BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

Blog promotion is a never-ending job. We list our blogs on various sites. We tweet our posts. But ultimately getting the word out about a blog depends on ranking well in Google and other search engines.

How do you make sure your blog ranks well enough in search results to be found by plenty of people? Search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is a complex and ever-changing field. It is hard to keep up, but most of us have to make the effort. It simply is too expensive for many of us to hire a really good SEO expert—and the bad ones are worse than useless.

Besides, knowing how to judge an SEO expert often requires knowing so much about SEO that you might as well do it yourself. If you know what you are doing, you can hire others to some of the work for you. But how do you know where to find them?

SEOClerks is a site where SEO workers of various kinds offer their services. The prices range from just $3 on up to about $1000, depending on the complexity or difficulty of the task and the skill of the service provider. Some of the SEO workers on the site offer subscriptions or give discounts for multiple orders.

This is a great site for buying SEO services. You can try out workers by purchasing small, cheap tasks and see how they do at those before signing up for more expensive packages of services. There is no need to risk much time or money finding out how well the services work for you.

If you use social media sites to get visitors to your blogs, you can, for example, Buy Tweets. You pay a small fee to get someone to tweet your sponsored messages to their Twitter list. Then you can easily see if the tweets resulted in traffic to your blog. If you sell goods or services on your blog, you can quickly see if the traffic resulted in actual purchases.

If you have a FaceBook fan page, you can, for example, have someone get 200 people to Like your page for only $5. From there you can send them to your blog. Pretty much any SEO work you could imagine is available for a reasonable price—or downright cheap.

For a few dollars, you can have an SEO-enhanced article written, get your blog listed on dozens of directory sites, or have comments posted on high-ranking blogs that link back to your blog. You can even buy links on specific blogs to permanently link back to yours.

Image via CrunchBase

When you first sign up for a blog on a site like Blogger, there is a wide variety of options made available that allow you to reach out to your readers.

From customizable templates to imbedded videos, audio and advertising, the new blogger seemingly has the world at his or her fingertips.

That warm and fuzzy feeling eventually starts to wear off though as new ideas pop up that may not be immediately covered by Blogger’s built-in features.

Luckily, Blogger and essentially any other blogging platform allows its writers to add any number of open source add-ons to their blogs for enhanced features and interaction with readers.

AdSense
The single greatest thing you can do for your blog is turn it into a profitable outlet for your daily writing. Google’s very own AdSense add-on is one of the easiest and most effective ways to do this. The best part is that it is incredibly easy to add AdSense to your blog through the interface provided by Google in Blogger. Read the rest of this entry →

Blogs are terrific methods of speaking out your thoughts and ideas to readers online and expecting that people will learn from it. No matter how articulate you communicate, your visitors will without hesitation close your page if your design is not interesting to them. Thus, be definite to always contemplate the blog’s design to help you to get the heightened traffic you choose.

Do not Put down Basic Styles

Writers who blog aspire their design to stand out, so they either compose or attain a design that has fascinating colors. This might be fantastic, but if you disarray your blog with flash files or complex navigation, how else can you let your visitor find to your content? Read the rest of this entry →

Building and using business blogs has become a standard for many online marketers in terms of marketing on the internet. However with the growth in popularity of online social sites many have begun using these communities as their primary marketing platforms.

In particular Twitter is being touted as a site that can supply all your business needs concerning marketing and traffic generation.

Does this mean blogging sites are now endangered in terms of their ‘leading’ role in web 2.0 online marketing? Actually this would hardly seem the case and here are 5 very strong reasons why. Read the rest of this entry →

When I first got interested in blog design, Blogging to the Bank was one of my first purchases. It was great advice on making a lot of money from blogging. My only complaint is that there was not quite enough information on building blogs for a complete beginner.

Blogging to the Bank has gone through several valuable upgrades over the years. The author keeps adding and updating information to keep up with changes in the business climate and the internet.

I still like the package, and I recommend taking a look if you want to make money with blogging:

http://www.blogdesignjournal.com/likes/Blog2Bank3/

Text messaging on a mobile phone

Want to drive more traffic to your blog? Here is an effective way to get blog visitors that you may not have thought of: a text messaging service.

A hot topic in the Internet marketing world right now is the generation gap between young users. More and more Internet users avoid email as much as possible. They prefer text messaging, Twitter and Facebook, unlike the “older” generation who prefer email.

Text messaging is huge, and you can use it to drive traffic to your blog.

A new mobile marketing site called 84444.com allows you to set up interactive text message marketing campaigns from your computer that can send traffic back to your site from the huge market of mobile texters. Think about how you can use that for SEO/SEM!

Using the self-service system at 84444.com and an existing list, you can direct customers to a particular website in real time. This is instant traffic!

Want to see how it works? Text the keyword LENS to 84444 (the short code) to get a discount on eye glasses.

Want to try it out—for free? You can get a free trial account (no contract, no setup fees) and set up a free trial campaign that allows you to send 25 free text messages.

With mobile marketing, you can set up sweepstakes, polls, and other interactive activities and send mobile coupons that can be used on line or in person.

As always with blog promotion, the only limit is your own imagination (as long as you stay with in the terms of use of the participating service providers and the applicable laws).

Clearly you also need to be sensitive to text user needs and preferences. Do not spam. Tightly target users with offers they will be glad to receive.

I’m excited about text marketing for traffic. I have not only set up a trial account; I have also signed up to be an affiliate.

For more information on the interactive text marketing industry and more ideas on how you might use text marketing to get traffic for your blog, you should read the Text Message Blog, which reports on mobile marketing.

A blog, believe it or not, when properly prepared creates content, and quite often is put very fast in the top ten of Google. Why it is so, try reading the following contribution to enlighten yourself:

A blog of domestic implements from a few features, allow search engines to crawl the content very quickly. The result was the fastest I have ever witnessed, added a new post within 20 seconds (including the top 10 ranking) for relevant phrases. How can this come about?

BlogPing

BlogPing is a protocol that implements any popular blog system. It serves primarily two things:

1. Blogs to notify each other (They were linked)

2. Notify search engines (Google Hello, I have published a new page)

Especially with the integration of Google Sitemaps that go on WordPress with a click of the hand, you need a search engine’s new content page to look once more. Sitemap opens directly to crawl a new page. Read the rest of this entry →