SEO Blog - Internet Marketing News

Getting, convincing, keeping and dealing with clients is an art for itself. Whether you’re a freelancer or part of a company, whether you’re a SEO, web designer, programmer or writer you will encounter the same issues again and again. You might argue that everybody is different and no client matches another one. This is true. Nonetheless the situations you will go through often match. So you can prepare yourself for those recurring situations.

After 11 years of web working as web developer, blogger and SEO both in agencies and freelance I have collected a list of 30 timeless tips to get, convince, keep and deal with clients.

How to get clients
To get clients you have to first make them contact you. Cold calling and aggressively marketing is bad for your mental health, most people do not like it and you get the wrong clients this way. You need to attract those clients who need you already. They are out there.

• Make a name for yourself, a name brand and/or a “real” brand. Do not act a one of thousands, stick out by being extraordinary in whatever way you choose.
• Be trustworthy by design, especially if you work in web design, copy writing or SEO where everybody can claim to be an expert. Prove it by showing off current working projects, having a good blog, testimonials, other people writing about you.
• Do not compete with India. Charge more instead of less and less. Most clients think what’s cheap is worthless. Indians will be cheaper anyways.
• Get clients to get more clients. If you can’t get any clients whatsoever do something for free for friends or charities to show off some work.
• Always keep your own projects alive. Clients will come and go. After a while you won’t be able to show off their work anymore. You need your own projects.
• Do not make a fancy website, show off your work on a usable website where the potential client can contact you easily.
• Be present on the main channels like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and whatever is industry specific. Some people do not use the overall WWW or email to find and contact you.
• Support your community. Nobody can do everything her or himself so that your “competitors” will bring you new clients.
• Specialize in rare, new and upcoming niches. Do not stick to what everybody does. Everybody offers services like web design, copy writing or SEO but who offers iPhone optimized web pages?
• Be local and proud of it. Many people prefer local businesses they can relate to or even visit.
• Offer more stuff to your existing clients or those you have already worked with and keep track of your clients with some CRM (customer relationship management) tools. There are web based CRM tools and open source ones for free.

How to convince clients
Once a potential client has contacted you doesn’t mean you’ll get him to work with you. Most people will contact several service providers and compare.

• Listen to what the client really wants and reply to exactly this demand. Do not just offer the standard package without even contemplating the specific case.
• Be quick or at least tell the potential client how long she or he has to wait. Use a template reply that has been tested and worked with previous clients of course changing the data and the text where the situation is specific.
• Do not try to teach the client everything about your trade. Concentrate on a few key issues the client has to grasp, the rest is your task and the reason why the client wants to pay you (not to bother with it her or himself).
• Do not talk about problems, speak about solutions. Do not focus on why Flash is bad but how you can use Flash to please both the client and to comply with web standards and SEO best practices.
• Be friendly and be yourself, explain why you are interested in a specic client and project based on your hobbies, family history and experiences. This way you also ensure that you really work for clients you like.

How to keep clients
Once you have convinced your clients to choose you, you want to keep them as long as possible. This may prove difficult just due to the nature of the Web and web working.

• Always say “yes”. Clients do not want to hear a “no”. Always say “yes, you’ll deal with it” and then do it on your own terms. A client wants a Flash intro, an all Flash site, or a bigger logo? Create a Flash intro for first time visitors which fades out on mouse movement, create an all Flash site with a HTML backup, add a layer with a huge logo that disappears when the visitor performs an action on the site.
• Document what you do and explain why. Web development, writing and SEO are often invisible. Clients do not see any changes on the outside after you spend a night on cleaning the code, a day researching for your article, a week testing on different browsers and a month on link building. Document each step.
• Be proactive in communicating issues and when being late. Clients who have the impression that you’re too slow and making too many mistakes you want to hide will quit sooner or later. Be open about issues you encounter and being late with a project.
• Do not stay the same and offer the same solutions even if “times are a changin’”. Clients are prone to buy and pay for things that worked once. They assume they’ll work again and again. The web is changing at a very fast pace. So things that worked 10, 5, 2 years or even a few months ago do not work anymore in many cases. Offer new solutions to old problems before the old solutions stop working.
• Do not keep all clients. To keep your good clients you have to drop those clients who prevent you from spending the right amount of time and effort with your good clients. When you frantically attempt to keep clients who are always discontent you will in the end loose both the bad and the good clients.

How to deal with clients
Working with clients will never be pure harmony only as your interests and those of the clients only converge partly. In many cases your own interest and that of the client differs substantially. You have to deal with that, you can’t ignore it and you can’t let your client dictate everything. Ignoring those issues will make you either insane or inefficient or both and both you and the client will end up discontent afterwards. So make sure to address these issues before they really affect your cooperation.

• Do not answer emails ten times a day. Email is an incredible time waster and very inefficient. It only works if used wisely. When a client emails you more than twice a day with issues and requests set up a todo list instead of answering each and every time. Replying to an email in most cases means that the client will rely too so you’ll end up writing emails all day instead of working. Or just call the client and sort out the issues.
• Charge by the hour and assess the number of hours you need per task beforehand. Otherwise a client won’t value your time. When a task runs out of hand you write a email that the assessed time for this task has run out and if the client wants to pay for another 2 hours.
• Send emails with protocols, todos and tasks for the client all people responsible. Then refer to your older messages.
• Contact clients who are late with answers, materials or payments telling them how it will negatively affect your project and that you might need to work for another clients in the meantime and having to set aside your project for a while due to them being late.
• Always charge upfront. Charge at least 1/3 of the sum at stake. Otherwise clients might even forget about you, hire other people to do the same work or not take your work after you’re done. Of course they just might not pay at all.
• Make sure to be allowed to show off your work. Some clients, especially in SEO tend to be paranoid. Also working clandestinely makes them assign a low value to your work. Sometimes they even tend to propose work that might compromise your integrity.
• Never depend on just one client. In this case she or he might just lay you off as if you are an employee.
• Do not meet a client more often than needed. Some local clients want to meet you several times even before the projects have begun and they paid you a Cent. keep off those clients, they will always want you to attend them in this way. Otherwise charge them the extra costs, both the time and the cost of getting there.
• Never let clients treat you like subordinates. You and the client are partners. Clients who do not grasp that will never make you happy with your work and will steal your time you could have invested in the clients who treat you right.
• Stop dealing with clients who get angry at you, shout and swear at you. Those people will always do that no matter how good you are at your work.

