I researched this list to motivate myself as much as anything else. No matter how long you’ve been blogging there’s always room for improvement. To improve my own blogging skills I’ve looked to outstanding bloggers for inspiration. You’ll find a list at the bottom of this post.

1. Successful bloggers are truthful: you can be confident that a little research won’t turn up gaping holes in their testimony.
2. They passionately adore their subject. This is a must. Your passion must also ignite your reader’s passion. Never try and blog about something you don’t love.
3. They are ambitious. Building a popular blog takes a lot of work and determination. Long hours spent writing and long hours spent learning the craft of blogging.
4. Their writing is conversational and easy-to-read. While most readerships are forgiving of the odd typo, copy that is riddled with spelling mistakes and missing words is just as off-putting as writing that doesn’t speak to the reader. Spend a little time perfecting your writing style. Examine the writing style of bloggers you find most interesting to read. Your byword should be ‘proofread.’
5. They make their blog look nice.There’s no excuse not to do this. Now you can get literally hundreds of nice-looking templates if you use a platform like WordPress. It’s easy and free, so pick one that will appeal to your target niche. Also, don’t forget to dig out an interesting picture or photo to accompany your blog posts. It’s well known that pictures make your posts a lot more attractive to a lot more people.
6. They blog regularly. This is quite possibly the most difficult thing of all to achieve. Blogging is a long-term commitment, and when you have eager readers and sponsors (advertisers) depending on you, you can’t just take a holiday whenever it pleases you.
7. Their posts are of more-or-less uniform quality. Research and care leave traces. There’s a huge difference to the reader between an article that has been lovingly crafted and a few paragraphs hurriedly strung together. This is another difficult habit to nail down. Sometimes you just don’t feel like blogging. I’ve found that it’s better to just leave a gap in your blogs rather than post any old junk. A good trick is to always have three or four draft posts ready to be dusted off and posted if you’re pushed for time, or just plain don’t feel like it.
8. Bloggers are, almost without exception, nice people. Even if they thrive on controversy, they’re not mean or insulting. To take this point a little further, the most popular bloggers are the nicest ones, like Darren Rowse of Problogger, or Maki of DoshDosh.
9. They love to learn. Blogging is a craft that needs to be learned. It takes a great deal of experimentation and reading to get to the point where you’re gaining readers on a daily basis and making your way into people’s RSS readers. To get you started in the right direction, consume this list by Problogger.
10. Successful bloggers network. Having a circle of others who know their subject and who are prepared to give opinions and otherwise help out is an invaluable aid to the blogging process. Their favorite haunts are sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, twitter, FaceBook, FriendFeed and others.
11. They are heavily into social media and social networking for the potential extra exposure. See list in bullet above.
12. The more popular a blog becomes, the more you’ll notice that the blogger is frequently seen in SEO circles. There are even a number of notable bloggers whose opinions on SEO are widely respected. Search engine optimization is essential for your blogging success, and the most important part of optimizing your blog is getting inbound links. You can do this by having great content that others want to link to, and by commenting on other good blogs. Don’t forget linking between your blog posts for legitimate links too. Beyond that, here are some great tips for optimizing your blog from Search Engine Land, and another from Pronet Advertising.
13. Successful bloggers give their readers information that is not just interesting–it has to be useful too. If you can help your readers out in their daily work or lives they’ll be back again and again.
14. For the most part, successful blogs deal with a niche–a specific part of a subject. There are a few examples of blogs that deal with a wide range of subjects though. One I love is Lifehacker.
15. They are prepared to spend literally hours a day to post, network and improve their blog. I would say that two-three hours a day is the minimum you’ll get by on if you want a remarkably successful blog. Just being honest here, for all those who think they can get by on twenty minutes a day!
16. The most successful blogs are those that form a community. Good bloggers are good community leaders, and for many blogs this is key. Over to Guy Kawasaki for more on building a community.
17. Create dialog with other top bloggers. It’s no coincidence that all the top blogs regularly refer to posts on other blogs, and even engage in conversation with other bloggers through their posts. This takes the concept of community building to a higher level and provides readerships with further resources that will be useful to them.

