Blog Marketing

You want to submit to each of the services below. Be sure to read my notes after the services that have them. This will GREATLY increase your traffic if you follow my advise! Wordpress users for the xml sitemap you need the plugin, read my article on wordpress plugins!

XML sitemap submission sites:

Yahoo xml sitemap submission you will need a yahoo account
MSN xml services (submit through regular site form)
Google Webmaster Tools XML Sitemap submission (This can get your site listed in as fast as 30 minutes)

Communities and directories every blogger needs:

Spicy Page (You want to be an highly active member at this site)
Fuel My Blog (You want to be an highly active member at this site)
My BlogLog
Blog Catalog (You want to be an highly active member on this sites forums! Also learning about broadcasts can get you some one way links!)
Blog TopList (You want to join this toplist. Read the rules, get visitors to vote for you! Vote for me while you are there!)
Bloggarama
Blogged.com
Blog Hop
Globe of Blogs
Blog Swirl (Its new but I have a feeling its a directory worth paying attention to.)

Blog Search Engines:

Blog Digger
Blog Pulse
Google Blog Search
Ice Rocket
Plazoo News and Rss
Read A Blog

If you have more directories and submission sites for BLOGGERS ONLY please please please let me know. I will add another list at a later date of directories and searches that are useful for bloggers but also accept other websites.

There is a common problem with blogs and search engine optimization. The problem is that you want your blog itself found by searching certain terms, and then you want your posts found under different terms. The problem that plagues most bloggers is the blogs keywords change from post to post.

This means depending on the day and time you may or may not be found by searching your blogs main keywords. Why? Because the posts may or may not contain the main keywords of your blog. So how do we avoid this problem?

Well I don’t know how with other blogs but with wordpress blogs there is an easy way. Wordpress allows you to have a different home page from the page your posts are on. This means you can have a static front page and still each of your posts will be found on the search engines!

Now to set this up first you must log on your administration dashboard and create two new pages. Name one of the pages “blog” and the other “home”. We can change this later but for now they are good defaults. Neither of the pages have to say anything at this point. We are just setting it up so we can edit it later. After you have the blank pages go to your reading settings. You should see two options, front page, and posts page.

Change both settings, the posts page should be set to the page you created call “blog”, the front page should be set to “home”. Save your settings and go view your blog. You should have your blank home page, and then a page called blog containing all your posts!

Now you want to create a home page that explains exactly why you are their and what users can expect to find on your blog. It is very helpful to open your page source and view your keywords so you can use them in your page.

You want to use your keywords as often as you can without appearing to “spam-like”. Each time you use your keywords surround them with either <strong> or <b>. You want to use some of your keywords at both the top and the bottom of your page. Using keywords about 3 times each is a good practice.

You also want to make sure your front page has 113 words or more. Why 113? I am not going to share that information. I will say trust me in the fact that you want at least 113. Also when spreading out your keywords you want a ratio of 1:13. For every thirteen words on your page one should be a keyword. This means your text should have at the very least 9 keywords for 113 word page.

When I say keywords I am not just referring to the words. I am referring to key phrases as well. Anything in your <meta keywords> tags.

Now you also want to make sure of one thing. If you are still logged into your dashboard, go to your “appearance editor”. Find the file called “header” and open it. You should see a bunch of source code that may or may not make sense to you.

You want to make sure you find your <title> … </title> tags and make sure they are placed directly after your <head> tag. This is very important for certain search engines! If they are not you want to move them there!

You also want to go back to your home page editor and make sure if you didn’t already that you add keywords to it! Do this with the all in one seo plugin mentioned in my post Blogging Basics – Getting ready for your first post

Okay now I am jumping around a little bit here but I suppose thats because I am a scatter brain. Please bear with me. Back to the actual home page. When creating this you want to make sure you have at LEAST one image in the page and you want to add an alt=”some keyword” into it. Search engines LOVE seeing keywords in the images. It gives the page a lot more relevance even if you don’t care about image searches!

One last piece of advise I have is when adding links to your front page, if at all possible, add links with keywords as text! This also helps your rankings a lot but is very hard to achieve (how do you link to a site with your keywords without appearing spammy?

