Tips to Create Great Content within Minutes

As you know, content development is a complicated, time-consuming and expensive proposition. It is also very expensive for small business owners to afford that kind of effort. So they tried the new concept of micro-content, or creating small bits of marketing content within little time to blog, create videos or spend all day on Facebook.

Using the following ideas, you can develop sufficient micro-content for your social media marketing strategy devoting only few minutes a day for these activities.

Do a Proper Preparation:

Like any marketing initiative you must have a concrete idea about your strategy, selling points and targeting audience locations. Spend time thinking through a set of keywords that represent your business and your customer needs. You'll need to weave these keywords into your micro-content initiative. Once you have a complete idea of "your story," here are some content marketing options that work using few minutes a day:

1) Slideshare:

Even the most content-starved companies have PowerPoint slides. Upload your best public presentations to Slideshare for a very quick and effective way to begin populating the social web with meaningful content. Slideshare is highly indexed by the search engines and you can assign key words to every presentation. Make sure your last slide directs a viewer back to your website.

2) LinkedIn Forums:

LinkedIn is a goldmine of opportunity to create micro-content.

There are about 750,000 LinkedIn Groups covering every imaginable business interest. Go to the "search" function at the top of the page, highlight "groups" and look for a few of those have like-minded people who might be interested in you. If you are in a very specialized field, you may even consider starting your own interest group.

Now, look through the Q&A forums and get involved. Simply answering questions is providing meaningful content that can attract attention to you and your website. I have made some fantastic connections this way and acquired some great customers just by answering questions in LinkedIn Group Forums.

Make sure your LinkedIn profile is complete and helpful so people can learn about you when they "click" on your profile. Depending on your industry, spending at least 15 minutes a day participating in relevant LinkedIn forums can be very profitable.

3) Networking on Twitter:

This is the ultimate site for making connections through micro-content by building a targeted audience through Twitter. It makes no sense to work on micro-content on Twitter if you have nobody listening. Here is a suggested micro-content regimen if you're just starting to tweet.

1) Create a habit of sharing Information: Today, every article, post and video has a "tweet" button. When you read something that interests you, share it on Twitter. It takes but a moment.

2) Leverage your Networks: If you have surrounded yourself with interesting people, they're providing a stream of relevant content. When you find something great, re-tweet it! You don't have to generate everything yourself. "Re-purposing" other people's content takes almost no time all.

3) Try following the "3 x 3 x 3 rule”: If you are new and trying to figure what to do, tweet three times a day, at three different times of the day, on three different subjects: a) interesting non-work-related information you saw, heard or read; b) news related to your business, market or industry (use keywords), and c) your opinion on an item in the news or something funny.

Remember that micro-content is still supposed to do the job of big content drive people to action on your website. Of course you need to include your website in your profile and use your keywords in your bio-data.

Don't be overwhelmed by the wall of noise on Twitter. Use lists to focus on your most important contacts so that your moments of daily networking are well-utilized.

4) Connecting Through Comments:

Spending 15 minutes a day commenting on relevant blog posts, videos, and Facebook pages is a quick and easy way to deliver micro-content that packs a punch. Here are some examples:

• As small business owner I advised commented on a magazine's Facebook site and was invited to send her product to the editor for coverage.
• Adding your comment to relevant YouTube viral videos can create impressions with thousands of people who are interested in a related topic.
• My comment on a popular blog post contained a link to my website which is still receiving hits nine months later. That's not unusual since posts on popular topics can have a long "shelf life."
• Comments on my blog have resulted in new business partnerships, guest blogs, and freelance assignments for my readers.
• I find that comments can carry even more impact when they’re micro or small. People will read a few sentences, but probably just scan a few paragraphs. Are there blogs that your customers enjoy? Why not contribute to this rich content with your own comments? 

5) Micro-videos:

Videos are just so hot right now but you don't have to spend thousands of dollars and precious hours in the editing booth to create great content.

Within few minutes worth of work, I had interesting content for my blog which fed my Facebook page, Twitter account, YouTube channel, G+ stream and LinkedIn status.

6) Micro-Content and Blogging:

There are so many great benefits to blogging but this is usually the place time-starved marketers stumble. Think about re-purposing micro-content on your website as a blog, even if it only happens once a month:

• Cut and paste answers you've already provided on LinkedIn and blog comments as new, unique posts.
• Start a blog post with, you found this interesting article through a link on Twitter and share the great content from one of your tweets.
• Embed a pre-existing company video or a Slideshare presentation as an original blog post.
• Share a relevant article, video or blog post from a trade publication and simply write a few sentences commenting on it.

A blog post does not have to be a PhD thesis. Using some of these techniques, you can literally create blog posts within minutes.

Hope the above tips are very helpful for writing informative content for your business website. Feel free to send your suggestions and comments for the enhancement of this blog. You can also contact me for SEO analysis and online promotion of your business website.  

Article Marketing and Syndication Techniques Used for SEO Campaign

As you know, Google rolled out its Panda update in the first quarter of 2011 and sites like Ezine Articles  suffered badly. Now the cynics among us might say things like ‘well they should have seen it coming,’ but what many people fail to realize is that websites like Ezine Articles were the main watering holes for thousands of web marketers. Not only has EZA suffered many online marketers and web businesses have suffered too.

The strategy of writing articles and submitting them to article directories to gain back-links and direct traffic was the cornerstone of many web marketing businesses, and now the well seems to have run dry.

First, the way in which these article directories have been utilized by marketers over the past few years wasn’t really the way in which they were intended to be utilized in the first place. The concept of an ‘article directory’ was and still is this: to serve as a repository for good quality content, a place where webmasters can find articles for their websites/blogs/ezines in exchange for providing an acknowledgment in the form of a link to the author’s website.

Then the opportunity seekers moved in and turned it into something different. Just like back-link building, blog commenting, and SEO in general; the concept was taken and exploited to the point where it simply had to be ‘regulated’ (by Google).

Now, if you’re thinking about apportioning the guilt for this, well, the Article Directory owners were not entirely without fault. They could and should have tightened up their quality standards and made it more difficult for people to exploit the system by throwing low quality canned/spun articles into the directory for the reward of a couple of back-links. Instead they added more and more advertising slots around the content and made hay while the sun shone bright.

So, where does this leave us? Do we walk away from article marketing in the same way we’re walking away from low quality back-link building and other strategies of the past? Well, we shouldn’t be too hasty.

Let’s wind the clock back to the days just prior to the point where it all went south, and look in more detail at the real purpose and function of a quality Article Directory.

There are many hundreds of thousands of niche blogs and websites which have a loyal and focused group of followers. Often, the number of followers can reach into the thousands, with some of the larger blogs boasting traffic stats of many multiples of that figures.

The key to creating such a successful enterprise is to keep your followers fed on a steady and reliable diet of whatever it is that drew them to you in the first place. Usually this falls into one of two fairly distinct categories, they’re either following the personality of the blog owner, or they’re following the specific topic of interest.

In the first case, it’s hard to have a surrogate personality, so the onus is on the blog owner to continue to make him/her available to the followers. In the second case, there is no reason why the information cannot come from a variety of sources, as long as the information, which is on-topic and supportive of the general theme of the blog/website.

But as a blog owner, how on earth can you continue to feed your followers information at the rate they require to keep them ‘entertained’ and wanting more. You need to have some form of ‘outsourcing’ of content.

And this is where the larger Article Directories came to known. People would submit quality articles in the hope of their articles being noticed by these niche (and oftentimes not so niche) websites and blogs. The blog owner would search the directories for content which he/she felt would satisfy the demands of his/her followers, and re-publish the article/content on their blog. In the spirit of any ‘exchange of services,’ the blog owner would retain the links within the article body, and/or bio box, so that the author would receive the recognition for their original work.

The blog owners would benefit from the fresh content being delivered to their readers, and some of those readers would follow the links within the article to the author’s own website. Hence the ‘exchange of services’ are the mutually beneficial exchanges.

What you have is simply a system of providing a service to fulfill a demand. It is called ‘syndication’ and it is widely used in the world of news and media. Associated Press is one of the best known syndication operations around. They have teams of writers who create news stories from around the world and the subsequent articles are syndicated out to partnering websites.

So, when one looks at the concept of Ezine Articles and some of the other article directories, they began life as a valuable resource created to feed a large and hungry crowd of web users with a constant supply of information. So has that really been neutered by Google or does it still exist?

Yes, things have changed, but you can still benefit from syndication as a writer and a blog owner. In fact, now that Google has stepped in and forced a reorganization of how these sites operate, you can benefit more than ever before.

Here’s a simple and condensed strategy which you can adopt if you are a blog publisher or website owner looking for more targeted traffic:

1 - Write an interesting and informative article on your niche. Don’t use blatant self-serving sales language, make it something entertaining and try to leave a question unanswered towards the end of your article.

2 - Create a bio box and word it to suggest that the unanswered question may be resolved if the reader would care to follow the link in the bio box.

3 - Link people to a page on your blog or website which provides a smooth continuation of the article and eventually answers the question posed in the original article.

4 - Integrate some ‘sticky’ components on the ‘landing’ page. Use a discreet opt-in box, have a step to a sales page or combine both together. If your ‘landing’ page is too commercial, too aggressive, you won’t satisfy the needs of point five.

5 - Search for blog / website owners whose content complements your own in some way. If you and they are commercial enterprises occupying the same niche, they’ll be less likely to want to work with you, but there will be some who will. Now write to these blog owners and offer them on-topic content for their blogs/sites. Offer to send them an informative article which is sure to please their readers and followers and include an example of your writing. Suggest that you would be willing to become a regular contributor if your work proves popular with their readers. Of course, your work will contain at least a bio box with links, and you would require that they respect you as the original author and retain your name and bio box intact.

Now simply repeat the above strategy over and over, contacting more and more blog owners with your offer of syndication. Maintain a careful record of your communication and start to build a relationship with the people who accept your work.

There will also be some syndication partners who operate Ezines. These can result in a very large surge of targeted traffic to your website over a short period, so be sure that your website is equipped to handle it and that your landing pages are optimized to reap the full benefits.

Lastly, towards the later stages of your syndication effort, submit your articles to the Article Directories. They can still be a source for syndicated content and there is no reason why your article might not be picked up directly by someone proactively looking for information to share with their readers.

As your syndication efforts pick up momentum, you’ll start to see that article syndication becomes a very real alternative to search-engine derived traffic, you’ll no longer be beholden to Google for your leads and prospects.

Of course, there is a need to do things the right way with article syndication to avoid some common pitfalls and to get the most out of your time. In the next article in this series for SPN I’ll be looking in detail at landing page optimization and list building, and exploring some of the problems with duplicating your content around the web.

Prepare Your Website for Future Google Updates

With the recent Penguin update that came down a few weeks ago from Google, a lot of site owners are wondering what they can do to recover from a search engine penalty. We know that Penguin was designed to target web spam tactics (Panda was more about content quality), and while glaring black hat tactics like keyword stuffing are easy to spot and fix, it's not always as simple to find the gray hat SEO tactics that might be contributing (or will with subsequent updates) to a search engine penalty. Many DIY SEO site owners run afoul of the Google Webmaster Guidelines simply because they don't realize they are doing anything wrong.

If your site has managed to escape unscathed by a Google update so far, don't assume that you're free and clear forever. Each search engine update gets a little better at catching and flagging sites that are in violation of the Webmaster Guidelines. Before you find yourself in emergency mode because your organic traffic was cut in half due to a penalty, here are 5 things every site owner can do to protect their website and ensure that future updates will only help their site perform better in the search engines:

1). Forget About Keyword Density

There is no "right" number of times you should use a keyword in any given piece of content. Forget every piece of advice you've ever heard about keyword density (2%, 6%, use each keyword at least three times!) and just focus on writing great content. One of the few hard and fast rules of SEO is that content should always be written for the human reader first, the search engines second. Believe it or not, a well-written piece of content will partially optimize itself because the topic naturally encourages you to use various keywords. You won't ever want to force a keyword into the content to meet some keyword count quota - it's almost always going to negatively impact the usability of your content. Of course you want to optimize your content for SEO, but worry about targeting keywords AFTER you've written the content. You can go back and tweak the post to be a little more SEO friendly in the revision round.

2). Diversify Your Anchor Text

A lot of SEO experts are hypothesizing that exact match anchor text might have been a big flag for the Penguin update. It's important to diversify your anchor text so the search engines don't have any reason to suspect that you might be trying to manipulate the SERPs. Branded keywords are probably going to make up a large percentage of your anchor text portfolio, but you don't want to rely too heavily on a short list of targeted keywords (and please don't use CLICK HERE as anchor text; it has no SEO value) for your anchor text. Much like with optimizing your content, there is no "right" number of times to use a particular keyword or keyword phrase as your anchor text.

3). Remove Questionable Links from Your Link Portfolio

In the weeks before Penguin, Google started sending out notifications to many site owners warning them about "unnatural links" in their link portfolio. These could be link exchanges, paid links, unrelated links, links from blogs and low quality directories and so forth. If there are any links in your link portfolio that might catch the eye of Google for the wrong reasons, it's best to do away with them now so you don't have to worry about it later. Keep in mind that a few "bad" links aren't going to destroy your SEO, especially if the vast majority of your link portfolio is full of great links. You can't control who links to you, which has made many site owners worry about the ramifications of negative SEO (a competitor would purposely link from dangerous sites to you to hurt your site). It's when you have an okay link portfolio or shady SEO past that you need to worry about scrubbing your link portfolio as quickly and effectively as you can.

Some SEO experts have also hypothesized that sites might feel a trickledown effect via their link portfolio. Even if your site wasn't hit by Penguin, if a lot of the sites linking to yours were those poor quality sites Google penalized, links from those sites become pretty much useless to your SEO. Your site may have escaped unharmed, but your link portfolio took a big hit.

4). Analyze the Value and Quality of Your Content

Ever since the first Panda update last year, just about every Google update since then has been focused on quality, especially content quality. It's hard to hold a mirror up to our own efforts sometimes, but take a good hard look at your content. Where is there room for improvement? Are there any thin pages that you could combine in order to make a strong page with a great user experience? Are there pages you should just delete entirely? Put yourself in the shoes of your customer - would you want to purchase from your brand? Is your content compelling and user driven or is it just a bunch of company mumbo jumbo and ego?

If you haven't already, now is the time to launch a company blog (or up the number of posts you have going live each week.) Onsite SEO and link building are crucial to long term SEO success, but content is really what is going to propel your brand forward. The more quality content you have built around your website the better you look in the eyes of the search engines. It gives your customers a reason to interact with your brand (and link to your site!), builds your online authority and helps grow your overall online presence.

5). Imagine There are no Search Engines

Speaking of overall online presences (and this is going to sound strange coming from an SEO professional), treat your online marketing like there were no search engines. It's important to diversify your traffic sources so your entire online livelihood isn't based on the mercy of the search engines. If Google didn't exist, what other online activities would you invest into connect with your audience? Build up these other channels so that if your site is impacted by an update, you can survive until you figure out and fix the problem. Google doesn't owe you anything, and even though they want site owners to do a good job with their SEO (it helps clean up the SERPs, which gives Google a better product) they aren't obligated to make sure your site survives. It's up to you to learn the rules of the online world and give your website the best chance at online success.

There are many, many things a site owner could so with their SEO that could trigger a penalty from Google. But these are 5 things a site owner can (and should) do to not only protect their sites from future updates, but actually benefit from them. 

Useful Tips for Small Business Owners

Leadership is important in your business whether you have 1 employee or over 50 employees. Hopefully, these tips will help you on how to be a good leader for your business if you are not already. All of these tips can't be done just once, you need to practice them daily or weekly or monthly. Repetition of each task will get you in a routine and make your business run smoother. Being a small business owner can be rewarding in many ways but can be frustrating as well.

1). Work on your Business, Not in It

This actually sounds pretty ridiculous because you should know how to do the majority of aspects in your business. This means that you need to focus on your future plan and how your business is going to move forward and grow. You are the mastermind of starting your business. You can't stop thinking and growing just because you are now open.

Sometimes it is a lot easier to focus on the day-to-day operations of your business because I am sure you know it best, but you are not helping your business this way. Why do you hire staff if you are just going to let them sit on their backsides and play games on their phones all day! You need to work on your five and ten-year plans and what steps you need to do to get there.

By working your business and not in it, your business will eventually be able to run itself. As an owner, you need to be able to take a vacation or if you need to leave for an emergency and not have to worry about whether the business will run itself or fall apart without you.

You should be able to leave at any given time and your business should sail smooth. It is very gratifying as an owner to not worry about your business when you are not around. It means you have done your job and have led your employees to be efficient and independent thinkers.

2). Have a Plan and Work It

Now that you know what your future goals are going to be for your business, don't forget about the actual business. I know I said don't focus on the day to day operations but it is important to find out how each department in your business is doing. Check on the inventory and assess your business on a regular basis.

Work this into your short-term goals. Don't let the business slip out from under your fingers because you were looking at your long-term goals. At the same though, don't micromanage every little detail. Practice your plan and make it work.

3). Find a Mentor

Find someone you trust, is patient and who has success in a similar business as yours. You need to be able to bounce off ideas or call them with questions. I'm glad my mentor was patient. There would be times when I would call my mentor five or more times a day and even at all hours of the night.

I wouldn't go this far if I was you, but I had a great relationship with mine. After getting scolded for waking her up, she was more than helpful. The trick to finding a good mentor is finding one that wants you to succeed. This makes all the difference in the world.

4). Keep an Eye on the Future

We briefly talked about long-term goals. I always told myself to look for the light at the end of the tunnel during hard days or think about that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This is important as well because there will be frustrating and long days. Remember why you started the business in the first place and to look forward to brighter days. If you have this attitude you will have more light days than darker ones.

A positive attitude is crucial in succeeding in your business. There would be days when I would have 20 clients needing my attention all at once. Remembering why I was in the business and what my goals were helped me get through the day and focus on my future. Thomas Fuller said "All things are difficult before they are easy." That is definitely true.

You may start promoting your business online by creating a website and following search engine optimization tips and techniques, or you can contact me for affordable SEO services at your door step.

5). Honesty and Integrity

I cannot stress enough how important honesty and integrity is in the business world. I know we have all heard word of mouth is the best advertisement. Well, not if it is negative. If you say you are going to deliver your product at a certain day and time, then do it.

Unfortunately, life happens and sometimes you can't make your deadline. That usually isn't a problem if you are honest with your customer. Tell them why you cannot make the deadline. They will appreciate your honesty even though it was not when you initially told them, but they will more than likely return to your business because you treated them with integrity.

They go hand in hand and can go a long way in your business. This doesn't sound like it would be hard to practice being honest but if you've helped someone learn the piano, then you know that paying attention to detail and communicating with your customers takes the same effort, it's just like learning to read music for the piano. Consistent practice is very important.

6). Pay Yourself

For heavens sake, pay yourself! I cannot stress this enough. We all go into business to make money, right? Well, how are you going to make money if you aren't paying yourself? It will become harder and harder to stay positive when you aren't paying yourself. There would be months when I wouldn't pay myself because I always needed something else for the business. You are always going to need something new. Make it wait and pay yourself.

I mentioned earlier about practicing these tips and how it is similar to learning to play an instrument. When you are learning to play an instrument you practice the movements and notes in a slow and methodical manner to make sure you are practicing it correctly.

Practicing all of these leadership tips is very similar. Imagine learning to play the piano and you have to practice every day. Eventually you will be able to play with speed from all of the repetition, just like you will be able to run your business much smoother because you have practiced every day. It is very essential to start promoting your business online by creating a website and following search engine optimization tips and techniques, or contact me for SEO solutions to small businesses at your door step.

Cool Features in Google Analytics for your Website

Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics solution available with almost two million websites (56% market-share) running the software and over 400,000 of the top one million most-visited sites on the Internet. It offers tremendous flexibility as it tracks site visitors, referring sites, search engine traffic and site activity – and it is free. A simple cut-and-paste of the JavaScript snippet before the tag brings an onslaught of data about visitors’ interaction with your website! But how do you get started deciphering this treasure trove of information?

1). The Intelligence Report Explained

The purpose of the Intelligence Report is to alert you to important changes in traffic patterns. It is able to do this by performing statistical analysis on previous data and predict traffic values, compare metrics, and create automatic alerts based on: All Traffic, Visitor Type, City, Region, Country/Territory, Campaign, Keyword, Source, Medium, Referral Path, Landing Page, and Exit Page. These are displayed on the Intelligence Report in green. You are also able to create custom alerts based on: Visits, Visitors, Page views, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, Percent New Visits, Goal Conversion Rate, Goal Value, Per Visit Goal Value, Revenue, and Average Order Quantity. Custom alerts appear on the Intelligence Report color-coded blue. Because this requires a large enough sample size, the Intelligence Report makes most sense for sites with over 100 visitors per day and data going back at least one month. This report can be customized so that the information that is important to you is immediately available to you when you log in. It is also able to send you email notifications of specified alerts.

2). Using Motion Charts

Motion charts animate data allowing you to watch multiple metrics evolve over time using a slider. A motion chart is a viewing option for reports in Google Analytics that is accessed by selecting the tab with the 3 circles at the top right when you are looking at a full report screen.
Animating a report plots five dimensions: x-axis, y-axis, data point size, data point color, and time. You can adjust the speed of the animation, have it plot trails over time, highlight important data points by altering opacity, and change between bubble chart and bar chart. Here is a great video from the Google Analytics Youtube channel giving demonstrating a motion chart:

3). The Benchmarking Report

Essential to every effective business strategy is your ability to accurately track and intelligently evaluate your results. Google Analytics allows you to filter and view a tremendous amount of raw data, but what does this tell you about the success of your site? How do you know how your results compare to your competition? Google gives you the option to share your data anonymously and in return be given access to anonymous data from web sites similar to yours. The Benchmarking Report allows you to compare metrics from your site (no revenue or conversion data) with sites of a similar size within your industry that have also chosen to share their data anonymously.
Comparing information such as visits per day, bounce rates, time on site, and traffic sources can lead to meaningful insights into the effectiveness of your website and Internet marketing efforts.

4). Site Overlay Reporting

The Site Overlay Report allows you to view a page from your website with key metrics for each link displayed in a pop ups as you mouse over them. This gives you a visceral way to understand your visitors’ interaction with a given page. The default displays the number of clicks for each link, but you can easily customize the metrics you would like to view in the “Displaying” drop down menu found at the top of the report. This report is an HTML preview of your site, so you are able to follow the links to other pages on your site and view them through the Site Overlay as well.

5). Campaign Tracking

Google Analytics allows you to uniquely tag landing pages so that you can isolate data into different campaigns. This has many uses. One that I have found helpful is to create a campaign for my email signature. By adding some code to my homepage URL using the URL Builder tool and then using this link in my email signature, I am able to track just the metrics of visitors who get to my site through this link. It is also very useful to tag embedded links in digital media such as PDF files and multimedia presentations. Be careful not to tag links that will be visible to search engine robots – they will be indexed as different links to identical pages making it appear as duplicate content.
Google Analytics is a great tool for evaluating your online marketing efforts and generating reports that allow you to make data-driven decisions about your website. When you understand the metrics that are important to the success of your site, you get reporting that goes beyond raw data and answers questions. Learning how to use the features available in Google Analytics is a crucial first step to seeing what this data is showing you–the actionable insights that it contains. In order to take advantage of these metrics, you want to have clear conversion goals and know what information is helpful. If you do this, Google Analytics has the answers you need to build a successful website.