Blogging Archives

Social Equity: The Benefits of a BizBlog

August 23, 2013/by Corey Padveen

There can be some notable benefits of a BizBlog for your company, and you should certainly be taking advantage of them.

First, what is a BizBlog? If you guessed the most obvious choice and figured it stands for business blog, you are right. And there can be substantial benefits of a BizBlog for your company.

There are three main areas in which a BizBlog can add considerable value to your brand. First, there are substantial SEO benefits to a blog (and a BizBlog in particular). Second, unlike the majority of social networks, a BizBlog allows you to tout your company’s skills much more aggressively and, in essence, sell your readers on why your brand is the best choice for the job. Lastly, a BizBlog offers you the opportunity to not only showcase your company’s success, but your expertise more so than other social networks.

SEO Benefits of a BizBlog

SEO is still an important (and can be a very expensive) practice. Every business is (or, at least, should be) engaging in it in some way. A blog is an excellent way to boost your SEO success, and a BizBlog adds a few additional SEO benefits on top of the already excellent help a blog provides when it comes to improving your search rankings.

With a BizBlog, you can create links to other articles or pages on your site and boost their effectiveness with anchor text. If you are writing about the best social media marketing company in the business, you can link that to your homepage and help your search rankings. (See what we did there!) Sure, one little link isn’t going to skyrocket your website to the top of the rankings, but it certainly helps both in the short and long runs.

Self-Promotion

Self-promotion is one of those taboo issues that almost any social or digital marketer will tell you to stay away from on social media. Put simply, it is in bad taste. People are not sharing content on social networks to be sold a product.

On your BizBlog, however, people are landing on your content with the expressed intent of finding out more about you and what you do. At that point, it is acceptable to talk about why you are the better choice and why you should be chosen over your competitors to do a job. And that brings us to our third point.

Showcase Your Expertise

In telling your readers why you are the best choice for a job, you might want to highlight what makes you stand out.

A BizBlog is a great place to showcase how much you know, where you brand outshines others and, as with the point above, ultimately sell your readers on picking you for a job. People always want to work with the best, and a BizBlog is a great place to show them why you are that choice.

These three features are very powerful, and add a considerable amount of value to your brand. It is not hard to see how a BizBlog generates Social Equity for your business.

Does your company have a corporate blog? Tell us where we can find it in the comments below or on Twitter!

4 of the Best Content Curation Tools

August 21, 2013/by Corey Padveen

What are some of the best content curation tools that exist for bloggers and marketers?

If you’ve ever written a blog or managed social networks, you know how difficult it can be to consistently produce great, original content for your readers and fans. When publishing content on a regular basis, one of the easiest ways to facilitate the activity is to use one of the best content curation tools on the market.

Below are 4 of the best content curation tools that exist on the web. Take a look at them and see how they can help you find great content to review and share with your readers and fans on social media.

Curata

This enterprise-level content curation software scours the web for topic-relevant content. Though it is not for everyone – it boasts a starting price of roughly $1,000 – it does sift through a tremendous amount of content and produces only the most viable and high quality content to share to your social networks and blog.

There is also an option of hosting a microsite for those without a standalone blog.

Aggregage

Community building is one of the most difficult tasks faced by any social or marketing manager. To build a community around your content requires a lot of time and a serious commitment.

Luckily, Aggregage is designed to build communities around relevant content by sourcing it from around the web. You choose your niche, and Aggregage will find blogs, whitepapers, articles and other bits of content to share to your audience.

BagTheWeb

Have you ever found yourself on a website or blog with great content but no way of sharing it with your communities? BagTheWeb is designed to help you find great content, place it into your topic “bags” and share those “bags” with communities of interested readers.

The tool makes it very easy to collect content from anywhere and share it everywhere.

Eqentia

Though there are plans for individual users with Eqentia, this content curation and engagement platform is designed for serious enterprise users.

The enterprise version of the software allows users to mine for content, curate tens of thousands of items, edit the filters in real-time that bring the content to your portal, re-publish content, brand your curated content, integrate social media accounts and, lastly, monitor analytics to see how your content is being perceived by your audience.

All in all, Eqentia is designed for users that are very serious about publishing topic-specific content.

Though these are some great content curation tools, they are not the only ones. There are several other tools out there – free and paid – that can help you with your publishing efforts.

How do you source great content to share? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

4 SEO Tips for Blogging Beginners

August 13, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Blogging can be fun and help drive traffic to your site, but there are a few crucial SEO tips for blogging beginners.

Your blog will be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal when it comes to driving an audience to your site. However, in order to fully capitalize on the great benefits associated with blogging, there are a few SEO tips for blogging beginners that should be well understood before you get started.

Keywords Matter…but in the Right Places

Keyword density has become less relevant with all the more recent changes to Google’s algorithm. Filling your article with keywords will not only look bad, but Google will penalize your post (and possibly your site) for this black hat SEO technique. That said, keywords are still quite important in certain areas.

On your blog, get a keyword in your post title, your meta description and alt tags (in photos). Though packing your article with keywords is no longer an effective technique, knowing where your keywords matter still is.

Always Use Images

A picture is worth a thousand words – and in the case of SEO, a picture can be worth a thousand more visits.

With the proper alt tags (with a keyword) in your photos, you stand to increase the chances of having your blog found by people searching images with your designated keyword. Not only do images make your post look better, there are also some crucial SEO benefits as well, so don’t overlook their importance.

Write for Your Audience

Are you writing for engineers with a highly technical understanding of your subject matter, or do-it-yourselfers with little to no idea how to screw in a lightbulb let alone rewire an electrical system? It is important to identify your target audience and write specifically for them.

Sure, this might mean that the average individual will not relate to your content, but if you are trying to find customers that fall into certain demographics, you need to appeal to them directly. Take a look here for a few more of these blog writing tips.

Do Some Research

You might have a baking blog and want to optimize for the term ‘cake’. Bad news, your post will likely never hit the top spot on Google (not in the foreseeable future, anyway). To get the real benefits of keyword optimization, you are going to need to do a little bit of research.

Find out what your competitors are ranking well for and where there is room for potential. You will want to mix it up, optimizing for keywords that have little competition and occasionally jumping into the mix with the more competitive keywords.

Also, focus on long-tail keywords (‘vanilla frosted layered cake’ instead of ‘cake’). There may not be as many monthly searches for your long-tail keywords, but when people do search for them, you know they will be finding you.

These are just a few of the more important SEO tips for blogging beginners. There is plenty more to learn about SEO along the way, but these should help get you started on the road to blogging success.

What other good SEO tips can you think when it comes to blogging? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

What Makes Good SEO Copywriting? [INFOGRAPHIC]

August 5, 2013/by Corey Padveen

With so many changes to Google, it can be hard to tell what makes good SEO copywriting.

There was a time when keyword density was the key to SEO copywriting success. Then came the day of the backlink (still in existence).

With so many ongoing changes to Google’s much feared and praised algorithm, it is always hard to tell what kind of copy will land your page in the top spot, and what will have you scraping the bowels of Google’s tenth page in search of light.

Luckily, the folks at ContentVerve have put together an excellent infographic detailing the features of high-quality SEO-friendly copy (at least, so far in 2013).

Among the great tips to note when drafting your content with SEO in mind are the social implications of search today. It is not secret that Google+ weighs heavily in search rankings on Google. After all, Google have described themselves as a social company, and their changes have concreted that statement.

Take a look at these ten tips and let us know which one (or ones) you think is most important to SEO success. Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

How To Use Google Authorship to Benefit SEO

July 24, 2013/by Corey Padveen

There can be a significant boost to SEO from the proper use of Google Authorship.

Considering the first half of the term, ‘Google’, it is no surprise that Google Authorship can have tremendous benefits when it comes to SEO. Frankly, any time a service or network (e.g. Google+) is owned and operated by the search giant, SEO tends to be a major byproduct of its use. But how can you add to SEO with the use of Google Authorship.

The 4 tips below provide some insight into how you can take advantage of Google Authorship to boost your rankings.

