Make Money Blogging

Today I would like to review an incredible piece of software that is a must have for all professional or aspiring professional internet marketers. It is called Domain Dashboard and what a time saver! I love software that saves me time because as you know there is only so much time in a day.

Looking at your stats and interpreting the information is a vital part of your ongoing business strategy. You have to know where your site or sites are ranking and for which terms. You want to be informed of your page rank and any changes that take place. We want to know how many visitors we’ve had and how many hits we’ve had. We want to know how many pages have been visited and if the pages are indexed in the first place.

There’s a lot of information in our stats that can help us adjust our business plans accordingly. In short, we want to know which sites need our attention more than others. So I would imagine if you are reading this up until now then you are probably saying to yourself, “Yeah, that all makes sense but that’s what I have Google analytics for…and it’s free.”

Well I used to use Google analytics as well and it is a very good free tool for sure. But the problem is that when you have many domains it is extremely time consuming (but not unpleasant mind you) to go to each account and check the stats. I have over 300 sites and thousands of pages to keep track of. That’s why I have Domain Dashboard.

Check this out: with Domain Dashboard you can check all your stats, manage all of your login details and keep track of your keyword rankings for all of your sites in one place. You can also access your cpanel’s at all of your hosting accounts so you never have to go bouncing around from one to the other again. Domain Dashboard allows me to free up valuable time to work on more important things like building links etc…

Domain Dashboard shows you the total domains, total pages indexed, total domains indexed, total domains with traffic, top 10 domains receiving unique visitors and the top ten most recent domains indexed. In the statistics panel it will also show you spider activity, bandwidth and robot activity.

It is really easy to set up and get this software running that even a total newbie can do it. You just enter your web host manager login, password, and ip address, create a nickname for your account and that’s it. Domain Dashboard will go a retrieve all of your information. It took me 5 minutes to download, install and get my info together and Domain Dashboard has been working for me ever since.

This is a must have tool for serious internet entrepreneurs with multiple websites and domains. This is not a tool for someone who has yet to make money online. If you are in the “I haven’t made any real money yet” category then this is probably not for you. You would be better off purchasing other software first like BANS, Seo Elite, Keyword Elite and perhaps after that some link building software such as Bookmarking Demon, Article Submitter Platinum (it auto submits your articles to hundreds of directories) and Fast Blog Finder.

Once you have say, more than 30 sites or so you may want to consider picking up Domain Dashboard. If you have closer to 80 or 100 sites then you absolutely need this. You want to be working on your business not in your business right?

So again I recommend a true time saver and time is money. When I think of all the time this software saves me I just can’t help but whole heartedly recommend this little gem.

Tags: make money blogging software, software reviews
Posted in Internet Marketing Software Reviews, Uncategorized| 2 Comments »

I would like to review an awesome piece of software called BANS. It stands for Build a Niche Store. BANS is a script that will build an ebay store in a matter of minutes. This is really addicting if a little bit tedious at the same time.

A family member was talking to me at the last family gathering about making money online. He is very enthusiastic and about to really jump in and get dirty! The problem is he, like all of us at one time, has no clue what so ever about how to make money online. Zero. Anyhow, he was asking me for advice incessantly. “What should I do first?” he kept asking me. I told him that there are lots of ways to make money online and some are more complicated than others.

After some reflection I told him to go out and buy BANS first and foremost. I explained to him that BANS is a no brainer and even if you have are really terrible at internet marketing, if you build enough BANS sites you will make money. He seemed to like that idea and he is now on his way to creating a BANS empire.

BANS is something I recommend for everybody but especially for noobys. It is just so simple and uncomplicated and really hard to mess up. Let me explain a little bit about how it all works.

First of all this is an Ebay partner thing. You need to sign up as an Ebay affiliate. It’s all in the BANS user manual which by the way is THE BEST user manual I have ever seen! So what you are actually doing is becoming an Ebay affiliate and creating a store to sell highly targeted items. It works like a charm.

If you plan to create a whole lot of BANS site, which is what I recommend, then you will want to sign up at hostgator for a reseller account. Then, once you have your reseller account and you’ve signed up at Ebay you are ready to start.

