Archive for the ‘Online visibility’ Category

Everyone wants to bring in more traffic to their website.  A simple way is though other blogs -  making comments on other blogs,  especially those in your niche.

How does this work?

Commenting gives you backlinks to your site. Backlinks are incoming links to a website or web page. Most blogsites have you enter your name, email and website link to post a comment, this allows other readers to click on your name and link and they will be directed to your website. Backlinks can also help your own SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Your ranking in search engines is increased with the more backlinks to your site. Better rankings, means better chances of being found in an internet search.

Making these comments also allows you to showcase your expertise on the topic to others reading the blog and comments.  It offers and opportunity to get exposed you to an audience you may not otherwise have a connection to.

Choose wisely when picking what blogs to comment on.  Go for a niche connected to your type of business and choose well ranked and respected sites. Making comments on sites like this means your name and backlink will also be published within another high ranking website.  This helps your own online visibility. Finding blogs can be as easy as following main ones in your niche or setting up Google alerts for specific terms and watching for good blogs to comment on from these alert results.

In most cases the first person to comment will get the most clicks to their site. People tend to follow on the first few then the most valuable… so make it a good comment and one that people will remember.

For your own blog you should encourage readers to engage and post comments on your posts, and when they do; reply and acknowledge that they took the time to:

1. Read your post
2. Make a comment

Their comments are also an opportunity for you to go deeper when providing an answer – help them out by providing links to your services or products. Take what you posted in the blog and based on what their comment is, go into more detail to help them.  Taking the time to do this will build your reputation and someone who is willing top lend a hand and go one step further when people ask questions. This helps build that KLT factor – Know, Like and Trust – so that people can visibly see why people do business with you and want to do the same.

Always have the option for blog readers to get blog updates via email or an RSS reader.  If they can sign up it means they get an email every time you publish a new blog post, creating an opportunity for them to directly read your blog and make a comment.

How often do you look for other blogs to comment on?  Is it a regular task you schedule in your weekly work – or simply a chance happening?

Here’s a challenge:

1. Do a Google search on your name and see how many results are online.
2. Setup a blog commenting time regularly over the next month.
3. After the month is up, check your name search again and look at the results.  Is there an increase in hits on your name?

I started this practice in late 2008, at that time there were about 1400 search results for my name (and they tend to all be me *benefits of a unique last name*).  If I do a search today there are over 32,000 results.  Yes all the social media content I do helps, but the blog commenting does as well.

Technorati Tags: blogging for business, increase website traffic, Small business

Seems everyone is always asking, what’s the best way to build links to your site? This is an easy one to answer. Hands down, the absolute best way to get others to link to your website is to offer them quality content that’s worth linking to.

Link building is a valuable way to increase your page ranking, website or blog exposure and help increase your traffic, sales and business.  However, not all back links are created equally and therefore it is important to decide what your goals are and how you will achieve them.

Quality content can vary depending on what your niche is and your target audience. But it will almost always include fresh and original content on various aspects of your niche, resources to help those who are looking for what you have to offer and information that website visitors want.

Quality content—the kind that encourages others to link to your website—is relevant to your topic, offers value to your visitors and potential customers, fits within the overall industry of the topic of your site (such as related products or services), and provides value to your site visitors.

Building links involves offering your website visitors what they want and that’s what quality content is all about. It’s the old WIIFM thing… (What’s In It For Me?). If you can answer that question with your website visitor in mind, and create content aimed at that visitor, you’ve just provided quality content. The odds of your visitors linking to that content will increase tremendously.

If your website deals with cocker spaniels, there will be some competition there, that’s probably not one of the most popular topics online. It should be relatively easy to create original content to build links to your site.

What if your niche is more common and your competition is stiffer? What if your site focuses on Internet Marketing? You can still create quality content to build links to your site.  For instance, your content could include original reviews of Internet Marketing (IM) products that you write yourself or have someone write for you. You can include resource lists of software products, eBooks and websites that are truly useful to other Internet Marketers.  It could include original articles and tutorials on every aspect of Internet Marketing.

The idea—regardless of your niche—is to create a site with content that is just a little different, or just a little better than anyone else is offering. Content that others will say, I need to tell my contacts about this.  When people ask me what’s the BEST way to build links to your site, my response is Quality Content, without a doubt.

If you want to establish yourself and your business for the long haul, then offering quality content and encouraging your readers to link to it is by far the best and most effective strategy.

Technorati Tags: Marketing, promote business, Small business

When I was doing my yearly planning for 2010, I listed the five marketing strategies that I intended to carry out. Number one on that list…Article marketing. I set a  goal to write and submit an article at least once every two weeks (I am short by one, so not too bad)

In case you’re not familiar with article marketing yet, it involves writing informative and useful articles and distributing them to article directories – giving permission to anyone to republish your article as long as your author resource box is left intact.

Two of the main results you can experience from article marketing are:

1. Traffic to your website
2. Increased rankings in Google and other search engines.

High authority article directories, like Ezine Articles, enjoy a lot of traffic (we’re talking millions of visitors every month). Many of those who read articles invariably click on the links in the author resource box and end up going to the author’s website. This is free traffic that otherwise would not have been able to learn about my site!

Search engine optimization (SEO) experts say that one of the most important ways to get high Google rankings for your target keywords is to have lots of links from other sites pointing to yours. The trick is the anchor text of those links should be the keywords you’d like to rank high for.

This strategy works so well that a Internet marketing guru once succeeded in having his website rank number one in Google for the keywords “coolest guy on earth” (or something like that!) – just by having all his buddies link to his site with that anchor text. That’s how powerful linking is.

These are the same links you get from the usually high-authority article directories all linking back to your website through the author resource box.

I realize many of you will immediately think – No way – no more writing! I have no time for that.  You have to think about it as marketing not writing. Write what you say to clients when you are telling them about your business and how it helps clients. Tape it if need be and just write down what you say – or hire a Virtual Assistant to take your words and turn them into articles.   Be targeted and use key words – words that people will use when searching for solutions on the internet.

A simple marketing strategy every business can use.  Are you?

Technorati Tags: buzz marketing, marketing strategy, online marketing

We are in the process at Time on Task of switching to 1 Shopping Cart for our newsletter and auto responder system.  That has meant checking into our list of subscribers and cleaning up the names and information to import to the new system.

I had been thinking that this is a task to do regularly with an email list – check your reports – especially after talking to a new client and discovering she had been using an automated newsletter system for a few years now and never once checked her bounce/delivered reports.  One quick call determined she had many errors, current clients on the bounce list and many old and out of date ones as well.  She also had no idea how many were getting opened every month and if anyone was clicking on the links in her articles. Keeping this list up to date is important for a few main reasons:

1. When you are paying a different fee with different subscriber levels -you will want to ensure that invalid emails are not going out every month – causing your numbers and thus your fees to be higher.
2. Knowing if there are entry errors on your list and that people who should be getting your emails are not.
3. You are investing time and money into creating your newsletter – what if not one soul was reading it? Would you change things around with your content, try something new or maybe even stop altogether and use your time/money elsewhere?

You would not know the answers to these questions if you are not checking your reports.

It is important to take a few minutes and review your bounce list each month and see if anything is out of place. Bring it up to date, fix the errors and get rid of the invalid emails. Sometimes you will come across emails you are uncertain what to do with.

Mickey.... one of my email Subscribers

Which brings me to the point of my post today… Mickey Mouse is on my Newsletter list. Yep – Mickey Mouse. The big-eared one himself… and I am sure it is him because of the email address – mmouse at a Disney domain name (I can’t publish full email addresses you know). An interesting dilemma…

I was going to delete him, but then realized his email was being delivered and opened – I checked my reports, again the importance of checking these reports comes out.

Curiouser and Curiouser…  I think for now I will leave Mickey alone and be happy I have such a celebrity on my list.

What would you do? and more importantly, do you regularly check your reports/list?

Technorati Tags: Business planning, efficient business, email marketing, newsletters, Organization

Soooo… Sunday I had a big scare from one of my Google Alerts.  The one that got me was one for my own name.

Yes,  I have an alert setup for me and my name as well as my business name.  I’m not egotistical or anything, I actually recommend everyone have these types of alerts setup in order to keep tabs on when and where your name comes up in the online world. An alert, for those new to this term, is an email update of the latest Google results (web, news, etc.) based upon the search parameter you setup. It’s an effective way to keep on top of mentions out on the Web of you, or even your company or clients.

Anyhow, Sunday I open the Alert for “Kathy Colaiacovo” and come to find it is a link to a website under construction.  I click on it and the fear sets in! Why?  The website was www.kathycolaiacovo.com !!  It was me!  And I didn’t own it! Crap!  That’s all I could think was “Crap!”, and how dumb I had been because I had not bothered to take the time and $10 to book the darn domain name – my name.

I was so mad!  And there I was looking at the screen and reading the message that said how this website was the home of a future website. I was fuming at my desk and my stupidity – sorry no better word could describe what I was calling myself at that moment!

I decided I had to see who owned the domain name, I knew there could be another Kathy Colaiacovo out there but, OH!  I was so mad at myself.  I head over to the Whois registry website to lookup the owner of this fine domain name – only so I could yell at them in my mind.  They had every right to buy it, since I dropped the ball.  Read the rest of this entry »

Technorati Tags: promote business, virtual assistant, website planning