Look for blogs that target your ideal client.
In order for guest blogging to be effective, be sure to find blogs that target your ideal client. It makes no sense to guest post on a site for vegetarians if you are selling meat. Your guest post idea probably will not get accepted. The idea behind this article is to get the reader to click through to your website. If your website isn’t related to the blog, you won’t see that result.

Find out the rules for guest blogging before you approach a blogger about guest blogging.
Nothing irritates bloggers more than to have people approaching them about guest blogging without having read the guidelines first. Not reading the rules is a surefire way for a blogger to tell you to take a long walk off a short pier.

Guest blogging is a great way to get backlinks to your website. It is also a great way to get in front of a different audience. Your best customer could come from the guest post you did. Please be careful and submit your best work.

Your keywords should be in the title.
The title is usually the first thing search engines look at when trying to determine if your website will rank for the keywords you want. Also titles help your readers know what to expect from the website. Your keywords should appear at least once in the title.

Your keywords should be in the headings.
Whenever possible, you should use headings in your web content. Use your keywords in these headings. Make sure you can use your keywords in a way that makes sense both to search engines and humans.

Your keywords should be in the body of your content.
You should also use your keywords in the content that is on your website. Don’t overdo this. If you don’t have your keywords in the content of your website, search engines won’t think your website is relevant to your keywords.

Search Engine Optimization is crucial if you want to be successful in any online venture. On page optimization is the first line of defense. It is the one thing you have 100% control of. Master this and you will be well on your way to gaining positive results from your website without spending a lot of money on advertising.

Be sure to get links from relevant sites. If your site is about pets, don’t waste time with a site dedicated to helping people with pet allergies. Relevancy is a key factor in how successful your off page SEO campaign is.

Make sure your keyword is in the anchor text. If you want to rank for dog cages, use that as the term that will be hyperlinked on the website. This is what helps you gain higher search engine placement for a particular keyword.

Off page optimization is just as important as on page optimization. If no one is linking to your site, search engines will determine that you are not an important source of information about your topic. If you are not using your keywords in the anchor text when you get links from other sites, you won’t rank for the keywords you are trying to rank for.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Ruth Burr discusses how you can use your keywords to drive personas, and ultimately affect your site mapping process for the better. Leave your thoughts and questions in the comments below!

For your viewing pleasure, here’s a still image of the whiteboard used in this week’s video!

Update: Ruth referred to some code that Mike King of iAquire put together that may help your site if integrated into your analtyics. Give it a look!

Read on and I’ll tell ya!

Calculating the real ROI

With so much emphasis often put on the traffic generation potential of a good content marketing strategy, I want to focus this post on measuring and increasing the return on the (sometimes sneakily large) investment. Some common goals you’ll hear surrounding a content marketing strategy include generating traffic for generic terms, increasing social shares, and developing the brand’s authority (measured by increases in branded traffic, or some other indicator). In the right circumstances, all of these are nice metrics for the relevant stakeholders in the organization, but they’re all just proxies for measuring the growth of a business. They’re measurements of the means, not the end.

The impetus for a lot of what I’ll be talking about in this post comes from Josh Braaten‘s post on the Google Analytics Blog a few months ago titled “How to Prove the Value of Content Marketing with Multi-Channel Funnels“. Josh talks practically about how to measure the business impact of traffic that first experiences your site via a page that isn’t directly selling a product or service to a consumer. Think: the “How to get into fly-fishing” article written by the outdoors retailer that sells fly-fishing poles, or even the “How to measure the effectiveness of content marketing” article written by the guy working for a company that’s doing a two day kick-ass web marketing conference in Boston on May 20th & 21st :). Indeed, these content pages aren’t selling a product or service, but they are selling the brand, the “purchase” made by the consumer is everlasting trust; and it has a really low conversion rate.

The necessary analysis for this gets difficult because it is so rare for a user to make the jump from discovery/informational stage to transactional stage in one sitting. Hence the need for multi-channel analysis: we need to take a conversion, look back at all of the interactions that have taken place leading up to that conversion, and assign some amount of credit to those channels that often show up toward the beginning of the conversion path. Social networks and the content that usually ranks for generic keywords are most often found in these early interactions. They are inherently ‘openers’ or ‘exposers’.

