Blog tools that help you get a loyal fan base

Monday’s Promotion Tip for Graphic Designers

You’ve taken the plunge. You’ve started a blog. You are either with Blogger, Movable Type, TypePad, or my favorite, WordPress.

Now what? Well, if you are using the blog as a marketing tool for you company, you want to get the word out about who you are and what you do.

You want to create a loyal fan base that keep coming back to your blog, day after day.

Strategies for getting people to your blog everyday:

1. Feed readers: For your more tech-savvy readers, they may use a feed reader (like Newsgager or FeedLounge). This allows them to scan at a glance all the different posts of all the blogs they are interested in quickly. Then they can read what interests them. Some of them are even compatible with Outlook, sending all the RSS feeds to Outlook (EX: Newsgator).
   
2. Subscriber links in your blog: I use FeedBurner so that visitors to my blog can subscribe to my blog in their favorite reader (there’s a huge list like Google, MyYahoo, MyMSN, etc.)
   
3. Email link: Then you’ll have readers who don’t know RSS feeds / readers but do understand email. This allows them to have delivered to their inbox any new post that you create. You do have a few choices to do this but FeedBurner offers it too.
   

C O N C L U S I O N

You have to make it easy (and offer different solution) to get people to your blog on a daily basis. This helps build your traffic and improves your ranking in the search engines.

I know this is going to sound really strange, but I subscribe to my own blogs. This is so that I can send some spider traffic my way!

Technorati Tags: SEO, Technology, Web Design

Building your list

Monday’s Promotion Tip for Graphic Designers

Today’s tip is something that you really want to focus on this year. It’s populating your site with qualified visitors and capturing their names and emails.

Initially, I decided that I would have 2 types of sites: one offering free information and the other a paid site offering in depth information in 4 crucial areas of design.

For the free, I’m offering a blog, newsletter, podcast and some other timely information as it came up. Then as a step up, and for those who are more serious, I would also offer a subscription site where people can go in and read articles and expand their knowledge base.

The key to success

Creating pages to generate their own traffic and to populate the site quickly and easily.

Here’s my step-by-step plan for building my subscription list:

1. Offer useful, informative and timely content — updated regularly
2. Include FREE incentives for signing up (in my case, a report and tip sheet)
3. Add a sign-up form on various pages for easy sign up (on as many as possible)
4. Never ask too much personal info on the sign-up form
5. Include a “privacy policy”
6. Create a “squeeze page” for my newsletter to sign up (click here to view)
7. Show sample issues of my newsletter to “try it out”
8. Landing page for each issue of the newsletter for immediate download or online viewing
9. Blog, blog, blog regularly
10. Build word of mouth by asking subscribers and others in your field to pass it on or market your newsletter.

C O N C L U S I O N

The goal of any list is to attract visitors to your site and keep them coming by offering updated information, incentives, reports, etc… And you don’t want to spend a lot of time doing it.

You also want to show your integrity by having a privacy policy guaranteeing their privacy, not sending spam, and allowing them to view sample issues.

And finally, you want your visitors to be so impressed with your site that they will share their “discovery” with others. Word of mouth can be from your visitors or others in your field that would feature you on their site.

Advertising is the name of the game!

Technorati Tags: Business, Management, Marketing, SEO, Web Design

SEO is more than just a buzzword

Search Engine Optimization…

You’ve probably heard of this because everyone talks about it — it’s a “hot” term. The basic definition is that it’s a system of techniques used to increase the amount of traffic going to your website from search engines.

Once you’ve designed your site was designed, your goal is to populate it with qualified visitors. So, I had to learn about SEO. The way you use these various tools will affect your standing in search results.

Factors search engines take into account when displaying search results:

1. Domain name
2. Title Meta Tag
3. URL directories and file names
   [tip: hyphens are preferable to underscores]
4. Description Meta Tag*
5. Keywords Meta Tag (fluctuates by month and by browser)*
6. ALT tags (ex: for images and links)
   [Note: this is no longer considered by some browsers]
7. HTML tags: headings, emphasized and strongly emphasized text
8. Keywords in heading tags (H1, H2 and H3)
   [Note: most important is H1]
9. Term frequency, both in your page and on the WWW
   [often erroneously called "keyword density"]
10. Link popularity: having sites of similar subjects or industry linking to you
11. Linking from one page to other pages on your site
12. PageRank (for Google) of the page
13. Your content! Keywords appearing in the text on your site
14. Sitemaps

Things to consider:

1. Don’t use these tools to “fool” people into coming to your site by including keywords that are not relevant to your site, it will often only serve to annoy the visitor — and he’s probably not interested in your site anyway.
2. Don’t try to overload your site with lots of keywords and meta tags information. Search engines are getting smarter by the minute and you don’t want to be penalized by the search engine thinking your site is essentially spam.
3. Finally, the best way to get up there in the search engine is to offer educational topics that others want to read and then link to. Also keep it long enough to be relevant: ideally between 500-750 words. Include your keywords in the text of the page as much as possible and keep it focused (you don’t want the search engine to get confused about what your site is about, do you?)

C O N C L U S I O N

Taking the extra time to set up a page properly is vitally important. You want people to come to your site and the more focused the page on your site is, the better. The goal is to have qualified people come to your site, and then they will naturally look around.

Remember: it’s all about people finding you!

NOTE: Many experts say that Google avoids META tags altogether. I use them “just in case!”

Technorati Tags: Marketing, SEO, Web Design