Blogging is an amazing way for any business, large or small, to start to generate some visibility online. Take SEOmoz for example, although the roots of the company go way back to 1981 when Rand’s mother started a marketing business, SEOmoz got it’s start in 2004 when Rand started blogging about his “thoughts, struggles, and discoveries” in SEO. From there they started doing SEO consulting, then eventually transitioned into one of the greatest SEO toolsets you can find online. You too can get your start online just by starting a blog and writing/publishing great content on a regular basis. The whole process starts with picking a domain name, so let’s jump in.

Picking Your Domain Name

Picking your domain name should be pretty easy if you have already decided on your business name. I say “should” because if you are picking a domain name that is in line with your business name, you have pretty good chances that it is going to be available. I”m often asked the question, should I purchase a domain name that is rich with my target keywords? To be completely honest, three years ago, I would have answered heck yes! Today, not so much. I would pick a domain name that is one, easy to remember, and two, is brandable. So what’s the cost of a domain name? About $11.00 per year. Not too shabby.

Monthly Cost: $0.89

Finding A Web Host

Picking your web host is a little more difficult than picking a domain name, at least I think so. There are so many web hosts our there to choose from that it is hard to know which one is the best. I’m really scared to start listing web hosts in this post because there’s always going to be someone who has had a bad experience and will most likely comment negatively. Personally, I really like Host Monster, but it is a little more expensive if you are on a budget. If you are looking for a cheap web host, I would go with Name Cheap hosting. I’ve use them before, and they are pretty good for the price. Regardless of price, you will want to find a host that uses cPanel and has one click install for WordPress to keep things as simple as possible. Hosting through Name Cheap will cost you about $48.00 per year. Also, not to shabby.

Monthly Cost: $3.95

Installing WordPress

As I mentioned above, you will want to find a web host that offers a one click install for WordPress. I’m not the most technical person in the world and I’ll bet that most small business owners are not either, so this makes it really easy. The beautiful thing about using WordPress to run your blog is that is is FREE! No cost to you whatsoever! They also offer a huge support community to help you with any problems you might encounter along the way.

Monthly Cost: Free

Installing Your SEO & Social Plugins

WordPress out of the box is pretty SEO friendly, but there is always more you can do to make it more friendly to the search engines, especially for small businesses trying to do SEO. I’m not going to go into great detail about what plugins you should be installing to help you SEO or to make your blog more social because some of my colleagues have already written about it in previous posts. So, check out the linked posts below to get a better idea of which plugins you can install to get you going. One thing to keep in mind is that not all WordPress plugins are free, but most are. All of the plugins recommended in the posts below are free to the end user.

The Top Three SEO Plugins

The Top Eight SEO Plugins Used By SEO.com

Monthly Cost: Free

Picking A Theme

Just like plugins, there are many themes out there on the internet that are free. Honestly, a lot of the themes out there are pure crap, which is why I always purchase themes or have them built for me, but if you are on a budget, you can find a good theme or two by doing some research. If you don’t want to go the free route, you can check out WooThemes.com or StudioPress.com. I’ve used both and like them a lot. If you are going to go the free route, here are a few resources to help you get started.

Free Themes From WordPress.org

WordPress Theme Gallery

Free WP Themes

Monthly Cost: Free

Writing Your Content

Now that you have your domain, have a functioning blog that is pretty and optimized for the search engines, you need to start writing content. Obviously, the cost of writing your content is free, but it does take some time. When writing, make sure that you are including keywords that are being searched on by your potential customers. You can do some quick keyword research by heading over to The Google and simply start typing your target keywords in the search bar, for this example, I used they keyword wedding dresses.

As you can see in the image below, Google’s auto complete feature gives me some related searches to my keyword. If I sold wedding dresses online, I could blog about modest wedding dresses and make sure to use that keyword in the title of the post and throughout the content.

In my next image below, we are going to be looking at Google’s related searches feature. This can be accessed by clicking on related searches in the left sidebar. This gives me even more topic/keyword ideas to write about than auto complete. I could also write about designer wedding dresses, wedding dresses perfect for beach weddings, and many others also making sure to include the target keywords in the appropriate places mentioned above.

