The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

It appears that large companies have given up their blogs and flocked to social media instead. The reason they’re giving up is because they say that social media is easier to manage than a blog. But is it?

I love this paragraph by Cynthia Boris:

Just remember that if you want your social media outlets to benefit you, you have to do more than just keep the lights on. You have to provide meaningful content that engages your audience. In that respect, it’s just as hard as blogging, but most people don’t see it that way.

Not only that, but …

What blogs give you that you don’t get with social media, is a chance to communicate without all the noise. On Facebook, you’re one of a dozen posts competing for instant attention. An hour later, you’re off the front page and forgotten.

What Cynthia Boris doesn’t say is that your company blog also provides you with search engine optimization benefits that Facebook and Twitter don’t offer. OK, Twitter does offer a little bit of SEO juice, but it’s nowhere near what your blog has to offer.

Every blog post you write is another chance to be seen in a search result. Your blog itself increases its SEO chutzpah with longevity. And you can build invaluable internal links with a blog. Facebook has blocked Google so your posts aren’t going to be indexed and your links back to your site won’t be seen. Twitter is in bed with Bing, not Google.

I’m not saying don’t use Facebook or Twitter. They have their place. But having a blog is one of the best SEO tools you can have. If you have trouble coming up with content, maybe you should think about hiring someone else to manage your blog.

Content marketing is the best way to reach your market today. In fact, it’s really the only way. You’re either effective at it or you’re not. But where do you publish your content?

Here is a list of 12 essential content marketing channels for your online content. Use as many as you have time to manage.

1. Pinterest – Pinterest is the new kid on the block, but if you have graphics on any of your Web properties, then it’s a great channel to incorporate into your marketing plan.
2. Tumblr – Tumblr, too, is highly graphic in nature, but unlike Pinterest it is also very textual. You can incorporate your best graphics with textual content and build a community around your content pretty doggone fast.
3. Blogger – Blogger is the original blogging platform. While it hasn’t changed much over the years, it has gotten better.
4. WordPress – This competitor to Blogger is another platform you should incorporate into your content marketing strategy.
5. Your own domain – Your blog and website at your own domain name is the best content marketing channel you have. Don’t abandon it or, for goodness sake, forget about it.
6. YouTube – If you have video content or you’ve been thinking about producing video content, then you should have a YouTube channel.
7. Twitter – You can actually say a lot in 140 characters, and drive tons of traffic.
8. Facebook – Connect with old friends and make new ones. Build a page for your brand. But don’t stop there. It’s the most trafficked website in the world.
9. HubPages – Build your own hubs and monetize, plus drive traffic to your own web pages with solid, original content.
10. Squidoo – Create lenses on any topic in which you are an expert, and point your links back to your website. It’s the perfect marketing channel.
11. LinkedIn – Meet other business people, ask questions about your topics of interest, answer some, and make connections for life.
12. Quora – If you are an expert on any subject in the world, Quora is the place to prove it.

Now that you know the 12 essential content marketing channels, what are you going to do about them?

If you don’t have a huge budget but you still want to take advantage of the benefits of link building, there are ways you can build solid links to your website or blog without spending a lot of time or money on the effort. It does, however, take some creativity.

The first step is to ask for guest bloggers to write content for your blog. Set up a Guest Blogger page on your blog and get people to sign up to be a guest blogger. Then, give them some sample post titles to write, but be willing to accept other types of posts as well. Keep an open mind. But one thing you don’t want to sacrifice on is quality. Insist that all content you publish is high quality content.

Be sure to promote your guests posts through your social media accounts. Then follow those guest bloggers on their social media accounts. Retweet their tweets, Like their posts, and build that relationship.

After you’ve built your relationships, cash in. Ask those fellow bloggers if you can write a guest post on their blog. When you do, use the rel=author tag to link your guest posts to your Google+ account (you do have one, don’t you?) and link your Google+ account to your guests posts. Also link those guest posts back to your blog or website, which is the inbound link that you’ve been coveting.

