lot more traffic, more inquiries, or more sales/affiliate income.  They read posts by those lying bastards, who make it sound like blogging is a get rich quick scheme.

Yes, you can make a very good income from the sale of services, goods, and affiliate fees, but this does not come quick and you need to do the right things, correctly!

So, why continue?

The reason to continue is that with the correct approach, in time you can develop a massively valuable commercial asset.  This blog is just over 2 weeks old, but I also own a very successful marketing blog.  Last year, I generated almost £130,000 from the sale of services, goods, and affiliate products, via that site.  That site took around 18 months to really take off.  If I had given up after 6 months or 12 months, I would have missed the most valuable business opportunity I have seen, in 25 years of marketing.

If you are frustrated with your current blogging progress or you simply want to achieve better results, check out these 6 tips:

Write great content, as often as you can.  A blog that is only updated a handful of times a month will take a lot longer to develop than an equally good blog, updated several times a week.  This post will help!

Make sure your blog theme is using clean code, which Google and Co can crawl effectively.  This is one of the top tips from Google’s Matt Cutts.  I use the Headway WordPress theme (affiliate link) on all my sites.  My marketing blog pulls in over 1000 inquiries a day from Google, and climbing, using Headway’s code!

Make sure your content is extremely easy to share on social networks, using share options like those at the bottom of this post.  This is really important.  Although it takes time to get high volume, targeted search traffic, you can start getting share traffic very quickly.  Share traffic from Twitter, Facebook, etc, was what got me my initial readers and the initial links to my blog.
Links are what drive search traffic.  So, you need to get as many links pointing to your site as you can, especially from sites that Google already trusts.  One ethical way to do this is to write linkable content.  In other words, write posts that other bloggers will want to link to as a resource.  One of the most common types of linkable content is list posts.  Posts, where you publish survey results, are also often linked to.  Think about the posts that you link to and use them for inspiration.

Get to know other bloggers and help each other out.  Bloggers are just like everyone else.  Some are total assholes, others are super-helpful.

Success leaves clues.  Look at the blogs that you read regularly and share.  What do they do, that you currently don’t?  Look and learn.

There are many elements to developing a successful blog, and those are just a few.  I will be covering blog development regularly here on Internet Marketing Jam, so remember to subscribe!

Keyword Stuffing: What every blogger needs to know!

What is keyword stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is the process of over-optimizing a page of content, for a word or phrase, which is then used over and over again, in order to improve the keyword density of the post. The higher the keyword density, the easier it is for search engines to figure out what that post is all about. The post I just read was 337 words long and repeated the same 2-word keyphrase 24 times!

It’s a low-value form of SEO, as these over-optimized posts tend to achieve very poor conversion rates. Yes, people will find them via search engines, but because they are stuffed with the same phrase over and over and over again, they make little sense. So, people tend to leave those pages as quickly as they arrive.

Focus on conversions, not traffic!

Over optimized, keyword-stuffed posts are tempting for bloggers, who are more focused on traffic than focused on conversions; sales, subscribers, emails, sales inquiries, etc.

Whilst it’s nice to see a few thousand people visit your blog each day, if they leave within seconds because the content fails to earn their attention, what’s the point? It’s a little like sending a huge mailshot out to people, which contains a badly written letter that makes no sense to the reader. It would reach lots of people, yet generate no positive response.

Organic optimization

The reality is that a well-written post, which is on topic and focused around a single idea, can easily be picked up by search engines, whilst being of value to your target readership. Such posts are organically optimized. It’s natural. It reads great. It converts!

Read this before you write your next blog post or newsletter!

Blogging and relevant content

Content marketing works best, when your content is targeted toward the needs, wants and interests of your prospective clients or customers.  The value you then deliver in those highly relevant posts (or newsletter articles etc), is what encourages people to link to and share your work; helping you grow a targeted and valuable readership.

