Today I’d like to suggest an exercise to think about the future of your blog. It’s a brainstorming task to get you thinking about the types of products and services you might one day add to your blog.

I remember doing this for ProBlogger 4 or so years ago and coming up with a long list of potential things I could add to the blog including a job board, membership area, eBooks, ‘real’ book, events and more.

At the time I wasn’t ready to add any of these new products, services or featured – but having that list in the back of my mind enabled me to keep moving my blog forward towards achieving some of them.

The other benefit of identifying these potential income streams that you could one day develop is that others may already be developing them. This might feel a little like you’ve missed the boat but it could also be an opportunity as those with these products might be potential advertisers and/or might have affiliate programs that you could promote.

Once you’ve come up with your list of ideas feel free to share some of them in comments below – it’ll be great to see what everyone is thinking.

PS: stuck for ideas? I don’t blame you – it can be hard to think of how to add a product or service to your blog. Check out the list of products and services that other bloggers have added to their blogs in the results of a poll I ran here on ProBlogger exploring this very topic.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Brainstorming Activity: What Could You Sell from Your Blog?

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Now that Google is including tweets in its main search results, many businesses are wondering how they can leverage it to their benefit. At SMX Advanced, WebProNews spoke with Stew Langille, the Vice President of Marketing at Mint.com, about what Mint is doing in this area.

As he explains, Mint merges SEO and social media efforts together to get the best results. The company recently launched an answers program that merges the two together and, ultimately, helps it rank well in search results and provide viral capabilities.

Mint takes topics such as “saving money” and develops content around it. They distribute the content on their blog and share it through social media. In the end, these topics appear in Google’s real-time search results.

Langille says that Mint does not monitor exact keywords or tweets. Instead, they take a more holistic approach and develop a blanket of content around a particular topic. If they do not appear in the real-time results, Langille says they ask themselves the following questions:

-    Do we need to be more specific in the topics we cover?
-    Do we need to develop better relationships with influencers within Twitter?
-    Do we need to build other Twitter accounts?

By combining SEO and social media efforts, businesses can actually be more successful in both areas. Are you merging SEO and social together?

This column is written by Kimberly Turner from Regator (a great tool that gathers and organizes the world’s best blog posts). – Darren

Hello and thanks for stopping in again for a list of this week’s ten most blogged-about stories! As always, Regator has provided the list, and we’ll use posts about these hot topics to illustrate this week’s tips. In the past, we’ve discussed some formats you can use to add interest and variety to your blog and, more recently, we looked specifically at list posts. Carrying on with that theme, we’ll focus this week on how-to posts. Because they solve a problem and guarantee a benefit, how-to posts tend to be popular with readers. And they can be used for virtually any niche (if the examples below aren’t enough to prove that point, check out “The Biggest List of ‘How To’ Blog Posts Ever Assembled” from one of the older ProBlogger Group Writing Projects). Let’s take a look at how bloggers used how-to posts to address this week’s hot stories:

1. Gulf of Mexico – Sometimes, a how-to post is not a tutorial that readers will follow themselves but rather an explanation of how a larger problem can or will be solved. Cosmic Log’s “How to suck up all that oil” is an example of this sort of post.
2. World Cup – If there is a particular problem or issue that your niche’s readers are concerned about, a how-to post is the ideal way to handle it. World Cup viewers, for example, seem universally irritated by the ubiquitous vuvuzela horns at the games, prompting a large number of sports and tech bloggers to offer solutions in the form of how-to posts. Asylum’s “How to Filter Out Those Annoying Vuvuzelas” is just one of many.
3. Tony Awards – Jaunted’s post on “How To Get Tickets To The Tony Awards” is a classic how-to. It clearly states the benefit of reading the post in its title then delivers on its promise in a succinct and straightforward way. It’s not always necessary to be extremely clever with how-to posts. Giving your readership the information they need is enough.
4. Bob Etheridge – Representative Bob Etheridge, who lost the plot and had a physical confrontation with a student on film this week, must not have read Marshall Goldsmith’s “How to Keep Your Temper at Work (And Everywhere Else).” This post not only gives solid advice, it also establishes authority on the subject matter in a way that is subtle yet effective (the author discusses processes he has used to deal with negative emotions “for more than 20 years”). There’s a good chance you’ve established this authority and trust simply by blogging on your subject matter, but it’s worth taking a moment, as you write that how-to, to ask yourself how new readers know that your advice is worth heeding. It’s possible, through a short bio or brief comment such as the “20 years” line above, to strengthen your authority without tooting your own horn to an obnoxious degree.
5. True Blood – Though Gawker.tv’s  “How to Date a Vampire” is clearly tongue-in-cheek, it has characteristics common to many good tutorials: It lists the materials that will be needed, it presents the process in clear numbered steps, and it keeps the readers’ interest through humor and interesting related tips. Consider these factors when writing your own posts.
6. Helen Thomas – Dumb Little Man’s “How to Recover From a (Big) Mistake at Work” is an example of a how-to idea that was generated by the blogger’s own personal mistakes. Sharing the lessons you’ve learned from your mistakes is valuable and may prevent your readers from making the same errors or, in the worst case scenario, may help them deal with the aftermath of a similar faux pas.
7. Nintendo 3DS – Opposable Thumbs’ “What Nintendo must do to make the 3DS a must-have” uses the how-to format (directed at giving advice to Nintendo rather than readers) to provide commentary and opinion then ends with a solid call to action for readers to share their own opinions.
8. Michael Jackson – When it was announced that the new Michael Jackson video game will teach players how to move like the King of Pop, Gawker.tv gave their readers a head start with “How to Moonwalk,” a video tutorial. There may be tasks, such as moonwalking or knitting, that are better explained via video. Consider whether video, audio, or photos would make your how-to post more effective and easier to understand.
9. Al Gore – Al Gore’s divorce and subsequent rumors of infidelity may have him wishing for a post such as Divine Caroline’s “How to Rebuild Your Life After a Divorce,” which uses subtitles and short well-written paragraphs to clearly outline the post’s advice. Subheadings such as these can help readers skim for the information they’ll find most beneficial.
10. Apple – “How to Pre-Order an iPhone 4 With Minimal Hassle and Headache” from Switched provides continued usefulness to its readers by updating the post as information changes. If you’ve written a how-to that will change with time, the added effort required to go back and update the post will be appreciated by readers.

