Online Marketing Blog

A bloggers dream is to get noticed. That could be in the form of a post getting re-tweeted hundreds of times, hitting the homepage of Digg, shared a lot on Facebook, getting noticed by the media, or one of the many other ways a blog can get traffic. However, a flood of traffic can quickly cripple a blog and turn that dream into a nightmare. The good news here is that the WP Super Cache plug-in can help minimize issues caused by too much traffic.

It’s difficult to find much value in content with no strategy behind it. Without a content strategy plan, your intended audience is unlikely to find your copy, let alone read it.

During the MIMA Summit last week, the importance of a content marketing strategy was the topic of a session presented by Rachel Lovinger of Razorfish.

For this week’s 5 Tips post, I’ve translated some of Rachel’s valuable points into actionable steps for creating an effective content marketing strategy.

1. Discover
In a nutshell, do your homework:

• Research competitors’ content. Whether you’re launching a blog, website or email campaign, determine what information is already out there and how it’s presented. How can you distinguish yourself?

Whether you are new to WordPress, or have been using it a long time, there are always features that are available in the software that people either forget about or don’t know exist. So I thought I’d write up 10 lesser known WordPress features.

1. More options in the WYSIWYG editor.

When writing your blog post in WordPress, there is a toolbar with items such as bold, italic, and lists. At the of that toolbar is a box with little squares on it. Click it to reveal another toolbar with options to underline, change the font colors, embed meida, undo, and more. Quite a few handy options hiding there.

At several conferences I’ve used the image above to illustrate how a blog can be the centerpiece to a social SEO effort where objectives are focused on raising brand awareness and improving customer relationships in a way that is beneficial to search engine visibility.

I see several key opportunities with a unified SEO and Social Media strategy:

1. Social media involvement produces content. Content that is optimized and linked to, does well in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Therefore, optimized social content and the digital assets that are common to social media (images, video, audio and widgets) are all optimization opportunities.  Better search engine visibility means more traffic to social media content from customers that are looking for it.

There are a lot of people who think that WordPress is just blogging software, but it’s much more than that. It can be a website’s entire content management system (CMS).

Here are 31 reasons why WordPress works as a CMS.

1. Simple to install.
2. There is a WordPress plugin to add almost any functionality you want.
3. Can setup multiple users with multiple levels of control on the site.
4. It’s SEO friendly.
5. Easy to theme.
6. Easy to customize design and add widgets.
7. One piece of software can run both the website and blog.
8. Comes with pages and posts to separate the blog from the website.
9. Post and page revisions so you have a history of changes to content.
10. RSS feeds included with no setup.

With Twitter riding the social media wave to a $1 billion valuation, the attention from celebrities, usefulness for everything from real-time communications in natural disasters to serving as a profitable marketing channel, a momentum of interest has spawned in how to make the most out of spending time on Twitter. Like any tool, Twitter is what you make of it. But Twitter and social communication applications like it are a lot more than just tools. One question about Twitter best practices that often comes up deals with how people (not bots) decide to follow one another on Twitter.

Any marketer who’s successfully made the move to social media will tell you the rules of traditional marketing have to be reexamined. That’s particularly true with Twitter, where brands have just 140 characters to inform, evoke emotion and inspire action. One of the most basic and critical rules for brands on Twitter? Be authentic and transparent in all you do.

Check out these 5 Twitter tips for staying authentic and transparent:

1. Reveal who’s behind the Tweets. It doesn’t necessarily matter who it is—the CEO, the social media manager or a marketing intern. It just matters that the person is in fact a person. Putting a face and name behind your Tweets through a photo and brief bio can help followers relate to and connect with your brand.

Nothing will turn readers away more quickly than blatant errors, boring copy and long-winded writers. Recognizing the deadly sins of SEO copywriting—and identifying ways to avoid them—is essential whether you’re drafting a blog post or creating an article to submit to an online directory.

Critical? Yes.

Difficult? It certainly can be.

But simplify the task and reduce the risk of losing your readers by following these 5 tips for avoiding the deadly sins of SEO copywriting.

HINT: Make yourself a checklist based on these tips and your own. Refer to that checklist at the end of every writing project.

1. Stop going on and on…and on and on. As a writer, one of the biggest challenges is removing yourself from your story in order to determine when enough is enough. To make your writing more concise and to the point:

Google Analytics is a full-featured analytics suite that is free to all to use. The data it captures lets blog owners know referrers to their site, keywords, popular posts, unique visitors and so much more.

With the Google Analyticator plug-in, you can view a summary of the blogs Google Analytics, for the past 30 days, right on the dashboard for quick and easy access.

Here’s how to setup Google Analytics on WordPress’ dashboard.

1. Sign up for a free Google Analytics account. If you already have a Gmail, or other Google account, then just sign-in. http://www.google.com/analytics/

Get Google Analytics

2. Get the Google Analyticator plug-in, install it on the blog, activate the plug-in, and remember to configure it.

Download The Plug-In

A novelist can ride the tails of that one great book for years. And a print journalist who’s broken the story of the century might be able to play off that success for several months. But for writers producing copy for the web, creating that one great blog post or article is just that: one great blog post or article.

The challenge when writing copy for the web is to consistently create content that is unique, relevant and entertaining—all at the same time. But it’s not easy to feel inspired and creative day after day.

The next time you find yourself in a rut, test out these 5 tips for creating fresh and unique copy for the web:

The nice thing about the iPhone WordPress is that there is a plug-in for just about everything.

Lets say you want to create a fancy image gallery to showcase your photography. With NextGEN Gallery you can add as many images as you want and have the beautifully displayed in blog posts or on a gallery page.

Image Gallery with NextGEN Gallery

Want to poll your audience? With WP-Polls you can create as many questions and get as many answers as you want.

Polls with WP-Polls

Maybe you want to you want to add Google Analytics to all pages of your blog AND see your stats on your WordPress dashboard. Google Analyticator can do that.

Google Analytics via Google Analyticator

Are you ready to celebrate the successful launch of your new company blog? Technically speaking, the launch went off without a hitch. Your content is fresh, informative and even entertaining. And your blog’s design is well-branded and intriguing.

But before you pop open the bottle of champagne, consider one more piece of the puzzle: blog subscribers. You’ve made an RSS feed available, but no one seems to be subscribing.

In order for a blog to generate links and traffic over the long term, you must devise a strategy to acquire an active group of passionate and engaged readers. Use these 5 basic tips as a starting point for gaining blog subscribers:

1. Make it easy and obvious for readers to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed. You can achieve this by: