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This will not be my last post on blog promotion tips, that’s for sure. There are so many facets to successful blog promotion that it’s impossible to even scratch the surface in a single post. Afterall, there are more than 150 million public blogs on the internet. It takes more than luck to get your website or blog into the hearts and minds of the people you hope will buy from you, donate to you or otherwise care that you exist.

Blogging is one of the most effective ways to establish thought leadership. But the number of blogs and bloggers will only increase not decrease, so here are some blog promotion tips to help you rise to the top in your chosen field.

The Holy Grail for any blog is to land at the top of the first page for a search in google around your chosen keyword(s). In fact, most people don’t look beyond the first few selections on the first page of Google, let alone check out page 2 and beyond, so figuring out how to get to the top of the first page for important phrases and words – known as keywords – is, well, key.

If you watched my interview with Ric Dragon, you heard Ric talk about something that trumps all other blog promotion tips out there: know what it is that your audience is looking for.

When you need information on something, what’s the first thing you do? If you’re like most people, you do a search on Google. Since that’s where your audience is, you need to be there too. Search is very much end-user driven. One of the biggest mistakes people make is writing about things that just don’t matter to the people they need to reach. Most blog promotion tips start with this: go where your audience is, not where you wish they were.

You may have heard the term Search Engine Optomization or SEO. Essentially, SEO helps you connect with people who are looking for your services, products or ideas by providing content on your website that will have you return high up in people’s searches. To do that, you have to seed your website with content and copy that includes the keywords they search for when they are looking for something that relates to your product or service.

A keyword is not particularly well named because it sounds like one word, when in fact, more often than not it is a phrase. A keyword is just whatever word or series of words or phrases that people put into Google to find what they’re looking for.

But keywords are a bit of a double edged sword. Yes, you want keywords that people are searching for, but you don’t want to use keywords that lots of other competing, probably bigger sites are already using because you won’t break through on them.

I’ll be covering that in greater depth later on, but for now, as Ric Dragon mentioned, you can use the free Google Adwords Tool to put in phrases that you think people might be looking for, and then see how many people are actually looking for it.

When you get to the page, you’re going to look for this near the top:

 

Keyword area of google adwords landing page

 

In here, you can either put in your website address or a category (for example, food) that you would like the tool to return keyword suggestions for, or, you can start by suggesting a keyword. The last option is probably your best.

To the left of the box pictured above, you will see a box that looks like this:

 

Google Adwords Keyword Tool - option to determine how closely the phrase should match.

 

This box lets you determine how focused the returns will be. The options are “broad” “exact” or “phrase.” If you go with broad, you will get more returns, but many of those people actually won’t be looking specifically for the keyword you’re searching. That keyword will just be part of the phrase they are using.

If you’re simply looking for inspiration, you might want to choose broad, but when you are looking to actually determine what keywords to bet the farm on, you want to use “exact” or “phrase.” That way, you know you will get a better idea of who is really searching using those keywords and not just inheriting those keywords from a less than satisfying search effort.

When you do see your search results, they will show up in a box below with four columns:

  • Keyword
  • Competition
  • Global Monthly Searches
  • Local Monthly Searches

So what does all that mean and how does it help you?

Keyword:

Here is where alternatives to your keywords will return. You may get dozens or even hundreds of keywords showing up here, depending on how broad the keyword was that you originally searched and how popular the topic. Out of these you hope to find a keyword that people are searching for but without a lot of competition in terms of websites that have content that pull people in looking for that particular topic. Which brings me to…

Competition:

This tells you how many other sites will return for the alternative keyword listed on the same line in the keyword column beside it. The lower the competition number is, the better. While your blog is gaining traction, you might want to concentrate your efforts on keywords with few than 100,000 competitors, because this will give you a fighting chance of cutting through.

Global Monthly Searches:

This tells you how many people are searching the keyword on the same line as this number. This number may be more important or less important to you than the Local Monthly Searches, depending on your business. If you have an Internet based business that isn’t specific to any particular geographic area, this may be your most important number.

Local Monthly Searches

If you have a location based business, let’s say a restaurant, this number may be way more important to you than the Global Monthly Searches. Local Monthly Searches will let you focus your search to a particular country, which you can change near the top of your screen. If location is important to you, you might want to further refine your keyword to reflect your area or even neighbourhood.

The keywords you choose to seed in your content on your site need to be keywords that people are actually using in their searches (what you will determine by looking at the Global and/or Local Monthly Searches) but not be so popular that there are tons and tons of websites trying to get their attention.

