Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

How many times have we hit publish on a blog and then realized we forgot to do something crucial, whether it is changing post slugs or a crucial spell check. Here is a quick checklist of what you should do before you hit publish.

Did you type what you meant?
Avoid the temptation to write and then immediately hit publish. Always go back and reread your blog entry to make sure what you had in your head actually ended out coming of your fingers on the keyboard. You can also catch grammatical errors and little accidental typos that still make an actual word or where you wrote the same word twice in a row.

Do you have a hook?
The first paragraph of your blog entry is crucial. If you have a poorly written opening paragraph, readers have to be pretty motivated to read beyond that. So think of the opening paragraph as the most important part of your entire article. Make sure it is well written and enticing enough – usually with a hook - to encourage people to continue reading through to the end. Copyblogger has a great post on opening with a bang.

Spellcheck
There shouldn’t be an excuse for not spell checking, and you should always do it… although even I often forget. Someone needs to create a plugin that has an auto-spell check function when you hit publish.

Double check your links work
Make sure you haven’t accidentily forgotten a http:// or forgotten a critical period. You should double check each and every link to make sure it works, and make sure you didn’t put something else from your clipboard in place of the URL you intended. I once saw a blog where the URL linked to was actually a snippet from an IM that the author intended to paste to someone and not the URL they planned to use.

Related articles you can link to?
Are there any previous blog entries that you can link to as relevant to the topic? If so, definitely lead your visitors in that direction, especially if the blog entry is an “oldie but goodie” and not one that you published just two days ago. There is a plugin available to automatically display related blog posts.

Other blogs you can link to
Share the link love. Are there blog entries that others have written that are related to the topic. Even if they are friends, as long as the content is relevant, include some links to others. Read Why you should actively link out from your blog.

Did you source your sources?
Reporting on a news story or commenting on someone else’s commentary? Be sure you include a link to your source, whether it is linking to Joe’s New SEO blog or the likes of CNN or Forbes.

Check your post slug
Wordpress 2.5 makes this a bit easier, by highlighting the post slug underneath your title, but I still sometimes forget to do this (although I usually remember between the time I schedule a post and the time it actually gets published. Shorten the length and make sure you are including the important keywords from the title.

Check your alt tags
Are you including alt tags on your images? Be sure to tag all your images when you blog with the relevant keywords specific to the photo. And yes, avoid the temptation to keyword stuff those as well Use the SEO Friendly Images plugin to optimize your images as well as do alt tags.

Did you include categories?
Now that categories seem fairly hidden below the blog entry field instead of next to it in the new Wordpress, I keep forgetting to tag blog posts with categories. But looking at analytics, I can see just how many people come to the blog on a social media or pay per click post and then go to the category level to see the other articles I have written on the same topic. So be sure you are including categories and that they are relevant to the topic.

Did you tag it?
Along with categories, be sure to tag relevant topics and keywords on your blog entries to… if you are new to tagging, also make the time to go back on previous blog entries and tag them.

Check the vibe and flow
Sometimes you just don’t have the flow going, no matter how hard you rewrite the blog entry. And a missing vibe or flow of the piece can make a blog post mediocre when it could have been great. In this case, hit save instead of publish, and go back to it another day. When you look at it again after a few days, you can rewrite it to capture that previously ellusive vibe.

While I try my best, I don’t always remember to do everything on the list when I hit publish, but I do my best Anything else I missed that you do before you hit publish on your blog?

Yes, it’s true, there are people who love to blog - and blog with such a passion we wonder how we could emulate what they do. But there is a fine line that you might be crossing over… one where it seems you are no longer the boss of your blog, but that your blog is the boss of you. While not everyone is in danger of this happening, it seems to be something that is happening to people with a bit more frequency lately. So if you are a super blogger, you need to sit back and consider if you are really running your blog or if your blog is running you.

Addiction
Some of us are lucky to get out a blog entry a week, while others desperately try for one blog entry a day. But if you are sitting and your desk blogging and turning down chances to be social (and no, I don’t mean just taking the time to update your Twitter status or video conferencing, I mean actual face-to-face interactions with other people) you need to sit back and think if you really need to be on the super blogger schedule that you are on. Can you cut back your seven blog posts a day to four posts then slowly get it down to one or two?

Addiction Pt. 2
Some bloggers have the need to post as much as they can, but in some cases, being so blog happy can actually turn off your readers. Why? Because when they view your feed there is just so much there they just don’t know where to begin if at least one of those blog posts don’t immediately pop at them. You could lose subscribers that would have happily stuck around to read one great blog post a day but found seven just two overwhelming day in and day out.

Honey, it’s bedtime
If your partner is making bedroom eyes at you, but you decline the suggested offer so you can blog instead, well, many people will wonder what on earth you are doing still at your computer!! Yes, there will always be times where you need to make the decision of blogging over your partner, but these cases should be extreme and few and far between. If your blog just got hacked from a WordPress exploit, most people can understand the need to fix it ASAP before any more damage is done. If you found something Digg or Slashdot-worthy because it is breaking news, by all means write your blog entry now, because those 8 hours of, er, slumber could mean that someone else breaks the story. But is it your latest top ten list of how to stop comment spam, well, that is something that can and should wait until morning.

