This was in my email box this morning. It is from Yaro Starak. If you have been online for any length of time, you will recognize the name. He is a Blogging "GURU" and this article really makes sense to me. It is true for everyone out there, whether Blogging or building a Multi-Level-Marketing business. I am posting it for your consideration. With the help of publishing here at Quikonnex, and the topics that will be coming up you will be able to accelerate your traffic even more!!!
Happy reading,
Marianne
Success Consultant
http://www.GuruetteOnTheNet.com
Is your goal to become a full time blogger?
Do you like the sound of blogging for a living?
Yeah, me too. At least I did anyway. But then I
learned the truth. I don't like doing anything
"full time".
Even something as fun as blogging is not an
activity I would want to do for the majority of my
day. I like variety in my life and while I want
blogging to be a part of it, I don't want it to be
the main labor. I want to do it because I like it,
not because I need to do it to make a living.
I remember when I first decided to become a
serious blogger. I monitored some of the other
professional bloggers, the guys and girls making a
living from blogging. Darren Rowse
[www.problogger.net] was of particular influence
on me because he was doing very well, had started
off as a complete Internet beginner and was from
Australia like me.
I tried to emulate Darren's blogging style. I knew
I had the skills to do it and in fact more
experience than Darren in a lot of ways because I
had been working online for over seven years while
he started much later. I had plenty of material to
blog about so I knuckled down and committed myself
to posting multiple articles every day.
It didn't last long.
Maybe I was lazy, maybe I was blindly following
someone else's lead without really thinking it
through. Whatever the reason I wasn't cut out for
writing blog posts each and every day. My blogging
strategy had to change...again.
Darren and many other bloggers are machine-like in
how efficient and how frequently they can pump out
good content for their blogs. These people work
hard. They enjoy solid rewards for their labor,
but my motto is not to work hard, but to work
smart, so I needed another way to make blogging
work for me.
REALIGN YOUR GOALS
I'm going to assume you are like me. You blog, you
want to blog, you enjoy blogging and you want to
increase your blog traffic. Most importantly you
want to do it quickly and efficiently and not
waste time putting energy into activities that
don't produce fantastic results.
The first thing you have to do, and this is what I
did when I decided full time blogging wasn't for
me, is to decide what your blog is for - what you
want to get out of it and consequently what your
audience should get out of it as a result?
I decided that I would use my blog for two main
activities -
1. To dump all my knowledge built up from years of
working online into article and audio format. I
wanted a repository of my skills and experience.
2. To increase my exposure and enhance my
credibility - to improve the "Yaro" brand.
With these two goals in mind I went to work
producing some big meaty solid how-to articles,
stuff you would read in books and manuals on
Internet marketing.
I didn't bother blogging too much about news or
linking to other blogs in my industry at this
point because those activities were not aligned
with my goals. I wanted my best stuff out there so
other people could learn from me and I could
demonstrate that I was an expert in my field.
In your case your goals should dictate what you
want to achieve with your blog.
If your blog is designed to help you get freelance
writing gigs, then publish lots of original
creative articles.
If you are interested in selling your consulting
services then go to work putting out articles and
case studies on the work you have done.
If you want your blog to become the news source
for everything related to Michael Jackson
celebrity gossip then aim to post multiple
news-bite sized articles per day.
The point is to define your objectives and work to
your goals. Don't follow someone else's goals just
because they appear to be doing well.
THE LAZY BUT SMART BLOGGER
I want to be clear about one point - you *don't*
have to work hard to be a successful blogger.
You don't have to post an article each and every
day. You don't have to create something of
'genius level' creativity each time you blog.
Ahh, see, now you can relax.
Of course if you don't write articles you won't
get traffic but as long as you post something
interesting, creative, practical or valuable every
once and a while your blog readership will
increase. People that like your work will look
forward to it regardless of how frequently you
post. A little anticipation is a good thing.
When you start to post regularly, not hourly or
daily but at least weekly, people adjust their
expectations accordingly. Remember you don't owe
anyone anything when you blog. Blogging is only
about putting in as much effort as is required to
meet YOUR goals.