That’s where you walk the tightrope, and the best strategy for emerging bloggers is to target what’s known as the Long Tail keywords – keywords that aren’t as popular, maybe even one that a handful of people use each day. But enough different pieces of content, each one pulling in a handful of visitors today can add up quickly, making that your best way to drive traffic to your site.

One final thought on keywords: each page or piece of content should have its own main keyword. Don’t create every blog post capitalizing on the same keyword and don’t stuff every keyword you want to target into one page or post. Take the longview on keywords, and they will start to work for you.

I’ve shown you the free Google AdWord Keyword Tool, I personally use a moderately priced paid service called Market Samurai. It accesses the information from the Google Keyword Tool but digs a bit deeper and lets me take a keyword I like, select it, and drill down easily on that keyword.

I have used the service very happily now for more than a year, so much so that I recently became an affiliate, which means I receive a fee from Market Samurai which is triggered when anyone  buys Market Samurai using this link but you might want to read more about Market Samurai here first. I will only ever recommend products that I have used, tested and believe in, so I believe in Market Samurai. That said, however, you might be perfectly happy with the free Google AdWords Keyword Tool.

In addition to Market Samurai, there are other paid services, but I haven’t tried them so I can’t vouch for them. Like Market Samurai, they aim to make the Google Search process a bit easier and more streamlined.

But back to the matter at hand. Once you have all this research, now what?

Armed with this research, you will create content that you know people are looking for. It will help you determine what content to put on your site, including copy, sales material and blog post content.  This is not a fast process. But it is necessary, and the time to do it is before you write a post, or better yet, even before you create your website.

If there is some key thing you want to be known for above all else, keep drilling down until you find the perfect keyword. You might even consider buying the website domain name and building your site around it, if it has good enough traffic returns and it is available, but more on that in a future offering.

And now that you have something of an understanding about keywords and how to source them, down the line I’ll look at how you can use them to have any press releases you issue help drive additional traffic to your website whether media pick up the story or not.

One final word about Google searches. Some SEO experts have been serving Kool-aid for years and a lot of people have been drinking it. Just getting people to your website is only a part of the battle. What you get them to do while they are there is key if you are an online business. And if you are a location based business, matching the online promise with the real world experience is at the heart of it all, but where many businesses fail.

But we’ll talk about that a lot more as we go.

I do hope this first in a series of blog promotion tips posts has been helpful. Let me know how it goes, will you?  This post came out of our online survey. If you have questions of your own that you think will be of interest to others, you can take the survey and ask them there or you can like my Facebook page and leave me a question there too. If it’s a topic that will be helpful to others too, I’ll answer it in a future article.

In the meantime, Ric Dragon’s recent book Dragon Search Manual of Online Marketing is available on Amazon. It’s a fast read and filled with all kinds of helpful advice.

 

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Every time I post or as the mood moves me, I’ll explain some industry specific terminology. This page will be then, as they say, organic and ever evolving. Come back often. Bring your friends…

B-roll

B-roll is the video that you supply or that a news team gathers that runs behind the intro that an anchor makes to a story or as the visual when a reporter or anchor is narrating overtop. B-roll does not include interviews.

B2B

sometimes written as b2b and less frequently as BtoB and btob, is simply short for business to business. A b2b company is more interested in selling its goods or services to another business entity. Conversely, a b2c enterprise is more interested in selling its services or products to consumers. b2c stands for “business to consumers.”

Beat

Some journalists specialize in a particular subject or area, the way a doctor or a lawyer does. They take on a specific area of interest or even geography and get to know it very, very well. When they do, they are known as covering a “beat.” Its origins supposedly come from the language of policing, as when a police officer walks a beat – his or her usual area of patrol.

Branded Journalism

It’s a relatively new concept, so if you’re asking “hey, just what is brand journalism,” you’re not alone.

Brand journalism essentially embeds a journalist (in my view, a former journalist) within a company to help the company tell better stories and create content that adds value to the reader, viewer or listener.

The idea is to create content that meaningfully engages the audience in ways that don’t leave them feeling like someone is trying to sell them something. It is a different kind of content from that which is in a press release, but it is a type of PR content that PR and marketing practitioners manage or create.

A company will hire hire a journalist who is not affiliated with any one news outlet to create the content, relying on their skills to tell more engaging stories and create multi-media content. PR departments get journalism quality stories that look and feel like real journalism.

But they aren’t journalism. And they aren’t because the journalist is on the company’s payroll, which, removes any possibility of any real sense of objectivity.

That’s not to say they aren’t bringing a great many of their journalistic skills to bear. That isn’t to say they aren’t great journalists, maybe even brilliant journalists, but in this role, they are not journalists. They have transitioned to to a new career in PR and marketing.

They are performing a paid service to help certain messages about a brand to resonate within target audiences.That’s not a journalism.

Many will disagree with me, especially those within the PR community who are promoting issues and products that get push back. Hiring a journalist to create their content gives it the aura of a third party endorsement. But it’s in appearance only, and it’s spin, since the creator of the content is on the company’s payroll.

What’s the difference?

Call up a journalist to ask for a correction because he didn’t write the story according to the press release, and there’s a mighty fine chance your story will get killed.

Branded content, I can buy. But not journalism.

Some proponents argue that Brand Journalism is “honest brand storytelling that invites audiences to participate.” Others say it is “honest, informative and engaging.”

The latter describes what PR should have always been. And the first is what it should increasingly be aspiring to in the era in which we live.

Bottom Up vs. Top Down:

When you are trying to get your message out to the world, there are essentially two ways of doing it: Top Down and Bottom Up. Until the advent of Social Media, it was widely considered that Top Down, or via the media, was the way to go because it was the fastest way of reaching a lot of people.

In many cases, it often is. Increasingly however grassroots organizations and others are finding that they are able to reach the people they need through email marketing and social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Linked In, and through other sharing platforms like YouTube and Pinterist.

When those activities reach enough people or touch some kind of nerve or create an effective rallying cry or platform, the mainstream media come to the organization to cover the story instead of the organization or movement going to them. That’s what’s know as Bottom Up.

Hashtags

A hashtag looks like # and is used on Twitter to identify your tweet as part of a particular conversation. When Charlie Sheen was so famously at the height of his bad boy behaviour, he coined the term WINNING to describe his take on events. #Winning took on a life of its own on Twitter, although it usually indicated that the tweet had something of a joke in it, and often one at the expense of someone who seems somewhat divorced from reality.

Hashtags are often used during conferences and during Twitter chats (see definition) for two reasons:1. To make everything said in one conversation identified with a hashtag searchable and 2. To create a bit of buzz around a particular idea or event.

There is a site called Hashtag.org which lists the often used hashtags for more commonly used phrases, like “customer service” or #custserve in the Twittersphere.

Endorsement Deal

More often than not when you see a celebrity wearing a particular brand or speaking on its behalf, they have signed what’s known as an endorsement deal. It means they lend their celebrity to a product giving it buzz, sex appeal, credibility or some other value that comes from being associated with them. Endorsement deals can come at a cost of millions of dollars or be much more modestly priced, depending on the deal. Even a smaller celebrity who appeals to a particularly important audience can command six figures and a multi-year deal.

Of course, there are downsides to endorsement deals as became apparent when Tiger Woods’ personal life upstaged anything he was doing on the golf course. Most endorsement deals have morals clauses now that allow for contract cancelations if the celebrity makes any one of a number of transgressions.

Infographics:

I’m sure you’ve seen them but you may not be familiar with the word and may be asking yourself “what is an infographic?” An infographic is a graphic dipiction (picture) of facts and figures, meant to make stats and bits of research more digestable. You can expect to see many more of them over the coming while.

Why?

They make it easier for us to scan information, and online, our brains are now trained to scan not read. Pictures are increasingly important on the web as we try and make as much understandable in increasingly shorter periods of times. And you know what they say about a picture being worth a thousand words.

Pinterest, the social sharing site which curates pictures users pin to virtual boards, is tapping into our growing love affair with pictures, and is growing fast. It even has an app called Piktochart that lets you build your own from their templates.

Here is an example of an infochart.

Key Messages:

If you’ve ever worked with a PR pro, you may have left shaking your head a few times and asking questions like “just what are key messages anyway?” Key Messages are what you want your target audience to come away knowing or remembering about your brand through any and all of your outreach and PR activities. They are crafted carefully to help you influence the people who can best help you achieve your business goals.

You may have different key messages for different target audiences.

Keywords

People use the phrase “keywords” to describe the words that people punch into search engines (usually Google) to find the information they are looking for. Ric Dragon from Dragon Search prefers the term “key phrases,” which is actually more accurate since most people don’t type in just one word, but usually a phrase. Because there is so much content on the internet, trying to optimize your site for any one word is increasingly difficult and more often than not impossible. Effective keywords (or as Ric would call them, Keyphrases) are usually at least a few words long – sometimes several words long. Most emerging bloggers will have more success with what’s known as LongTail keywords, keywords that won’t pull as many searchers but will still pull a core group specifically looking for information you can give them and put you on the first page of Google for a lesser searched term. Enough longtail searchers will ultimately add up to a more robust website.

