Gaining exposure is necessary when it come to successfully starting a green business and generating new clients is also important. Keeping customers informed and having accessibility to you and your company should be a top priority. A great way to do this is by creating a green business blog. With the increase in technology information and the outlets provided to you for free, beginning a green business blog for your green business is a great way to market and gain new customers. Let’s start with this…

Exactly What is a Blog?

A blog is basically an online journal where you can write, read, edit, publish and share personal or business information. Stemmed from the words “web log,” a blog is a website that incorporates regular entries written by an individual, including event updates, and other material that you want to share, i.e. pictures, videos, announcements, links, etc. Blogs can be easily maintained without prior knowledge of the technical aspects of web design. The many free blogging platforms make it possible for anyone to make one. Sometimes blogs can be made for personal use to write about your days, similar to a journal. Other people utilize blogs to write about certain themes or areas of interest. They also allow for users and viewers to comment on any updates you publish. If you’re running a business, utilizing these blogging tools and technology to promote your message of going green is an efficient and promising way.

I Already Have my Green Business Website, Why Do I Need a Green Blog too?

While having a website with your own personal URL for your green business is great to have, establishing a green business blog will help you succeed just as much, if not more.

Websites are great because they show an amount of stability and a concrete place for establishing your internet presence. Blogs, however, will generate traffic and can bring new customers into your website. Usually blogs are generated or hosted by a main website such as WordPress.com or Blogger.com. Like Facebook or Twitter, there are already users plugged in and skimming other people to be “friends” or “follow.” Blogs are just a free way to give you more accessibility to your customers or new customers, and at the same time, they can have easy access to you. Spreading the green message about your business is already something that needs promotion in its own; the tools necessary to do this are out there and ready to be utilized. Having your green business blog will allow you to do the following:

• Keep your customers updated and current with all the exciting news and things to look forward to from your business
• A direct message feed on your green business blog will allow your customers to know your current special offers
• Direct contact with customers and hear feedback concerning your business will be easily accessible
• Allow communication of new ideas and create an outlet for sharing your experiences from having a green business
• Generate traffic from your green business blog to your website

A Green Business Blog Can Benefit You in Many Ways

As stated before, blogs can be free and with a little extra time, you can have it up and running in a matter of minutes. Marketing strategies for businesses usually generate the same way. With any business, you can really utilize the internet to your advantage. Without having to print and throw away paper for flyers and other promo things, establishing a green blog is just another way to promote and market your business in a eco-friendly way. These are the key points in what a green blog can do for your business:

• Creating your blog and keeping it current with new content will increase your SEO (search engine optimization) – that means, search engines will pick up your blog more and more with your updates.
• When you write and publish your blogs with updates, you can fill it up with keywords like “going green,” “buy green,” “green furniture,” “green household items” – whatever your green business is about, you can utilize keywords into your updates which will increase traffic to your site
• Creating a blog will also allow you to have more pages so you can interlink your blog posts and product pages, thus driving more traffic to your website
• Also a cool thing, you can get more involved with your customers and be able to receive and share information about being green and possibly creating a green living blog

So if you haven’t started a blog, you should today. Whether you’re running a green business or not, it’s a free and easy way to promote and market your business. It’s easy, fun, and can make your business grow.

Related posts:

1. The Complete Road Map to Launching a Green Brand Online
2. How to Optimize Your Green Business Website for Local Search
3. SUSTAINABLE MARKETING BLOG » Blog Archive » The three goals of …

I think I’ve researched every WordPress SEO plugin in existence. The list I amassed was daunting. I had plugin anxiety. All In One SEO Pack or Platinum SEO? Many of them had features that overlapped. The thought of having to install all those plugins and to get them to work with each other was a developer nightmare.

Due to some fortuitous Tweeting, Joost DeValk, the WordPress SEO Guru, picked up on my Tweet and offered to go over my massive list of 30 SEO plugins via Skype, and eliminate the chaff. Granted he wrote many of these – but that’s why he’s the WordPress SEO guru. If you care about WordPress SEO, you oughta mosey on down to Joost’s site and read his WordPress SEO Bible.

