Category: Blogs

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No One Likes to Hear No, But We Aren’t a Good Match for Everyone

That’s right we do actually turn prospects away. We are simply not a good match for every prospect’s needs. What we do do, we do great. That being said in a nutshell, we have a passion for small to medium sized business owners who typically have a brick and mortar operation. We are typically also working with the business owner directly and not a corporate chain of command.

It bear repeating, but we do not work or provide any of our services for these business sectors:

Adult Content

Any site that has adult themes such as dating sites, soft core pornography, images of partially clothed women that are used to sell your products, lingerie, any sexual aids or products, we just do not provide services for regardless of whether it is blogging or even Google AdWords.

Stock Brokers, Day Traders, Forex Traders and Their Management Software

In this case we have simply found that the nature of your business is so complicated that the time it takes us to learn and be effective for you is just not cost effective for us. In many cases you are additionally governed by regulations making even blog writing a difficult operation.

E-Books and Products Sold by Squeeze Pages in Multi-Level Marketing Programs

We typically do not supply services for products that are e-books or online how to guides. Although you can still be successful with these approaches, we simply do not have a passion for working with products that are typically sold using these vehicles. This would cover e-books on how to make money in real estate, sell or trade stocks or use the forex, or how to sell multi-level marketing products.

No one likes to hear no, but it is by far better for you to find a supplier that has a true passion for what you do and what you sell. We can help many businesses, but just not all.

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Article Syndication – Does It Work for Link Building Today?

I have to say that since Google really changed the way they count links I have been incredibly careful with not encouraging link bait articles as it has appeared that Google has devalued many of the links incurred this way. However I do want to share a new strategy with you that IS working for link building.

Currently we are using Google Knoll, American Chronicle, and www.GoArticles.com for several clients and post copies of their best topical blog posts there as well as on their blog. I was worried initially that this would not be a workable link-building strategy but have now been proved wrong with over three months of statistical data accumulated showing a positive trend in link building and documented referral traffic.

Here’s what we do. We select the top blog posts and then select two a week to post to Google Knoll, American Chronicle, and GoArticles.com. Since doing this for the last three months we have seen a slow but steady increase in links that Google is recording in the Webmaster Control panel. Additionally we have been able to see consistent referrals coming in from these three sites.

That is excellent news for building organic placement as link building with articles has always been an excellent approach but has been hampered with Google’s new link evaluation. The bottom line is that not all article sites will be good choices to focus on, but consider the top three that we have selected for your link building strategy as well.

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How to Add Our RSS Feed to Your News Reader

I’ve had a few blog visitors ask this question recently and want to share with you a few ways and ideas on RSS news feed readers.

First, you can access our feed by clicking the orange icon in your browser’s tool far near the “Home” button. When you click the feed, you will see that we have several RSS feeds you can subscribe to. Select one from the drop down and click. A new page will open which shows the address of our RSS news feed and also the content of the news feed. Depending on your RSS news feed reader you will add the address into it directly. Just grab the address from the address bar.

If you use IE 8, when you click the RSS news feed link, you can click subscribe right on the page and then access our news feed without even coming to our blog site. You access your subscribed feeds from a place near the IE 8 browser favorites bar.

If you want to start using RSS feeds but don’t know a good RSS news feed reader, I would recommend www.My.MSN.com. I used to love www.My.Live.com but it has been retired. To add our feed to www.My.MSN.com, you will need to set up an account (it is free) and then click “add content” near the top of your new account page. Then pasted in  my RSS feed address in the box subscribe to feed.

I read about 40 news feeds daily using www.My.MSN.com and am able to read the first paragraph or so from within the reader and can click in to read the full article if I want. Using a news feed reader I can scan volumes of content from sites that I monitor and then read only what I want very quickly. RSS news feed readers allow you to review a lot of content in a very short period of time.

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WordPress – Ready to Go Checklist

So you’ve decided to start a blog. That’s great, I feel that blogging is one of the best ways to build “web authority” for search engines and improve your “web visibility”. I personally prefer an installation of WordPress installed under your own domain name, but what else should you do to make sure that your blog gets started on the right foot?

1. Make sure you link to your new blog from your main website. I like it best when you incorporate links to your blog in your main website navigation. If you can’t do that, create a button to go to your blog and position it prominently on every page or incorporate a link to your blog in your website footer.

2. Make sure you link your blog to your website. This is usually done in WordPress by creating a Blogroll. Typically I will include links to the main website, the contact page, and other important pages in the main website in the Blogroll. I do not typically link to outside sites in the WordPress blog roll. Additionally I like to position the Blogroll near the top of the column where it resides. Remember this is the navigation to your main website and you want to feed visitors there.

3. Make sure to enable your Blogroll and archive links on all pages of your blog. Don’t defeat this important navigation by installing this important feature on just the home page. All separate blog pages, archive, and tag pages should include these navigation elements.

4. Add items to your sidebars to make it easy for users to find what they need on your blog. Make sure to enable important features on all your blog pages such as archives, recent posts, recent comments, calendar of posts, and tagcloud. You can check out my own left and right blog sidebars to see what I personally consider important and where these items should be placed.

5. Use plug-ins to make your blog effective and easy to maintain. I always use the SEO All in One Pack plug-in. Additionally some of my favorites are: the Google sitemap creator, WordPress database backup, and Feedburner implementation. Additionally don’t forget to install Google Analytics or your web tracking script in your blog template.

If you follow my checklist above, and review all new plug-in configuration options you will be ready to go. Got a question, just click comments below and let me know and I’ll try to respond to each one.