Bloggers I find Outstanding

(In no particular order)

• Darren Rowse of Problogger
• Maki of DoshDosh
• Chiropractic of Planet Chiropractic
• Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz
• Dave Taylor of Ask Dave Taylor
• Brian Clark of Copyblogger
• Michael Gray of Wolf Howl
• Rae Hoffman of SugarRae
• Lyndon Antcliff of Cornwall SEO
• Chris Garrett of ChrisG.com
• Lee Odden of Top Rank Blog
• Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void
• Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz

Ever noticed how sometimes a few straggling birdies get left behind each year when all the others are migrating to better climates? Chances are those that get left behind end up not making it at all.

I hate to be a drama queen (not known for it), but if you are stubborn about not getting involved with twitter, you might just find yourself wishing you’d joined the rest of the flock, especially if you work online.

I know there are a number of online personalities who, like me in the beginning, see twitter as just one more social-media drain on our time, but I’m happy to admit that I was wrong on that score. I’m now a self-confessed twitter-holic.

The twitter world is fast developing into a hub for the various industries. All you need do to ensure permanent access to professional opinions, great company, and breaking news, is open an account and search for all the people in your industry you wish you had access to. You’ll probably be surprised how many are already on twitter. Join as many communities you want, and you’re all set.

Remember though, that if you want to use twitter for family and friends too, you’d be better off opening more than one account so that your professional associates can’t end up reading your family small talk.

Like many others in the SEO industry in particular, I’ve discovered that twitter is wonderful for keeping me in touch with what’s going on. We’re even privy to breaking news as it’s actually breaking, and I love hearing about stuff before anyone else does!

There are a number of twitter clients designed to help you get the most of your micro-blogging experience. Instead of exhausting (and boring) myself, I’m going to send you over to this brilliant list. That should be plenty to keep you going for a while. My favorite (and the only one I use) is Twhirl. It’s easy, non-intrusive, meaning I can work while I’m using it, and it seems to have few bugs. In the bargain, you can log onto multiple accounts and read them all from the same tiny window. Brilliant.

My one pet peeve with Twhirl, however, was that it opened links in IE instead of FireFox, which is my default browser. I tweeted about it a couple of times but no one answered my cries for help. Then yesterday Andy Beard encountered the same problem, so my eyes were glued to his tweets until he came up with an answer, which I knew he would. So it is with full credit going to Andy that I present to you the solution here! I’m so happy that now when I click on a link in a tweet, it comes up in FireFox. I HATE IE!

Just in case any twitter people get to read this, one thing both twitter and Twhirl are lacking is an efficient search mechanism. If you just know you saw a tweet about something important a few days ago, you can’t find it in search (well not reliably). You need to go back through all the tweets, which can be an extreme headache, particularly if you’re pushed for time which we all are.

But I love twitter, and even the attractions of FriendFeed can’t lure me away, well not for now anyway.

So what do I mean by ‘don’t miss the twitter migration?’ It seems to me that at some point they’ll probably have to change the rules for twitter, when it gets too big to manage in its present format. Maybe there will come a time when you can’t just decide to ‘follow’ any person of your choice. For me this is a totally valid reason to get in now before things do change (of course, then again they might not). And then there’s always the fact that some pretty impressive individuals are still willing to follow you back. Once they’ve got upwards of 10,000 followers that’s unlikely to be the case.

Oh, and if you love the little birdie with attitude featured in the twitter logo, you’ll be impressed to know that it’s the work of another twitter-holic, non other than cartoonist Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void.

If you want to start somewhere, follow me on twitter!

In a few weeks I will be traveling again, so coming across this post on securing your laptop for customs inspection
was pretty timely for me. A laptop is precious to anyone who owns one, but for those of us who conduct all our business from one, it becomes more than precious.

I have suffered extreme anxiety at times when my laptop has suffered an ‘incident.’ The last one was when the motherboard failed on my Toshiba Satellite back in September. I now have a Compaq Presario V6000 from the UK. I think there is an HP equivalent (same company now).

Anyway, I was recently thinking about things I can do to lessen the stress of taking my laptop abroad with me, given that so many things could possibly happen. It’s obvious that you want to back up your hard drive onto a thumb drive before you travel.

And while we’re on the subject of traveling with a laptop, remember that it’s not always safe to connect up to just any Wi-Fi connection you come across. NEVER send your private information anywhere while connected to an unfamiliar network. For more dos and dont’s, here’s an essential Wi-Fi list.

Are You Scared of Paying for SEO?

Increasingly I’m seeing companies who are new to the concept of having their website search engine-optimized, or SEOd, balking at the prices we charge. In most cases the problem is that they’re not convinced that SEO is a worthwhile expense for them. My advice to them invariably is, if you don’t want to pay for this service, then simply don’t. Wait it out and see what happens. Like so many others, you can wait and see if SEO is just going to ‘go away.’

In the meantime, all your most aggressive competitors will seek and find competent SEO people to do work for them. Maybe even me.

I no longer have the time to convince anyone that they need my help. They’ll find out for themselves when the time is right.

Don’t Let the SEO Boat Pass You By!

You know what that means? By the time they realize what’s going on, their competitors will have a huge head start on them. That doesn’t mean the situation will be hopeless: nothing in this life is ever hopeless. But it does mean that they are losing business to the competition unless and until they get some decent SEO work done. Yes, the competition is eating their lunch!

How Much Should SEOs Charge?

But still, exactly how much to charge is a matter of confusion for people buying SEO services, and a matter of significant dilemma for those like me who are selling it. We shouldn’t feel guilty for doing something that takes such an enormous amount of our time, and for which we’ve spent countless hours collecting the knowledge to be able to do well. But we are sometimes made to feel guilty, so it’s worth pointing out why we charge what we do.

Let me stress the point because it’s important: Good SEO is extremely time consuming. There are no short cuts. We might spend a couple of days analyzing a your website and your most successful competion before we’re ready to make changes that will count.

But naturally, that’s not to say that all SEO operatives are of equal ability.

Personally, I’ve sub-contracted for quite a few larger companies than my own, whose in-house staff are nowhere near as competent as I am. I frequently find myself explaining basic SEO concepts (while rolling my eyes). Usually they’re benefiting from my knowledge free of charge at this stage.

I’d like to draw some attention to what Rand Fishkin said on SEOmoz last summer regarding the vast discrepancy in the standards of services provided by SEO:

“Generally speaking, however, if it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is (as folks like Internet Advancement continue to prove). SEO is a challenging practice that requires both technical proficiency and a great understanding of marketing on the Internet. The fact that very smart people at very big brands make decisions to pay $500-$1,000 an hour to spend time talking to the best and brightest (and, yes, most notable) from the field of search marketing is one of many great pieces of evidence of the value of SEO.”

It is vital that you check out the SEO company you’re planning to hire. Let them refer you to people they’ve done work for. But once you’ve made your decision, don’t be surprised if they want to charge you up-front. It’s only fair: a website audit, competitive analysis and proposal take a lot of time and contain the author’s intellectual property. They deserve to know that they won’t get ripped off once you have this valuable knowledge in your hands.

In 2006 Rand Fishkin wrote a superb article about pricing an SEO campaign.

For a further point of reference, I’m going to reproduce Rand’s very interesting table:

Service	Low End	Mid Range	High End
Site Review + Consulting	$500	$2,500	$10,000
Hands-On Editing of Pages/Code	$2,000	$10,000	$50,000
Manual Link Building Campaign	$500	$5,000	$20,000
1-Day SEO Training Seminar	$750	$4,000	$12,000
Keyword Research Package	$100	$500	$2,000
Viral Content Development + Mktg	$1,000	$7,500	$20,000
Web Design, Development + Mktg	$5,000	$25,000	$100K+
Monthly Retainer for Ongoing SEO	$2,500	$7,500	$20,000+

Most of the SEOs I know charge in the mid-range, as do I. But people like Rand Fishkin, Michael Martinez, Andy Beal, and Bill Hartzer charge higher prices because they are leaders in the industry. They have a right to charge more for being the best. I picked these out of the thousands of successful and highly-respected SEOs in the industry because these are the ones I personally like best.

Of course it isn’t necessarily so that the most expensive SEO firm will be the best, just as cheap ones are not always awful, but you can depend on the names I’ve just mentioned.

As a parting shot, I’m anticipating some naysayers questioning my choice of Rand Fishkin as a resource for so much information on SEO campaign pricing. Quite simply it’s that no one else has put themselves on the line and come up with resources like he has. Rand can be counted on to tackle subjects related to SEO that everyone else shys away from. He has my utmost respect for that.