Hopefully these tips help someone. I klnowe my brain is a bit scattered so it may be confusing. If you find this hard to follow, post a comment and I will happily explain anything!

Lets face it, sooner or later one of three things is going to happen. You are either going to have to heavily research a topic you don’t know a lot about, you are not going to have time to write up an article for whatever reason, or you are going to have a case of writers block.

Now many people are going to recommend when these things happen to use article spinners. An article spinner is a program that takes someone elses articles and re-writes them so you can use them on your own site. Stay away from this type of software!

First of all, article spinners don’t work correctly. They make you look like you are a foreigner just learning the English language! They do not always correctly format sentences, and they usually spin out articles that are less then quality. When a visitor comes to your page, they see this type of article and never return. Trust me on this!

Rather then the article spinners what you want is an article generator. The difference is an article generator goes to a lot of sites and gathers information from a multitude of sources and pieces together totally unique and original articles.

The reality is most of the software for generating articles are not good either. However I have found one that is not only quality, in my opinion it is just amazing. The only set back to the software is it requires a monthly subscription. Honestly I can say I have used the program, and it works! Its worth its weight in gold!

Before I tell you of the software and where to signup for the service, first I want to show you a video of exactly how the software works. I highly recommend watching this video. I am certain you will be so impressed by it you will see the value of the service and signup for yourself. Just like I did!

Now are you impressed? Are you interested in this software and where to signup for the service? I thought you might be. So check it out! Instant Article Wizard Pro!

Okay due to some recent complications there is a very very small chance that my website will have to relocate. On the off chance you find yourself at my website, only its gone, there is another way to get here.

I have an alternative address that can ALWAYS be used and will likely always be valid. That address is theda420.info. Please bookmark or store this URL somewhere.

Also I can always be reached via email at 00purple@gmail.com Add me to your contact list now please. I assure you if you do this you will ALWAYS be able to find this website!

Now why am I giving you all this information on ways to find the site and contact me? Because I wrote a software package. That’s correct! I wrote a software package that cleans up garbage useless registry keys from trial software that is no longer installed on your computer.

I started selling this software for $7.00! The problem is this software also cleans out things like trial software counters, so certain trial softwares can be used again and again. The software companies of these trial softwares (specifically two) don’t like what my program does.

It basically means you could use my software to never pay for their software! So these two companies have threatened me with lawsuits (no biggie).

One of these two companies have also falsely reported me for spam on digg and had successfully had my account closed. This same company also has contacted my AWESOME web hosting provider justfree.com and claimed I am selling pirated software.

So far justfree has not contacted me about this, but I did contact them as I was forwarded a copy of the email. I told them of what is happening but ultimately this decision is theirs.

Just to be on the safe side I am stressing you keep a record of both my email and my alternative web address. Thanks for reading, and I am available to answer any questions about either my software or this legal matter.

Because of this software

After you have been blogging for a while you will discover the number one method of gaining readership on a blog is actually through the use of blog comments.

First it creates a link back to your site, second others who read your comments and want to check out your stuff, have a chance. Now in the past there have only been two ways to comment on other blogs.

The first method is the whitehat method. This method involves searching for related blogs and reading the contents, then making a well thought out reply based on the article in question.

The problem with this method is its EXTREMELY time consuming. You need to make thousands of comments on blogs to get any sort of real traffic. This means you are going to be spending more time making comments then anything else. Not very appealing.

The other method is of course the blackhat method. The blackhat method requires a software to gather up related blogs and then send out a predefined comment to all of them.

The problem with this method is your comments are spam and its very obvious! No matter how well you write your spam comments, people will spot them. After all without reading an article, how are you going to make a well thought out reply to it?

So how do we do this the greyhat way and get the best of both worlds? First you need a firefox plugin called easyComment 1.1 (this also works with the the flock browser).

The easyComment plugin works by automatically filling the name, website, email, and comment fields of any wordpress blog comment form. Unfortunately at this point the plugin only works with wordpress blogs, not blogger or any of the other available blogging software.

When setting up the autoComment plugin you need a default comment that can be easily changed and doesn’t look like spam. I have pasted an example comment below so you can understand what I mean.

Hi there, this is my first time visiting your site and man I love it. This isn’t the kind of blog I normally read but the picture of “look around site and find a picture to prove you visited the blog” really drew me in. I am highly impressed. I will definitely return here again!