Monthly Cost: Free

As you can see, it is really easy (and affordable) to start building your online business through starting a blog. In my next post (probably next month), I’m going to talk about easy and affordable ways to start building links and driving traffic to your blog once you start pounding out some content. If you have any other additional resources that relate to this post, please feel free to share them in the comments section below.

Topic Generation

There’s all sorts of talk in the SEO/SEM space about ways to generate blog post ideas. Most of them revolve around doing competitive research to help guide your efforts. Most recently, at Pubcon Las Vegas, Arnie Kuenn, President of link building agency Vertical Measures spoke about using Open Site Explorer to find which pieces of content your competitors have that have attracted the most links. Once you know this, you can build a similar piece of content for your own site in hopes that it will attract some interest and links as well. He also suggested that you do some manual outreach to the sites that linked to your competitors content asking them to link to yours as well. Brilliant, huh?

There are lots of different ways to come up with blog post topics, online and offline. I wanted to write this post because I've been doing a lot of offline research that has helped me grow my blog content and I wanted to share with everyone what I’ve been up to.

Offline Blog Research

As I mentioned above, there's a lot of talk about ways to research blog topics online, however, there isn’t a lot of talk about researching blog ideas offline. A few months ago, I was sitting around the house flipping through one of my wife’s magazines (I don’t want to say which one in fear that I will be ridiculed by my co-workers and peers), but as I was scanning some of the content, I thought to myself, some of this content would be interesting to my readers and if I got it up quick enough, would probably attract some natural backlinks as well.

The more I thought about it, it really made a lot of sense to build a blogging strategy around content published offline. When you think about it, most of the content found in popular magazines is content that is well researched by a professional journalist and is most likely content that people are very interested in right now. Take Kim Kardashian’s divorce, bloggers are all over that and getting loads of traffic and links because of it. Most of the work is done for you. All you have to do is come up with some unique content and a different take on the story and you have a rocking blog post.

Scalability

My next thought was, how do I get a lot of ideas without having to subscribe to dozens of magazines each month. It just doesn’t make sense to spend $2-3 per issue just to get blogging ideas. Well, maybe it does if you are a hard-core blogger, but for someone who blogs in his/her spare time, it doesn’t.  A few days after my idea of using magazine content for blog ideas, I was at Target with my daughter looking at some children’s books. While there, I saw the big magazine rack and I realized that by spending 30 minutes a week in a store like Target, Wal-Mart, Barns and Noble, or even the library, that I could get a months worth of blogging ideas without paying anything at all. So I decided to build a process to help me be as efficient as possible.

Process

Identification: I first had to identify which type of magazines related to my business or blog. If you sell wedding dresses online, then you might consider all of the bridal magazines. You might also consider magazines like People which talk about celebrities getting engaged or married. I typically like to do this before I arrive at the magazine stand.

Pulling: Once I get to the magazine stand, I find the targeted magazines, pull all of them, and head to a table or nice clean spot on the floor. Whatever you do, don't sit on the floor at Wal-Mart… they aren't that clean.

Scanning: After I have my stack, I glance at the cover and the table of contents to see if anything sounds interesting to me. If so, I flip to the page, whip out my iPhone and start snapping pictures of headlines. I don’t want to use the content, but I do want to use the topic.

Organization: Once I have all my pictures taken, I put the magazines back, and head home to dump the pictures on my computer and organize them. What I am looking for here is level of interest. If something is time sensitive, I will typically move it closer to the top of my list. If something is more interesting, I move it up. If it is less interesting, I move it down. You get the idea.

Research: As I mentioned above, I generally don’t want to use the content found in these magazine articles. I like to do some research on my own (or outsource it) to build my content. This ensures that I am not blatantly copying the content and that it’s a fresh take on the topic.

Creation & Publishing: If you are a blogger, both of these steps are pretty straightforward. You can either write the content yourself, or job it out to someone on Elance or oDesk. Once you have the content, you optimize and publish it.

Results

The first time I put my process to the test, I spent twenty minutes at Barnes and Noble and found 42 different blog topic ideas. I spent an additional fifteen minutes organizing the topics and another twenty getting them all jobbed out to one of my writers for research and creation. If I publish one piece every business day, I have approximately eight and a half weeks of content ideas in just under an hour. Pretty decent if you ask me.

One thing that you need to remember is, as with anything we do in SEO, these numbers can and will fluctuate depending on the person, niche of the site, number of magazine you need/want to go through, and other factors. Don't get discouraged if you come out with just a dozen ideas the first time. It was still a worth while activity!

So, how do you come up with blogging ideas? If you have processes outside the norm, please add to the conversation by commenting below.

Internet Marketing Infographic by Vertical Measures

Other than revenue, a website's success can be measured by the amount of targeted visitors that it receives. More targeted traffic often translates to more revenue. To achieve this objective the site must rank highly in the SERPs for keywords that your target group is actually using to search. The only way to enjoy a websites continued success is by retaining this high number of targeted visitors month in and month out. Listed here are five tasks to help achieve this, in no particular order.

Content

A constant flow of fresh content is the main objective for any website to maintain a consistent following of readers. A well written search engine optimized article involves the proper placement of just the right keywords, an engaging headline, and often a creative or interesting writing style to make the piece stand out from the rest.

The subject matter of content, and the way it’s delivered are of the utmost importance. When an article is written strictly with SEO in mind and no thought is given to the article's continuity, the piece is likely to be a flop – no shares, no links to it, and probably very little traffic to the page which equals little help to building your domain authority. Sure, it is important to write articles that are search engine optimized; however, it's equally important to keep the readers interested.

So what type of content should you provide? A variety of media can act to facilitate the process of building authority through content. Here are five of them: 

#1 Video

An effective tool at your disposal is video. In May of this year alone, Google reported that YouTube reached a whopping 14.6 billion internet video views and that's only 43 percent of the total online views for that month. That’s 34 billion videos viewed on the internet in one month!

Drive traffic, leads and business through the use of video marketing and optimization. A recent webinar discussed this very topic and gave great tips such as:

• Start with keyword research and other market research to determine the best topic your audience will love
• Try informational keywords and long tail terms
• Optimize videos for search engines: Have compelling titles, add a description, add tags, make sure it’s high quality resolution, pick the best thumbnail image, have a video sitemap on your site, include a transcript on the page where your video is embedded, use microdata, and limit it to 1 video per page.

#2 Infographics

An interesting and creative Infographic can be used to build site authority when done correctly and executed well too. You’re able to show your site visitors an interesting and unique take on a set of data, helping them to connect to the piece on a sensory level.

Coming up with a creative concept, working with a designer to execute your idea, and then promoting the Infographic may seem easy on the surface but require a bit of strategy and planning. A few tips:

• Have a brainstorm session with your team to come up with possible topic ideas.
• Conduct market research and keyword research too
• Any sources you want to use – verify them first before you develop the graphic!
• Stick to a simple layout
• Include SEO rich copy on the page where your Infographic resides
• Include an embed code on the page
• Don’t forget social sharing buttons!

#3 Webinars

Just about any industry could use webinars to help build their site authority. Using presentation software, like PowerPoint, and presenting to a group of users through webinar software or even a video sharing program can help build notoriety for your brand, can be leveraged for links, and be added as content to your site. A few pointers:

• Conduct market research to see what topics you should cover in your webinar. Do a bit of keyword research too.
• Record your webinars and upload to video sites. Pay careful attention to their terms of service however, to ensure your content won’t get reported and taken down.
• Use slide decks on sites like SlideShare. Opt to have the notes section of the slides added to the upload.
• Embed webinars on a site on your page – sticking to one video or slide deck per page.
• Don’t forget social sharing buttons!

#4 Blog Posts

Regular old blog posts are of course a great way to get down on virtual paper what you think your readers are interested in seeing. Whether it’s a top 10 post, an editorial, a post on a controversial subject, or any one of these 50 corporate blogging topics, the use of blog posts to help you build site authority can be effective. A few more tips:

• Don’t just limit yourself to blogging on your own site. Try out guest blogging on a few of your favorite industry blogs and become a regular writer!
• Optimize your posts for search engines paying special attention to H1s, adding custom meta titles and descriptions, and custom tags to the post as well.
• Link to others and let them know about it. They might just help you promote the post when it’s live.
• Add a plugin like Zemanta to help you build relevant backlinks from other blogs.

