“Dear Bloggers, I Apologise. Regards, the SEO Industry” plus 1 more

Dear Bloggers, I Apologise. Regards, the SEO Industry

Posted: 09 Jan 2013 12:09 PM PST

This guest post is by Daylan Pearce of Next Digital.

There are three common reactions I get from people when I tell them what it is I do for a job.

"What is that?"
"Oh that's cool, how does that work?"
*Rolls eyes* "Oh riiiight, you're one of those guys!"

So what is it that I do for a job? I'm an SEO. Each day, I work with businesses and websites to make sure their sites and Internet presences are in the best shape possible to be found in search engines.

A big part of my role is to respond to the first two of the reactions, which is something I actually enjoy doing. These two responses open up a door for me to explain something I really love doing. It's the perfect opportunity to educate someone on how I can help make a website, author or idea as visible as possible online.

Yet it's the third response I mentioned that I, and many others, am finding is becoming more common lately. SEO has become a bit of a dirty word (okay, it's an acronym, not a word) lately. And one of the most vocal groups of this negativity is from you guys—the blogging community.

There is a growing perception that SEO is full of tricks and cheats. That it is an industry full of scammers who are trying to use your site for nefarious and dastardly reasons.

And why wouldn't you think that? If you're a frequent visitor to this site, then you're probably someone who receives daily emails from SEO companies looking for a guest post or link on your site. You know the ones—those poorly written and often templated emails asking if you'll publish their awesome, relevant, and completely unique blog content on your site. The ones that remind you to “please ensure you use followed links, oh and please use these specific keywords.”

It's insulting to you and your readers and they always seem to come from people who are doing it for SEO purposes. After cleaning out your inbox each day with the same rubbish guest post outreach emails, I don't blame bloggers for not trusting SEO and those who claim to do it. We look like lazy, condescending jerks.

But we're not all like that, I promise. I believe you can divide up SEO today into three categories. Every single person within the SEO industry will fit into one of these no matter who they are.

The scammer SEO

These people understand SEO, no doubt. They understand what algorithmically makes words and sites rank well and they will use any trick or tactic necessary to get those rankings.

Black-hat SEOs and companies want wins at any cost, and unfortunately the people who do partake in these tactics do often get results at the expense of those trying to do it by the Google/Bing/Yahoo etc guidelines and rules. However, these wins are often short-lived as search engines target these methods constantly, penalizing those who use them.

How to spot them

A lot of the time these tactics are obvious—we all know what spam comments and emails look like. Sometimes, though, the tactics can get a little trickier.

Domain cloaking and redirects from approved links already on your site are two common tricks. Perhaps check your analytics now and again for any abnormalities within your referrer data or link profile:

keyword stuffing
redirects
linking to doorway pages
comment spamming.

The lazy SEO

These are the people within the SEO industry which blogging communities are probably exposed to most.

They are the ones that fill up your blog comment threads with seemingly obscure and irrelevant content trying to get an easy link on your site. They are the ones who send you those poorly written emails exclaiming their undying love of your blog to get a link. They are the ones who keep those companies who sell 1000 links for $49.95 in business.

How to spot them

These guys often have a shotgun approach to blog outreach: send many emails and hope at least one gets a response. They:

follow a generic (template) format
perpetrate spelling errors
have no personality
wish to write about topics not relevant to your site
offer money
have specific technical link requests.

The genuine SEO

This group of people know that SEO is more than just about title tags, directory submissions, and spamming blogs in the hopes of getting one response that agrees to a guest post.

Genuine SEOs will and probably have contacted you because they believe that they have something that could be of interest to your audience and their client/site. They are first and foremost online marketers who are looking to effectively convey a message to a relevant and engaged audience. The link is a nice by-product, but forming the relationship and reaching an audience is the real goal.

How to spot them

These SEOs can be trickier to identify due to the sheer volume of rubbish emails that often surround them. But typical features of a good marketer is someone who is offering:

relevant content to your audience
personalised contact and information
an understanding of your blog
a knowledge of the topic they are talking about
enthusiastic and personable interaction
a genuine tone of voice.

The shape of SEO

Unfortunately, we are all lumped under the one banner of SEO, a title that as an industry is having its reputations run into the ground because of quick wins and lazy tactics.

The ironic (and tragic) part is that SEO is all about building brand awareness and boosting reputation, yet the tactics that a huge number in the industry use to try and achieve this goal are destroying our very own brand and reputation. SEOs are hurting SEO.

Ultimately, it's up to us as SEOs to help make the Internet and search results better. That may seem corny as hell, but we know how this search stuff works. We need to stop turning the Internet against us.

There is a reason that 19 of your 20 blog out reach emails don't get a reply. Instead of coming up with tactics to get a link, we need to come up with and promote tactics to build an audience. Otherwise it's kind of like Superman using his powers to become the world's biggest super-villain instead of helping those in need.

So, on behalf of all people within the SEO industry who do search marketing and optimization with the view to benefit users and readers a like, I apologise for those who don't.

