The result was that the beat he played didn’t sound very interesting or fun.

After a brief pause to explain the importance of charisma in his delivery, he played the same beat again, but this time added some ‘charisma’; he bobbed his head to the beat, swung his arms a little more wildly, and moved his body as if he were dancing.

Wow! What a difference it made. Suddenly the same boring beat he had played before came alive. It was somehow more danceable, enticing and engaging. I literally found myself dancing along as I watched.

There was no difference between the beats he played, but yet the second version was so much more exciting. Adding a little charisma to your blogs and posts can have the same effect; dress up your story with a little charisma.

The dictionary defines charisma as a ‘compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others‘. Perfect! This is exactly what your blog needs to stand out in the crowd, and just what your message needs to get through the clutter.

Adding charisma is easier than you think; all it takes is some personal excitement and a little extra spice. Let your audience know that you are personally excited about the product or service you are talking about, and express your self in fantastic, exciting terms! Get a little loud, and let your readers know that you are jumping up and down with enthusiasm, and that you can’t wait for them to try your suggestions.

I can’t wait for you to try this; It really works!

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

Questions are compelling and generate interest. Creating a blog title that poses a question is almost irresistible to most readers and a great way to stick out above the crowd and get noticed; while everyone seems to have something to tell, it is not often that we get asked.

When we are asked a question, it is hard to resist giving an answer, finding out why the question was asked in the first place, or learning the reason to an obvious answer.

Rewrite your next blog title in the form of a question. If the title of your post is going to be ‘Make Your Titles A Question‘, rewrite it as ‘Are You Using Questions To Generate Interest?’ By doing this you are turning a definitive instruction into a compelling reason to seek more information. The question on your reader’s lips will be ‘why should I use questions to generate interest?’, and they will be compelled to read more about it.

When you share your post to a social network like Facebook or Twitter, you have a limited space in which to describe your post. A question represents the shortest way to communicate the value proposition of your article while enticing your readers to investigate further. The next time you share an article to Facebook, or tweet a link to your blog, add a question to the comment and present the link as the answer.

If you have done it right, you should see an increase in interest to your blog from your social sites, and an increase in retweets and forwards.

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

One of the best places to find a good video is on YouTube.

You can create your own video, of course, and post it to YouTube without too much trouble. You should give it a try; it’s actually quite fun and relatively easy if you have a few basic tools, including a webcam and some editing software. Most newer computers come with everything you need.

Finding a video on YouTube is pretty easy to do. Just visit YouTube.com and perform a search in the box at the top of the screen. You can search for anything such as a product or company name, an event, or keyword. Expect to get a lot of hits and to weed through a few videos before you find the perfect one.

If you are looking for a company video, you can usually find them posted to the company channel, which will feature a group of videos from the same company or sponsor.

Once you have located your video, there are a couple of options for sharing:

First, to include the video on a blog page, all you’ll have to do is copy the embed code from the YouTube page and paste it into your post. To do this, look to the right of the video and click on the box marked ‘embed’. This will open a drop-down section that allows you to select from a handful of options including whether or not to add a frame to the video, what color the frame should be (to match your site) and a size that will work best for your template.

Make the appropriate adjustments and simply copy the line of code in the ‘embed’ box. Paste this code into your blog post and you have now added a video. The video will play right on your site and your readers won’t have to leave your page.

The other way to easily share a YouTube video is to click the ‘Share’ tab just below the video. This tab will open a few options including one-click links to share to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

When you click a share link you will be given an opportunity to add a comment to the video that will appear with the link on your social network page. Easy!

Sharing video from your company is a great way to spread the word, and is a great way to get a corporate message out without having to repeat it yourself. This can open the doors to a more engaging conversation after your readers or friends have seen the video and have a visual background of your products or services.

If your company doesn’t have a video posted to YouTube, take the initiative and create one yourself. Be sure to get the usual permissions for copyrights and trademarks, and be sure to stick to the features and benefits of the product without extending your liability.

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

What I want to talk about in this post is how to share the information we create or discover in a way that makes it compelling for others to read. After all; there is no sense in taking the effort to share if there is little chance that your recipient will take a look.

A few weeks ago I shared some insight into adding personalization to your posts in order to make them more compelling to our readers. The same rules apply when sharing a link, and especially when sharing by email.

We have learned from Twitter and Facebook that adding a brief descriptive introduction to our posts makes it more likely that others will participate. Whenever you share a link in Facebook, for instance, you are provided with a comment box in which to add your own comment. Twitter works the same way, allowing a very brief comment to be included so that others will know what the link is about. Incorporating these skills into our other communications is a great way to get our audience to engage with us, particularly in email.

I get forwarded emails all the time, and a good percentage of these are links to articles that my friends and associates want me to see. I appreciate them, but sometimes all I get is a single link, with no explanation or no lead in that tells me what I am getting into. I hate getting these…

Why? Well, for starters it creates some apprehension against even clicking on the link in the first place. After all, this is how a lot of phishing sites deliver their spam; an email with a lone link, lurking about in the off case I will just click it out of curiosity. I never do, and neither should you.

My point is this; without a brief introduction to the link you are now competing with spam emails for attention, and if you are like me you usually discard them without a second look. You don’t want that happening to your communications.

Another reason is that as the reader you are committing me to look at the link ‘cold’, which means you have missed an opportunity to influence my perspective on what I may be reading. By sharing your enthusiasm, sympathy, or excitement about an article you are linking to, your readers will instantly become more interested. And that makes for good business!

We are constantly barraged with information, and when it takes more than a second or two to process the ‘hows’, ‘whys’ and ‘whats’ of a message we often tune out or discard it. This happens whether you are on Twitter, reading an email, on the phone or speaking in person. The best way to get your audience to engage with you is to engage them first, and all it takes is a quick introduction of the information you want to share to turn it into a conversation.

Here’s my protocol for success, in the context of an email. Let’s assume you are forwarding a link to your blog post, or to an interesting article you have found on the Internet.

Make your subject line descriptive of the action you are taking, just like you would start a conversation in person: ‘Here’s an Interesting article for you to read’. But don’t stop there; add a descriptive line in the body of your message, ahead of the link. Something that conveys your feelings about the article whether you are excited, empathetic, or displeased. Something that connects your reader to the story and either makes it important to them or generates some interest: ‘I read this and thought you would be interested because you have had a similar experience’.

The more personal you can make it, the better.

The idea is two fold: 1) you are working to generate genuine interest, and 2) you’re trying to persuade or prepare your recipient’s perception. After all, you’re not just passing this along for no good reason; you have a communications objective whether it is to sell, persuade, or build friendship. To engage your audience you need to engage them first; Start the conversation with a compelling introduction.

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

Adding images to your blog is easy. In popular blog platforms such as Wordpress there are tools that allow you to easily upload a small image into your blog. Once you have uploaded an image, you can also make some adjustments including the padding or spacing around the image so that your words don’t bump right into the image, and the justification so that you can position the image to the right, left, or center of your post.

Uploading the images is fairly easy. As a quick note, the most common and easily used images for your blog are .JPG, .PNG, and .GIF. JPG is the most preferred, and what is generally produced by most digital cameras and screen capture utilities.

What I find to be the hard part is in finding an appropriate image to include with your post. Just the right image can add volumes of context to your post. Funny or abstract images are my favorites, but there is certainly good reason to add clarifying images, or those that appeal to emotion.

There are plenty of places to look, but the first thing to be aware of is copyright laws. It is illegal to simply steal an image from another person’s website or library without permission. Doing so can get you into trouble, but there are several ways to avoid this problem.

The first is to pay for an image. This costs money, of course, but is a safe way to get high quality images for your blog. My favorite site for purchasing images is iStock.com.

Another way is to use your own photography. Most of us have digital cameras these days so it is relatively easy to plan ahead, take a break from your computer, and host your very own photo shoot. I have done this in a variety of ways and I’ve had a lot of fun doing it every time. Of course you don’t have to go to elaborate lengths to create the perfect photo; sometimes a simple picture of a flower in the back yard, a window reflecting the sky, or a fencepost will do.

When blogging for your business, stock photos of your company’s products and the ways they can be used are good images to include, and are often available from your company website.

Another great place to get photos is Flickr. Flickr.com is a great source of photos taken by regular people from all over the world. You’ll be amazed at the quality and breadth of the photos you can find on Flickr. A great search tool for finding photos on Flickr is called Compfight. Just go to compfight.com and perform a search for the image you are looking for. Compfight takes care to search only those photos that are labeled for public use, however you will still want to be sure you are using a photo that has been given a Creative Commons license, meaning it is open source and available for use without payment. Some restrictions may apply, so always double check.

Adding an image to your posts is a great way to spice up your content and give your readers a little extra fun to look at when they stop by your blog.

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

I was impressed. I actually thought ‘certainly she can’t keep this up all day’, but then I realized that yes, she probably could; there is no shortage of things to say when you personalize, and no limit to the amount of interest you can generate when you add a personal touch.

Imagine you were standing there in line in front of me, and as you approached the clerk she paid you a compliment on the color of your shirt. You would instantly feel a personal bond and would be compelled to engage with her, perhaps thanking her for the compliment, or maybe telling her a short story about where you found it, or that it is also your spouse’s favorite, or that all your shirts are this color because you love it.

