Am I alone out here? Does anyone out there read my blog???

Sometimes I wonder why I do this? When I look at my analytics and dont see sizeable numbers reading my blogs … Are you in the same position?

Well, there are thousands of blogs in the search results leaving us to really have to think outside of the box – not only to get visitors to your site but also to have them create some sort of action once they get there.

This is my solution ::

Here are 6 basic blog marketing ideas that I think simply go hand in hand right now in making a blog successful in any niche.

Forget Free Blogs

If you are getting serious about turning your blog into something more than a hobby you are going to need to move beyond the free blogging platforms. Blogger, WordPress, etc. are not going to make the cut if you want to turn your blog into a business endeavour. Purchase a custom domain name and have a personal self hosted blog. Today you can get one for $10 – $15 per month.

Clean Design

As marketers we know that design is very subjective and you won’t please everyone but good design elements are always very important, things like the types of buttons that you use or if all your images are sized properly make a difference in the eyes of your audience. Keeping things clean and consistent without a great deal of clutter is important for good overall design.

Easy Calls to Action

If you want someone to do something on your blog, leave a comment, share, reply, etc. you have to give them the opportunity to do it. Don’t assume that your traffic is going to find what you want them to do. You have to display it all times regardless of what page they are on. If it is an online store or a newsletter sign up make sure it is clear and visible in the right location on every page of your blog.

Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is very important because the search engines need to be able to ping your blog and pull in your posts for others to find in search queries. Most blogging platforms have many plugins you can use to make this process very easy. Key to a success SEO strategy is understanding your industry keywords and introducing them into your writing as you go. Be patient, this will help you out over time. If you want your blog to rank in search results eventually you will have to perform some sort of link building activities. Be careful not to get in trouble with this one!

Social Media Marketing

Social media and blogging go hand in hand so if you want to build up an audience and start getting followers coming to your site you will have to push out your blog posts a little further. This means using LinkedIN, Twitter and Facebook along with other social bookmarking websites out there designed to help you market your blog.

Engaging Content

Content is the key driving force to a blog so you have to make sure it is engaging. If you don’t enjoy writing and you are forcing it quite a bit you might want to rethink starting your own blog because you have to really enjoy the writing part … a lot!

Approach your blog like a business rather than a hobby and over time you will see it shift gears quite a bit. Nothing in life is easy and owning a successful blog takes time, patience and passion to make it successful. Don’t get frustrated just keep putting out good content and over time things will pan out. Good luck!

The Golden Triangle :: mobile, social & real-time

In a Forrester report published earlier this year, Social Media spend is expected to increase by 34% by 2014, placing it just behind mobile marketing, but ahead of search marketing.

Regardless of industry, the top areas of marketing, whether it’s interactive or marketing in general, for any business, must focus on social, mobile, and also the real-time Web. Thus forming a Golden Triangle engagement.

• The iPhone is the poster child of mobile.
• Facebook is the poster child of social.
• Twitter is the poster child of real-time.

SEO Tools

* Google Rankings
* Google Webmaster Guidelines
* Google SEO information for webmasters
* Overture Keyword Selector
* Search Engine News
* ASP Tips – 301 Redirecting
* Search Engine Marketing Tools for SEO
* URL Rewriting
* Virtual Promote Tools

Glossary of New Media Terms

Search Engine Optomization [SEO] has become an essential weapon in the arsenal of online business. Unfortunately for most healthcare marketers it also somewhat of an enigma! This is due party to the fact that the field is new and changing rapidly and also the fact that SEO experts tends to speak a language unknown to lay marketers!

I have generated this glossary from as an expert from “An SEO Glossary – Common SEO Terms Defined” By Glenn Murray. It is a remedy and explanation of SEO terms in plain and simple english …

algorithm :: A complex mathematical formula used by search engines to assess the relevance and importance of websites and rank them accordingly in their search results. These algorithms are kept tightly under wraps as they are the key to the objectivity of search engines (i.e. the algorithm ensures relevant results, and relevant results bring more users, which in turn brings more advertising revenue).

backlink :: A text link to your website from another website.

crawl :: Google finds pages on the World Wide Web and records their details in its index by sending out \u2018spiders\u2019 or \u2018robots\u2019. These spiders make their way from page to page and site to site by following text links. To a spider, a text link is like a door.

domain name :: The virtual address of your website (normally in the form http://www.yourbusinessname.com). This is what people will type when they want to visit your site. It is also what you will use as the address in any text links back to your site.

Flash :: A technology used to create animated web pages.