#5 White Paper or Free Guide

Have an industry expert at your company who likes to write? Have them develop a white paper or free guide. If you don’t have the resources, try sourcing it out to a freelancer who has a knack for writing educational pieces. White papers and free guides aren’t just great for lead capture; they’re also great for building site authority. If it’s useful and interesting, more people will be willing to read it, share it and link to it. A few tips:

• Decide whether you want your guide to be free to all or if you want it to be available for users who give you some information (such as e-mail, name, phone number, etc…).
• Conduct research to see if there is enough information to provide on the topic for your guide.
• Optimize your guide for search engines by paying attention to SEO PDF best practices.

Simply put, building your sites authority in any niche is a matter of making that website popular and growing its following through any and all means available. You want engaging content that will keep users on the site, get shares through social channels, be found by search engines, and receive lots of backlinks. By diversifying the types of content you develop you’re sure to find a method that your audience appeals to and that can aid in the pursuit of building your sites authority. Check out the below infographic to view a few other ways you can use content to build the authority of your site.

What type of content have you found works best for your target demographic?

As I discussed in a post over at PRMarketing.com, the sole purpose of infographic marketing is to attract natural backlinks. Infographics, when created with a purpose and an end goal, do just that; get loads of natural backlinks that are very hard to replicate by competitors.

The trick to getting even more backlinks is by increasing the number of people seeing your graphic, liking it, and sharing/embedding it on their own website. I like to generate this additional visibility by submitting my graphics to infographic directories.

Web Directories

Many SEOs cringe when they hear the word directories. Most think that link acquisition via directories is a dead tactic. As Cyrus Shepard over at SEOmoz blogged about last month, directory link building is alive and well, but the way we should approach this link building tactic has changed considerably when compared to ten years ago.

One of the most basic rules that SEOs live by these days is to only submit to relevant web directories. This can include directories of a specific type (infographic, document sharing, etc), industry/keyword specific directories, or region specific directories. Submitting to these types of directories will ensure you get maximum value out of these types of links.

Infographic Directories

Now that we’ve established that some directories can still provide value, lets talk about infographic directories. Truth be told, there are quite a few awesome infographic directories out there that not only give you great backlinks to your website, but generate visibility, and often times drives traffic to your website. As infographics continue to grow in popularity, the number of directories will also grow, giving us additional distribution points for our graphics. For now, here is a list of the infographic directories that we use at SEO.com when promoting a graphic:

http://visual.ly/

http://www.coolinfographics.com/

http://submitinfographics.com/

http://www.infographichub.com/

http://www.infographicsshowcase.com/

http://www.wallstats.com/

http://www.best-infographics.com/

http://www.omginfographics.com/

http://dailyinfographic.com/

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

http://flowingdata.com/

http://infographicsite.com/

As always, submitting to each of these sites doesn’t guarantee that your graphic will get published. Keep in mind that your graphic needs to be quality. If it is, you will get a lot of links, passing a lot of link juice, and a ton of additional visibility.

Although this was a short post, I hope it was valuable and ask that if you know of other great infographic directories out there that you will share with us in the comment section below.

I first heard about these two tools when I read a stellar review from Doc Sheldon last week. I tweeted out a link to his review and within a few minutes Garrett contacted me offering me a free trial account. I was on vacation, but immediately accepted and figured I’d play with them when I got back.

I started diving into the tools on Tuesday of last week. After a few days of testing, I am pleased to say that they are two of the slickest tools I’ve used in a long time and they saved me loads of time when prospecting for links. Because of this, I wanted to write a post on how I used each of the tools to plug into my current SEO strategies and how I found just over 400 qualified prospects in about eight minutes. Let’s get started.

Outbound Link Scraper Tool

The Citation Labs Outbound Link Scraper tool is pretty straightforward. In a nutshell, you give it a URL and it scrapes all outbound links on the given page and returns them to you in a csv file.

