It’s YOUR blog. You need to take charge from the start. If you follow this short guideline, you can be the Mad Scientist and create your own winning formula.

Almost nobody comes to your website ready to buy. Heck, these days, they need a darned good reason to even give you their contact information. They’ve already signed up for ten tons of worthless, time-wasting stuff online. You’ve got to make their eyes pop to have any impact whatsoever.

And that job is up to your website content. Your visitors are looking for help when they come to your blog. If your blog post is designed to make a sale, you have missed your visitors by a mile. They are nowhere near buying.

So you’ve got to entertain, enlighten, and/or educate. Tell them something that’s valuable to them, something they don’t already know, something that makes them say, “Oh, really?”

Recent studies have shown that a vast majority of visitors to old-style sales pages hit the “Back” button immediately. If you try to sell them on your blog, check your stats. You will see a too-high number of “bounces” (people who land on your site and go away immediately). They’ll go someplace else to find the answers they’re looking for, since they can’t get any help from you.

First, you need to really understand your prospect. What really motivates them? What do they love? What do they hate? What questions do they need answered more than anything?

Next, the best strategy to create content that searcher-prospects will salivate over is to REALLY narrow your focus. Take what you know about your prospects’ motivations and create your own very small speciality area of focus where you can be an uber-expert. Set up a Feed Reader to bring you all the research you need, and publish the best stuff on your blog.

You need to really picture the value you can provide your site visitors. Never in human history has there been so much information available. Most people, even those who know what they want, get totally overwhelmed in a hurry. If you get good at searching through lots of stuff and finding what they really, really want, then you have performed a huge service … and they won’t forget you.

“Louis, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship!”
– Humphrey Bogart to Claude Rains; last line of Casablanca

Richard Dennis

A key part of your Net Traffic Machine is the ability to use analytics to leverage search engine results and create more visibility for yourself. To do that, you need to know & understand what the search engines do, in general. How do the SEs work? What is a search engine algorithm? You need to know the answer to these questions in order to get authority status for your website, leading to free search engine listings. And I know some of these words sound scary. But all they really mean is, “Track your results.” And you can get a simple Wordpress plug-in to do that for you automatically.

How does Google decide who gets ranked #1 for any web search term? How do they decide the Top 10 results, which are the only ones that get on the first page when you click to search?

What we know is, Google measures key metrics. Here is their strategic thinking:

• How important is your content? Is it high-quality?
• How big is your network?
• Can your reputation be measured?
• How many people subscribe to your blog RSS feed?
• If you are on Twitter, how many followers do you have - and how big is THEIR network (their followers).
• So wherever you publish your niche, how big is your network and how big is your network’s network?

Google’s spider wants to know. Google is doing what marketers have done since the dawn of marketing. They track what people do. They use a spreadsheet to compile statistics and then they make their decisions, based on their measured actions of the crowd.

An easy, obvious way to measure your network and their regard for you is, who links to you? How many of them? Are they people of influence (measured by how many link to them)?

To get consistent high regard from Google, you must:

1. Consistently build inbound links from people of influence.
2. Consistently turn out content brimming with the LSI words that tell the search engines you really know your subject.

If you learn to execute these 2 steps every day, you should be very happy with the results you get from Google and the other search engines.

Richard Dennis