You blog on days you really shouldn’t be
Is it an hour before you exchange wedding vows and you are sitting at your computer blogging about what you think Google should do with YouTube, you really have to sit and ask yourself WHY. There are some days where blogging should be a no-no, so think of life’s big events (weddings, baby’s birth, significant funerals) and either schedule those blog posts or get up a little extra early to do it before anyone else in the house awakens, or perhaps a quick “He’s here, 8lbs 2 oz, Christopher Michael, pics soon!” posted to your blog from your Blackberry. Even your wedding anniversary qualifies if your husband or wife is sitting in the living room waiting for you to come down so you can leave for your romantic evening out. If you are putting these types of events second to blogging, yes, Houston, you have a problem.

Making life’s small events blogworthy
Sure, we all have things happen to us and think “Wow, that will make a great blog analogy”, such as the friend who replied to me “So, you do Facebook” when I mentioned I do social media consulting. That isn’t really a stretch, and it highlighted the fact people in the industry still think of social media as sites like Facebook and MySpace. But are you taking all those little things and constantly wondering how you can make them blog worthy? If you are an SEO blogger, you will probably find it hard to figure out how to spin the fact your daughter is potty trained into a blog post… but if your blog is running you, chances are you will figure out how to do it anyway just so you have something - anything - to write about, even if the end result sucks.

Does your output match your expected quality
When I have followed those who blog multiple times a day, I notice that the quality goes down. Why? Because they are so focused on how much they can output, with the desire to blog anything just to blog, they fail to notice the quality drops significantly compared to when that same person writes one well thought out blog post. I have unsubscribed from people’s blogs for this exact reason because I tired of not only how they turned potty training into an SEO related post, but did it so poorly that it was almost embarrassing to read. One well written and thought out blog post will trump 20 lesser blog posts any day of the week. Your blog doesn’t “need” you to post the seven times a day you want to blog, so cut back on quantity and up the quality instead. And if you think your blog really needs you, you probably have bigger issues than just a blog addiction!

Blogging something you hate
I would much rather read about a subject from a blogger who loves it, rather than from a blogger who hates the topic but does it anyway. If this is how you feel about your blog, where it is a chore to blog even just once a week, you might be better off kicking it to the curb and selling it, then using the money to start up something new that you are passionate about. Just because you end up hating the topic doesn’t mean you are a failure. But you might want to pick the next topic with much more care next time. It is no surprise that finding your blogging niche equals blog success. Just make sure you aren’t having a bad week and sell on impulse, which so often people end up regretting. If you are hating it, sit on it for a month, while continuing to blog so you maintain the blog’s sell value, and if you still despise every moment you have to spend on it, then sell it.

We all have times where we swear our blogs and/or websites are running our lives… and sometimes they do and they (unfortunately) need to. But it is still important to make sure that you aren’t always being run by your blog… if you are missing out on what non-bloggers would consider must-not-miss events, well, you should probably rethink your priorities a bit so that you can have a balanced life and not one where you blog is making your personal decisions… because last I checked, your blog really isn’t good company when you are out of reach of your computer

Now, hands everyone… is your blog running your life? And what do you do about it?

With paid links so high up on the radar at the Googleplex these days, it has become even more crucial that your website’s link profile is as natural as possible… even if the links themselves aren’t 100% natural. So what makes a natural link profile? Here are ten things to consider when you are getting links to your sites, both paid and organic, so your site and its link profile will be as low key as possible.

Pay attention to anchor text
What looks more natural… a ringtone site with 95% of all incoming links with “buy ringtones” as the anchor text - especially when both of those words are not in the domain name - or a ringtone website that has at least 20 variations of anchor text, with none of those non-domain-name variations having more than 15% share of the backlinks? You guessed it, the site with the wide variety of anchor texts in the incoming links. Also consider that naturally, some links will have anchor text of “click here”, “buy here”, “source” or your straight URL linked up. For more, read Choosing Your Anchor Text for Incoming Links.

Don’t solicit unnatural anchor text
If someone is linking to this blog, the natural anchor text is Jennifer Slegg. And that wouldn’t trip up any spam filters. But if I asked everyone to link to me with “Search Marketing Consultant” or “Social Media Consultant“, that would certainly trip some flags once it hit a certain percentage of my overall link profile. Why? Because it is not natural. Left on their own, perhaps one or two people might have used that anchor text, but naturally, nearly all would link to me with “Jennifer Slegg” as the anchor text, or if linking to an individual blog entry, with the blog entry title as the anchor text.

Oldie but goodies
Look at a smaller site in your niche market that has been around since well before the era of paid links. Now go an investigate their link profile. Pay special attention to links that look as though they have been around since the beginning of time, such as articles or online newsletters that are dated with the publish date. Now look at the anchor text and where those links came from to see if you could easily replicate it from either those sites or similar ones. This is helpful for those who are new to the industry, and don’t quite remember what it was like before the days of whoever-has-the-highest-paid-link-budget-wins.

Are you using nofollow with care?
Are you nofollowing every outgoing link on your site, even ones that Google has already decided is an authority. If you are nofollowing the CNNs or the Amazons of the world, you have to ask why you are doing this unless you are trying to manipulate PageRank loss from your site, and keeping it all for your own internal links. And nofollowing everything is just not natural, no matter how you slice and dice it. Only use nofollow for those sites you cannot vouch for, and give the rest of the sites your link love. Still not convinced? Read Why you should actively link out from your blog.

Don’t just get links from sites with higher PageRank than you
This was a popular tactic back in the days when everyone was emailing for link exchanges, and people would only ask for links from sites with a higher PageRank. Yes, it makes sense to get links from sites with higher PageRank than you (and yes, I will save the whole “how relevant is PageRank today” argument for another day ). But would it be natural for a PR2, or even a greybar or PR0 site, to only have incoming links from sites and pages that are PR6 or higher? You guessed it, there is nothing natural about that at all. So while lower PR sites might not give you a huge overall boost, it will definitely go a long way to making your link profile look much more natural, especially if you have some high PR paid links you have thrown into the mix.