The way I used it for my tests is by doing a few searches in Google for lists of [insert your niche here] blogs. For example, I searched for list of weight loss blogs. Google returned hundreds of pages of results and I was able to quickly go through and grab the URLs that looked relevant to what I was searching for. I then took those URLs and dumped them into the tool and it scraped all the outbound links and gave me a nice list of legitimate weight loss blogs. This took me about five minutes and produced around 2,200 URLs. Pretty awesome huh? Onward to the next tool…

Contact Finder

The Contact Finder is the tool that really got me excited because it can be very time consuming to harvest contact information by manually going from site to site, especially if you have a few thousand sites to go through like I did from the exercise above.

With the Contact Finder, I took my list of weight loss blogs and added them to the tool. Next I needed to specify what anchor text I wanted the tool to look for on the website (an about us or contact us page) and then look for and scrape the contact information (email address). The default set up is a regular expression to match against anchor texts. The Regular expression is ^(Contact|About) which means that is must start with “contact” or “about” and the default limit is a maximum of three words.

Instead of running with the default, I decided to do some tweaking of my own and have the tool search for anchor texts that start with “guest”. What I was trying to pinpoint are blogs that accept gust blog posts, guest authors, or guest article submissions. Doing this would guarantee that the contact info I harvest will be for websites that say they want guest content contributions. I find that these are typically easy wins and have high email response rates. This took me about three minutes and produced around 400 email addresses. Even more awesome huh? Onward to the last part of the process…

Guest Blog Outreach

Once I had my list of email addresses, I needed to email them to see if they were even interested in the type of content I had to offer. I’m all about building efficiencies, so I took my list and added them to my email marketing software so I could mass email everyone without having to send 400 individual emails. Brilliant, huh? The process took me about ten minutes.

I know many SEOs probably wouldn’t feel good about the mass email approach, but I did for two reasons. First, these are sites that have told me “Hey Greg, we will accept your content so send it right over” so they are already open to an email from me, and second, my offer was tailored specifically to their niche, weight loss.

So, I did the whole mass email thing and in less than 24 hours, I had 61 positive responses. People, that’s a 15% response rate. Booyeah! Obviously, as you get more niche or head to other less saturated verticals, you will have fewer link prospects, harvest fewer emails, and fewer positive responses, but this test has me very optimistic that these tools can streamline a lot of what we are doing for our client in terms of guest blogging and in quickly pushing a lot more content out for them.

I guess the only problem these tools have created for me is the fact that I now have to create 61 pieces of content to have published. I’m not complaining because it’s a good problem to have, but creating that much quality content will take some serious time or cash out of pocket to get it done.

In summary, these tools are awesome and I would highly recommend them to any SEO or SEO agency looking to get more efficient with link prospecting. They do cost some money, but not as much as you would think for such amazing tools. It’s all based on bandwidth and the pricing scale is as follows:

$10 – 100MB

$20 – 250MB

$30 – 500MB

$50 – 100MB

I would love to hear about other successes out there and how others are using this tool differently than I am. Please share in the comments below.

Post Update: So this post got a lot of buzz and generated a lot of discussion around if harvesting emails and “bulk” emailing them is ethical or even legal. I need to be clear that this test was run on a personal project of mine and that we at SEO.com in no way bulk email link prospects. Our team members adhere to a very strict one email at a time policy when doing link outreach. I’ve been asked several times over the last few days if we can get an email marketing software and my answer was and always will be, absolutely not. Nothing beats manual outreach and customizing emails to website owners. You will always get a higher response rate and you will keep your or your client’s brand protected (which is what we strive to do every day for each of our clients).

Disclosure: I’m not getting paid to review these tools and not getting paid to send business Garrett’s way. I love these tools and like I said above, I highly recommend them! You can get started by heading over to Citations Labs now.

As many know, picking a search marketing agency to help your website reach the top positions in the search engine results pages (SERPs) is no easy task and can be very confusing in today’s rapidly expanding industry. That’s why we are grateful for our visibility in the search engines, publications like Website Magazine, our awesome employees, and strong client base that make our business successful each and every day!