You can’t adhere to all these tips at the same time. Also if you just adhere to the “how to deal with clients” part without first making an effort to stick to the “get, convince and keep clients” parts it won’t work out either. The rule of thumb always must be that both you and the client are happy with your work.

“It doesn’t make sense to give up your life, integrity or self-respect for a client as it ultimately will hurt the client as well.”

That said I’m really, really happy with my current clients. SEOptmise is one of them as I’m a paid writer for their SEO blog. I even accept lower pay from those clients I am happy with which in turn of course makes them happy as well.

To work with clients be it in a SEO, writing or web development you must be eager to work on a project. You can’t be too selfish as you must be proud of the success you generated for others and you have to give the best you have.

My work for SEOptmise is proof of this. I just write once a week for the SEOptmise blog but I generate several thousands of page views with each of my bigger articles, much more than on my own blog.

Many SEO practitioners still apply optimisation techniques like in 1999. Back then popular belief was that it was perfectly enough to lure Internet users to a website with whatever means it takes and then everything else would would work fine. Things like readability were far off the SEO agenda.

For a few years now the SEO industry focuses on conversions, that is converting a website visitor to a client through web design for ROI. In order to achieve that the foremost task is to keep the visitor on the page in the first place.

Still you see plenty of people who do not apply the most basic readability measures to increase their conversions. Webmasters still risk a high bounce rate due to large chunks of text which are not easily digestible by people visiting a site. It actually makes them leave instantly in most cases.

It’s known at least since 1999 that people do not read on the web, they scan pages in order to find quick clues about the subject matter they are interested in.

There are at least 10 ways to provide them with such clues. Thus I introduce to to you 10 readability measures to increase conversions. I start with the most basic, important and must use methods of making any text readable. Of course you’re advised to write an abstract, intro or teaser even before the main text starts.

1. paragraphs
Any text that is longer than a few sentences must be split into paragraphs, otherwise the human eye can’t deal with it without getting tired very quickly, espeically on the Web where screen flickering even aggravated this problem.

2. bold, italic
Bold and italic are the two most basic ways of stressing or emphasizing the most important key terms in a text. Don’t ever use underline on text online unless it’s a link. Italic works best on new terms you introduce, bold on the most important parts of a given message. You should never use bold and italic more than once in a paragraph as this takes the emphasis away and confuses the reader.

3. background colors
Text marker like emphasis by background colors (think yellow!) can be very powerful to capture readers attention. It’s also a little annoying to the eye so use it wisely, like once per page. Also you could use very modest colors to prevent eye strain. Sometimes a grey backgropund color is perfectly enough.

4. citation
A very intriguing tidbit which also works without reading the whol etext is often great to get attention of the raeder. Thus I most often use at least one citation in my posts. Use blockquote for this purpose.

5. subheadlines
It is not coincidence that HTML has as many as 6 headline tags, the h1 - h6. Most people do not use more than 2 of them while at least 4 make sense. h1 as headline of the page (SEO blog), h2 as the headline of the article “12 Readability Measures to Increase Conversions”, h3 could be abstract. h4 can be used for long texts as headlines for each paragraph.

6. unordered (bulleted) lists
Unordered lists using the ul-tag are a very simple means to make a text readable. Any list of items that is no longer than 6 is best fitted into a simple bulleted list.

7. ordered (numbered) lists
Nothing makes a post more readable than a numbered list. Be it a top 7, 8, 10 or top 100 list. People reading on the web rely on lists to quickly find the relevant part of a text. You notice in an instant which items you already know or do not interest you and skip them, while perusing a page and jump to those most relevant to you.

8. tables
More complex data can’t be fitted into a simple list be it bulleted or numbered. Once you have to compare data you need a table with columns. tables provide a quick overview and comparison of numbers or factors. I love the our product vs the competition features tables and always stick to analyze them.

9. charts, pie charts e.g.
Humans can better grasp visual information than information hidden in a text. So whenever there are numbers, especially percentage numbers or date over time a chart is the best way to display them in a meaningful way. Pie charts are great for percentage numbers and bar graphs for data colected and compared over time.

10. images (photos)
Most main stream media employ illustrators for their feature articles. In SEO most people do not use images. Either they can’t afford illustrators or due to lack of SEO images, you just don’t see much of SEO you could photograph. Instead you can use real life stock images to illustrate your points metaphorically. Beware of SEO stock image cliches though. Nobody wants to see an ugly spider on a SEO company page or a magnifying glass like on all others.

11. pagination
Pagination is a method of making test readable we know from books and magazines. On the web pagination is often annoying and requires several clicks on tiny icons to see more images or read a whole text. Sometimes pagination can also result in duplicate content issues that hamper SEO efforts. On the other hand scrolling huge pages and loading them in the first place is annoying as well and makes people run away before the page is full loaded. You can connect both worlds by using CSS pagination.

12. borders
Ever since CSS was introduced you do not have to stick to bold and italic anymore, you can use background colors and borders as well. A border around a large piece of tect makes it appear like a painting. This very much magnifies the importance of such a text part.

I assume most people already know that you should place a text of approx. 200 words to not be considered an empty page by Google. This number has been contested but it’s common sense that you need content to get found in most cases. Also most of these measures have a direct positive impact on search engine visibility. For instance keyword repetition in lists is regarded as natural and is not perceived as keyword stuffing like elsewhere on a page.