Now you should be able to see just based on my example comment what I am about to tell you. When you fill out the comment form on easyComment, make it so you can quickly glance around whatever blog you are at and pull out some key piece of information in a hurry, and replace the string in your comment.

After you have easyComment setup all you have to do is go to googles blog search and do a search for a keyword that has relevance to your blog. It helps if you change your preferences on google so you are displaying 100 results in your search listings.

Visit each page on the list and click the small text “easyComment” in the status bar of your web browser (see picture on the top left of this article if unclear). If the blog is a wordpress blog, the comment form will automatically be filled in, then just quickly finish the comment, submit, and go to another page.

If the blog is not a wordpress blog you will get an error saying “no comment form found”. If this happens, just go to the next blog on the list. Using this method you can easily comment on about 100 blogs in an hour.

Best of all they have a personal touch that shows you didn’t spam. )

My blog is one month old today. This is my 16th post. I have over 100 comments. This article explains how!

I get asked it all the time, how am I so successful. Why is it others are using my tips and not finding the same level of success as I am. Is there a secret not being shared?

The answer is yes there is a secret not being shared. Its not being shared because its so simple people over look it all the time.

Lets say for example you just started your blog, and have made a few posts, but you want to get someone other then you to look at it. What do you think the fastest way to get traffic is? Any idea?

The absolute fastest way is by picking up the phone and calling up your friends and saying “hey check this out I started my own blog, tell me what you think?”. Who of your friends is going to refuse to check your blog out?

So what does this have to do with marketing online? Everything!

See the trick to marketing on the internet is simple. Stop trying to get traffic to your blog. Use tools that help you make friends! Build internet relationships with people. Rather then trying to get on top of google, try to make new friends using websites like myspace, twitter, and facebook.

When I say make new friends, I mean make friends not get friends on your friends lists! Interact with people, email them, get them on instant messangers, follow what they do, make comments to them, ask questions about the things they do, take a real interest in your friends!

You should treat every relationship you develop as a new potential client. You should treat every new potential client the same way you would treat a new boyfriend/girlfriend! Would you ignore the things your potential partner says and expect they will still listen to you, trust you, or pay you any attention at all?

Treat you potential clients the same way!

Yes I send out mass friend requests on myspace. Yes I send out mass twitter follows. However I also follow up on all of them and start conversations and build relationships!

I do the EXACT same thing on website forums. Sure I could go and post just for the link, but I find it more beneficial to not only post, but reach out to the person I am posting to.

I tell them if they need help with anything they can contact my private email. I find certain people on forums and follow what they say and comment to them over and over on multiple threads so a relationship is built. I am not just making random posts I am directing them at someone so they notice me and become interested in what I do because we become online friends!

So do I use programs to automate my success, yes! Its the only way to get fast traffic and a fast following! But I follow up with those people to ensure they follow me and don’t just add me and forget me!

First let me explain what black and white hat marketing is.

Blackhat marketing is an online method of marketing that involves breaking the rules. Whose rules are you breaking? Depends on the sites you want listed on!

If you are using myspace for example, its considered blackhat marketing if you are using a program like FriendBlasterPro to mass friend requests, make mass mailings, and add mass comments.

Whitehat marketing is following the rules to a tee. Using the same myspace example a whitehat marketer would never use a program like FriendBlasterPro on myspace because they say any automated software is against the rules.

The whitehat marketer instead slowly hand selects his friends list. He builds a relationship with them. They grow to know and trust that person. The image of the person remains flawless. A great network of people is built this way. Your friends are interested in what you have to say because they are real friends not just a random person at the other end of a screen you have never even chatted with.

So for a long time running now there has been a debate over which method is better to use. Whitehat marketers argue they build a company brand and become well known and trusted businesses and this is why they are successful.

Blackhat marketers argue that their method is based on a numbers game and can therefore be achieved quickly. If you spam 2,000,000 people it may not be the right thing to do, but its two million people who may have never heard of your company had you not spammed (not all spam revolves around email or is illegal).

What the top professionals are not telling anyone is that both methods are right and both methods are losing out because of it!

I use a method called greyhat marketing. Its called greyhat marketing because in the world there are three ways to live. Live in the white never breaking any laws, living in the black always breaking laws, or living in the grey and usually not breaking laws but when you do, its done so tactfully. Greyhat marketing follows that same logic.

This is the method professional marketing firms use! This is what the self proclaimed SEO guys don’t understand. Go to a major corporation like coca cola or pepsi, their paid marketing teams are using these methods. The guys you hire who claim to be SEO experts are fake!!!!!

So now its time to teach you about greyhat marketing. Greyhat marketing takes the best of both worlds, blackhat and whitehat, and uses the knowledge to its advantage.

For this example I am going to use twitter because its where I have currently been doing the most greyhat marketing.

First I created free account with tweetlater. This program/account allows me to do a lot of things but I only use it for 2 very basic things.

I use it to auto follow anyone who follows me. This means I don’t have to go through my list each day and check who is following me and return the favor. Its automated.

I also use it to send a direct messages to anyone who follows me thanking them for following me and recommending them to link exploder, my free traffic building program.

I am not entirely sure yet if this program is considered blackhat or whitehat. However when I team it up with the next program I have to show you, it definitely becomes a blackhat method!

I use a program called hummingbird. Hummingbird is a program used to mass follow people and mass unfollow those who don’t follow back. This builds a huge twitter list of followers in a big hurry if you use it to its full potential. This program is not allowed by twitter and is definitely blackhat!

Because I am doing greyhat marketing I don’t use hummingbird to its full potential. I have added a little over 850 people in a couple days with this program, but then I stopped using it for a while. Why? Because its time to work on the whitehat side of things.

This is where I sit back and make comments and start conversations back and forth with the new people on my follower list. I help them solve problems if I can. I talk to them about everyday things. For example I just talked to one guy about how to open a beer bottle without a bottle opener.

I am building relationships with people in a hurry because of this. I get to know a massive amount of people all at once rather then a few at time. After a few days of talking with various new people on my list, I will do the process all over again and start talking to even more people.

This way people get to know me on a personal basis and my image gets a brand just like those big corporations. People trust me very much because they see I am real! They see I not only know what I am talking about, but I also know when to kick back and be friendly and real.

This is greyhat marketing at its finest. Its using the tools of a blackhat marketer that allows a quick presence and following with the tactics of white hat marketing to build the business reputation only a quality business can build.

Now for all you twitters out there wondering about the $200 twitter application known as hummingbird, I can get the exact same software to you for $7.00! This is NOT pirated software and it IS legal!

How? I tell you the download link of the free 35 hour free trial. Then I send you a small file with some instructions on how to keep that trial software forever without registering. Its not pirated software. I am not sending you a crack for the software. I and not sending you a serial/registration number. You will not have an unlimited copy of this softtware. You will have a free for life trial copy. (which has very little if any limitations)

If you want this software for $7.00 leave a comment on this post with your email address and I will get back to you as soon as I can! You must have a paypal account to get the software for $7.00!

When I first got into the business of blogging there were an infinite number of programs and software packages that claimed to submit your website to thousands of search engines, or they claimed to get you on top of search results.

Basically they all had some gimmick they were trying to promote that would promise to get you result but did nothing to deliver them. Honestly I shamefully admit I tried software after software and had failure after failure. I even paid money for a lot of these programs.

After many failing programs I vowed not to waste my time on software.

Then about 6 months ago I got into a marketing practice known as article writing (I will explain this in another article at a later date). Because of this method of marketing I started looking for software that would automate my submitting articles to hundreds of websites.

I never did find the software I was looking for, but I did run across a different software. It was a submission software, but it was also promising a lot more then any submission software I had previously tried.

What was even better is they had a free version of the software available. The software is called WebCeo.

When I downloaded the trial I was very skeptical. So I went to what was familiar to me, the submission section of the software. Well to say I am impressed is an understatement!

The first thing I notice is this website has nearly 200 websites that I can automatically submit to. Then they have another list of what they call “semi automated”. This list was AMAZING!!!

They have free search engines and directories, they have paid search engines, they have pay per click search engines, they have shopping search engines, they have press release sites and news sites, they have a limited number of top article directories, they have a list of blog directories, they have a list of blog communities, and a list of sites to submit your sitemaps too. All this is in the free version!

