Build your blog

7 Benefits to Starting a Direct Sales Blog

A “niche” refers to a targeted market with profit potential that is not saturated with competitors. The whole idea is to realize the benefits of building niche blogs and then find the niche markets out there and start building.

Benefit #1

Niche Blogs are essentially niche websites that are alive!

That’s because your blog will grow as you continue to publish posts or pages regularly to your blog. In contrast, many niche websites are seldom modified or updated after they are created.

Benefit #2

Blogs are designed to publish and update contents easily once you have them set up, configured and running.

Once you get the hang of it, it’s a matter of getting into that habit of writing blog posts and pages and publishing them regularly.

Benefit #3

They are either FREE or cost very little to set up.

You can create your blogs easily by visiting blogger.com or wordpress.org and taking time to study and learn the “how-to”.

Benefit #4

You can make money with your niche blogs in many ways, such as:

– Publishing third-party ads in your blogs (eg. Google Adsense pubishing)

– Recommending affiliate products and services in your blogs (eg. Amazon)

Benefit #5

Unlike websites, blogs are interactive. Visitors, or blog readers, are usually allowed to post comments for a blog post (or article) to the blog owner.

This ‘dialog’ helps to build rapport and relationship between the blog owner and his visitors or members.

Benefit #6

Since blogs are usually updated regularly via blog posts and pages, blogs will rank higher in search engines as compared to websites. In contrast, you have to do a lot of tweaking to a niche website through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques.

Search engines will visit your blogs more regularly as you blog more regularly.

Thus, you can also place links of your other websites to get them indexed quickly by the search engines.

Benefit #7

A blog’s syndication function is its most powerful benefit!

You can syndicate the contents of your blog by allowing other website publishers to publish your feed (or channel) on their sites. This helps to bring more traffic to your blogs as the visitors of these sites subscribe to your feed via web-based or desktop newsreaders.

So, with the above benefits, doesn’t it make a lot of sense to start building niche blogs as quickly as possible?

How Blogging Markets your Business

Now that blogging has become so popular among everyone from the novice writer to the most experienced journalist, businesses are starting to take notice. A well-written and frequently updated blog can help market almost any type of business. Blogging can help target readers who are interested in a companyís product or service and businesses can keep track of what their readers are looking for through blogging. In addition, blogging can help link together companies that compliment each other very easily.

There is a lot of talk about blogging. Some feel that blogging is just a passing fad, but others feel it is just the beginning. Some business analysts feel that blogging does not significantly help a business market the company. Many businesses feel that this is not so. Blogging can be a beneficial way to mark a business, build an audience and help link in other companies together.

Blogging can help almost any business expose their readers to their services and products. Sometimes with new products, a blog can create interest in something new. Blogging is helpful because it can talk in depth about the product, and it can also give step-by-step instructions on how a certain product can be used. A reader, who is interested in the product after reading about it on a blog, will be more inclined to research similar products on the Internet. This can lead to a more informed consumer and can save a consumer time when shopping or researching a new product. In turn, a company may save time because customers who have read the blog are already informed about the product. These customers can also read reviews on these products and services, which can be helpful in the buying process.

Another great thing about companies using a blog for their products and services is that a blog enables the company and the customer to communicate effectively. A customer can read the blog and comment on it right away. This provides good feedback to the company and they can know what the customers want. Usually blogs will provide places for readers to leave their comments or send emails to the writer. This is a good marketing tool for businesses. People enjoy communicating about products and services that they have had good or bad experiences with and blogging provided the opportunity to do so.

Blogs can also help market a business because it will be included in search engines. When people enter certain keywords, blogs that contain those words will show up. When blogs are updated frequently, search engines can provide your company with a lot of hits. This can lead to many people looking at the companyís blog who might not otherwise have done so.

When companies use blogs, it also has the ability to create a sensation around a product and influence public opinion. This is an excellent tool for companies to use. Because of the huge popularity of blogging, this can be a more effective tool than some forms of advertising. Readers are more likely to share interesting blogs with their friends and this can help companies get the word out about their product.

Another way blogging can help market a business is that blogs often help a company position itself as a leader in a certain field. This means that those who blog can show their expertise about certain subjects and then updates this information on a regular basis. Blogging can help generate leads and send a positive message about your company without spending a lot of money for advertising. Readers can look at these blogs and know that they are dealing with a quality company.

Companies also use blogs to help network with other companies that compliment their business. This is beneficial because they can easily share their links and readers will see all of the blogs that relate to what they are searching for on the Internet. Link swapping is often used in blogging, especially with businesses.

Blogging is proving to be a beneficial marketing tool for businesses all over the world. While itís a fairly new way for companies and customers to communicate with each other, blogging provides an immediate and unique form of advertising for the company. Customers are able to read and research products and services through blogging and companies can better understand what their customers want.

How to create “click bait” articles for your blog

Why are click bait articles important to your site?

Building links remains one of the single most important strategies when it comes to SEO. Links provide Google with in-roads to finding your content and they suggest to Google that your content is high quality. Google looks at links as referrals or as testimonies and if you have lots of links pointing at your site from high quality blogs, then it will suggest that those blogs thought your content would provide value to their users.

But creating links is not so easy. Google
will ban any site owners that are found ‘buying’ links, link swapping no longer
works and Matt Cutts has even warned against over-reliance on guest posting.
And anyway, if you’re a small site, then you’re likely to find that a lot of
other websites won’t want to link to you anyway!

So how can you go about getting those
links?

Simple: you post something on your own
website that is so incredible that it moves a huge number of your visitors to
share it for you. This is called
‘link bait’ and it is the very best way to build a genuinely organic links
profile.

What Makes Great Link Bait?

So how do you create link bait?

The first tip of course, is to make sure
that your content is unique, interesting and well-written. Think about the kind
of content that you would share. Would you share something that was badly
miss-spelled? Or that was only 300 words long?

If you don’t have the necessary writing
ability to create top-tier content, then hire someone to do it. And if you’re
going to hire someone, pay them enough to ensure it will actually be up to a
good standard.

But making great content is not enough.
There’s a good chance you have already been filling your site with high quality
posts and you still haven’t seen many links appear on forums or other blogs. So
what is the missing ingredient?

Again, it comes down to reflecting on what
makes you post links or share
content. And normally, this comes down to communication. Normally, we refer to
other links when we’re trying to educate a reader or someone on social media or
when we’re trying to back up an argument.

This means that you can benefit from
writing content that will serve as a comprehensive guide to a particular topic.
If you write a text all about how to raise testosterone and you cover every method and all of the technical
language, then future articles might refer to your guide.

Likewise, if you write a post that is
controversial and uses studies and logic to refute a popular viewpoint, then
your article might be used to back up arguments by those who agree with you.

Sharing
as a Form of Self Expression

Finally, acknowledge that a lot of people
will share your content actually as a way to express themselves. We are all
narcissists and we love using the web to tell our friends and family what we
think and who we are. Write blog posts that are aimed at a very specific type
of person and you’ll find they want to
associate themselves with them! Don’t try and please everyone, or no one will
care enough to share!

Hey, come and check out our Facebook page and give us a like! We love to know what people are looking to learn in WordPress world! Our group, The Bloggers Bistro is filled with an amazing group of Female Entrepreneurs learning how to blog to promote their business, their passions and their voices!

The Future of SEO and Blogging

If Google’s devastating Panda and Penguin
updates taught the internet anything, it’s that content creators can’t rest on
their laurels and hope to keep relying on the same SEO techniques forever.

Google is constantly updating, improving
and tweaking its algorithms to make its search tool smarter and more effective
at matching search terms with the right results. If you don’t adapt and evolve
with those changes, then you’ll be left behind!

The best SEO strategies then need to involve
an element of prediction and speculation. Creators need to look at trends and
clues and use these to predict the future of search and of Google. So where
exactly is the industry heading? The answers might surprise you…

Google is Becoming too smart!

The big change is that Google is moving
away from simple search to become a much more powerful AI. This is most evident
when we look at Google Home and the Assistant packaged with Google Pixel
phones.

Google wants users to be able to talk to it and it wants to provide them
with answers without them having to open up a web page and search through the
content. More and more people will be relying on voice search and this
fundamentally changes the game: we use voice very differently from the way we
type our searches!

When typing, most of us will tend to write
the precise search term we’re looking for. For example, you might search:

“Length of a piece of string”

When asking Google by voice however, you’ll
be much more likely to use a conversational tone and that means you’ll be more
likely to ask:

“How long is a piece of string?”

How
This Changes SEO

So, what does this have to do with SEO?

Your initial impulse might be to assume
that you now need to use search terms that sound more like questions. But that
would result in some pretty awkward-sounding content.

Instead then, Google is aiming to deliver
on this ambition by changing the way it matches content. Instead of looking for
precise matches in search terms and content, it is now able to understand the
actual question and the context and use this to provide a much more relevant
result (most of the time).

