You’ve picked the template, got your blog set up, chosen the direction of your content, but once you’ve launched, how do you know how people are finding you?

Just about every web host gives you some simple statistics software with your account, but they aren’t always the funnest things to read.  You need something a bit more graphical, and you really can’t go wrong with something like Google Analytics.

You just set up your account, insert a bit of code in your page, and the service tracks just about every thing you can think of in the way stats.  How long they stay on your site, what they read, how they arrived at your page, and more.  It is well worth your time to set up and study every so often.  When you see something working, don’t beat it to death, but you certainly can do follow up posts.  Over time you’ll get a feel for what works before you even write a word.

I mentioned the other day how you need to make sure to design your blog for as many users as you can. This doesn’t apply to just your physical design though, you also need to do it with your content. Who are you writing for? Who are you targeting? What do you wish to accomplish?

If your blog is a corporate tool, then you need to set guidelines for what can and can not be discussed, and it needs to be written in stone. You need to avoid controversial subjects, and you need to always portray a professional image. The drawback to this tact is that it can get mind numbingly boring for the writer, and the reader, fairly quickly.

There are ways to be corporate, but still have some fun. Switch your posts up by having one to two days a week be about business, have a day for fun, and make up the rest of the week talking about news stories that impact your industry. The whole point is you have to keep things fresh and engaging. If you just talk about the widget your company came out with over-and-over, your readers just won’t even bother looking at it after a little while.

I talked the other day about how tempting it is to sell text links, but I would suggest against it. Well, sadly, I have been proven right.

According to information from Search Engine Journal, Google has confirmed via email that they are in deed penalizing sites for selling text links.

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

In short, no matter what you may think of Google, they account for 60 - 90% of search traffic depending on the country you look at. You can’t afford to damage your reputation with them in any way, so make sure you stay abreast of the latest developments, such as this one.

When sitting down to start thinking about the look and feel of your blog, you need to ponder who you are designing for. Just because you have some super fast fiber optic cable to your house, doesn’t mean John in the middle of the woods does. There are still people on dial-up access in this world, and they still make up approximately 3% of most web sites traffic.

So do you design with them in mind? In a way, yes. I still optimize all images for my sites for 56k modems. It just compresses them and makes them easier to load with no real lose of quality. It’s a small thing, and puts less stress on your server anyway. That’s just one small thing, but make sure anytime you add something flashy to your site, ask yourself two questions: Does it add any real value and will it make it harder for people on slower connections to use my site? Just because something is pretty, it doesn’t mean it belongs on your blog.

It may seem silly to design with the dial-up customers, but can you really afford to turn 3% of people away from your business?

One drawback to running a blog on your own is having to update.  It really is the only major drawback, but the advantages of controlling all aspects of your own site is worth it in the end.

All that being said, the brains at WordPress have already upgraded the recently released version 2.3 to 2.3.1.  You can read all about the fixes, and grab the update, here.  It seems to be a fairly major update with over 20 bug fixes for those where at 2.3 already.

Don’t ever think you can just skip these incremental updates as there are bots out there that look for older installs to attack.

There are a number of services out there now wanting to buy space on your blog.  They pay you to review a service or site, and it seems like easy, and tempting, money, but in th end, it does nothing burting you.

It seems that when Google updated everyone’s PageRank this week, they took a hard line against sites that sold “text links“.  PageRank, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the score assigned to your web site by Google.  It is based on a 10-point scale, and the higher your rank, the better you show up in search results.  So, seeing your PR go down is never something you want to happen as it can hurt where you show up in the searches.  The lower in searches you are, the less traffic coming in to your site.

In the short term, using some of these paid review sites will help you earn a few dollars here or there, but is it worth risking your long-term traffic for it?

A while back we talked about if BlogRush was going to be worth it.  Well, for 10,000 bloggers it seems it wasn’t.

Without much notice, 10,000 blogs were removed from the network, their credits, and advertising of the network, meaning nothing for them.  They were told how to improve, and to re-submit, but will people who were dumped unceremoniously really care to come back?  Why not give them a warning and give them 2 weeks to make the requested fixes?  Why were they just dumped, leaving a bad taste in their mouthes?

BlogRush may not be able to recover from the bad PR that 10,000 angry bloggers can spread rather rapidly.

I’ve seen bloggers install so many plugins into their WordPress themes and then not use them, or use them for a little while then deactivate them. The problem with plugins is that too many can be worse than not enough. You really don’t need most plugins. There are so many to choose from that you can find two or three plugins that do the same thing. Which one do you choose?

The easy answer is whichever ones will benefit you the most. But which ones are those exactly? Keep in mind that every plugin you install adds more code to your blog posts. That increases your code-to-text ratio and makes it more difficult for the search engines to crawl your posts and rank you accordingly. Remember, it’s the content that is the most important part of your blog.

So why do you really need plugins at all? That’s a good question. One without an easy answer. To be sure, some plugins are worth it. For instance, you probably want to install a plugin to make it easy for your readers to bookmark and subscribe to your blog. Those are useful plugins. But be careful which one you choose. Someone I know installed a plugin for their WordPress blog that adds several bookmarking buttons to their blog’s face and for every button there is additional code. They’ve got a plugin for del.icio.us, Fark, Pluck, this, that, and something else. Not necessary. One plugin can make it easy for your readers to bookmark at any bookmarking site on the Web and will add less code than any of the other plugsins singularly, let alone all of them at once. The plugin is called AddThis. I highly recommend it.

Be careful with plugins. Too many will make your blogging experience less useful and less effective. You don’t want to murder your blog with useless code. So be judicious in your choice of plugins.

I made a post the other day about doing six free blog tips. You can read that post by clicking here.

Fitzy, or Brian Fitzpatrick asked me to review his blog so here we go. Now understand, this isn’t a review so it may sound negative at times because I focus on what can be improved. There are several things being done very well, but to give you 6 blog tips to improve your blog I have to focus on what needs to be improved.

1. Brian, it might be just my computer, but the blog hangs when I first visit. Maybe there is a little too much to load, but it was frozen while something loaded for too long.

Load time is important to both seo and your visitors, so maybe you could have a friend or two go there and test it. Make sure they hit shift+refresh if they have been there before so it doesn’t just load from the cache.

You can remove one element at a time until you find the culprit and remove it.

2. Permalink structure. When I click the headline of a post, the title of the page I go to reflects the blog post title, then your blog name rather than the other way around. Good job on that. The default is usually blog name, then title of the post which is not as good.

But permalinks are the same. The title should be first. Your post about stumbleupon for instance. The url for that post is http://www.fitzbiz.org/2007/10/17/stumbleupon/ so the keywords or keyword in this case is at the end. This will hurt you on posts with much longer titles.

Here is a sample permalink structure that will improve your seo. I have to change the same thing on this blog so don’t feel alone. Choose custom permalink structure and put this into it.

/%category%/%postname%/%monthnum%/%day%/%year%/

Now the url would look like this;

http://www.fitzbiz.org/internet/stumbleupon/10/17/2007/

Now since you have been blogging for awhile there are likely trackbacks and search engine listings pointing to the urls you already have in place. You don’t want those links to go to 404 pages just because you want to change the permalink structure. So you can set up a 301 redirect for all 404s to go to your home page or actually have a programmer put in a redirect that takes all of the old urls the way they are structured and points them to the right post. Not sure exactly how to do that, but there are scripts that can be written to make it happen. maybe a reader here can help us on that one.

3. Now going back to that post about stumbleupon. There is an element in the page where a user can make a comment that says “page cannot be displayed” so whatever that is needs to come out or be repaired. It’s on all of the pages where a comment can be made. That’s in IE7. In Firefox it doesn’t show that.

4. Your stumbleupon image at the top of each post on the comment page is not displaying either so need to fix that one too. I’m using IE7. My friend in firefox said there was no image at all there.

5. This blog tip is for everyone who has a wordpress blog. Take out the css and xhtml validation links. I haven’t found a wordpress template yet that will validate. Those links are useless. Anyone who does click them will see that your blog does not validate. None of them do. So why even leave those links in?

W3C Compliant is important to web designers that want to prove they are better than another web designer. Yahoo and Google are two bigshots on the Internet and their home pages don’t validate. So obviously not too important to them, so not important to me either. I know that might get some comments from the guru section, but try validating some of the top ranked websites for your key phrases in google and see if they validate.

6. I don’t really have a 6 for you. Most of what you are doing here is very good. You use good keywords in your titles, the posts are interesting. The blog looks good. Your anchor text for links is good. Most everything I see is done well.

Most of the stuff I mentioned is just technical. You do have some issues with IE compatablility, but they should be easily fixed.

Good blog Brian.

Certainly not. As with web design, blog templates vary as far as the look and feel of your blog. You should choose a template that matches the mood of your blog. By that I mean if you are writiung a hard-hitting news blog you might pick a different theme than someone writing about celbrities, jewelry, or fashion.

Simple enough, so I won’t go further into the design aspects of your wordpress template. But are all wordpress templates equal when it comes to functionality and search engine optimization?

No and no. Many wordpress templates stop allowing you to create more categories after a certain number. Many wordpress templates have other functionality issues that interfere with proper blog management, such as not allowing you to put your links into categories in the sidebar and making all of them appear under blogroll.

Some wordpress templates have too many files and the size of those files is huge in others. Both equal bloated code. I’ve found simpler and lighter is almost always better for seo purposes.

You need to test several wordpress templates before choosing the one you are going to use. Personally, when setting up a new blog, I find 6 templates I like for that blog. Then I test each one to see if it functions the way I need it to.

Remember, just as with website designers, wordpress template designers may not have any experience with seo and are more likely to be interested only in what the blog looks like.

So all wordpress templates are not created equal.

Making lists of blog tips seem to be a favorite of bloggers who talk about blogging. Why? Because lists make it easier for readers to absorb the information you are giving them.

