How To Write A Blog Post Like A Pro

Everyone has a blog these days. My dad (just turned sixty last month) has three. He has his business blog, his personal blog and he’s got a twitter blog where he’s writing a novel at 140 character installments six days a week. ??So what makes your blog special, and how do you write a snappy, eye-catching, engaging blog post every time?

Journalism 101

Seriously, if you want to write a blog and you’ve not taken a basic course in journalistic writing, do so. You’ll discover ‘The Inverted Pyramid’ and a semester’s worth of other concepts that can be applied directly to your blog. A creative writing course would be nice, too, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Most important are the 5 W’s: Who, What, When, Where and Why. Here’s a crash course.

Who are you Writing For?

It’s a simple question, sure, but it can have a difficult answer. Who will be reading your blog post? Are you writing for ten year olds or twenty-something’s? Do you intend to be read by colleagues, fans, friends, employers, locals, internationals, or bi-lingual’s?

Having a targeted demographic will help you to picture your audience while you’re writing your blog. It will help you to choose a tone, vocabulary, and topic that will appeal to them, as well as be understood by them. More important than knowing what you’ll be saying is knowing who you’ll be saying it to.

What Will You Be Writing About?

This one is pretty simple, really: “What is this blog post about?” If your blog is designed to share your adventures with friends and family while you’re teaching English in South Korea, your topic is already decided. If it’s more of a soap-box upon which you champion a political stance and ideology, you might have a little more work cut out for you in coming up with a topic.

When Will This Be Posted?

It’s at this point that I have to confess that I’ve modified the journalistic “5 W’s,” in order to better meet my own needs. The original ‘When’ refers to “When did the event happen?” That doesn’t work well in an overall guide for writing blogs. So instead I’ve chosen “When Will This Be Posted.”

You need to decide whether or not you’ll be posting immediately, delaying the publishing date, or even implying that it has been posted weeks prior to the day you actually wrote it. Knowing this while you’re writing allows you to maintain continuity with other posts you may have written. If it’s an article about Halloween posted in April, you might want to explain why.

Where Will This Be Seen?

You know your audience, your topic and your time, now know your stage. Does your blog have any recurring themes, concepts or standards you have to adhere to? Is it moderated by an outside censor or is it governed by your own good judgment?

Second to deciding who will be reading it, knowing where it will be read will help you to craft an appropriate tone and vocabulary. These are key components of the ‘voice’ of your piece.

Why Are You Writing?

I’m not getting metaphysical on you. If you’re an artist, poet, or novelist, you could be writing to express yourself, or gain exposure. If you’re an activist you could be writing this blog to engender awareness and provide a voice to the voiceless. If you’re a fan you could simply be pointing out why United is better than City (over and over and over again), or if you’re a freelance writer you could simply be trying to build a good name and reputation for yourself while sharing useful and hard-earned knowledge as a guest poster on quality websites.

Having an honest answer for this final ‘W’ enables you to write your post with purpose and drive. Your readers’ time is too precious to waste with unclear thoughts and ramblings. Make sure you always know why you’re writing, and why it matters to your reader.

and “How.”

Like the five vowels ending in ‘and sometimes Y,’ our 5 W’s end with a “How.”

The concepts above aren’t a magic key to always writing good blog posts, but it’s how you start. It’s an easy to remember mnemonic device for building a foundation before you type every blog post. I take the time before I sit down to actually write out the five W’s and then build my article on top of them. That’s how I do it.

Jake Walker is a freelance writer and has been working on the web on and off for the last 10 years. An avid blogger he has had many posts featured on major social networks and other news portal websites. He currently works as a search engine optimization consultant with the other smart people at SEOP.com

3 Things To Look For When Building Links

Building links should be the corner stone of any SEO campaign.

1. One Way Links

This became important after all the link exchange programs started sprouting up in hopes of manipulating search results. For a while it worked. Now, the best kind of link is not recipricol. One way links only please.

2. Backlinks To Linking Site

You will want to check the backlinks pointing into a site when considering it for a linking partner. No pagerank isnt everything, but it might be a good indication of the quality of links a site has pointing into it.

Remember, neighborhoods are important. So associate with quality sites. And don’t be afraid to link to quality when it makes sense for your reader.

3. Number of outbound Links On Linking Page

The more links pointing out, the less juice a link has. That’s the bottom line. It’s always best to have as few outbounds as possible on a page where you’re placing your link. However, it should be said that a link is a link, so don’t be too picky about outbounds, unless you’re paying for the placement.

PRO TIP:
The best links are the ones that occur naturally, because you have a good website with quality content.

Good luck and happy link building!

This is a guest post from our friends at Top Click Media.  Please visit their site for more search engine optimisation information.

On-Site SEO that Works

There is a ton of misinformation on the web about which SEO techniques work and which don’t.  As always, you should read with caution and test for yourself.

The #1 rule for on-site is SEO is relevance.  Make sure that the site or page you are trying to rank is relevant and useful for the visitors that click on your primary keyword.  A clean, straight to the point site will be appreciated by your visitors.  Use custom web design techniques which enhance the subject matter, don’t go over-the-top with flash, moving graphics, or anything distracting.