You need to buy a domain to set up BANS on. Do not use a dot info domain!! Google has changed its algorithm as of about April 2008 and all of my dot info BANS sites got de indexed! Not all of them actually but the vast majority of them did. My dot coms are perfectly fine. So NO DOT INFO’S.

Once you have your new domain and you’ve transferred it to your reseller account you simply upload the BANS software to the appropriate folder and follow the simple directions. It takes me about 10 minutes to set up a three page site/store. Do you see the potential here?

I actually upload BANS to the ’skel’ file in my main domain at my reseller account. This saves time on future installations as now, every domain that I transfer to my reseller account will automatically have bans uploaded to it. So taking this into consideration I can actually set up an entire BANS site in 4 minutes flat! Once you get the hang of it you can put up dozens of sites in a single day. It is tedious but profitable.

I keep my BANS sites small and extremely targeted. The method I recommend is based on volume and trickle traffic. I target very low competition keywords that get maybe just a few searches per day. for instance I had one site that featured as the main keyword “Fender Stratocaster Electric Guitar 1972 Used Free Delivery.” It’s true, I found this keyword while doing my keyword research and it is actually something that people search for…when they are ready to buy!

So with keywords like that it’s no wonder that I take position one in many cases. I don’t get much traffic to my sites but the traffic I get converts well and that is all that matters to me. I aim to make about a dollar a day from each of my BANS sites. Since they are so easy to set up those dollars start adding up.

You get a commission from each sale but what’s even better is that if someone signs up for a new Ebay account, you make $25! Can this be exploited? It sure can but I will save that for another post. I just want you to realize how doable this is. Surely you can average a buck a day from one site right? I don’t think that that is wanting too much. The challenge is scaling it up and creating a couple hundred sites but that’s what BANS is supposed to do.

Tags: make money blogging software, software reviews
Posted in Internet Marketing Software Reviews, Uncategorized| No Comments »

Article Submitter Plantinum by Brad Callen is the topic for todays review. I use quite a few of Brads tools for one reason and one reason only: they work wonderfully! He’s got the market cornered but for good reasons. Article Submitter Platinum is super cool and is a must have in my book if article marketing is part of your overall link building strategy.

First I would like to say a few words about article marketing in general before I get on to the actual review. Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to build links hands down. For those who don’t know how or why article marketing is so effective let me briefly explain how it works.

When you submit an article to an article directory you are allow to place two and sometimes three links in the resource box. The resource box is where you can write a little something about yourself or your website and leave a few links. I always leave three links in the resource box even if some of my articles get denied because most of them are approved. Starting to get the idea? Let’s put some numbers to it and say that submit your articles to all the directories you can and one hundred of them get approved. Each article has three links in the resource box so that totals 300 links.

Don’t expect your links to show up quickly because they don’t. Your articles are buried deep in the article directory and it will take a while before the search engines count them all. So expect to see the results of your article submissions show up slowly over time. I am experimenting with the idea of gathering all the urls from the article directories where my articles are kept and pinging them to alert the search engines. I am just experimenting but so far this technique seems to help get more of those submitted articles indexed quicker. More testing is needed in order to refine the process and develop a script to do it automatically.

Article Submitter Platinum has about 374 article directories that you can submit to and, like the directory submitter, it is a semi automatic process…sort of.

You simply enter in your article and fill in the blanks. Then you can navigate from the top of the list to the bottom and submit your article to each and every site on the list. Article Submitter Platinum will load your information at each new article directory saving valuable time.

But here’s the kicker. Article Submitter Platinum has an ‘auto submit’ feature that allows you to submit to hundreds (but not all) of the directories! You just click ’submit’ and off it goes. Article submitter platinum will enter all the captchas and even pick the categories. Too bad directory submitters can’t do what this article submitter does. This is truly automatic but it doesn’t submit to all of the directories, only about half 200 of them or so.

I have no complaints about this software except for the fact that sometime it doesn’t pull up the right category. Unfortunately I don’t recommend using this software if you are submitting articles for clients for that very reason. But for myself this is what I use. I actually used to manually go to about 33 article directories and slow submit to them. How inefficient! Now I take ten minutes, write an article and submit. Done, finished.

