VIA (Dutch)

This is a guest post by Peter Minkjan (@peterminkjan on Twitter), founder of the Dutch Facebook marketing blog FacebookPro.nl.

#1 Pick your niche
First of all, if you start your own blog, pick your niche. Where do want to focus on and how can you help others with your articles?  Way to many blogs are having a too broad range of subjects they want to cover. Online marketing is too broad, so is social media. Try to narrow it down to one specific topic or one specific branch. Otherwise you’ll end up as bad copy of Mashable or TechCrunch. Picking a niche is quite simple, focus on that certain topic which you really like, where you’re knowledgeable on and write about the info that actually helps people who aren’t. OK, maybe it’s not THAT simple for all of us, but it’s crucial to start with.

#2 Read a lot about your niche
If you’ve picked your niche it’s important to know everything, or at least more than 90% of your audience, about your topic and… you must be constantly up to date.  To accomplish that I use Google Reader, in which I’ve collected the RSS feeds of more than 200 blogs, and Twitter where I follow a lot  of people in my field of expertise. Every morning I start with reading the headlines in Google Reader and check out my Twitter timeline. Within less than an hour I’m totally up to date and know what’s going on. I read the most interesting articles and share those on Twitter. After a while you’’ll notice that a lot of blogs just duplicate the major blogs and a lot of Tweeps just retweet those messages. Go beyond that clutter! It takes some time and effort but it’s worth it.

#3 Go for quality, not quantity
Remember: you’re running a blog, not a newssite. Nobody expects you to publish multiple times per day or week new stories so why should you? Unless you don’t have a job you probably don’t even have the time to write that amount of articles. If you go for quantity you’re probably end up with a lot of short posts with a few lines of text, infographics grabbed from popular blogs, embedded video’s and translated posts from other blogs. And even then you will never out speed websites with full time editors. What’s the added value of that strategy? Zero to none. Instead, focus on quality; write posts which can be found nowhere else on the web. And yes, that often costs more time and it’s hard work but you’ll end up with articles which people actually read and isn’t that you’re goal with writing your blog posts or having a blog in the first place? Come up with something good that adds value for your readers or don’t even think of writing it.

#4 Blog because it’s fun
If you don’t agree with this headline don’t start a blog. Do it because you think it’s fun, you like it and nothing else. That’s the reason why you should start with thinking about your niche. Pick a niche which you actually like. Don’t do it because you think it’s looks cool to say you’re a blogger or that you will become rich with it. That might be the end result but it’s not an instant money maker. I’m only writing articles when I feel like it (luckily for me, that’s quite often) otherwise I just do other stuff. Life is too short to do boring stuff that isn’t necessary.

#5 Know SEO
The most important traffic driver to your blog will probably be Google. And unless you’re willing to pay for that traffic through AdWords you need to rely on organic traffic. To grow that traffic source you don’t have to be a SEO guru but you have to know the importance of the right keywords and backlinks for example. Learn at least the basics and follow some good blogs like SEOMoz to know the new developments in that field. One SEO tip from my side: write a guest post (like this one) regularly to gain backlinks and to enlarge your audience.

#6 Don’t care about the stupid critics
If you do like your topic (rule #1) and do thorough research on your (rule #2 & #3) you probably know what you’re writing about. If you combine that with rule #5 you will generate a fair amount of traffic to your blog. Some of those visitors will comment on your posts. The majority of these comments are constructive, formulated in a neat way and will help you to improve your future posts. But some comments are just from people who just want to be negative about you and your blog. They often respond without leaving their real names, make the comment off topic and below the belt and even go that far to investigate all your previous blogs and work to find any inconsistency to point at. Maybe even you will find some of those comments underneath this post. My advice: f#@ck them, accept that not everybody will like what you write and put your energy in something else. Blogging is fun, remember.