This is where LSI – Latent Semantic
Indexing – becomes so important. LSI is the use of synonyms and related
language in conjunction with classic key phrases. And when used properly, this
can give Google much more context while also avoiding keyword-stuffing
practices.

Another thing that search optimization now
needs to take into account, is the role of structured data. This is content
that uses markups to tell AIs like Google what particularly content is about.
This is what lets Google show recipes, times, ratings and other key information
right at the top of the search through ‘Google Quick Results’ and the knowledge
graph.

Don’t try to second-guess Google but keep
this direction in mind when designing your own SEO strategies. Google is more
than a search engine – it is an AI.

How to Build Trust for Your Website

If you want your website to be as
successful as possible, then there are a lot of different factors that you need
to take into account. Which of these is most important all depends on who you
ask but one thing that we universally know to be highly important is ‘trust’.

Google wants to provide its users with answers. This is one of its main services and if Google can’t do it, then people will look elsewhere – such as Yahoo – to get what they’re looking for.

But in order for Google to provide answers,
it needs to know which sites it can trust. The results pages are not ‘curated’,
meaning that Google doesn’t have a team to actually check the content. And that
means that it needs to start recognizing sites that deliver popular answers in
a programmatic, algorithmic manner.

How can you make sure that this all works
for you and your site is considered one of the ‘trusted’?

The
Right Links

The first and most important way to
accomplish this is with the right links profile. You need to attract links from
sites that Google already trusts – but how do you know what sites those are?

One strategy is to look at Google’s ‘In the
News’ section. Here, Google highlights breaking stories by sharing posts from
popular news sites and sites in that niche. This is a very important tip
because in order for Google to share that content as news, it must already have a high amount of trust
for those sites – and this will rub off on you a great deal.

Another tip is when possible, to try and
get a link from a .edu or .gov domain. Google likes these sites because they
have obviously got a certain amount of credibility and by aligning yourself
with them, some of that credibility is likely to rub off on you as well!

Branding

Another useful tip is branding. Google likes brands and has shared this information openly in the past. If your site name is currently the same as your keyword – rather than a catchy company name – then you’re doing yourself a disservice. (The Purple Teacup is already taken – just letting you know)

Likewise, you should also try to get links from other big brands. Google knows brands like Coca-Cola, like the BBC and like The Verge and that means they can pass on a lot of credibility.

Check out our article on SEO and Branding here.

Degrees
of Separation

Of course it’s not exactly easy to get
links from the BBC, or from the biggest sites in your niche that Google is
featuring. So what can you do if you’re still ‘small fry’?

One answer is to think of this as a game of ‘degrees of separation’. If you can’t get a link from the BBC, then getting a link from a site that has a link from the BBC can work a great deal!

Researching
Backlinks

How do you know what links a site has pointing to it? Simple: use a backlinks tool. And this also has the advantage of allowing you to research precisely which links worked for the biggest sites in your niche… so that you can build the same ones! Check out our article on being a guest blogger – guest blogging is great for backlinks

Whatever you do, keep blogging – the more content you have the happier Google and other Search Engines are!

Looking for ways to improve your SEO? Check out our SEO Awesomeness Course – an incredible resource for categories, tags, and keywords. And join us over in the Bistro! Our free Facebook Community where all the fun bloggers hang out and tag about WordPressy stuff.

What is Bounce Rate and what does it mean?

So, you are looking at your analytics for your blog and you see “Bounce Rate” and honestly, you have no idea what it means or if yours is good or not. So, let’s talk about it!

According to Google – “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (or web sessions). It is the percentage of visits in which a person leaves your website from the landing page without browsing any further. Google analytics calculates and report the bounce rate of a web page and bounce rate of a website.”

HUH? Basically, it is the percentage of people who come to your site, look at one page and leave. (Yes, it can get more technical – but this is the best and easiest way to explain it)

So, what is a good rate? On average, most sites rates are between 25-70%. An excellent rate is between 25-45%, a medium level would be 45-60%, with a higher, but don’t worry about it rate being 60-70%.

So, what can you do to improve your rate? There are a couple of fairly easy things.

What is Bounce Rate and what does it mean

1. Write posts that are tied together. Sometime you will write a post that is fairly wordy (say over 1200 words) take the time to split that into two or three posts, and hyperlink them together.

2. Write good call to actions in your blog that TELL people what to do. If you want someone to check out another article – literally write “I have another great post similar to this one, check it out here – or something like that.