Do how-to posts work well on your blog? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

One more thing: I’ve received emails from some of you indicating that you’d like to have your blog reviewed for possible inclusion on Regator, but nominations were closed while we finished our relaunch. I’m happy to announce here that nominations are now open and ProBlogger readers are the first to find out. Feel free to submit your blog.

Kimberly Turner is a cofounder of Regator.com and Regator for iPhone as well as an award-winning print journalist. You can find her on Twitter @kimber_regator.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Blogosphere Trends + Writing Great ‘How To’ Posts

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Blogs can be a very marketable and very profitable tool if used correctly. Profiting from blogs is just a matter of grabbing the attention of an audience and not doing any actual salesmen selling. In this article you will learn the 13 most essential steps to successful blogging.

1) Where to start?

You should begin your blog with a free blog hosting service such as Journal Home or Blogger. Starting with a free blog hosting service allows you to begin blogging instantly without having any advance knowledge of scripts, hosting, or programming. It allows you to focus on your content and not the internal maintenance of the blog. The best benefit of starting with a free service is, in the case your blog doesn’t become successful you do not lose any money or are you left holding the bill. The great thing about a blog is that they are organized in chronological order, your latest entry is displayed first. When your blog traffic grows greatly and you are ready to upgrade to your own domain then you can simply make your last blog entry the announcement of your “move”. Simply add a last entry stating that your blog has “moved” and type the new blog URL address. Which directs visitors to your new blog site, keeping your following, without a major inconvenience to anyone. Upgrade as you need to…but only when you need to!

2) Niche

A niche is a targeted product, service, or topic. You should first decide on a product, service, or topic which interest you. Choose an area which you can enthusiastically write about on a daily basis. You can use keyword research services like Google Zeitgeist or Yahoo! Buzz Index to find popular searched topics. It does NOT matter if your topic is popular as long as there is a audience for your topic and the topic is precisely focused then your blog should be successful. Anything can be considered a niche as long as it has a target audience no matter how large or how small the audience is. A blog about your cat can be a niche or a blog about the species of the cat family can be a larger niche market, if there are people who are interested in hearing about your cat or the species of the cat family…you can even choose to build your audience for a market which an audience does not exist, but first you must build your blog.

3) Update Daily (nothing less)

This step is a must and not a suggestion. Updating your blog daily not only keeps your blog more interesting to readers, but it also gives your blog fresh content on a day to day making it more appealing to search engines. Not updating your blog on an occasional holiday or one day here and there is understandable to most, but missing days at a time or weeks is unacceptable and will most likely result in your blog being unsuccessful. To keep your blog traffic and retain your visitors interest it is a must to update your blog daily with multiple entries. You should try to update your blog everyday with at least 3 or more daily entries. The best way to accomplish this is to set aside 1-2 hours a day for tending to your blog and adding new entries. It may even be wise to schedule a set time which you dedicate to your blog each day. Give yourself work hours and treat your blog as a job, what happens if you don’t come to work for days or weeks…you lose money or worse you get fired! Same applies here…if you don’t update your blog for days or weeks you’ll lose visitors.

4) Traffic

It’s no secret. You must have traffic to profit from blogs. There are numerous ways to build traffic. Paid advertising, free advertising, viral marketing, search engine marketing, RSS/XML feeds, and word-of-mouth. You should always use your blog URL address in the signature of your email, forum discussions, message boards, or any other communication media. You should submit your blog URL address to search engines and blog directories. You should submit your RSS/XML URL feed to blog ping services like Technorati, Ping-O-Matic, and Blogdigger. You should confidently share your blog with family, friends, co-workers, associates, and business professionals when it relates. Many blogs can be considered as a collection of articles, for this purpose you should submit your blog entries (those that are valuable and lengthy articles) to content syndicators like GoArticles.com or ArticleCity.com. Once submitted your articles can be picked up and published by others. The trick is to make sure you include your Blog URL address in the “About the Author” passage. What this does is create link popularity and backlinks for your blog, when someone picks up your article from the syndication then publish the article on their website the “About the Author” passage is included with each publication and the link you included is followed, crawled, and indexed by search engines. Imagine if your article is popular enough or controversial enough to produce 10,000 publications across the web. The search engines is bound to find your site in no time with that many publications and credit you a authority on the topic, in return increasing your rank on search engines. The small effort of writing a well written article is rewarding. You should try to write at least 1 full length article every week for syndication and submit your article to at least 10 article syndicators.

5) Track Your Blog

How do you know if your blog has traffic? Just because no one is leaving comments doesn’t mean your blog isn’t growing. Many visitors do not leave comments but they are returning visitors. I know it sounds crazy but with blogs people are more interested in what “you” have to say! Many visitors do not comment their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd time. Some do not comment at all, but are active daily visitors.