Guide to Networking with twitter
There’s no shortage of social networking sites online. In fact, if you’re like me you sort of get a sinking feeling every time you see that another one has been launched. It’s getting overwhelming. And worse, most of them are a total waste of time; a short flash-in-the-pan that fades away to nothing.

I actually thought twitter was going to be like that. Boy was I in for a surprise. I never thought this tiny, simple micro-blogging application would soon be the one I use more than any other. In fact, twitter has a way of growing on you, and now I see it as my most useful networking tool: I can easily choose who I network with. I have even been getting backlinks from twitter, and a small amount of traffic (hey, traffic is never to be sneezed at, especially if it’s targeted).

It would be churlish of me to try and create a twitter resource without making reference to others who have done a far better job than I might have done:

Let’s start with this ‘how to’ guide from New Media Bytes. It tells you all you need to know to get twittering in the shortest amount of time. I should mention that it was intended for journalists, but bloggers and just about anyone else will find it very useful too.

Second up we have Lee Odden over at Top Rank Blog with a pretty comprehensive twitter guide.

This list of SEO twitterers is the work of MarketingPilgrim, and you’re going to love it if you’re at all interested in SEO.

That should be more than enough to get you started on twitter. Now tell me you don’t love it?

Stumbleupon: How to Get Tons of Traffic in One Easy Lesson

Stumbleupon quickly became my all-time favorite once I reinstalled it last year. I say reinstalled because I dabbled with it some years ago when it was new on the web, but couldn’t see a purpose for it at the time. Wrong again. When I began using it this time, I noticed a curious thing just a few days after I installed it: a huge spike in my web traffic. I couldn’t understand it–about a thousand visitors from nowhere. When I investigated, every single one of them had come from Stumbleupon. I was excited about this discovery–so much free traffic at absolutely no cost–it deserved to be investigated.

Oh, just one word of caution here: I actually had to change my hosting provider once I started using Stumbleupon because they closed me down a couple of times saying I had used up all my bandwidth. Don’t burn traffic by not being prepared for it when it comes with plenty of usable bandwidth.

You can be sure this nugget of information piqued my interest: The more active you are on Stumbleupon, the more traffic you get. So you can even control how much traffic you get. But you can’t just go in there and spam members. If you do you run the risk of getting buried, or worse. Be sure you’re doing it right: read these highly informative articles about using Stumbleupon before you even download the Stumbleupon toolbar. This one is for Firefox, but you’ll find the IE version there too.

Here’s an explanation of how to use Stumblupon like a Pro that should put you in a great place to start stumbling right away.

Tamar Weinberg wrote this Stumbleupon How-to guide for 10e2 a year ago, but it’s well worth a trip over to read it.

Andy Wibbels wrote this article about how to find great websites using Stumbleupon, and this is useful information too.

OK, so now you know why you should be using twitter and Stumbleupon. Don’t forget to follow me (I’ll reciprocate) on twitter, and be my friend on Stumbleupon. See you there.

Repeatedly we’re reading predictions that Google is going to be replaced as THE search engine pretty soon. Naturally, the runner-up search engines would have a hand in Google’s demise if they could. But I see it as indicative of Google’s true strength that despite the best efforts of their enemies, Google seems to be riding the waves so far.

Why would Google laugh at all the dire predictions that this behemoth is going to hit the runway? Well from their perspective things have probably never looked better. Let’s take a look at the facts.

• They rule the roost as far as search is concerned, and at the moment no other search engine looks even close to catching up with them (I get around ten times as much traffic from Google as I do from Yahoo or Windows Live and it’s probably a similar story for most websites out there).
• They are expanding in every direction and into different segments of the online market.
• They are the authority as far as achieving a high profile business online is concerned.

But, they’re losing something that’s vital to any business large or small, and that is customer satisfaction, particularly among customers who are more web-savvy. What are Google’s customers (including myself) starting to worry about or question?

• More than once it has been suggested that the Google apparatus is dangerously large and their databases retain information that could be used against us.
• They are beginning to sound arrogant when complaints are leveled against them: it’s as if they know they’re #1 so it doesn’t matter if a few complain.