We would also like to congratulate the other 49 search marketing agencies who made the list this year!

Does local search engine optimization have you feeling frustrated beyond belief? Do you feel like you are doing everything you can to rank well in the seven pack and and blended local search results, but you just can’t get there?

In this follow up post to my webinar yesterday, we are going to quickly address the big problems that most small businesses face when trying to play in the local search space. There are three of them:

NAP (Name, Address, Phone)

Citations

Reviews

This isn’t going to be a post on how to optimize your Google Places page, but once you are optimized, how to make sure you get some visibility and rank high in the search engines.

Having different addresses and phone numbers tied to your business across the web is a huge problem if you want to rank for local keywords. What’s even worse is when small businesses trying to do seo think that all they need to do is focus on their Google Places Page (you know, since Google is where it’s at) and ignore everything else, most often leaving dozens of business profiles with incorrect information out the on the internet just waiting to cause them problems. So, let’s talk about how to fix this problem.

First off, you need a dedicated page on your website for every location you have. On those pages you need your official business name, your official address, and official phone number. You need to decide here and now how you will format those so they can be formatted the same across the web, meaning 123 North vs 123 N.

Once you have your business information standardized on the page, you should mark it up with the proper schema. For those who don’t know, schemas are html tags that webmasters can use to mark cup their pages in ways that are recognized by the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing). The engines rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, ultimately making it easier for people to find the web pages they are looking for.

There are many schemas that you can use to mark up your website, but if you are a local business, there is a schema you can use to mark up your business data to show the engines that you are indeed a local business and this is your address and phone number. You can find the schema for this here: http://schema.org/LocalBusiness

After you have your individual location pages set up on your website, you need to make sure that each of your major maps pages are created, optimized, and officially claimed. These are the big three (Google, Yahoo, and Bing). Make sure when setting these up that you use the exact same address and phone number that is listed on the related web page so there is no confusion to the search engines.

What most business owners don’t know is that there are some major data providers online who have information about your business, then share with with many other smaller sites. These data providers are Infogroup, Acxiom, and Localeze. If your business data is incorrect with at least one of these provers, your data is most likely wrong in many places across the web. When this happens, it confuses the engines and makes you not look legit so it is vital to get your data cleaned up with the data providers first and they will in turn push that correct data down to the many sites online.

For those who aren’t familiar with citations, citations are to Google Place Pages as links are to web pages. They are a credibility factor which helps your page rise above your competitors. Citations are external web pages that reference your exact business name, address, and phone number. So the question most local businesses have is, how do I get these?

Truth be told, it used to be really easy to find citations and acquire them. You used to be able to go to a competitors place page and find the majority of their citations listed at the very bottom. All you had to do was go to those sites and set up your company profile and BAM! you had some citations. A he problem is, few months back Google made some changes to their Google Places pages and they pulled that data. This caused search marketers and local businesses to have to get creative to find their citations.

To get started, I like to start with my favorite citations sources. They are Yelp, Judy’s Book, Merchant Circle, Insider Pages, Kudzu, City Squares, BOTW Local, and Hot Frog. In about thirty minutes you can have eight solid citations sources to help get you on your way. After that, I like to do some competitive research.

The way I do my competitive research when trying to dig up citation source is by looking up my competitors in the search engines by their address or phone number. When you do this, it will generally show you loads of web pages that reference their address or phone number, well, these are citations of course. You can then go to those same sites and get the same citations as your competition. It’s not hard, but it does take some time.

I also like to use tools to help me find and acquire my citations. My favorite tool by far is the Whitespark Local Citation Finder. My buddy Darren Shaw has built an excellent tool to do most of the leg work for you when it comes to citations. They have a free version and a pro version (which is worth the monthly fee and no I’m not getting an affiliate commission off of this) so you should check it out.

When it comes to ranking high for local keywords, reviews are huge! Reviews not only build trust with the search engines, but also with your potential and current customer base. So the big question is, how do I go about getting these reviews?

First and foremost… ASK and make it super easy for your customers to leave you a review. Believe it or not, if your customers are not socially savvy, they probably won’t bother going online to give you a review. It’s just not going to happen. So when do you ask?

Hey “customer name” don’t forget to review our product once you tried it. You can give us a review at (insert your favorite review site). When you ask, you might also hand them a flyer that gives them a URL to the web page where you want them to review your business. You could also print them on receipts and circle it with a highlighter. The point is to ask and make it stand out.

Asking for reviews via email is money, if you do it right. The hardest part is, you must build the email list to be able to email them. For most brick and mortar stores, this is the difficult part.

To build your email list, you should incentivize the opt-in. Give your customers a coupon for some percentage off their next purchase or give them something for free. This will entice them to give you their email address.

After you have built your list, you should then segment it by type of email account, then craft an email campaign for each type of email and send them to the appropriate place to leave a review. For example:

Gmail –> Google Places Page

Yahoo Mail –> Yahoo Local Listing

Hotmail –> Bing Local Listing

Remember when I said you need to make it easy? If they have a gmail account, they are logged in when they read your email, therefore they are logged in when they click on the link to take them to your Google Places Page and they can easily drop a review. See… money!

The last few ways to get reviews is by using package inserts if you ship product and asking by adding badges to your website.

That pretty much wraps up the summary of my webinar yesterday. I think the recording should be up either today or some time early next week. Thanks to everyone who attended and everyone who read this follow up post. If you have any additional recommendations on how to overcome these three big problems, please feel free to drop a comment below.

Idea Generation

The first and most common way to start guest blogging is by finding blogs that write about topics directly related to yours. For example, if I run a website that sells a weight loss supplement, I should look for blogs that write about weight loss or the actual supplement that I am selling on my website. To the engines, most of these links are highly credible because of how relevant the websites are to my site. I want to get as many of these as I possibly can.

The second way, which takes a little more creativity, is by finding blogs that write about topics that relate to your products or services indirectly. Using the same example above, I might look for a blog that discusses everything you need to know about being a new mom and offer to write them a post about how to lose the baby weight. I might also look for a celebrity blog that discusses the latest celebrity fads and offer to write them a post about the latest weight loss fads that celebrities are into.

If you really put some time and effort into it, posting your content on sites that relate indirectly can help you reach viewers that you might not have reached otherwise.

Research

There’s probably a dozen ways to get started researching blogs to publish your content on, but in this post, I am going to stick to the two ways that I use most often.

Typically when I begin a guest blogging campaign, I start by searching the keyword or topic in Google and selecting blogs. As you can see in my example below, www.weightlosswithsandra.com/blog/ might be a legit site to get a guest blog post published on. When I visit the site, it looks like she accepts content from many different individuals or websites, so I would add this to my list.

When I exhaust my Google Blog search, I turn to more advanced search queries. These queries will drum up more results than a typical Google Blog search and can bring additional opportunities to get your content published. Some of the more popular search queries that I use are as follows:

[keyword] blog

“[keyword] blog”

intitle:[keyword] blog

inurl:[keyword] blog

“add comment” [keyword]

“post comment” [keyword]

intitle:tag [keyword]

intitle:post [keyword]

[keyword] guest writer

[keyword] guest blog post writer

[keyword] submit content

[keyword] submit post

[keyword] submit blog post

[keyword] guest blogger wanted

Blogger Outreach

Reaching out to blogs, asking them to post your content, and actually getting it published can sometimes be tricky. That’s why building a relationship with the site owner or blogger before asking them to guest blog is often the best route to go.

To start building the relationship, I start off by commenting on and sharing some of their content through social channels. After doing this a for a few weeks, I will reach out to them via email or a contact form. I let them know how much I appreciate the information I read on their blog and that I have been sharing it on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. I find that if I tie in the sharing of their content in the initial email, I get a much higher response rate. When I get a response, I begin the discussion about writing a unique piece of content that can be published on their website. The rest is pretty much history.

I would like to wrap up the post by mentioning that guest blogging shouldn’t be a one and done strategy. You should work to keep the relationship with these bloggers alive for as long as you can. Just because you post a piece of content on their site once, doesn’t mean you can’t get another piece published in the future. Reach out to them often, ask them to share your content through social channels and continue to share theirs. You can also ask them to post your other types of content like infographics and videos. With just a little effort on your part, you can have a “link building partner” for life.

One of my favorite ways to generate natural links coming into a website is by creating and publishing link bait. One form of link bait that I really enjoy and have a lot of success with is being one of the first to blog about current events happening in your industry.

With the roll out of Google Instant, the almighty search engine has gotten pretty close to indexing new content published in as little as a few minutes. Add some Diggs, Stumbles, and Tweets within the first 30-60 minutes and you’ve got instant visibility!

You’re probably thinking… But Greg, my industry is so boring, there is no way for me to find things to blog about, let alone current events. I beg to differ… Your industry is not boring, you’re boring! And you’re not thinking outside the box.

For example, I have a client who manufacturers wood flooring used on college basketball courts. What could my client possibly blog about that would be interesting? Let me give you a hint… there was some sort of a basketball tournament that was wrapped up in the last week. Imagine if you were one of the first who published a blog post announcing the winner of the NCAA Final Four tournament? You would not only drive loads of traffic, but people will consider you as a resource and link to you. It’s really a beautiful thing.

Let’s consider another example. I also have a client who manufacturers and sells wedding dresses. Again, what could my client say about wedding dresses that hasn’t already been said thousands of times before? What if my client started to blog about celebrity weddings, providing details and photos, and was one of the first to publish these posts? Same scenario as above… You will drive loads of traffic and people will link to you.

As I shared in my webinar a few weeks back, I leverage this exact strategy on a website I own that sells tungsten wedding rings. I blog about recent celebrity engagements and provide pictures of their engagement/wedding ring and I see huge success. I know it’s kind of embarrassing to share, but I watch E! News & read US Weekly on a regular basis to get the scoop on engagements so I can post the content as soon as possible. It’s truly all about being smarter than the next guy!

So, to get started, I would first identify the types of people, businesses, organizations, etc who would use your product or service. Then, figure out how they use your product or service. Once you know this, you should be able to come up with some clever ways to produce content that would be interesting for people, especially if you can tie it back into a current event.

Good luck! Any questions/comments that add to the discussion are always encouraged and appreciated!

I am a huge believer in starting a reputation management campaign in the initial phases of launching your business, or even launching a simple website selling an affiliate product.

The purpose behind this strategy is twofold: One, it provides you an opportunity to fill the search engine results pages with relevant content about your business, your website, or even your executives, before anyone else can come in and dirty them up. Second, it allows you to take that content and strengthen it via backlinks and other methods so that if you do screw up or have a disgruntled customer posting negative online content, yours is aged, more authoritative, and is harder to outrank.

So, this sounds good right? Sure it does!

But how do you get started?

First

You need to identify certain properties you would like showing up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for the names you want to protect. Obviously, I want to make sure my website is ranked #1 for the search query. I will also set myself up to capture positions 2 and possibly 3 in the SERPs by having a blog and other authoritative pages on my site.

Next

Identify the basic Web properties you know that you can have full control over. These are sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Squidoo, and HubPages. You might also look at building a Wikipedia page, although it’s a bit more risky since you don’t have full control over the content of the page. I will then take the time to build out an optimized profile on each of these sites and begin interlinking them and building some external backlinks to them as well. For your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn profiles, you might also link to them from the footer of your website to help pass your site’s authority to those properties.

And Next

After you have the properties set up and optimized, you definitely aren’t done. The sole purpose of these is to keep any negative content from creeping up to page one of the results. To better your chances of success, you will continually need to strengthen them through different methods.

Building external backlinks will help, but often times they only get you so far. One way I like to strengthen these properties is by finding ways to build internal links. With just a few internal links from pages with a lot of authority, your company’s profile pages will quickly start to rise in the SERPs, and have staying power.

There are other methods and strategies you can execute to strengthen these pages, but this should help you get off on the right foot. The most important things to remember are that one: you need to be proactive and not reactive when it comes to reputation management. Start early and push hard to protect your what’s rightfully yours. And two: pick properties that you can control. Nothing is worse than putting out some content to assist in the reputation management process and finding out that you aren’t able to moderate comments and you just shot yourself in the foot.