Article marketing has been on a bit of a roller coaster ride in the last eighteen months.  The major search engines’ attempts to clean up their results have led to the disappearance of many article marketing sites.  Article marketing as a sales strategy is nothing new, just a re-vamped version of advertorial marketing techniques used in traditional print media.  The problems with article marketing were simply that, like many areas of the internet, it is an ‘unregulated’ industry.  Anyone with a minimum of two fingers and a keyboard can write effective articles, right?  Or maybe not.  Article marketing can still be very useful as a manual link building technique as long as it’s approached with a little care and attention.  The main aim of any article SEO strategy is to increase links to your site, the important part of creating links, especially today, is focussing on quality links.  SEO has, [...]

Trans-par-en-cy a) the quality that makes something obvious or easy to understand b) lack of hidden agendas and conditions, accompanied by the availability of full information required for collaboration, cooperation, and collective decision making. c) Minimum degree of disclosure to which agreements, dealings, practices, and transactions are open to all for verification. d) Essential condition for a free and open exchange whereby the rules and reasons behind regulatory measures are fair and clear to all participants. definitions via Merriam-Webster and BusinessDictionary.com All Industries Lack Transparency Some just more than others. For example I can tell you from personal experience that the SEO Industry has far more transparency in it than the Online EDU industry. But having said that the SEO Industry still has it’s fallacies that a user can easily fall victim to. The fact is that all industries lack the transparency that customers are looking for. So logically if [...]

Everybody loves to use throw around the buzz word “quality content.” And a simple Google Search query for “quality content” will lead you to even more discussion debating what “quality content” actually is. But forget theory… let’s get down to some nitty gritty numbers shall we? Below is a ranking/scoring system I created for measuring Quality Content with intelligence. The basis or foundation of this scoring system relies on 3 things. 1) that this content is actually blog content rather than traditional static web content, 2) the goal for this content is to be “remarkable” and 3) the other goal is for this content to be Evergreen Content. So… let’s get started. 1. How Was the Content Received Socially? First I like to see how an article performed socially. Was it engaging? Did it catch people’s immediate interest? These answers and more can be answered simply by how well the [...]

10 specific steps for bringing an old website back to life and increasing traffic from Google organic search. So let’s say you find yourself in a situation where you are having to take an old or aged website and increase it’s traffic from Organic Search sources. Mainly Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Oh there’s so much that can be done. But where do you start? What should you be putting your effort towards and what should you ignore? The answer is of course Search Engine Optimization. But what specifically should you be doing? Let me show you what I do with old/aged websites. Recently I had the privilege of reconstructing an aged website for SEO purposes and I wanted to take some time to share with you the strategy and the specific steps I took to drastically increase traffic from organic search. The following are the steps I took (shortly before [...]

Note: this article was specifically created for bloggers who’s goal (or one of their goals at least) is to acquire customers via their blogging efforts. Q: Why in the world would you need a Content Funnel for your blog? A: Because customers needs vary depending on where they are in the decision process. To understand the nature and purpose of a Content Funnel let’s first explain what a Sales Funnel is… since it’s similar in principle. Content Funnels = Nurturing Your Leads Okay so if you have a blog that generates a decent amount of traffic, you have probably ran into a problem that many other bloggers face. The ability to turn those visitors into customers. It’s a problem that plagues bloggers of all kinds from the Corporate blog to the Citizen Journalist style blog and everywhere in between. What’s the source of this problem? Simply put it’s that blog [...]

A well thought out Content Strategy can have a profound effect on your blog. Think of it as being a Business Plan specifically for your blog. Learn step-by-step how to create one that will help your blog grow exponentially! The term Content Strategy as it relates to blogging used to have a simple meaning for me… the overall plan/purpose/concept behind a blog. Oh boy was I wrong! Very wrong. I have learned these past few months the power an official, in depth content strategy can have on a blog. Let me explain in more detail. Over the past couple of months you have seen me write about many things related to Blogging as a Business. I’ve covered everything from the Flagship Strategy to performing a Content Audit on your blog. During this process I started to find out that my blog (this one of course) was lacking some specific direction [...]