If you post new articles six times a day people
will start to expect it from you. You will start
to expect it from yourself and blogging will feel
like a job because of pressures to publish a
certain amount of new content each day.
Now if that's your goal, that's fine, just
remember you can change things if you find
yourself suffering because you set unrealistic
goals. Don't ever feel obligated to do anything.
In my case I started to post between one and two
big articles per week and about one or two
podcasts per month. I'd also do a little news
linking or track-backing of other articles I had a
strong interest in during the "heat of the
moment". I could brain-dump my thoughts quickly
and effortlessly into a blog post whenever the
inspiration hit me.
I did most of my early foundation blogging while
at work. I worked at a computer help desk with
Internet access so I could blog in between helping
people at my job.
I ended up blogging collectively for maybe 2 hours
per day on average and I still managed to grow my
blog traffic to 1000+ daily readers within a year
and then 5,000 by the end of the second year, and
I didn't have to post each and every day to do
it. There is a smarter and easier way to get blog
traffic.
Here's to your blogging success,
Yaro Starak
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com
The following article offers some great tips. If your Article Marketing and or Blogging is going to take you where you need to be, this is excellent information. We will be using it here in this channel to help you improve your marketing results. Have a good read and a great weekend!
God Bless YOU!Marianne
Success Consultant
http://www.GuruetteOnTheNet.com
http://www.InternetMarketing-Mavens.com
http://www.2EZ2BuildTraffic.com
How to Begin Keyword Research
What is a keyword?
It's anything people type into a search engine. It could be made up of one word or several keyword phrases joined together. Every person uses their own method of searching, and that makes anticipating those keywords that will connect their websites with the right visitors very difficult. Keyword research starts with the understanding that finding lots of related keywords that deliver targeted traffic is the ultimate goal of any keyword research.
Sending thousands of visitors to a site who have no interest in your product, let alone in buying it, is just wasted effort and doesn't do any good for your business. If possible, we want to find the customer who has a clear knowledge of what they want and is close to buying something soon.
We would ideally want a few visitors who are seriously looking to buy in the near future. In order to achieve this, we want to find the least competitive keywords with the highest number of searches that are the most relevant to our website.
If you are just starting out, it definitely would be to your advantage to target lower competition terms. Having success with low competition terms will lead to increased confidence to target more competitive terms with higher search volumes.
Thinking like your customers
Thinking like your customers is easier said than done.
All merchants are guilty of thinking in terms of features and specs of the products and not thinking in terms of benefits it can provide to the customers.
You know your business and market too well. The industry jargons and slang are in your every day language. No wonder when you start your keyword research you have a very narrow keyword focus. You become your own worst enemy in exploring other ideas.
Here is an example: what is the most popular search term, "cheap flights," "cheap seats," "low fares" or "discount fares"?
As you can see it's not that simple to pick the best keywords, is it?
The hardest part of keyword research is to keep an open mind about all possible search methods people might use to look for the same thing. Keyword research is part science, part intuition, and imagination. Since we can't get into the heads of every possible potential visitor to your site who may be interested in your products or services, we have to rely on keyword research tools to tell us what people actually search for and how often.
There are a handful of very powerful keyword research tools that are worth using, but the amount of information you can mine from them is mind boggling.
Another great resource for proven keywords is to look at your competitor's website. We are talking about finding the highest ranking competitors on the search engines using your target keywords. Once you find the top 5-10 competitor sites, perform a quick review of their keywords on the web pages.
This can be a lengthy and slow process, but luckily there are free Keyword Analyzer tools that can dig up keywords from your competitor's sites in a snap. We'll cover in detail how the Keyword Analyzer can be used to add hundreds of keywords to your keyword research project.
Keyword research is like a job interview process
In order to find the right candidate you may need to interview hundreds of applicants to find the perfect fit for the job. Well, the keyword research process is very similar; you have to cast a widenet first to capture all the possible combinations of keywords known to man. Even then, it's almost guaranteed you will discover new keywords you have missed in the original research only a few weeks earlier. What this tells us is the keyword selection and refinement process never ends, or at least it should not end until you are happy with the number of visitors you are receiving to your site.
