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Book details
  • Genre:BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
  • SubGenre:Marketing / General
  • Language:English
  • Pages:300
  • eBook ISBN:9780980130720

MASTERING BLOG MARKETING

HOW TO LAUNCH YOUR WEBSITE TO THE TOP OF GOOGLE

by Doug Williams and David Portney

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Overview
This book will teach you how to use a blog to bring target website traffic to your site and how to naturally reach top rankings for your most important keyword phrases. Creating your own business blog is a powerful way to build your brand as the industry expert in your market. Blogs, if used correctly, are the most powerful SEO tool available. You will learn the technique of SEO blogging. Blogs are the natural way to add keyword rich content to your website on a regular basis. This is a great strategy if your website is small (5-10 pages), or if it’s more graphical and lacks text content. Blogs are a natural link magnet that attracts inbound links if you write interesting, original and engaging posts. Adding “linkable” content to your site is the natural link building method. Link building is the most important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) today. Experts have long said “content is king.” Blogs add content to your website on a regular basis and then they broadcast your message to the world via RSS. In December of 1992, there were only 50 websites1 on the Internet. By June 2011, this has grown to over 340 million websites2. The World Wide Web continues to be more competitive. Most businesses have a website. . . or at least should. How do you compete and standout from the crowd? The World Wide Web is like the largest trade show on earth. It is a marketplace that has 2.1 billion people attending globally3. It has over 340 million booths in the form of websites. This is 6 people for every booth (website). It truly is a place where every conceivable product and service is researched bought and sold. According to a 2009 study by WebVisible and Nielsen Online, only 44% of small businesses have a website. Yet in today’s marketing landscape, every business today should have an online presence. Once online, each business needs a traffic strategy to promote their websites to Google. Blogs are the answer.
Description
This book will teach you how to use a blog to bring target website traffic to your site and how to naturally reach top rankings for your most important keyword phrases. Creating your own business blog is a powerful way to build your brand as the industry expert in your market. Blogs, if used correctly, are the most powerful SEO tool available. You will learn the technique of SEO blogging. Blogs are the natural way to add keyword rich content to your website on a regular basis. This is a great strategy if your website is small (5-10 pages), or if it’s more graphical and lacks text content. Blogs are a natural link magnet that attracts inbound links if you write interesting, original and engaging posts. Adding “linkable” content to your site is the natural link building method. Link building is the most important aspect of search engine optimization (SEO) today. Experts have long said “content is king.” Blogs add content to your website on a regular basis and then they broadcast your message to the world via RSS. In December of 1992, there were only 50 websites on the Internet. By June 2011, this has grown to over 340 million websites2. The World Wide Web continues to be more competitive. Most businesses have a website. . . or at least should. How do you compete and standout from the crowd? The World Wide Web is like the largest trade show on earth. It is a marketplace that has 2.1 billion people attending globally3. It has over 340 million booths in the form of websites. This is 6 people for every booth (website). It truly is a place where every conceivable product and service is researched bought and sold. According to a 2009 study by WebVisible and Nielsen Online, only 44% of small businesses have a website. Yet in today’s marketing landscape, every business today should have an online presence. Once online, each business needs a traffic strategy to promote their websites to Google. Blogs are the answer. According to a Hubspot study of 1531 of their small and medium sized business customers, blogging shows some real benefits in the study, 795 businesses blogged and 736 didn’t. These results were received by the companies that blogged: 55% more visitors: Blogs broadcast their message via RSS rather than passively waiting for search engines to spider and index them. Regular blogging attracts new visitor traffic. More traffic arriving to a website means more visitors that could be converted to buyers or leads. 97% more inbound links: Blog naturally attract links because their content is new and original. Other bloggers will reference other blogs and websites with a link to support what they are blogging about. 434% more indexed pages: Each blog posting produces a new page. This is why adding a blog to an existing website is a great way to grow the size of a website with keyword rich content. Larger sites are usually rewarded with higher search engine rankings. Blog marketing gives businesses other tangible results. Blogs build your brand awareness and build you as an authority in your market. Blogs build rapport with your audience as well as a relationship of trust. This makes you the natural person they turn to for help.
About the author
For most of my career, I was a business manager in the corporate world. My experience grew with a variety of positions, from managing departments within large corporations to starting up successful new businesses. In early 2001, I was managing 3 divisions for a large electronics manufacturing corporation. We assembled consumer electronic products for other companies in our factories in Oregon. I had 600 employees working for me, and sales were at record levels; the corporate office was happy, life was good. By late 2001, everything had changed. A recession hit the electronics industry full force after 9-11; sales evaporated, and I had to try and maintain profitability. Our large corporate customers moved assembly into their own facilities in an effort to keep their own employees busy. We had to lay people off and shut down one division completely. Pretty soon we had dropped our number of employees to just 80. When more demands for layoffs came from corporate, I decided to volunteer myself for layoff and save the jobs of my two remaining plant managers. I decided to start a new career as a business consultant. I formed my business and hired a web designer to build my first website. I wanted was to be found on the first page of Google for “small business consulting” and my designer assured me he could get me there. While eagerly waiting for my website, I immersed myself in learning about how search engines worked and something called search engine optimization. I was fascinated with the science involved and read everything I could find. After a few weeks I had a chance to see my new website for the first time. I was happy with the visual design, but something was unsettling about it. My new search engine education taught me that there was a list of things that should never be done if you wanted to rank well with Google. I identified many of the items from the “NEVER DO” list in my new website design. My designer, a 22 year old college student, refused to make any changes to HIS website. After weeks of asking for change without success, I took matters into my own hands. I purchased web design software and, with the help of my son, finished the site. I worked hard and after a few months I‘d successfully moved my website it to the first page of Google for my goal phrase, “small business consulting.” Some of my consulting clients were very interested in what I was doing, and they asked me if I could do the same for them. Being a hungry and relatively new business consultant, I said “Of course.” I did this first for one and then another; they recommended me to their friends and my business grew. Then someone wanted a new website. With the help of my son, we built it. The business grew . . . at least the web portion did. I hired employees to build websites and taught them how to optimize for search engines. My passion was helping small business owners grow their business. In 2004, I finally realized that to continue with my passion, I’d need to refocus my business. We became an Internet marketing firm. By late 2009, we’d grown to 16 employees, all in a single brick and mortar location. Our business consulting roots gave us a different approach. Our competitors were owned by either graphic designers or aggressive SEO marketers, neither of which understood what it took to grow a business. This gave us a tremendous advantage because we focused on core business strategies as we formed these online businesses for our clients.