Often, in an attempt to get as many readers as possible, bloggers write about a wider and wider range of subjects, until they end up with a blog that is no longer directly relevant to their prospective clients.  By focusing on reader numbers (traffic) rather than the quality of that traffic, it’s all too easy to find yourself building numbers, without building value into those numbers.  The end result can be a site or newsletter, with no real direction and little power to convert.

The numbers that matter

For your content to attract and convert prospective clients, it must be highly relevant to them and their needs.  If it isn’t, you can end up with a site that gets hundreds or maybe thousands of visitors a day, few of whom ever become clients or customers.  I have seen bloggers with a few hundred visitors a day generate more inquiries and sales, than sites with several thousand, poorly targeted visitors.  Content always king, but only if it is relevant!

In addition, by keeping your content focused, you will also make it a LOT easier for search engines to get a handle on the kind of traffic to send to you.

The bottom line:

Keep your content tightly linked to the needs and interests of your prospective clients.  Grow a targeted community of great people around your blog, rather than just building traffic.

How to get inbound links

So what do you do?

There are two ways to get traffic to your site:

• Pay for it
• Get it free

I’m going to assume you’re interested in free traffic, so I’ll talk about that…

How to get free traffic:

There are two main ways to get free traffic to your site:

• From search engines
• From other sites

Interestingly, the efforts you make to get traffic from other sites are what will eventually lead to traffic from the search engines. Search engine traffic is the holy grail of free traffic, so we’ll focus on that. And the things we’ll do to make this happen will also generate free traffic from other sites in the process. Pretty cool.

Getting indexed:

The first step in getting traffic from Google and other search engines is to get indexed. Getting indexed means that Google knows you exist. Google has visited your site and taken some notes on it (stored data in its massive database). Whether Google chooses to share your site with others depends on your ranking… But the initial step is getting indexed.

And the only way to get indexed is to get inbound links from sites that are already indexed and “crawled” regularly. When you have a link on one of these sites pointing to your domain (aka an “inbound link”) and the Google engine “crawl” that site (looks at it and sees what’s new) it will notice the link to your site. It will even follow that link and see what’s on your site.

This is how you get indexed. So, obviously, you need inbound links from sites that are already indexed.

One of the easiest ways to get inbound links is to use social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is like saving bookmarks in your browser to visit later. Except instead of saving them only for yourself, you save them in a public profile that everyone (including Google’s indexing engine) can see. And they are stored as active hyperlinks. So bookmarking your blog will get it indexed in Google.

How to use social bookmarking:

The inbound links from social bookmarking sites don’t do anything to boost your ranking, so this is not what’s going to get you free traffic from Google. But they will get you indexed and that’s the first step.

There is value in getting a lot of these links, though. Even though each one doesn’t mean much, having lots of them is what Google expects to see for an “authority” site. Authority sites are what Google considers to be important sites and the content on them is given higher page rank. And page rank is what’s needed to start getting the free traffic.

So, even though these links don’t add to your page rank, having lots of inbound links is still important. So the first step is to get lots of inbound links – even if they are individually each of low quality.

We’ll talk about building authority and increasing your page rank soon. Please start your social bookmarking campaign now in preparation for this…

Rules to Apply to Your Content Creation Strategy

When creating content for your website you would like in touch in mind that content shouldn’t be created for the sake of making content. Instead, it should form a neighborhood of your company’s broader digital marketing strategy and follow strict rules and guidelines.

• First and foremost you should conduct an onsite keyword analysis. This will assist you to know which keywords you ought to be using in your content –and what keywords your customers are checking out 
• Focus on creating content that is informative and shareable. This is probably the foremost important rule for SEO content success – great content is about getting people to interact 
• Have an opinion and write eye-catching headlines
• Include pictures with alt tags, alt tagging images helps drastically improve your SEO
• Share and upload content on a daily or scheduled basis.
• Syndicate content bent your social media and online article websites.
• Remember that everything you set out into the web world counts as ‘content’ therefore specialize in creating a balanced, keyword orientated message on your website, through your blog articles, and on social media

Using this approach helps you avoid making the error of making worthless and spammy content which will haven't any benefit to your company.