The great thing about article marketing is that webmasters who are looking for free articles will download your articles from these directories and put them on their sites. They are supposed to keep your links in the resource box but some don’t. None the less this is the viral aspect of article marketing and it is quite effective. I have a number of articles that were downloaded 500 times or more over the years and the links just keep coming.

If you don’t have Article Submitter Platinum then I suggest you get it as it is a great time saver and it generates links like crazy.

Tags: make money blogging software, software review
Posted in Internet Marketing Software Reviews, Uncategorized| 1 Comment »

I use four tools in my link building method and each tool helps me get links from a different source or platform thus providing me with a healthy variety of links. The greater the variety the more natural it looks. So on to my review of Directory submitter Gold by Brad Callen.

I have tried a number of directory submitters over the years and this one by Brad Callen is probably the best in my opinion. First of all when discussing directory submitters, those of us who have some experience with this type of software know what the main problem can be. The most irritating problem of all is that the directories change status all the time.

Directories that used to be free are now free only with a reciprocal link or, sometimes they are not free at all anymore. Keeping the database up to date is the biggest issue in my book and I have to say that I have been a bit disappointed with every directory submitter I have ever tried including this one. Having said that I should also add that Brad does in fact try to keep updating the list from time to time. Overall I am satisfied with this aspect of Directory Submitter Gold by Brad Callen.

Other than that I absolutely love this software! It make the directory submission process semi automatic. You first need to load your information and just fill in the blanks. Directory Submitter Gold will ask you for your name, email, website title, url and so forth for each campaign. It will then load this information each time you navigate to a new directory saving you boat loads of time.
You still need to wade your way through the categories at the directories and choose the most relevant one so it isn’t completely automatic unfortunately, but none of them are.

The software’s interface is divided into columns showing you the name, type of directory, whether it is paid or free, the page rank, alexa rank, date last submitted, anchor text used and your description. Again I will remind you that to be completely honest the page rank information is only partially accurate and needs updating a little more often that Brad Callen actually updates it.

But as usual I don’t like to fuss too much over details. The point behind directory submissions is to generate anchored links. By far and large, directory submissions result in nice clean one way do follow links.

Directory links show up very slowly over time so it looks completely natural. In light of that I usually submit my new sites to a few hundred directories as soon as possible. I may even submit to more than that depending on how many links I need to rank competitively in a particular niche. One thing you should be aware of if you haven’t done directory submissions before is that not all of your submission will be approved. The directories can deny your site inclusion for any reason they want. They could dislike your site or find it to be unsuitable in their directory, or they could just be backed up and don’t want any new submissions.

Back to the software. Another important feature that Directory Submitter Gold offers is the ability to enter in multiple titles, keywords and descriptions for each campaign. What ever you enter in for a title will actually be used as your anchor text when your links shows up. So by varying the titles you actually vary the anchor texts. This is important if you want to avoid ‘Google Bombing.’

So the bottom line is that I do recommend Directory Submitter Gold by Brad Callen and I do feel it is the best choice among the directory submitters currently being offered. I do wish that Brad would clean up the list a little more often and update the page rank information but all in all those things do not detract from the overall usefulness of this software.

I still give it two thumbs up.

Tags: make money blogging software, software reviews
Posted in Internet Marketing Software Reviews, Uncategorized| No Comments »

I would like to review one of my favorite and most frequently used internet marketing tools. Bookmarking Demon in essence is a terrific time saver. That is the point when using tools anyways right? A good tool should help automate repetitive tasks so as to free up you time for more important things. Bookmarking Demon does just that. To get some ideas on how Bookmarking demon would fit into an overall promotional plan check out my ten part series on how to make money blogging.

Created by Edwin Soft, Bookmarking Demon allows you to semi automatically sign up and register at each of the top 20 social bookmarking sites. These are sites like Faves, Getboo, Simpy and 17 others. All you have to do is enter the captcha when prompted and Bookmarking Demon will do the rest.

