Blogged Out | Blog Promotion & Marketing Tips

I’ve spent a little time recently thinking about how I can improve on my various blogs and I thought I’d share some of the ideas I came up with based on my own network and checking out some other people’s blogs.  The core issue I was thinking about was whether or not each individual site should really be a blog and not a news site / forum / whatever.

Feel free to reply with your own ideas or any comments you may have.

1. Is a blog really right for you?

I see a lot of people (me included) setting up blogs because it is easy.  Realistically, what you are trying to achieve with your site may not necessarily be compatible with running it in a blog format.  Wordpress and other types of blog software makes it easy for non tech people to quickly and cheaply setup a website - perhaps you should think about what you are trying to achieve before settling on the blog approach?

2.  Using an “out of the box” blog for SEO

Blogs aren’t great for SEO, despite the explosion of blogs in the SEO industry.  The blog is that out of the box, you still need to make a lot of modifications in order to “optimise” your blog.  These include:

• Title tag and Meta tag modifications
• Blocking category and / or archives to minimise duplicate content

On top of these, there are some other issues.

The format in which a blog presents information and archives it over time can be bad for SEO.  New posts receive a good boost in terms of SEO because they are linked to from your homepage.  But over time they are pushed a few pages back - the result is lower PageRank (or “link weight”) passed to those pages.

Google particularly looks at the rate of link growth to pages over time - Wordpress and most other types of blog software create a rate of negative link growth to pages over time.  This may suggest to search engines that the page is getting less important or popular so it will rank worse.  You may notice this effect in play if you write a new post that brings in good traffic for a while, but a few months down the line - nothing.

Another issue (or at least, a theory) is that commonly used blog types can be easy to spot by search engines.  As such it may be easy for them to treat the content differently - as blogs can be very news focused, search engines may make a concerted effort to deprioritise old blog content (as it is deemed to be less relevant a few months later).

3.  Blog software makes it difficult for users to find old posts

Your blog basically creates a chronological list of posts usually organised by category.  If I come to your blog I’m not going to spend time looking around - I’ll check a few recent posts and base my decision to comment or come back on that.

Do you have gold dust posts from last year that are still relevant today?  Then the chances are you are getting as much value from that as you should be.

4.  RSS feeds are useful for repeat visits

A fairly obvious one here.  Are you promoting your RSS feed adequately?  Don’t make me look around for it!

5.  Monetising blogs can be a pain

Again another obvious one for experienced bloggers.  Adsense conversion rates can be pretty poor - without some template modifications it can be a problem to position your ad blocks effectively.

Other forms of advertising can be equally problematic.  The only real options for bloggers are direct advertiser agreements (e.g. banner ads, which you then need to add to the site manually) or paid links (easier to implement, but run inhereit risks of being penalised by search engines).

Are you promoting your own services effectively?  If you have no services, then why not create an area of your site where others can pay to promote their own services?

6.  Maintaining a good supply of new content

It can be tough to keep posting new posts.  What seemed like a good idea when you started out can turn into a headache if you can’t keep up with new ideas for content.  If you commit to writing x posts a week, then your users expect that - any change to that rate of publishing can lose you visitors.

There are options though:

• Think outside the box for new ideas for content (e.g. check your referrls and see what people have arrived at the site looking for).
• Use 3rd party content writers (there a few firms out there that do good rates on quality articles).
• Look for guest posters.
• Consider expanding the remit of your site - perhaps your subject area is too narrow as it is?
• Expand the type of content you deliver - move from personal opinion to industry news, humour, insight, interviews and so on.

7.  Looking good

It’s rare to find a Wordpress theme that looks good and hasn’t been used on a million other blogs!  I’m in the process of having my own themes designed just now for that very reason.

If your technical skills and graphic design skills aren’t that great then you can find a decent WP theme designer for relatively cheap (trying posting the job on webmaster forums to find some people).  While $150 may be more than you want to spend on your blog, keep in mind if you do want to get serious about your site then looking good is an excellent place to start.

A good looking site is more likely to get regular readers and links from other sites.

So there are my thoughts on the matter.  Just a few of things that I’ve been mulling over in my mind lately. :)  Anyone here thought about moving from a blog format to something else?  I’d be interested to hear any experiences you’ve had.

Scott

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Filed under: Blog Promotion Tips, Blog Software on January 14th, 2008