Must Have WordPress SEO plugins

The list of plugins below should have your site covered for all things SEO.

HeadSpace2 – HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools.  While the name only mentions “Google” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Friendly Images – Yoast is on the fence this. I kind of like it.  Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog.  You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features. Some of the great things it does includes:

• Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags.
• Prevent indexing of the subpages to your homepage, by adding a noindex,follow.
• Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
• Add noodp an noydir meta robots tags, allowing you to opt out of DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions
• And more!

RSS Plugins

MediaRSS – MRSS is an RSS extension used for syndicating multimedia files (audio, video, image) in RSS feeds. MediaRSS is a way of embedding media into your feeds. This plugin is equipped to locate img tags in your posts and generate XML code that can be used by feed readers.
RSS Footer – This very simple plugin let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, which you can edit like this:

Social Media Plugins

Sociable is a social sharing plugin with big, plush social media buttons that you just want to press. It’s much more attractive and noticable than Share This.

Post Ratings – Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

Twitter Plugins

Choices abound on Twitter plugins. I would do Retweet first and then the Twitter Box once your account is up and running.

Retweet Button – The TweetMeme retweet button is for website and blog publishers who want to encourage their audience to tweet their content on twitter.  The button shows a live count of the number of times your webpage or blog post has been tweeted.
Tweetbacks – People are talking about your posts, and not only in the comments to your post. A lot of that conversation is happening on Twitter, and now, you can take that conversation right back to your blog! This plugin imports those tweets about your posts as comments. You can display them in between the other comments on your blog, or display them separately.
Twitter Box – Provides on how to create a fancy box that displays your latest Twitter rants in your sidebar without having to turn to clunky plug-ins that bog your blog down.

Content / Media

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site. Key features include:

• An advanced and versatile algorithm: Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.
• Related posts in RSS feeds: Display related posts in your RSS and Atom feeds with custom display options.

Video Player Quicktags – This plugin adds a button to your editor that allows you to paste the URL that the video is located at into the prompt box. You can fully configure how the videos are displayed (width, height, colors, alignment on the page) and much more. Your site will even stay (X)HTML valid unlike with the code provided by most video sites.
SlideShare – This plugin allows you to easily add SlideShare presentations to your blog by just copy pasting the default WordPress embed code.  It has one (!) setting, “default width”. If you set that setting, it will make all presentations appear at the width you set there, allowing you to easily adapt the width to your theme’s content width.
Smush.it – Reduce image file sizes and improve performance using the Smush.it API in WordPress. Every image you add to a page or post will be automatically run through Smush.it behind the scenes. You don’t have to do anything different. Smush.it optimizes images by:

• stripping meta data from JPEGs
• optimizing JPEG compression
• converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
• stripping the un-used colours from indexed images

Commenting

Subscribe to Comments – Subscribe to Comments 2.1 is a plugin that allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there for the simple reason that it helps foster a community around your blog by encouraging commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog

WordPress Maintenance plugins:

W3 Total Cache – W3 Total Cache is a performance optimization plugin for WordPress, in other words, it speeds up the performance of your WordPress site so that you don’t lose traffic and you rank better in Google. Written by Frederick Townes, a social media designer and  the CTO of Mashable, W3 Total Cache is designed to include every speed enhancing feature possible, and optimized to handle all hosting environments.
WP Database Backup – Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.
No Self Pings – Some people really like that WordPress sends pings from your own site to your own site when you write posts; it lets them easily leave a trail of related posts.  Some people do not like this behavior; it clutters up their comments.  So here’s a plugin to disable self pinging.
Other
Zemanta – Zemanta provides contextual content recommendations to you while you write. It enhances your blog post with relevant images, videos, links, and SEO optimized tags. All recommended content is blogger friendly with clearly marked licenses (Creative Commons or similar).

Other Tips:

Sitemaps are now a part of core WordPress functionality. According to Yoast a traditional sitemap can actually be done within the theme, so there is no need for a plugin.

Breadcrumbs used to once require a plugin but are now incorporated into native WordPress functionality as well.

Related posts:

1. Essential Tagging Plugins for WordPress
2. SEO Title Tag 2.0 – The Best SEO Plugin for WordPress
3. Great Social Bookmarking Plugins for WordPress

So I’m in the process of teaching someone how to create her first blog on WordPress.com. This is an eye-opening exercise in working with someone who is not computer literate or Web-savvy. Granted she is a Native American elder, healer, and ceremonial leader. Hey, we all have our gifts, and can’t all be technogeeks!

In trying to find a straightforward way on helping her navigate the WordPress.com UI and figure out how to publish content to the web, I Googled  “WordPress.com video tutorials” and stumbled upon my friend Chris Abraham’s awesome video. This video takes you through the end-to-end process of signing up for a WordPress blog and publishing a post.

Related posts:

1. 6 Steps for Creating a Social Media Marketing Roadmap & Plan
2. Social Media Revenge by Viral Video – United Airlines Breaks Guitars
3. Flock Eco-Edition – Social Web Browser Goes Green for Earth Day 2008

Recently, Britta Meyer of Eurekster, which makes an embeddable custom social search portal called a “Swicki”, posed a question on LinkedIn about how one would go about defining a social media marketing roadmap, and how you would prioritize each social media channel.

There is no cookie cutter approach to social media marketing. Your strategy will depend on:

1) Your goals – SEO, PR, traffic ( to drive awareness? advertising click-thus? conversions?)
2) Your audience – where does your target demo hang out?
3) Your resources – you, you plus an intern, internal team, agency?

Here are 6 steps to help you design your social media marketing roadmap.

Step 1: Understand What Social Media Is

The best way to look at social media is to view it as one of many Internet marketing channels, one that has the amazing power to go viral. In the very least, it has the awesome ability to engage your audience in meaningful conversations about your product, issue areas, company, and brand.

The social media marketing umbrella includes sites that are both Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 – basically you want to be anywhere that enables discussions, sharing, and user-generated content (UGC), such as:

• Blogs and Forums / Discussion Boards
• Consumer Review Sites
• Social Networks / Online Communities
• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Social News Sites
• Social Music Sites
• Video and Photo Sharing Sites
• Wikis

Step 2: Understand What Social Media Can & Can’t Do

Social media can engage your audience, encourage online conversations that are user-generated, increase your web presence, expand brand awareness, generate publicity (both good & bad) and provide SEO benefits. It doesn’t convert.

For most marketers, social media has no ROI but is great for:

• Brand building
• Relationship management
• Product development
• Reputation management
• Customer interaction
• Customer feedback
• Customer support
• Community building
• Defensive SEO – Yes! Bury your bad press with positive UGC

In some cases, social media can convert – usually if you own the community, and have the power to strategically capture leads. But that’s like being the D&D Dungeon Master.

Step 3: Determine Where Conversations are Happening

You will need to respond to conversations that are already happening. To determine where conversations are happening about your brand, you will need to have some kind of buzz monitoring or online reputation management system in place.

Prioritize these discussions, then hop in.

Step 4: Divide…

Next, you want to expand into unchartered territory.

Before venturing out into the vast unknown, create your social media road map – a map of the social web as it pertains to your business. Gather all the sites that would be most interested in what you have to say and segment them by type (blogs, social networks, social news sites, forums, etc) and by target audience / topical interest.

Once you’ve done that, it will be more clear to you what your campaign specific marketing strategies and tactics ought to be.

Step 5: …and Conquer

Now comes the tactical deployment. Here are some examples of different kinds of social media engagements.

Blogger outreach & engagement – this is a top down, bottom up approach. To demonstrate a significant impact, this is best handled by a team. You will need to identify the A-List blogs, cultivate a positive relationship with as many as possible, persuade them to blog about your issue, or guest blog for them. You will need a team of conversation agents to fan out into the blogosphere and engage in MEANINGFUL conversations wherever conversations about your topic is happening.

If you have a call to action, relevant product, or web resource you are trying to drive traffic to, drop html links with target anchor text for an additional SEO lift (a % of the sites you will be hitting will be do-follow)

Disclose your identity, be courteous, informed about the subject, or you will be flamed, and that will live forever on the web.

Social networking – only hit the communities relevant to your issue, product, company, topic or you will get poor quality traffic, if any.

Are you infiltrating tight-knit interest-specific online communities? If so, you will need to ingratiate yourself into the pack.

Are you starting your own community on a hosted platform, like a Ning? You can drive conversation and awareness, your revenue options are limited (ad revenue sharing).

Do you own the community? Great – you can drive targeted conversations and include strategically placed calls-to-action, promos, ads, anywhere. If you’ve designed your site with SEO in mind, your users will create the content, and you will had an advantage in the SERPS, especially for long-tail keywords.

Social news marketing – thru social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Newsvine. These sites also have a unique culture and will work for you if your news item relates topics favored by the community. Digg, for example, veers towards the geeky. Write for maximum click thrus – think “linkbait”. Popular stories here can get picked up by bloggers, which will also give you an SEO boost. Traffic can be huge and fickle like a tsunami. Don’t expect it to convert. Avoid marketing here – you will be buried.

Step 6: Trust in the Force

Finally, trust is a huge factor in social engagement. Understand that social media marketing is most effective when users in the community know you. The only way for the community to know you is if you spend a lot of time online and invest managing your social web presence across communities.

Social media builds awareness and drives conversation. It’s a powerful way enable communication between the company & customer. Always remember, selling is a secondary or tertiary benefit of social media.

[tags]social media, social media marketing, seo, social networks, blogging, roi, lorna li[/tags]

Related posts:

1. Buzz Marketing Through Social Media – What this Means for Search Engine Marketers
2. Social Media Optimization with StumbleUpon
3. What’s Your Buzz Share? 4 Easy Steps For Tracking Online Buzz

What’s Code Got to Do With It?

Face it, while linklove is sexy, in SEO, code ain’t no second hand emotion.

SEO is a multi-faceted discipline, where keyword research, SEO copy-writing, linkbuilding, and code optimization work as a team in an attempt to address a variety of search engine ranking factors. Programming your website in a way that allows engine spiders to access, categorize, and index the content on your site so will ensure your other SEO tactics go the full mile. As an SEO best practice, you will want to make sure your code is as error-free as possible, from a W3C validation standpoint, and that you follow guidelines for semantically correct markup. Testing shows that good, clean, semantically correct code not only allows your site to load faster in major browsers, but also allows for faster indexing by the search engines.

W3C Compliance and SEO

There is a great deal of debate as to whether W3C compliancy will enhance search engine rankings. According to Michael Gray:

From my experience having a site that is 100% code compliant doesn’t give you any SEO benefit. That said throwing up a page with complete disregard for valid code is looking for trouble. If you put your page into a validator and it comes back with hundreds of errors you may be looking for trouble. Depending on what your errors are you may have made it harder for a bot to crawl your website. However if you can get it down to handful of errors, it might not be worth the time obsessing over those last few details.

Even if you can’t enforce strict compliance, be familiar with Google Webmaster guidelines and search engine bot indexing behavior, and code your site accordingly.

Understanding Semantic XHTML Markup

Semantic markup (or Semantic coding) is the art of programming your website so that the code used is descriptive and representative of the information it contains…and more meaningful to search engine bots. Standardized markup tags define the content on a page better than generic elements like <div> or <span> tags.