Spread the love around
In Google’s eyes, how natural does a site look when it has 12,000 pages, yet only page on the entire site with any incoming links is the homepage? While the homepage will usually get the highest number of links overall to a site, with the exceptions a social related influx of links to an internal page, a large site without a single external link to any internal page on the site is a definite flag. Ensure your site does have links coming into its internal pages… and if not, you should either rectify it or consider reasons why people aren’t linking to anything but the homepage.

Lots of link love from one site isn’t very loving
In a dream, getting a link from every single page on a high traffic site sounds wonderful. But in reality, rarely do sites ever link to another site with a link on every single page of their own site… unless the links are either paid or they are within the same network. A single link from that same site is much more natural and healthy for your link profile.

Avoid footer links like the plague
It could be the most natural unsolicited link from a site whose webmaster just doesn’t know better when he decided to add his ten favorite sites in the footer of his homepage. But anyone looking at that footer link knows it might as well have a 500×500 animated gif above it flashing “Warning! Paid Links Below!” because even if they aren’t paid for, everyone will think they are.

Slow and steady wins the race
What do you think looks more suspicious to Google? The site that suddenly develops 300 links overnight or the site that develops 300 links added in small groups over several months? The first site will look suspicious, especially if it has other warning flags, such as being a brand new site or links with all identical anchor text. Do keep in mind that larger sites can handle more incoming links at once than smaller sites without raising suspicion. So be aware of your own link requirements and restrictions before you go overboard and know what a site your size and in your market area can handle.

Taking a sword to a gun fight?
Don’t forget to take into account competitiveness in an industry too. A site in specific highly competitive markets (ie. credit cards, poker, etc) will need many more links to rank than a site about tourist attractions in your hometown. So don’t attack both of those sites with the same link plan. The first type of site will need thousands of links from a mixture of high PR, authority and market sites, while the second site can likely achieve the desired rankings with a handful of carefully chosen links from related sites. And yes, throwing thousands of high quality links at a site that has no real competition in the serps will definitely cause it to stick out like a sore thumb when it comes to the linking profile, especially when the job could have been done with just a fraction of those links. So don’t go with your link guns blazing at a small site and don’t show up with a sword when you are playing with the big fish.

Developing a natural link profile is going to become more and more important this year, especially since Google is taking action against sites it perceives as purchasing links. So ensure you have a natural link profile for your big money sites, and if you have done suspicious link acquisition or paid links in the past, start cleaning up your profile to make it look much more natural before you accidentally trip the paid links spam filter.

Who doesn’t fondly remember some of those old school Sesame Street songs we all watched in the 70s and/or 80s? So I thought I would take a trip down memory lane showing my daughter some of the Sesame Street songs I listened to, since by the time she was Sesame Street watching age, it was all about Elmo.

So I hit YouTube, where just about every old school Sesame Street song video exists, and watched Mahna Mahna (which is technically Muppets, but was also on Sesame Street), Jellyman Kelly, What’s the Name of That Song, Echo Song etc (included the links incase any of you wish to relive your youth too!)

However, as I was watching one of the videos a week or so, I happened to glance down at the comments, which can be pretty spamalicious on popular videos to be greeted with some pretty colorful language I am sure hoping my daughter doesn’t learn for a good ten years or so! So, thankfully her attention was all on the mana mana singers, and she wasn’t testing her reading skills out on the comments, but I hastily resized that browser window smaller so the comments weren’t visible.

But it make me wonder, why is Google showing so many porn & adult language comments on kid videos. And not only that, why isn’t Google doing a better job of either filtering these comments or at least using some sort of filtering for those who aren’t logged in. Seriously, Akismet does fantastic job compared to YouTube. Google has filtering for their safe search as well as in Gmail, so why isn’t it being applied to YouTube comments too? And judging from some of the good comments on these videos, plenty of parents are using YouTube to show their kids some of these older videos too.

Now, i was not logged into my YouTube account when I saw this. So I logged in to see what the settings were. Now, I have an option to “Filter videos that may not be suitable for minors”. But what about filtering comments not suitable for minors? Other than the one filtering option, there is nothing more family friendly - such as prevent comments from showing entirely - for YouTube.

Why not at least have something in place where if it is clearly a kid’s video that comments are not shown by default? A simple click to show the comments would be a passable solution to this problem. While not all videos are tagged with things like “Sesame Street” it shouldn’t be hard to identify searches that include specific keywords like Sesame Street, Disney (and specific Disney characters), Teletubbies, The Wiggles and other common kid’s shows and entertainers and place a stricter comment filter on them or have a click to show comments rated below a +5, since it seems to be rare that some of the problem comments on kid’s videos would get at least five thumbs up if they weren’t appropriate… right now, the default is to show comments all comments until they have 6 or more thumbs down on them.

Now, there are definitely times when I see comments that are not family friendly but are still appropriate in the context of the video. I have no problem with those at all, I don’t think YouTube should be censoring everything. It is children’s videos - ones that you would expect those under age 10 to be watching on YouTube - that I think should have some kind of filtering.

Now, incase anyone at YouTube is reading this, I am not sure if these are all the exact videos I watched a week or so ago, if you are looking at the historical comment data of them. All the ones I looked at while writing this had clean comments. Was I just on the site during a bad bot run on videos that had to get cleaned up? Maybe. But even with a spam bot gone wild, something automated should be there to catch them.

I also talked about this yesterday with Jeremy on the Shoemoney show. You can listen to the show and read Jeremy’s take on it too.

Is this a “never go to YouTube ever again” problem? Not for me personally, i am continuing to relive Sesame Street 70s and early 80s videos as I write this. But it will make me carefully check any videos before showing them do my daughter, rather than my usual practice of the two of us searching together, with her pointing out the ones in the related videos sidebar.

It seems lately that every company and corporation out there is jumping on the blog bandwagon, and while some are doing quite well, others are failing dismally. So what makes some company blogs so great, while others are languishing? Let’s look at some of the reasons why company blogs are doing so poorly, and how to correct them.

Me, Myself & I
Is your corporate blog to “Me me me” oriented? Sure, you want to use your blog to promote your products and/or services, but even the most devoted customer will tire rather quickly if every blog entry is about a product you sell or a service you offer. While a blog can definitely be used as a selling vehicle, you don’t just want to copycat what a reader can find on your site already. Give a fresh perspective on your products by telling a story. If you sell fishing lures, tell the story of a customer who won a fishing derby using one of your company’s lures. Do you sell yarn? Instead of blogging about a specific yarn, blog about a sweater that a customer knit using that yarn, with bonus points if an original pattern to knit that garment is included. Think outside the box, especially if you can place the product in the reader’s hands, as opposed to just reading a promo copy of the product itself. Let’s face it, what is more interesting, reading about a ball of wool, or reading about what someone created with that ball of wool? Both could end in potential sales of the same product, but one way does it much more effectively than the other.

Not enough diversity
Why not include industry news? If there is some big news in the fishing derby world, blog about it. Is there another romance novel coming out or a movie being filmed based at a yarn shop? Well then blog about it. Being diverse in the content you offer can keep it interesting for your readers, and will make them less likely to feel like they are reading “same old, same old”. Maybe interview someone famous who uses your products or who is a noted designer or celebrity in the market area. These can be great to bring in traffic, especially first-time visitors.

Engagement
Make it easy for those readers to make a comment… yes, this means that you have to allow comments, or it really isn’t a true blog. Not only can you showcase reader’s comments, but it also shows the popularity of the blog and the company interaction on it… and yes, that means you do have to respond to comments too. Let’s look at the yarn example. After the blog entry about what someone made with a specific yarn, ask readers to share what they have made with the same yarn. Not only are you getting responses, but you could easily find yourself with a future blog entry about the yarn and a completely different type of garment to showcase. You might not want a second sweater pattern for that yarn posted within the next month, but a blanket, hat or purse made out of that same yarn could easily be posted in the blog within that same time period.

Blogging frequency
Too many company blogs tend to space their blog entries months apart. If you are going to have a blog, make a commitment to blog at least once a week, or more if it warrants it. Many people unsubscribe from blogs if there have been no entries in the previous couple of months, assuming they are dormant. When it is especially hard to get new blog subscribers for a new blog, you don’t want a lack of new entries to be the reason why you lose some. Not enough time yourself? Ask other people from within the company to send you blog posts for consideration. Sometimes it is that variety that can really stimulate readers and get them engaging. Or make it a practice to spend one day every couple of weeks to do multiple blog posts you can then schedule to publish every few days. Even though you didn’t write them on the day you published them, your readers won’t know that.

Heavy handed moderation
Part of having a blog means people can end up posting comments that are negative. So have a comment policy in place so you don’t get a reputation for deleting all but the most positive comments. And look at those “negative” comments in a non-knee-jerk way. Some comments you think are negative at first glace (”I knit a scarf out of this same yarn and found it quite itchy,” are not really the negative you think they are… instead, approve it and then post a follow up of something like “Because this yarn has 50% wool, some people might find it itchy if it is directly against the skin as a scarf is. So be sure to wear a shirt under the sweater if it bothers you. Or maybe try Yarn B, which is quite similar in weight but without any wool”). A negative can easily be turned into a learning experience and a positive, and could result in a product sale to that commenter who was looking for something to fix what she saw as her problem.

Where’s your brand?
Your blog should match your site and match your brand, because it is representing your company. So why let it languish with a free template or worse, the default template? It is relatively inexpensive to get a matching Wordpress theme done, if you do not have anyone in house to do it. But even though it may reside on the coprorate URL, the trust factor will significantly increase when the brand is clearly visible. Not only that, you want the continuity so that if someone clicks to your blog from another page on the site, they will still know they are on your site, and haven’t just been shipped off elsewhere.

Keep it simple
Don’t install eighteen different plugins to clutter your corporate blog. Pick maybe 3 or 4 plugins you think will be most useful on the front end, such as Socialize or threaded comments, and leave it at that. Of course, this obviously doesn’t apply to plugins you add to make your blogging life easier, such as a comment replying plugin or something for blog spam. But keep the number of plugins on the front end to a small number, and only the most relevant. Does someone really need to know it is 87 degrees with a 10% chance of rain at your corporate headquarters today? Not really, so remove it and use that web real estate or something more relevant or to leave more white space.

Too much advertising
If it is a company or corporate blog, Google AdSense, affiliate ads or any other kind of advertising should be kept far, far away. A simple 125×125 promoting your own services or products is fine, but why would you want to send your readers off to competitor’s products or services, because especially if it is AdSense you have chosen, it will happen. All corporate blogs should be ad-free.

Not enough promotion
Is your blog linked to from the company homepage? It should be. Do you mention it in email newsletters or customer emails you send? You should be. If you start a blog, don’t expect people to just find it somehow if you don’t let them know it’s there. So make sure you link to it and promote it so that your target readership can find it and subscribe.

Just getting started on a corporate or company blog? A good starting point is to read 20 Best Practices for Launching a Corporate Blog, or hire a consultant who can start you off blogging in the right direction, so you don’t run into any problems later.

Do you think social media is either Facebook and/or MySpace, and that’s it? When I was recently chatting with a friend in the industry I mentioned I do social media consulting, he replied, “Oh, so you do Facebook?” Well, fortunately for all of us, social media goes far beyond Facebook! The problem is that people don’t quite know what to do when they have eeked out all the possible value out of their Facebook networking.

Chances are good that you have had an IM cross your computer with nothing but a link and a “can you digg it?” message but maybe you didn’t quite know what digging meant and never got around to checking it out. Or maybe have you heard of people talking about tweets, sphinns and stumbles, and want to know how you can do it too? If you want to dip your toes further into the social media pool, here are some easy ways to start broadening your social media horizons, both by joining specific social media sites, and by your behaviour once you join.

Sign up for a Twitter account
Twitter is a place where you can submit status updates of what you are doing (”Off to a meeting with the boss in 3..2..1..” or “Listening to the Daily Search Cast right now”). If you use Facebook, think of it as your Facebook status updates multiplied by 1,000. But you can also use it to write replies to other people about what they’ve said (”Ouch! Hope the meeting is a good one” or “Thanks for the reminder, I am off to listen too”). Chances are very good that at least a handful of your friends are already on Twitter, you can do a search for them once you set up your account or once you add one friend, check out who he or she follows and you will probably find plenty more people to follow. And you can follow me (@jenstar for my personal one and @jenniferslegg to follow new posts from this blog) to kind of see what it is all about. Then start posting little updates about what you happen to be doing. And if you are tempted to market with Twitter, you might want to read Ten ways to market your blog on Twitter without being a spammer.

Voting it up
If you are reading this blog, chances are good that you will find Sphinn interesting too. In a nutshell, people (including you!) submit interesting news stories and blog entries that the community would find interesting, and if others like it, they will vote on it (called Sphinning). Once it hits X number of votes, it will show up on the homepage of Sphinn. Sphinn is a nice way to get your toes wet before venturing onto the larger voting sites such as Digg, which will probably be your next post-Sphinn stop after you figure out how it all works. Because Spinn is so niche to the internet marketing world, it is much quicker to see the fruits of your labor there than if you immediately dive headlong into Digg! So sign up for a Sphinn account and then go and submit a fabulous blog entry you have recently read.

Start Stumbling
StumbleUpon is a site where people can give thumbs up or down to specific webpages they visit, which increases the odds of other people, such as you, visiting them. You download a plugin or toolbar, available on the site, and when you hit stumble, it will randomly show you a site that others have given a thumbs up on. When you are just beginning, try and narrow down your category as much as possible… sometimes people check off nearly all the categories and quickly become overwhelmed with just how much variety and seemingly off-topic pages there are. So stick with one area, whether you want it business related or even something like TV shows or video games, and start stumbling. As you become more familiar with it, you can suggest your own sites.

Sharing the love
Whichever social media platform or program you are doing, be generous and share the love…. this means don’t just promote your own sites, vote on or share other people sites and pages too. This could mean recommending a good blog entry you just finished reading on Twitter, doing a quick Stumble on it or submitting it to Sphinn or Digg afterwards. Be as generous as you can with those links because what goes around comes around - yes, you will find people do the same back to you - and people will notice if you are stingy on sharing others.

Thanking in return
If you see someone has Twittered that you have a great blog entry and includes your URL, take a quick moment to thank that person… and especially if you ASKED the person to do it for you. When someone asks me to Sphinn or Digg something, I am much more likely to do it again for that person if they thanked me the last time around. And if I have submitted something to a social media site without being asked by the author, and they go out of their way to thank me for it, you bet I will consider submitting the next great read from him or her. And returning the favor with a future mention/submission/vote/etc is always nice too!

Being successful in social media takes time and effort… which is why many attempts at it fail. But getting your toes wet in places like Sphinn, StumbleUpon and Twitter will help you get started in places beyond the usual Facebook and MySpace which have dominated the news in the past, and trying out some new places to test your skills. You might find you are a StumbleUpon maven and set your goals on becoming a top stumbler, or you might find you love Sphinn and then tackle Digg. But broadening your social media horizons should be the first order of business, so you can find what works best for you.

Getting a person to your blog for the first time is hard enough work as it is, but what can you do to encourage those readers to come back for a second (and third and fourth) visit in the coming days or weeks? There are some simple things you can do to encourage new blog visitors to feel at home so that they subscribe, return and participate in your blog.

First impressions
As much as we hate to admit it, first impressions count. Make sure your font is large enough - and “normal” enough - to be read easily. Make sure you have a clean yet unique design… one that people can identify as yours, even without seeing the URL. I have been to blogs where the content was decent but I was completely turned off by what it looked like. Black background and red text? No thanks.

