Search Engine Marketing Info and Strategies

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• The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web (Voices That Matter), Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar
• The Articulate Executive: Learn to Look, Act, and Sound Like a Leader, Granville N. Toogood
• Adam, Ted Dekker
• Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It: No Schedules, No Meetings, No Joke–the Simple Change That Can Make Your Job Terrific, Cali Ressler
• Personality Plus for Parents: Understanding What Makes Your Child Tick, Florence Littauer
• The Shack, William P. Young

Having a good headline, a good article and even a good-looking site isn’t always enough to maintain an audience. To keep people coming back to your blog day after day you have to go through the extra effort to keep your visitors interested in your content.

Think of your blog as a TV show. How many shows start out strong but can’t maintain the interest as time passes? I remember years ago watching the show Alias. It quickly became one of my favorite shows that I looked forward to watching each week. Then somewhere around mid second season it jumped the shark. (The post-Superbowl episode when SD-6 was brought down and the sexual tension between the two main characters… oh, never mind. Yes, I’m still holding a grudge!) Alias just as quickly became one of the many shows that I threw away.

While you don’t need to have sexual tension in your blog content (or an evil mastermind, for that matter) to keep people interested, you do need to have an element of anticipation. Your readers should want to come back and read what you have to say next. But unlike a TV show, the anticipation of each “episode” of your blog needs to provide a release, leaving the reader completely fulfilled.

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It’s just a fact of life, good looking people get more attention. We walk through the checkout line in the grocery store and see half a dozen magazines filled with beautiful faces on top of beautiful bodies. A good looking woman walking through the mall is bound to turn a few heads. Commercials are filled with models that pass the schwing test. (Yes, I pulled out my 80’s innuendo reference manual for that!)

Our love of beauty isn’t just focused on the human body. We love well manicured lawns, beautiful sunsets, and gorgeous building architecture. Some of us even go to restaurants where the food is pretty. Face it, we are very visual people.

It strikes me as odd, that as much stock as we place in things that are wonderful to look at, we often don’t take as much care with our blogs. I understand that it’s not easy putting together a website that looks good. It takes effort, skill and often a good amount of money. So instead of doing what needs to be done we skimp. Blogs, on the other hand are far easier, it’s just a matter of finding a good theme and running with it. But for whatever reason, that often doesn’t happen.

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You have a good idea for a blog post, but getting people to keep coming back and reading day after day takes more than a good idea. You have to execute that idea in an appealing way.

Ever wonder why so many commercials we see on TV revolve around sexual appeal? Because sex is appealing. At least when it’s packaged properly. Commercials using fat, bear-bellied men or “average” looking women are few and far between. Everyone is nicely toned, handsome or strikingly beautiful.

Blogging is no different. The best titled “pickup line” in the world is only going to get you so far. To get anywhere you have to prove that you’ve got the goods that go with it.

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If you want to get someone’s attention you have to have a good opening line. “Hey, baby, what’s your sign?” isn’t going to close the deal, much less even open the door.

When writing a blog post the title of the post is your pick-up line. That’s your first opportunity to make a first impression. Deliver a poorly crafted pick-up line and there is a good chance your blog post sit there alone and unread. Craft a strong pick-up line and you at least have a shot of pulling them in to see what else you got going for you.

The headlines below headlines all come from search engine marketing blogs. These headlines may not be “sexy” like what you might see fronting the gossip mags in the checkout line, but for the industry, these turned out to be some attention-getting headlines. In fact, while the headlines themselves didn’t win any awards, the articles that followed certainly did.

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In Step 1 of the Go Blog Yourself series I discussed the need to know more about your audience. If you want to get someone’s attention you have to know more about those that will be looking. It does you no good to bring dinner to a desert social!

Once you know who’s eye’s you’ll be turning your way, the next step is to really hone in on they type of content that they will want. In the world of movies, it’s not hard to generate a male audience. Show a little T&A, add some guns and explosions and you’ve got a movie almost any guy will watch.

But the world isn’t made up of only men. This something that Hollywood understands when it comes to selling TV advertising. There are the 18-49 year old male demographic, but there are also teenage boys, tween girls, older women, older men, etc. Each one of these segments has their eye on something completely different.

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Most bloggers start by their blogs by writing about business or personal things hoping that they will attract an audience from their day to day musings. With each post they hope to pick up more and more readers who like what they have to say. For many, this works. Usually it’s because they are good writers or have a clever take on whatever topic they choose to opine about.

But for every beautiful woman who takes her top off at the beach and gets the drooly-mouthed stares of the men in the vicinity, there are dozens of fat, beer-bellied men that make the kids giggle as they walk buy and attracts the incredulous stares of those who just can’t turn away. The question is–if we relate these images to blogging–which are you?

Actually, the better question is, which audience do you want to attract. Some blogs are out there looking for the little-boy giggles. Others are trying to attract the same element that pays to go peek behind the curtain at the freak-show. If you’re a business blogger, looking to speak to other professionals, you may not even want to be the gorgeous woman taking her top off. The point here is, before you can really know who or what you’re going to be as a blogger, you need to know who your intended audience is.

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As a general rule bloggers tend to be really full of themselves. Just as a person needs a certain amount of ego to run for political office, you have to think pretty highly of yourself to write a blog. On the most basic level, you have to think that someone actually cares what you have to say, otherwise you’d just keep your ramblings hidden away in a Word document on your computer’s hard drive. And perhaps people do care. After all, you’re reading this blog post right now. But the danger is that as more people begin reading what one has to say on their blog, the more highly one tends to think of him or herself.

But who am I to condemn? You’re reading my blog post and making me think more highly of myself. But I’ll share. You’re welcome to get in on some of the ego action with your comments below! See? It doesn’t always have to be all about me.

But just because an over-inflated ego causes you to believe people want to hear what you have to say doesn’t mean you don’t have some valuable or important to contribute to the worldwide discourse on your given topic. As a business owner, communication is key and there is no better way to start a dialogue with your target audience than to start a blog.

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Over the past ten years or so the Internet has busted the doors of “free stuff” wide open. More and more we are able to get cool things for absolutely no charge. Blogging platforms such as wordpress are free. Wordpress addons are free. Many iPhone apps are free. Blogs and newspapers provide free content online. You can download TV shows and songs for free (legally or not.) And you can connect with your friends for free via IM, MySpace, facebook, twitter, and a host of other free social networking platforms. I could go on.

The era of “there’s no such thing as a free ride” is coming to an end. So many things are free now days I often wonder how anybody makes money anymore, especially competitors trying to sell what someone else gives away.

But free works. This has been true long before the web was invented.

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