For many website owners, running an online (and perhaps offline) business leaves little time to create their own blog content, at least on a daily basis. There are number of ways deal with this situation.

The first and most obvious is to only post to your blog two or three time per week. In today’s world, it can be quite acceptable However, if you are looking to leverage your blog for search engine traffic then the more content you have, the faster your search engine rankings may climb. It is not only the search engines; the more blog content you can provide the faster you can gain a reputation within your niche.

Other options include buying content. This can be done on a post by post basis, as a series of posts, or as full contract where the blog content is not only supplied; it is created and published on your behalf. They basically manage the blog on your behalf.

What many organizations don’t realize is that you can combine both. You can create your own blog content, say two or three times per week whilst using a bog content service to fill in the gaps. This may be a better alternative for many business owners as they can maintain their own contributions yet have the benefit of daily posting, for less money.

There are many blog content services that will happily negotiate posting timetables and relative costs. You just need to determine how much of your time you can afford to dedicate to creating content. Place a realistic figure on that time and then do a comparison with various content providers. You may be surprised at the low costs involved.

Social bookmarking and blogging have built a reputation for unreliability and high bounce rates. If you approach social bookmarking sensibly, this does not need to be the case. You can develop a flow of regular readers over a period of time.

Most bloggers forget the original theme behind social bookmarking - and that is the term social. For many bloggers, they sign on and try to accumulate as many ‘friends’ or contacts as possible. They then spend their time submitting their own content and sending it on to all their friends in the hope they will vote it up.

To be effective, you need to be a little more social. Rather than promoting your own content, you should be on the lookout for content that may interest those you have befriended. Over time you will gain a reputation for only promoting the best content.

Once you have developed the reputation for submitting quality content, slipping your own posts into the submission process will not be a problem, so long as it is quality and of benefit to all. There will be times when you won’t need to submit your own content. Because you are seen as someone who only submits quality content, those who visit your site are quite likely to submit for you if they think it is quality.

Social bookmarking is all about being social and interacting with others on the various sites. Sites such as Digg work very much on a reciprocal basis. If you Digg their quality content, they are likely to Digg yours. Be social and social bookmarking may work for you. Be selfish and the only visitors you get will be the high bounce rate type.

If you decide to run ad units as part of your blogging income, you need to determine where you are going to place them. If you are being paid by the placement then you should have an agreement as to where that ad unit is placed. If you are running affiliate or PPC ad units, then placement can have a huge effect on your results.

With pay-per-click (PPC) ad units such as Adwords, you will need to play around with the various types and placements of your ad units. The most popular is generally considered the 300×250 text/image ad unit placed within the body of a post. However, different blog layouts will require testing to see the best placement.

When testing ad unit placements, give each placement a reasonable time frame. Ten days is probably a minimum to test for effectiveness. Make sure you record the ad units placement and number of clicks and income received. After ten days, move the ad unit to another place and test again.

One mistake that many bloggers make it to decide on an ad unit and test it in three or four places. They then select the best out of the three or four and run with it. You nay be losing a lot of blogging income if you quit your test regime to early.

You should test in four or five different places on your page, and you should test several different ad unit types including the text only ad units.

If you want to capitalize on any possible blogging income, you will need to test, retest, and test again until you find the best ad unit and the best placement for that ad unit.

If you are an Adsense publisher then you will want to publish your ad units in the most effective places possible. You may also want to have control over when you publish those ads. For example, if you also undertake affiliate marketing and you write the occasional blurb on one of your affiliates, the last thing you should really do is include an Adsense ad unit.

If you install the Adsense plugin WordPress you can control when your ad units are inserted into your posts. To use the plugin, you need to setup an ad unit through your Adsense account. One the best for converting into clicks is the 300 x 250. You can play around various ad unit sizes until you find one that converts into clicks more frequently.

Once you have downloaded the plugin, you will need to unzip it and edit the adsense.php file - notepad or similar is useful for this task. Find the following section of text:

<b>Your Google Adsense code should be here, but you forgot
to edit the plugins/adsense.php file and replace the code
there with your own.</b>
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–
google_ad_client = “client-code-goes-here”;
google_ad_width = 468;
google_ad_height = 60;
google_ad_format = “468×60_as”;
google_ad_channel =””;
//–></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”
src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”>
</script>

Replace this text with the following:

<div style=”float: right; margin: 10px;”>
Your Adsense code that you have retrieved from your Adsense account
</div>

This will float the ad unit to the right. If you would prefer to have it on the left, replace the word ‘right’ with the word ‘left’. When you are creating a post, place your cursor at the beginning of the line where you want the code placed and then click on the Adsense button. The code will be inserted and the ad unit will appear after the post is published. Now you can chose when to insert the code.