Remind people to subscribe
Not only should you make it obvious and noticeable for people to subscribe, you should also hit them up with an RSS reminder at the end of each post. Look at the bottom of this entry to see how I do it… and be sure to subscribe while you are at it

Subscribing Made Easy
First, make it easy to subscribe to your blog and give them lots of ways to subscribe. Offer standard RSS feed links, but also offer quick links for adding to Bloglines, Google Reader and the other main RSS services (more on this below) to make the subscription process as painless as possible for frequent RSS readers. And whatever you do, don’t make people fill out a survey to get the feed link like one recent blog wanted me to do. Yes, the information can be useful for advertisers, but that blog lost at least one subscriber because of it, and likely many others. Always be sure to have your subscription options in the sidebar of your blog, and make sure it is on every page, not just the index page.

Offer solutions for subsciber reading preferences
Perhaps you have plenty of potential Google Reader, Feedburner or Bloglines subscribers. Make sure you offer quick buttons so that your visitors can subscribe to a variety of services quickly and easily. Feedbutton is one way to do it, rollover to see it in action:

Email subscriptions
Especially if your blog is in a market area where you have readers that have no idea what an RSS reader is, or what RSS is, offer to send new posts via email. This will enable you to make those who aren’t RSS savvy to keep updated with your new blog posts, which will make them return visitors.

Engaging
Comments are not just for visitors, they are for the blog writer too. If someone asks a question in your comments, answer it within the comments. If a new visitor has made a thoughtful comment, reply back to it, even if it didn’t require an answer per se. Visitors love to be engaged by the authors and this personal contact - albiet in a public form - will be remembered by many of those visitors. You can also make it obvious you are responding in the comments by making your comments a different color so they are easily identifiable. Major Nelson’s XBox blog is a perfect example, and it makes it easy to scan through the comments to see where he has responded, as his comments are in green. Likewise, don’t consistently ignore the oldtimers either just because they are regulars. They can easily find somewhere else to go to get their daily dose of whatever you are providing.

Showcase your most interesting blog posts
Many have posts that are way more popular than others. Be sure to include your top blog posts, or even just your favorite ones if you don’t have enough traffic yet. The blog post that brought that visitor initially might not have been enough to convince that reader to subscribe, but maybe the blog post you did a year and a half ago that you list in your sidebar is the one that will make him or her subscribe. There are many WP plugins that do this, I will be adding one shortly now that this blog is all WP 2.5 happy Not sure what you reader favorites are? Do a post with your top 10-20 blog posts and ask readers which 3-5 should be listed in the sidebar.

Offer a freebie or make a contest
Really want to get a lot of subscribers quickly? Give people an incentive for subscribing, whether it is a free ebook, report or whitepaper, or do a contest with prized which is based upon getting new subscribers. Shoemoney & John Chow held a contest with over $13,000 in donated prizes. I have seen others offer free books, t-shirts and even iPods. So think about what you have to offer that people might want and gain subscribers that way.

Make sure you write often enough
If people land on your blog homepage and see 2007 (or worse, even earlier!) as the most recent blog post, they are much less likely to subscribe. So make sure you write consistently, and if you can’t, try writing some blog entries that will still be relevant a month from now that you can set to automatically post in the coming weeks when you will be sitting on a beach in Hawaii instead of at your desk.

Make sure you have auto-discover feeds enabled
This means if someone goes to your homepage - www.jenniferslegg.com for example - in Firefox, you will see an RSS icon appear on the right side of the address bar, showing that Firefox was able to find my RSS feed right from the homepage. In IE7, the RSS icon will change to orange on the right side (placed between the home button and the print button). And also make sure it is pointing to the correct feed

Need help doing some of these things? I have more detail on how to make subscribing easy, how to highlight your own comments, how to add additional RSS buttons, etc in my post 52 easy ways to optimize your blog while on your coffee break

Every day, social media consultants pull off very successful social marketing campaigns for clients as well as for their own sites. But often when those less experienced with this fairly new type of marketing try and pull off similar feats, they end up failing miserably. So what makes some social marketing successful while others are doomed to never leave the starting gate? Here are some of the top reasons why social media campaigns fail, and what you can do to ensure you are not mistakenly making the same ones.

Time
If you want your social marketing efforts to pay off, you need to put in the time. And this is one of the most important areas that people tend to neglect. But surprisingly, even though some of those efforts might take all of 30 seconds a day, people just don’t do it. A friend was bragging to me that he has 300 Twitter followers. But when I checked out his Twitter profile, he had tweeted four times in six months. Even if he had to request his password every time he posted to Twitter, his total time spent putting into Twitter was a mere five minutes. Further questioning revealed he thought it sucked because it didn’t send him any traffic. Well, no surprise there! Imagine what he could have done with five minutes a day… or even a week, but he simply didn’t put the time in. No social media campaign will work if you don’t have time set aside to be social with it.

Effort
And what is time without effort. Sure, you could happen to get on the front page of Digg with your very first submission. But chances are you will need many, many more than that before once of your submissions hits the front page. Whether it is building your profile with submissions, voting, commenting, stumbling, etc, it can be a tremendous amount of work, especially if you are focusing on more than one social media site at once.

Hunting
We all can’t be the one who creates that killer blog post that is begging to be on the front page of Digg or Sphinn… which means you actually have to search out interesting - and timely - things to submit in order to build up your profile. And that means having a ton of blogs on your RSS that tend to post entries that Digg/Sphinn/Reddit/Mixx etc love… AND then you also have to be the first one who submits it. In the time it takes to fill your coffee cup, someone can scoop that next submission that will hit the front page.