With Twitter the phase of “do we really need it?” is over. The “how do we use it?” phase is right now. There are numerous ways of using Twitter for everything from business to bull**** and even clients come up to me and ask me about Twitter after reading one of those Twitter articles in the main stream media.

So what are the Twitter tools that really make a difference for SEO and overall business users?

We see at least a dozen new Twiter tools every other day. So I selected just 30+ Twitter tools that are most useful right now. Some of these tools have been around for a few months some have sprung up just recently. They have one thing in common: You must be aware of these tools in case you’re serious about Twitter participation.

Twitter Clients

TweetDeck
Sleek Adobe Air desktop client for Twitter offering a good overview with several panes.

twhirl | the social software client
One of the more popular Twitter clients.

Spaz: An Open-Source Twitter Client for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux
Cross platform open source Twitter client.

Hahlo
Web based iPhone (and iPod Touch) optimized Twitter app.

Twinkle - New iPhone Twitter Client Uses Locate Me Features! | Just Another iPhone Blog
Twitter client for the iPhone that allows you to socialize with people near you. Great for conferences it seems.

Twobile: A Twitter client for Windows Mobile - Download Squad
Twitter client for Windows mobile powered mobile phones. Most smartphones other than iPhone, Blackberry and Google Phone use Widows Mobile.

Misc. Twitter Tools

Twellow :: Twitter Search Directory, Twitter Search Engine
Twellow is the “Yellow Pages” of Twitter.

iTweet 2 : Web
This is an alternative web based interface for Twitter and indeed it’s a little more usable than the default one, for instance it offers one click retweets and makes bio links clickable etc.

TwitterCounter: How popular is @photojojo
This is a Twitter followers counter similar to the Feedburner count for blog subscribers.

Magpie: Make Money on Twitter
Magpie is an ad-network for Twitter. It boast that users can make something like 50 to 200$ a month just by tweeting.

About crowdstatus :: Crowdstatus.com
This tool allows you to create address groups of people at Twitter and notify all of them at once.

Twitter WordPress Plugins

Twitter for WordPress - Rick’s HideOut
Very basic but unobtrusive way of including your Tweets in your WordPress blog.

Wordpress Twitter Widget
Clean and simple Twitter widget for the WordPress sidebar.

WP to Twitter | Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design
Twitter updater plugin using the Cli.gs short URL service for tweeting your posts.

Adnan`s Crazy Blogging World » Blog Archive » My blog gets twitterized
Basic and quite ugly but very popular Twitter plugin many bloggers use, even TechCrunch.

AJAX Twitter plugin for Wordpress
Advanced AJAX powered widget for your blog not only displaying tweets but letting you send updates from your blog.

Twitter Updater » Fireside Media Development Blog
This tool lets you tweet your blog posts automatically.

Firefox Extensions for Twitter

TwitterFox – naan studio
Simple but effective and popular Twitter Firefox add on.

TwitBin - twitter your browser - twitbin.com
Even simpler Twitter add on for Firefox.

TwitKit
Another Twitter Firefox client with more features though.

TwitterBar :: Firefox Add-ons
Let’s you post from the address bar of your browser.

Twitter Social News

Twitturly - Real-time Link Tracking on Twitter
Digg-like interface for the currently hot tweets.

MicroBlogBuzzes of the last 24 hours
Shows you what’s most popular today, this week etc. on Twitter and across the other common microblogging platforms.

Twitturls - Popular Twitter Links Tweeted err Twittered err Twhatever
Shows the latest and most popular links on Twitter.

ReadBurner: What’s Shared on the Web
Lets you monitor the buzz around Twitter elsewhere among many other memes.

POPrl.com / Shrinking popular URLs since 1973 / What’s POPular
Short URL service like TinyURL but better. Offers not only stats but also a Digg-like interface for the most popular URLs shared.

Twitter Analytics

TweetStats :: Graphin’ Your Stats
This statistic tool measures everything from when you tweet (weekdays, time of day) to who your real friends are by counting how often you address people.

Twitstat.com - Twitter Analytics
Both a Twitter search engine and popularity stats at the same time (e.g: showing most active users).

Twitterverse
A Twitter keyword tag cloud for quick overview on what’s going on.

Twist - see trends in twitter
Twist allows you to quickly view and compare popularity trends on Twitter. It’s similar to Google Trends.

FriendOrFollow.com - Who’s not following you back? Who aren’t you following?
This tool compares your list of friends with your followers and shows you who does not follow you back.

Twitter Twerp Scan
Gives you a quick overview about your followers so that you don’t have to click each one.

These 30+ Twitter tools will allow you a seamless integration of Twitter in your daily routine but make sure you know what you doing on Twitter and have some business objectives. There is a new blog by problogger Darren Rowse called Twitip to help you out with that.

I’ve been blogging for the last three years now and one of the most important things I’ve learnt is readers don’t have the time (or attention span) to read through long detailed posts. Concise, attractive looking posts grab the attention of readers and performs far more effectively almost every time.

I figured this out the hard way, spending hours writing up long posts which I perceived as quality content. Unfortunately no-one else agreed! Surprisingly the short and very quick posts which I didn’t think were anywhere near as interesting, seemed to grab the attention of readers, commenter’s and social media audiences.

5 reasons why you should forget about writing the perfect piece of quality content

Image Credit: Flickr

1) Ditch the long paragraphs - no-one reads them!
Is it worth describing point 1 in detail here? Chances are that readers will skim over the title and skip to point 2! So off to point 2…

2) A diagram paints a thousand words
An informative diagram will be quicker to understand and instantly provide an overview of the post. Additional content can be added to back-up the post for users who are looking for more detail, without the need for reading through everything for those who aren’t so interested.

3) A picture doesn’t even need to paint three words!
Images make the page look attractive and can be the difference between a StumbleUpon thumbs up or a user leaving the site before the browser even loads.

4) Spend your time researching a large number of bullet points instead of copywriting
As interesting as the post might be, if it looks long-winded it will probably get ignored. If you have a bullet-pointed list full of useful information or links, for example, users are likely to scan through each item and bookmark to finish later.

5) A boring headline = no-one reads your post
You might have thousands of website visitors or RSS subscribers, but no matter how good the post is, it’s likely to get skipped if the headline is dull. Put more of your copywriting effort into considering the headline and the reward should be far greater.

So there you have it, it’s simple - blogging’s all about headlines, lists & images! Maybe you should try it yourself, drop the hours of copywriting and watch the social media votes roll in!

Recently, I’ve found that I’m searching around for the top sites in any niche on a regular basis. When I mention top sites, I’m referring to sites with:

• The most traffic
• The most number of feed subscribers
• Sites with a specific audience (if I’m marketing a country specific item)
• The most evangelical audience

To give you an idea of what these might look like, I’ll use the internet marketing niche as an example. In my mind, some of the top ’sites’ would be ones like Search Engine Land, SEOmoz, Copyblogger, Chris Brogan and SEO Book.

If I received a link from any of these I would be expecting it to be high quality in the eyes of search engines and drive a decent amount of traffic. Similarly, if they were posting specifically on a product I have for sale or a competition I’m running, I would expect sales and / or entries from their recommendations. The latter example is the reason I like to look at blogs with the most evangelical audience.

Why?

So, besides actually finding these top sites, what is my motivation for finding them? Well, I actually have 2 motivations:

1. If I’m promoting a new website then I want to find blogs that I can comment on and interact with. It’s likely I can receive some decent traffic on the comments and on any links I manage to attract my way.

2. If I have a product to promote then I’ll look for sites that might accept payment for a post or that I might be able to leverage to help me out. For example I may leave a few comments on a blog and then ask the author if they mind posting about X, where X is something relevant to their site. This is far more likely to work when you’ve left a few comments and given something back rather than asking them straight away.

If you are a blogger, finding these top sites can also mean that you see the type of content that is doing well in your niche. You can also get a better idea of traffic potential based on the activity of the top sites and how many feed subscribers they have.

How to Find the Top Sites

Finding the top sites in a niche is as easy or as hard as you want to make it. I’m sure you will be very familiar with some of the options here but hopefully a few are new to you as well.

1. Gather your keywords

Once you know the niche that you are going to be blogging in or even just researching, start to map out some keywords that people might use to title their sites. For example, when I launched PluginID I know that the main word used for this topic is ‘personal development’. However, there are other similar keywords such as:

• Self Development
• Self Improvement
• Spirituality (a large part of PD)
• Lifestyle Design
• etc

Whatever your niche is, make sure you work out some of the best and most common keywords people use to refer to the type of content you will be creating. A good tool for this is Google Sets, simply enter a few related keywords that you are aware of and Google will return more for you.

2. Query the top search engines with your keywords

This is probably the most obvious but it is effective and I don’t remove things from a blog post just because they are expected to be here. Once you have your keywords from step one, use them to find the most popular resources. You’ll tend to find that the most popular sites in terms of traffic and feed subscribers also tend to rank well in search engines. This is because they receive a lot of backlinks on a regular basis and they have massive trust and relevance around their keywords.

Instead of just searching for the keywords, try to add things to the query such as:

• “niche keyword” blog
• “niche keyword” forums
• “niche keyword” community
• “niche keyword” resource

With this method you should hopefully find a lot of good sites you can add to your list as the top in your niche.

3. Check the Google Directory

When I talk about the Google Directory, I’m actually referring to the one that you can find within Google Reader. If you click on the discover button on the left hand side you will end up at this location.

First of all you will see recommendations for other feeds based on the sites you already subscribe too. This can be very helpful; something else that is useful is the number of Feed subscribers shown. This is calculated by the number of people subscribing to a feed using Google services such as Google Reader and IGoogle, their personalised homepage.

There is also a browse feature which means you can use your keywords from earlier to see which sites are the most popular.

4. Check Bloglines

Bloglines is another popular reader besides Google Reader and also comes with a feature that shows you how many people subscribe to feeds using their service. Some less popular feed readers do this but because they have no audience there’s nothing to compare the figures against.

I tend to receive 10% of my feed subscribers as Bloglines readers so whatever number you see next to a feed can be multiplied by around 5 to 10 to get a more accurate number of subscribers. Once again, use some of your keywords from earlier and check out the top sites:

5. Browse BOTW

In the past I would have recommended looking through the DMOZ directory, these days however I would much rather recommend Best of the Web. Besides the fact that their website is updated regularly and fully of quality sites, they are also hiring ex-DMOZ editors to help them moderate the site.

First of all I recommend going through the relevant categories and see if you can find some interesting sites there. It’s always good to look through a paid directory like BOTW because:

• The sites have gone through a manual review when being added
• Their owners care enough about them to be listed

Be aware that some sites may not be all that useful and simply submitted by the SEO company that they are hiring. After you’ve searched around the general directory you can then check out their Web Blog Directory which offers some great resources and top niche sites.

6. Technorati Categories

Technorati is the original blog search engine, and despite being under competition from the likes of Google Blogsearch, it has continued to be a very popular destination. Technorati has a very interesting ranking system known as ‘Authority’ in which a site gets points based on how many links it has received in the last 6 months.

This is quite crucial as it means any sites with a lot of authority are likely to be posting regularly and getting a lot of attention from other websites. You can browse hundreds of categories to see sites that are going to be in a niche that is relevant to yours and you’ll be sure to find some gems.

7. “Top Niche Sites”

There are quite a few search queries you can use to see if people have covered the top sites in your niche before. Some examples of this include:

• top “niche” blogs
• top “niche” websites
• top “niche” blog posts
• the best “niche” websites
• the best “niche” resources

If you use a little imagination you can probably think of some more. The reason I included top “niche” blog posts is that this seems to be very popular and you are more likely to find something like that then the top niche blogs. Once you’ve found the top posts you simply click through to see if the site is popular.

Hopefully you enjoyed this guide and will have no trouble finding the top sites in a niche from now on.

There are probably tens of thousands of Internet marketing blogs. They often focus on different marketing aspects yet still you can easily get overwhelmed by the sheer number of them in every niche.

In order to prevent information overload I selected 30 marketing blogs I am convinced everybody serious about online marketing success for his blog, website or ecommerce site should at least know.

I divided the list into categories. Of course they aren’t as strict as they seem, search marketing blogs also deal with general Internet marketing e.g. This categorization is based on the main focus I perceive.

Internet Marketing

• Dosh Dosh
• TopRank
• Hubspot
• Marketing Pilgrim
• Marketing Hackz

Search Marketing

• Search Engine Land
• Search Engine Journal
• SEOMoz
• SEO Book
• Matt Cutts

Affiliate Marketing

• John Chow
• Shoemoney
• Affiliate Dragon
• Carl Ocab

Social Media and Viral Marketing

• Chris Brogan
• Social Media Trader
• Traffikd
• Dan Zarella

Problogging, Writing and Content

• Problogger
• Copyblogger
• Chris G
• Skelliewag
• Daily Blog Tips
• Michael Martine

General Marketing and Business

• Seth Godin
• Rohit Bhargava
• Micro Persuasion
• PR 2.0
• Inside CRM

You will notice that neither the SEOptimise blog nor my own SEO 2.0 have entered the list. I’m working very hard to make both of them enter this list but and while both have more than 1000 subscribers etc. I still won’t compare them to giants like Search Engine Land for instance.

I added some dark horses (unknown blogs) though by bloggers that have made a lasting impression on me and the Web. Most notably the two serial bloggers Steven of Traffikd and Ritu of Marketing Hackz who even managed to get on the Digg front page several times with his marketing postings at a place who traditionally hates marketers. Both of them have a whole network of high quality and very popular blogs. The marketing blogs being just a small part of their empires.

On the other hand I actually dislike some other bloggers on this list. As I attempted to make an objective must know Internet marketing blogs list I had to mention them. You must decide yourself whether you want to read them.

In short: I wanted this Internet marketing blogs list to cover all the needs for someone who wants to cover 80% of his informational needs with 20% of the time to read the probably 120 blogs this list should contain.

You will also notice that the list above contains only 29 items. It was so hard to pick #30 out of all the magnificent blogs out there that I want you to suggest one, but please do not suggest your own blog!

WordPress is the most popular blog platform for a while now and thus the main target of hackers just due to this fact. Also vulnerabilities pop up so often that you just can’t keep up with the hackers. Recently one of the many WordPress Blogs I look after got hacked again by an “online pharmacy”. Of course I’m not the only one. It was the second hack with 3 months of this WordPress blog.

This time the hackers (or more aptly crackers) even blocked my access to the WordPress admin so that it took really hours of work to get it clean and running again. Ironically this blog was the one I kept up to date quite diligently, uploading a new WordPress version as often as I could. Sadly you have to do it almost weekly, yes there are plugins now to do that, but nonetheless you have to take a look what changed (sometimes a major overhaul of the admin interface) and whether your plugins still work etc.

In short: It’s work and it’s tedious and it’s annoying but most of all, it’s dangerous!

So I really can’t recommend WordPress blogs to clients anymore unless you know they’d be able to do all that upgrading and fixing.

In case you need a reliable, easy to look after and secure blog platform for corporate or business blogging and if you want to host it yourself (still the best option for SEO etc.) you need a WordPress alternative.

I watch the blogosphere since 2001 and contribute since 2003 so I’ve seen plenty of blog platforms. There are at least 7 great self hosted blog platforms that are good WordPress alternatives: All of them offer clean URLs, semantic markup (h1, h2 etc.) and similar SEO basics.

1. MovableType: One of the most popular blog platforms. It has been bigger than WordPress a few years ago but it wasn’t Open Source and you had to pay for it so it lost market share. Now MT has open sourced and it is marketed aggressively as the secure alternative to WordPress. It certainly is more secure and has less upgrades to be performed. MovableType had some major spam problems traditionally, this might be a drawback though. Akismet on WordPress manages spam almost perfectly by now.
2. Serendipity/S9Y: S9Y was the upstarter when it comes to blog platforms. It’s relatively new as it hasn’t been around in the early day of blogging but has a growing community. Some people in the SEO industry use Serendipity so I’d be glad to hear their opinion.
3. Drupal: Drupal is more than a blog platform but you can set a blog with it comfortably. Also it has been hailed as SEO friendly for ages. Some pretty large sites that are not blogs use Drupal too and to be honest I’ve hear of any problems with Drupal.
4. B2Evolution: This blog platform has been around for ages but never got really popular. It may be name or the lack of character, B2Evolution even attempts to mimic Wordpress looks by using the Kubrick theme, but this might be as well an advantage. anyways, just the fact that it’s around as well as “alive and kicking” for a such long time makes it a viable alternative.
5. Textpattern: Back when I started blogging it was an easy decision, Wordpress o Textpattern. It was a choice like PC vs Mac, the more design oriented bloggers have chosen Textpattern. The community seems a little dormant by now but Textpattern is still a good choice it seems to me. Also there seem to be quite a lot of plugins for SEO.
6. Mephisto: This is a comparably unknown blog platform but if you look at the code, screenshots and and Wordpress-like URLs it looks very promising. Sadly due to lack of funding and only two developers working on it Mephisto is stuck at Version 0.8
7. Typo: In version 5.1 Typo introduced many of the features we’re accustomed to from Wordpress or MovableType. Now it seems to be a really good alternative. Like Mephisto the URL structure follows WordPress defaults and the markup looks great.