Tracking your blog does not have to be overly sophisticated usually a simple free page counter like StatCounter.com or Active Meter will do the trick. Install (copy/paste) the code into the html of your blog template and start tracking your visitors. Its better to use a service which gives you advanced traffic analysis, such as keyword tracking information, referral information, and search engine information. Visitors, returning visitors, and unique visitors should be standard for any page counter service you choose.

6) Listen to Your Audience

When using the proper page counter you should begin to see how others are finding your blog and if through search engines then which keywords are being used to find your blog. If constantly your blog is being found by 1 or more keywords then focus your blog around those keywords to make it even more powerful. When writing entry titles and entries use the keywords as often as possible while keeping the blog legible and interesting.

7) Multiple blogs

Use multiple blogging accounts to attract more people. This means you should have a blog with JournalHome.com, Blogger.com, LiveJournal.com, Blog-City.com, tBlogs.com, etc. The more blog accounts the better. You can copy/paste from 1 blog to all others. Having different blog accounts is like having a publication in different newspapers. This enables you to attract more visitors and this also increases the chance that 1 of your blogs will be in the search engine results for your focused keywords.

Short & Concise

Aside from the lengthy article a week for syndication and publication your blog entries should be short & concise (if you can help it). Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule and you have no choice but to blog lengthy entries, but try to avoid this as much as possible. You do not want your blog entries to become hours of reading. Visitors like to easily find information and skim through your entries. It is good to be detailed and provide useful information, but do not include useless information or run away sentences that veer away from your topic.

9) Digital Art

Try to include non-advertising graphics, pictures, photos, and art in your blog entries. Not too much. Once a week is fine. Graphics can sometimes bring your blog to life. Of course, the content of the blog is the most important aspect and you do not want to overshadow your content with graphics, but displaying graphics can add a bit of spice to the blog. Be choosy about your graphics and make sure they fit your entry topic. You should add content with the graphic, at least a caption. Original graphics, photos, pictures, and art is recommended.

10) Keep it Personal

A blog is most successful when it is kept personal. Try to include personal experiences which relates to the topic of your blog entry. Stay away from the business style of writing. Write with a more personal style and use first-person narratives. Do not write any of your entries as sales letters, instead share product reviews and personal endeavors.

11) Interact With Your Visitors

You now have the traffic you deserve. You should begin interacting with your visitors. Create a regular theme such as: “Monday Money Tip” or “Picture of the Week” which entices your readers to look forward to each week.

Give your readers advance notice about a product, service, or topic which you are going to review and then talk about later. If the President was scheduled to give a speech then in your blog you should state that you “will discuss the speech and give your opinion after the speech airs. Comments will be appreciated”.

Try your best to find exclusive information that not many have. Do not disclose any confidential or secret information which is deemed illegal or can potentially get you into trouble, but try to get the scoop before everyone else does. Such as: If your blog was about Paris Hilton (the socialite) and you had a blog entry about “Paris Hilton Getting Married” then it would be interesting to your readers if you had a actual picture of Paris Hilton engagement ring. Give your best effort to dig and search the internet for exclusive information and you will possibly come up with something useful. Your readers will appreciate this and they show their appreciation through word-of-mouth referrals. Imagine how many readers will tell their friends, family, and others about information they only can find at your blog.

12) Make Money

Once your blog has gained some real momentum and your blog traffic is increasing then it is time to start thinking about turning your traffic into profit. You should use contextual advertising, like Google AdSense or Chitika. Contextual advertising is usually text links which use the content of your blog to publish targeted ads on your blog. The payout is usually based on a pay-per-click model, meaning for ever click an ad receives you are paid a small percentage of the profits. In addition to contextual advertising it is good to also use graphical advertising such as: BlogAds.com, Amazon.com, MammaMedia, or General Sponsored Advertising.

13) You’re a Professional

You’re a professional now! What are you still doing with that free blog hosting service? It is time to upgrade to a domain hosted solution. You need to get a web host and choose a domain name for your blog then check its availability. Select the blogging software you wish to use, such as: Squarespace.com, WordPress.org, MovableType.org, etc. When you have your new blog domain setup and ready for traffic then it is time for you to announce your move on all your previous blog accounts. Your last entry to the blog should be a “move” announcement. The title should be “Moved” and the blog entry should state something like “Old Blog has been moved to New Blog please follow and bookmark this link for future reference. This way all returning visitors and new readers should not have any problem finding your new blog domain.

At the level of a professional blogger you may want to team up with 1 or more other bloggers. This will create a more interesting and more powerful blog. The old saying “two heads is better than one”, more authors mean more advertising and exposure because each author will have a vested interest in the blog. The idea of a team blog is to make it profitable and rewarding for all authors, while continuing to target the blog topic and keeping the blog interesting for visitors.

Following these blogging techniques should make your blogging experience much more rewarding. There is no guarantee that your blog will become popular or a household name, but the effort should at least put you one step closer. Making money online is not an overnight experience like many may think, but making money online is definitely a foreseeable possibility. As well, growing popularity on the web is not an overnight experience, but through time, dedication, and persistence you will be rewarded with all the royalties of blogging.

About The Author

Ant Onaf is an expet SEO consultant. Ant Onaf has years of SEO related experience. His ingenuity, dedication, and passion for technology, internet marketing, & writing has made him an monumental icon on the World Wide Web. To learn more visit Ant Onaf blog here

Author: Ant Onaf
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Guest blogger

Here’s a quick tip for companies or individuals pitching to bloggers to link to their products, services, events, sites etc:

Make it a Win/Win/Win interaction!

A Quick Story

Yesterday I was pitched to on my photography blog by a company running training events for photographers. They felt that they had a useful training event that would help my readers and as a result thought it’d be great for everyone if I linked up to it and gave it a little promotion.

