Blog Marketing Singapore - Business Blogging Optimization Strategies

Over on the official Gmail blog, it was announced yesterday that they will be releasing themes for all Gmail accounts.

I’ve got mine and I love it.

Here’s what my Gmail inbox looks like now. Pretty.

Have you got yours?

Tags: gmail

Some time along your journey as a blogger or Internet marketer, we will be tempted to use “the cheaper alternative” - whether it is for web hosting, for autoresponder services, analytics services, ad servers etc.

Don’t.

I know you know this, but are you doing it?

Cheaper alternatives cause irreparable damage in the long run. From my own experience, it ALWAYS pays to get a professional to do the job. Do your due dilligence and do your research. Professionals charge a professional price, and they give you professional results.

The Story Goes…

Recently I met a friend attended an Internet marketing course held by one of Singapore’s Internet marketers. The course was great, as he has claimed, but as a newbie then, he was recommended to put his site under a web hosting provider.

Apparently the “web hosting provider” he was recommend to was not even in the business of web hosting! Their main business was in some international calling cards, callback and roaming services. But of course, being a good learner, all he did was follow. He was told that the money he paid would get him “lifetime webhosting”.

And by the way, he didn’t get a good deal. The amount he paid was equivalent to about 2 years of hosting fees with many of the good hosts you see out there. It is quite obvious that there was some joint venturing between the marketer and that hosting company.

“Lifetime webhosting” for a one time fee. Right. They just didn’t mention whose “life” it was.

Anyway, just one year down the road, the hosting company “migrated servers”. My friend had a WordPress blog hosted in his original website with over 20 well written articles. 20 articles is not a lot, but each article was well thought, and it was a lot of effort.

Guess what he got back? He got a “clean-Kubrick-themed-hello-world” blog back.

Overnight.

Good thing for him, he’s got the articles on disk. He now has to reload the articles one by one, creating the exact permalinks.

Now that’s painful.

Imagine what would have happened if he didn’t have those articles on disk?

Case Number 2

As I am writing this, the world’s most popular autoresponder system (the one on my sidebar) is refusing to load my opt in form. Instead of taking 5 seconds to load a page, my blog now loads at a facinating speed of 30 seconds.

Enough time to bore even the most hyperactive child to sleep.

Not only that - I’ve just sent out my monthly newsletter. I’m eager to see my open rates and click through rates. The click thrus in the newsletter ARE tracked. That means the clicks first go to the autoresponder system’s domain, THEN get directed to the page on my site.

Unfortunately I think my subscribers are going to see the same thing as what I see.

This.

Good thing my email out was not a product launch. It was not as fortunate for CopyBlogger, judging from his tweet.

I’m confident of AWeber’s deliverabilty, but after today, maybe not so much confidence in their uptime anymore. I believe this is not the first time this has happened.

Case Number 3

4 hours ago, I was at my prospective client’s office. It was a web design job.

One and a half years ago, they outsourced their web design project to an overseas firm. It was a Joomla project. The website was set up beautifully.

Everything was perfect, except the firm provided a pathetic manual on how to update the site. There was no training given whatsoever, of the editorial process, the user roles etc.

Leaving the non-tech savvy users to the steep learning curve of the Joomla administrator pages, you can imagine how broken the site is now.

They tried to get in touch with the web design firm. No news.

So now they are looking for another provider (me!) to step in to make the changes.

So the moral of the story goes…

If you want to cut your business expenses…

Then pay a good price for professional services. You will find that the work professionals do - the little things that didn’t seem apparant at first… that will save you money in the long run.

Here are some things you need to look out for when you select a provider, whether for outsourcing or as a strategic business partner.

1. Independant third party accreditation and certification.
2. Track record. Reviews, comments from the previous buyers.
3. Price. Is it too good to be true?
4. Documentation. In programming code, and user manuals.
5. Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Do they have any in the first place?

If you are on twitter or any social media platform, do a shoutout - ask for opinions and experiences. Search the forums. Look at what people are saying.

Don’t scrimp on the essentials, if you mean business.

I know you know this, but are you doing it?

Tags: business, web-design, web-hosting

I’ve just read Ian Lurie’s SEO Copywriting eBook, “The Unscary, Real World Guide to SEO Copywriting” and I must say it is an excellent 30 pages of straight-to-the-point, easy to understand, no fluff content.

In his book, Ian explains very clearly 6 principles behind his writing techniques, and the things you need to watch out for when you want to publish information online and get it well ranked in the search engines.

The best thing about it is that the whole book was written in really clear and plain English - and frankly, if you know how to read English, you are up to the standard to digest the book.

Check out Ian’s book now! A definite recommendation for every online business entrepreneur… especially if you are are not technically inclined!

Tags: Ian Lurie, SEO copywriting

Photo Credit: Jelene

As many SEOs may say, search engine optimization is about making you don’t do the wrong things; about making sure that your site is well structured and has all the elements in place so that your website appeals to the three powerful spiders (more powerful and Spiderman!) GoogleBot, Yahoo! Slurp and MSNBot!

But how do you know how the spiders sees your site?

Well, it’ll be good if the spiders would be even half as heroic and eloquent speaking than Peter Parker, coming to your website’s rescue milliseconds before you get into trouble, but unfortunately for us webmasters, the three very powerful bots are kinda deaf and dumb…

Urgh… in fact, they maybe the worst citizens in the web! If they see you in trouble they’d be the first to erase off your web address from their address books, and even go around feigning ignorance of your existence!

How would you know?

You’d have to pay their homes a visit! That is where you can rummage through their diaries and personal log files to find all their thoughts, so you can make the necessary structural changes to your site, before they decide to isolate you from your peers and leave you stranded on a no man’s land.

Shhh… don’t tell anyone we’re plotting this intrusion. Here are their addresses:

For the naughty GoogleBot, go to Google Webmaster Tools.

For Yahoo! Slurp, go to Yahoo Site Explorer

and for MSNBot, go to Live Webmasters

They leave their doors wide open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

What should you look out for?

Here are three main things you need to look out for as you rummage through their homes, especially from GoogleBot’s home:

1. The times they’ve tried to pay you a visit, couldn’t find you. They knocked on your door a couple of times, and but nobody answered. Most of the time, they write these cases on the 404th page of their diary.
2. Check out what their favorite food is! From my knowledge, their favorite dessert is called “sitemap”. Maybe you’d like to serve them with that for start. You can order that from here, or if you have a WordPress blog just ask for the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin
3. Top search queries. Find out what it is in your site that the spiders love, so you can work on giving more of that to them.

Go now. Go. So you can make sure your site remain in their address book for a long time to come. Check out what they think about you. You might be surprised… and shhh… don’t tell them I told you this.

Tags: googlebot, msnbot, yahoo slurp

Its been a long time since I had my bookmarks to explode! Here are some great stuff I’ve seen over this week (some older) to start a brilliant Sunday.

1. Starting a Business Blog? Be careful, don’t let Ian Lurie hit you on the head like he explains in his 15 rules for business bloggers… but is this the real truth about business blogging?
2. There is always a long debate on ranking for long tail keywords versus ranking for the short head. Here’s a case study on Online Flower Delivery in Singapore.
3. Of course, if you’ve not downloaded and devoured this yet… Google’s SEO Starter Guide.
4. If you are new to blogging on WordPress, ProBlogger has some tips for plugins for your new WordPress blog.
5. And if you want more people subscribe to your feed - check out these 14 ways to get more RSS readers. Remember, not everybody uses RSS, but studies have shown that people using RSS are powerful influencers on the net.
6. And another kindly reminder from Ted (the author of Blogging for Business) - things to watch in your blog design so your readers will love you.
7. Walter shares his opinions about Obama’s win being a Web 2.0 phenomenon. From this, we learn that social media marketing can work, and will work if you work it! Social media marketing is not a waste of time!
8. Everywhere you go, you see long salesletter boasting about their “traffic to their sites exploding” when they used some product or some marketing strategy. While its true that Internet marketing is a numbers game, Jim shares here that it also pays to focus on the people, not the hits!

… and some of you might have noticed the addition of Twitter Tools to my sidebar. If you haven’t come follow me on twitter!

Oh by the way - I’m looking for a tool to do a bookmark explosions post like this. I have this on my Delicious account but I want to add more text to the post first before I publish it, so I don’t like the automated “posting to blog” function in Delicious.

Any suggestions?

Have an awesome Sunday dudes!

Tags: bookmarks, business-blogging, delicious

Yesterday I re-watched a module in the StomperNet STSE2 video course, and Leslie Rhodie was recommending this optimized 3 column CSS layout.

Optimizing your page HTML order is very important for SEO, to provide search engines the unique content of every page first. This means that if the spiders from the different search engines have a limited amount of time on your site, they will get the unique content of the page first.

I think it is an excellent resource. Great work Matthew.

Tags: css, Search Engine Optimization, seo

I read this on SEO Book this morning about being an SEO service provider and it makes sense:

Here is why I think some of you might be selling yourself short if you sell your hard won skills to clients.

If you can return real value to clients i.e. not just ranking and traffic, but real tangible, value - then why aren't you keeping all that value for yourself? Why not compete with them instead? How about partnering with people so you get to keep an on-going share of their business? If you can position sites in lucrative keyword areas, that is a very valuable skill. Can clients even afford to pay what you're really worth?

If you’re really good at SEO, do you really need clients?

I can fully relate to this - partnering with people to get an ongoing share of their business. But in real life, its not easy. For example, if you were partnering with an SEO provider for your business selling rubber stamps, how do you decide that “oh this stamp is sold because of SEO… and this one is not?”.