Where and how to look for keywords
In order to find the best keywords for our website we need to gather information from a variety of resources. Some of these resources may include:
Brainstorming: Getting your brain to go on a magic carpet ride is one of the best ways to find relevant keywords for your website. Don't just settle for asking the obvious question, what does my website sell? Ask questions such as: "What is this product made up of?" or "Who is using my services?" or "What problems do my products solve?"
Finding the main and secondary keyword phrases should take less than a month for even 2 or 3 websites. This does not mean your keyword research has ended forever, but finding the 4-5 word long secondary key phrases can be done with the free keyword research tools if your budget is tight.
Free keyword research tools: You can gain access to the powerful and free Google external keyword tool to expand your keyword list. Unfortunately the Google external keyword tool only gives a search volume indicator instead of the actual search numbers. Another very valuable feature in Google external keyword tool is the "Site-Related Keywords" finder. By simply entering the website URL of your competitors, you can find out in seconds which keywords they target on their web pages.
Another free keyword research tool available without creating an account is the Overture keyword inventory . As of now, August 2007, this tool only shows the January 2007 search volumes as it's being phased out, but Yahoo! is promising a replacement. If you have a Yahoo! Search Marketing account you can still gain access to their keyword tool albeit without the search volume numbers.
Related search terms suggestion tools: One of the fastest ways you can find hundreds of related keywords is to use online lexical or thesaurus tools.
Creating a large initial keyword list that includes a large number of synonyms and acronyms is essential to effective keyword research. Discovering related phrases that are not simply stemming from the original keyword term is a cornerstone of semantic latent indexing . Semantic indexing can be described as the grouping of related documents based on not only direct relationship between words, but the meaning of the words as well.
Some of the search engines provide a related search command list in their search results. Try Clusty by entering a search command and take a look at the "clusters" side bar. You can get dozens of ideas from the keyword clusters by playing with different combination of keywords. You can also visit Technorati a well known blog aggregator and social media tagging site to help unlocked your brain and generate new keywords. Enter a search term and observe the "Related tags" section directly under the search results.
Visitor statistic reports: These can be generated from web server log files or from script based visitor statistic programs. This can help you uncover new keywords for your website by discovering what the visitors are typing into the search engines to find your websites. In some cases, you'll find keywords you didn't expect to come up for in the search results. You should further research those keywords and uncover new keyword niches.
Site search engines: This can be a great source of new keywords and a potential data mining source. As well as further analysis of the average number of keywords, keyword length and other important keyword metrics.
Top ranking competitors: These websites are already well optimized and contain keyword rich web pages. Why not leverage their efforts and harvest the best keywords for your own website? With the help of the SEO Studio keyword analyzer you can extract hundreds of keywords from their META keywords and HTML page content in seconds.
A few examples of good keyword selection practices
Selecting the best keyword takes experience and a little know how, but it's always helpful to see how the pros do it, so here are a few basic steps for keyword selection.
Using your favorite keyword research tool Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or the Keywords Analyzer, type in the main keyword phrase. Start with the broadest possible search terms, this way there is less chance of missing keywords that might otherwise be overlooked.
Look for 2-4 word key phrases that have at least a daily search volume of 200 or more. Since the top 3 sites will receive 60 of all searches, it follows you can expect at least 120 or more unique visitors for those keywords phrases. In some cases, you may want to lower the minimum search volume threshold to as low as 50 if the search term is well targeted for your business.
At this point you should have at least 20-30 really good secondary keywords in your basket.
Hopefully most of the keywords you have selected will have little competition. Some of the keyword tools we have recommended will also tell you the amount of competition for each keyword, but you can also verify these numbers manually by typing the search terms into the search engines with quotes.
It's very important that you use quotes around the keywords to let the engines know you are looking for an exact match. The rule of thumb we use to assess keyword competitiveness is around "100,000" websites. Anything above a hundred thousand results is fairly competitive and requires a fair amount of optimization and link building.