And so it goes for blogging. Adding a personal touch to your posts will not only help you bring interest and life to your stories, but it will help people identify with you on a more personal level, and will compel them to engage with you.

Creative writing is a challenge for most of us, but retelling a story can come quite naturally. I find that one of the best ways to blog is to simply retell a story in my own words. Personalize it, and give it my own personal perspective. When you find a story that is worth passing along, don’t simply retell the story word for word; reinvent the story from your own perspective. Give new insight, posit new theories, and offer extending ideas.

An easy way to do this is to insert yourself into the story. As I did in my opening story; you probably envisioned me standing in a grocery store line waiting for my turn, and probably have a mental image of what the clerk might have looked like. By telling you about my place in the story, you became connected and your mind engaged. At least I hope so…

The people around you are most interested in hearing what you think about a story, not necessarily in the story itself. It’s your personalization that really brings it home for your audience. The next time you post content to your blog, or to a social network like Facebook or Twitter, take care to add yourself to the story and watch how others get engaged with you.

Can you believe I record these things? Give it a listen and tell me what you think:

The most popular and easy way to add video to your site is to embed video from YouTube.com. It’s easy to do; simply find a favorite video on YouTube and copy the embed link you’ll find just to the right of the video. Clicking on the embed link opens a drop down menu of options you can select to change the way the video looks, including border colors and sizes.

For those of you using Wordpress, you’ll want to drop this bit of code into the HTML editing view in your post window. Change back to the visual WYSIWYG editor to add some content.

Add some content. This is really the gist of my tip this week; video alone is not enough to satisfy the search engines’ hunger for written content. While video is fun for us humans, it doesn’t leave much for the search engines to index; search engines can’t watch and understand videos. So no matter how many you have on your site, the search engines will pass you by if you are not including the written word.

So even though you have added a great video to your blog, it’s important to add content, too.

Next time you add a video to your blog, take just a few extra minutes to add a description of the video underneath. Give a quick explanation of what your readers will see in the video, add your thoughts or opinion about the video, and make sure to use a handful of keywords.

You only need a paragraph or two to give the search engines enough to go on, and the mix of video and written content will assure that the search engines are as happy as your readers.

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

The report surveyed 259 marketing professionals and asked them where they plan to spend their time and money in the coming year. A full 72 percent mentioned social networks as part of their marketing plans. Importantly, social networking was the number one position for marketers. Online newsletters and blogs are listed as second, with 63 percent saying they are engaged with these types of marketing tools. Another interesting result of the survey is that the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh positions of the report were strictly content, in the form of white papers, articles, case studies and online video.

The reason I was surprised that newsletters and blogs are tied for second is that blogs can be used as a newsletter, effectively killing two birds with one stone. I think it is both important and telling, too, that the positions just below ‘Blog’ are specifically content, all of which can be distributed via a blog (supporting my long-time stance that a blog is the foundation of any online marketing campaign).

There’s no doubt that a newsletter is a great way to stay in touch with your audience, and there are certainly reasons to use a newsletter. However if you are already a blogger, you may not have known that you are already on the way to hosting an newsletter. There are two ways to deal with this, and both help you leverage the concept of a newsletter or broadcast to deliver your blog content to your audience, and to attract them back to your site for more information.

The first way is probably already built into your blog, especially if you are using a ListPipe solution, or the popular Wordpress software. It’s called ‘RSS’, and it’s a built-in way for people to subscribe to your content. RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication‘, and it’s a web standard that most browsers support automatically. When a visitor comes to your site they have an ability to subscribe to your RSS feed, and can receive content from you in their own browsers every time they post.

If you are using a ListPipe or Wordpress solution for your blog, simply type the word ‘/feed’ after your URL in your browser, and you’ll be asked to subscribe. Using this simple technique will allow you, and your readers, to receive an automatic update whenever you post new content.

Another way to deliver your blog content to your readers is to use a subscription service such a Google’s Feedburner. Feedburner is a free blog service that offers a subscription management tool. All you have to do is start a Google Feedburner account, and then direct people to your Feedburner subscription form to capture their email address. Whenever you post content to your blog, Feedburner will automatically email your readers with your article right in the email.

With Feedburner you also have a number of tools that allow you to manage your subscribers including adding and deleting them. Don’t worry about the management headache; Feedburner handles unsubscribes for you with a handy link at the bottom of every email they send on your behalf.

So if you are a blogger already, you are already ahead of the crowd when it comes to delivering an newsletter, you just need to make a few adjustments and let your readers know.Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

Marketing online is a relentless pursuit, and even the tiniest of breaks can literally break the chain.

In particular, when blogging you risk loosing the attention of the search engines if you stop posting great content on a regular schedule. Your social networks, too, depend on your constant attention in order to maintain a top-of-mind presence in the minds of your followers.

In my experience, most bloggers start off with strong intentions and then begin to wear out after three to four weeks of posting. Now is the time to pull ahead of the crowd and reinvigorate your online efforts. Here’s a few quick tips to keep your blog alive and your networks growing:

1. Create a schedule for yourself. Make a note in your calendar and set aside a specific time to organize, write and post to your blog. Also, make sure to set aside a specific time each day to check in on your social networks and to repost a few items. Set a calendar reminder and stick to it.

2. Organize your effort. Posting to a blog is a complex task and requires at least a little bit of planning for even the best of us. Take a moment to establish a plan for your weekly posting routine. Identify a process that suits you and practice following the steps each week. For instance; set a timeline, and make a list of items to check off for each post. Your items might include ‘Brainstorming’, ‘Defining a Topic’, ‘Research’, ‘Writing a Draft’, ‘Editing’, and ‘Posting Live’. Whatever your routine; get it down on paper and follow it each week.

3. Keep in Mind. Through your week you will be inspired by new ideas and topics to write about. Be prepared to recognize these moments and have some tools on hand for capturing your fresh ideas. Make a note on your phone, or keep a pencil and paper handy. Train yourself to recognize new ideas and to capture them for later blogging.

4. Don’t Cheat. It is tempting to cheat a week or two and procrastinate, especially at this time of year when the sky is a little extra grey, and the cabin fever starts setting in. As we all know, this is the first step to failure, and the first opportunity for our competition to get the upper hand. Don’t let them have it! Stay true to your plan and work hard to meet your schedule. As soon as you let yourself slip, it gets a little harder to get back on the saddle, and before you know it all is lost and you are starting over.

Take a few moments to reset your commitment to blogging and social marketing, and you’ll be glad you did as you pull ahead.

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

It seems that all we hear about at this time of year is ‘goal setting’, but most of us rarely pause to consider what goal setting is, and how it relates to our online marketing plan.

Whether you are concentrating on social media, your marketing blog, or a good old fashioned email marketing campaign, it helps to understand the difference between Tasks, Goals, and Objectives. Let’s break ‘em down with a quick analogy:

When playing a sport, for instance ‘football’, your objective is to ‘win the game’. This is your overarching reason for all the effort and sacrifice you invest. While playing football, you win by making goals. Simple enough; you achieve your objective by setting and reaching goals. A goal can be scoring a point, or a goal can be to post to your blog on a regular frequency.

Finally, goals are made by executing tasks. A task in football might be to count to ‘three alligators‘, run ten steps and turn around to catch a ball. In your business a task is the smallest increment of work that helps you achieve your goal. In this case it might be ‘writing a post’.

Your Strategy is the plan you assemble to organize and complete your tasks and goals in order to achieve your objectives.

So as you contemplate your social media strategy, first outline your objective by asking yourself ‘What do I want to accomplish with all my effort?’. It may be a specific financial objective for your business. Next, determine the goals you need to set in place that drive your progress toward your objective. Goals are shorter term, and you need to have several if not many of them.

Tasks are the basic components of your goals; the actual ‘doing’ that gets the job done. Many tasks comprise a goal, and many goals comprise an objective.

Note that the most important aspect of Tasks, Goals, and Objectives is that they are all specifically defined, measurable, and timed. Like a three legged chair; without these three elements, you do not have an achievable task, goal or objective.

Of course you can always save yourself the time of performing many tasks by signing up for a ListPipe account. ListPipe provides regular customized content to your Wordpress blog to give you a leg up in your online marketing effort. We’ll do all the research and writing for you, and all at a very affordable price. Check out http://listpipe.com for more information.

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With more and more marketers blogging these days, it’s getting harder and harder to make a splash in an otherwise crowded marketplace. But that shouldn’t stop you from having a plan to blog about your business in the coming new year.

With search engines concentrating evermore on organic writing, high frequency and relevant keywords, the notion that ‘Content is King‘ should be the foundation of your marketing strategy for 2010.

Here is my quick list of reminders and tips to make your blog really stick out:

Organic Writing: Search engines are looking for original content. When you write on your blog, Facebook page or Twitter, your content is being scoured by the search engines and compared to other relevant content. When your content is deemed to be unique, you are awarded a higher organic status than with content that is copied or reproduced, and placed higher in the search results for your given topic.

Ways to make your content more unique, and more organic, include adding localization, personalizing information such as your contact address and phone number, putting the story into your own words, and allowing your own personality to shine through in the content.