Incorporate Google+ Into Your Writing

Google+ should be included on every website where you are sharing content. Google+ is a major consideration by Google when determining the authority of a given author, and if you are properly using Google+ when you write, your articles will have a better chance of finding their way to the top of search rankings.

Don’t Ignore Google+

Having said that, it is important that you are using Google+ consistently.

Simply having a Google+ profile does not mean you are using the network – it comes with a Gmail address. You need to really immerse yourself in the network in order to see the benefits associated with Google Authorship. The more active you are on Google+, the more recognition is given to your Authorship. (It may not be fair, but it’s fact.)

Invite Credible Authors to Share

If you are leveraging your own Authorship on your blog, that’s good. If you are leveraging the authority of several qualified authors on your blog, that’s great.

When your blog is filled with articles written by authors with great Google Authorship rankings, you can rest assured that it will improve the rankings of several articles on your site. We recently discussed the Social Equity of guest blogging, and Google Authorship is one important benefit to note.

Engage with Influencers

Industry influencers, like credible authors, can do wonders for your own Google Authorship. By engaging with influencers on Google+ and seeing mentions of your profile increase, you stand to see a trickle down effect resulting in increased authority given to your Authorship.

Reach out to influencers and join in the conversation in influential groups and Communities and expect to see the benefits to SEO.

Try a few of these tips and see how they help your SEO efforts. Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

5 Ways to Boost SEO with Social Media

July 16, 2013/by Corey Padveen

What can you do to boost SEO with social media?

There is a lot of debate over whether or not social media factors into your search rankings. There are those who firmly believe that social media is the ‘next big thing’ in SEO, and those who feel as though the power of social media has been taken out of context as it pertains to SEO, and that is has not real benefits at all.

The fact of the matter is that social signals do have an impact on SEO, and that you can, through the use of a few key practices, boost SEO with social media.

Focus on Google Authorship

Whether it is through blogging, Google+ or YouTube, you should try, whenever possible, to increase the authority of your name on Google.

Google Authorship is an important social signal when Google ranks its results. Ever see a blog article pop up in Google with a little picture on the left? That’s a ranking factor that should be considered when writing. The more authority your name has on Google’s social layer, the more likely those articles are to pop up when someone searches for a specified keyword.

Share Links with Your Content

When it comes to social signals, link-sharing on social networks is very similar to link-building through anchor text. While keywords do not necessarily hold as much weight on social media, your links do. When someone shares a Facebook post linking back to your site, or retweets a link you shared, search engines tend to pick that up.

Don’t miss out on an opportunity to get noticed – share some links (when they are appropriate).

Consistency

Your presence needs to be felt on social media and your content needs to be ongoing. You should be partaking in conversations on a regular basis if you want to see your search rankings improve. This results from two things. First, your content will be shared more regularly on social networks. Second, the effect of your presence on social media means a greater potential for people to search for you outside of these networks.

Social media networks are a great way to get your name out there, so be there as often as you can.

Go To the Source

Google is the world’s largest search engine. Google+ is a social network owned by Google. Ergo, one can easily conclude that Google+ is important to search rankings in Google.

It’s a fact. In a recent infographic created by Searchmetrics that measures 2013 ranking factors on Google, Google +1s topped the charts. Sharing interesting and engaging content on Google+ is going to lead to +1s on your content. +1s mean more love from Google. Join Google+ Communities, join conversations and share relevant material and you can be sure to see your rankings improve.

Integrate Social Media and SEO

These are not two standalone factors that increase your business. Social media and SEO needs to be approached together. Granted, one strategy might have been in place before the other, but that does not mean that they cannot be integrated into one another.

Look at your keywords, where your traffic is coming from and where you are finding success on both social media and SEO, and create a single strategy where the two act as complements, not competitors.

These are just a few ways you can boost SEO with social media. How have you found social media has an impact on SEO? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Guest Blogging

July 12, 2013/by Corey Padveen

How can guest blogging add value to your business?

Guest blogging is becoming more common practice in the world of online content development, and for good reason. Guest blogging offers certain benefits to your business that few other practices do, and those benefits translate into significant value added in terms of Social Equity. But before we dive into the great value that guest blogging brings to your business, we should probably understand what guest blogging is.