Start at the top.  The title of your page should feature your primary keywords and tell visitors and search engines what the focus of your page/site is.  Once you have attracted traffic to your site, they should instantly be able to see content which directly addresses the keywords you’ve placed in your title.  Article, video, or post headers should feature the keywords.

You can’t cram a ton of info onto your homepage, so include excepts with links to back pages that expand on the subject matter of the keywords.  According to Web Design Richmond you should keep the focus of the page simple and concise.  Function over form.

You want to make your site as clean and crisp as possible.  Even though most people have fast connections such as cable or satellite internet you don’t want to miss out on vital new consumers that are still kick’n it old school with dial-up.

Finally, make sure your link structure is easy to follow and intutive for finding information on your site.

For most legitimate web sites, the above steps will be all the on-site SEO necessary.  If you have a particularly large site, consider a site map.  For most though, they are unnecessary.  Keep it simple, stay focused, and above all – be useful!

Trimming Your PPC Fat

In order to meet your conversion objectives in a pay per click campaign with AdWords, it will be of critical importance to manage the costs of your campaign. Controlling spending throughout your campaign occurs at a number of levels. You can make a small number of manual changes that can cut your costs. A more practical solution though is to employ automatic software— particularly software that has control over bid management—as these programs are able to automatically adjust costs for keywords.

First you will want to determine your costs on the level of the campaign. If your campaign is utilizing both Google’s ad networks as well as its content networks, then you will want to set up a campaign that exclusively targets the search aspect and a duplicate campaign that focuses on the content side. Creating these separate campaigns will allow to you control spending for each one separately, so you can find optimum costs that maximize the utility of each campaign. In your content based campaigns it is also important to use exclusions for both site and category terms that will prevent your click dollars being spent by putting your ads on unrelated websites.

When your campaign has gotten started and you are seeing some results, you will want to analyze the data coming back on your top performing keywords, and adjust their spending so that you can see even more returns on them. In addition to this, you can also add new query match formats for your existing and underperforming keywords to boost their functionality, allowing you to develop a unique bid for every match type that you are using.

Be sure to monitor the quality scores of all of your keywords. Stop using terms that have zero conversions and/or low quality scores, as they are essentially wasting your time and money. Remember, that your keyword’s quality score will affect its cost per click and its estimate in bids for the first page. Quality Score also affects the ranking of your ad and its eligibility to be featured in an ad auction.

When you are working with an insurmountable number of key words, it is simply not possible to manage them by hand, you will require the assistance of software to help manage your spending for each of your selected terms. The following list details a number of management tools that will help you to adjust your campaign spending in the most efficient manner possible:

• Acquisio SEARCH. This is a top of the line, well programmed pay per click bid management tool. It is able to offer suggestions on which keywords should be paused, alerts you by email to keywords that are given low quality scores, and allows you to set programmable cost per click values for your keywords.
• Clickable. This tool is able to offer performance enhancing recommendations for your campaign. It will indicate calculated and reasonable bid increases on high performing keywords, a reduction of bids on your lower performing keywords, or alerting you when keywords have not met their first page estimates.
• DoubleClick DART Search. This tool is able to automatically bid on any of your keywords a maximum of twelve times daily. You can create a bid strategy that is executed based on a variety of factors concerning your keywords.
• Omniture SearchCenter. This tool offers the standard bid management tactics that you find in such software which includes portfolio based or rules based routines. This tool also features day-parting, but this comes standard with almost any modern pay per click engine.
• Podium adCore. This tool can adjust your bids on a wide level and will allow you to remove underperforming words that do not meet specific performance requirements.

Though these tools sound like they will have your campaign running itself, it will still require regular human intervention, if only to collect your earnings. Though these tools will help maximize your profits, they still require solid human generated ideas to be truly effective. If you give your campaign the human touch that it needs and employ the tools above, your campaign will really start gaining steam and really getting your ads out there!

SEO In The Dating Niche

Dating is one of the most competitive industries when it comes to the web because so many well funded sites are appearing to grab their piece of the pie. The paid dating sites have huge revenue budgets to allow them to spend a fortune in SEO as well as advertising and promotion in general. The free sites however are able to recruit thousands of members which create thousands of internal pages on their websites creating a very strong search engine optimized site.

Both free and paid dating sites have their advantages and disadvantages, but for this case study we will discuss smart SEO techniques for promoting a free internet dating site that has an average monthly advertising budget but needs to do smart SEO. The simple SEO techniques still apply, such as strong on site content as well as submitting the site to a plethora of strong directories. The problem with being in the dating niche is that there are not a lot of dating related blogs like there are in other industries. This lack of normal every-day-joe blog’s means dating webmasters need to make up for it somewhere else, and that usually means it is a competition of buying the most links.

However, with a smart search engine optimization plan, this is not necessary. The are the recommended link building strategies for a site in the competitive dating niche would be social bookmarking, blog commenting, press releases, strong internal structure, and throwing a small contest to attract bloggers to write a dating site that they otherwise wouldn’t have on their blogs. Hope this is a good start for all of you in the free dating niche!