January 2011 - Bludelta

How to Measure Your Social Media Success

Social media marketing really is quite a commitment. After all, it means juggling various social media accounts, researching and writing blogs and you may be asking yourself – am I really getting anywhere? Well there are a number of metrics that you can take each month to understand how far your reach is and whether readers are engaging with you. In this post, I’m going to share with you how to measure whether your blog is performing effectively and growing in readership and the engagement of your readers.

Each month, consider that you should be taking these measurements:

How many visitors have been to your site this month? Is the traffic increasing?
How many comments are you gaining per post and is this increasing?
Are you gaining links to your posts and tracking them?

If you find that all your numbers are going up each month, then you could guess quite correctly that your content is not only engaging your readers, but you are gaining some great back links from others sharing and promoting your content for you.

Through practice and experience, it has become increasingly clearer that to really be successful at promoting a blog, it is important to spend just as much time away from it as on it. At least half of your blog time should be spent on the blogs of others, reading and making comments. By becoming part of the blogging community in your niche, you will find that people will be helpful and will help promote your blog, and will visit it to make comments.

So what else is there that you should be measuring?

Keep an eye on your page rank. With an increase here you will find that your search engine ranking will improve and so will your traffic count. Try Googling your keywords and the name of your blog for starters, and then use SEO tools to track how you are performing.

If you have other ways that you use to measure your success, then please let us know by leaving a comment.

January 31, 2011/by admin

6 Best Social Networking Tools

A couple of months ago, Google announced that posts on Facebook and Twitter now contribute to search engine ranking positions. This means that is now more important than ever for websites to reach out over the social media sites in their online marketing efforts. Fortunately, there are several tools online that will help companies discover how far they reach and will even report back on what the competition is up to.

Addictomatic – this nifty tool can be used in various ways. Check how your site is performing by typing in the name of your site or your product. Alternatively, you can check the competition by doing this for them. Results will be from blogs, social networks and also from the top search engines. You can gauge penetration levels and what is being displayed to your customers.

Social Mention – the degree of positive or negative mention can be gauged by this speedy tool. For example, who is mentioning you and in what context. Check out the competition whilst you are there too. Remember that the competition can be your best friend with internet marketing. Watch their advertising and promotion work to find out what works with your market and what doesn’t. If you see something used continually, you are onto a winner.

How Sociable? – upgrade to the expert Pro version to compare your site against your competitors. Alternatively, you can just discover how visible your site or business is across the social airwaves.

Hootsuite – this has to be up there as one of the most popular social networking tools. You can schedule your status updates and tweets for several accounts. All mentions and responses will be displayed and it even has a URL shortener to boot.

TwitterFeed – automatic posting on Twitter and other sites that use the Laconia micro-blogging style software can gain you free back links and exposure. Try sites such as identi.ca and hello.tx for improved SEO ranking.

Using these tools will really save you so much time and will give you access to information that would not otherwise be available. It’s almost like having your own full time employee on the case. You can seek out opportunities, keep an eye on what the competition is doing and you can check out the reputation and coverage of your business.

January 13, 2011/by admin

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Social Media Optimisation

How to Promote Your Blog for Increased Readership

With all the time and effort that it takes to research and write blog posts on a regular basis, it is critical to ensure that you are promoting your blog to gain new readers and links. Read on for our top tips on how to promote your blog for new and increased readership:

Make it easy to subscribe. Add a button for RSS Subscription and/or make it clear how to sign up for email subscription. Once you’ve got readers coming to your site, you want to capture your audience.
Consistent posting. Not only will Google keep coming back to your site to crawl it, your readers will too. For maximum results, try 5 days a week posting with regular promotion. You should be spending just as much time promoting your site as you are writing it.
Share/promotion. Write some really useful and unique content i.e. ‘The Ultimate Guide to xxxxx’ and then distribute it around the web. Use your LinkedIn groups, Digg, other social bookmarking sites. The more useful the content, the more likely it is that others will actually share it for you.
Blog Community. Spend just as much time as you do on your own blog, off your blog. Visit the sites of other blogs in your niche and spend time reading and commenting. The owners will return the favour and will visit you, and you will be exposed to your target market.
NetworkedBlogs. Use this tool on Facebook to post any new content automatically to your Facebook Page.
TwitterFeed. This is another automatic poster. You can set it up for Facebook, Twitter and other similar micro-blogging sites. However, give your posts the human touch for best results.
Twitter. If your content is really link-worthy, then you are bound to get some re-tweets.
Blog sites. Sites such as BizSugar and other niche portals, are a great way to bring in new readership.
Guest blog. Traffic and new subscribers can result from writing free content for other popular blogs in your niche. Make a list of 10 popular sites and request to write for them.

What are some of the ways that you promote your blog?

January 11, 2011/by admin

Search Engine Optimisation

7 Tips For an SEO Makeover on an Established Site

With so much effort going into link building externally, it is easy to forget the power that can come from linking internally on a site. This can especially help an older more established site that has not had an SEO makeover done on it.

If you have pages on your site that already have page rank, then you could be missing out on some great on-topic links that can push your site up the ranks. Search engine ranking has a lot to do with website structure and internal links. Think about that small site that you know does not have many external links, but it still continues to perform well in the search engine results. It is most likely set up properly, themed and structured for a set of keywords.

Here are some tips for you to give an SEO make-over to an established site.

1. Limit outbound links (links going out from your page) to just 10 per page.

2. Anchor text should be focused, make sure it is optimised by using your main keyword/phrase on the page.

3. Optimise titles, descriptions and the URLs with your keywords. Ensure that you use H1 and H2 tags too.

4. Don’t optimise the page for more than 3 keywords otherwise you will lose some of the power.

5. Resize your images to reduce load time. Google considers how long loading time is when it is working out ranking. You may want to check your coding too to cut out anything unnecessary

6. If you don’t already have a blog on your site, then add one and watch how it can elevate your ascension up the search engines.

7. Rename the image files to match your optimisation, use the image alt-tags too.

With just a few tweaks, your website can start ascending the ranks. Don’t forget that our business is SEO, if you need a helping hand, then we can certainly help you out.

January 2, 2011/by admin

How can we help you?