Consistency
On StumbleUpon, to be a top Stumbler, you have to put the time in… and this means stumbling A LOT. And we are not talking minutes, try an hour a day… but consistently. And if you aren’t consistent, you will fall off the top stumblers list, and your Stumble value has just dropped considerably. If you don’t tweet regularly on Twitter, you will miss out on the natural interaction between followers that result in other people discovering you and becoming a follower. The same can even be said for writing killer headlines, especially if writing is not your forte… if you take a month hiatus from submitting to your social media site of choice, you will be rusty when you come back to it. Consistency is key - and yes, this can mean every single day, or at the very least the weekdays. But it will pay off with success.

Visibility
Along with consistency comes visibility, which can be a make-or-break scenario when you are active on many social sites. When other people see you on other sites they are also active on, they become much more aware of who you are and what you are doing. If someone is your fan on StumbleUpon, they will probably give your submissions a closer look if they see you on Digg… and those extra votes that came strictly because of your visibility on other sites could be the votes that promote your submission to the front page. If you aren’t visible - and this even means ensuring you share the same username across the sites as well as using the same avatar, because they won’t know RyGuy, LVUGrad and HotTaco across various sites are actually all the same person - you lose the visibility value of cross networking.

Brute Force
You have that initial excitement when you notice that one of your pages has been submitted to Digg and it has a good chance of hitting the front page with the number of votes it already has. So what do you do? Send a notice around asking all 32 people in the office to Digg it too. Well, unfortunately for people who do this (and this happens a lot more frequently than you’d think!) not only will that entry have no shot of making the front page, but you will probably end up getting most, if not all of those accounts banned too along with your IP for good measure. If you have an office with multiple employees, just make a rule that they are not permitted to be logged into their social media accounts where this could be an issue (Digg is notorious for this) and voting or submitting to any of them from the office. Instead, request that anything they want to do be done from home instead. And yes, make sure they know this covers their breaks at work too!

Tunnel Vision
Sure, we all would love our own stuff to be on the front page of Digg or to get Stumbled… but we don’t live in a bubble so it doesn’t take long to cross the line where it seems that the only sites you are aware of that exist are all your own. So you need to be sure you mix it up with sites you have no relation to, whether it is larger news sites, techy sites such as Wired or even a small blog that posted a very submission-worthy entry. So while you might Stumble one of your sites, don’t submit or stumble another one from that site. Trust me, your fans will be able to tell exactly which sites are yours when they notice the same ones pop up again and again and they will be turned off by it. So make sure you are submitting, voting, stumbling all kinds of other sites… a good ratio would be to have only 1 self promoting one for every 30-50 non-promoting ones. Of course, this can definitely vary depending on the specific site you are doing as some have more leniency than others… for example, with Twitter you can self-promote all you want and Twitter is fine with that but your followers might not be though! A good rule of thumb is to see what the top users of the site are doing and follow their lead.

Not De-Spamming
Sure, you have a fabulous new product you feel everyone would love to have… but post about how great this new must-have product is on Digg and it will die a quiet death with about 3 Diggs, unless it happens to be about a new video game. Spin it around about how a product does something unexpected (think what mentos do when put in diet Pepsi), how a celebrity ironically endorses it (okay, I am sure Nicole Kidman is a smart woman, but she wouldn’t be the first person I would chose to endorse More Brain Training for the DS), or even the funny/interesting/must-watch commercial that goes along with the product, such as the Dove commercial that went crazily viral a year and a half ago or any of the “Get a Mac” commercials.

While there are other reasons why social media campaigns can fail, these are the ones I see popping up again and again when discussing with clients how to best promote themselves in the social space. If you are making these mistakes, set aside time to think about how to best handle your campaigns, and then make sure you are implementing them properly so that the next time you decide to tackle your social site of choice, you have increased your odds of being successful and reaping the benefits that come from it.

So, you want to start a blog… but don’t we all? First, you have to figure out what you want to blog about. Then secondly, you have to consider the market area, because does the world really need another mesothelioma blog? But while some areas are definitely over saturated, there is definitely room to find a blogging niche in a crowded blog market… and yes, even in the over saturated markets, so long as you are looking at it from a unique perspective.

Here are some things to consider before you decide if you really should add another mesothelioma blog to the world, or if you should perhaps chose something a little lower on the spam radar.

What do you like?
Sure, someone told you once that mesothelioma is the highest paying keyword on the net, and last I checked, it still was. But does this mean it would make the perfect blog niche for you? If you are a physician who researched it for a patient, or have a close family member with mesothelioma, then you probably know enough about the topic to easily start a blog. But if you had to check wikipedia just to find out what mesothelioma is, consider the fact that every time you want to write a blog post that you’d need to not only think about what to write about, but research it. And trust me, it is a much better idea to choose a topic that is much less labor intensive.

So what does this mean you should do? Think about the blogs you regularly read. Now think about what is missing from those blogs that you wish they did… that is probably a good niche idea that you should run with, because if you think it is something those industry blogs are missing, chances are other people do too, and you have just found yourself some readers. When you have less - or zero - competition, the better off your new blog will be.

Can you write about it?
Make sure it is a topic you can write about easily, with minimal research required. Perhaps you are just rewriting the latest Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan gossip while including your own cynical comments. If you just need to watch for anything newsworthy about the particular celeb in question and add your own caustic comments, that is a pretty easy blog to do.

Don’t forget that sometimes topics you are interested in can be very hard to write about. Maybe you consider yourself an armchair hockey player… but when you actually have to write a post a day about NHL, could you come up with something fresh and new while giving it your own unique spin? There are only so many ways to recap a hockey game with “He shoots, he scores!”

