seo – Page 6 – Practical Blogging

June 12, 2006

Onsite Search

Learning what your customers want using on site search

I came across this article today and it reminded me of the free gift your users are giving you when they search on your site. They are telling you exactly what they are looking for on your site:

Analysis of 34 million site search queries on more than 40 web sites using WebSideStory Search or HBX analytics suggests that marketers would be well advised to focus optimization efforts on the most popular queries versus a broader range of queries. The findings showed that a concentrated 4% of all the unique site search terms captured accounted for about 50% of all the searches conducted on a site. It was an even narrower band for e-commerce sites. The figure dropped to just 2% of unique terms representing half of all queries on e-commerce sites, which accounted for 15 of the 42 web sites studied.

Take a look at the article and note the conversion rates of users who utilize on site search.

June 7, 2006

Looking for Freelance Bloggers

Normally when I look for bloggers to expand my network, I find blogs that I like to read and approach those blogs to find new authors for clients. However, because my time is so limited at this point, I’m writing this post to let those of you who are interested in some freelance work apply to write for our network.

At this point, what we write on is fairly topical. For instance, some of our blogs cover topics that range the blogging spectrum, from wedding flowers to real estate and financial planning to stock market investing. So, if you are a blogger with:

1. Excellent Grammer
If you often confuse To, Too and Two or They’re, Their and There or if you don’t know how to place a comma correctly, you probably would hate to work under me. I am quite a nitpicker.

2. Excellent Spelling (Or rigorous spell checking OCD)
I will check the spelling of your writing and your keywords. No one wants to rank well for a misspelt keyword. In fact, it’s errors like that that make our clients look really bad.

3. Punctuality
All our blogs must be posted by 9am E. If you can’t do that, then this is probably not for you. Of course, you can post them as early as 6am E as well.

4. SEO Knowledge or a willingness to learn and apply SEO knowledge that I will teach you
Many of these blogs are written partially to capture search traffic. A blogger that will not pay attention to the SEO that I teach them will have less success.

I’d love to hear from anyone, especially someone with an interest in financial matters. I have current openings in real estate and finance and new blogs come available everytime a new client requests blogging. What is very exciting is that many of our clients are so pleased with the results that they are increasing the number of posts per day, so diligence and attention to detail are very beneficial.

Also, I need some help writing podcast scripts. These pay a great deal more as they tend to be much longer than the typical 250 word blogging post. Either way, what I am looking for is a well written email telling me a little about your blogging history (current blogging experience is not necessary, but helpful), your writing history and anything that you think might be useful. If I like what you write (yes, the initial email is being graded 😉 ) then I’ll follow up with a request for specific, on topic samples, to see if you can write for a particular blog. You may find that one topic doesn’t work for you, but another might. (mail to robyn@sleepyblogger.com)

**Feel free to pass this post around. I am always looking for good bloggers.**

May 24, 2006May 24, 2006

Robyn’s Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

I purposefully am avoiding reading the other entries until I finish this one, because I want to truly give you my opinion on successful blogging habits without being influenced by the other submissions.

Early Birds Get the Scoops
One of my favorite habits is blogging in the early morning. I find out a lot of information much earlier than the rest of the blogosphere because I start my RSS reading in the very early am, when the rest of America is still snoozing.

Read many, many feeds
And, I read small blogs. Of course, I would suggest this blog ;), but there are many, many smaller blogs that end up giving you the best scoops (my opml). Remember, the larger blogs find those scoops somewhere (and are usually kind enough to provide a source link). One of my favorite habits is to subscribe to those ‘scoop’ links when I see them. If they are horrible I can always ‘one-click’ unsubscribe. If not, I may be able to pull some great info from them as well.

Preblogging Preparation
For those times when news is slow consider series blogging. I use Google Calendar to plan out my blog series. I have a seperate calendar for my blog post ideas and series planning. I only make it viewable when I need to see it, otherwise it’s hidden to prevent confusion in my appointments, podcasts and other scheduled items. I like doing it this way so I can pull the data from any computer with a browser.

Mobile Blogging
Which brings up the fact that I blog all over the place. I am very mobile and can take my computer anywhere (see my blogging schedule article) so I am almost always online. I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone, but I actually enjoy what I do so I like to stay plugged in a lot. I have an EVDO card (mobile wireless for the laptop) and a Palm Treo 700m (mobile email when I leave the laptop behind) so I can literally be blogging riding down the road, waiting for my car to get serviced or even sitting in a restaurant.