Google :: The search engine with the greatest coverage of the World Wide Web, and which is responsible for most search engine-referred traffic. Of approximately 11.5 billion pages on the World Wide Web, it is estimated that Google has indexed around 8.8 billion. This is one reason why it takes so long to increase your ranking!

Google PageRank :: How Google scores a website\u2019s importance. It gives all sites a mark out of 10.

keyword :: A word which your customers search for and which you use frequently on your site in order to be relevant to those searches. This use known as targeting a keyword. Most websites actually target \u2018keyword phrases\u2019 because single keywords are too generic and it is very difficult to rank highly for them.

keyword density :: A measure of the frequency of your keyword in relation to the total wordcount of the page. So if your page has 200 words, and your keyword phrase appears 10 times, its density is 5%.

keyword phrase :: A phrase which your customers search for and which you use frequently on your site in order to be relevant to those searches.

link :: A word or image on a web page which the reader can click to visit another page. There are normally visual cues to indicate to the reader that the word or image is a link.

link path :: Using text links to connect a series of page (i.e. page 1 connects to page 2, page 2 connects to page 3, page 3 connects to page 4, and so on). Search engine \u2018spiders\u2019 and \u2018robots\u2019 use text links to jump from page to page as they gather information about it, so it\u2019s a good idea to allow them traverse your entire site via text links.

link popularity :: The number of links to your website. Link popularity is the single most important factor in a high search engine ranking. Webmasters use a number of methods to increase their site’s link popularity including article PR, link exchange (link partners / reciprocal linking), link buying, and link directories.

link text :: The part of a text link that is visible to the reader. When generating links to your own site, they are most effective (in terms of ranking) if they include your keyword.

meta tag :: A short note within the header of the HTML of your web page which describes some aspect of that page. These meta tags are read by the search engines and used to help assess the relevance of a site to a particular search.

natural search results :: The \u2018real\u2019 search results. The results that most users are looking for and which take up most of the window. For most searches, the search engine displays a long list of links to sites with content which is related to the word you searched for. These results are ranked according to how relevant and important they are.

rank :: Your position in the search results that display when someone searches for a particular word at a search engine.

robots.txt file :: A file which is used to inform the search engine spider which pages on a site should not be indexed. This file sits in your site\u2019s root directory on the web server. (Alternatively, you can do a similar thing by placing tags in the header section of your HTML for search engine robots/spiders to read.

Sandbox :: Many SEO experts believe that Google \u2018sandboxes\u2019 new websites. Whenever it detects a new website, it withholds its rightful ranking for a period while it determines whether your site is a genuine, credible, long term site. It does this to discourage the creation of SPAM websites (sites which serve no useful purpose other than to boost the ranking of some other site). Likewise, if Google detects a sudden increase (i.e. many hundreds or thousands) in the number of links back to your site, it may sandbox them for a period (or in fact penalize you by lowering your ranking or blacklisting your site altogether).

search engine :: A search engine is an online tool which allows you to search for websites which contain a particular word or phrase. The most well known search engines are Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

site map :: A single page which contains a list of text links to every page in the site (and every page contains a text link back to the site map). Think of your site map as being at the center of a spider-web.

Free SEO Tools

I don’t know about you, but I’m still learning about SEO. Therefore, I rely heavily on trusted experts and free tools to learn more. Try out these SEO toolset. Try a search of your own and share what you learn in the feedback section below …

Open Site Explorer Provides web professionals the ability to explore or compare a site’s backlinks, top pages and other metrics.

Linkscape A professional-quality inlink tool with advanced filtering, inlinks, anchor text distribution and more.

SEO Toolbar for Firefox The power of Linkscape is now available inside Firefox.

Trifecta Measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain.

Term Target Helps determine how targeted a particular page is for a specified keyword by analyzing a variety of factors.

SEOmoz Labs SEOmoz Labs is a place where our more adventurous PRO users can check out the bleeding edge of SEOmoz technology and product design.

Rank Tracker Check, track, and monitor your rankings at all the major search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and Bing.

Term Extractor The term extractor tool analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines.

Crawl Test This tool helps quickly diagnose search engine crawling issues on your website – it examines title tags, http response codes, cache dates and presence in the search engine indexes.

GeoTargeting Detection Discover how well your website is targeted to country specific search engines.

Keyword Difficulty Used to analyze the competitive landscape of a particular keyword, this tool issues a percentage score and provides a detailed analysis of the top ranking sites at Google and Yahoo.

SEO Toolbox A collection of FREE Tools that will give you quick answers and aid in daily SEO activities.

Popular Searches This tool aggregates and archives popular searches from various sources.

Juicy Link Finder The Juicy Link Finder is intended to find links that have authority – old domains with a high PageRank that rank well for the keyword you enter.