Frequency. You have heard me talk about the importance of frequency before; basically the more you post, the more popular you will be in the search engines. This is a good time of year to establish a new goal to step up your frequency, and to expand your posting ritual beyond your blog to Facebook and Twitter. You should be posting once per week at a minimum, and more if you can. For serious marketers, I recommend posting twice per week with a daily post to both Facebook and Twitter.

Relevant Keywords. This, too, seems to be an overworked mantra. However, including relevant keywords in your content is the single most important way to let the search engines know where to include you in search results. The start of a new year is a perfect time to make a list and check it twice; revisit your keywords by doing a little research on what your customers are searching for, and physically write them at the top of your writing template. Review them often and include a selection from the list in every post.

If you are a business blogger and are looking for great SEO content for your blog, consider a subscription to ListPipe; in just a few short minutes you can get us started writing original, personalized content for your blog that is search engine optimized and linked to your primary website from relevant keywords. Take a look at http://listpipe.com

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

Keywords are the terms and phrases in your posts that are most relevant to your topic. For instance if you are posting in your blog about a healthy food product, then your keywords will of course be the product name. But don’t stop there; keywords will also include the product category, the product ingredients, and can also include the ways you can use the product.

Your ultimate objective with keywords is to make a connection between your content and the terms your customers are searching for. While many customers search for generalized terms, some search for very specific terms. When you stick with the generalized terms on your site, you are competing with a million other sites for those terms. However, when you make your terms more specific, you reduce the number of competitors and open the door for more attention, albeit from a smaller crowd.

The wisdom follows that you would like to get more interest from a smaller, more focused set of customers than from a very small portion of a larger but less focused set. Would you rather be fishing with a big net in the ocean, or a small net in a barrel chock full of exactly the fish you like?

Let’s talk about a few ways you can optimize your keywords…

Keyword modifiers can help distinguish your product from a competitor’s, or can help refine your search for a more specific term. For instance you may add the word ‘chewable’ or ‘drink’ to your product name to help distinguish its specific product type. Adding words like ‘healthy’ or ‘natural’ can help refine search results for people looking for specific categories.

Modifiers are intended to make your keywords more specific, and thereby reduce the number of competing terms.

Associative Keywords are keywords that are related to your keywords, but that may not be precisely related to your product. For instance if you are selling a healthy food, you will want to add keywords that relate to proper digestion or good nutrition. These types of words will come naturally in your discussion, but it helps to be aware of them so that you can concentrate on using them in slightly more density than you might otherwise.

As you contemplate your keywords, don’t forget to consider misspellings or alternate spellings. If your keywords are hard to spell, or have a common alternative, intermingle these in your post to help the search engines identify your content with what your type-challenged customers may be entering into the search window.

Finally, remember to use localization terms with your keywords. The search engines are including localization tags in all their search results, meaning that it matters where you are from and where you are selling. Localized search results are relatively new and many users are only just catching on; this is a great way to get ahead of the curve and take advantage of local searches for your product. To add localization to your keywords, simply add the name of your city, state, and zip to your keywords.

Keep your keywords in mind as you write in your blog, on Facebook and Twitter. Optimize everything you write so that as the search engines index content from these sources, they know exactly how to match you up with the customers searching for your products.

Looking for a great way to start a business blog? Check out our new Business Blog Content Service from ListPipe; We’ll get you started with a blog and even write the content for you, every week!

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

A conversion goal is basically a step in your sales process. Specifically, it is the ‘next step’ that you want your customers to take when they visit your site or complete a previous step.

As we talk through this, remember that a conversion goal and a sales process is not necessarily tied to the sale of a product; we could easily be talking about supplying a service, generating a membership, or asking for simple participation. In this context, your ’sales process’ is the collection of steps you want your visitors to complete, and a ‘conversion goal’ is a milestone of that process. Bare in mind, too, that a conversion goal can be the completion of a single step such as the visitation of a specific page, or the completion of the entire process such as a sale or a signature.

In a nutshell, a conversion goal is the specific task you can measure that demonstrates when you have achieved success. The easiest way to come up with your conversion goals is to ask yourself ‘What do I want my visitors to do when they come to my page?’

Examples of conversion goals can include any of the following:

• Completing a form
• Making a payment
• Forwarding information
• Subscribing
• Leaving a comment

Note that on a website the measurement of a conversion goal is in loading a specific page. For instance if your conversion goal is to complete a form, the measurement of that goal may be the loading of a ‘Thank You’ page that is triggered when the visitor hits the submit button. In this way you are measuring the results of an action that confirm the action.

When it comes to blogging, you’ll want to think through your conversion goals each time you write. Ask yourself how your subject is going to support your conversion goal, and how you can direct your readers to complete it. In this way you can support your conversion goals with links, calls-to-action, and supporting information.

Every post should contain some form of direction toward your conversion goals, and you should be focused on measuring them for success.

Oh, by the way: Subscribe to my blog (in the upper right corner) to receive these weekly tips via email, and look for me on Facebook and Twitter.

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The links in your content are very much like your personal social connections; They are a reflection of your site personality and an indication of how well you are connected. ‘Authority’ works much the same way as a popularity contest; when you hang out with the most popular kid in school, some of that popularity rubs off on you. If you play it cool, you can build on that popularity-by-association to create your own independent popularity.

Because links are so important, it is important to know how to create good links. Here are a few tips:

1. Link Volume: The number of links you create in a given blog post is important. If you maintain a ratio of about one link per hundred words you will be at a maximum recommended density. Any more, and you risk being seen as a spammer. Any fewer and you are not taking full advantage of your linking opportunity.

2. Words to Link: Concentrate your linking on keywords and phrases, but don’t link more than once from the same word or phrase within the same post. Don’t be afraid to link from multiple words, but make sure they are a searchable phrase. You don’t want to link from phrases such as ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Click Here For More Info’ because there is no SEO value in these phrases and you are wasting potential authority.

3. Placement: Provide links from the keywords in the most convenient places to better serve your readers. At the top of your article, in the first sentence is a great place to provide a link because it is convenient, and is most likely to be reproduced in excerpts.

4. Tagging: Tagging your links is the process of providing the content that appears when you hover over a link in a blog. This content is important to the search engines and provides an opportunity to clarify your keyword. Always add tags to your links, and juice them up with keyword modifiers such as your geographic location, your business name, or an additional keyword. For example, if you are linking the word ‘guitar’ you might tag it as ‘Fender guitar in Chicago’.

5. Destinations: To impart authority from your links to a specific page, you will of course want to link to that page as often as you can. However it does make some good sense to mix it up a bit and direct links to various places around your site as are relevant. It is also a good idea to link outward to other relevant sites; don’t just link to yourself, link to other sites that can add to the value of your reader’s experience. Link to research, supporting comments, or additional resources that add value and relevancy to your content.

6. Finally, make sure you test your links after you have posted. Dead links will count against you, both with readers and search engines. Simply visit your live article and check through the links you have created. If you find a problem, fix it right away.

Links are a critical foundation to blogging, and an important aspect of your search engine marketing. Make sure you are adding good quality links to your content for optimal organic growth.

If you are a small business, ListPipe can provide SEO marketing tools that take the work out of blog marketing.

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There are three basic ways to add media content to your site.

One: You can embed content from a video site like YouTube.com. YouTube in particular has made it extremely easy to share a video to your blog by providing embed code right there on the same page with the video. All you have to do is copy the embed code and paste it into your blog. Add a few written comments about the video and you have a sticky post that will capture search engine attention and give your readers something to watch. Pretty easy.

Two: You can create your own videos to post. This, of course, is a little more complicated, but can be worth the effort because you are posting your own unique content that cannot be found anywhere else. This is a great way to share video of an event that you attended or interview that you have conducted. Making your own video will require that you have a few tools, and a little know how. You’ll need a camera and video editing software. Most newer computers come with the basic tools to edit and post a video. Facebook has a video posting option right in their online account options, and YouTube is a great place to post your videos for sharing around.

Three: For those of you who are camera shy, audio podcasting is another great way to add unique content to your site. It’s not as exciting as video, but it doesn’t always have to be; the podcast industry is going strong with audio content that attracts millions of subscribers. One of the best ways to use an audio podcast is for an interview. An advantage of doing an audio podcast is that you don’t even have to be in the same room to complete the interview. I prefer to do my interviews over the phone using Skype and Sound Recorder, which gives me a podcast-ready file as soon as I am finished with the call.

Regardless of the type of media you include with your posts, adding an additional level of interaction for your readers make your content more interesting and provides a greater opportunity for viral sharing.

A few ideas to consider when posting video or audio content to your site:

1. Keep it short and simple. A long podcast starts to really drag on when you have things to do or get distracted. If you produce your own media, try to keep it to 10 minutes or less.
2. Keep it clean. We’ve all encountered tasteless jokes or less than upstanding content on the Internet. These kinds of things are dangerous in a business setting and are sure to offend someone. Your best bet is to keep your content family friendly.
3. Watch for copyrighted material if you are republishing from another source. YouTube and some of the other popular video sharing resources are a safe play. Be careful of sharing private videos or videos that are owned by a corporate entity. Always ask permission when in question, and get a response in writing.
4. If you are creating your own content, make sure you add your own brand and present a call-to-action at the tail end of your presentation. Direct your visitors to a website where they can followup with you, and keep in mind that others may share your video, so you always want to provide a way home for friends of friends.

Spice up your blog with a video from YouTube to get started; it’s pretty easy. Once you get the hang of it, branch out into creating your own videos or audio podcasts. Your readers will appreciate you for it.

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

Here’s the rundown on a couple tips and tricks for any website copy that deals with copyrights or registered trademarks as well as for product or brand names that have special characters or that are hard to spell:

Let’s start with the trademark symbol. You have seen this on nearly every product brand, and it is always included in copywriting to ensure that legal ownership of the brand is established. While it is a good idea to include a trademark symbol in your copy, it is a terrible idea, and completely unnecessary to trademark every instance of the term. Over-use of the trademark symbol (™) or registered trademark symbol (®) in your copy will render it cumbersome and your readers will give up sooner than they might otherwise.

The other problem with using these symbols is that practically no one uses them in their search terms. By tacking these symbols to every use of your product name or brand you are limiting the relevancy between your posted content and the actual terms people are using to search for your site.

I recently found a web page containing only three paragraphs of copy with 20 trademark symbols scattered throughout. I found the page very difficult to read and quickly became distracted by all the clutter.

The solution is to trademark only the first instance of any product or brand name on any given page. By doing this you establish the legal ownership of the trademark and leave the successive instances free and clear for easy readability.

Another common problem I see is the use of special characters. You may have an umlaut or circumflex character with a line or dots over the top of a letter, or cedilla in your term with a small tail hanging down like in the word ‘façade’ (with a tail on the ‘c’). In these cases you may be tempted to incorporate the unique character for the sake of your brand, but be aware that almost no one will use it in their search, and the simple addition of a strange character can change the searchability of a word.

Like the solution for trademarks, use the special character in the first incidence of the word, and then use a more common spelling for all subsequent uses of the term.

Next lets quickly explore a brand-relate SEO tip for words that are hard to spell: When writing about a product or brand name, make a point to notice whether it is easy to misspell. Words don’t need to be hard to misspell, for instance some defy common practice by simply re-ordering letters that are more commonly used in a specific order.

Take for instance words that are spelled with ‘ea’ like ‘read’ or ‘instead’. A unique brand that uses the reverse of this (as in ‘AE’) may find that a lot of people are misspelling the term in their Google searches. This is an important consideration.

The solution: You may actually want to incorporate misspellings of your own terms to help capture additional search traffic, or to ensure that people who accidentally get it wrong are still able to find you. I don’t recommend misspelling your primary brands on your home page, but you may do well to miss one or two at the bottom of an occasional blog post.

It is true that in many cases the search engines will recognize a misspelling and direct traffic to the appropriate place, however you also need to consider that competitors may understand this tactic, also, and may be optimizing their copy to take advantage.

To find out if people are searching for misspellings of your brand, go to the Google Keywords Tool and do some research on misspellings. You will certainly be surprised at the number of searches that occur for misspelled words.

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

When posting to a blog, frequency is often a leading factor. Post length is not as critical, but there are some guidelines.

Writing as few as 50-100 words is adequate. That’s about one or two paragraphs. An article of this length is easy enough to produce without racking your brain for something good to produce, and provides enough juice for the search engines while being short enough to keep your human audience reading.

A perfectly sized post will be about 300 words. This is a good amount of info to provide for SEO, and is just enough for a quick read by your friends. Articles that approach 600 words are too much and risk getting truncated by the search engines, or not finished by humans who loose interest at the 300-400 mark. (interest isn’t fair; usually it’s that we don’t have a lot of time to absorb your wordy story.

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

A few weeks ago, Google confirmed this in an article titled Google Becomes More Local. The article was not about Google’s plans to open local shops across the country, it was about Google’s understanding that when we search for products and services, we usually want them in the geographic area from which we are searching.

Apple, too, recently revealed that they will support geolocation services in their new iPhone 3.0 software. Geolocation services will allow you to search from your iPhone and receive results based on your current location. Imagine standing on a city corner and searching for ’sushi’ and getting step-by-step directions to the nearest location for lunch. Pretty cool, and very powerful.

To take advantage of these new technologies, and to attract local search traffic to your site, you need to be incorporating geo-tagging and geo-centric keywords. One of the easiest ways to do this is to include the name of your city or town as a modifier for keywords in your articles. For instance, instead of simply stating that you are a ’sushi restaurant’, you might mention that you are an ‘Provo sushi restaurant‘. Using the name of your city helps the search engines understand your location, and is a good way to help capture a typical keyword search.

It helps to understand what your customers may be looking for when they type in a keyword string in a search engine. knowing they may be looking for your service in your town, or even local surrounding cities, will help you attract local customers to your site.

ListPipe articles always include geo-tagging. Our articles are linked using a combination of city names and keywords to help search engines better judge the type of service our customers are providing to a geographic area.

If you are posting a typical article of about 250-300 words, you should be including at least 2-3 links, but not more than 4-5. Links can and should lead to one of three places:

1. Your Home page;
2. Another post on your site;
3. Another site altogether (but make sure it is relevant).

I have a quick video that will show you how to add a link in your Wordpress blog.

Don’t go crazy with your links; just a couple for each post, and remember that linking to an outside site is a good thing. Just make sure the new link opens in a new window, and that the target site is relevant to your content.

Here’s how I create links in my blog:

1. Open two tabs in your browser, one for the blog editing window, and one for the ‘public’ side of your blog;
2. Write your article and get it ready to publish in the editing window. Before publishing…
3. Find a keyword in your new post that you want to link, highlight and copy it;
4. Now, Go to the public blog site (in your other tab) and perform a ‘Search’ for your keyword;
5. You should get a couple articles from your blog in the search results. Select from the list of resulting articles and click the headline;
6. Copy the URL from the browser window and move back to your editing window;
7. With your keyword still highlighted, click the ‘link’ icon at the top of your editing window and past in the URL;
8. Complete the process by identifying a ‘Target’ (open in Same if on your site, open in New if another), and add a Title. Don’t worry about ‘Class’ right now;
9. Hit ’save’, and treat yourself to a donut. Don’t forget to post your new blog article before you head out.

Jott is a remarkable technology that lets you call into your account from your cell phone and record a message. The message is automatically converted to text and stored in your Jott account. If you opt for a paid account, you can have Jott forward the message to an email address or text message destination. Pretty cool.

Cooler still is Jott’s ability to post to a Wordpress blog account. Simply create a Wordpress link in your Jott account and name it the next time you call in. When the operator asks you ‘Who would you like to Jott?’, name the link (‘My Blog’) and then speak your message. Within a few minutes, the Jott system will convert your voice mail message into text, and will post it to your account.

You can see an example of this in the post just below. I called my Jott account from my iPhone and spoke the words ‘Hi, this is my first try at posting to ListPipe from my Jott account‘. Jott converted it to text and posted it within a few minutes. Amazing!

Jott opens up a new world for bloggers who have trouble writing, and prefer to use the spoken word to create content. There are a couple limitations to know about before you get started: A free Jott account will only let you record 15 seconds of content. A paid upgrade will get you up to 30 seconds. Also, while Jott has impressive voice-to-text conversion, it did get a couple words wrong in my testing. Regardless, Jott was able to get it right most of the time without any trouble.

I am pretty impressed, and excited about the possibilities this presents for starting a blog about ‘a day in the life’, where I might call in throughout the day to report my activities. I could imagine a soldier or traveler using this to record a journal on-the-go, or a a salesman using it to post time-stamped updates from the road.

Give it a try; you can start a free account in just a few minutes.

You can view our recommended top ten wordpress training videos here. Just click on the headline for each numbered item to go to the video page.

You can also dive straight into our ListPipe Wordpress video library from this page.

Our how-to videos are presented in high quality Quicktime on the site, and are available on YouTube if you want to see them in a smaller version. When you get to YouTube, do a search for ‘ListPipe’ and ‘Wordpress’ to find all the videos. There are currently 13 of them, covering topics such as logging in, and inserting images.

Each video on our demo blog includes written instructions on how to complete the task in the latest Wordpress version. Each video is designed to teach you a specific task in between two and three minutes. For those of you new to Wordpress blogging, this is an excellent way to become familiar with the basics of your Wordpress system.

Take a look and let us know what you think. Enjoy!

We are starting with three new domains to choose from; one from each of our current target markets:

• www.mydentistblog.com
• www.myrealestateagentblog.com
• www.mychiropractorblog.com

When a new customer of ListPipe signs up for a new blog, and subscription to our custom copywriting service, you will have the opportunity to select from one of these domains, and then have the opportunity to name your own sub-domain in the system.

The result is an automated system that allows you to create a blog site such as ‘californiarealestate.myrealestateagentblog.com’. Naming a sub-domain with a keyword modifier provides an important advantage in SEO, and the more relevant domain names will go a long way to help expand our ability to market the blogs within our system.

We are thrilled that we can now deliver more relevant sub-domains for our future customers. Pass this news along to anyone you know in the real estate, dentistry, or chiropractic markets.