When it’s Blog Catalog of course - or MyBlogLog for that matter. These two appear to be in a head to head race to see who can outdo each other as alternative social media sites as well.

To the outsider it may appear they are competing for blog owner traffic. The reality is that most blog owners, if they are active on one, are also active on the other. The major difference is the level of activity on each of the sites. There is no doubt that most users prefer one over the other, that doesn’t stop them using both.

This is probably a good example of brand loyalty. No matter how many features each of these blog directories add, users are remaining loyal to their favorite. Since the beginning of this year, both sites, more notably Blog Catalog, have added a lot of different features - all aimed more at the social networking aspect than as blog directories.

These two sites are hard to categories now. They are blog directories and they pick up your blogs feeds and deliver them to your profile. They are also social networking sites with forum style discussion streams. There has been talk of live messenger style chatting. While all of this is going on, you can also have a twitter style feed of all your social media activities. What you have dugg, thumbed or promoted in any way - all shared with those that want to share.

As for generating traffic - like anything social, the more you work for the community, the more traffic you will generate.

One of the most important aspects to running any business, online or offline is the reputation that business’ can build. In a bricks and mortar world, your customers are the primary starting point. There are other avenues such as sponsoring local sports or charities and promoting certain angles such as being green. For an online business, there is an opportunity to develop a blog - this can be a tremendous tool to developing a business’ reputation.

A blog is one area where, with a little careful wording, a business can blow its own trumpet. As a business owner, you can blog about your history, your achievements, your products or services and your personnel.

Being able to interact positively with customers or potential customers creates air of trust. Potential customers can see that you go out of your way to help customers and those seeking information.

If you include pages that show visitors how to use, update or service your products you will find visitors returning frequently. You can also add FAQ pages that are interactive, that is, you allow individuals to comment or add their own experiences.

The end result is a blog that is a perfect advertisement for your business. If you are ever in a situation where negative talk is generated around your products or business, your blog is the first place to start addressing the issues. A business blog is your own publication where you can publish material that may help fight any negative publicity.

Having a blog that has helped to generate a positive reputation is an asset to any business that cannot be measured in simple ROI or dollar terms. A positive reputation is an intangible, but it is one of the most important intangibles any business can possess.

How often do you check your blog for dead links? Doing a regular check is important as it can identify any broken or dead links within your blog, and any dead links leaving your blog.

Having a link that points to a site or page that no longer exists is a waste of a link. You are should remove and dead links and either leave them out altogether, or point them to content that exists.

More importantly, you need to be able to find broken or dead links within your own site. If you don’t delete or rename content, the only issue will be broken links. These are often caused by typo’s when you first created the link.

If you have modified URL’s for some reason, a link checker can help you find the links to the old URL. Update them to new URL and everything will be fine. Search engines don’t particularly like broken or dead links. Incorporating a good 404 redirect page is a must.

Internal links are of particular importance. You have obviously linked two pages together for a reason. If that link is broken for whatever reason then the link proves will halt at the breakage therefore not achieving your desired outcome.

One of the more common problems is the moving deleting of images. If you have used those images in a post and then moved, removed or renamed the image, it will appear on your page as a broken link.

There are several good link checkers:

Dead Links

404 Checker

Xenu

There are many others including plugins for WodPress. Try one out on your site and see how many broken links you have.

What is the purpose of a blog? More importantly, what is your purpose in hosting a blog? If your answer is purely SEO then I suggest you think again. Blogs can and do help with the overall search ranking of a site when optimized effectively, they are however far more powerful than simple SEO.

Blogs designed for pure SEO are often not terribly user friendly. In fact, whilst they may rate well early, overtime they will struggle to maintain high ratings. Because they are not user friendly, they can scare away more potential business than they attract.

You can often look at a blog as being your receptionist in your business. Most businesses look to hire an attractive yet very efficient person for this role. They are the first and often last person a visitor will see when they visit your business. They are certainly the first person they hear when they telephone.

Your blog is no different. Yes, you optimize it to rank well in the search engines. That is what SEO is all about. Because it ranks well it will receive endless traffic and where is that traffic going, to your blog. The first face the internet visitor is going to see is your blogs. Is it ready? Is it user friendly? Does it say “hi, welcome to …… what can I do for you?”

From your blog, you need to funnel your traffic to your website where the final act can be delivered, be it a sale, newsletter signup or contact form. How your blog is presented will determine whether or not your traffic is funneled to your blog, or back to Google for another search option.

Some people are quite fastidious about keywords and exactly what sort of percentages they have on their pages. Other people like to sneak keywords in wherever they can in an attempt to increase the number of keywords on a page.

Keywords are important. We suggest you include a keyword in the page title and that you spread your keywords throughout your posts. This works well for most websites and blogs. You can, however add one more keyword or set of keywords and that is through your WordPress login.

You will notice that this blog has “written by Brick Marketing” just below the post title. If you were an online business with several departments, let’s say furniture is your business and you have departments and keywords for ‘bedroom furnishings’, ‘dining room furnishings’, ‘living room furnishings’ and ‘outdoor furnishings’. Create logins for each department and you will have a post title followed by “written by bedroom furnishings” (if the post related to that department).

Of course you would need to ensure you logged in with the correct keyword every time. One additional benefit to using keywords like this as a login is that you can personalize your author. This works particularly well if you can get one person from each department to write their blog post. Your login and post author would like “written by Bob from dining room furnishings”.

This can look far more professional that just ‘written by admin’ that I often see. It is certainly more personal, it puts a name and department to a post whilst, if each department is authored separately, gives some pride and ownership to blog author.

As your blog gets bigger and the number of pages expand, sometimes it can be difficult for your readers to find information. We live in an instant world where people want everything at their fingertips. One of the best ways to help your readers is to have a well placed internal search option. There are other options.

Your past content should not be wasted, particularly if it is good and has been well received in the past. Some bloggers do a weekly recap where they summarize and link back to their best posts for the week. This can be quite helpful if you are prolific and write several posts each day.

If you are not quite so prolific then perhaps a monthly recap where you highlight the best posts for the month, again linking back to those posts, can be a great help to your readers, particularly those that are new. Of course these recap posts get syndicated out as well, with the internal links.

One of the most useful recap posts is where you dig back through your past archives and bring together related material as a recap. For a blog like ours, we could create a recap post on the best ‘blogging tips’ or the most commented on, or simply link together related tips. The recap post then links back to each post referred to.

There are two common threads to this blogging tip. One, you are using old information to create a new post whilst helping your readers find some of those older gems; and two, you are creating an internal linking structure and reminding the search engines of previous posts.

This is a simple blogging tip that can be of immense help to your readers. It can often be good to reduce bounce rates from the home page as readers click through to read older posts. Whilst you don’t have to think of new material to create these posts, don’t assume it will be a time saver. It can take a lot of work to find the best posts to use and then to craft together a useful post. However, you will find that over time readers will come to appreciate your recaps and the time its saves them.

There are a lot of ways to measure the progress of a blog, however standard metrics programs don’t always tell the real story for a blog. Having said that, basic blog metrics information is easy to collate and can be a good indication of the success of a blog. These are probably the 8 most important blog metrics for everyday bloggers.

1: How many posts over a given period of time. How many posts per month is a good start. This statistic can be used to compare other statistical information. For example, if you increase or decrease the number of posts, what effect does that have across the other metrics?

2: The average number of comments per post. This can be indication as whether or not you are ‘connecting’ with your reader. This metric can be compared over time to the increase/decrease in traffic. For example, if your traffic increases, does the ratio of comments increase as well.

3: Traffic. There are several traffic measurements that can be useful. How many visitors you receive, how many unique visitors, and over what period. Will you measure per day, week or month?

4: Subscribers. This is not as effective as it once was as many subscribers can be scrappers who are receiving your feed simply to collect any content that be used on their sites. However, increases/decreases in subscription numbers can be useful information.

5: Yahoo Back links. This can be indication as to how popular your content is and whether or not other people are referencing your pages.

6: Technorati authority and ranking. These statistics can be useful for measuring how popular your content is with other bloggers.

7: Search traffic. Knowing how many visitors are arriving via the search engines is a good indication of your SEO activities. You are looking to see a steady increase over a period of time.

8: Page views per visitor. This metric along with your bounce rate can be a good indication of the quality of your content and your site in general. If you have a high bounce rate with a poor page view stat, you may need to rethink your writing and linking campaigns.

This is by no means a definitive look at blog metrics. There are always going to be statistics that are more important on one site compared to others.

SEO friendly themes, particularly free versions, have become extremely popular over the last 12 months. The problem is, whilst they claim to be SEO friendly, is that they are not truly SEO friendly. So what makes a theme SEO friendly? To avoid confusion, the term ‘theme’ and ‘template’ are basically the same so I will stick to the term ‘theme’.

This question is debatable since many SEO friendly themes are relying on plugins that every theme can use to improve their blogs SEO outcomes.

If you ignore the plugins which assist with keywords, tags, descriptions and titles, and the content that is generated by the blog owner, there is only a few areas remaining that can help with a blogs SEO.

Page loading sequence can certainly help. Having the header load followed by the content before the sidebars is an import issue. If the pages code is going to break it is generally caused by a widget in the sidebar. If the content has already been spidered, then this does not become a big issue. Many SEO friendly themes still load the sidebars before the content. This is one area that is quick and easy to check yourself.

Another area of your blogs design that can help with SEO is in the categories and archives sections. If these only produce snippets of each post them you will avoid any issues with duplicate content. You can use a plugin, however the fewer plugins you use the better. Again, many SEO friendly themes do not use snippets. They use the full posts.

The final area that needs close inspection is in the footer. Because some of these themes are free, the links to the theme creator can be sold resulting in a link to sites that you may not want to be associated with. Check each link the footer carefully to ensure it does lead to the themes creator’s pages.

Before jumping on an SEO friendly theme, make sure it is ‘friendly’ first.

There are times when a post should not be a post; instead it should be a page. What is the difference? A page is a daughter to a main home page and to a certain extent has a life of its own. More importantly, because it is a page and not a post, it can be linked to alongside other pages such as ‘About’ and ‘Contact’ - often in the header section of your front page.

Pages get treated differently to posts in most blog software platforms. In WordPress, you can constantly modify your pages and WordPress doesn’t react, unlike a post which gets pinged every time you make a change (unless you install plugins to prevent that).

A well written page can be a center piece for your blog. It could contain helpful information, a ‘how to’ piece or perhaps information such as a corporate or product history. Generally speaking, posts are fairly short at around 500 words. A page can be as long as you like, although there is a good argument to break a long piece into two or more sub pages.

The page content could be a collation of several posts, particularly if you have written a series. Rewrite the series into one long page and publish it separately. Link from the series posts to static page. As you update the page, you can write a short post advising every one of the changes. This brings this page back to everyone’s attention again.

From an SEO perspective, static pages make a lot of sense for information that could be of use to readers instead of simply using a post.

If you are a business owner with a brick & mortar location in the greater Boston area and have not had much success in the online space and are eagerly looking for a guiding light to help you with your online marketing knowledge or to help you launch that blog that you have been trying to get visible then the eBusiness Symposium might just be the answer for you. This Boston internet marketing event will help you get started with your online marketing campaign. As a local business owner at some point in time it is very important to learn the basics of online marketing in order to keep business healthy, growing and keeping up with the times. More and more local customers search online to find what they need so it is important to stay on the radar of those potential customers.

Hosted by Brick Marketing president and SEO expert Nick Stamoulis he will go over all topics such as the ABC’s of SEO and local internet marketing to help boost local awareness of your product or service and help you drive visitors to your blog. Nick Stamoulis brings 12+ years of online marketing experience to this event only offering good quality information that is guaranteed to help improve your company’s visibility. Nick is the editor and publisher of 7 relevant website marketing blogs and is an active member in groups such as SEMPO and the American Marketing Association. Nick Stamoulis also specializes in one-on-one website consulting for anybody looking to work directly with Nick Stamoulis.

The ABC’s of SEO is designed to teach SEO techniques to those who are looking to increase sales, leads and visitors through all the major search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN. This is a judgment free event for all those beginners that might be timid to attend an event such as this. This Boston internet marketing event is constructed for those who don’t know where to turn for help and advice. At this event all questions are good questions. Not everybody has the ability to learn the popular SEO techniques that many are using so now is the time to learn as much as you can from an expert in the field. This event will teach you not only the basics but also some advanced programs such as social marketing website building and newsletter marketing. This event is a one stop shop to hit all angles of your online business. This program will teach you how to successfully tackle up to date online marketing techniques to further your knowledge and help grow your online business the right way.

Don’t wait until the last minute, early bird registrations going through September 12th. Save $25 per registration by doing it now. For more information on how to register please visit the website today and pre-register for your space.

Many blog owners run ad units of some description to help generate blogging income. There are so many different ways to generate this income and so many different ad units that can be used. One Blog plugin that can help manage your ad units is the Adsense Manager for WordPress.

Although titled Adsense Manager, this plugin does more than just manage your Adsense ads. It now also supports  AdBrite, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Commission Junction, CrispAds, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN and WidgetBucks.

Automatic Ad Code Importer for all supported networks. Widgets & Sidebar Modules compatible (as used in the popular K2 theme). Automatic limiting of Ads to meet network T&Cs (Google 3 units/page)

This plugin generates the code automatically and allows the ad units to be placed using widgets. As it now supports so many different advertising streams, it possibly one of the best Adsense Ad managers around. It is easy to install and fairly easy to use. You really do need to read the instructions carefully however.

If you have ad units on your site then this blog plugin should make life a lot easier. The easier it is to manage your ad the easier it will be to increase your blogging income.