Welcome to the second installment of More Content = More Cash. We had some great feedback from you on issue one which focused on four quick tips to kick-starting your SEO campaign. Really hope that you found the comments and links helpful, and fingers crossed it wet your appetite for this week’s issue. This week we look into the tools you will need to produce content and talk about publishing frequency, building link popularity and using current affairs as a fuel for the viral fire. Remember we love getting your comments and feedback on the blog, so please keep them coming!
For now, tuck into the full packed content below and well…. just enjoy!
Issue 2: The Four Corner Stones of Blog Publication
Content Tools
There is an out-and-out winner when it comes to blog production and that title belongs to WordPress. Reason? Simply because it’s a widely accepted and supported platform with tremendous SEO benefit and plug-in flexibility. Further benefits include a vast range of templates and themes many of which are free and its ability to syndicate (broadcast) your content to many news recipients. Setting up WordPress is simple if you’re quite technical by nature but somewhat challenging if you’re not so, but many hosting companies offer a package with the latest WordPress already installed. Two examples include JustHost and UK2.
Places to get templates & themes? To name a few: WordPress.org, wp4themes (dating) & NattyWP.com (adult dating)
Setting up and configuring WordPress is outside the scope of this post but all this information can be found on the WordPress website. There is one more task I will add and that is to expand the default list of recipients your content is broadcast to. Within your WordPress admin; under ‘Settings > Writing’ you should see a text area entitled ‘Update Services’. This lists all the services your blog is broadcast to when you hit publish. Below is an extensive list you can use to expand on the default provided:
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc/
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://rpc.feedsky.com/ping
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
Topical Blog Writing
‘Blog’ is a coined phrase from the term ‘web log’, so basically a diary written online. They started as more of a personal means to write about individual travels or any other goings-on that require a frequency of updates. This gives you an immediate clue to what you are to write about and that is something that requires frequent updates. I’ve left the next section to discuss frequency so lets focus on topical blog writing.
Topical blog writing is about matching current affairs and hot topics to the nature of your blog or post. Why? Simply because people will be using social media sites and search engines to keep themselves informed of hot topics and trends. If you can successfully ride this trend wave then you have created a hook into this traffic and have more of a chance to use the powerful ’social media machine’ to build links back to your post/article thus increasing the underlying SEO with keyworded back-links. At this point it’s important to reiterate the use of keywords within the post links. Since the blog post title tends to be the main back-link, make time to think about strategically adding keywords to it.
Lets put this into an example; everyone knows about Peter Andre & Jordan splitting up and it was a hot topic at the time. We could reactively write a post titled ‘Jordan seeks dating after splitting with boyfriend Peter Andre’. I’ve managed to capture the hot topic of interest and insert the dating keyword.
Stuck for ideas on titles? A great but simple tip is to check the big social news aggregate sites: digg.com, techorati, delicious.com and look at the headlines of the most popular posts/links as these seem to be working well. No special tricks here, just do what is doing well!
A few points to remember:
- Ride the wave of hot topics and current trends
- Use keywords in post titles and text to build SEO
- Social media targets peoples view points and personalities so adding topics for argument is always a great idea to stimulate the popularity
Publishing Frequency
Frequency of posting not only helps attract repeat visitors but also triggers a synchronicity with search indexing. That means the search engines effectively ‘learn’ when you publish new content and sync their bots to come along more frequently to grab it. An obvious benefit to SEO is the long tail of content you produce over time. The back-links established from all this content really help build a concrete SEO foundation. This is why it’s important to get the keyword research right upfront as SEO is for the long haul. A final point about frequency is to maintain a focus or topic around your continued blog posting. A good example would be the very one you are reading, you expect to see something next time
Using Social Media for Link Building
Arguably we have covered this above as social media is based on UGC (User Generated Content), all we need to do is fuel the already mentioned ’social media machine’ and it takes care of itself! Using social media is therefore quite simple as it ‘uses your content’ in the way its users see fit. A bit of a tongue twister but the efforts you put in to producing the ’sticky’ type of content as described above then you’ll be sure to notice the effect. One thing I would suggest is making it easy for users when reading your blogs or posts to be able to submit it to the big social media sites. AddThis has everything you need to plug-in to your WordPress installation or code to paste in adhoc to achieve this.
A lot to digest this week! Next week we’ll look at the power of multimedia, how to create it and how to use it effectively….look forward to seeing you there!
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More good tips Francesca. I’ve been using Wordpress and Social News sites to good effect on a number of sites for a while now. It definitely works for improving search engine rankings.
Sweet. Just updated all my blogs with that list.
Excellent post on Blogging, some of the resources listed are fantastic, well done.
My only concern with building blogs for my dating sites (apart from already having 5 other blogs to post to!) is being able to post interesting, relevant content.
There may be lots of content available on the net re dating, relationships etc. but it can’t just be reproduced due to copyright & Google also disregards duplicate content in its search engine rankings.
This means either writing your own original content on a regular basis, or re-writing what you read so that it isn’t treated as duplicate content.
Will have to sit down & think about my story writing abilities
)
Blogging is a great idea as is social networking. I have had limited success with the likes of Facebook and twitter but am a newbie for social networking as a marketing tool.
As with all these things, keeping on top of them is the challenge, it is all too easy to add a tweet once in a while (I am guilty of this), rather than keeping it regular. Same applies to blogs and facebook too.
Amazing post, did not thought reading it was going to be so great when I read your link.
I have found some of the most awesome link building tips
Lots of of guys write about this subject but you said really true words!!