Adventures In Visibility | Online Marketing for Small and Solo Businesses | Denise Wakeman
How to Get Better Visibility on the Web
User experience is an important part of running a successful blog.
It can also be overwhelming, as so many different parts make up the whole.
From the content you present, to the design, to the speed of your loading, there is a ton to take into account.
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I saw a really interesting statistic on OrbitMedia recently. According to a study, they found that it now takes 65% more time to write a blog post than it did back in 2014. That is more than three hours per piece of content, quite a chunk of time. The reasoning behind this can be argued but I personally think it shows the care that is being put into those blog posts in order to compete with others.
Think about it, what did we see a lot of in the early days of online content marketing? I know clear back into 2014 I was still witnessing a shocking number of spun articles and keyword-stuffed blog posts. The algorithm was changing but old tactics were still being used by less reliable sources.
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Way back in the olden days of blogging, around 2004, it wasn’t very complicated.
You wrote an article, around 500 words or so. You published the article. And, that was it. You definitely didn’t need a checklist of 27 ways to promote your blog posts!
If you wanted people to subscribe to get automatic updates when you published new blog posts, you set up an RSS feed for an email subscription with Feedburner or Feedblitz (both are still alive and well, I’m happy to say) and asked your blog readers to subscribe. That’s it. The automation was simple and worked.
If your content was great, you got hundreds or thousands of subscribers and could monetize your content with affiliate offers, ebooks, ads, teleseminars, and other products and services. You could build an audience of fans and build a sustainable business.
In fact, that’s how I started my company, The Blog Squad, in 2005. There was a ton of demand to help people set up blogs and train them on how to use it. I started my first business blog in 2004 and never looked back.
Things are more complex now. There are millions of blog posts written every day. [Read more…]
Successful content creators take each of their content assets seriously: There are hours of brainstorming and research behind each article they publish.
How do successful creators do this consistently?
The focus on research is a lot more than you’d think.
Thorough research is what distinguishes great content asset from a mediocre article.
Here are seven tools to use to do content research properly: [Read more…]
All too often, we think of the blog that we write for as “our” blog. And, it is. We, as the website owner, have control of the blog. We created it, we operate it, we publish posts on the blog. It is, in fact, ours.
In reality, however, “our” blog shouldn’t be entirely about us. It’s more like a partnership where we have the controlling interest, but our readers have an almost-equal say. After all, if they don’t want to read the posts we add to our blogs, we’ll quickly find ourselves in a deserted area of the Internet filled with virtual tumbleweeds. [Read more…]