Do other people care about it?
Look to see if there are other blogs on your chosen topic. Does the blogger post frequently? Does he or she seem to have a lot of subscribers? Plenty of comments? Or are all the blogs on the topic more akin to a barren wasteland due to reader disinterest? Looking at competitive blogs in the niche can help you see if there are enough readers and interest to support another blog… or readers that care at all. Having a hard time finding if there is interest? Check out message boards that discuss the topic to see if there are people actively talking about your niche in a forum setting. If the most recent post you can find on the subject was back in 2003, interest could be an issue!

What is the competition like?
Can you even compete with the big boys or girls in the space? Unless you can provide something the others aren’t, or doing something to generate the readers, you might be better off choosing something a bit less competitive. Instead of an all-encompassing poker blog, maybe change it to a Chick Poker Players in Vegas blog instead or a blog catering to seniors who play poker. Poker isn’t niche. Targeting a specific demographic of poker player is a niche.

Is there money in it?
We all have niches that we could blog about until the cows come home. But just because you are passionate about underwater basket weaving doesn’t mean it is the best topic either, because last I checked, there probably aren’t many people paying to advertise on it. A quick way to check is to pick the main topic for the keyword, and then do a quick Google search for it. Are there millions of pages on the topic or do they number in the tens of thousands… or worse, hundreds? Then look at the AdWords advertisers. Underwater Basket Weaving with 47,000 results and no AdWords ads tells me that it probably isn’t going to make me much money. True, you could do the basket blog just for fun or to practice your writing skills, but if you are looking towards blogging as your day job, you might as well start with a blog that can be your day job.

Are there related affiliate ads?
Don’t just look at AdSense and consider it your get-rich-quick method of making money from your new niche site or blog. Are there affiliate ads that you can run alongside the AdSense to increase your revenue potential? Not sure about how affiliate ads work? Read my article over on JenSense, Supplementing AdSense with Affiliate Ads. But if there are targeted affiliate ads that are related to your niche - the more targeted the better - you can often make much more money with affiliate ads, and AdSense would end up being the supplement.

In the end, writing what you know and love will go a long way to help you become a successful blogger. Then, following the other tips to help you discover if your chosen blogging niche is one that will find readership and pay off financially, even in a small way… but preferably in a BIG way!

There are some bloggers who link to everyone everywhere at anytime. They just love dishing out the link love! However, not all bloggers are living in the free love world. Since the advent of the nofollow tag - which was marketed to bloggers as a way to stop blog spam - bloggers have seemingly become much more stingy with when and where they dole out those links in their blog posts… and that is if they aren’t nofollowing them in the first place. And if they are PR-conscious - that’s PageRank, not public relations! - they tend to be even stingier, under the impression that their PageRank will be better if they hoard it all to themselves.

But there are benefits of actively linking to other sites and blogs from within your own content.

More value to your readers
If you can provide useful links or additional commentary of your blog topic du jour, your blog has just become that more useful to your readers. If they are just going to go and Google your topic to find out more, instead of staying on your blog, why not just link to other sites in the first place? Then you also have the added bonus of choosing where your readers go off to read more next, instead of letting Google pick the sites.

Networking
With the great dashboard implementation in Wordpress, if you link to another blogger, they will know it… even if they never look at their blog stats. If they aren’t familiar with your blog, chances are pretty good that they will click the link to check you out and see what you wrote about them. And if they like your blog well enough, you have just got yourself a new subscriber by the mere act of linking to another blogger’s post from your own entry.

Sharing link love
If that blogger you linked to likes your stuff, chances are good that if they aren’t adding you to their blog roll, that they just might follow your stuff for the opportunity to link back to you one day. So that single outgoing link in your blog post can easily result in another link back to your own blog.

Promoting smart anchor text
Try and avoid linking with “here”, although sometimes that is what will happen so it doesn’t seem out of place or interrupt continuity in a blog entry. But do your best to link with the blog entry name or the blog name if possible. This will help those you link to, but also encourage others to link that way as well, and hopefully a few of those will be in links back to you!

Linking to Authority vs. non-authority
If you are blogging about Chevy trucks, you should link to Chevrolet’s official site, which definitely falls under the category of an authority outgoing link. But you might also want to link to your local Chevy dealership (which I would here, if they actually had a website I could find in Google!), which could be considered non-authority. I try to link to authority websites as well as some non-authority, but just do a check to make sure that non-authority site isn’t also lurking in a bad neighborhood! (Not sure what makes a link or site be in a bad neighborhood? Read Revisiting your linking strategies for a health check). There are also SEO benefits to linking out to authority sites, so definitely include them in your links.

Great for writer’s block
Stuck for a few days with nothing to write about? Do an entry where you link out to favorite blog posts you have read in the past week or two. But instead of doing snippets from the blog you link to, provide the link and your own blurb about each, such as why you think people should read it or something useful you got out of it. This will help differentiate these kind of posts from the usual “links of the day/week” that many bloggers are fond of.

Avoid the nofollow
Unless you are linking to someone with nofollow for a specific reason (which can be anything from being in a bad neighborhood, or you just don’t personally like the blogger!) dole out straight non-obfuscated links in your blog posts. If you link to a blog with a nofollow, trust me, they will notice and chances are pretty good they will either not link to you at all, or you can guarantee if they do, it will definitely be nofollowed back. There are far more benefits for you if you actively link out with straight links.

These obviously aren’t the only reasons why linking out is good But definitely some food for thought if you are one of those bloggers who rarely links out because you don’t want to share the link love!