In Niche Marketing Quantity Matters Also

Everyone is banging on about the quality of blog posts.

And I'll confess, I have done my fair bit of this also.

There really is no doubt that the quality of your website content, be it blog post or website content is crucial.

That really goes without saying.

But there is quantity as well and a lot of people are leaving this one out

Quantity matters
Quantity matters to your search engine optimization
Quantity matters to retaining return visitors
Quantity matters to the reach of your website
Quantity matters to the amount of revenue you can make from your site

I'll give you an example.
If you think about it, the blogs that tend to do extremely well in the search engines post several times a day. Some of the posts are rather dull. But hey! it's useful content to someone.

Again think about this.
How often do you go back to a blog that hasn't had a new blog post in a couple of weeks? For me the answer is 'Not very often!'
Life is too short and a lot of us are impatient to get our next tip or bit of news.
So we tend to gravitate towards sites or blogs that have something new every time we visit

And another thought.

More posts = More keywords

The more posts or content you have, the more keywords and keyword phrases you can compete for in the search engines.
Lets take the extreme example of wikipedia. There is a wiki page for virtually every search term worth ranking for.
I am not saying make your blog or website the new wikipedia.
But I am saying with frequently updated content and frequent posting, you can cover a lot of search terms related to your niche

Now do not misunderstand the thrust of this post.

Quality does matter and the aim should be to write posts that have genuine, valuable information.

But quantity is something that can help get a lot of momentum for your website or blog pretty quickly

My Big Adsense Awakening

Adsense and making a significant income online are a pipe dream. At least that's what I thought when I first started on this internet marketing or niche marketing business path

Like a lot of my niche marketing colleagues, it was a good adsense day when I made $2 in that day

'WOW'
Not really the fast track to financial freedom :(

And like a lot of people out there still seem to believe, if what we read in the forums is anywhere near the truth, I thought the people who make a significant income with adsense must belong to some secret club where they share the real secrets about making money with adsense

And you may snigger but the concept of adsense secrets has been used as a marketing gimmick [successful] by many a marketer

I knew I didn't have a chance of getting into any inner circle of adsense insiders, if they did exist

So I focussed on what I know and urge you if you are reading this to do the same

I focussed on content and traffic. I really knuckled down and worked hard on my sites.

Be it search engine optimization, social networking, forum participation... I was there.

I worked hard.... very hard

And you know I slowly noticed an increase in my adsense revenue.

At first it was sporadic good days, and then things evolved into sporadic bad days. I hope you can tell the difference

And so I had my huge adsense awakening. The information you need to make a success of this is all there. The tools you need to make adsense work for you, most of you probably already have

All you need to do is focus on your content, learn how to generate traffic for the long term. Work hard and adsense will pay you

What To Do With Long Blog Posts

So what does one do when the idea you are trying to get across just will not fit into 450 words.

There are a few options

Break it up

You can break up your posts into a series. You'll notice on this blog there are a few posts that are actually one topic broken into a few posts. If you do this you have two options in formatting a title for each post

Numerical. This is when all the posts in the series have the same title but are numbered i.e. part 1, part 2, etc. I have done this on niche traffic sale [this blog] and some of my other blogs. But there is a better way.

Unique titles. This method is excellent for optimizing for a bunch of long tail keywords. Each blog post in the series should have a title that is unique to it and competes for a different long tail keyword phrase from other posts in the series. Because you are going after long tail keyword phrases, there is less competition and the chances of each post doing well and therefore getting search engine traffic, is much higher

Page Layout
If you really must include all that content in one post then you should consider laying out the post so it is easy to read. You want you readers to be able to scan your article easily, get the major points you are trying to make, skip from one concept to another without working too hard

To achieve this, you could use white space, bullets and subheadings.

Subheadings are particularly important again because of the all important SEO. Subheadings have emphasis on them. They are areas where the search engine spiders expect your important themes to be. So include your keywords in your subheadings if this does not ruin the reading experience of your blog's visitors

Ideal Length Of A Blog Post

So what is the ideal length of a blog post?
I see this question asked time and again in the forums.

The simple answer is ideally 250 to 450 words.

...Because...

Readership

Today's Internet user has so many options that he or she is impatient to get on to the next thing. The next website, or blog. Check email. Hang out on Facebook. Or is it twitter? So when they land on your blog and there is a lengthy post on some topic or the other, they move on.

Focus

There really is nothing more irritating than starting to read a blog post which is supposed to be about a certain topic and then find the post goes around the houses instead of just getting to the point. Or worse still, goes off topic completely.

Knowing that you have only 250 to 450 words in which to get your point across helps you focus your content. package your points in a clear succinct and effective form. This gets rid of all the rambling and makes each and every sentence valuable to your reader. Meaning... You get there attention

Search engine optimization

Now this one is debatable but a lot of SEO 'experts' advice 300 to 450 words is ideal for SEO. Certainly we know that low content is not ideal for SEO. It makes sense that with a few words on a page there will be issues like word count to code ratio. And also how often can you include your keywords in a 50 word post?

But sometimes you really cannot cover a topic in a blog post that is 450 words long. Especially if you want to write a pillar article that really exhaustively goes over all aspects of a topic.

So what do you do then?

We'll cover this in a future post. :)

How To Post Useful Blog Comments And Get Them Accepted

Posting comments on blogs can help generate traffic to your website or blog directly or indirectly if done properly.

By direct traffic I mean a reader of your comment clicks on your link and goes to your website or blog

By indirect traffic we are talking about the SEO benefit of the backlinks to your site or blog in your blog comment if the link is 'do follow'.

We all know this. It's blog commenting 101

But to have any effect, you need for the owner of the blog which you are commenting on to accept and publish your comment.

Gone are the days when comments were posted automatically.

Now there are antispam plug ins, e.g. askimet, and heavy comment moderation going on so you have to be savvy about this

So, to maximize your comments chances of being posted' keep the following in mind each time you post a blog comment

Relevance

Your comment must be relevant to the content of the post your are commenting on. It should directly address something in the post that the author has opened the door to.

Useful

Some bloggers like their egos massaged a little and those bloggers will allow a lot of 'great post on commenting' type comments. But these bloggers are few and far between.

The majority of us want comments that add to the content of our post. It could be an extra tip, a genuine question or even disagreement with the post content.

In allowing our visitors to make comments on our blogs, our main aim is to generate more content on our pages. Relevant useful content.

Links

Most comments boxes allow you to enter a user name, email address and URL.

The URL is automatically linked to the user name if the comment is accepted.

A lot of bloggers get irritated when in the body of the comment another link is dropped. Some will automatically reject your comment just on that bases.

I am not saying don't do it. But if you are thinking about dropping another link in your comment's content, look at the other comments already published on the blog to see if any contains additional links

User name

Because of the automatic association of username and URL, a lot of us like to use our keywords
as our user name.

Some blogs actually encourage this and usually have a little icon saying keyword luv.

However some blogs use plug ins to filter out 'scam' comments. And some of these plugins will reject any user names that contain certain keywords. So, again, look at the previous comments accepted in the blog to see if this may apply

Read the post

In our rush to get as many backlinks as possible, we sometimes do not read the blog post before commenting.

I recently put a post on this blog on generating sitemaps. The post went through everything from generating the sitemap to submitting it to Google's webmaster tools.

Someone tried to post a comment asking how they could generate a site map and submit it to Google. Oh and he or she had his URL included twice in his comment. Hey?

Needless to say that comment was rejected.

When posting, show evidence in your comment that you have actually taken the time to read the article you are commenting on

Digg Now Using No Follow Selectively

One of the major advantages of Digg was the do follow attribute on links there. You submit your story, you get a back link

Just read on the digg blog that digg has decided to put the no follow attribute on some of the links on the site

These include

• Links in comment
• Submit that do not meet a certain threshold in popularity
• Links in user profiles

Obviously the question now is, what are they using as a measure of popularity?

• Is it the number of diggs a story gets
• Or the number of times the link is clicked on

Still a little unclear but I'll let you know if there is any further news