I found this post at www.fastpitchnetworking and thought it was interesting and broke it down into a list;

(Referring to different types of corporate bloggers) Wright(2005) suggests that there are seven personality types,

1. Blogs that advise, analyis or place authority on the industry or topic run by ‘Barbers’ who are candid about their work and are impartial.

2. ‘Blacksmiths’ who come from inside their firms report news and build relationships. Software developers are blacksmiths.

3. ‘Bridgers’ who connect people and draw new customers.

4. ‘Windows’ who provide internal news, and address complaints and problems.

5. ‘Signposts’ who identify valuable resources and information while offering little opinion.

6. ‘Pub’ bloggers who meet in communities and discuss shared topics.

7. ‘Newspaper’ bloggers who report facts, but post very few opinions.

Now, keep in mind they are talking about corporate bloggers here. Bloggers who either work directly for a company or that have been hired by a company to do their blog. I think they have identified the different types well, but they have missed a couple that I would add.

Think outside of the box when creating blogs for your company. Identifying your target audience is of course important to all aspects of your business, so you should know who your target audience is already.

8. ‘Entertainment’ Set up a blog that entertains the same audience that you target in your business. You will attract the same target sudience and get them to like you. People buy from people and businesses they like.

9. ‘Special Offers Blog’ Set up a blog that has contests and giveaways that your target audience will be attracted to.

These are just two ideas you can use for your company blog. They are not the “standard corporate blog”. Most bloggers out there who give advice about corporate or problogging get stuck with a standard way to do things for companies and use the same stale approach over and over again.

Think about what will attract your target audience and find a way to tie your company to what they want rather than trying to use your blog to ram your products down their throat and you will win every time.

Wright(2005) goes on with ten tips for corporate blogging: “Be real”. “Be passionate”. “Write often”. “Link lots”. “Leave comments on other blogs”. “Have fun”. . “Push the envelope”. “Ping”. “Use feeds”. “Create meaningful titles”.

I’m not going to add to that.

This is a limited time offer. No, really! It is! No Hype! For a limited time, lets say through November 15th, 2007, Brick Marketing will be offering you free advice about your blog.

We will be giving you 6 tips on how to improve your blog. These are not just random blog tips you can get right here on Blog Marketing Journal. These are 6 things you can do to improve your blog. We will take a look at your blog and give you those 6 blog tips right here or in a private email where appropriate.

Just a free service we are trying out so we can help people improve the results they get with their blog. So comment if you would like to receive your 6 free blog tips.

A lot of information is out there about how to write a good blog post and I’ll likely repeat some of them here. But for new bloggers, this information is helpful. Even some of us who have been blogging for a long time forget the basics.

1. Bold Text or enlarge Subheaders in a long blog post. People forget to do this all the time. Maybe you don’t start out to write a long blog post and it just becomes one. Go back and create some subheaders and bold them or enlarge the size of the font.

In brackets you can use FONT SIZE=”+3″ COLOR=”RED” or you can use +1 or +2 or gray, black, greeen or whatever text color you want.

Make parts of your article stand out for those who are just scanning the article for information they might find useful to them. It also breaks it up and makes the post more readable.

2. Short Paragraphs. On the web, short paragraphs are much more readable than long ones. Another point is that when the next paragraph is short, the reader will feel like reading at least one more paragrah. They will continue to do that all the way down the post.

If that next paragraph is long, they feel it’s a good time to stop and go onto something else. If you really want them to read the whole blog post, use shorter paragraphs and make it easy to read.

3. Use bulleted lists to organize your content. Lists are easy to read and readers like them. It makes topics easy to understand.

4. Spelling. Here I’ll probably give you different advice than most people who give blog writing tips. Everyone says you need to check your spelling and that people won’t read your blog or take you seriously if there are misspelled words in your blog post.

I disagree for many blogs. If you are writing a blog having to do with writing etiquette or how to write business letters or something academic, you do not want to have any misspellings. Your readers will definitely point them out to you.

However, in targeting keywords for ppc, people actually pay for misspelled words that users type into the search engine so their ads will show up. Why? Because not all users or readers of your blog are perfect spellers either.

If you misspell a word, it’s likely someone else out there misspells it the same way you do. They might find their way to your blog just because of that misspelled word.

Now I’m not telling you to go out and purposely misspell words on your blog. I’m not telling you not to read over your blog post to see if there are some obvious errors you can fix.

I’m just saying relax. If you misspell a word every now and then, it is not the end of the world and it doesn’t make you a bad blogger.

Online Marketing, simple it gives you the opportunity to get fresh content about your product on the web everyday.

Branding, its the number one tool in making your company an everyday household name. Think about companies like Pampers, Coke-Cola, McDonalds… All of them have built a brand name, or branded their companies. They did this by exposing people to their company name frequently. How to better do that than to take the company name or product name to people everyday? Blog marketing does that by providing your company name or product to people daily.
Blog marketing is one of the easiest tools there is to establish a brand and rake in online marketing conversions. It is a commitment but it will payoff quickly if you provide quality content on your blog.

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