Coming soon…
I”m in the process of starting a master list of websites with blog directories, or that take blog submissions. If you have a site, know of a site or are even thinking of developing a site with a blog directory, or similar give me a shout!
What’s in it for you? Well, at the very least a link on this page to your site or blog from your comments. If you own a site, you’ll be receiving a link to your site of course on our main list.
This article by Simon Clarke really sums up what effective blogging is all about. Many of us do one or two of these, but when you follow all 10 steps, your blog begins to take authority and demands instant respect.
A weblog can be a powerful resource for a coach. Many coaches have achieved significant exposure over the web with their own Blogs, not to mention the extensive professional networking opportunities that the ‘Blogosphere’ can provide.
So if you want to Blog, what do you need to consider? Here are IQ’s top ten tips to assist you launch into the Blogosphere:
1. Niche It
When considering your Blog’s content, make sure you are considering what your niche will seek. If you are planning to develop a Blog to increase your profile, your content will reflect how you position yourself to your prospects. Therefore, write content that matters to them.
2. Search It
Enable search mechanisms in your Blog. Most Blog platforms provide these as easy-to-install widgets at no cost. This function will allow your readers to quickly find content they are after, thus improving the efficiency in which your message will be delivered.
3. Link It
Link your Blog to your personal profile and website (if you have one). Most platforms will provide a Bio page where you can include your qualifications, experience, personal interests and other relevant information. This is a good opportunity to introduce yourself from an up-close position, allowing your readers to identify themselves with their ‘prospective coach’ (include a professionally-looking photo in your bio).
4. Contact It
Make sure you allow your readers to contact you. Some Blog use email links, other use forms – either way, ensure your readers can get to you (and do so without having to spend several minutes looking for your email address or telephone number within your Blog pages).
5. Categorize It
Create meaningful and concise categories to organise your content. If you are serious about Blogging, soon you will have plenty of content which will need to be well-organised to attract readers. Good categories will likely generate a good first impression from your Blog’s potential readers.
6. Domain It
Register a domain name and direct it to your Blog. It is a low investment which can generate an excellent level of return, and also reinforce your brand. Furthermore, it adds a professional touch to your page.
7. Disseminate It
Register your Blog in as many directories and registries as you can. Get your blog out there so people can find your content. You can start by creating a Feedburner account to distribute your feeds (and also take advantage of their automated email notifications, amongst several other tools) and then claiming your Blog at Technorati. Then look for other registries such as Google Blog Search and Blog Top Sites to multiply your presence on the web.
8. Syndicate It
Publish your posts at news syndication sites such as Digg. These websites represent a large margin of the Internet’s web traffic and if your posts prove to be appealing, it could direct more traffic to your Blog than anything else.
9. Network It
Develop relationships with other Bloggers who have the same client profile as you have. Reciprocal links, cross-promotions, and many other web-marketing strategies can help you leverage your content and increase your exposure over the web.
10. IQ It
The most important aspect of all is the quality of your content. Writing superb content will get your Blog on top. Conversely, writing poor content will slowly kill your efforts to create a professional Blog and attract prospects to your business. And if your Blog has great content to offer, it could become one of Coach IQ Coaching Club’s recommended resources!
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Simon Clarke has over 15 years of experience as a writer, entrepreneur and business specialist. He is also the founder and Director of the Life Coaching Institute and the Australian Institute of Professional Counsellors: both industry leading training providers in Australia and overseas.
Just wrote a short blurb on my other blog that deals with online marketing.
An eyetracking study has been done that followed how people actually view your website. The images posted are more than just eyeopening. They show you how to layout a website and in what order for real, human, visitors.
Duplicate content is one of the problems that we regularly come across as part of the search engine optimization services we offer. If the search engines determine your site contains similar content, this may result in penalties and even exclusion from the search engines. Fortunately it’s a problem that is easily rectified.
Your primary weapon of choice against duplicate content can be found within “The Robot Exclusion Protocol” which has now been adopted by all the major search engines. There are two ways to control how the search engine spiders index your site.
1. The Robot Exclusion File or “robots.txt” and
2. The Robots Tag
The Robots Exclusion File (Robots.txt)
This is a simple text file that can be created in Notepad. Once created you must upload the file into the root directory of your website e.g. www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. Before a search engine spider indexes your website they look for this file which tells them exactly how to index your site’s content. The use of the robots.txt file is most suited to static html sites or for excluding certain files in dynamic sites. If the majority of your site is dynamically created then consider using the Robots Tag.
Creating your robots.txt file
Example 1 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search engine spiders and make the entire site available for indexing. The robots.txt file would look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Explanation
The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders. By leaving the “Disallow” blank all parts of the site are suitable for indexing.
Example 2 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search engine spiders and to stop the spiders from indexing the faq, cgi-bin the images directories and a specific page called faqs.html contained within the root directory, the robots.txt file would look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /faq/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /faqs.html
Explanation
The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders. Preventing access to the directories is achieved by naming them, and the specific page is referenced directly. The named files & directories will now not be indexed by any search engine spiders.
Example 3 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to the Google spider, googlebot and stop it from indexing the faq, cgi-bin, images directories and a specific html page called faqs.html contained within the root directory, the robots.txt file would look like this:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /faq/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /faqs.html
Explanation
By naming the particular search spider in the “User-agent” you prevent it from indexing the content you specify. Preventing access to the directories is achieved by simply naming them, and the specific page is referenced directly. The named files & directories will not be indexed by Google.
That’s all there is to it!
As mentioned earlier the robots.txt file can be difficult to implement in the case of dynamic sites and in this case it’s probably necessary to use a combination of the robots.txt and the robots tag.
The Robots Tag
This alternative way of telling the search engines what to do with site content appears in the section of a web page. A simple example would be as follows;
In this example we are telling all search engines not to index the page or to follow any of the links contained within the page. In this second example I don’t want Google to cache the page, because the site contains time sensitive information. This can be achieved simply by adding the “noarchive” directive.
What could be simpler!
Although there are other ways of preventing duplicate content from appearing in the Search Engines this is the simplest to implement and all websites should operate either a robots.txt file and or a Robot tag combination.
Source: ArticlesFactory.com
Should you require further information about our search engine marketing or optimization services please visit us at http://www.e-prominence.co.uk – The specialist search marketing company.
You’ve got your blog set up and you’ve started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?
Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.
1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates.
Http://www.bloglet.com
2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com)
http://www.my.yahoo.com
3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don’t write things like “nice blog” or “great post.” Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.
4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.
http://www.pingomatic.com
5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com
6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site:
http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/
Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.
7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.
8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.
9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.
10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.
11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.
12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as ‘feeds’) may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries.
To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-readers.htm
13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts
14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.
15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).
16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time.
Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com
Denise Wakeman of Next Level Partnership, and Patsi Krakoff of Customized Newsletter Services, have teamed up to create blogging classes and marketing services for independent professionals. You can read and subscribe to their blogs at http://www.biztipsblog.com, http://www.coachezines.com and http://www.bizbooknuggets.com
10 Tips On Promoting Your New Blog
One great way of getting more traffic and more importantly, making the traffic come back to your site over and over again, is by having your own blog.
The term, ‘Blog‘, is becoming more and more popular, and these days most online companies have a blog.
How can you promote your blog? Once you get your blog known, if you have good enough content, then it will promote itself, thats the amazing thing with blogs.
Heres some quick tips to help promote your blog.
1. Allow your blog readers to subscribe to your own RSS feed. Subscribe with Feedburner. Feedburner allows blog owners and podcasters the ability to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers.
2. Always set your blog to ping ‘update services’. What is that? If you use the Wordpress software, here is a great explanation, http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services.
3. Take full advantage of Technorati. For a full explanation of what Technorati is and how it works, take a look here, http://www.technorati.com/about/tour.html.
4. Use the power of social netwroking sites, such as digg.com, reddit.com and del.icio.us . If you write a great article, submit it to these sites, if they get picked up by them, you will see a massive increase in traffic to your blog.
5. When writing a post, always make sure you link to as many related sites and blogs. Many blogs have a ‘trackback’ feature enabled which can see what other blogs, like yours, are sending visitors to their blogs. They then usually link back to your blog automatically for free.
6. Get your blogs web address in as many places as possible. Use forums, and put your blogs address in your signature.
7. Submit your blog to as many blog directories as possible, such as blogcatalog.com
8. Link to your blog from your websites homepage, and also in the footer of every other page on your website.
9. Get tips from 2 pro bloggers, such as problogger.net and shoemoney.com
10. Finally, and most important, write great content that is relevant to your website, and you will then find your readers will do your promoting for you.
Article Written By Phil From www.adquick.co.uk - Please check out AdQuick
So you’ve started a blog, and now its time to get the word out there. But where? How? Does it cost?
To answer that question, you can spend many sleepless nights Googling and reading, trying to make sense of the online blogging world. What do words like RSS, Feeds, XML, pinging, wordpess and other geek-speak mean?
We hope to answer some of these questions through articles and blog entries we at The Blog Resource share with you through this blog.
Getting started promoting your blog? Start by submitting your site here first. Make sure you follow our submission and promotion tips to ensure your blog gets listed.
To your success!
- Ed Loveless
Webmaster of TheBlogResource