Few Ads
Going crazy with ads is the worst mistake bloggers can make. I’m skirting on too many ads already. If a site has too many ads they run the risk of scaring away readers. …enough said.

Networking
Link a lot, comment on other blogs, form collaborative projects, join email lists, participate in the online conversation… I would say this has been my most important ‘habit’.

Great Content, Useful Content
If your blog doesn’t help people then they’ve no reason to come back, day-after-day, much less subscribe to it. Your content should be so good that they’ll feel they can’t miss a minute of it. Otherwise, you won’t *earn* their viewership.

Passion
If you don’t enjoy blogging, you probably are taking it a little too seriously. While I admit consistency, picture usage, niche focus and uber professionalism are important, if there’s no fun involved, take a step back and rethink your strategy. My number one blogging habit is definitely passion.

May 23, 2006May 25, 2006

Podcast with Darren Rowse of Problogger.net

Edited to include the podcast link that is correct and does NOT include our off the record chatter. *sorry Darren*

I was honored to have as my latest guest, Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net. If you are not familiar with Darren’s blog, I encourage you to take a look at the wealth of information on professional blogging maintained therein.

Darren has been earning a large sum from Adsense each month for quite some time now, and is able to blog full time very successfully. He blogs at several different blogs, and Problogger is not his most profitable site, however, it is the one most of us know him by as we all soak up his wisdom on a daily business. If I could only subscribe to one blog, I can assure you that Darren’s blog would be it. (and that comes from one who now has 300 feeds in her blog reader).

Anyway, I have bragged on Darren enough now 😉

I hope you’ll listen, if nothing else to find out what Darren has found to be his favorite monetization methods and to discover how he got started.

Darren Rowse, Problogger.net, Podcast

May 9, 2006May 9, 2006

How to become a successful business blogger

In answer to Christopher Salazar’s excellent post on business blogging last week. I challenged Chris to write up his thoughts and now I am answering with my own.

Being a successful business blogger really isn’t all that difficult. And, if you’ve built a successful business, I know you have it in you. However, you may need some guidance. Here are my favorite suggestions for beginning business blogging.

Share Your Knowledge
You know a great deal about your business. Share your successes and failures. Encourage those who are looking learn about your business topic by providing them with insights that would have helped you when you were first starting out.

I know your first thought here is that you are giving away your secrets and help to the competition. However, blogging is in it’s infancy. Those of you who are positioning yourselves as ‘experts’ in your field will reap the rewards as customers look for the __________ experts in Google and see your name pop up. Of course, that’s not to mention the power of expert status offline. How’d you like to be the person the media called to comment on your business field? Wouldn’t you like to be the one that spoke all over the country as expert in your field?

Plus, giving away something of value for nothing has always been great PR. (and it just feels great to be helpful, doesn’t it?)
Don’t vett your posts for anything further than errors and readability
If you second guess all your posts you’ll never release anything of value. Just write it, read it and post it. Don’t spend a week on one post. I’ve read dozens of bloggers complain that they don’t have time to post anything of value because it takes them a week to post. A week to post is ridiculous. I can see a week in research or more even, but a week to write a post on a regular basis is not practical for a business blogger.

Consistency
Which brings us to our next topic. Consistent posting is almost as good as quality posting (note I said almost). Give them a reason to subscribe and a reason to keep coming back to the site. Frequently updated sites get more traffic, period.

Read and Comment on Great Blogs
Find some great blogs and digest everything they have to say. Learn from those who now are where you want to be soon. Look to the great business bloggers to understand what they are doing (note their content, their discussions off their blog, their passion and their wit).

Remember the Long Tail
What you write today, while it pushes off your front page rather quickly, doesn’t disappear. It will be available in the search engines’ archives forever. Make sure it 1) respresents you and your company well and 2)is a topic that will be popularly searched for a long time. FYI, I have more readers visit my blog from Google for past articles than I have subscriber+readers combined. Don’t discount the long tail and it’s power to drive targeted (read they are actively searching for info on your topic) traffic to your business blog.

Be controversial, but not rude
You should be willing to throw down a gauntlet, but not every Tuesday. And, your passion should never turn into trolliness. I’ve unsubscribed from more blogs than I can count because of rudeness and excessive vulgarity. Remember, this is your *business* blog and while it should be conversational, it should not be ‘boy’s talk’. Think lunchroom discussion not locker room discussion.