As a site or blog owner, you have the burden of constantly populating your site with new, engaging content that readers (and search engines) want to see. This may sound easy enough, but managing both your blog and your business can sometimes become overwhelming, and while a blog is a tremendous business tool, it sometimes unintentionally falls by the wayside.

Guest blogging offers business and blog owners an opportunity to invite outside writers from within their industry to post relevant content to their website. There is a reciprocal benefit in that guest bloggers can build up their portfolio and increase links back to their own sites while blog owners can have fresh, insightful content loaded to their blog while having third parties promote their website (and, essentially, their business).

So where is the value added from guest blogging to your business?

Link-Building

Traditional link-building is time consuming and can be quite tedious. There are companies that have been built entirely on offering this service to other businesses that simply do not have the time to do it themselves.

Guest blogging is a great way to go about link-building as your guest bloggers are happy to link to your content on social networks as well as their own websites. This saves time and money while providing you with a great service to promote your company.

Authority Building

It takes a very good blog to attract high quality guest bloggers. And while not every blog is willing to accept outside bloggers, those that are want only the best.

If your business blog has the clout to attract industry and thought leaders to share their insights, it bodes well for your blog and your business. Essentially, a guest post, though in a way self-serving, is an endorsement by that blogger for your company. That builds your business’s authority and, subsequently, your Social Equity.

New Brand Advocates

When a blogger shares content to your website, he or she is not going to keep it a secret. They, in all likelihood, will be going out there and promoting it as if the site was their own!

Garnering brand advocates is among the most difficult things to do in marketing, but when you do, you have struck gold. Guest blogging creates pseudo brand advocates as the aftermath of their post being published is, usually, heavy promotion of your site by third parties.

Guest blogging is an excellent tool and can add significant value to your business. To inquire about guest blogging for t2Social, click here.

Does your blog offer guest blogging? Have you every been a guest blogger? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Equity: Social Bookmarking Your Business

July 5, 2013/by Corey Padveen

How does social bookmarking your business on sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon generate Social Equity for your brand?

There is virtually no shortage of benefits when it comes to social bookmarking your business. In addition to building links, increasing your readership and targeting niche audiences, it is a relatively simple process that adds significant value to your business.

There are two areas in which social bookmarking generates Social Equity: SEO and visibility.

Social Bookmarking and SEO

It wasn’t long after social bookmarking sites like Reddit came about that SEO experts began to notice that links shared to them were treated as backlinks by search engines. While there is much that new techniques on social media have to offer with regards to SEO, backlinks are still an excellent means of increasing your SERPs.

The ability to create links to each piece of content on your website is a valuable tool, and these links remain in search engines and on social bookmarking sites indefinitely. Staying power and the ability for users to find your business through search on both engines like Google and bookmarking networks like StumbleUpon mean real value added in terms of findability and reach.

Social Bookmarking and Visibility

In keeping with the theme of findability, one can also look at the value added from social bookmarking sites as increasing your brand’s visibility inexpensively, quickly and to a very targeted market.

Similar results might require significant SEO efforts. The ability to categorize your content, share it to engaged audiences and provide pseudo titles and meta descriptions on these networks is a tremendous asset. Furthermore, results arise much quicker and, once again, generate a certain staying power for your brand online.

By showcasing your content to niche audiences, you gain a certain attribute that most other social networks do not afford: longevity. On networks like Facebook, where a post has a shelf life of roughly a few hours, or Twitter, where a tweet’s shelf life can be as short as a few minutes, the ability to maintain one’s presence for an extended period of time is virtually invaluable.

Over time, with ongoing attention paid to such a practice, a ripple effect will take place and your content will make its way across the internet, all leading back to your landing page, blog or website. It is hard to imagine too many other techniques as simple as social bookmarking that add that kind of value to a brand.

Do you share your content on social bookmarking sites like Reddit, Digg or StumbleUpon? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

4 Tips for Tumblr Beginners

July 3, 2013/by Corey Padveen

There are certain best practices Tumblr beginners need to be aware of in order to take full advantage of the social blogging network.