The idea behind Bookmarking Demon is to create links for your sites. Some people say the get tons of traffic with Bookmarking Demon but that hasn’t been the case in my experience. I basically use Bookmarking Demon to generate some anchored links and to help get new sites and pages indexed.

Some of the major social bookmarking sites are no follow and some are do follow but I don’t make too much of a fuss about that. A link is a link and don’t forget that Yahoo and MSN don’t care about do follow and no follow. Not only that but sometimes you may see in your Google webmaster tools that some of the links showing are supposed to be no follow. So it seems to me that sometimes Google follows the no follow links.

The point is that when you bookmark your site at these high traffic and often crawled sites, the search engines are more likely to find your links and follow them to your blog or site. This is how Bookmarking Demon can help you get your sites indexed. So as far as indexing goes Bookmarking Demon has been a great help for me.

There are some of these top social bookmarking sites that are in fact do follow. This is great because we can stack up those anchored links in a hurry and improve our pages rankings.

Bookmarking Demon will also search for scuttle sites on the web and register at those too. Scuttle sites are created by a script called ‘Scuttle.’ They are basically unknown bookmarking sites and there are hundreds if not thousands of them scattered across the web. A lot of these scuttle sites don’t even have an admin panel so guess what we can do with Bookmarking Demon? We can link like crazy! True they are not the highest quality links but anchored links all count a least a little bit.

As far as ease of use goes I think Bookmarking Demon is a piece of cake to use. I use it in a very simple way and don’t make use of all the features. For instance there is a proxy server for those of you who abuse BMD and get your IP’s banned at the social bookmarking sites. I haven’t been banned so I don’t use that but lots of new users seem a little overwhelmed when faced with all the options.

Again, I keep it simple. I simply sign up and register at the top social bookmarking sites. Once that’s done I go to the ‘Bookmark URL’ tab and enter my url’s. Bookmarking Demon will prompt you for a title name and keywords as well as a short description for each url you submit.

Then I click ‘bookmark’ and that’s it. It bookmarks all my urls! I could do this by hand and so could you, but in an effort to save lots of time I have no problem using this excellent software.

One thing potential buyers should be aware of is that Edwin is in the process of a major upgrade as of the time of this writing (July 16, 2008) and will soon be announcing Bookmarking Demon 4. It will be more expensive than the previous versions but if you purchase before the update you will be grandfathered in and thus avoid paying the ‘New Price.’

I highly recommend Bookmarking Demon as it saves time, generates one way links and helps to get your sites indexed more quickly.

Tags: make money blogging software, social bookmarking software, software reviews
Posted in Internet Marketing Software Reviews| No Comments »

I have been using Fast Blog Finder to find high page rank blog posts to leave a comment on thus gaining valuable back links. There are really four basic ways (and many more creative but not so basic ways) to get links, which I talked about in the make money blogging series. The four basic and very popular methods are leaving comments on blogs, submitting your website to directories, article marketing and social bookmarking.

From these four ways to get links to your site I would have to say that commenting on blogs will get you the least amount of links. Having said that I would also like to add that I think there is no better way to score some real quality links. Almost all of your article submissions, directory submissions and social bookmarking tags will be gray bar links, meaning they are a page rank zero.

So blog commenting is a really practical way to grab some high page rank links from authority sites. Page rank isn’t everything but it is a factor in how Google ranks your site. It also reflects the authority of your site to some degree. We can all agree that a site with a page rank 8 is an authoritative site.

I used to use Blog Comment Demon by Edwin Soft but I switched to Fast Blog Finder for one particular reason. Fast Blog Finder parses the do follow from the no follow. I have checked and double checked just to make sure that it was accurate and indeed it was.

I would also say that Fast Blog Finder easily finds many more blogs than Comment Demon or the free program Real LInk Finder. Real Link Finder is a great free tool no doubt but it doesn’t really compare to Fast Blog Finder. I have lots of experience with both and Fast Blog Finder is my preferred tool for blog commenting nowadays.