3. Make sure to include multiple links and options in posts so that people have a chance to pick where you want them to go. And make sure your links actually go where they are supposed to.

How to Not Screw up Guest Posting!

While no SEO technique is perfect, guest posting is perhaps the most reliable and useful tool for building a backlink profile that is available to marketers today.

For those who aren’t familiar, guest posting creates links to your website from external blogs and sites by providing them with free content. You write a post or article for a blog or website and send it to them to publish on the proviso that you can include a link to your own website in there.

As a result, they get free content and you
get a link back to your site. Everyone wins…

But as with any tool, it’s all about how
you use it…

Tip
1: Don’t Overdo It

The first important tip to keep in mind is that you mustn’t overdo guest posting, as with any other search engine optimization strategy. A good links profile is one that seems ‘natural’ and thus you don’t want there to be an overabundance of any one particular ‘type’ of link. Use guest posts in conjunction with other methods and make this part of a broader strategy.

Tip
2: Choose Authority Blogs

Probably the most important factor to consider when getting guest posts is the type of blog that your link is going to end up on. In that regard, the best option by far is to get your links on authority blogs and sites.

Authority blogs and sites are those that Google already trusts as an authority and these will thus be able to act much more effectively as useful ‘testimonies’ as to the quality of your site.

One excellent way to find high authority blogs is to look at Google’s ‘In the News’ section. This will show you sites that Google trusts enough to feature reporting on breaking news. If you can get a link from one of these, then you can be sure they will help you a great deal.

Another tip is to look at the links profile of the blog you’re planning on targeting. Trust for Google works a little like ‘degrees of separation’ and if the blog linking to you has a link from an .edu site for example, then this will translate to more trust for you too!

Tip
3: Write Excellent Content

The content you write is also highly important. It needs to be a high quality post, not only so that it sends more of the right signals to Google, but also to encourage other high caliber blogs to want to link to you. (It’s also important to ensure your branding is strong for the same reason).

At the same time, you need to write excellent quality content that is directly relevant to the topic of your website. This is important because it will help to communicate the topic of your blog to Google and will make the link more relevant. Google demands that all in-bound links be highly relevant at all times. What’s better than having a link embedded naturally into a post that you wrote?

Branding and SEO

Why
a Brand is Crucial for Good SEO

Many marketers will make the mistake of viewing their SEO and their broader marketing as being separate. The assumption is that marketing entails things like social media marketing and advertising, whereas SEO also known as ( Search Engine Optimization ) involves adding lots of content to your website and using keywords. The two are entirely different and there is no crossover… right?

Some site owners will even go as far as to
eschew marketing altogether and instead focus on only SEO as a tool to boost the status of their website.

But marketing and SEO are not separate. In fact, they go
hand-in-hand and each supports the other. If you’re going to come up with an
effective SEO strategy, then it needs to
take into account an effective marketing campaign. And this includes things
like social media marketing, web design and branding…

Why
Brand Matters

So how does creating a great logo, web
design and site name help you with SEO specifically?

Firstly, creating a brand for your site is
something that Google highly recommends. Real companies are not called
‘How-To-Get-Big-Biceps.Com’, they are called ‘CrushingMuscle.com’. Brands help
to give a business – and a website by extension – a persona and an identity.
Think about the sites that are most successful
on Google and you’ll likely find that they all
use a brand rather than just a keyword as their site name!

Another reason that brands matter to Google
is that brands matter to users. If your site has a great logo, a smart web
design that matches the logo and a clear ‘mission statement’, then you’ll find
that your visitors find it much easier to get behind your message and to become
fans of your content.

That in turn means that they’re likely to
spend long on your site, reducing your bounce rates. It means they will be more
likely to share your links too. These are both things that Google will look at
and view as a sign of a high quality website.

Another important reason to build a strong
brand and spend time creating a site with high production values, is that it
will send the right message to other site
owners. You know, the sites that you want to work with when building links? Try
and get a guest post from a top blog if your site looks like spam and see how it works out for you…

How
to Design a Great Brand

So how do you create a great brand?

A great brand doesn’t start with a logo but rather with a mission. It starts by knowing exactly what it is that you want to deliver to your users and exactly what sets you apart from the rest. Your logo is then an expression of that and a label that will tell people what to expect when they come across your site. This is where it starts!

Build your blog

The Right Links

Branding

Degrees of Separation

Researching Backlinks

Tip 1: Don’t Overdo It

Tip 2: Choose Authority Blogs

Tip 3: Write Excellent Content

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