Seven Simple Ways to Annoy Your Readers

If you want to make a living blogging, there are a number of things that you need to get right. Arguably, the most important being some killer content and some savvy SEO. One other thing that you need to get right however, is to not irritate your readers.

Many bloggers make mistakes, that unbeknown to them, greatly irritate their readers. Such mistakes result in a loss of traffic, a loss of profit and in some cases, a loss of a blog. Here are seven simple ways to turn loyal readers against you.

Ignore Your Comment Sections

Just about every blogger is aware of the importance of blog commenting when it comes to promoting their blog. What many bloggers don’t realise is that how they handle their own comment sections is equally important.

When somebody leaves a thoughtful comment on your blog, you need to respond. When you fail to do so, it gives the impression that you do not care what your readers think. And that’s simply not how you build a following.

Take Frequent Unannounced Holidays

One of the first rules of running a profitable blog is that you post on a regular basis. You can post daily or weekly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you post to a specific schedule.

When you disappear, your readers continue to check your blog for new posts. When they do so, they get disappointed. And eventually disappointed readers stop being readers.

Cover Your Blog in Ads

Bloggers, like anybody else, deserve to earn a living. And one of the easiest ways to turn a blog into a profitable web property is to include a few advertisements. There’s nothing wrong with this and most of your readers aren’t going to begrudge you for it.

There is however a line and when you cover your blog in flashing banners, you’ve crossed it. If you want to monetize your blog, do so with subtlety. If your ads are the first thing that visitors see, you’re not being subtle.

Write Sneaky Sponsored Posts

Another highly effective way to monetize a blog is to write sponsored posts. While there’s nothing wrong with sponsored posts, two important rules must be followed.

First off, sponsored posts must be honest. Don’t write a positive review for a poor product. And secondly, the sponsored nature of a sponsored post must be declared. Break these rules and you will lose your readers respect.

Make Navigation Impossible

The wonder that is WordPress allows just about anyone to create a reasonably professional looking blog. Web design expertise is therefore by no means required to profit from blogging.

One thing that you do need to get right however is your blogs navigation system. If navigating your blog is confusing, frustrating or simply inefficient, you will lose readers. Here are a few tips to help you avoid this faith.

Categorise your posts in a clear fashion.

Include links to said categories on every page.

Underline all textual links and don’t underline any other text.

Use breadcrumbs so that readers know where they are.

Experiment with Cool Fonts

There are many ways to express yourself in your blog but your choice of font isn’t one of them. When deciding what font to use for a new post, the only thing that you should be thinking about is legibility.

This means nice big, black letters. It doesn’t mean Comic Sans and it certainly doesn’t mean yellow text.

Make Them Wait

Some bloggers get a little carried away when it comes to making their blog look shiny. They add a few hundred photos, choose a textured background and finish the effect with some nice Flash graphics.

While the resulting blog often looks fantastic, it suddenly takes forever to load. This is not a clever trade off to make. If you think that your blog takes longer than average to load, here are a few tips for solving the problem.

Limit photos to one per post.

Optimize all photos.

Remove flash completely.

Clean up your blogs code (or pay somebody to do it).

Leveraging Social Media for Better Website Traffic

The only way to keep ourselves on top of the SEO game is to keep ourselves updated with new techniques and strategies. Many are still coming to terms with the new strategy of using social networks as a method of promoting their websites. Many would even say that creating links on social networking sites such as Facebook for example could have some effect on a website’s search engine results.

Social Networks and SEO

Before we get confused, let us first define what SEO and Social Networking are. SEO is defined as strategies or techniques employed to improve a website’s search engine results. It works on the principle that websites that are prominently displayed in search engine results have a better chance of attracting traffic.

Social Networks on the other hand improves traffic to your website thru community building and information sharing. This does not in any way optimize a website’s search engine results. They work very differently but are similar in their objective which is to drive more traffic to your website.

Social SEO

I’m not exactly sure if this is the perfect term to describe the process of optimizing your social network campaign for improving your website traffic but I guess it’s clear enough to stress the point. With Social Networks gaining more prominence, search engines like Google have included.

Great Titles

Just like your regular websites, social networking sites gives you the option of creating titles for your articles or announcements. You could then link these back to your website. The great thing about social sites is you don’t have to come up with long word articles just to capture your audience attention. A few words or killer title is all it takes to drive traffic to your website. The rule of thumb here is to create a killer title that is difficult to resist which is easier said than done.

People Targeted Content

If you’re going to write, write for people. This has always been an important factor even for web content but the difference here is that no SEO is required. Throw keywords out, no amount of keywords is needed here. Even Google’s ever dependable spiders will not be able to crawl their way thru social networking sites.

Build your Social Profile

Be an active member of the community. Joining other social networking groups helps you build meaningful relationship and increases your exposure. This is where branding and link building comes into mind in terms of social networks. Just like link building, you are creating backlinks to your social network sites.

Add Social Widgets

Many website owners are missing out on the benefits of social networking by failing to install social networking widgets on their website. It only takes a few minutes to install these but their benefits are invaluable. People are unable to follow you simply because you have not given them the option of doing so. Adding a share button makes its simpler for them to tweet or share your articles at Twitter and Facebook.

Images and Videos

Social media sites have opened new doors for promoting your services and products. Posting a few images and videos over YouTube for example gives you a creative way of promotion aside from writing good content. It is said that pictures can tell a thousand words enhancing the quality of content.

Different Strokes

SEO and Social Media Marketing are two different sides of the coin. SEO in its strictest definition helps us get to the top of search engines to increase traffic to our websites. Social Media can also be considered as a tool for increasing traffic to your website but works on a different principle. The difference is that SEO targets search engines while Social Networks is people oriented. With the growing popularity of Social Networks it has become another valuable tool for increasing traffic to websites.

Linking PR with SEO: Taking Strategy to Next Level

In the aftermath of Google’s Panda and Penguin updates, something interesting happened. SEO experts started focusing on the public relations team. Yes, a love affair between public relations and SEO has been brewing and we’ve got the scoop on how you can maximize your results by encouraging this match.

Today’s SEO is being reimagined. Links are still an all important piece of boosting your website’s rankings. But these links are now being obtained from different sources. When directories lost their oomph, link farms got blown out of the water, and keyword stuffing became de rigueur, public relations remained the shiny hope to obtain new links and create a buzz around a business’ products and services.

Using PR as SEO Benefits Your Business

In the wake of the search engine algorithm shake ups, search engines have begun trying to offer its online visitors meaningful content in the form of social content to enhance their experience. Today’s internet searcher is savvy and content hungry, consuming and curating content on social media forums and discarding content that doesn’t make sense. To distinguish a brand from the rest, a business now has to create a buzz. Gone are the days you could simply rely on SEO tactics alone to earn those coveted top spots online. Today’s internet users are searching for relevant and newsworthy items, so it’s important that your business’ news is found in these searches. When businesses use PR, they can enjoy increased benefits unavailable from SEO tactics alone. This includes:

• Earned traffic, recognition, and buzz. By enhancing your PR with SEO, a business can gain increased brand recognition, and encourage trust and loyalty among internet users. Public relations offers brands the ability to get their news featured across the web in forums and news sources which make a brand appear in demand. When you enhance this with SEO tactics, you increase the likelihood that your press will be found by internet searchers and that your traffic will go up.

• You’ll increase traffic conversion rates with organic press. When a business releases press releases online, they are pushing this news out to thousands of news outlets, many of whom may pick it up and republish the news online. When consumers stumble across this organic press, it appears more relevant and more trustworthy. Consumers who enjoyed these stories and click on the website’s link are doing so because they genuinely want to know more about the brand, the product, or the services. These organic visitors are easier to convert into paying customers because they are led there by genuine interest, not questionable links in fuzzy related sources.

• Press articles encourage social shares. Internet users love sharing news stories on their social media forums. These publications attract much higher rates of traffic, which means that your content could be shared more frequently, and deemed more valuable to users. The likelihood increases that your article may be exposed to millions instead of the hundreds that your website may attract.

• Enhanced brand image from positive buzz. When a brand wants to attract new clients, it often creates a buzz about its products to do so. Additionally, when a brand has been slammed online, it often resorts to creating favorable press to counter the negative stories online. Public relations can craft and control this image with positive buzz associated with these stories. When you add SEO to this, it increases the likelihood that your article will be found ahead of any negative items.

• Increased quality back links. Press releases are sent to thousands of news sources and are often shown on diverse news outlets’ websites. These news sources generally have high page ranks and huge flows of traffic. For example, a press release which is featured on the LA Times obtains a link from a website with a high page rank, boosting your link profile. When you accumulate these back links, your rankings will go up up up!