Funny and Smart Uses of Google AdWords
May 24, 2008
Last year we had also seen John Chow sending text messages to specific bloggers using AdWords (read How To Use Site-Targeted Google AdWords for more info on that).
Do you remember any other clever use of this advertising tool?
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9 Essential Questions to Ask Yourself Before Posting to Your Blog
April 27, 2008
HaraldJohnsen asks “As a quality control, what are the most important questions to ask before hitting ’submit’ / posting a blog post?”
Great question Harald - I actually think that most of us as bloggers could improve many of our posts by pausing before hitting ’submit/publish’ and asking a few basic questions about the post. Here are a few questions that I ask myself:
- Does this post give something useful and unique to my readers?
- Will it enhance their lives in some way or is it ‘fluff’?
- Is the spelling correct?
- Does the post make sense grammatically?
- What could I cut out of the post to make it more concise?
- How could I make the post easier to ’scan’ for readers (headings, formatting, images etc)?
- Is the title engaging? Does it draw people into the post?
- Could I give this post a little more time before publishing to ‘mature’? Would coming back to it tomorrow help me to add depth to it?
- Have I written on this topic before and can I link to it?
How Do I Get More Relevant Readers for My Blog?
April 25, 2008
@happygirl08 asks about how to - “get more relevant readers to your blog/ mailing list??”
Good question - some bloggers tend to focus on getting more readers of any kind - they don’t really care about who they are, they just want their numbers to increase. So I think it’s good that you’re asking about ‘relevant’ readers because some readers will come to your blog and then leave, never to return, whereas others will come back again and again because they click with something on your blog (I presume this is what you mean by ‘relevant readers’. OK - now that I’ve said that - an answer:
Here’s the question that I encourage you to ask - “where are the readers that I want already gathering in numbers?”
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How to Target the Right Social Media Sites
April 7, 2008
Most bloggers recognize the incredible potential that exists with social media marketing. Many want to maximize the traffic they receive from social media, so they add a Digg button to their posts or sign up for an account at StumbleUpon. What too many bloggers overlook is that Digg and StumbleUpon are just two of the hundreds of available options, and they may not be the best fit for every blogger.
In order to get the most out of social media traffic you’ll need to put some thought into choosing the social media sites that are the most appropriate for your blog and your audience. Unfortunately, none of us have the time to be an active member on more than just a few social media sites, and trying to target too many of them by adding countless buttons and widgets to your blog will only make it cluttered and ineffective.
Among social media sites there is a huge variety of audiences, types of content that is popular, amount of traffic that is sent to popular links, etc. I think most of us would agree that quality traffic is more important than quantity of traffic. The quality of traffic that you receive from social media will be largely dependent upon finding the right fit for your blog. You’ve probably read that social media traffic is very low quality. From my experience, this is not always the case. Traffic from poorly-targeted social media sites will be low quality.
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How Many Topics Should a Blog Cover?
April 4, 2008
“I also hear focus your blog on one topic. That has been my stumbling block. I want this blog to focus on the Law of Attraction in Action, AND I want to write about lots of other things that I am passionate about, including cooking, blogging, making money online, my art, people and causes, to mention a few.”Read more
A Strategy for Building Niche Focused Blog Networks
April 4, 2008
Advantages of a Niche Focussed Blog Network
- For starters having related blogs means you can cross promote and leverage the traffic from one blog to promote another
- Secondly it has some advantages for selling advertising directly to advertisers. If you have two blogs on completely different topics it’s virtually impossible to sell ads on both of them to the same advertiser but if you have two blogs with similar reader demographics it doesn’t take much to upsell advertisers to run campaigns on both.
- Thirdly - it can help with your SEO to be interlinking related sites.
5 Ways to Get the Opinion of Others and Add Dimensions to Your Blog
March 27, 2008