Microblogging:

What is microblogging? Microblogging is simply any writing or updating one does using social media sites that allow a limitted number of characters per post, including Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Pitch

Journalists don’t have a lot of time to make decisions on story ideas, so PR people often send them a “pitch.” Traditionally, it’s no more than a couple of paragraphs and contains everything that makes the potential story compelling. Better pitches inlcude a strong hook and additional information like links to more information, video, sound bites, art, graphics etc. You might consider pasting your media release or media advisory below it or attaching it (be careful of attachments though – some news outlets block them and you’ll end up bounced or in the spam filter) or you can wait and send that as a follow up if they are interested. Make sure you have your contact information in your pitch as well.

Slideshare

Slideshare is a site dedicated to letting people share slides. Often, those slides have been created in Powerpoint or Keynote, however, Slideshare has other handy uses. For example, you may want to put a video on your Linkedin page. You actually can’t do that right through the application, but you can drop in one slide housed on slideshare that has your video as the content of that one slide. To do that, you must have a paid Slideshare account.

Target Audience

What is a target audience? Essentially, your target audience are the people you need to reach or influence with a particular message. They may be grouped together by age, or by sex, where they live, by what they do, and a variety of other criteria in various combinations or alone.

Your target audience is essential to you achieving your business goals. Often, they are the people you need to buy your product or services or donate or support your cause.

Top Down vs. Bottom Up

When you are trying to get your message out to the world, there are essentially two ways of doing it: Top Down and Bottom Up. Until the advent of Social Media, it was widely considered that Top Down, or via the media, was the way to go because it was the fastest way of reaching a lot of people.

In many cases, it often is. Increasingly however grassroots organizations and others are finding that they are able to reach the people they need through email marketing and social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Linked In, and through other sharing platforms like YouTube and Pinterist.

When those activities reach enough people or touch some kind of nerve or create an effective rallying cry or platform, the mainstream media come to the organization to cover the story instead of the organization or movement going to them. That’s what’s know as Bottom Up.

Twitter chats

By nature, people love to build communities. Twitter is no exception. So when likeminded people gather on Twitter to discuss things they care about, it’s not unusual for them to say “hey, we should explore this more indepth at a particular day and time each week and see who else is interested.” That, in a nutshell, is what Twitter chats are: groups of people gathering at the same time and day each week to talk about something that matters to them collectively. Their conversations are no more private than any ordinary time on Twitter but the hashtag (#) is a way of distinguishing all tweets around a particular chat and making the content of that chat searchable after the fact.

Twittersphere

The universe that is Twitter.

YouTube

It’s hard to believe that YouTube has only been around since 2005. For a long time, it was lumped in with social media but, as Ric Dragon talks about, it’s really more of a search engine than any kind of community building platform, except that it allows comments. But what a search engine it is. It is the 2nd most searched engine in the world eclipsed only by Google. Because of that, even organizations that would prefer a more polished and professional look of another video service like Vimeo feel it’s important to have a YouTube channel. Brands should build out their YouTube channels and make sure that all of their videos are tagged and optimized with keywords.

The average user can upload videos up to fifteen minutes in length, although preferred users in good standing can upload longer videos. Supported formats include .AVI, .MKV, .MOV, .MP4, DivX, .FLV, and .ogg and .ogv which include video formats like MPEG-4, MPEG, VOB, and .WMV. YouTube also supports 3GP, meaning videos can be uploaded from mobile phones.

YouTube videos are generally easy to embed on other sites and blogs. YouTube claims that 4 billion videos are streamed on its site daily and that 60 hours of content gets uploaded every minute.

YouTube has a rather insipid FAQ that really only lists the most basic of information and in generalities.

Video News Release

Video News Releases are usually a news story created by an organization. In the US, they are commonly released to news stations and sometimes broadcast as news stories, as if they had been shot by the news organization. In Canada, that rarely happens and, when it does, the news organization usually identifies that the piece was produced by the organization and not the news outlet.

Video News Releases can be useful in getting media because they can show an outlet how a story could run and also, parts of it might be useful as b-roll or for use in related stories. Better video news releases are not overly promotional and actually have more of a neutral news feel, but many of them are easily identified because they feel commercial and more promotional than newsy.

 

 

 

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