The Wonder Twins Track at SMX West: SEO and Blogging, provided the audience with information on how to best launch and promote a blog.
Here are 8 tips, from Aaron Wall of SEOBook, on how to gain traction for your blog.
Own a Niche
- Owning a smaller niche is an easy way to starting building personal brand
- #1 player gets more play in the media
Make Formatting a Priority
- Ensure you have a clean appealing design
- Highlight best practices
- Include an “About Us” page
- Make it easy for press to contact
- Leverage pictures/video/sketchcasting
Write clearly
- Write headlines like a wire service writer
- Use simple words and short sentences
- Use bulleted lists/headers/sub-headers
Filter
- Create Google news alerts
- Custom RSS feeds
- Save drafts and refine before publishing
Social interaction
- Comment and link out
- Create community based ideas
- Ask for feedback BEFORE launching
- Actively solicit feedback and reply to comments
- Write for others
- Network offline
- Don’t be afraid of controversy
- Get people to talk about you
Regularity
- Pre-write draft posts for future ideas
- Offer tools or bolt on community stuff like job boards and forums
- Encourage contribution from others
- Highlight best contributors
Monetize a new blog
- No AdSense above your content
- Sell branded ads or co-brand affiliate offers
- Create your own products
Leverage Push Marketing
- Build links
- Buy AdWords and AdsSense ads, blog ads
- Sponsor other related sites
- Syndicate your content
Aaron provided a great list of tips for anyone considering/launching a blog. You might also want to avoid these 3 blog mistakes and follow these 25 blog marketing tips.
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Yup…
C’mon Marty what kind of comment is that? Why bother?
@Lee: Because I truly enjoyed the post, was in the middle of a crazy day of blogging for clients, wanted to support and acknowledge your writer for terrific work that mattered to me, and only had a second.
As you know, covering SEM shows is really hard work and often times these types of posts don’t generate as many comments…sometimes none. I know what that feels like after live-blogging my ass off all day. OMB is an important community to me. I wanted to support.
As a blogger, it always matters to me when folks appreciate conference-coverage posts, be it one word or 150….That’s why I “bothered.”
Maybe there should be form validation requiring 50 characters minimum in your threads to discourage such one-word “way-to-go” sentiments. Mine was from the heart. 🙂
Hey Marty, it’s because of the sheer volume of “way to go” spam comments that I replied as such and not wanting to encourage more – not that your “yup” was spam of course.
Nice blog, Jolina. It’s interesting to read. I am going to start my own blog soon.