I went to the event page and it did look like a useful event – however I came away from the pitch feeling a little less than inspired to promote it because it wasn’t really a Win/Win/Win situation.

• I could see how dPS promoting it would be a win for the company running the event – we have 3 million or so readers and a certain % of them would sign up for the event.
• I could see how promoting it might be a ‘win’ for my readers – they learn something about photography.
• But I struggled to see the ‘win’ for me and the site. Yes, helping my readers could have some benefits for us as a site – however there was no direct win really.

The thing I fed back to the event organiser was that I’m asked to promote events most days of the week so I’m a little selective in what I promote partly because I don’t want to overwhelm our readers. I’m also ideally looking to promote things that provide value for readers (and so reject some events simply because they’re irrelevant or don’t see to be high quality) AND also want to see some benefit to my site also as a result of it.

I fed back to them that while that might seem a little greedy and self interested – that I’m running a business here (as they are) and if I’m promoting a commercial event then I have an expectation that not only the organisers of the event should benefit. I’m looking for mutually beneficial partnerships.

How to Make Your Pitch a Win/Win/Win Pitch

If you’re pitching bloggers – don’t just look to get something out of it for yourself – you need to be pitching in a way that the bloggers readers will benefit (this is mainly about promoting relevant and high quality products) and hopefully where the blogger/blog itself will benefit in some way.

This doesn’t just mean financial wins for the bloggers (although that should certainly be considered if you’re benefiting financially) but it could include numerous things. Here are a few ‘wins’ for bloggers that might increase your chances of a successful pitch:

• advertising – one obvious type of financial win is to buy advertising on the site. Whether this be a banner ad, an in-post ad, a newsletter sponsorship or some other kind of ad – this at least compensates the blogger for promoting your event.
• affiliate deal – paying the blogger for a conversion/sale is a good way to go for you because you’re only paying for conversions and good for the bloggers as it gives them real incentive to promote your product/service/event.
• promotion – an exchange in terms of promotion could work – if the blogger is promoting you, why not agree to promote them back either at your event, on your site etc. Promoting them as a sponsor or partner won’t cost you anything but helps the blogger to do something that they’re on about – growing their blog.
• product – many bloggers will accept products either as payment or to give away to their readers as prizes. In a sense this is payment (and most bloggers will want to disclose it) but it’s going to cost you less while still delivering value to the blogger for their promotion.

I’m sure there are other ways you could bring some value to a blogger (feel free to share some in comments) – the key is to find a way to not only deliver value to yourself and their readers – but to them also.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Pitch Bloggers – Make it a Win/Win/Win Situation

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Posted by Tom_C

User Generated Content pretty much rules the web these days. If a website isn’t including comments, blogs, reviews, thumbs up or polls then frankly it might as well be a book instead of a website. Lame. So this post is all about how to squeeze the most SEO benefit out of your user generated content.

Remember folks that even if you don’t have "classical" user generated content these tips are applicable if you put out a large amount of content, regardless of whether it’s UGC or in-house. If you have a team of writers you can pretty much think of them like a small bunch of users creating UGC for your site so these tips apply for many different types of sites. If these tips don’t apply then you’re probably running a boring website anyway.

1) Nudge Users Into Doing SEO For You

This is one of the most powerful tools in your UGC armory and applies equally well to UGC uploads and also in-house content generation (how many in-house SEOs have come up against CMS limitations in teh past!). The idea is simple – firstly you need to figure out what a perfectly optimised UGC upload looks like. For example, say I was doing SEO for youtube (I’m not btw) I might consider a video like this pretty much spot on:

This video has all of the key elements

1. A descriptive title with the relevant keyphrases in there ("omg cat" and "dramatic chipmunk")
2. Submitted to the correct category ("comedy")
3. Lots of good relevant tags added (like "slack" and "jawed")
4. A good (though not actually perfect) description with the main keywords repeated on the page.

Compare that to a video like this which has virtually zero SEO value:

The video title is "640×360.mp4", there’s no description and no tags.

So when you’re building your UGC upload process (or internal CMS for uploading content) you need to build in as many nudges as possible to turn videos like the second into videos like the first. What these nudges might be will vary wildly and depends on your definition of a perfectly optimised page and what sort of content users are uploading. That said, here’s a few nudges that you might want to consider:

• Enforce a minimum and maximum title length. This will force people to put at least a few relevant phrases in there but also avoid spamming the title with too many phrases.
• Enforce a description.
• Let users choose their own related content on the site and embed links to those pieces of content automatically. This can be a good way of increasing internal linking to strong content.
• Provide users with some popular tags they might want to use instead of letting them think for themselves.

It’s important to note here that some of these changes might seem to be a trade off between usability and SEO, enforcing a description for example might lose you a few video uploads. You should carefully watch this to ensure that you don’t kill conversion rates in the process and you should strongly emphasise WHY a description is important to ensure users are motivated to add one. Be sure to put the WHY in their own terms (i.e. "your video will get more views and comments if you include a description"). Linkedin does this very well with their "your profile is only 60% complete" calls to action.

2) Mash Up Your Own Content for Agile Rankings

Sometimes we get quite hung up in SEO as to what exactly we mean by "unique content". We might check for example, that an article written for a website is unique. But once we determine that the content is unique how many times can we put that article on our site? Can we re-use the headline on multiple pages? Full answers to these questions is beyond the scope of this post, suffice to say that you can often get away with re-using sections of unique content on more than one page on your site. And unique content is an asset. So consider these two situations:

Ranking For Head Terms – If your site is full of user generated content then you will naturally have plenty of long-tail phrases nailed. But what about the big terms? These terms are harder to nail down. Instead of relying on your community to optmise for this phrase, instead you can aggregate content from your community and sit it on a page that otherwise is perfectly optimised by hand. For example, let’s continue looking at youtube and consider the keyphrase "poker videos". Now in the UK there are no youtube results for this on the first page. In fact the highest ranking youtube page is this video:

Now, ranking with an individual video is fine – but it’s not perfect because it’s not the best page for a user to land on and also it’s not ranking 1st page! So what can we do about it? Well how about we create a page which sits on this URL: www.youtube.com/videos/sports/poker-videos and is perfectly optimised for the term "poker videos" with a good title, header and intro text. Then most of the content on the page can be pulled from existing uploaded videos. So aggregating content in this way can provide you with powerful canonical pages which you can internally link to strongly and can rank for specific head terms without you having to rely on individual videos.

Being Agile & QDF Terms – The above technique can be done en masse as part of a site overhaul and I suggest that building these kinds of pages into your site as part of the category structure is a GOOD THING. But sometimes, search phrases come out of nowhere – these are the phrases that weren’t anywhere yesterday, let alone 6 months ago when you did your research! Still with the youtube example, looking at the hot trends for today I see that "draft picks 2010" is a hot phrase right now:

Keeping with the youtube example I see that there are plenty of videos for the term but that’s just the problem – there isn’t a good single page for Google to find that is specifically about the term. So, if YouTube were being agile they could quickly deploy a page (www.youtube.com/nfl-draft-picks-2010/) targeting the term, link to it from a high-crawl page (like the homepage) and BAM they’d be ranking in no time. The beauty of this is that all they need to do is do a little picking and choosing of existing content to create the page. They don’t need to write anything much in the way of original content to rank for the term. This is great for videos but applies equally to other forms of UGC and can be a powerful tool in your arsenal. QDF FTW!

3) Link Building is Hard – Get Someone Else To Do It!

This is one of the aspects that is talked about most elsewhere – widgets and embeddable goodness is talked about a lot so I’m not going to labour the point. One thing I do want to point out here is that you can apply conversion rate optimisation methodologies to your link building efforts here by improving conversion rate of sharing content. For example, YOUmoz is a linkbuilding tool for SEOmoz – so when a new YOUmoz post goes live we could set up an email that is sent to the user who submitted it which has a strong call to action to both blog and tweet about their latest YOUmoz post. This simple action might improve the link conversion rate of YouMoz posts by 20%. Boom, extra links!

4) Use Your Community To Do Research

Another way that you can use your community to help your link building efforts is by using feedback forms and surveys. For example, a site I worked on recently which let’s say promotes widget expertise sent out a survey to their users and one of the questions they asked was "where else do you talk about widgets online". Some people said Facebook, some said blogs but a surprising number said they not only talk about widgets on this site but they also discuss widgets on forums. So this is a really valuable insight and should motivate you to ensure that when you offer widgets and embeddable content you also offer forum code as well as HTML to ensure that you’re getting as much exposuring as possible. I can’t really predict exactly what insight you’ll gain from surveying your users but I can guarantee that if you do it you’ll learn something about other sites in your industry, keyphrases you were missing or usability issues which can lead to conversion rate improvements.

By the way – did I mention that you should go take the SEOmoz industry survey?!

5) Educate Your Users on SEO

Not everyone in the real world hates SEOs. Shock horror! In fact, plenty of regular users are really keen to understand more about how SEO works. So running training sessions for your users highlighting in particular the benefits good SEO can bring them can really help motivate your community and helps users optimise their own content, do their own link building, keyphrase research etc.

Towards the end of last year the SEOmoz team did some work with Etsy and actually put together some training courses/videos/PDFs for the community to help users learn about SEO. Here’s the Etsy Guide to SEO.

Etsy Guide to SEO Workshop from Etsy on Vimeo.

 

So, in summary – user generated content is a phenomenal asset, use it wisely and you will profit! As usual, I’d love to hear about other creative uses for UGC in the comments…

 

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This column is written by Kimberly Turner from Regator (a great tool that gathers and organizes the world’s best blog posts). – Darren

Every week, we’re using the trending topics from Regator to show you what bloggers are writing about most during the previous seven days. Click any trend to see posts about that story. So far, we’ve used the trends to illustrate how you can break out of the echo chamber and solve problems for your readers.

This week, we’ll focus on crafting effective post titles/headlines. You can delve into the ProBlogger archives to find some great posts by Darren on this topic: “How to Craft Post Titles That Draw Readers Into Your Blog” is a must read for every blogger and “15 Ways to Rework Your Next Blog Title” is a useful follow-up. For this post, we’ll focus solely on the effectiveness the headlines, but as you blog, remember to deliver on what you promise–some of the posts behind these headlines do that better than others. Let’s see how a few bloggers handled the headlines for this week’s top stories:

1. Twitter – Between buying Tweetie, archiving tweets in the Library of Congress, holding its developer conference, and unveiling promoted tweets, the service could not be ignored. The title of Gizmodo’s “Inside America’s Secret Historical Tweet Vault” is almost as tough to ignore. As Darren points out, there are “power words” that, when used with care, can make your titles nearly irresistible. He lists words like: secret (used here) free, stunning, discover, and easy. There are plenty of others: exclusive,  shocking, new, etc.
2. Goldman Sachs – “How to” titles are effective because they follow Darren’s #1 headline rule: Communicate a benefit. The Money Game’s “How to Trade the Goldman Panic Right Now” does this well. My most widely read post ever was a “how to” post: “Seven Ways Social Media Is Ruining Your Life–And How to Fix It.” In large part, I credit the headline for that post’s popularity.
3. Supreme Court – Personalizing titles by using “you” helps readers feel connected to the story. Queerty’s “The 3 Supreme Court Cases Obama’s New Pick Will Decide for You” takes a larger story and makes the reader feel that it’s relevant to him or her.
4. President Obama – Creating a keyword-heavy headline not only gives your readers a clear indication of what to expect, it also makes it easy for them to find your content in search engines or aggregators. Sometimes a straightforward, keyword-heavy headline is your best bet. i09’s “Obama’s Plans for NASA: Mars by 2030, $6 Billion Budget Increase Today” is long but will be easy to find in a search. CMT Blog’s “Garth Brooks Is Just Like Barack Obama” is even more effective. It has keywords but also draws on reader curiosity.
5. Pulitzer Prize – Asking a question in your post’s title draws both readers who want to see how others answer and readers who are interested in sharing their own viewpoints. You might find that using this technique also helps you get more comments. “Sure, Online Journalism Nets Its First Pulitzer But Will a Blog Ever Win?” from Techdirt is a great example of a headline that provokes strong opinions and encourages discussion.
6. Tea Party – Creating controversy with your headlines is one way to attract readers if you’re prepared for the consequences. Many bloggers enjoy igniting heated discussions. If you don’t mind disagreement, try stating a strong, polarizing opinion in your headline like AlterNet has in its post “The Tea Party Crowd Needs to Wake Up to Who the Real Villains Are.”
7. Conan O’Brien – You’ve heard it before but I can’t do a post about titles without mentioning that people adore lists. Absolutely love ‘em. Lists quantify benefits and let readers know they’ll take away seven, 10 or even 99 new facts, tips, or tidbits. Take, for example, Vulture’s “Seven Things Conan Can Do on Cable That He Couldn’t on NBC.”
8. Record Store Day – If you’re covering something you have a very deep knowledge of, consider creating a “guide” style post. These posts are making a big promise to your reader–”guide” implies that you’ll be telling them all they need to know–so be sure to deliver. “Pitchfork Guide to Record Store Day” and “Flavorpill’s Guide to Record Store Day 2010“ both went that route.
9. Pope – WSJ’s Law Blog chose to ask a hot-button question that would incite reader participation with its post “The Pope Can’t Be Sued Abroad…Is That a Good Thing?” and managed to elicit some comments nearly as detailed and lengthy as the original post.
10. Iceland – Using humor in headlines is a tricky thing but, when done well, can result in clicks aplenty. City Room’s “Iceland Volcano Spews Consonants and Vowels” and HuffPo’s “Volcanic Ash Cloud Turns Out to Be Finale of Lost” both managed to make me smile…and get me to click to read the full post.

One last non-trend-related tip I’ll give from my own experience. Magazine editors labor for longer than you may think to craft the perfect cover line that’ll make you drop your hard-earned cash on their products. As a whole, they’re pretty good at it and the same principles apply to blog post titles. I’ve found that spending half an hour at a bookstore reading cover lines can be a great way to get inspired.

What makes you want to read a story? Please tell us about “power words” that have worked for you, humorous headlines you’ve crafted, question headlines that have elicited huge reader responses, or other techniques you’ve found to be effective. What works for your blog?

Kimberly Turner is a cofounder of Regator.com and Regator for iPhone as well as an award-winning print journalist. You can find her on Twitter @kimber_regator.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Blogosphere Trends – What Bloggers Are Writing About This Week

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Posted by RobOusbey

This is a graph of organic traffic for a theoretical site – they might be in an industry such as print advertising, construction equipment or VHS rental. The decline in traffic is pronounced and serious.

A critical distinction when looking at a graph like this is whether the site’s performance is increasingly worse than the competitors, or whether the whole industry is in decline. In this post I want to recommend some metrics that can be tracked to benchmark your site against competitors (independent of market behaviour) and to check the health of the industry. I’ll then make suggestions for finding opportunities to slow or reverse the trend of dropping traffic.

For the benefit of the time-poor, the post ends with a three point checklist / summary.

Competitors and Benchmarking

There are a couple of different metrics you can use track, which will demonstrate the more direct outputs of your SEO work, and expose your performance amongst competitors.

This chart tracks the Site Authority of the target domain (and some competitors) through time.

To date, trying to chart Linkscape metrics has been a bit misleading: the rapid increase in the reach of Linkscape and modifications of the tool’s algorithms have meant that month-by-month reporting of a site’s Authority wasn’t always a fair comparison. However, Nick tells me that the team are currently putting effort into tackling the challenge of tracking this data. Though you’ll have more confidence in drawing a trend chart such as this one soon, I’d still recommend collecting numbers right now to get a snapshot of where your site is amongst the competition.

Obviously, this assessment of site strength is query independent; differences in site architecture, on-page term targeting and the anchor text of external links will have a significant effect on each site’s performance and number of keywords.

In many ways, the next graph address this. The line for the target site is an ‘average ranking position’ – I’d recommend creating this by taking around twenty non-branded, representative keyphrases (eg: ten which you’re specifically targeting and ten which send a significant amount of traffic) and finding the mean of the site’s ranking for each phrase.

The competitor lines should be calculated by finding the mean ranking position of that site, for each of these keywords where the site ranks in the top 20. (We do this so that the mean isn’t artificially dragged down by keyphrases which the site isn’t trying to compete for, and where it ranks very poorly.)

Even a single month’s data points on these two graphs will provide a snapshot of your site’s position amongst the industry’s other players. Tracking the data each month will demonstrate how your standing has changed, and can directly show the impact of your SEO work – both on-site and off-site.