With Fast Blog Finder you can refine your search for relevant blogs according to a variety of criteria. It will search for both do follow and no follow together or just do follow if you want. You just type in a broad search term related to your niche and press start. This software shows you the url of the blog post, the page rank of the domain, the page rank of the post page, the number of outbound links and whether the page is do follow or no follow.

Fast Blog Finder saves your results so you can go back later and do a comment run. I often get thousands of blogs in my results to comment on. There is just no way you can comment on that many blogs in one sitting so it’s great that it automatically saves your lists for you. You don’t have to save and store away any lists or anything. Nice and lazy!

The real key in knowing how to fully exploit this powerful tool is knowing how to search. Most people do exactly what I recommended above which was to enter a broad search term into Fast Blog Finder and let it bring in relevant results. That is just fine and dandy but you could get a little creative here and find some really high page rank pages to post on. I have found personally a ton of PR6 posts that are actually do follow and they had just a few comments on them.

I am not going to give away all my secrets but I will give you a tip. Think about what kind of pages get lots of trackbacks. It is already well known that pages that get lots of trackbacks end up with high PR. Can you think of any reasons why lots of folks would send a trackback to a post? Maybe someone was link baiting with a free download of some sort… Hmmm

Learn how to search for footprints. Footprints in this sense are phrases that are common to a certain type of blog or post. For instance “download free” is a footprint. This query will bring back results where there was a free download of some sort. If this was on a blog then there are sure to be some trackbacks. Do you see what I mean?

Bottom line is I highly recommend Fast Blog Finder as a one way link building tool. It is in my opinion the best program for blog commenting out there today. With a little creativity you should be able to score some awesome links in no time flat. In fact, I find this software addicting!

Tags: make money blogging software, software reviews
Posted in Internet Marketing Software Reviews, Uncategorized| No Comments »

SEO Elite is a tool that every serious internet marketer should have. This is a very popular tool and for good reasons too. The main function of this software is to help expedite the process of analyzing your competition. I already mentioned this software in my make money blogging series but I want to discuss some of it’s features and it’s intended purpose a bit more indepth.

Analyzing your competition is an absolute must. You should never just blindly create a site and try to start ranking for all kinds of keywords. This is an important step that I think a lot of inexperienced internet marketers don’t fully take advantage of.

Aside from helping you decide if a certain niche is worth pursuing, analyzing your competition is also a great way to learn about what it takes to rank number one particularly in the Google serps. The sites taking position one in Google must be doing something right in Google’s eyes and this is important for us to understand. These sites sitting at the top of the serps have done a tremendous amount of successful research and work to attain their elevated ranking.

We can just simply copy the seo strategy of the top sites and then go a bit beyond to take position one for ourselves. Think about it. Some ambitious webmaster or seo has put in countless hours finding places and ways to get links from all sorts of relevant sites. A lot of time goes into that. Yet all we have to do is analyze their on page and off page (back links that is) seo strategy and presto! We have a winning plan.

This is where SEO Elite comes in to play. With SEO Elite I can analyze both the on page and off page statistics of my top competitors. I can look at whether or not my competition is placing their keywords in the title and h1 tags. I can also look the keyword density of their content and if the keywords are in bold or h2 tags. This tells me a lot. For instance, right off the bat I know if my competitors know seo or not. If they have neglected to optimize their ‘easy to do’ on page factors then that is usually a good indication that their off page optimization is lacking as well.

It also gives you an idea as to whether or not you will have nagging long term competition or not. What I mean by that is sometimes, when you finally take position one away from your competitors they suddenly wake up and begin to try to out optimize you.

If however your top competition for a potential niche doesn’t even know how to optimize their on page factors then chances are they wont know how to fight back when you take position one from them. I like easy targets.

Next comes the critical off page optimization. This is basically about the back links. Did you ever wonder how many links it takes to get to the top of the serps? Well now you can know for sure. Just enter the url of the site you want to analyze into SEO Elite and I will show you ALL of your competitors back links. Not only that but it will show you what the anchor text being used in their back links. This is of huge importance. This will tell you how many links you need to take position one. Actually you will probably need about %30 more links than your top competitor.