For example, if you were creating a page heading, use this code:

<h1>SEO & the Importance of Semantic Markup</h1>

Instead of this code:

<div id=”page-title”>SEO & the Importance of Semantic Markup </div>

Semantic Coding Guidelines

Here are some great semantic coding guidelines, courtesy of Barry Wise:

• <h1> tags should only be used once on a page, to define the title and/or purpose of the page. It should be very close in meaning to the <title> tag of your page.
• <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> header tags should be used for subheadings, in order of descending importance. Try not to skip.
• Don’t use <br> to separate list items. Instead use the <ol> tag with <li> elements for ordered lists, and <ul> and <li> should be used for unordered lists.
• For bold or emphasized text, use <strong> or <em>, instead of the less descriptive <b> and <i> tags.
• Wrap paragraphs in <p> tags, and never use <p> or <br> tags just for spacing. Use the margin and/or padding attributes of the <p> tag in your CSS code to add visual spacing.

List of Semantic Code Elements

• ABBR and ACRONYM: For Abbreviations and Acronyms. They have an accompanying title tag which you can use to describe the actual meaning of the abbreviated word or acronym.
• CITE: Citation, used to cite a source of information.
• CODE: Computer or Programming code.
• DEL: Deleted word or phrase.
• DFN: Definition.
• DL: Definition List. Similar to UL and OL, but uses DT (Definition term) and DD (definition description) to show terms and definitions.
• EM: Emphasis, displayed as italicized text.
• INS: Insert, used to display text you have inserted due to an edit at a later date.
• KBD: Keyboard instructions.
• OL: Ordered List.
• SAMP: Sample output, used to show sample output from programming code.
• STRONG: Strong, or bold, emphasis on a word or phrase.
• UL: Unordered List.
• VAR: Variable, used to represent a variable in programming code.

Semantic Web Markup for Blogs

Unbelievably, nearly every WordPress, MovableType, or TypePad theme fails a simple test for truly semantic XHTML markup. One of the most common errors is that the blog title / logo is served within <H1> tags. Serving your post titles in <h1> tags is far better.

For a great info on how to correct your blog XHTML, visit master WordPress developer Cris Pearson’s blog post The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs.
For non-code related tactics on blogging SEO, check out my summary of the Blogger’s Guide to SEO meetup, hosted by Aaron and Giovanna Wall.

Freedom from Code Bloat

Code bloat occurs when the amount of code on a page greatly exceeds the amount of text on the page. Excessive code can get in the way of search engine spiders indexing your content, especially if your content is placed deep within your code structure. It’s harder for search engine spiders to crawl the content of the page and determine its relevancy of the page if there’s extraneous code in the way. Furthermore, code bloat can create longer than normal download time, which can impact how search engines rank your site, and cause visitors to navigate away from your webpage.

There are four types of code bloat to be aware of:

• On-page styling
• On-page JavaScripts
• Excessive table usage
• Poor HTML formatting

According to technical SEO consultants HiRank, you can reduce code bloat by moving as much javascript and CSS to external files. This enables your users to cache those files on first load, that way, search engines don’t have to download these files all the time. To fix these four common types of code bloat, visit Stoney deGeyter’s post on how to fix the Javascript and CSS that is jacking up your SEO.

Good web development involves minimizing code bloat and programming your website with a low code to text ratio in mind. While there is no agreement on an ideal code to text ratio, the lower the ratio, the faster the load time, and the easier for search engine spiders to determine the relevancy of your content.

[tags]seo, search engine optimization, blogging, blog seo, xhtml, semantic markup, code to text, w3c compliance, code bloat[/tags]

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1. How to Optimize Your Green Business Website for Local Search
2. Google Earth Outreach – Best Practices on Mapping Social and Environmental Issues Accross the Globe
3. The Concise List of Must Have SEO Plugins for WordPress

Lately I’ve taken to using Flock, the Social Web Browser, because it consolidates and simplifies my social web lifestyle. Today, Flock just got better.

For Earth Day 2008, Flock launched the Eco-Edition of the Flock browser that delivers the latest environmental and sustainable living content to eco-minded social media and web users. The Eco-Edition comes prepopulated with the best news, photos, videos, and feeds from leading eco-content partners on the Web,delivering fresh content from Grist, GroovyGreen, Treehugger, PlanetGreen, Sprig, Current and other top eco brands daily. Furthermore, Flock will donate 10% of the proceeds of the Eco-Edition browser at the end of 2008, and as a recognition of the power of community to create change, will allow users of the Eco-Edition to select the recipient of this donation.

The Flock Eco-Edition Browser, is available as a free software download for Mac, PC and Linux at www.flock.com/eco.

Why Use Flock?

If you are a social media news hound, blogger, Twitterer, are active on multiple social networks, and depend heavily social bookmarking to manage your favorite links, Flock will help you consolidate all your social web activities into a single dashboard.

• You can see updates from friend on Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter in the Flock people sidebar
• You can simultaneously favorite your urls to the Flock browser and to del.icio.us.
• You can post to multiple blogs from the same interface
• It does Technorati tags for you
• You can drag and drop Flickr images & YouTube videos into your blog
• Manage your favorite news feeds

[tags]flock eco-edition, flock social web browser, social media, web 2.0, blogging, microblogging, social bookmarking, lorna li[/tags]

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Related posts:

1. What Is a Social Media News Release?
2. How to Boost Traffic & Turbo Charge Your Blog in 2008
3. Great Social Bookmarking Plugins for WordPress

presented by Giovanna & Aaron Wall

Tuesday night I went to one of the first SF Blogger Meetups to gather after a long hiatus and it was well worth the wait.

The group practically took over Amici’s pizzeria on Lombard and, with the exception of my bub.blicio.us buddy Victor Karamalis, included no one I recognized from the Web 2.0 circuit.

But it did include a treat – I got to meet, sit next to, and pick the brains of Aaron Wall and his wife Giovanna. Yes, THE Aaron Wall, of SEO Book and one of the most well known SEOs of our time. In fact, the couple is so successful with building monetizing blogs that they now occupy the ranks of the New Rich – a term coined by Tim Ferris of the 4-Hour Work Week. Both Aaron and Giovanna are seasoned veterans of blog monetization – they’ve optimized and monetized websites so that several of them bring in over six figures in income. Sharing their blogging secrets, as well as picking up the tab for 40+ attendees, was their way of giving back to the community.

They also threw in a free resource The Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization.

Alas, if only I could spend an ENTIRE DAY learning from Aaron or Giovanna!

The Blogger Meetup was largely made up of novice bloggers, and folks unfamiliar with the term SEO. Most of what the Walls shared was pretty general knowledge, seasoned with nuggets of valuable insider wisdom, some of which they urged, to keep to ourselves.

Topics covered were:

1. How to Generate and Grow Traffic

Content is King

Write good content that caters to your target audience – ideally content that is so good that it redefines the industry. Be sure to create a unique angle the reflects your personality. Mention and link out to other blogs – the owners will notice the incoming link, and often they too will share some link love.

A good tip from Aaron on scrapers stealing your unique site content is to create links to older articles in your blog post. That way, if scrapers pick up your content, at least they are providing links back to your site

Community Participation

Start online friendships by in conversations on blogs, forums and social networks related to your topic. Try to have a popular blogger mention you and link to you – this can bring considerable traffic to your site. You can also offer to write for other well-known bloggers.

Create a community project related to your topic and ask web-savvy experts to give their opinion about it. If your project is buzzworthy, all of the sudden you will have organic citations from thought leaders in the field pointing to your site from around the Web.

Pay Per Click

Use PPC to build traffic. My take on PPC is that it’s worthwhile if you have a product to sell that would at least enable you to generate some kind of ROI, otherwise buying this kind of traffic can get very expensive very quickly.

However, Aaron and Giovanna maintained that even if you’re not selling anything, buying traffic through PPC can be powerful, because, if your content is good, it can go viral. And niche keywords can actually be very cheap – around 5 or 10 cents a click, so if you have a small budget to play with, PPC traffic can be relatively inexpensive and worthwhile.

StumbleUpon Ads

For a nickel a visitor, StumbleUpon, a social search application, can drive considerable traffic to your site. StumbleUpon allows users to discover Web sites, people, videos, online communities, product information and more in a manner very much like channel-surfing, but for the Web. You can use StumbleUpon as a social media marketing tool for free – join a Stumble group for maximum impact – or as an advertiser. Other Stumblers vote your content up or down – the more positive votes you get, the more the StumbleUpon recommends your site to other Stumblers.

Paid Reviews

Solicit paid reviews from other bloggers through ReviewMe.com and PayPerPost.com.

2. Building a Large Subscription Base

RSS

Encourage RSS subscriptions by promoting RSS buttons aggressively. Create a page that explains what RSS is.

Create Brand Evangelists

Make your email accessible or use a contact form. Aggressively solicit comments and answer every real comment.

Encourage Registration

Encourage registration if you want to build a community and offer bonuses for registering.

3. Monetization Strategies

Adsense

The easiest way to monetize is Adsense, which is good for setting a baseline. Aaron recommended staying ad-free in the beginning and to avoid putting ads on your homepage unless you are very well trusted.

Affiliate Offers

Make sure that they are selective and relevant to your topic – and put the offers section on another part of your site.

Create or Sell a Product

Create or sell a product that is relevant to your topic; this works best if you are a recognized expert in your niche. You can also try to sell information-based products created from your intellectual capital, such as e-books, videos, or DVDs, or consulting services and speaking gigs.

Do not pollute your blog with advertising – it becomes a roadblock.

4. Technology

Aaron and Giovanna’s recommended blog platform of choice was WordPress, Drupal if you want to start a community. They also recommended Google Analytics or HaveAMint.com for site stats.

5. Other Takeaways

Trendspotting

One of the key takeaways from the Meetup was the value of spotting trends. According to Giovanna, “The best way to make $ out of blogging is to spot trends and be an early adopter.”

Here’s how to do it:

1. Research trends

Tools you can use to spot upcoming trends include Google Trends, trendwatching.com, ebay’s Marketplace Research Pro, which for $20/month gives you access to what people are searching for on eBay.

2. Keyword Research

Once you’ve zeroed in on a new trend, research the keywords around those trends, buy a domain name with those relevant keywords. Remember:

• Make sure the keyword is in the url
• Hyphens are branding suicide
• It doesn’t matter if your domain is a .biz, .org, or .net

3. Launch a blog about it.

Now all you have to worry about is creating a continuous stream of compelling content. Good luck!

As a blogger, creating quality content is probably the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of blogging, and not all of us have budgets to hire writers.

But according to Aaron, if you have a niche site optimized for niche keywords you can still receive a healthy stream of organic search traffic without the need to aggressively create content. The need for fresh content depends, a great deal, on the market.

Aaron, “I would never start a blog about SEO now – it’s too saturated a field.”

Giovanna, “If you are starting a blog about mortgages now – good luck!”

Given that the blogosphere only seems to be expanding exponentially, like a rogue galaxy hurtling out into space, it seems nearly impossible to gain any traction at all on anything, let alone monetize it.

Following these tips from Aaron and Giovanna Wall, you too, can earn money from your blogs. May the force be with you.

[tags] sf blogger meetup, blogging, blog monetization, blog seo, seo, search engine optimization, aaron wall, giovanna wall[/tags]

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Claiming your blog on Technorati establishes that you are the author or co-author of the blog, which allows you to use other Technorati services that can help increase its visibility. Claiming your blog is fast, easy, and can send more traffic to your site.

Why claim your blog on Technorati?

Claiming your blog on Technorati is like sticking a flag pole in the vast expanse of the rapidly expanding blogosphere. While this might seem like a futile endeavor in a world with over 106 million blogs, there are some social media marketing benefits:

• You can have your name, photo, bio and blog description appear on Technorati search results that are related to your blog.
• You can tag your blog for as many as 20 categories in Technorati’s Blog Directory, which can increase your visibility and traffic.
• You can have a chance to be a featured blog on Technorati’s home page.
• You can have access to additional tools and services.

