Online Marketing Blog

When reviewing search marketing blogs each week for inclusion in our big list, one of the most consistent problems we see is that blog owners don’t make it easy to subscribe. Either there is no icon for the RSS feed or it’s hidden way below the fold.

Something as easy as adding a prominient RSS button near the top of the blog template with the word “Subscribe” near it can increase the number of return visitors substantially. We’ve done this ourselves and we’re now just under 6,000 subscribers.

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As you can see from the graph above, the number of RSS and RSS to email subscribers of Online Marketing Blog has grown substantially since we moved over to WordPress and updated the design. Participating in a little social media optimization hasn’t hurt either.

One of the metrics we look at with client blogs as well as our own are the most popular RSS feed readers and aggregators used. This influences the RSS chicklets or buttons used to promote the feed.

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With all the buzz about social media optimization the past week, I thought it would be timely for us to present two updated tools for encouraging the sharing of and linking to content as well as distribution. These are concepts that are fundamental to the notion of social media optimization or SMO.

The first tool is one we’ve received excellent comments on and it’s called the Social Bookmark Creator. In order to make it easy for readers to save a blog post or a web page for reading later or to aggregate resources using a social bookmark service, we’ve created a tool that allows you to add a social bookmark menu after each post or on a static web page.

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A while back Thomas aka Twistermc, whipped up a handy tool for creating RSS subscription buttons to place on blogs. This makes it easy for the reader to subscribe to the blog using their favoriate RSS reader or aggregator. (See the buttons down the left side of this blog) This particular tool has been very popular and is the source for many, many links to Online Marketing Blog and to the blog marketing tools page over at TopRank.

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Thomas has done it again. This time he’s created a social bookmark links creator to make it easy to add del.icio.us, digg, furl and more links to your blog.¬† A TopRank version is coming soon and I’ll post in more detail about how to use this excellent tool.

If you need a cool tool for creating RSS feed subscription buttons on your site, be sure to check out another TwisterMC creation: the Automatic RSS Feed Button Maker.

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