#7 Conversations matter
Actually, this reason doesn’t make any sense to me but Matthijs asked me to include the word conversation(s) so I do. After all, this blog is about conversation management, so hey, let me stick to the format. And by the way: I don’t care if you like it or not (see reason # 6)/.

These are my rules, what are yours?
I don’t claim that these are the only things you have to do to be success full at blogging, I just know they work really good for me. Let me know if you what you’re rules are and we might even have a conversation about it.

Content marketing can come in many different forms and flavours: press releases, blog posts, Slideshare presentations or even social media messages such as tweets, Facebook or LinkedIn posts. Video, however, is the most powerful medium, as it appeals to a combination of human senses: motion, sight and sound.

When perceived as being valuable, your content will be shared and generate additional visibility outside your own website. Make sure your video is embeddable by other websites. Therefore, video content marketing is a very engaging way to effectively spread your message.

Browse the slides of the Explania presentation at Internet World 2011:

So if you want to get found online and if you want to optimize your content and search marketing strategy for SEO, then you should definitely be aware that there is more to organic search than meets the “Google” eye. Here are some main attributes to pay attention to.

First of all search is social. Google recently expanded its social search capabilities because it couldn’t prevent people from using social sites and consuming/producing content outside the normal web pages. Its recent update integrated the search results onto the first page of organic search results. In this way even more people will discover social sites when they search for content on Google. As a result, companies need to broaden their online footprint to produce content across social media sites that can now be indexed.

Secondly, content is king and this also means it has to reach certain quality standards. Your content can only be treated like a king if it is relevant and valuable for your target group. Rewrite or remove old and non-relevant content from your website and be aware of duplicate content. Google is measuring relevancy to give a quality score to content and penalizes content with low quality. Pay attention to keywords and keyword phrases but keep in mind that your content is made for humans, not for search engines.

Last but not least, make your content shareable. If you want to reach your target audience and ecosystems online, make sure your content can travel to all these places far away from your homepage. Also the more people that share your content the more authority it will get and the higher you will score in the rankings and search results.

You can find the entire blog post and more attributes for organic search here

Looking for convertible conversations

It would be good to take greater account of consumers’ conversations in the SEO strategy. First of all, they represent a more reliable source of information for a consumer. And secondly they determine the real positioning of your brand. Thirdly, they are more numerous than the messages that brands can disseminate into the world themselves. In other words: an SEO strategy is highly dependent on your conversation strategy. The main question is: ‘what information would you like people to find?’ Evidently the information must be in line with your organisation’s values, but you should also be sure that it can have a strongly converting effect. We know for hotels that the scores on ‘trip advisor’ are important for convincing customers. Do you know what information has that same effect for your company? The answers to these questions determine what should be the basis for your SEO strategy.

4 tips to apply starting today

1. Stimulate consumers to share their experiences.

A simple method is to send an e-mail to a customer shortly after his purchase. In the mail you will provide a link to a site where they can share their opinion. If you are a hotel, you ask the customers to immediately add their evaluation to trip advisor rather than to place it on some secret, untraceable location.

2. Communicate your own #tag wherever you can.

An example: the Belgian national broadcasting company regularly communicates the ‘hash tag’ of a programme when it’s being announced. Recently the programme Basta scored really well that way. Furthermore, the story of the Mobistar employee very quickly travelled from Flanders to the Netherlands via the digital highway. #Basta was the leitmotiv in all that communication.

3. Combine internal and external conversations.

In my previous article (http://www.frankwatching.com/archive/2011/02/05/heb-jij-een-conversatiewaardig-bedrijf/) I already wrote about the combinations of internal and external conversations. The content of both streams is very complementary. Having a proper blog, for example, could help for you to be found more quickly during Google searches.

4. Be smart when choosing your words.

Google helps us to get an overview of the most searched words. Such overviews help to adapt your own vocabulary to the search words used by the consumer. If you use the same terminology in on-line conversations, the chance of being found quickly increases.

Should you have any other ideas about combining conversations and SEO, feel free to share them with me!