Industry Assessment

If you have been collecting ranking data in the past, then it can be useful to identify a term for which you’ve had a relatively static ranking over the last year or so. If your traffic from this term has declined over the same period then this provides a useful example of how market behaviour outside of your control is having an effect on the business.

If you don’t have historic ranking data, but suspect that your industry is in decline, you should compare search volume trends to organic traffic sent by some specific terms. In the example below, the site sees a decline in traffic for the single keyphrase ‘football tickets‘ but comparing this to the search volume for the term shows that the site’s performance has actually improved – they are increasing their share of that traffic.

If the industry really is declining and search volumes for all the typically valuable phrases are unlikely to return, then there can be a serious consideration about even continuing to operate in the market. If your core business was VHS rental, consider offering Blu-Ray; if you rank well for house and holiday insurance but are suffering from the decline in these markets then consider adding pet insurance  – a steady / growing market. (Check out this Google Insights data for UK insurance markets.)

Of course, these are extreme examples – and if you’re in these particular industries then you shouldn’t need a blog post to make these suggestions – but they remind us that there are some markets where a time comes to look for business from elsewhere.

Actions

As we did in the graph above, you must begin by looking at the organic traffic trend for keyphrases individually. A lot of information is lost when data is aggregated (such as in total organic traffic.) Go back and look at your highest volume keyphrases from a year or two ago, and compare these to your current highest volume keyphrases, by charting the monthly volume of traffic they sent over that period. It may quickly become clear that whilst your keyword portfolio has been dragged down by some dogs, there are some stars (or problem children) that are contributing a great deal to the overall traffic.

If you last did keyword research 12 or 18 months ago, user behaviour may have changed significantly – even for people looking for exactly the same product. Whilst the metrics mentioned above may bring you to the gloomy conclusion that search volume in your industry is substantially down, it’s possible to overlook the fact that there’s simply been a change in searcher behaviour.

Examples of such changes that have happened in different geographic regions:

• searchers are using more direct queries (‘cinema‘ & ‘film tickets‘ are steady or down, ‘film times‘ is way up)
• searchers are moving from long tail to head terms (‘internet marketing‘ & ‘website promotion‘ are declining but ‘SEO‘ and ‘SEM‘ are up)
• searchers are moving from head to long tail terms (‘currency exchange‘ is down but specific terms such as ‘dollars to pounds‘ are up)

The message here: don’t miss out on opportunities to compete on the emerging keyword groups.

I promised you a checklist.

Please take away these three points:

1. If your organic traffic is down, either for particular keywords or as a whole, be clear whether this is because your site is under-performing, or because the search volume for a keyword / in an industry is descending.
2. Benchmark yourself against competitors by regularly recording the Authority and/or rankings position for relevant keyphrases of your site and theirs
3. Revisit your keyword research – a year is a long time on the internet, particularly given the current state of flux that so many industries are experiencing.

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A Guest Post by David Cleland from TotalApps.

In 2006 I proudly started my first blog, DigMo! It was technology, it was creativity, it was music and it was education. Despite it being a bit of blog soup I was pleased at how quick the site grew but within a few years it reached a critical point beyond which I really couldn’t get the traffic to grow. The site was frankly far too general to appeal to a specific community.

The site had a massive 80% bounce rate and taking advice from reading the great advice on this site I decided to take stock and critically re-evaluate the future of DigMo!

As a result I decided to split the site and create two separate niche blogs, DigMo! To focus on educational technology and I launched a new site, TotalApps, to focus on Mac and iPhone App reviews. The thought of starting from zero scared me and I looked at ways to get the site up and running quickly.

I decided the best way to draw attention to the blog was to offer regular site competitions. Finding companies willing to sponsor prizes was actually much easier than I initially expected. I tend to target companies whose product I have reviewed and especially if the review has been popular with readers.

With blog authors being urged to declare any products they are able to keep once a review is published what better way to retain your creditability but by passing the review samples on to your readers as a competition prize ? It seems to me like a logical benefit that will add value to your site and grow the community.

The Mistakes

I think it is best to share my mistakes with the Problogger readers and the initial competitions I ran simply required visitors to leave a comment on a post. This didn’t grow the site and managed to result in a massive 70% bounce rate i.e. the users came, entered, and left knowing we would email them if they had won.

The Successes

I decided if I was going to make competitions really work they needed to be of benefit not only to the visitor but also the site and thus I needed to limit entry to RSS subscribers (both email and reader)

The solution was simple and surprisingly successful and will basically work for anyone running a WordPress blog even with a custom theme.

Setting the competition up takes a tiny bit of code adjusting but nothing too difficult.

The Concept

The competition works by placing a code at the bottom of blog posts that will only appear when the entry is read in an RSS reader, i.e. it does not appear on site.

To do this I used a known solution that was pointed out to me by fellow blogger Thaya Kareeson.

There are a few versions of this idea around but this solution works brilliantly on TotalApps. As I haven’t come across any plug-ins that can run competitions this bit of code fiddling is the ideal solution for now.

Getting Started

Open the functions.php file in your current theme folder (I would back this up before adding the code just to be on the safe side).

Paste the following code into the text :

function contest_post_filter($content) {
if ( is_feed() )
return $content.'TotalApps Competition Code (Please note it is case sensitive) : a12221s';
else
return $content;
}
add_filter('the_content','contest_post_filter');
function contest_comment_filter($comment_text) {
return str_replace('a12221s', '[code hidden]', $comment_text);
}
add_filter('get_comment_text','contest_comment_filter');

There are two lines you need to change - 1. the line that says TotalApps Competition Code and 5 lines down the code is repeated (a1221s).

I recently ran a competition where visitors could win a copy of Screenflow 2.0. The following screenshot shows the bottom of the post as it appeared in the browser.

……. and this is how it looked in the RSS reader. You should note your RSS Feed must be the full article view (i.e. not just the abstract) for the code to appear.

When the competition closes as I generally ask the sponsor to select a number between 1 and the number of comments and then contact the lucky winners using the email address in the comment.

When a competition closes you can either comment out the code in functions.php by adding /* before the code and */ after or alternatively is simply change the text to "No competition at present"

Offering a reason to sign up to the RSS feed resulted in the number of TotalApps RSS subscribers growing in one month to double the number of readers DigMo! had after 3 years.

Tips :

• Know what your readers want and try and target prizes appropriately.
• Make sure you link to your RSS and RSS by Email Feeds in the post to make it as easy for visitors to subscribe as possible.
• Make sure you make the rules clear and post the winner's name publicly on site.
• Where possible have the competition sponsors look after the postage. This not only saves you time and hassle but it is also assures the sponsor the competition is above board.
• Don't run competitions for more than a week as most of the comments tend to happen in the first week after that it dries up quickly.

I have to say I am certainly no expert in coding or blogging but am really excited to find a solution that really works for managing the competitions and I am equally as excited to see the number of subscribers grow.

There may even be better solutions out there and if you know of any I would be keen to hear them.

David Cleland is a teacher based in Ireland who runs three successful blogs (TotalApps, FlixelPix and Digmo.co.uk)

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How To Run Subscriber-Only Competitions on Your Blog

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In this post David Wright and Sean Platt from direct response copywriters share some suggestions on indicators of when your blog might be on the road to success.

Starting a blog was one of the most exciting things we have ever done. Building a loyal audience, gathering intelligent subscribers with insightful comments, and making plans for the future were all part of a wonderful first year blogging. The problem for us was that reading about blogging and actually blogging are two entirely different things.

Blogging is hard work. Much like becoming a parent, all the warnings in the world do little to prepare you for the reality.

No blog becomes famous overnight unless its author happened to be famous a couple nights before. Blogging requires hard work and diligent effort for a sustained period of time. Many bloggers give up in the first few months and the majority never see their sixth. I can sympathize. With all the blogs screaming for attention, how are you supposed to know if your work is going to pay off or if you‘re wasting your time?

Outside of tons of visitors, or lots of ad revenue, success is defined differently by different people. Some bloggers are seeking a path to money while others are more interested in simply connecting or sharing their voice. The list below is simply a way of gauging whether or not people are connecting to your blog.

Five ways to tell if your blog has what it takes:

1) Comments

Comments can be both an empty measurement and a solid indicator that things are going well. If your blog is receiving a lot of comments, that’s probably a terrific sign. However, if the majority of those comments ring to the tune of “great post!” then even 100 are rather meaningless. A couple of valuable comments that provoke discussion are far better than double digit comments that are only there for the benefit of a link. It means that people are finding value in your content and interested in engaging you and other readers regarding that content.

Darren previously wrote on 11 ways to get your comments noticed on a popular blog. Use this information to help you determine the value of the comments you’re receiving, while helping you to learn to make your best comments.

2) Subscribers

All growth is progress. If your subscriber count is growing, then you can consider yourself on the right track. Slow and steady wins the race and it can take months blogging to break into the triple digits. Many people, ourselves included, set unrealistic goals for their subscriber counts. This only leads to disappointment and frustration. Be realistic and remember, blogging is a process, not an event. If your numbers show steady growth, then you’re doing something right. If not, then you need to reevaluate your content, posting frequency or perhaps your social media strategy.

Darren has written many times on getting more RSS subscribers. This post has 9 tips to help you find more with a nice video and link roundup.

3) Links

Links are the currency of the net and help to pay for whatever it is your blog needs: traffic, social proof and search engine rankings; all are the direct result of high quality links. And one of the best ways to generate quality links is to produce quality content (and make sure that content is seen). The more recognized you are, the more links you will receive. The beauty of incoming links is that they carry a cumulative effect. After a while, people will start linking to you simply because others are.

Getting links is important. Here are 11 ways to increase your chances of being linked to by a blogger, as previously written by Darren.

4) Friends

With blogging, an ever expanding web of friends and blogging buddies is essential to long term success. You could even make the case that who you know is sometimes more important than what you create, though I do believe the quality of your work must always stand on its own. Strive to meet new people and widen your network as best you can. I’m not saying to strike up phony friendships with people you’d otherwise have no interest in. Rather, find people you are genuinely interested in and can learn from. You will have created a network of mentors that can teach you a lot more than a dozen courses. If there is a natural complimenting of each other‘s strengths and weaknesses, all the better.

As part of Darren’s excellent 31 Days to Build a Better Blog series, he ran a post on Day 15 about finding a blogging buddy.

5) Niche

Many bloggers make the mistake of not clearly defining their niche. I know I’ve made the same mistake several times myself. If you are blogging as a hobby, it is unnecessary to build a fence around your ideas. If you are looking to turn your blogging into profit, or a full-time living, it is essential that you understand the audience you are targeting and how best to market to them.

In this previous ProBlogger post, Glen Allsop talks about how to find your passion and know what you should be blogging about.

Remember, we all define success differently. However, paying attention to the above list and the advice linked within can help ensure your blog lives up to its fullest potential.

Question: How do you define blogging success? How have your opinions of success changed since you first started blogging?

David Wright and Sean Platt are the team of direct response copywriters behind GhostwriterDad.com.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

5 Ways to Know if Your Blog is on the Right Track

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