Katie Freiling featured WordPress blog

The featured WordPress blog this week is the personal, coaching and marketing site of Katie Freiling, a social media, blogging, and personal development coach in the online home business industry. This one takes the headline position because of its balance between the personal blog style, and the content and panache of a marketing guru. It uses the Fresh News theme by WooThemes from WooThemes

The site is a must see for anybody who is considering setting up a blog for marketing purposes, including nonprofit organizations, associations or coalitions, or even just to promote a worthy cause. It contains tips on Video marketing, getting top rankings in search engines, list building and numerous desirable achievements. The included YouTube videos are textbook examples of the way to build your brand online, in small chunks.

Among her plugins, Katie is using the WP-FacebookConnect, WP-Polls and the ubiquitous Contact Form 7. WP-FacebookConnect adds Facebook functionality to WordPress using the Facebook Connect APIs. It provides single sign-on, avatars, and News Feed publication of comments. WP-Polls adds an AJAX based poll system to your WordPress blog so that you can easily include a poll into a page or post.

You can find the plugins to add to your own WordPress site by following the links below:

Click here to visit Katie Freiling’s blog

Featured WordPress blog is Twingly

The featured WordPress blog this week is Twingly Blog, and more specificly a post by Martin Weiger called Europe’s 50 most popular startups according to the blogosphere.. Using data from their Twingly Blog Search they rank blogs in the global blogosphere from May 1 to July 31. This gives you a useful list of web and tech startups to check out for inspiration.

The blog has posts going back to September 2006, and provides lots of interesting comment and links to resources. It also contains the observation that A blog is a timeline; The fact that every blog is an ordered record of thoughts and opinions makes the aggregated data of many blogs very valuable.

This is a useful tip to remember when you are structuring your own WordPress posts, as you should consider that you are also writing for history, as well as promoting your latest product or venting your spleen. Surf back through the Twingly timeline and see how the writing style has progressed, and the rated Social Media sites and tools have emerged. Consider the way your own posts might be viewed in three months, or after a year, or in five year’s time.

The Twingly Blog uses the Neutra Theme, by Artmov which is a simple and elegant free theme. The site is hosted at WordPress.com.

Resources to check out:

3 Top Tips For Marketing Via Your Blog

In response to a number of inquiries about How to boost your Search position on Google, here are the three
Top Tips For Marketing Via Your Blog which we cover on our Low Cost Marketing Using WordPress one day seminar.

  • Chose a Compelling Title
  • Keep It Simple and To The Point
  • Tell Your Readers What They Want To Know

In order to boost your search engine rating on Google, Yahoo! and Bing, and make the most of your marketing effort, make sure that your blog posts take account of the advice they give about SEO. SEO is an acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”, and describes the techniques of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the natural or un-paid search results.

In the context of marketing your business, using your WordPress Blog to tell people about your goods and services is a great idea, so you want the most people to see it. This is the way to make Blogging help your business for very little cost, and so get the word out to as many people as possible. A good Blogger grabs the attention of their readers, and holds it long enough to establish an emotional connection, so that they will want to return.

Compelling Title
First of all chose a Compelling Title to grab the reader’s interest and attract them to visit your site. This may be repeated in the content, which will help the search engine spiders correctly rank your site. On Google, the PageRank will determine how close to the top of the search results your site or page appears in the list returned to the user. Make sure your title is relevant to your content and brings visitors who want to know more about your subject.

Keep Content Simple
Once your visitor has arrived, you have only a few seconds to give them enough information so that they can chose that they want to read on. Keep your content simple and to the point to hold their attention, and if possible provide a bullet pointed list near the start to aid comprehension. This will allow them to confirm that they are on the right site for their needs without wasting time reading the detail. It is better to have someone decide that they do not want your content and leave quickly, than have them read to the bottom and leave disappointed.

Give Them What They Want
Finally, tell your readers what they want to know, rather than what you want them to know. That means you have to write to satisfy your readers’ need for information, rather than for your need to tell people about your new Widget making process! Tell them what they will find immediately useful, so that they will feel grateful and want to visit you another time. A happy reader is more likely to buy from you than a resentful one who has had to wade through all your marketing copy to find the nuggets.

A word of caution about taking the optimization too far: some SEO experts will claim to get you to the top of Google using secret techniques known only to a few, for which you will pay a premium. As Google will tell you, deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site.

So in summary

  • Chose a Compelling Title to grab the reader’s interest
  • Keep your content simple and to the point to hold their attention
  • Tell your readers what they want to know, so they will visit you another time

To maximize the potential of your visitors, without spending a lot of money on marketing, apply the three tips listed above and you will satisfy your readers’ needs, help them to feel good enough to want to come again, while aiding the search engines put you it the correct place in the rankings. That has got to be a good deal,and a win for everybody.

Other Resources:

Top Tips For Writing A Blog

We often get asked to give advice and tips about writing a blog. Common questions people ask are:
How much should I write on my blog? How frequently do I need to add posts? What do I do if I get stuck and can’t think of anything to write? While we cover this sort of thing during our WordPress training, it doesn’t hurt to extract a couple or three top tips for writing a blog, just as a reminder. They are:

  • Aim for 200-300 word to start with
  • