Marketing with blogs is a very smart decision for any business needing increased online exposure and website traffic.

I am not talking about blogging about your business. I’m talking about using other blogs to market your goods and services. Marketing with blogs is much easier than getting businesses to blog, believe me, I know from experience.

Having a blog as a part of your business website is a very smart idea. Posting info about your business on a regular basis is the best use of a business website blog. However, the blog on your business website domain is only one blog. Limited to only the visitors that know it is there. This means it probably has very little broadcasting power when it comes to getting the word out.

A better use of blogs, one which thousands of bloggers participate in daily, is to market products and services offered by businesses all across the net.

Marketing With Blogs the Easy Way!

Bloggers need revenue. Unfortunately for the average blogger, their income potential from blogging is very limited. Many blogs only have a few hundred visitors a month and only a dozen or so regular readers. It can be very hard to monetize such small amounts of website traffic through the programs available to blogs. Bloggers need additional sources of revenue to make their blogging profitable. For this reason, any serious blogger has buttons or banners promoting ads and sponsorships on their site. This is the real power of blog marketing for businesses needing to increase their website traffic.

There are blogs about every topic under the sun. No matter what you sell or offer online, you can easily find hundreds if not thousands of blogs about your business niche. Google provides a cool blog search tool to help you locate these potential marketing channels.

A quick search with this blog search tool will easily provide you with a list of blogs to investigate further. Visit and save as many as you feel may meet your marketing needs. This would be blogs that directly relate to your businesses niche. These blogs will also need to have at least a few comments on the posts on the blog. No comments generally means there are no regular visitors to the blog unless the blog’s comments have been turned off. You do not want to use any blog that has comments turned off as this generally means the blog has very low traffic of is maintained on an infrequent basis. A real blogger wants comments and the discussion they bring to the table. Comments are the life of a blog.

Once you have your list, email each blogger to see what their rates are and what types of marketing opportunities they offer.

A banner or a button on a blog is a affordable way to put your business website in front of very targeted visitors, however, getting a blog post about your products or services is a much better way to get website visitors now and in the future. Buttons or banners cannot be indexed into search engines like a blog post will. Generally, you can but a blog post or a blog post review from bloggers for a very affordable cost.

The best thing about marketing with blogs is the cost. A small business can effectively market their products and services using blogs for as little as $25.00 to $50.00 a month. For those who don’t have the time or inclination to do the work themselves, I offer a blog marketing service that can very affordably put your business products or services on the pages of blogs that will send you visitors.

Email or call me to learn more about my blog marketing service today.

877.321.5718

Online directories offer many options when submitting your site to their directory. Most common are paid listings, reciprocal listings and free listings.

Paid listings are a waste of money and time. The only directories worth paying for are BOTW and the Yahoo directory. The traffic within the directories are minimal so there is really no need to spend money for a prominent placement within the thousands of directories available online. Directories are really only good for the one way links. Free listings are worth the effort, however, free listings can take many weeks or even months to show up in the directory. To get your listing reviewed and posted within the directory as quickly as possible, you should select to do a reciprocal listing.

With reciprocal listings, the directory will list your submission in a much quicker time, sometimes within hours, after you post a link to the directory from your site. So, I discovered a way to use a reciprocal links page to get those directory listings listed in as quick a time as possible.

When you select to reciprocate the directory link, you must first post the directories link on your website. The directory will immediately check to see if the link in on the selected page you submitted when you submit your listing. Once they find the link to their directory, your listing will be reviewed within a few weeks if not days. Listings without a reciprocal link can take months to be reviewed.

The benefit of this technique is getting the approved listing as fast as possible. The drawback is having all of those directories listed on your reciprocal links page. So, I cheat a little.

Once the directory has visited the website and approved my listing, I wait a couple of weeks and then delete the listing from my reciprocal links page. After they have checked for the reciprocal link on your site, 99% of the directories will never visit your site again. So, you expedite your listing and end up with a one way link from almost every directory you post to without taking months to get the link. Once the directories you have posted to have listed your site you can then go back and remove their listing from your links page. This keeps your links page manageable and in time all of the directories you have linked to will be removed.

Of course, you could always just leave the directory links in your links page, but why? The visitors to your website, if they actually do find your links page, are probably not there to visit online directories. More than likely, they are looking for websites that are very similar to yours.

Use online directories for what they were intended for, a source of one way contextual links.

With many SEO specialist there is a theory that there’ is no such thing as a worthless link. Every link has some value as long as the link comes from a respectable site. This would include directory listing websites. I would be one who believes that there is no such thing as a worthless link. Some links carry a great deal more weight than other links but any link you can get is better than no link at all.

Online directories allow you the opportunity to place a contextual link in a related category with the anchor text of your choosing. The opportunity to place one way contextual links within a targeted category in large numbers seems almost too good to be true. Actually, it is. Directories no longer carry the ranking weight they once did. However, I can tell you from experience, directories can still help to position a website in search results for less competitive search rankings and are very good for local business websites.

Directory listings are always a very good starting point for SEO. Pick four or five title phrases that make sense for your website. These phrases should be four to six words in length and should contain very good targeted keywords for your website. Alternate these four or five phrases in as many directories as you have time to submit to using a different description for each of the four or five title phrases.

I usually submit to 100 to 300 directories for any site I am working on depending on the website topic.

Results will vary. Directory listings are worth the effort. I recommend submitting to 10 to 20 directories every week until you have submitted to several hundred. Unfortunately, it can take many weeks or even many months to get accepted into the directories you submit to so be patient.

I recommend using a reciprocal link when you submit to the directories. Learn how to use reciprocal links for speedy directory listings.

Keywords research is the foundation of any website optimization plan. Without this research, there will be no focus to your rankings. Rankings take a concentrated effort to achieve or they will never materialize. Knowing which words and phrases need to be optimized for is the first step in ranking any website for the visitors we all want.

A quick scan of almost every SEO company online will give you the impression that 10 keywords are all it takes to increase your website traffic. I say this because almost every SEO company on the Internet sells it’s services based on the number of keywords you want optimized. The more keywords you need to rank for, the higher the cost.

Honestly, 10 keywords are not enough for almost every business I work with. I do not base my service rates on the number of keywords your website needs. I rank every business website I work with for as many keywords as makes sense for your business. For some, there are hundreds of keywords being optimized for.

Your business website may very well need to be optimized for many dozens and possibly hundreds of keywords to create a significant increase in your website traffic. SEO is, after all, the process of doing what is needed to increase your website’s traffic. That being said, lets take a walk through a keywords research example.

Keywords Research 101

There are many keywords research tools available online. However, there is only one that tells you what people are searching for in Google, where practically everyone searches for everything. That tool is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and it is available here…

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

There are other keywords tools available but you are optimizing your website for Google so you might as well see what Googlers are looking for since the majority of all website traffic will come from Google.

I will use a local business example for this post.

Let’s see how people looking for plumbers in Los Angeles. Click here to open the screen shot.

By entering los angeles plumber into the search field and hitting the Get keyword ideas button, Google will return a long list of actual searched for and bid on keywords that appear in Google. The top list will show those keywords that most relate to your query, the bottom list will be search phrases that relate to your search. Generally the top list is what you want to focus on, the bottom list could provide you with additional possible search phrases that relate to your business.

This report will show you the average monthly search volume for specific keywords for your website. This is a good gauge of potential traffic numbers but keep in mind, these numbers are only approximate, actual search volumes will change daily and monthly.

In this example, a plumber in Los Angeles will want to target several of these keywords for his business website.

This list only includes 8 keywords but generally local businesses require fewer keywords. Adding additional geographic modifiers such as the state,  “california plumbers” or communities within Los Angeles such as Hollywood, Brentwood or Studio City will help your site’s rankings for plumber searches within those locations.

The -1 means there is not enough search volume to report, however, that does not mean that you would not want to use those keywords. Remember, you want to optimize for as many keywords as make sense for your business.

Hopefully, this has provided you with a basic understanding of keywords research. This is the process I use on every website I work with.Once you have a good long list of keywords that you would like your website to rank for, next comes the linking. Google loves to find targeted, one way, contextual links pointing to your website, it just so happens that my SEO services are centered toward these highly coveted links. So, if you need help with your keywords or your search engine optimization, please contact me today.

Search Engine Optimization Any Small Business Can Afford!

Local Small Business SEO does not have to cost a fortune.

• * No contracts! You pay month to month and can cancel at any time.
• * Local Small Business SEO starts at $300.00 a month!
• * Most jobs take 3 to 4 month to complete! $900.00 to $1,200.00 total.
• * I make myself personally available for those small business owners needing a greater presence online while maintaining a search marketing budget that does not break the bank.

My Very Affordable SEO Services will increase your website rankings and website traffic starting at $300.00 a month. This service consist of complete website review, SEO Consulting, onpage optimization and a very successful linking strategy that optimizes internal linking and points trusted, contextual, editorial links to your website.

Linking is the key to website rankings.

Keywords in your meta tags will not rank your website. High keyword density will not rank your website. On page optimization will not rank your website. So what will? Targeted links pointing to your website is the number one influencing factor in website rankings.

To reach the first page on Google’s search results you need large numbers of contextual links with targeted anchor text pointing to the pages of your website. For the majority of local small business websites, inbound links alone can rank your website. For business websites in larger cities where the search competition is greater, larger numbers of targeted inbound links and additional website content will out rank your competition over time. The number of inbound links needed and the additional website content needed to rank higher in search results will depend on your competitions link and page numbers.

This information will be supplied in my initial survey of your website’s ranking potential.

What Makes My SEO Services Affordable?

I am a one man operation. My office is in my home just south of Nashville Tennessee. I have no employees or other business expenses that can drive up the cost of my services.

I have been a small business owner. I know that most small businesses are operating on a shoestring budget. Many small business owners get paid whatever is left in the bank every month if anything at all. I have been there. I understand the needs of small business. I also understand the the vast majority of small local businesses cannot afford the extreme rates many SEO firms charge.

My SEO Rates

I charge $50.00 an hour and bill a minimum of six hours a month for my services. Most small businesses will need no more than six hours of service a month to achieve the desired results. My rates are not in line with the industry standard. Most professional SEOs charge a minimum of $150.00 an hour and rates as high as $500.00 an hour are not uncommon. I can live quite comfortably on $50.00 an hour and my rates can be afforded by even the smallest businesses operating online.

My SEO services are more affordable because the needs of local small business are much easier to address than a large online operation looking to dominate the Internet. Small Business SEO does not take teams of people working long hours every day to see results. The minimum of six hours a month I devote to your search needs allows for research, reporting, consulting, content creation for link building and all of the communication you require.

So, if you need better placement in search results for your products or services, you need to speak with me. If you need affordable small business SEO, I can guarantee you, I am your man. Call or email me today.

Call Terry Reeves at
615.439.0902 for more information today.

Its funny how fast some trends can change.

I joined Facebook on May, 26 2007. I didn’t know anybody personally on Facebook then. For me then, it was primarily used as a way to network with other IM professionals and since I was a nobody in the Internet Marketing world it was pretty useless for me then. However, things have changed. Now, almost everybody I know personally is on the book. Below is an article I received in my email about the exploding popularity of Facebook. I thought some of my personal FB friends might find it interesting.

Is MySpace Toast? Officially googled by Facebook

If it’s lucky, MySpace is the new Yahoo. If unlucky, and it is unlucky lately, MySpace is AOL. Facebook has supplanted it, and will continue to do so, in much the same way Google ran past Yahoo, and for many of the same reasons.

The suspicion was there from the start of the social networking phenomenon MySpace spearheaded. When it stops being cool, what then? Well, then is now, and MySpace is a strip mall in a sleazy part of town. Traffic is down. Revenues are down. Executives are stepping down.

Back in 2005, when the buzz first came on about MySpace, I took a look and said, simply “meh.” The profiles seemed ugly and pointless. It seemed faddy and a lot of work just for the sake of coolness. In general, the site reminded me of slap bracelets, Beanie Babies, and acid washed jeans mixed with red plastic cups, bathroom walls and booty calls.

And then News Corporation took it over.

But I wasn’t 15, so what did I know? I regarded it like one of those teenage nightclubs creepy old men go to for no good reason at all. I just didn’t have any business there, and that may be just one of the problems leading to MySpace’s eventual peak.

High school student Jacob Ruffman, quoted today by McClatchy, has his own more teenage reasons. “I can go to the Facebook home page and see what’s going on with my friends. Then I flip over to MySpace and I get kicked in the face with colors and flashing penguins.”

Jacob’s at odds with my stepson, who’s 15 now and recently lamented that all his friends, like Jacob, had switched to Facebook. He could really customize his MySpace profile they way he had once customized his abandoned Gaia profile. And his parents and grandparents weren’t on MySpace the way they were on Facebook.

Coincidentally, about the same time he told me that his friends had all switched, a friend my own age had worried he’d not hear important news from home if he wasn’t on Facebook like everybody else. About that time too Facebook had started to overcome MySpace in terms of visitors.

Compete.com shows the shift began late last year. Facebook equaled MySpace around December, and by January had surpassed it, a huge feat considering how MySpace dwarfed Facebook this time last year. Compete says MySpace traffic is down by 5 percent for the year, though it still attracted over 58 million unique US visitors. Facebook on the other hand is up 125 percent for the year, and grabbed over 68 million visitors. On an international level, Comscore says Facebook is outdrawing MySpace by 110 million monthly visitors.

Taking a direct hit from MySpace’s woes is Photobucket, another Fox Interactive (News Corp.) property. MySpace had helped propel Photobucket to holding 45 percent of the online photo sharing market–just half a year ago. In February, Photobucket traffic declined by 24 percent, according to Hitwise, and Flickr is near to supplanting it as well. How quickly things can change.

I guess now, the question is why things turned around completely in just a couple of months. A year ago, Facebook wasn’t anywhere near MySpace, no threat at all. Well, part of it is, I think, MySpace’s time has come and gone. That doesn’t mean it won’t stay a reasonably popular and trafficked site, but, like Yahoo, MySpace will be a distant second at least.

Effectively, MySpace has been googled by Facebook for much of the same reason Google googled Yahoo. Facebook is cleaner, more intuitive, and has better features. Its members are rabid devotees who freak out at the slightest provocations. But they don’t leave. They protest until things change. Facebook has loyalty MySpace never did.

And while Facebook is opening up more and more, and making, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week, “hundreds” of upgrades over the coming weeks, what has absentee landlord MySpace been launching?

Ooh look, an HP cosponsored print button, and a MySpace cobranded credit card.

Pretty yawnable, if you ask me.

Here is the link to the original story.

Many people, both business owners and search marketers find the online encyclopedia to be a nuisance. Frequently Wikipedia will turn up at the top of a tremendous variety of search results, pushing other more relevant websites down the page. This is caused by the very large number of Wikipedia pages that have been created ( content ) and the very large number of regerrences to the Wiki from other websites ( inbound links ), the two things Google likes to see to rank a website high is search results.

The problem with Wikipedia is that anyone can edit the information found on the individual pages. If anyone can add to or remove what is believed to be facts that can be trusted by the nature of the page’s position in a search result, should such a resource really be there in the first place?

Recently a student took advantage of the editability of the Wiki.

An Irish student’s fake quote on the Wikipedia online encyclopaedia has been used in newspaper obituaries around the world, the Irish Times reported on Wednesday.

The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre, who died in March.

Shane Fitzgerald, 22, a final-year student studying sociology and economics at University College Dublin, told the newspaper he placed the quote on the website as an experiment when doing research on globalisation.

He quoted Oscar-winning composer Jarre as saying, “One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life.

“When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear.”

The quote was posted on Wikipedia shortly after Jarre’s death and later appeared in obituaries in major British, Indian and Australian newspapers.

Mr Fitzgerald told the newspaper he picked Wikipedia because it was something a lot of journalists look at and it can be edited by anyone.

While he was wary about the ethical implications of using someone’s death as a social experiment, he had carefully generated the quote so as not to distort or taint Jarre’s life, he said.

Mr Fitzgerald said he was shocked by the result of his experiment.

“I didn’t expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised about,” he said.

He said the hoax remained undiscovered for weeks until he emailed the newspapers that had been deceived to tell them that they had published an inaccurate quote.

The Irish Times said that despite some newspapers removing the quote from their websites or carrying a correction and the fact that it had been dropped by Wikipedia, it remained intact on dozens of blogs, websites and newspapers.

So the next time you think of using a Wikipedia page as a resource for anything you are researching online, just remember, someone may be making a fool of you.

Read the original story here.

This monster, reported to have grown into a EF4 at this point, crossed one of the busiest four lanes into the Boro and tore across another of the most traveled roads in Murfreesboro Tennessee to completely destroy a two story office complex on it’s way to make over one hundred families homeless before it left town. It is reported to have traveled over 23 miles.

The only deaths were a mother and her 9 week old baby who were trying to cover themselves in their house hall way. Their house was completely leveled. Gone! Nothing left standing.

My home is about 10 minutes from this location.

The middle Tennessee area is visited by tornadoes on a regular basis. None have been so well documented as this one.

I have a son that is adopted. He came to live with us at the age of 18 months. He is now almost 7 years old and he is one of the very few people in my life I love more than anything.

At the age of 4, we took Alex to register him for Smart Start which is a program that prepares little boys to play T-ball. As we were filling out the paperwork to get him into the program one of the coaches suggested that Alex not join the Smart Start program. He said Alex needed to signup for T-ball. He was too big to do Smart Start. So, at the age of 4 years old, Alex became the youngest ball player on his team, the Indians.

He took to T-ball like a pro. He is now starting his fifth “season” which includes spring and fall ball. Alex will move up into the “big boy” league this fall and as a player, he is well prepared and more than able to play with boys older than he is. To me, Heaven would be getting to watch Alex play baseball all day long, everyday.

Alex is a power hitter and a very skilled third base player. This season, he is playing on the pitcher’s mound mainly because he is the most experienced player on his new team. I love to hear the other parents when Alex hits the ball. When Alex runs the bases. Alex is good and it makes me very proud and tremendously happy to watch him play.

I see Alex playing baseball in high school. I see Alex playing baseball in college. I dream of seeing Alex playing baseball in the Major leagues. I would love to spend my retirement sitting in the stands watching my son play professional baseball.

I’m sure I am not the first father to share that dream. It would be sweet if it came true. Time will tell.

The dream did come true for one very proud father. Jim Adenhart flew across country to watch his son pitch for the Los Angeles Angels. The 22-year-old pitcher made his season debut with his father in the stands, throwing six scoreless innings against the Oakland Athletics. Just a few short hours later, Nick Adenhart was killed with two other firends by a drunk driver who ran a red light.

The death of that 22 year old young man is tragic.

However, I can’t stop thinking about his father.

“Anything we’re feeling pales in comparison to what the Adenharts are going through. We lost a teammate and a friend. They lost a son. ”

– Angels manager Mike Scioscia

One way link building is vital.

To rank in search engines, especially in Google, you need one way links with key worded anchor text pointing to your website. Yahoo and MSN also requires one way links for rankings but the Big Goog ranks every website based on it’s inbound link profile.

Building links is very important.

Unfortunately, link building is not completely understood by many small business owners. I find most business people do not have the time to market their websites online in natural search. For those who do have the time, I have a very effective one way link building process that will not only send real people to your website but will also send the search engines to your website through targeted key worded anchor text from a trusted, authority domain.

Google loves trusted authority domains.

This one way link building process will benefit any site from local small business to websites needing broad search traffic. Obviously, the more competitive the search results needed, the more links you will need to acquire. Building links using this approach can be very effective but it is time consuming and as with any link building campaign, the amount of work required sometimes seems out of proportion for the results obtained. Fortunately, the authority and trust factor from the links you will obtain are great deal more beneficial than sheer link volume. It is always advisable to add a small number of quality links along with other linking that will add volume to your link profile. This method will provide those quality links your website needs.

The process:

To find the potential linking site you need to do a search in Google. You will be searching for Blogspot blogs that are within your site/businesses niche or topic. Blogspot blogs, or Blogger blogs, number in the millions and cover every imaginable topic on Earth. Blogger is owned by Google, so the Blogspot domain carries authority and trust within Google. Blogspot blogs are regularly monitored for spam or misuse. A few links from a regularly updated Blogger blog can do wonders for your website’s rankings.

To find Blogger blogs for your business niche, you need to do a specific search to give you specific results. Google provides the means to find these Blogger blogs with their blog search site.

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch/advanced_blog_search

This page makes it very easy to locate specific blogs for specific niches. For those who cannot afford a link building campaign, Google’s blog search in invaluable.

To find the blogs we need for our one way link building task, we will need to tell the Google blog search what you are looking for. The screen shot below shows what needed to be entered. In this example, we will search for fly fishing blogs.

These search parameters returned this result. Over 5,400 Blogspot blogs about fly fishing.

Now, you are ready to get to work.

Finding the blogs is the easy part. Now you have to “fish” for what you need to get what you want.

The work:

What you are wanting from these blogs are links. One of the easiest ways to get a link is to ask for it. This method is also one of the quickest ways to not get the link you want. However, if you offer to give in return for your link, your results will improve significantly. So, here is what you need to do.

Visit each blog and look for contact information. Some bloggers on Blogspot don’t provide any so if you can’t find a email address or none is provided, go to the next blog. In this example there are 5,400.

Once you find an email address, email the blogger and ask if they accept contributed blog posts. Most will not but many will. Those that do, request that you receive a link credit, actually two links, in the post you provide. Those that allow contributions will not have a problem with this.

Next, write a blog post that is informational and not a sales pitch for your website. trust me, this can be very hard to do but will be perfected in time. Within that post body, link yo your website with a keyword or phrase that you want to rank for. You can link to your homepage but a topical sub page would be better. In the “resource” area at the bottom of the post, link to your site again using anchor text that is not keyworded. Your site name or your business name or your personal name would be good. Link to the homepage, an “about me” page, a contact page or any page other than the page linked to in the body link.

Submit the blog post and wait for it to be posted. If you write well, you may be asked to contribute again. Say yes!

Rinse and repeat.

This link building method works and can move the rankings of ANY site that implements the process. The benefit of the links will vary based on the competitiveness of the search results desired. I have seen some very competitive search phrases benefit from this link building technique. The best part about this link building method is the links to your website will actually be seen by real people who have the opportunity to visit your website from the post.

One thing to be aware of, some bloggers will request a payment for the post you provide. I would not pay for any post until I exhausted the freebie posts possibilities first. If you do pay for a post, make sure it is a one time payment. No annual payments or monthly or any of the other crazy request they may make. Also, never pay more than you think the post is worth. Personally, I think blog posts like this are worth $25.00 to $50.00 a post. If they ask for more, refuse them. Many will come around to your offer in time.

One final recommendation. Track all of the blogs you contact in a spread sheet with notes and dates. A little link building FYI.

For those who simply do not have the time to implement this one way link building campaign, you can hire me and I will build the links for you using this method, when appropriate, along with other successful link building methods. All methods are “white hat”, above board, ethical and all that.

Just send me an email or give me a call to learn more today.