This guest post is by Fritz Guinn

First of all, note that while you can and should have a blog for advertising your business, it is not meant to replace a website. Rather, it will be a complementary tool that promotes both your business and the website behind it.

A study of 1,531 HubSpot small and medium scale customers showed that those who blogged got about 55% more visitors on average than the non-bloggers.

The companies that blogged got 97% more incoming links, and 434% more indexed pages in the search engines.

Way it works is that a blog at its core is meant to be a visitor engagement and community building tool. This means that it attracts people who like the content and are interested in the subject. They read the posts, and contribute by posting comments and replying to other comments.

A static website, on the other hand, is more of an informative or product copy page. It does not ask for any engagement, except for a call to action to purchase a product or contact the company for more information.

The blog is also a good SEO tool. It creates new content when posts get comments, and the search engines come back again and again to index the changed content. This increases the frequency, number and freshness of indexed pages. Blog posts get ranked higher in search results, and it boosts traffic from the search engines.

A blog post also triggers natural or organic links from the community, which triggers a snowballing traffic boom from these other blogs and the search engines. For example, if a particular post is well received and linked to by two or three popular blogs or websites, the post is instantly pushed higher up in the search rankings for relevant keywords.

This in turn puts the post in front of even more people and other webmasters, some of whom will link to it now. The cycle continues like this, with more incoming links and increasing search traffic until it hits a ceiling and then the traffic slowly starts dropping. But a post like this will continue to get some amount of traffic indefinitely.

It sounds very delicious, yes? But it is not so easy to do in practice. You have to hammer away at a hundred posts before one suddenly attracts organic links and starts snowballing. The point here is that your business can get a huge number of extra customers if you have a website and a blog, as opposed to only having a static website.

Knowing when to take a rest was a really hard lesson for me to learn.

Knowing when and how often to post is also a hard lesson.

The good and bad of blogging is that the more you do it the more and better results you get for your efforts. Read = you get more traffic.

Of course, that means you can fall into the temptation of more, more, more!

I did.

The Blogger's Sabbath Day

At one point I was writing 15-20 articles a day, every day. Every every day. Day after day after day. Month after month after month. While also teaching a double full-time load online and teaching in the physical classroom as well.

And I noticed, that the more I wrote, the more and better results I got. So, I wrote more and more. Addictive to say the least. Compelling. Not to mention physically exhausting. But still I did it.

When I was desperate for a day off – to attend a swim meet, or a concert by my sons, I wrote double the day before or after but still got online to do the social bookmarking thing as necessary. It was hard.

Then one day while attending worship services (I am a Christian so you will ALWAYS find me in a worship service on Sundays – then working before or after), the preacher said something in his sermon that hit me hard.

“You know. You can do more work in 6 days than you can in 7. Give God his due.”

Ouch! But from the very next week, I resolved to take 24 consecutive hours off at least one day each week. And I did. And, and … things got even better!

Sure as shooting, spending less time, I could get more done. What do you know?

So, here’s my question – When is your day off from blogging? And how do you spend that time?

Want to make money online? Start by reading this series – How to Blog for Money and Traffic.

My daughter, Mia Mei, has her own blog. She writes there somewhat regularly. What can I say? They don’t make 4-year olds like they used to.

Yesterday she wrote a post “How to get to car engine, um, Carnegie Hall.”

It got me to thinking about what I have learned from Carnegie that has helped me to be a better blogger.

Andrew Carnegie and the Blogger

Carnegie made a killing in oil and steel after coming to the US at the age of 13 and getting a job as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory for $1.25 week. I used to work for $1.25 an hour, but never that cheaply for a week. But, then at the time, I could buy gasoline for .25/gallon. Let me see…I worked for 5 gallons of gas (more…)

Should I podcast? Should I video cast? Or should I blog? You know. Write. Hit publish. Rinse and repeat.

Blogging beats podcast beats video

Podcasts are cool. Unless you sound like me - tweezers on the nose, all nasally.

Videocasts are cooler unless you look like me. I mean, most people if they had a dog with a face like mine they’d shave the dog’s butt and make him walk backwards.

Blogging – the coolest. Just write. And hit publish. Images and links, too, of course.

But what is really cool about blogging is that it is searchable. Findable. Search engines can’t search video and podcast content. These mediums work best… ONLY work?… when they are embedded into a blog post and surrounded by searchable text.

Bottom line…. blogging wins IF you want to be searched out and found. Podcasts and Videocasts are what you serve up AFTER the reader gets there.

In short, nothing is better than the written word when it comes to wanting good search engine optimization.

• • This is an exchange with one of the members of TheTrafficProfessor that I thought worth sharing (with minor editing). It will definitely save you time (if you are doing your own writing) and money (if you’re outsourcing content).

    It answers one of the most basic and important questions a blogger will ask.

    What is the optimal length for a blog post?

    ————-

    

    December 22, 2011

    Sue Anderson LaPointe

    • Hi Bill
      Hope you’re doing great, and getting ready for a wonderful Christmas.

    Got into a bit of a blogging conversation/debate and was telling another writer about how much I’d changed my blogging process since your course. He’s got a mentor ….., who’s swearing by 2000 word posts, which seems nuts to me.

    I told him about your idea of frequency, and he replied: “If Bill Belew built his sites in 2005+ era, that strategy would have worked. And now that his sites are *already* authority sites from before, it doesn’t matter what he posts because it’s already an authority site. But he’s mistakenly projecting past Google conditions onto today. A new site won’t rank with that same strategy that way have worked even just 5 years ago. So the question is, did Bill Belew start these sites back then or did he start them very recently?”

    I think your sites are more recent, but didn’t want to answer incorrectly. Also, figured that might be a great question to answer on your blog! and in the marketing.

    Hugs and all warm wishes -
    Sue

• 

  December 22, 2011

  Bill Belew

  • I started back in 2006. Still…2000-word posts are great but they are not for Search Engines. Ask yourself how many times you have searched for something and found it in the 400th or 1000th or 2000th word section of an article. Doesn’t happen. SEO = a balance between what appeals to a real person and what appeals to a search engine. 2000 word articles don’t have much appeal to readers either. Invariably when you do a search, find the link you want and click on it, the very next think you do is scroll down to find out how long the article is…if it is too long, you go away, right? This is called Bounce. And the higher the bounce rate, the worse the SE findability. The ideal length for a blog post is something that will fit above one click of the scroll. Make sense?

• 

  December 22, 2011

  Mike Maunu

  • In addition, not all the blogs were started then and many of Bill’s students only started in the last 18 months and they are getting the same results based on the lower word count.

• 

  December 22, 2011

  Sue Anderson LaPointe

  • THAT is fantastic news, then… because I’m getting totally hooked on these little 200 worders  Totally makes sense for readability – If I want to read 2000 words on something, would rather read 10 posts on it than one post. I’m in the process of creating blogging packages for my writing clients based on this and was SO hoping/then glad to find 200 words will get it done!
    Thank you guys for getting back to me so fast.
    HUGS!
    Sue

• 

  December 22, 2011

  Bill Belew

  • 200-300 words will suffice. Each blog posts generally answers one question. It never takes 2000 words to answer a question unless you are a preacher…. 

• 

  December 22, 2011

  Sue Anderson LaPointe

  • Lol. True that!!!!! I’m loving how much easier it is to blog like this. It’s actually getting done rather than languishing months between posts!!!

    ———

I knew a preacher once who’s favorite line was “If you aren’t you, who’s going to be you?” I am not sure what that had to do with anything in the Bible, but that is a different story.

I am in the process of reading Ronald Reagan’s memoir. Yeah, I know. He has been gone for a while.

One of Reagan’s best friends on the world stage was Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher has a famous quip that I think helps define voice for a blogger.

I am a Christian and totally unashamed of the fact. I do not welcome controversy but sometimes it finds me. And, I will not shy away when it comes to defending my faith. That’s not the point of this post, however.

I wrote an article – The ABCs of Evolution.

Wilby reciting the ABCs of Evolution

And, oh my goodness, the atheists came out of the woodwork. Traffic for the post zoomed and with that income as well.

The atheists (they hate me. This puzzles me because I do NOT hate them. I just think they are wrong about a few things.)

Many people commented at the above post – I reckon they were atheists because of the content of the comments. They then posted a link in “we hate fundies” and “Christians are do dos” and other such sites. So much so that those people came to yell at me, too! They even blamed my (more…)

This guest post is by Mark Stephan.

