ActiveRain Tutorials: August 2010

I admit it, I find myself being a Foursquare junkie at times.  Ok, all the time. Becoming a mayor is as addicting as chocolate to a pregnant woman.  Not to mention the badges that you can grab and how that will continue to feed my addiction.

Today I'm not getting into the ways to use Foursquare for business or why it is or is not a great place to increase your sphere of influence and grow a business.  Instead I just wanted to share a fun app I found that allows you to track your check-ins on a map.  I think this is a great way to help you promote to others places you feel are great places to visit.  Since I live in a resort area, I have people visiting all the time from out of town looking for a great place to go.  This map will be a great way to share quickly & easily the places I enjoy & frequent the most in my area.  That way they can check it out & see what I love to try out on their own.

In an area like Myrtle Beach, this can be really helpful for picking a restaurant.  Why you may ask?  Well, there are enough places to eat here that you could have 3 meals for a year and a half and never eat at the same restaurant twice. With all those choices, it is hard to know what is good and what may not be.  If someone sees I am a mayor of a local restaurant & have been there 5-10 times then they can easily recognize this must be a great place.  Check out my map below:

Jeremy Blanton's Foursquare by WeePlaces.com.

You may not be a fan of Foursquare, but at least I see how an application like this connected into my account could be a benefit to others.  Not to mention it gives me great conversations on both my Facebook & Twitter accounts with friends.

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

How to Use Creative Commons Photos- The Why

We all understand the importance of adding photos and labeling them properly into our blog posts.  Adding just 2 images can increase the time someone stays at your blog by up to 300%!  That means if the average time is around 30 seconds, we can get someone to stay up to 3 minutes by adding them.  This is an important thing to note because not many people can read 500 word blog posts in under 30 seconds.

The reason this works is because consumers scan posts for the important points.  If a photo is there, that consumer's eyes are drawn to the photo and they will study it.  If the photo is good enough to get their attention, they will read the content.

How to Use Creative Commons Photos- The What

There are several ways to get photos for your blog.  Some are legal, and others are not.  Let's first address the not so legal ways.  Many times when I ask a client where they found the photo for their blog, they say that they simply did a Google search and the photo appeared.  They liked it, so they copied & pasted it into their post.  Whatever you do, don't copy & paste a photo from the a website without permission! When you copy & paste an image that you do not have permission to use, you are begging for a lawsuit to come your way.  I have seen and heard countless horror stories of people who have been sued for several thousands of dollars for doing this.

The second is to take the photos yourself.  We all now own some sort of digital camera or smartphone that has a camera built in.  Use those to snap photos yourself and load them into your blog.  You don't have to be a professional photographer to get good pictures for your blog.  But what do you do in instances when you don't have a photo of your own? You can turn to photo sites where you can purchase the photos for a few dollars each, or if you are on a tight budget, you can use a creative commons licensed photo.

What are Creative Commons photos?  To understand completely, visit their site here & read what is CC?  Basically, they are pieces of content that someone else has agreed to allow others to use under a common agreement that you will give the credit for the piece to the originator through proper recognition as required.  Giving proper credit normally means placing a link back to the photographer giving them credit for the original work.

Creative Commons Photos- The How To

So how exactly do you go about finding the photos and using them properly?  Well instead of writing it out, I decided to do a short video which I have placed below.  Simply follow the steps and you will be well on your way to finding great photographs to use in your blog posts.

I hope this helps you to find great photos for your upcoming works that are both functional & free.  If you have any questions, feel free to contact me for more help.

Photo Credit by Trekkyandy

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

Today we continue our series on how to blog and increase your blog traffic by discussing the subject of keywords.  In case you missed my last post, you can read it here and pick up a few more good nuggets on how to increase your blog traffic.

Keywords are by far one of the most misunderstood components for any blogger.  Usually they can pick out the few big keywords for a product/service, but have a very hard time finding the balance of terms that will rank well in the search engines as well as deliver a good amount of traffic to your site.  While it may be easy to dominate the first page of Google for a term like: “best real estate agent in Myrtle Beach South Carolina,” if that term receives less than 10 visits per month, is it really helping your business to spend time writing on that term? Granted, the leads that come directly from that are going to be very solid, your number of them will be few & far between.

On the other end of the spectrum, if I am in real estate, do I really want to try & rank for terms like Myrtle Beach Homes or Myrtle Beach real estate?  Those terms receive high amounts of traffic and and are going to be very difficult to garner page one results without a lot of work, content creation, and probably even hiring an SEO company.  Not to mention the quality of your lead is not very good either.  These broad general terms can generate lots of traffic, but very few transactions.  I remember an agent once that ranked for the top of the SERPS for a major term and got hundreds of leads each month.  He knew they were a waste of time, so he just handed them off to newbies in the industry and if they struck gold, collected a nice fat referral check.

So what should I be looking for in regards to keywords to increase blog traffic?

Take a look at this graph first to understand what section of keywords we are targeting:

We want to target the keywords in the green section to hopefully return the best results.  This means the terms that are showing a few thousand searches per month but not those with hundreds of thousands of searches.  They will deliver more traffic than those in the yellow with the quality of lead being better than terms in the red section. These terms are going to take a little bit of work to get to page one of Google, but will also send a few hundred hits to your site each month.  The leads will be a higher quality than the red section of our graph.  These people are not doing just general searches, they are doing searches that are more specific to a service or product and therefore are a little bit better quality.  When you see your site taking over page one of Google on these types of terms, that is when your phone will start ringing and sales will begin to skyrocket.

Determine Top 5 Keywords to Increase Blog Traffic and build from there.

The other day I was having a coaching session with a client, and we were developing the best keywords for his business.  He has invented a great piece of fitness equipment and hired me to assist him with his onlie presence.  I asked him to give me his top 5 keywords and from that we began to develop an in depth spreadsheet of keywords.  One of the keywords he gave me was “cheap workout equipment.”  I entered this term into Google Adwords and began to review the results.  The term “cheap workout equipment” is only being searched around 1,000 times per month, but a minor adjustment to “cheap exercise equipment” takes that number up to 8,100!   So, before you write your next post, take a few moments to determine what types of keywords to use.  A slight alteration can be the difference between 10 visits to your site and 1,000.

If you have any questions on how to increase your blog traffic through selecting the right keywords, feel free to ask in the comment section or contact me directly if you would like assistance determining the best keywords for your business.

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors