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:

We have spent a good deal of time discussing social media networks like Facebook and Twitter; it seems these have been all the rage this last year and for good reason. However I don’t see these networks carrying the excitement throughout 2010. I agree these will remain important facets of our online marketing, and they will continue to be an important way to reach a close circle of friends and followers with your message.

Facebook and Twitter have achieved staple status and aren’t going away any time soon, but the early adopter wave is over and the laggards are now catching on. I see these as must-have commodities toward the end of 2010, but not the primary differentiators they were for 2009.

Facebook remains as the king of social networking, and new business tools being developed will help businesses take advantage of groups, pages and fans. Watch as Facebook evolves into a more mature business tool in 2010 as professional users give this environment the credibility it deserves as a powerful business forum.

Twitter is a great place to make quick announcements, but watch this space continue to evolve as a research platform where an instant pulse can be taken for messaging campaigns and streetwise advice.

I remain convinced that blogging will again shine through as the king of online marketing. Content is King of search results and there’s just no better way to present frequent, relevant content on the internet.

There are a lot of people blogging out there, but many have yet to find their groove, and most are still trying to capture an audience. Blogging is the perfect mix of story-telling, presentation, discussion and debate. For those that can concentrate on their niche and present content that is interesting, engaging, and optimized for search engines indexing, you’re blog will be the primary differentiator that sets up the reason to use Facebook and Twitter for your 2010 online marketing.

As always, your basic plan should be founded on a regular blog with featurettes and announcements going out as often as possible to your Facebook and Twitter audience.

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:

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:

If you are marketing from a website, the more links there are pointing to your website, the more popular it appears to be to the search engines. Think of this as a kind of ‘popularity contest’.

The search engines rely on popularity to help determine how valuable your site is to potential searchers. Although this is not the only criteria the search engines use, this is an important factor in your overall online marketing approach.

It goes like this: search engines are delivering a product to their customers, and that product is search results. The search engines know that you are looking for the most relevant sites possible, and they know, too, that people who find sites to be particularly relevant, they like to link to them. Search engines track the number of links there are to any given website, and use this information to help determine where to place the site in the search rankings to give their customers the most relevant sites to choose from. A site that has more links is deemed more valuable to searchers, and is therefore given a higher priority than a site that has fewer links.

To be clear; this is not the ONLY way a search engine grades a site, and there are certainly cases where more links gets trumped by some other data point. Nevertheless; links are important and it makes sense to build as many quality links as you can.

So, how to build links? There are a couple ways to get you started:

1. Make comments on blogs. Find blogs that discuss your market topic and get involved. Make comments on their posts as often as you can. Most blog sites will allow you to add your URL to the comment. If they don’t, move on. When you do make comments, make sure they are thoughtful and that they contribute to the conversation; you don’t want to be seen as an annoyance.
2. Get involved in forum discussions. Forums are a great place to get involved with other birds of a feather, and allow you to make successive comments. In most cases, you can include your URL in each of your comments. Again, make sure you are contributing to the conversation and building your credibility with valid comments. Don’t get into arguments, and try to avoid being critical of other people in the forum. Basically: Play nice in the sandbox.
3. Post news to free news sites. Whenever you post content to your blog, make sure you are taking advantage of opportunities to repost your content. There are a number of free sites out there that allow you to post your news and articles. For news, simply do a search for ‘Free News Posting‘ to find a list of sites that allow you to post for free. For regular articles, use sites like StumbleUpon.com, Digg.com, Delicious.com and even Facebook and Twitter.

Note that all of these sites are free. All it takes is a little elbow grease and your site will begin to shine.

A final point: Make sure you choose your sites carefully. As a popularity contest, your reputation is built on the reputation of the sites from which you are linked. The more popular the site, the better. Like being a good friend of the most popular kid in school, you get some of the credibility from the leading sites. Conversely, links from bad sites known for spam or suspicious practices will tend to hurt your site. So be selective.

Listen to the Corporate Blogger Tips Podcast of this post:

1. Research
2. Creative writing
3. Linking

Before we get into those, let’s talk about ‘why’.

Keywords are basically the anchor text of your article that help readers, and search engines, determine your relevance. In terms of ‘relevance’, there are no wrong answers; you are not trying to be relevant to a common standard. Rather, you are trying to be relevant to your own chosen topic.

For instance; If you are writing about ‘humanitarianism’, you will want your keywords to be relevant to the subject of ‘humanitarianism’. Relevant terms could be ‘philanthropy’ or ‘charity’. Conversely, you will want to avoid a concentration of key words that are not relevant such as ‘Brittany Spears’ or ‘horseback riding’. Unless, of course, your humanitarianism involves giving a horse to Brittany, but you get the picture.

It all has to do with ‘relevance’. Relevance is how closely related your keywords are to the subject you most want to be indexed for in the search engines. As the search engines scour your post for relevant keywords, they will choose the predominant topics and use those to index your article. In this way, a reader can find you when they search for ‘humanitarianism’ in a search engine. The key for you is in making the relevant keywords within your article easy to identify. The easier it is for a search engine to determine the keywords in your article, the more prominent you will be in the search results for your given topic.

Research

One of the most daunting tasks in effective blogging is in finding the most appropriate keywords. It’s not that hard, but does take a little ‘know-how’.

The first steps in your research are to determine the subject of your article, to outline topics, and to write down your assumed keywords. Assuming keywords is easy; just imagine what your audience might type into a search engine in hopes of finding your specific article.

Next, you’ll want to conduct some scientific research to confirm your choices, or to find viable alternatives.

A great tool for this task is found at http://google.com/keywords . The keyword research tool at Google is as good as any, and takes advantage of Googles remarkable collection of data. Once you enter your assumed keyword idea in their form, and get past the annoying-but-necessary captcha, you’ll be presented with a spreadsheet of data that now requires some study.

Listed in order of relevance, with the most relevant term at the top, you will see a list of related terms with information about how much competition there is for the term, and how many local searches and global searches have been conducted on the term in the last month.

Your job now is to find keyword alternatives that have a good balance of competition vs hits. The higher the competition value, the more the keyword is used in other blogs and the lower the chances are for you to stick out among the crowd. High competition keywords are tempting because of the high number of hits they usually receive. However you may do better by selecting a low competition term and shooting for a greater piece of a smaller pie. You don’t necessarily need to avoid high competition terms, so long as you are working in the lower competition ones, too.

Note that further down in the spreadsheet you will find a list of alternative terms that may help in your creative writing exercise.

Creative Writing

Perhaps the most difficult step in your effort to incorporate keywords, creative writing now requires that you come up with a story, and develop the ability to include terms in an appropriate density. You’ll want to include as many as 10 percent keywords to your SEO copywritng. Tricky, but over time it becomes second nature. Ten percent may be a bit too much for some articles, so shoot for a minimum of five percent.

It is also important to maintain ‘human readability’. The search engines understand language, grammar, and punctuation, so you will want to pay attention to these important aspects of writing to avoid appearing as spam and receiving an index penalty. Write your article in natural language, and use keywords as often as you can without creating lists or appearing to be blatant.

Be sure to modify your keywords with localization as well as with descriptive terms. There are two ways to modify your keywords;

1. With a descriptive modifier, so that if our primary keyword is ‘humanitarian’, we can say ‘humanitarian relief’ to make it a stronger keyword phrase.
2. With a localization such as ‘Miami Humanitarian’, which helps the search engines localize my search index for people within the Miami area searching for the term ‘humanitarian’.

Localization has become one of the most important aspects of keyword usage because of the mobile revolution, where people search from a mobile device to find local products and services. The search engines have responded with more localized search results and listings. You can take advantage of this simply by adding the name of your town in front of a keyword.

Keyword Linking

Finally, be sure to link your keywords to appropriate pages around your site, or to an appropriate page on your home site. A few rules of thumb to consider include:

Don’t link excessively. In a 300-word article it is appropriate to link 3-4 keywords. More and you will appear to be spamming, and will dilute the authority you are giving to each keyword. (Authority is a measurement of strength based on the relevance of the article.)

Don’t link a specific keyword more than once; no need to waste authority on the same keyword. Keep it simple for the search engines to follow, and don’t waste their time by leading them to the same place from the same keyword multiple times.

Use alternate tags to add information to your links. This is a great way to help the search engines understand more clearly your terms and their specific modifiers.

I talked about keywords in this week’s tech call with Paul Jensen. Here’s an excerpt if you’re the listening type:

Note that there were a few technical snafus in the podcast, and I didn’t realize the mic was on the computer, and not in the headphones, resulting in some fan noise.

The next one will be better.

Google released a new Internet browser into the wild yesterday, and almost instantly created a sweeping hit. While I sit by and wait for the Mac version to come out, I couldn’t help but notice some important chatter on the new browser interface, and what some of the features are doing for the SEO marketplace.

In particular, the new search feature in Chrome instantly returns the top five results for any search. What?!?

Yes, you heard correctly; the new browser will show a user the top five results for any search typed into the search field. This means that if your website is number six, you may not be immediately visible to a searcher. Talk about turning the market on it’s head…

It has long been known that a ‘top three’ presence was almost critical. Statistically speaking, most of us select our sites from the top two or three slots on any given search results page. Even worse, we typically do this within 7-10 seconds of getting the results page, and we rarely go below the top three. Searchers almost never go to page two. Nevertheless, a presence on the top page, or the ‘top ten’ was seen as a holy grail of SEO, and generally considered good placement.

Chrome may change the way we look at placement, and will certainly make a top five placement the critical goal.

Check out what CNN had to say about it…

Beehive Credit Union is an up and coming financial credit union with roots as far back as 1954. They have branches in most major areas of Utah, including several in the Salt Lake City area, Provo, and as far south as St. George.

You can see each of the Beehive Credit Union banking blogs by clicking the links below:

Murray Beehive Credit Union

http://murray.beehivecredit.com/

Parley’s Way Beehive Credit Union

http://parleysway.beehivecredit.com/

Provo Beehive Credit Union

http://provo.beehivecredit.com/

Salt Lake City Beehive Credit Union

http://saltlakecity.beehivecredit.com/

Sandy Beehive Credit Union

http://sandy.beehivecredit.com/

South Jordan Beehive Credit Union

http://southjordan.beehivecredit.com/

St. George Beehive Credit Union

http://stgeorge.beehivecredit.com/

Taylorsville Beehive Credit Union

http://taylorsville.beehivecredit.com/

ListPipe provides Powerful Custom Content™ for Beehive Credit Union. We post a new customized blog article each week that includes research on keywords, and high value links to important pages on their home site.