In case you want to build a blog on a more stable and less insecure and hackable platform than WordPress try one of the alternatives above. Of course I haven’t tried all of them so I’d like to hear some feedback from you:

• What are the drawbacks and advantages of your blog platform?
• Why is is good for SEO or why not?
• What do you miss or why did you dump WordPress or another blog CMS in favor of it?

Business blogging is not always easy.

A business blog is subjective but unlike a private blog you still are writing for people interested in your trade, products and services and not necessarily you as a person watching movies and eating out.

You can’t annoy people too much, you can’t be too

• personal
• funny
• outspoken

So you need ideas that are creative while not being too creative as to scare away your business audience.

To assist you I collected a list of 50 blog post ideas for business blogging for any industry. You can apply it in most niches I think. Some of these ideas are the bomb and will bring you publicity and popularity while others focus on highlighting your expertise or are part of a social networking strategy. Some of the post ideas are all of these at once.

1. Envision the future of your industry by extrapolating the current developments
2. Explain why everybody should care for your trade and not only specialists
3. Make a list of famous people who deal or dealt with issues related to your business
4. List 30 or more online resources for business people in your industry
5. Review a publication dealing with your industry
6. Make a list of the top myths in your industry and debunk them
7. Disagree with a high level personality in your business, prove her or him wrong
8. Make a list of the top 10 blogs in your niche
9. Report from a trade fair
10. Compare the your national market to markets abroad
11. Collect the best blog postings in your niche and compile a best of-list
12. Expand your focus to a similar area of expertise by comparing
13. Write down a code of ethics for your blog and your business as a whole
14. Explore and depict a niche social media platform for your trade, if there is none use a forum to do that
15. Add a forum to your blog or site if your site has a big enough community to sustain it
16. Break the rules of your trade by remodeling them and adapting to current situation, write about it
17. Go off topic and link a topic from everyday life back to your business “10 Ways SEO is like Base-Jumping”
18. Make a list of WordPress plugins that are most useful for your industry “The 10 Best WordPress plugins for Graphic Designers”
19. Reach out to your clients and fans: “What would you like to change in [insert your product or service here]?”
20. Display attractive images of your products, several of them, in the best case your own products
21. Analyze the current climate in your industry and explain the ramifications
22. Identify leaders in your area and ask them to guest post on your blog or write for their blog instead
23. Show what went wrong in your company, why and how you dealt with it, learning from mistakes is very helpful for others
24. Compare the new vs the old ways of doing your buisness
25. Highlight top female bloggers or experts in your trade
26. Create fictional and visionary product description
27. Satirize a very well known personality, be it of your trade or outside of it
28. Write an allegory about your idol doing your business like “The Bruce Lee Method of Business Blogging”
29. Thank your 10 favorite readers and/or commenters
30. Expose a scam in your industry (make sure to consult a lawyer in advance)
31. Take a big brand (or several) and use it as an example for best practices vs mistakes
32. Use humor to lighten up a boring topic “I Can Haz Pay Per Cat? The Lolcats Way of PPC”
33. Explain the local advantages of your company, do not hide behind modesty: “Oxford: SEO since 1542″
34. Review a book dealing with your topic that really displays thinking outside the box
35. Combine your topic with another one, usually but wrongfully not combined with yours, like SEO and graphic design
36. Express your own personal view an a highly debatable issue and do not just repeat common ground opinions
37. Make a short movie to show on your blog, this can be something funny or just simply you speaking
38. Create a list of indispensable software or web tools for your job
39. Take a common issue many people care about and explain how it relates to your business
40. Introduce a new business model in your trade or better, several of them
41. Be the first to break news, for instance reveal your new product via the blog
42. Check your search engine referers and write postings for those queries that had no matches until now
43. Check in your stats which post is the most popular one and write a follow up
44. Join a trade organization and explain why you did it
45. Make a donation to a good cause and blog about it
46. Introduce the 10 most promising bloggers in your industry
47. Check Digg, StumbleUpon or Technorati to find out what’s most popular right now and find a new angle to it
48. Engage in a discussion on a forum and reprint on your blog
49. Ask people on Twitter a question and blog the best replies
50. Make a list of blogging ideas specifically for your industry

Remember that business blogging is about value. That’s indeed the most crucial difference between private and business blogs. In private blogs people want to express themselves, business bloggers want to create value for others. So while writing a post for a business blog always consider this question: Of what use can this article be to potential clients, people in my industry and the general public?”

Some terms are even meaningless by now so that you have to change your mindset completely.

keyword density/stuffing - killer content creation
Back in the days the more you mentioned a keyword (keyword density) the better you performed in the search results. It was long ago. For years it’s the other way around. You create highly contentious and linkable killer content to get popular with users and the links push you in the search results, even if your keyword is mentioned just a few times.

PageRank optimization - authority links
Some people really say “PageRank optimization”. PageRank optimization is like Pen** enlargement. Bigger does not mean better performance. Recommendations by respectable websites still count but the simple fact that you are linked there often is worth more that the PageRank that gets passed.

metatag optimization - tagging/folksonomy
Like in the above example this is a term that was always disproportionally focusing on one aspect. This aspect is nowadays almost meaningless. The meta keywords tag can be dropped altogether. If you want to add keywords to your page, try tags or even better folksonomy (tagging by many people collectively) to enrich your content in the visible content area.