It would be interesting to hear other points of view on this topic. Please comment.

Just recently we’ve seen a number of new applications appear on the web to help online business, and in particular bloggers.

In my last couple of posts you heard about how important it is to track your web stats, and a few carefully considered suggestions from me. I promised to let you know about a new tracking program I just discovered called GoingUp. Well, the verdict’s in: I LOVE IT! Trust me, you should try this one. I’m using the free version which tells me just about everything I want to know about where my traffic is coming from, how much, and what they look at when they arrive at my blog. Heck, this free program even has heat maps, which as you know can be vital to successful online marketing.

Now the next tool is going to please you if you’ve ever wanted to post some information in PDF form on your blog or website. This absolutely beautiful little gadget from Issuu not only does the job efficiently, it makes your web page look so impressive. You can see it in action here in my copywriting secrets post on my other blog. I’m sure you’ll want to start using Issuu yourself right away, and when you’ve seen for yourself how great it is, please go and vote for it in the SXSW awards.

Many bloggers are getting a bit jaded about commenting because so many blog owners don’t realize that they’re depriving commenters from that all-important link goody by not changing WordPress’s default no-follow arrangement. If you’d like to encourage your visitors to leave comments (you should-they’re the life-blood of a blog), then check out the several so-called link-love plugins offered for WordPress users. I use Lucia’s Linky Love do-follow plugin. Don’t forget to adjust the plugin settings to give link goodness after a certain number of visits–3 seems to be optimal.

Well, I think that should be enough to be going on with for now. Please remember to comment (yes, you’ll get link goodness), and I’d also really appreciate a stumble. Thanks.

If You’re Not Monitoring Traffic, You’re Falling Behind

Staying abreast of the growth of your blog or website online can be easier than you think, and it needn’t cost you anything. I’ve noticed that lately there has been a sharp rise in the number of companies offering free tracking so that you can keep an eye on what’s going on online.

But do be careful: there have been many calls for standards within the web tracking industry, and just because a company charges a great deal for their tracking software, doesn’t mean you’re going to get your money’s worth. It is definitely a case of Buyer Beware. What better way to find out which programs you should be using than seeing what professionals use?

The kind of tracking you’ll want to be doing for your blog or website depends on what you want to achieve. If you’re actively trying to sell something, then your tracking needs to be a great deal more precise than if you just want to increase your readership rates for example.

The basics of tracking are

· How much traffic?

· Where’s it coming from?

· What is it looking for?

· Was it satisfied on your pages?

· Can you identify trends that will allow you to increase a particular flow of traffic?

The more products or services you want to sell, the more complicated your tracking will become, particularly if you’re trying to attract a widely disparate demographic for each product.

I was going to create a separate list for the free and paid tracking applications, but some really good software is free, some not-so-good software is paid, and a lot of these applications offer a free and a paid version, so here goes:

A Rundown of What’s Out There

Google Analytics is a great free web tracking application. You just sign up and get the snippet of code to embed in your web page. You can even program goals for each page of your website with Google, and although there are paid programs with far more programmable options, this is a good start if you are totally new to tracking your stats. Just because it’s free, don’t underestimate Google Analytics: many professional search marketers use it (I admit often in conjunction with other programs). It’s basic, but it’s good and reliable. A common failing with many stats programs is that they go down, develop glitches and generally underperform so that you end up with huge holes in your stats records, which can be disastrous if you’re trying to make strategy decisions based on your stats.

IndexTools was recommended to me by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, so it has to be good. This application is obviously capable of coping with the stats for a huge and extremely busy site like SEOmoz, so it would be more than fine for the rest of us.

FireClick Again, Rand was the source for this one, but he told me that there was a lot of positive buzz about it in the industry. Again, a good sign.

Mint is the program of choice for DoshDosh. She told me she has tried many different applications and always returns to this and Google Analytics.

Awstats is just one of the applications I use, because it comes with my hosting package. You can read all about its advantages and disadvantages on Wikipedia.

CrazyEgg has been around for a while. This application is one of a new generation of stats applications that will show you just where your visitor looked on the page with the aid of a ‘heat map.’ If you study the information carefully it will show you where on your web page you need to put your most important information and your click-thru mechanism. It can help you decide where to put ads and give you ideas for improving page layout. I’ve been using CrazyEgg since 2006.

GoingUp is another great application I’ve just discovered. It’s quite simple, but it’s also simple to use, which is good if you don’t have much experience. There’s a free and a paid version. I’ll let you know more about that once I’ve had a chance to try it out.

Another company, called OneStat, claims to have over 75,000 subscribers. An application with that many followers has to have something going for it, so it’s worth looking at.

Be aware that heat maps are the way to go for anyone who is serious about online success. Many of the biggest and most successful online companies, who incidentally are incredibly secretive about the tools they use for their success, make a point of utilizing heat maps to tweak their web pages for optimum effectiveness. This technology is quite possibly THE most significant advance in tracking technology. While CrazyEgg leads the field in heat map tracking software, ClickDensity is another one to consider, and their software does have some slightly different features.

This is by no means an exhaustive list: it’s meant to get you started, or perhaps to draw your attention to some programs you might not have heard of. I can do another piece about this if enough of you write in with information on the applications you use.

What to do With Your Results

Learning what your visitors are doing can be nothing short of a revelation. However, before you make any drastic changes to your website or blog, be sure that you’ve monitored enough visitors. A couple of thousand should do it. And when you do make changes, introduce them one at a time so that you can then monitor the results before you go on to the next change. ClickDensity in fact has a good article about making changes on your site according to your heat map findings.

Want to know what’s the single most important thing you can do to increase your conversion and grow your business? No, I’m not about to sell you on some insane program. This is vital stuff that you can and should be doing for low-cost or free.

Again and again search marketers tell their clients that they really, really need to track everything they do. Sadly a lot of the time this sage advice falls on deaf ears. If you’re new to the business the whys and wherefores of tracking everything you do online can be missed, to be sure.

But this subject is worth grappling with and I can’t think of a better example than Facebook, which is now worth a whopping $15 billion according to the (very reasonable) calculations of Danny Dover over at SEOmoz.org

Just for the sake of comparison, MySpace changed hands in 2005 for a mere $580 million, yet it has been around for much longer than Facebook, which is only five years old, and the MySpace user base was over 100 million as of 2006.

Now why should Facebook be worth so much more than any of the other social networking sites?

It’s all down to tracking. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tracked everything his members do and stored that information.

So what?

Well just think for a moment how much more effective it would be if you wanted to place an ad on Facebook, and you could choose the age and gender of your target market. Not only that, but you could match your product to their interests (just to mention a few simple parameters of search). Just think how much you could increase your conversion rate by knowing these details and being able to target in this way.

Well, that’s the secret. That’s why advertising on Facebook is likely to be so much more effective than advertising on any of the other social marketing sites.

Now, almost certainly this information is going to have you rushing out to arrange for tracking of your site. Good idea. But before you do it take the time to shop around. If your web hosting doesn’t provide you with a range of comprehensive tracking tools (mine does: the button to HostGator is to your right over there), then go and sign up immediately with Google Analytics. Its free, you can track as many sites as you want, and you can even set some goals for yourself over there.

Stay tuned for a post on the best tracking tools out there in the next day or two.

if your blog is typical it’s nice–clean lines, easy to understand navigation, and useful content. But it doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from the millions of other blogs out there.

If you want to really stand out from the crowd, you have to get some kind of a buzz going. The ways to do this are:

• Write about something outrageous before anyone else does (like Britney shaving her head for example)
• Write something so useful that millions of people will want to bookmark it and link to it
• Offer readers something for free that will keep them coming back for more. Examples of this might be software, such as how much is your blog worth, or an offer to do something for a reader–something they’d find really useful. The sky’s the limit really–the point is you gotta offer them something they really want.

One important thing: a blog is only as important as its comments, so encourage people. Ask them to comment, and give them link love. Make sure they realize that you don’t employ no-follow. So many people are doing that these days and it doesn’t make sense when you’re trying to establish a blog. WordPress actually has a plugin called LinkLove which I employ to help in this direction.Try and get a few good incoming links. I got a good .edu link, and I’ve been trying to find the wonderful little blog post that helped me to do that. when I track it down I’ll pass it on to you.

Try and get people to favorite you on Technorati too. That can really make a difference. Make sure you include your little icons so readers can write you up to Digg, Delicous and all the others.