Daylan Pearce is search lead for Australian Digital Agency Next Digital. You can find him via his blog at DaylanDoes.com where he writes about all things search & social or on Google Plus.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Dear Bloggers, I Apologise. Regards, the SEO Industry

3 No-nonsense Strategies for Profitable Part-time Blogging

Posted: 09 Jan 2013 06:07 AM PST

This is a guest post by Matt Alden S. of DividendMonk.com.

If you’re blogging as a part-time income stream rather than a full-time profession, then your priorities can be substantially different from the fill-time blogger’s.

A full-time problogger will likely focus on maximizing overall revenue, whereas a part-time problogger will focus on maximizing revenue per hour.

One of the largest problems I see with some underperforming smaller blogs is that they’re not focused on that key difference. Part-time bloggers often do not have advice given to them that is specialized to their part-time situation, and instead they end up following what full-time bloggers are doing, with mixed results.

Darren wrote a great post on part-time blogging over three years ago, but that post missed these three strategies that I’ve found invaluable for achieving part-time blogging success.

1. Be selective with social media

Full-time bloggers have hours every day where they can try new things, and can afford to spend time in areas that don’t yet give them a great ROI. Part-time bloggers, however, need to have a higher ROI on most of their activities.

In other words, don’t be on every social network just because you feel you ought to be. Don’t worry about doing every thing that every blogger is doing.

For example, I’m on Twitter, but Twitter is not where I spend any real time and it’s not where any real traffic is going to come from for me. Why? Because I write about long-term value investing, which is like watching paint dry. Not exactly enthralling Twitter material.

And yet, I have received over 50,000 visitors and over 130,000 pageviews from a single social media platform: Seeking Alpha. It’s a large site that brings investors and readers together. Moreover, the traffic statistics show that in terms of pages per visit and time per visit, it’s my single highest quality source of traffic.

The point here is to follow the 80/20 rule: focus 80% of your time on the stuff that gives you an excellent ROI, and use the other 20% for experimentation.

2. Stand out with ridiculously high-quality posts

Large blogs and websites can afford to publish mediocre content. That’s not to say that all large sites do so (in fact they generally got to their size by being well above average in the first place); it’s just to say that they can do it if they want to, and some of them do.

Very large sites that have years of full-time focus or multiple writers have strong enough domain authority to get mediocre content to rank well in search engines. Plus, their intangible brand authority can make fair content appear to be superior content.

Part-time bloggers don’t have this luxury. You’re not going to be able to write mediocre content and get it to rank well, and your brand is not yet strong enough to carry its own weight.

The emphasis on the part-timer should be to maximize individual post value. Spending 12 hours a week writing two or three extraordinarily high-quality articles will usually get you further than spending the same amount of time publishing every single day with less unique and compelling content.

When you’re setting out to write an awesome post, there are small things you can do to give yourself a huge advantage. If you’re preparing to write about something, first stop and do a Google search for it. Check out the main articles on that subject that are on the first page of the search results. Read or skim through them, and gauge their quality.

Your goal now is to write a post that is far superior to any of the posts on the first page of Google for this subject. Your post will not be a “me too” post, but will instead be the new high-water mark of quality and authority for this subject. You’ll write it in a more personal, more complete, more concise, and more original way.

3. Having a product helps greatly

Successfully selling a product or service online revolves around content marketing these days. That is, you get an audience by providing excellent free content that solves their problems, and then you use this content platform to present products or services to your readers that further solve their problems or help them in some way.

Your revenue per visitor, and therefore usually your revenue per hour, generally goes up substantially if you offer a high-quality product that fits your audience, compared to relying strictly on advertising or affiliate sales. Consider spending some time to create an outstanding product that requires little maintenance when it’s finished, and then offer it up on your blog.

When I did this, and published a $16 ebook and spreadsheet tool that stood out in the niche, the revenue from the ebook outpaced my advertising revenue and brought in thousands of extra dollars in profit. Higher-priced offerings will generally do even better than this. A good product or service genuinely solves problems or creates opportunities, improves your authority in your niche, and can bring in some solid income for your invested time.

A key advantage of having your own product or service is that you can get access to other bloggers’ platforms. When you rely on advertising, you’re limited to the size of your own platform, which generally isn’t going to be huge if you’re working part time. Similarly, when you sell affiliate products on your platform, you’re still limited to the size of your own platform.

But when you produce your own, high-quality product, then you now have something that can be sold on other writers’ platforms as well as your own. You can tap into other peoples’ email lists, social media accounts, and blog articles, if you’re the source of the product and they’re the marketer.

Use these strategies if you’re focusing on part-time blogging. Maximize your revenue per hour by being selective about what digital real estate you spend time on, by focusing on quality over quantity, and by leveraging your expertise onto platforms that are larger than your own.

What other advice can you add from your own experience? I’d love to hear it in the comments below.

Matt Alden S. publishes the free Dividend Insights Newsletter, and helps readers build wealth through investing for the long term in dividend stocks and other assets.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

3 No-nonsense Strategies for Profitable Part-time Blogging