Building links this way won’t be fast, but it is effective and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Now that blog marketing is more than a decade old it is apropos to ask if it is still effective. To answer that question, let’s look at what the benefits to blogging have been for the past ten years.

• Fresh content published on your website
• Solid inbound or internal links with great anchor text
• More web pages with the potential to rank for your key search terms
• The more you publish the more your site gets crawled
• Branding
• Reputation management
• Traffic increases to your website
• Relationship building with your audience
• Social media interaction
• Expertise positioning
• The ability to share your knowledge and experience while presenting yourself as an authority within your niche

These are just some of the benefits that blog marketing has offered businesses over the past decade. But does blogging still provide these benefits or has it run its course? The answer is a resounding “Yes! Blogging still provides the same benefits.”

Of course, there is a lot more competition today than there has been. There are more blogs and more bloggers vying for attention – in your niche and in every niche under the sun. This makes it more difficult to achieve the same results that you could achieve ten, or even five, years ago. But it can be done. The key is to have a strategy and to be diligent in pursuing it.

Blog marketing is still as effective as it ever was. Focus on delivering great content that is optimized well for the search engines and that is pushed out through social media. Position yourself as an expert and you’ll be perceived as one.

If you don’t have a ghostwriter on your team, then you should probably consider one. A ghostwriter – especially if you don’t have the writing skills yourself – can take your business to all new heights. The tasks that one good ghostwriter can handle are legion. Here’s a short list just off the top of my head:

• Write your daily blog posts. This is important. Having a daily blog is a vital part of any online business.
• Manage your social media campaigns. You’ve got to promote those blog posts somehow. Your ghostwriter will be instrumental in pushing them out to the popular social media sites.
• Write your SEO content. Make sure your ghostwriter is well-versed in SEO tactics. A good copywriter with a working knowledge of SEO is worth his weight in gold.
• Produce your weekly newsletter. You should have an electronic newsletter to help you build relationships with your clientele. A good ghostwriter can help you with that too.
• Write your PPC ads. A writer should be able to write ads with a strong call to action. If you run PPC campaigns, you need a good ghostwriter.
• Article marketing. This includes writing and submitting articles to directories as well as writing guest blog posts on occasion.
• Link building. Since your ghostwriter knows SEO and can write articles, have him manage your link building campaigns.

There really is no limit to what a good ghostwriter can do for your business. If you are serious about marketing your company online, a ghostwriter can be a lot of help.

One of the biggest hurdles to get over for new content creators is the development of ideas. Sure, you can keep it going for a while, but what happens when you’ve run through your list of keywords a dozen times and you begin to repeat yourself? What do you do?

Why not ask your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn followers?

Your social media followers are likely some of your most avid blog readers and most frequent website visitors. Why not ask for their feedback on what to write about next?

It doesn’t have to be a big to-do. You just want some ideas for content. So ask your followers to visit your blog and tell you what they want you to write about. There are several ways you can approach this.

• Make it fun – Write a blog post saying the best suggestion for a blog post will get a free copy of your e-book. Give a deadline and then share your blog post on your social networks.
• Up the stakes – Ask your followers to give you their ideas and if you use the idea, then you’ll give away your e-book or multimedia presentation to each person whose idea you use.
• Ask for guest bloggers – Open up the floor for others to post their content on your blog or website.
• Interview a reader – Pick one of your most avid readers and interview them. Post the interview on your blog and make one of your questions about you. Ask “why do you like reading my blog?” or “what kind of content should we write about here?”

Readers love to give you their feedback, so give them plenty of opportunities for doing so.

Like your automobile, your WordPress blog requires periodic and ongoing maintenance. It is a tool for your business and if you don’t perform routine maintenance, then it won’t perform optimally. Here are five specific routine maintenance items you should perform on your blog to keep it safe from hackers, to ensure it performs optimally, and to keep your content working hard for you and through the search engines.

1. Regular back ups - You should back up your WordPress at least monthly. You can manually do this, but there are plug-ins now that will do it for you automatically. Some of the best back up plug-ins will schedule a back up for you daily, weekly, or monthly and send it to you by e-mail or save it on your server.
2. Keep your WordPress software up to date – WordPress is continually in development. New versions arrive several times throughout the year. You don’t have to adopt every new update immediately, but you shouldn’t allow yourself to fall too far behind. If you are more than two versions behind the latest, you should update your WordPress software.
3. Update your themes – Like the WordPress software, themes need updating too. If you operate on an off-the-shelf free theme, then it isn’t as necessary. But if you have purchased a premium theme for your WordPress blog, then updating regularly is a necessity.
4. Update your plug-ins – Plug-ins are another WordPress tool that I’d recommend staying current on. Almost all plug-in developers update their plug-ins periodically to keep them working optimally with the latest versions of WordPress. You should update your plug-ins as soon as the developer makes them available.
5. Site diagnostics – Finally, run periodic diagnostic checks to ensure that your WordPress blog is free of malware or unnecessary hacker code, and spam. Google Webmaster Tools will do that for you for free.

If you keep your WordPress blog maintained properly, it will give you years of good and useful service.

You know you need to write to your blog every day. But how do you make the time? You’re too busy.

You can fix that. Discipline and a little bit of time organization is all it takes. You can write a blog post every day in 20 minutes or less. Here are the steps to take to ensure that you can have a blog post every day and have it written in less than 20 minutes.

1. Keep a running idea list – Every time you get an idea for a blog post, write it down. Keep a running list. This is easier if you create a keyword list before you set up your blog. Come up with 10-20 blog post ideas for each keyword on your list, and your keyword list should have 50-100 good keywords.
2. Let good ideas sit – Instead of trying to write about something the day you come up with the idea, let it sit a few days. You’ll think of other ideas that can go with it. Write them down. Start with your running idea list and go from there.
3. Cut unsupporting ideas before you write – If you keep a running list of ideas and related ideas, you’ll start to see that some of the ideas you thought initially supported each other are actually not related enough. They could be their own blog posts. Cut them out and separate them. Remember, the goal is to write fast. A nonsupporting idea doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.
4. Use lists – You can say a lot with ordered and unordered lists.
5. Keep your posts short - Remember, you’re trying to write fast. So keep your blog posts to under 500 words.
6. Write in bursts – If you get stuck on a blog post and can’t think of how to finish it, save it as a draft and come back to it later, when you can think of something fresh.
7. Write about your best ideas now - Why save your best ideas for later? Save time now. Just knock it out.

This blog post took 15 minutes to write. It’s less than 500 words and more than 250, so it should pass Google’s search engine optimization guidelines. Yours will too!

Social networking has become so important today that you’ll hardly find an Internet marketer not doing it. If you do, they probably aren’t very effective. But you can get a leg up on your competition by spending some time doing a little social networking. To do it correctly, it’s important to identify the right type of social network for your need.

Here are 5 types of social networks you might consider for your online marketing needs:

1. Plain Old Vanilla – If you haven’t heard of Facebook, then you probably live under a rock. It’s not the only plain old vanilla social network online, but it is the most popular.
2. Social Bookmarking – These sites, like Delicious.com and countless others, allow you to save a link with a summary of your favorite web pages.
3. Question & Answer – Getting more and more popular every day, sites like Quora and Yahoo! Answers allow users to log on, ask a question, and get an answer from the crowd. Sometimes you’ll get several answers that you can choose from. And the community can often vote on the best answers.
4. Video Sharing – These sites – sites like YouTube and Vimeo – allow users to upload videos that others can view online. And you can use them to drive traffic back to your website.
5. Blogging Communities – Blogging has become the trend of the decade. So why not join a blogging community. There’s one for women called BlogHer and then there are more generalized communities like LiveJournal. They are places for bloggers to meet, share their ideas, and network over conversations.

There are plenty other types of social networks as well. Pick the type that best suits your needs and jump right in.

A gravatar can be a very useful tool for online content providers. It does several things for your online identity including:

• Notifying bloggers that you are not a spammer
• Making your name and website more brandable
• Easily identifies you as authentic everywhere you go
• Unifies your blogging, commenting, and social media presence across all channels

Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar. It’s easy to set up. You just head over to Gravatar.com and upload your photograph or image – the one you want to be associated with a particular e-mail address. It’s important to note that if you own several websites and have different e-mail addresses for managing those websites and often comment on blogs, forums and social media sites under your various names, then you can have more than one gravatar. You can have one for each e-mail address you own because the gravatar is associated with a single e-mail address.

Every time you enter your e-mail address into a comment form, your gravatar will appear beside your name. This makes you recognizable to other commenters while branding you online and shows that you are a legitimate poster, not a spammer.

I highly recommend that you set up your own gravatar – especially if you blog regularly and comment on other blogs regularly.

A customer asked, “Shouldn’t I put my blog posts in multiple categories for better search engine optimization?”

Our answer: No.

The search engines won’t rank your content higher because you’ve placed it in multiple categories. In fact, they might gig you for duplicate content if you allow them to crawl your categories at all. And that’s why many SEOs put a nofollow, deindex command in their robots.txt files for the category and tag pages of their blogs.

Your categories and tags are for reader benefit. Fewer categories on a blog make for a cleaner, easier-to-follow blog. Limit your reader’s choices in categories and you’ll encourage more reading. Therefore, your categories should be broad catch-all organizational tools like the chapters in a book.

Tags, on the other hand, are narrower in scope and therefore it’s OK to have more of them. It’s also OK to give individual blog posts with multiple tags.

Tags are more like the index at the back of your book. You might have only 10 chapters (blog categories) in a book, but you’ll have hundreds of tags. And specific words or phrases may appear in several chapters of your book. Those words or phrases (tags) in your index will show which specific pages of your book those words or phrases appear in even if they are in different chapters.

The reason this happens is because you’ll give a full treatment of a topic in a book chapter, or a blog category, but you and your reader both recognize that all of your concepts are interrelated. Sometimes, due to that interrelatedness, you’ll mention a topic in a chapter that covers another topic with a fuller treatment. It’s only mentioned as it relates to the other topic. That’s where your tags come in.

Keep in mind that tags and categories are organization tools, not necessarily SEO tools.

You’ve likely heard of blogs. There’s nothing really magical about them, but you can use a blog for your business to increase your market and talk to your customers. Here are 7 ways you can use a blog to boost your business and your brand online.

1. Search engine optimization – Well optimized blog posts can increase your standing in the search engines.
2. Social media optimization – Promote your blog through the popular social networks to increase your traffic and brand exposure.
3. Field questions about your business – A blog allows your customers and potential customers to communicate with you. You can answer their questions and build your brand.
4. Network with others in your industry – A blog is a conversation. Your market is a conversation. Why not join the two?
5. Increased search engine rankings - Not only can each individual blog post be optimized, but the more blog posts you have the more chances you have of being ranked in the search engines.
6. Close more sales – You can use your blog to close sales simply by putting links to your landing pages in high profile locations on the blog.
7. Customer service – Handle customer service issues on your blog in less time and with fewer expenses.

You no longer have to sit on the sidelines and watch while your competitors steal the market. You can use a blog to drive more business to your website and increase your search engine and social media exposure.

Since the inception of Google+, Google has been saying that it plans to integrate all of the Google services with the new social networking service Google+. That’s a lot of services.

Google+ started out with Picasa integration. YouTube integration was minimal, but the service has had video support. Slowly, Google is integrating its other services. Recently, they’ve announced that Blogger integration is happening right now.

This is good news for bloggers who use Google’s own blogging platform.

While we’re big components of WordPress uploaded to your own domain name, there’s a pretty good chance that if you’re stuck on Blogger, then this integration will only boost your small business blog’s presence online. Historically, Blogger has not ranked well despite being owned by Google. But this integration could change that.

If it doesn’t, then there are still other reasons to continue using Blogger.

One reason is because it will be easy to share your blog posts through Google+. I also believe that using Blogger will increase your Google profile’s presence in the search engines making Blogger a great reputation management tool. Already, Google+ is causing that to happen. By using your Google+ profile for your Blogger account, that will make your reputation management efforts even better.

Which is the best kind of online marketing for small businesses? Blogs? E-mail marketing? Social media?

The answer is as proverbial as the question. It depends. All three have their place and each is very effective when accompanied by the other two. That’s why we typically recommend a mixed bag of tricks.

Blog Marketing – Blogging is good for SEO, branding, and social media injection. If you use your blog effectively, you’ll gain search engine traffic, drive new traffic to your important landing pages, and develop a conversation around your brand.

E-mail Marketing – E-mail marketing is the perfect tool for keeping your audience in the loop. It can drive steady traffic to your landing pages and prepare your audience for closing the sale. Dollar for dollar, it’s the most effective marketing for most businesses.

Social Media Marketing – With social media, you can drive traffic to your website, build relationships, grow your brand, and keep your audience engaged.

Rarely is it a question of either/or. For most businesses, a combination of the above tactics is best. You can make your blog, e-mail blasts, and social media work together for the good of your business and your customers. Build your strategy around your business goals, then take action through the various tactics at your disposal.

Successful Internet marketers know that a blog is a great way to improve your search engine optimization efforts. Here are 5 specific ways that a blog can improve your SEO.

1. Fresh, original content – A blog adds fresh, original content to your website every day. Search engine spiders thrive on fresh content. Every time you write a blog post, you will invite the search bots to your website again to crawl it and look for new content.
2. Improve your internal link structure – A blog on your website with the right links pointing to the right pages can improve your internal link structure. This in turn improves your overall search engine rankings.
3. Attracts inbound links – A good blog will attract inbound links from all over the Web. Those inbound links will help improve your website’s SEO.
4. Increases you chances at achieving high rankings – Every single web page you post is another chance to rank in the search engines. Each blog post is seen by the search engines as a separate web page. So the more blog posts you have, the more chances you have to rank for your important keywords.
5. High powered niche marketing – Over time, as you write more and more blog posts targeting specific keywords, those blog posts are more likely to rank for the keywords you are targeting – and your blog as well. An aged blog with highly targeted content with an awesome inbound link portfolio is better suited to rank high in the search engines.

Now that you know 5 ways your blog can improve your search engine rankings, why not start a blog today?

Every blogger at some point runs out of ideas and has to look for ways to spice up the blog machine. So how do you go about finding things to blog about? Matt McGee knows. He suggests:

• Delicious.com
• Question-based keyword research
• Look at your analytics (what are people reading most, and how are they finding your site?)
• Q&A websites like Quora and Yahoo! Answers
• Ask your readers

To be sure, there are more than five ways to find new blog ideas. In fact, there are hundreds of ways to generate ideas for content. Here are ten more ways to find new ideas for your blog content.

1. Read other blogs in your niche and write about the same topics (be sure you don’t plagiarize or steal the content, and don’t take ideas from the same competitor every time
2. Find an old post that was popular and write about the same topic from a different angle
3. Visit a niche article directory; what are the most popular articles about?
4. Use Google’s Wonder Wheel
5. Where are your pay-per-click clicks coming from?
6. Watch a few YouTube videos in your niche
7. Current events – Is there something going on around the world that you can play off of?
8. Your Twitter stream
9. Facebook
10. Use your RSS reader; scan the headlines till something pops out

As Matt says, there is always something to blog about. Just do it.

So you’ve decided to start a blog to promote your business. That’s a good move. But how often should you update your blog?

That’s a good question. The answer is, It depends.

How much traffic would you like your blog to receive? How serious are you about search engine marketing? Do you want the search engines to crawl your blog often and update their search engine listings accordingly? Are you doing it for fun or for profit?

Blog marketing is not a hit-and-miss proposition. It is a commitment. The more often you do it, the more likely you are to see positive results. That’s how it is with just about anything. Right?