SEO Elite will also give you the titles of the pages linking to your competitors. In this way you can get a feel for how relevant your competitors links are. Remember, links from relevant pages weigh more than links from non relevant pages. So say your top competitor has 100 links featuring the anchored keyword you want to rank for. Now let’s also say that these 100 links are mostly from non relevant pages. This is good news for you! This means that you could possible outrank your competitor with fewer links as long as your links are more relevant on the whole.

SEO Elite also provides the url of the page that is giving your competitor a link. For one thing if you discover a bunch of spammy links you can report them to Google as you approach the number one spot! Hey, it’s all part of the game. But perhaps more importantly you can find some great places to get links to your site.

I would say that one of the greatest benefits of using SEO Elite is being able to study some of the very creative methods that some webmasters use to achieve a top ranking. This can teach you a lot about how the search engines think. Once you analyze a hundred top ranking sites or so you will probably never read another ebook on how to rank in Google.

Personally, I’ve discovered many interesting strategies that I’ve not seen discussed anywhere online period…and I’m not about to discuss them either!

Brad Callen, the creator of SEO Elite takes pretty good care of his customers. My hard drive failed on me and I lost my software (I procrastinated backing up my files…bad, bad, bad!!). I email Brad and in no time flat I had another download link in my email with no bologna or anything. Great customer service all the way around in my experience.

I highly recommend SEO Elite to anyone who doesn’t have it yet is serious about making money online.

Tags: make money blogging software, software reviews
Posted in Internet Marketing Software Reviews, Uncategorized| No Comments »

I use Keyword Elite for all of my keyword research. This is an extremely powerful tool created by Brad Callen that is actually much more than just another keyword tool. This was created by an seo for an seo’s.

What Keyword Elite does and how to use it properly is of course two different things. Let me start with what it does and why I recommend it and then I’ll get into how I use Keyword Elite to begin a very important part of analysis called keyword research.

Keyword Elite will, like all other keyword tools, will create a great list of related keywords based upon the main and generally more broad keyword you enter in. This is called ‘project one.’ In fact, it takes a while but Keyword Elite will actually create a list of up to ten thousand related keywords. That’s quite a bit! It will grab keywords from meta tags and titles and even misspelled keywords. It will search Ask.com, Google suggestion tool, Yahoo, Freekeywords WT and keyword Discover if you have an account with them.

Once you have created a keyword list you can select a number of keywords to send to ‘project two.’ This is where Keyword Elite will analyze the cost per click information, number of results, number of searches the previous month, R/S ratio, KEI, and the number of Google campaigns. Not only do you get the number of Google campaigns but you can also see the website urls of the folks buying the ads. Needless to say that can be yet another resource to mine for effective keywords.

This is what I consider the meat of the software. With just this information alone you can make a much more informed decision regarding your keyword selection. You could do this all manually too but Keyword Elite is such a great time saver that I consider it a must have tool in every webmasters bag of tricks.

Another great function of Keyword Elite is the ability to analyze your competition. You can see the page rank of your competitors as well as a host of other statistics. For instance you can see if the keywords you are analyzing are being used in the title and header tags as well as the alt image tags and links. This is great because now you don’t have to go to each site one by one. You can get a complete overview all in one place at one time. Very convenient.

There are other valuable functions that Keyword Elite can perform but these are the ones I use most often.

I use Keyword Elite to generate a huge keyword list from which I select the most choice phrases. I then create a keyword list from each of these choice phrases and come up with even more keywords. Once I have a giant, massive keyword list I choose a few targeted phrases to send to project two where I will analyze the CPC, KEI and number of searches etc…

I only select the top buying phrases for further research but that doesn’t mean I just dump the rest of that massive list! I often use that leftover list to base my content and titles off of.

Now, in project I determine which keywords would be both profitable and easy to exploit. I look for keywords that have a high cost per click. I want ads on my site that pay well so CPC is important. I don’t want to do a lot of work only to find that I will get paid .02 per click. Once I find a decent paying keyword from among my top targeted list I then check out the KEI and number of searches.

KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index. It is basically a ratio between the number of searches and the number of results showing for that query. The higher the KEI the less competition. However, I use the KEI more as general guidance than the ultimate determining factor. I always analyze the back links of the competition to help make my final determination but the KEI points me in the right direction.

The bottom line is that Keyword Elite is much more than just another keyword research tool. It has many features that help you save lots of time in doing your keyword research. Everything from generating great keyword lists (check out those misspelled keywords!) to analyzing to competition in very sneaky ways.

This is just a brief overview of what Keyword Elite can do and is in no way meant to be a comprehensive review. That would simply take too long as this is an incredibly versatile tool. I highly recommend it. Using Keyword Elite in conjunction with SEO Elite is a real powerhouse combination. This gives you such an enormous advantage over your competitors who only use the free tools.

If you haven’t done so already check out my ten part series on how to make money blogging.

Tags: make money blogging software, software reviews
Posted in Internet Marketing Software Reviews| No Comments »

Keep a set of guidelines for your corporate blog. Visitors have strong expectations for each post they read, so you need strong, uncompromising expectations for each post you write.

1. Demand that each post you write REALLY be useful to your market. Think. Bring a new twist to an old subject. Connect 2 very different ideas and then write about how they relate to each other. The more unique and insightful you are, the more reason you give readers to keep coming back.

2. Respond to comments as soon as possible. Show appreciation for the comment and then get right to the point. Always take care to be polite, confident, and helpful in answering comments. This is a great opportunity for relationship-building. Don’t let communication with your market slide. If you don’t show up, they will stop showing up.

3. It may sound harsh, but some readers will actually downgrade you in their minds if they see bad grammar or misspellings. Edit & spell-check every time. Especially in a corporate blog, some readers consider minor errors to be a sign of incompetence. Your blog needs to be darned close to perfect in spelling and grammar.

4. Readers will email you with questions. You will hear some questions over and over. Write a great answer once, then use that same answer every time. Save your own time. Also, as you get an idea which questions many people are going to have, you can create a corporate blog FAQ page to feature the most common questions.

5. Crack the whip on yourself. Set up a feed reader that churns out a steady stream of fresh ideas from other bloggers every day. Set a writing schedule and stick that forces you to be cranking out new, unique, valuable material every day. Maybe it will help to imagine a bad, bad, evil-eyed boss standing over you.

Your corporate blog readers have high expectations. It’s important that you come through for them.

Tags: comments, corporate blog, FAQ, feed reader
Posted in Corporate Blogging| No Comments »

Who reads your corporate blog?

• Customers
• Prospects
• Vendors
• Employees
• Bosses

1. Look at your stats. What urls is your corporate blog traffic coming from? Take a look at those urls. Now … who exactly is reading your blog?

2. Keep a constantly-updated list of who reads your blog (by url), and check out their websites. Find THEIR blogs. Look for posts that would be really useful to your readers. Now … in your blog, link to THEIR post. Talk about the value of the information. Tell what you learned from it. Do a review. Write about it in your blog.

3. They will find out. They will notice when they start getting traffic from your blog. Chances are, they will pay more attention to you and will write about you. It can be the start of a great relationship … and when you write a really hot column after you’ve featured several other bloggers in your posts, it could be the start of a viral explosion for you.

4. Include a button on your post to “Email a friend.” The easier you make it for people to share your content, the more they will do it, when they really like your content.

5. Moderate other blogs and forums. What questions are asked? What are the hottest subjects in YOUR market? Compile some of your blog posts together into an ebook targetting that topic. (Be sure to put your url at the bottom of each page & on the cover.) Come up with a title that would have strong appeal for the audience of the other bloggers who connect to you. It’s worth the effort to spend time choosing a really hot title. Publicize the ebook on your blog, and email your contact list to offer the free ebook to their readers.

6. What could you put in a video that would be funny and/or controversial and relevant to your market? Humor or controversy give your video the chance to get passed around a lot.

These ideas are not difficult or costly or time-consuming to implement. A consistent program of 1-6 above will get your corporate blog viral exposure over time.

Tags: controversial, corporate blog, traffic, viral
Posted in Corporate Blogging| No Comments » « Previous Entries