Tumblr beginners might not know exactly how to use the network; it is not the most familiar territory and certainly does not feel or operate the same way most other social networks do.

Tumblr is a social blogging platform that allows users to share content that appeals to them on a customized, fully social blog. Sounds great, right? Well, in order for Tumblr to work for you, it is crucial that you follow certain best practices. Otherwise, your blog is just one of the tens of millions with little activity.

Tag Your Posts

Tumblr tags are an excellent way of increasing your post’s visibility. At the bottom of your post (shown below) you will find an area in which to add tags. Take advantage of this the same way you would tags on a standalone blog post. People can search for tags and categories on Tumblr, and the more well described your post in tag-form, the better the chances that people will find your content.

Diversify Your Content

One of the great features of Tumblr is the ability to share several types of content. Your posts can be as simple as a single image or a quote from your favorite author or as complex as a step-by-step explanation of functionality of a particle accelerator.

One key thing to remember, however, is that you should aim to share a diverse selection of content (all related to your blog’s theme and tone) in order to engage as broad an audience as possible. You might have a small group interested in the process of particle acceleration, but be able to broaden your reader base with an album of some impressive, research-grade particle accelerator images.

Social Sharing

You’ll notice in the image above (in the tags section) that there are small icons under your post for Facebook and Twitter. Now, this might not apply to all of your posts (you don’t necessarily want to duplicate other posts on Facebook or Twitter) but in order to streamline your social media marketing, you should consider sharing the content you post on Tumblr to your other social networks.

This is a great way of promoting your Tumblr blog and quickly building your readership.

Be Social!

Tumblr might be a blog, but it is as much a social network as Facebook or Twitter. You should be re-blogging (sharing other people’s content to your own blog) and commenting on other blogs the same way you would on Facebook.

Being social is the goal of Tumblr, and it is also a great way of increasing your own exposure on the network.

Though there is a lot more to Tumblr than these 4 simple tips, these are must-dos for Tumblr beginners in order to get the Tumblr activity off the ground.

Do you use Tumblr for social blogging? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

4 Features Every Blog Post Should Have

June 25, 2013/by Corey Padveen

There are certain features every blog post should have in order to both be seen as a quality article by your audience and work to help build your readership.

There are some elements that put certain blogs in a category above the rest. While some of the better blogs out there are very different from one another, each post has certain features that every blog post should have. These features are what add to the overall high quality of the blog, and for yours to reach that same level, you should be incorporating these features that every blog post should have.

Though there are certain elements unique to one post or another, the four elements below should always find their way into each of your posts.

Shareability

You want your content to reach as many people as possible, right? Well then you should include means through which your audience can share it!

Adding share buttons to your blog should be one of the first things you do once you get started. The easier it is to share your great content, the faster your audience and reader loyalty will grow!

Images

Sure, images look great and add a visual aspect to your posts, but including an image with the proper alt tags is an excellent way to get found. It is important to optimize your blog for search engines in every way possible, and properly tagged images are one way to do that.

The presence of an image or two also means that Pinterest now becomes a player in the social sharing game. Recently, the photo pinning network surpassed Twitter as one of the top sources for social referral traffic and it shows no signs of stopping. So add images to your blog posts – they are far more valuable than you might think.

Questions

Get the conversation started and engage your audience every time you post. End your article with a question, or ask your audience for their thoughts. You might have a group of readers that want to take part in the conversation but still need that extra push to get involved, so give it to them!

Succinctness

You are not writing a novel. The poetics and imagery are not nearly as important as the substance. (Unless of course you are writing a blog about poetics and imagery.)

Online attention spans are not very long – only a few seconds, actually. You need to grab your audience’s attention fast and share what you need to quickly. Filling an article with fluff will mean a higher bounce rate. But if you are clear and concise you can surely expect reader to come back for more.

These are just a few features every blog post should have. There are certainly more, but these are among the most important – no matter what type of blog you are writing.

What other features have you found to be important when it comes to successful blogging? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

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