Blogging for Marketing 101

• How to establish a 2.0 blog that encourages enagagement and allows users to share your content…
• Which posting frequency suits your blog content…
• How to strategically choose blog topics and categories…
• Where Google Adsense can be used to monetize your content…
• How to discover niche keywords for your blog titles…
• SEO tips for writing articles that attract search engine traffic…
• Methods for convincing Google News that your blog is worth syndicating…
• Strategies for getting bloggers and your competitors to link back to you…

How often should you post? In many cases, the answer to this question depends on how much content you have, and the amount of resources you have available to fill the need of your audience.

In this chapter, we’ll show you what makes sense for your publication, and three methods for increasing blogging frequency without too much additional effort.

Blogging works best when it’s done daily, and that takes a lot of information. One endless source of info—the news—is a great way to excite your readers while educating yourself. But how do you know which types of news excite and which types bore?

That is answered, in part, by Google Hot Trends, a free service that shows the top 100 fastest-rising Google searches every hour. We’ll also discuss how to write for the long-tail when your content is more evergreen.

One of the easiest ways to make money online is with Google AdSense. Google provides advertiser-paid pay-per-click text advertisements that match the content on your page. You just create great content and drive targeted website traffic in to read it.

Next to Adsense, discover how other publishers are monetizing their blogs with premium products and membership websites.

Depending on the status of your website, you may need to find niche terms in order to get a decent rank in search engines. If you’re Harvard Law School, you can probably go after broad keywords like “negotiation” (they show up 7th in Google), but if you’re not Harvard, you’ll have better results going after three to four word keyword phrases.

Discover why keyword research can give you article ideas and boost your search engine rankings, while catchy headlines work better for newsy content.

In the days of old, magazine editors had one primary responsibility: writing great content. Getting people to subscribe to, buy and read that content was someone else’s job. In the online world, things are much different. If an editor wants their content to be found and read online, they must learn to partner with Google.

In this chapter you will begin to understand what people are searching for that is related to the content you offer, and how to write and produce content specifically to those search terms. It’s not easy, but it is necessary for online success.

What does being included in Google News mean for you? Increased traffic, tons of high visibility exposure, a wider audience for your news and services and the potential for higher ad sales, are all among a few of the benefits.

Not every site can get into Google News; but with some attention to the recommendations we’ve laid out in this chapter, you can greatly increase your chances of success.

It might seem like bloggers have their own clique when it comes to cross-linking, but much like any social gathering, it’s all about taking a sip of wine and getting out there.

In this chapter we give you several tips for building relationships with bloggers and lay out several tips for writing blogs that are link-worthy and likely to be written up. We’ll also show you how to get your competitors to give you some link-love and also where to create your own inbound links.

Tagging started out as something used internally by companies to help employees find and share files easier. Nowadays, it goes hand and hand with Web 2.0 and user-generated content, as people are actually able to put their own vocabulary and interpretation into something that they didn’t create—blogs, articles, podcasts, videos, etc.

Discover how sites are letting readers define their own content with custom tags and helping publishers learn popular terminology and perspective.

Many publishers view their RSS feed as a self-sustaining journal, a part of their blog that is great because of the low-key and hands-off approach that it was designed for. Well we’re not sure if they’ve noticed, but there’s a whole lot more to this online publishing than recycled content. Recycled content—with class!

Luckily, monetizing your RSS feed doesn’t mean diving into the nitty gritty, it’s pretty easy, and surprisingly exciting to find your content in niches that were once unexplored territory. In this chapter, we suggest a list of six things you can do—today—that will attract new visitors, create an open revenue stream, retain your email newsletter unsubscribers, and will give you (or your webmaster) something to brag about.