What really is impressive though is the fact everything I have listed thus far is not even a small piece of what this software can do. It also automates link trades, allows you to manage pay per click (PPC) campaigns, helps you find search keywords that will benefit your site, tells you how to change your site to get better results on those keywords, checks links and ranks in all the major search engines, monitors an infinite number of important things like website uptime status and website traffic reports.

Honestly I kid you not all this is 100% free.

The software was so good in fact I did something I never do. I started looking at the difference in the free and the paid versions. I was really impressed by what they were offering so I opted for their professional package. What I learned is honestly for a single blog all you need is the SmallBiz Edition which is CONSIDERABLY cheaper.

However I am honestly not trying to sell you the software. It sells itself. Try the free (it is freeware NOT shareware) version and I am certain you will be so incredibly happy and impressed you will buy the software also!

After you have been blogging a couple days you are definitely going to start getting antsy about how to get people reading. So how do you go from having a blog no one knows about to one that is getting good exposure?

I have a method that I can guarantee will bring you in 100 visitors a day for the first month. After the first month, the traffic will slowly start to die down so this is only quality traffic for starting your blog (or if you haven’t used the method in a few months).

To correctly do this method you are going to need 5 email accounts (I recommend gmail.com) and you are going to need a 5 url shortening service’s.

http://is.gd/
http://tinyurl.com/
http://myturl.com/
http://shorl.com/
http://notlong.com/

You will need 5 accounts at http://www.linkreferral.com a free manual traffic generating system.

To sign up for 5 accounts you will need to use a separate email for each account (hense the 5 email addresses).

Also you will need a different URL for each account. So as you are asked for your url, use each of the 5 url shortening services to create 5 separate urls for your website.

To do this, go to a url shorting site, type in your blog address, then click save (or shorten or whatever the button says). Copy the new short url and use that url on link referral as your blogs url. Do this 5 times for 5 different urls of your page

As you are signing up each time, you will be asked to place your link in the directory. To do this you must pick a category. You want to pick 5 different MAIN categories for your links.

I recommend 1 of them being “Miscellaneous” and another being “Social / Personal Pages “. The last 3 can vary depending on the topic of your blog.

You also must pick a sub category for each link. This is no nig deal because you can change these as often as you like as long as you stay in the main category.

Now all you have to do is each day for the entire month (about 30 days) goto http://www.linkreferral.com and login under each email address and follow the rules (it takes about 20 minutes each account, just under 2 hours for all 5 accounts). It may seem like a lot of work, but watch your traffic go from 0 to 100 OVERNIGHT!

Change your subcategories every 2 to 3 days for maximum exposure!

This method goes against the rules and although it works, can get your account canceled. I have used this method on other sites but do not use this method for marketing this blog.

When creating blog posts keep something in mind, this is online print! This is a blog. This is not a book! People are reading the things you write off of a computer screen.

This makes a big difference in the way you should be writing. Online people don’t want to see big paragraphs and lengthly speeches. They want to see something that is short and sweet and to the point.

In reality the length of the post is not what matters, its how big the post appears to be. To make a post appear shorter, the paragraphs should be shorter then usual.

Instead of having 5 or 6 long sentences in a paragraph that make up a complete though, have 3 or 4 very short sentances and a thought carried out between 2 paragraphs. People don’t mind reading 4 short sentences at a time! But they DO mind reading 5 or 6 long ones.

Another thing to keep in mind is the size and style of font you use. You want a font and a font size that is very easy to read. The smaller the font the harder it is to read and the less likely someone will actually read what you have to say.

Likewise you don’t want a script type font (a font that looks like cursive writing). This is much hard to read then a standard font such as arial or times new roman.

There are actually thousands of tips I could give you about writing. Honestly writing for the internet can have many factors such as the types of words you use, when to use bold or italic font, when to use smaller or larger text, when text headers are meant to be used, and a great deal of other things.

If you are going to be serious about blogging on the internet I highly suggest you learn about the power of word online. My personal recommendation is the book Net Words: Creating High-Impact Online Copy

I personally own a copy of this book and it has helped me immensely. I think the author of the book is brilliant in his methods of marketing with text and I think anyone who take the time to read it will find their online writing style will greatly improve!