Blogging 201: Make Your Blog a Lead Generation Machine with Rich Brooks #ftw2010
Social Media FTW is an annual conference held in Portland, Maine. Follow the conversation on Twitter at #ftw2010.
What you need:
- WordPress (or another Content Management System)
- Own your own domain name not a WordPress, TypePad, or Blogger subdomain.
- Be committed to the process
Lead Generation: What does a lead mean to you?
Holistic Web Marketing
- Attraction – SEO, Blogging, Business cards, etc.
- Retention – How you keeping communication open with customers, Email marketing, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
- Conversion – Move them through your sales funnel, Calls to action
- Measurement – Google Analytics
Attraction
- Search Engine Optimization – do a keyword analysis for your blog and find out what your audience is searching for
- Use keywords in your blog title/page title, headers, links, categories and tags
- Every blogpost is a new web page and every web page is another opportunity to rank well at the search engines
- Use the most important keywords front loaded in your blog titles
- Recent post titles (typically) show up on every other blogpost
- All-One-SEO: best tool for SEO on a blog
- Sharing Tools
- ReTweet for Twitter
- Like button for Facebook
- Share this for most other networks
- RSS: Real Simple Syndication
- Cross pollination
- Commenting on other blogs
- Guest blogging
- How can you find bloggers in your niche?
- Alltop
- Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc.
- Twitter (Twellow.com, TweetFind.com, WeFollow.com)
- MyBlogGuest
Retention
- Leverage RSS: make sure it’s near the top of the page; use a feed like FeedBurner to syndicate blogposts
- Engage commenters; the more you engage with them, the more you’ll come back and continue to comment
- Disquis
Conversion (Tactics)
- Link to a product/ecommerce page or your contact page or your call to action
- Affiliate programs
Measurement: Google Analytics
Advanced Blogging Tools
- Google Alerts
- RSS
- NetworkedBlogs
- Disquis
- My Blog Guest
- Ping.fm