Category: Blogs

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Building Web Authority with Blogging

Web authority is valuable for any business which wants to position themselves as an authority in their field. Building web authority can not only be good for establishing yourself in your clients’ and prospects’ eyes as their resident expert and “go-to” resource, but can be hugely beneficial for improving organic search engine placement.

Web authority is gained on the web from quality content, depth of content on a topic, age of your website, number of pages your website contains, and number of links from outside sources pointing to the content. Web authority is certainly not gained overnight, but many things can be done to your website which will help to immediately create an authority factor.

One of the best ways to build web authority is to blog on your selected business topic. If you don’t want to blog, hire a professional to blog for you, but BLOG! Blogging builds content for your website fast and if the content is good can help to immediately start you on the path to building your authority on a specific topic or narrow range of topics. You’ll get the fastest and best results if you start out blogging five days week, but at the minimum of at least three days a week. If your budget won’t allow you to hire a blog writer indefinitely for blog post five days a week, invest in two months worth of blogging and then cut back to three days a week at the end of two months.

Blogging adds content easily to your website and search engines consider each blog post as if it were a single and new HTML page addition to your website when your blog is filed on your web hosting server under your domain name.

If web authority is important to you stay away from off-site blogging. Use WordPress and have it installed on your own web hosting account using your own domain name in your blog. You can’t get any web authority benefits when you blog at BlogSpot or at Typepad for your website.

In our next few post we’ll discuss other opportunities for building authority such as feature articles for syndication and whitepapers so make sure to come back tomorrow for more information on building your own web authority.

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Blogging For Hire – A Note to Professional Writers

If you are blogging for clients professionally be aware of several potential pitfalls that we have experienced – the unexpected use of your blog content.

You won’t care if you are “working for hire”, how a client uses your blog posts, but if you also sell your services to create press releases and web content, if you do not license your content or contractually state how your content is used, you may end up hurting yourself. What I specifically mean is that without restriction a client can build website content at the price of your $10 or $15 each blog post price, can get a press release written on the cheap, or even get content for their next how-to book at your expense.

Certainly this is not what you expected when you started blogging at $10 or $15 per post, but this is what has happened specifically to us, so learn from our experience! Although each client contract is different and we can be flexible, now, our standard contract states that our created blog content is licensed only for use on th client’s one blog and to see us for prices on web content and press releases created from blog posts.

If you don’t care that the going rate for press release writing is around $250 and you are potentially supplying a press release at your blog post price of $10 to $15, then go right ahead. If you don’t care that the going rate for 450 words of content is around $250 and you are supplying it for $10 to $15, then go right ahead. Just be aware that there are some potential clients who WILL make an effort to build their site, book, or press release arsenal at your expense hoping that you simply won’t be savvy enough to know any different.

We even had a client even gloat to us about the fact that they compiled our created blog posts into a book and published it as a “how to book”. The nerve! If you don’t spell it out in your contract, you are simply setting yourself out to be taken advantage of unfortunately.

Be particularly careful of clients who are very specific of what they want you to write in a post as they may be using it for a press release. Don’t be afraid to ask why and what the use will be. Be careful of clients who give you a list of topics that look like chapters in a book, or steps to follow in a process. They may be writing a book from your content.

The bottom line is if you are contractually working for hire, you have no rights, but be aware that the price for a blog post is way, way, way below the average established market price for press release writing, book authoring, and web content creation. Don’t sell yourself short or give away your intellectual property too cheaply. If you are not sure if your client is taking advantage of you, do a web search on a verbatim phrase from some of your work quoted like this “search phrase in quotes” on Google and see what pops up.

It’s time to take a careful look at your contract or if you are writing without one, to get one in place.

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Twitter Your Way to More Traffic

If you are not using Twitter you may want to strongly consider giving it a whirl. My Twitter site is http://www.twitter.com/mccordweb

I have been having fun with Twitter for about the last 30 days. I went from posting all the time to posting every day or so and include interesting links in my posts.

Twitter is like a mini-blog. I like it, it is easy to use, and I am using it to keep on top of the NOW news on the Web. I have found more really cool applications using Twitter and links from other peoples Tweets than taking the time to read a full blog.

What I like is also the ability to subscribe to Twitter Feeds of others in my industry and real celebrities in my industry as well like Matt Cutts (Google engineer) and Danny Sullivan (SEO guru). I find it hugely interesting to see what they are watching and even seeing their mundane day Tweets as well.

If you are looking for a bit of fun, check out Twitter, you may become addicted too.

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Outsourcing Your Blog Content Creation Overseas

The old adage you get what you pay for is exactly right when it comes to outsourcing your blog writing overseas. Indian and Philippine writers simply do not have the grasp of the American language to communicate properly with blog readers. When you are serious about communicating your message, you simply do not want a United Kingdom spelling of a common word that Americans may consider a misspelling as well or the strange use of everyday term.

Your website and blog content is about communicating your business message and should not have the distractions that a non-native speaker may include in an important post or online message. It is not as if they do it on purpose, clearly non-native speakers want and try to write and speak like a native speaker, but they can miss commonly used syntax or introduce strange wording or meanings without knowing that they are doing so.

I’ve seen some bloggers charge $5 a post for blog writing, but on analysis the post was worded strangely or included misspellings. There is simply no replacement for a native speaker when it comes to crafting your message for your blog or website.