Many businesses want to keep their business within themselves. They’d prefer the idea of “outsource” instead of “partnership”.

… and yes, as much as anyone is skilled in SEO, they will need to work with other people for knowledge in the particular niche. Of all the “people”, clients pay best because they are “business transactions”.

What do you think?

Tags: Search Engine Optimization, seo

I mean from the Google webmaster central blog, free.

The 22 page Google SEO guide is what it is - for starters.

But on the other hand, I’ll also say that its packed with what is essential for your site to perform on Google. If you just stick to the concepts illustrated in pages 2 to 19 on the guide as your bible, then you site is practically honey to the GoogleBot bee (it doesn’t sound very nice to say your site is a “fat fly to the GoogleBot Spider” right? )

Page 20 is a one page writeup about the principles behind off page optimization - or how you should promote your site.

I’d highlight the “avoids” because I think these are important:

Avoid:
attempting to promote each new, small piece of content you create; go for big, interesting items
involving your site in schemes where your content is artificially promoted to the top of these services

Avoid:
spamming link requests out to all sites related to your topic area
purchasing links from another site with the aim of getting PageRank instead of traffic

Go grab the SEO guide and read it now!

Tags: google, Search Engine Optimization, seo

I read a very interesting article today about “Save Your Career, Start a Blog”

In the article, Joseph Jaffe shares 10 reasons why you need to have a blog. I particularly love the second reason, and I can really relate to it.

Blogging = market research. In my experience, blogging keeps me smart. It forces me to be active within my community. It’s amazing how much you’ll discover by plunging down the rabbit hole of links. Blogging is the new account-planning function.

Frankly, if I didn’t put pressure on myself to maintain this blog, I would have sunken into the deep pits of laziness, and stayed in front of miniclip.com, playing games all day long.

Oops! Now you know.

Its interesting to note events in the blogosphere about people getting fired from blogging, and then have a totally different perspective today that blogging can save your job!

Which do you relate to?

If Joseph’s 10 reasons still doesn’t push you over the edge and get you blogging, check out my 10 practical ways to use a blog. Find one reason. Any reason… and start blogging!

Tags: Corporate Blogging, online resume

Okay, I might probably be the last one in the whole wide world to complete watching StomperNet’s Stomping the Search Engines (STSE2) video course which Andy Jenkins, Brad Fallon and team gave out for free two months ago.

But frankly… my thoughts… This whole package is a big load of CRAP! In fact, I’d say that this is the most awesome piece of CRAP I’ve ever watched!

Heh. Don’t shut me off. CRAP is a good thing! Let me explain.

C - It’s Complete!

It covers all the essential topics for a online business owner to dominate the search engines, right from the start about why SEO, and the SEO mindset (I love that one!), all the way until how to measure and track your progress!

R - It provides Real Life Examples!

Unlike many other courses you get for $47, $67 or $97 which provide a lot of theory and vague examples, Andy showcased two of his real-life sites in the slides, and frankly, for me, that helped so much because I know one of the best ways to learn is to analyse successful sites and mimick their site structure!

And yes, like I’ve always emphasised - if you are looking for “guru” to follow, look for one with success not only in the Internet marketing niche. The StomperNet faculty members have definitely done that!

A - It’s packed with Actionable steps!

In the modules on keyword concepts, site structure, on page optimization, off page optimization and measuring and testing. Many of the points are very action focused! This means you can just take that point and go make changes to your site!

In fact, I could have gone through that 7 modules quickly and dumped it into my digital junkyard.

But what really intrigued me was the really practical steps to take. I resolved that I had to relisten to some modules over and over and I even bought a notebook to take notes on the action steps to implement! I have 22 pages of notes! Some of the concepts have already been implemented on this blog!

P - It’s awesomely (is there such a word?) Practical!

I think its a VERY practical package for web designers, online marketers, and online business owners - to immediately take their websites on to the next level. I like it that its delivered on a CD-rom, as opposed to delivered online - which many marketers do.

This allows me to view the videos even while I was on the train back home. With the CD, I know that the content will be there all the time when I need it… and I’m confident that I’ll return to it as a reference within the next year!

If you haven’t got the package, too bad. The StomperNet guys are closed to handle some order fulfillment issues at the moment.

But get on their mailing list and wait. Its worthwhile. You’ve GOT to get your hands on this.

One Drawback

I’ve to admit, there is one drawback to the package. I think this video course is perfect for people like myself. I’m trained in computing, and I had to replay some of the segments to fully absorb what the speaker was putting across.

In other words, the non tech-savvy people might take a longer time, and would definitely require some help in getting the tasks done. But that’s not new - SEO is grunt work at times, and it can be technical.

If you are in that situation, think of “how can I get this done?” rather than “should I do this?”. There are lots of great technical people behind elance.com waiting for projects, so feed them! … Or you can feed me too!

Great work, StomperNet!

Tags: Search Engine Optimization, seo, stompernet, stse2