SEO copywriting for spiders - SEO copywriting for users
Are you interested in “SEO Services SEO Company India Search Engine Optimization (SEO) India”? Probably not, that’s why you are reading a “SEO blog” offering “Internet Marketing News” from the “UK”.

article marketing - business blogging
Article marketing was big when it was important to get many links from different websites and IPs. Duplicate content issues, low quality and other disadvantages made it less of an viable option. At the same time business blogging has really taken shape. It works far better for generating links than article marketing. Of course it’s a lot more reputable.

search engine submission - xml sitemaps, pinging
It’s amazing how some services still offer search engine submission (to hundreds of search engines sometimes). While in most countries Google is basically a monopoly, rarely more than 5 search engines matter at all. Three of them enable you to use XML sitemaps to “submit”. While this is a viable way of submitting to search engines, it’s still better to ping Google at it’s BlogSearch with a blog post instead to get instantly indexed.

checking rankings - checking 33 other metrics
Some people obsess about ranking as much as about PageRank (some even mix up both terms). Rankings differ though depending on the place you search from and your personal search history among others. So in short two people in most cases won’t see the same search results. You should consider measuring some of these above linked 33 website success metrics instead.

reciprocal linking - linking out
No, the modern version of reciprocal linking are not three way links schemes or something. As long as the link swapping works artificially on the premise of barter it’s outdated. It takes much more time and effort to attempt to find suitable link partners than just linking out to the blogs in your niche you favor. While not everybody will link back some will if your content is a king and not just a peasant. Some people even will link you even more than you linked them in many instances. These links will be perfectly natural too so they will count more than artificial exchanged links.

paid links/text link ads - sponsoring, charity
Some people just can’t get sex for free. It’s the same with webmasters. They want it now without the hassle, they still want to pay. Link love that is paid seldom works out in the long run, but there are ways to get valid links with a monetary investment. It’s indirect though. Sponsoring and charity done right will be great for both the artists, activist or non-profits receiving the funds and the company supporting them financially.

forum signature - homepage link on active social media profiles
Many people still use forums, especially forums that allow signatures that “pass PageRank”. Sometimes the signature is longer than the forum post itself and Google has taken this “SEO tactic” into account years ago. On the other hand there are lots of social media sites who let you add a link to your homepage in the profile. When you are contributing consistently to these your profile page gains more and more authority, also for Google.

footer links - content links
Just a few years ago people used to stuff their page footers with useless links to their link exchange partners. Bad news if you still do that: Google discounts those in most cases. What you need are content links. So make people write about you in their blogs by providing exceptional resources, up to the minute news or a unique analysis and opinion not repeating what everybody else said.

blog comments - trackbacks (comments on your blog)
Many people still comment on “dofollow blogs” as one of their major “link building” tactics. These links still might pass some Google juice but for how long and how much? It’s much better to write in your own blog about others bloggers or link and trackback them to get a response, a link back to your site or blog.

anchor text - topical pages/paragraphs
When people realized that you can rank higher if your link anchor text e.g. is <link>SEO blog</link> for a SEO blog they started to “build links” with the same anchor text over and over. Normal users don’t link with relevant anchor text, let alone the same anchor text everywhere. So soon Google adapted by discounting anchor text that is obviously SEOed. Moreover ever since Adsense appeared years ago, Google has been able to determine what’s around an element or on your page in the first place. So your “SEO blog” anchor text doesn’t matter much if the page is about dating.

noscript tag links - no flash or ajax versions
Webmasters discovered the noscript tag to insert lots of invisible links in pages that look legitmate to search engines. Unfortunately they do not for a few years now. You should provide an alternative version for non-flash or non-AJAX users though if you have a fancy menu for instance. Load the Flash or AJAX-free menu for those who have switched of scripts or haven’t Flash installed. These links are also useful for search bots.

hidden counter links - widgets with “more” links
Some free counter services still force you to add not only invisible links to the counter homepage but to completely irrelevant third party sites. Of course this is crap nowadays and won’t last. One user who reports it to Google suffices. In Web 2.0 times and beyond there appeared lots of widgets for blogs and websites though that use such a method in a legitimate way. They offer basic info in a widget and add some more of it after clicking a link.

WordPress themes links - Firefox Add ons
For a while footer links in WordPress themes made WordPress theme designers the most popular web personalities on the Web. This problem of blown up link popularity has been discovered and dealt with in 2007 so you won’t get a “PageRank 7″ just by designing or porting a few themes. What’s still very popular though are Firefox extensions. Millions of people use Firefox and add ons. As most Firefox users are quite web-savvy they feature their favorite add ons on their blogs so that you get plenty of authority links once you write a popular extension.

too many directory links - generating buzz
While directory submission to a few directories (like a 12) still makes sense to get a site indexed in Google via the directory links it does not make sense to submit to hundreds of directories as these are often low value. Create a buzz around your site by viral videos or even good old press releases to get for link power.

HTML 3.2 - XHTML 1+
for a long time SEO experts advised to use the simplest HTML possible for Google, HTML 3.2 for instance. Sites designed in in this archaic HTML version looked accordingly. While the simplicity argument is still valid I made the best experiences with XHTML 1+ strict. It limits the code size naturally and you end up with being simple to crawl for Google and other bots.

guaranteed positions - ROI and conversions
Some SEO firms still proclaim to offer “guaranteed top positions” in Google, while in itself a misleading claim it does not make sense anymore to rely on rankings as these differ from place to place and computer to computer. Focus on ROI and conversions instead. If you like to guarantee a ROI of 200% or a 10% conversion rate it does make much more sense on the business level.

link building - getting links
The concept of link building has an underlying assumption of links that are artificially “build”. Otherwise it would be called “getting links” or something else, but building implies an active involvement of the SEO and actual manual inserting links somewhere. In contrast link baiting and other more common methods nowadays rely on other means than sheer “building” to get links in a natural, organic way. Built links will always be subject to the search engine’s quality team’s scrutiny. Completely organic links can’t be filtered out obviously.