So, now that we’ve covered the theory, let’s look at measuring that ROI.

NOTE: This post replaces a popular one I wrote on the same topic in 2007. This post is intended to be useful to all forms of bloggers – independent folks, those seeking to monetize, and marketing professionals working an in-house blog from tiny startups to huge companies. Not all of the tactics will work for everyone, but at least some of these should be applicable and useful.

#1 – Target Your Content to an Audience Likely to Share

When strategizing about who you’re writing for, consider that audience’s ability to help spread the word. Some readers will naturally be more or less active in evangelizing the work you do, but particular communities, topics, writing styles and content types regularly play better than others on the web. For example, great infographics that strike a chord (like this one), beautiful videos that tell a story (like this one) and remarkable collections of facts that challenge common assumptions (like this one) are all targeted at audiences likely to share (geeks with facial hair, those interested in weight loss and those with political thoughts about macroeconomics respectively).

If you can identify groups that have high concentrations of the blue and orange circles in the diagram above, you dramatically improve the chances of reaching larger audiences and growing your traffic numbers. Targeting blog content at less-share-likely groups may not be a terrible decision (particularly if that’s where you passion or your target audience lies), but it will decrease the propensity for your blog’s work to spread like wildfire across the web.

#2 – Participate in the Communities Where Your Audience Already Gathers

Advertisers on Madison Avenue have spent billions researching and determining where consumers with various characteristics gather and what they spend their time doing so they can better target their messages. They do it because reaching a group of 65+ year old women with commercials for extreme sports equipment is known to be a waste of money, while reaching an 18-30 year old male demographic that attends rock-climbing gyms is likely to have a much higher ROI.

Thankfully, you don’t need to spend a dime to figure out where a large portion of your audience can be found on the web. In fact, you probably already know a few blogs, forums, websites and social media communities where discussions and content are being posted on your topic (and if you don’t a Google search will take you much of the way). From that list, you can do some easy expansion using a web-based tool like DoubleClick’s Ad Planner:

Once you’ve determined the communities where your soon-to-be-readers gather, you can start participating. Create an account, read what others have written and don’t jump in the conversation until you’ve got a good feel for what’s appropriate and what’s not. I’ve written a post here about rules for comment marketing, and all of them apply. Be a good web citizen and you’ll be rewarded with traffic, trust and fans. Link-drop, spam or troll and you’ll get a quick boot, or worse, a reputation as a blogger no one wants to associate with.

Videos get shared.
When people see interesting videos they tend to share those more quickly than articles. If your video is on a video sharing site that allows webmasters to embed the video, your video could wind up getting shared on different websites without your having to ask. This increases your exposure in ways that writing an article doesn’t.

Videos help you build rapport with your target audience.
Sometimes people just need to see for themselves that you are in fact a real person. When you record video, you get the added benefit of using your personality and body language to help people be able to trust you. With so many con artists on the Internet, people want some reassurance that you are not going to cheat them. When potential customers see your video, your dazzling smile and charming personality will help them get to know you better.

Video marketing is a must for any online marketer. Don’t worry about how you look. Don’t be concerned about what to talk about on your video. Chances are that if you have enough to blog about, you have enough to do a video on.

Social media gives you one way links.
When you post your link on social media, that is a one way link. You usually don’t link to each individual post from your own website. This creates one way links. One way links signal importance to search engines.

Social media gives you more places to share your content.
When you’re active in social media, you have more places to share the content that you create. This is important because you need to have traffic to your content. It’s helpful if the visitor already trusts you because of the relationship you have built with that person through your social media actions. Use social media wisely and you will have tons of qualified traffic coming to your website. Don’t expect overnight success. Stay consistent and you’ll see positive results from your social media campaign.

Social media should be a big part of your Search Engine Optimization strategy. Yes it can be time consuming, but you can outsource a lot of that work. Social media is not going anywhere. Your business needs to have a social media presence to assist with your efforts to rank highly for certain keywords.