How do you claim a blog?

If you are already a registered user of Technorati, click on the My Blogs tab and scroll to the Claim a Blog section at the bottom.

If not, click on the “Claim your blog now link.”
and create a Technorati profile, after which you will be taken to the blog claim page.

Enter your blog url. Now you have 2 choices:

1. Quick Claim Activation – certain blogging platforms like WordPress or TypePad enable you to quick claim your blog using your blog user name and password.

2. Post Claim Activation – claim your blog by pasting the auto-generated code into a blog post and publish it. It needs to appear as an active hyperlink on the home page of your blog to work.

Click on “Release the Spiders”. Once Technorati has verified your blog, you can delete the blog post.

Next, customize your blog info. Here you can add a short custom description of your blog and tag your blog for up to 20 categories.

Done.

Related posts:

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2. Social Media Optimization with StumbleUpon
3. How to Boost Traffic & Turbo Charge Your Blog in 2008

Social bookmarking sites allow websurfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online. Social bookmarking is a social media optimization (SMO) tactic that can can send direct traffic to your site, as well as build back links and invite secondary back links.

It is hotly debated among SEOs whether social bookmarking sites like Digg or del.icio.us confer any PageRank or link juice. Many of these sites have the rel=”nofollow” attribute (otherwise known as a “link condom”) which indicates that the destination of that hyperlink should not be afforded any additional weight or ranking by search engines performing link analysis upon web pages.

Some SEOs claim to recieve some link juice from social bookmarking sites. While social bookmarking sites can definitely send traffic, whether or not a social site will boost your search engine rankings will depend on the site itself.

The two social bookmarking plugins evaluated for this website include:

Sociable

The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience.

Share This

Share This is another free social bookmarking plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows visitors to share your content via social bookmarking sites and/or e-mailing the post to a friend.

Unlike Sociable, which displays a busy array of teensy logos from all social bookmarking sites in existence, clicking on the Share This icon neatly pops a box that includes a tab of several major social sites and another tab that enables email.

Unfortunately, Share This doesn’t seem work properly in the newest version WordPress – Version 2.2. Rather than displaying the nifty, 2-tab ajax popup, it redirects you, instead, to another page with a form, which is fully functional.

I am waiting anxiously for the update!
[tags]SEO, WordPress plugins, search marketing, search engine optimization, social bookmarking, SMO, social media optimization, lorna li[/tags]

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Tags are labels that people use to make it easier to find blog posts, photos and videos that are related. Technorati is a blog search engine that employs tags to index content found in the blogosphere. Placing Technorati tags at the bottom of your blog posts is essential if you want to be indexed quickly by Technorati.

When I say quickly, it is almost instantaneous.

SimpleTags

SimpleTags is a free WordPress plugin that will allow you to easily generate Technorati tags at the bottom of your post. While there are already several tag-generating WordPress plugins out there, SimpleTags is the only one that does not make you use the custom fields within WordPress. It’s really that simple.

Download SimpleTags.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

The Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) is a free plugin that increases post tagging capabilities and expands site navigation through the creation of lists of tags. UTW also allows you to get an overview of your tags through tag clouds and graphic representation such as a long tail graph and/or weighted bar arrangement. UTW is a versatile tagging plugin that has a numerous features that allow for a wide range of customization, such as:

• Create a tag archive page
• Display a tag cloud
• Display a long-tail graph
• Display a weighted bar

Download the Ultimate Tag Warrior.

Tag Cloud Widget for UTW

When used in conjuction with the popular WordPress Side Bar Widgets AND the Ultimate Tag Warrior, this free widget enables you to add a tag cloud to your WordPress sidebar. Tags are sized according to their popularity.

Download the Tag Cloud Widget for UTW.

[tags]SEO, WordPress plugins, search marketing, search engine optimization, SimpleTags, tagging, technorati tags, ultimate tag warrior, utw, tag cloud widget for utw, tag cloud, lorna li[/tags]

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