Most blog owners would happily give an arm and a leg to turn blog readers into contributors and build up an active community. But, very few bloggers actually get it right.

After all, 60 to 80 percent of bloggers give up within the first month, and 95 percent of new blogs are abandoned within 3 months.

It’s not because people are no longer interested in blogs.

On the contrary, there were 122.6 million blog readers in the US in 2011, and there are going to be 133.8 million in 2012 and 141.6 in 2013.

So, why is the success rate for blogs so dismal? Well, start by asking yourself why to blog. Most new bloggers run after money, while some just want to talk about themselves and their cat. That’s not the way it works, because 70 percent of blogs are authored by people who do it primarily to share their expertise.

You can only be an expert in one field, and that’s what all the blog posts have to be about. Stay on topic and keep hammering at it every day. Visitors will eventually turn up and find out that you seem to know what you’re talking about, and start asking you questions. If you do it right, the blog ends up as a place where lots of people come to discuss this subject on which you’re the resident expert.

It’s also important to have strong opinions. Nobody wants to read a post that confuses them some more. They want you to take a stand and then justify it. In fact, nothing works to spark engagement more than a raging argument or debate in the comments or between two bloggers.

Speaking of comments, it’s important to install the required plug-ins that make commenting easy and even encourage it. For instance, asking people to register and login before they can comment is a turn-off. It’s much easier to moderate comments and allow regular users to post comments right away without moderation.

Also, a plug-in like Do-Follow will invite engagement with other bloggers, since it is a kind of back-scratching arrangement where bloggers post comments on each others’ blogs and both blogs benefit from it.

But the thing that actually sparks engagement and builds up a loyal following on a blog is the blogger’s own response to comments posted by readers. It is incredibly important to respond to each comment intelligently and make readers feel their input is valued. Encourage readers to come back and continue the thread, post more comments and talk to other readers.

Apart from these basics, use of polls, contests and other incentives for posting comments are helpful in sparking engagement. For example, many bloggers offer a free prize to the blog reader who posts the most comments in a month.

This guest post is by Martha Jose

A picture is worth a thousand words, but only if you have the right image. A wrong photo will instead muddy the message or drive away visitors.

Everything from the image size and the caption to the alt text and where the image is located on the page makes a difference.

There’s also the very important and legal requirement of crediting the photographer and finding images for free use under a creative commons license.

Photo by -mrsraggle- (via flickr – creative commons).

The first and most important thing a blogger needs to remember is that every blog post should have a picture or a video. The visual impact grabs visitors by the scruff of their necks and brings their browsing between multiple windows to a screeching halt.

It’s not hard to find the right image or video. Flickr now has over 51 million registered users and hosts over 6 billion images, and is an invaluable resource for bloggers looking for copyright-free images with a creative commons license. As for video, finding and embedding videos on a blog couldn’t possibly be any easier, as testified by the 3 billion videos viewed daily on YouTube.

But, there’s a lot more to be done before the image looks and works perfectly on a blog. For starters, the size has to be optimized because a large file size will slow down the page loading.

According to Akamai, you can lose 33 percent of your visitors if a page doesn’t load within 4 seconds. Another test done by Amazon showed that sales drop 1 percent for every 100 ms increase in page loading time.

Then the image has to be supported with the right caption and alt text to make sure visitors and search engines know the context in which the image is being displayed. The location has to be perfect to catch the visitor’s eye and complement the text content, but should not distract readers after that.

Generally speaking, an image has to be located between the first and second paragraphs, aligned left. If there is a numbered or bulleted list in the blog post, then the image should be aligned right beside the list. If two or more images are needed, then they should ideally have the same on-page dimensions.

Of course, these rules all go out the window if the blogger has taken the pictures. Many of the most successful blogs are those where bloggers have taken pictures themselves and posted 10 or 15 of them in the same post.

This works extremely well for reviews, such as a blogger’s visit to a restaurant or a store or anew city. Instead of talking about it in a long and verbose post, the collection of pictures with the right captions speaks volumes. Even in this case, it’s better to start off with one photo up top, then a few paragraphs of text and all the other pictures in serial order down below.