The story of a Serial Blogger - by Paul Steven

Tis' time for a story. Set in a far, far away land. So, snuggle up get cosy and I'll tell you how being a serial blogger has been the most financially rewarding move I have ever made.

Y'see, a long time ago I started life as a simple SEO guy, forever cultivating my digital patch, watching in earnest as my well cared for search positions took root and sprouted into high ranking websites. Life was good but hard work as mine wasn't the only prized garden in the competition.

When a stranger came calling

Then one day I received a phone call from a stranger not-from-these-parts asking if I had ever contemplated running his companies weblog on a
paid-per-post service. I had partaken in the art of blogging on my own site but never taken it seriously as a written work. Because my niche is of the optimised variety, I felt more comfortable in discussing the benefits of harvesting your own organic garden than talking about the tools and methods used. There were far better commentators than myself that were by far more green-fingered than I.

Overcoming the social media short-term fix - by James Duthie

Social media works as hard as you do. When you’re happy, healthy, creative and insightful you can expect it to be your best friend. But beware… social media is a fickle creature. It won’t support you through troubled times. In fact, when times get tough, it’ll leave you for Angelina Jolie in a second.

Hand’s up - if you're addicted to social media? I know I am... Dave is too... he confessed his obsession for Sphinn recently (hardly a secret by the way Dave… and please put your hand down… ). And to be honest, what’s not to love? Oodles of traffic, a smattering of inbound links & a couple more RSS subscribers each time you publish new work. Everyone’s happy

… until you do something silly, you know, like breaking your hand (or worse)!

Quite simply social media is not scalable, nor reliable as a single person blogger. It is purely a short-term traffic generation tactic. Social media requires a constant and ongoing effort. As soon as your personal blogging production line breaks (pun intended), so too does your social media output. Failure to produce new content is the quickest road possible to a social media traffic flatline.

Somebody call me a doctor!

So what does all this mean? Should you abandon all social media activities pronto? Hell no!

Social media is a critical part of blog promotion. Many of us get 50%+ of our traffic from social media. And while conversions are low, each social media traffic spike is sure to generate at a least a couple of new RSS subscribers.

What it does mean is that you need to balance short term traffic hits with sustainable longer-term traffic generation tactics. Don’t place all your eggs into the fickle social media basket, or they may end up getting scrambled.  

*The following is a guest post from David Snyder; life saver and SEO blogging junkie.

I let out a juvenile giggle every time I listen to SEO’s and other Internet marketers’ rail off their initial strategies, strategies that rarely involve high quality content creation plans. So often the cliché, “Content is King,” is screamed through blogs, but rarely is it the king of online marketing plans.

Without quality content why would anyone come to your site? Without quality content why is your site relevant enough to rank? Without quality content how will you convince anyone to utilize your site the way you want it to be utilized?

Ok, step back. Understand something before we continue my rant, coming from a heavy writing background, having taught writing for several years, the reason I got into Internet marketing was my love for writing.

So, obviously I am biased.

If you are still reading this post, it is possible your content needs some help.

How do you measure success?

So you want to measure the success or popularity of your blog do you? My pal Jeff Quipp was thinking out loud again a while ago about this very concept; Measuring Blog Popularity. In the post he outlined some possible measurement tools (sources) and asked for some thoughts from everyone. Once I began to craft a comment I found that it was running away from me early on. And so I shall continue the Canadian connection posting handball habit that my fellow Canuck and I began last year on a few occasions. My beer to his pizza... let's look at benchmarking a blog.

I think the first thing one needs to address is that trying to use analytics to measure engagement will get you no end of grief from many in the analytics sector and with good reason. They are not readily measurable and quantifiable and this can mean some fuzzy data at best. It is a grey area which gives us some insight into other angles of perception more than hard and fast numbers or primary indicators. Branding activities are rarely best served by metrics.

To Each His Own

For me, right away, I felt that each of the proposed metrics have a different valuation in various markets. That is to say that Comments on a Blog might be more important in a demographic where interaction is a large influencer. This would also be true with value of other aspects such as inbound links in the over-all scheme of things. In the case of a seasoned blog over a newer entry into the game, backlinks may be a primary indicator whereas an older blog with a robust link profile may not value this as much. Each factor has unique dependencies that would dictate the ultimate starting valuations. There is no hard and fast rule set that I was able to see. So let’s just play with some generalizations to get the juices flowing