PageRank Sculpting - Making every page matter and useful
This one seems to be an accepted practice of many in the SEO industry while, others, whom I support, advise against it. PageRank sculpting means that some pages on a website are linked by nofollowed internal links to ensure that other, more important pages get more Google juice. While this seemingly makes sense, most people overdo it and in some cases even whole sites get nofollowed by accident. Recently I encountered several sites that were completely made non-indexable for search engines via noindex/nofollow for no reason. Many webmasters will for instance nofollow the contact page in order not to make it the most important page in Google (as it’s linked from everywhere). In fact in many cases it is though, people are searching just for your address or a company nearby, especially via iPhone or other mobile phones.

forums - communities
Do you consider adding a forum to your site? Well, think twice. Forums are problem oriented (people go to forums to solve a problem) and people using them are often aggressive. Social communities on the other hand add a far more positive enhancement to a site. Adding content is based on popularity and thus good content is submitted. Sphinn is the best example for that in spite of the fact that recently some try to superimpose their condescending and aggressive behavior on the community. It seems that with growing popularity you also face these problems with communities but it’s not a wide spread inherent problem like with forums.

outstanding frontpage design - landing pages, usable check out forms
Not a cool homepage counts, or at least not solely, but clean and focused landing pages as well as working and usable check out forms for visitors to complete a purchase.

cluttered portal like pages - white space and focused pages with no distractions
Do you remember portals? Google made them obsolete but amazingly enough some commercial sites still try to imitate the portals of the late nineties. These sites work by overwhelming the visitor with information overflow. The logic behind that is that the user will get stuck somewhere, find something out of the hundreds of links to click. This doesn’t work though. People bounce off the site and search for another one less cramped. You need to offer white space for strained eyes to rest and focused pages no distractions that offer exactly what the visitors wants one keyword per page.
DMOZ - Delicious Popular
Some people submitted their pages to DMOZ directory to get an authority link and they still are waiting after 2 years or more. DMOZ is an epic failure of an elitist directory system. Instead try to get on the Delicious homepage, here you get many more valuable links. Delicious killed the DMOZ star.

While on most of the above mentioned issues most experts will agree, some of them are debatable but nonetheless you have to face them and decide whether you keep with the old ways or adapt to new web environment.

Almost 3000 Sphinn visits from August 6th until September 5th

August was a very successful month for this blog, especially as it was during summer when many people are on vacation. Business blogging is one of the key methods of reaching an audience for an SEO company. SEO firms can’t rely on the major social sites like Digg, Reddit or even StumbleUpon as the audience there often is wary of SEO already due to the elusive nature of SEO: You only recognize bad, spammy SEO unless you are a search marketer yourself.

So what audience is a “target audience” for a SEO blog or more broadly for business blogging?

1. High profile experts of the trade?
2. Your peers in the industry?
3. Bloggers and social media users, in other words multipliers?
4. Advanced web users and webmasters?
5. Main stream internet users?
6. All internet users?

You have to ask yourself who the people are you want to reach before every post you write. I hate the term “target audience” as I’m not gonna shoot at anybody, I rather say “preferred audience“.

In August I had the unique opportunity to support the very successful SEOptimise blog team with 4 larger lists that go beyond the usual top 10 of this or that. Keep in mind that this blog is one of the most important SEO blogs in the UK according to the Google ranking at least, which in SEO circles speaks for itself. Also internationally it’s more often in the top 10 for “SEO blog” than not. Moreover the blog has more than 1200 subscribers. So it has undoubtedly already an audience.

Nonetheless I was able to reach much larger audiences, 5 to 30 times larger depending on the post. In this post I want to focus on the question why some posts “only” get 5 times as much traffic while others 10, or 30 times.

I experimented with my audiences this month. Although you can’t separate the above mentioned groups in such a clean manner you can decide beforehand which one is your preferred audience. Number 1 is the most narrow one, number 6 obviously the most populous one.

Addressing an audience is often as simple as naming it in the headline/title. Consider these three examples, they could represent the same list. Just the “target audience” differs:

• 100 Resources for Small Businesses
• 100 Resources for Web Developers
• 100 Resources for Geeks

You might want to change the description of each resource slightly but overall you can use the same resources for all three of them. When you use a very exclusive term (in the sense of excluding people) like “SEO” you will end up with a much smaller but probably more targeted audience in contrast to e.g. using “Search”. Which post is more relevant for general users:

“The Future of SEO” or “The Future of Search”?

Again, both can deal with the same topic, the first one will get a few hundred people to read it, the second one can reach thousands or more.

Beyond the headline there are of course other considerations: Do you take acronyms like “SEO” for granted or do you use terms that everybody can understand? Do you explain in a manner people outside the industry can relate to or not?

Blogging for the SEO industry is more difficult than for most others as explained above but still you have some places to reach out to: Niche social news sites for marketing, especially Sphinn for search marketing and beyond. Then there is Delicious representative of the larger web developer, webmaster and advanced web user crowd. SEO tools and resources can get popular there if they are useful enough for more than just the tiny SEO community. In fact most SEO tools and resources are but they fail to make the people believe they need them by disregarding the advice I gave you above.

Call it web tools and you get more people to use them than just the SEO tools.

In some cases you are better off by ignoring some audiences, you can’t satisfy everybody and some people just do not want to be content with your content

Nothing exemplifies that more accurate than the bizarre reactions of some “experts” to my last post on SEOptimise. This post gained 76 votes and had the same number of visits from Sphinn alone but multiplied with 10.

While the headline expressed that the post is about the “easiest” not the most advanced methods of getting links, these people were not satisfied with this explanation and repeatedly argued that the list is “stupid”, “basic”, “not fitting on a social news site” etc. The only thing that was stupid here was that I wasted my time trying to react to them. The sheer number of people approving of the post proved them wrong.

This post was both the most popular submission of mine in votes during my one year of participation on Sphinn (and I’ve been numerous times on the Sphinn fp), the most popular post written by me on Sphinn ever and the most popular SEOptimise post on Sphinn ever. It ended up on top of page 4 of the Sphinn “Greatest Hits”.

So you really have to decide, are you targeting these 5 people whom you can’t satisfy as they want to be “bigger experts” than you are, the 50 peers on Sphinn who approve of your post or the 500 visitors. Beyond that you might want to address the 5000 Delicious and/or StumbleUpon users depending on your topic.

All of the posts got what they deserved, a dozen authority links from blogs too. To be honest I also targeted the real experts of our industry and I got them too So you also can decide for both, 5 and 5k.