The search engines view each of your blog posts as a single web page. But they also pay attention to your entire website. Every time yo update your site, they send their spiders back to crawl it. Update it every day and you’ll get crawled every day. That means each blog post you write has the potential to achieve high search engine rankings in addition to your site as a whole achieving those rankings.

Every blog post is a new opportunity. The more opportunities you have, the better your marketing. So how often do you think you should be blogging?

Adding a blog to your small business website can increase your SEO benefits tremendously. There are a number of benefits you can receive from a company blog, but these three SEO benefits are very distinct benefits you receive if you blog often and blog using the right strategy.

1. Increased search engine rankings – Every blog post is treated like its own web page. That means every blog post has the potential to rank for your keywords on its own merit.
2. More opportunities to rank – Every blog post you write invites the search engines back to your website to recrawl it. They will not come back to your site again until it is updated. Because your static site gets updated less often, you should have a blog that you update on a regular basis so that you can have your website crawled often.
3. More navigational links – Because you can link from your blog to your main website, you can build more links. Those links will serve as important navigational tools for your visitors, but the search engines like links too. The anchor text you use for those links can push your web pages up further in the search engines in addition to the SEO benefits you get from the content.

A blog is one of the best SEO tools available for your website. If you don’t have one yet, now is the time to consider one.

Ask anyone who has been around for 40 years or longer and you’ll find that the ways of marketing a business have changed. What worked in 1960 was different than what worked in 1980 and what worked in 1980 isn’t what worked in 2000. Even the marketing strategies used today aren’t the same as what worked in 2000.

Here are 7 online marketing strategies that work today and that will likely work ten years from now.

1. Search engine optimization – Build a website and make sure each web page is optimized for search engine traffic.
2. Pay per click marketing – Spend your money on clicks for a speedy response to your message and watch your income rise.
3. Social media marketing – Use social bookmarking and social networking to connect off of your website, then drive that traffic to your web pages.
4. Video marketing – Online video marketing has arrived in full force. Engage with your audience on YouTube and other video marketing websites.
5. Start a blog – Write to your blog every day. The search engines love the fresh daily content.
6. Article marketing – Write articles and distribute them online to websites within your niche. You’ll build your reputation and build links to your website.
7. Claim your local business listing – Each major search engine has a local business listing associated with their Maps feature. Claim your listing if you are a local business.

There is no substitute for these 7 online marketing strategies. You can do more, but I wouldn’t dare do less.

Can the addition of a blog help your online presence? There are lots of arguments both for and against a blog and the answer to that question very much depends on who you talk to. From our perspective, the positives that blogs deliver far outweigh the negatives, especially if you publish your blog in the most appropriate manner.

Blogs are especially beneficial to those who try to market a business on a small budget. In fact, apart from your time, blogs can be published and used as a marketing tool, virtually for free. However, don’t make the mistake of adding a blog and then publishing anything and everything. Like all business processes, a little planning can go a long way. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

Consider your audience:

Your blog should be targeting your audience, and that starts with simple things like your theme and the language used. If your audience is young, then a bright, cheerful, and fun theme may be appropriate. If your target audience is more mature, then a more mature blog may be more appropriate.

When it comes to language, if your target is a youth audience, then using the language of youth could be appropriate – you could even consider hiring a young person to write your blog. Likewise, if you are targeting mothers, getting a mother to write your blog could pay dividends.

Focused content:

Plan your content. One of the biggest mistakes that many business blogs make is to oversell. Use your blog as a social communication tool rather than as a formal business tool. This is where niche related writers often bring better results than marketing people. Your content should be focused on your business, be entertaining, and should take a ‘helping hand’ approach – even when introducing new products.

One of the benefits that blogs bring to any online presence is the steady stream of content. Search engines will visit a website more often if it is regularly publishing content. Naturally, your blog should be optimized for organic search to deliver best results.

Ultimately, your blog is a great communication tool. It draws interest from search engines, from social media communities, and from general readers. Make your content interesting and people will come back on a regular basis.

The real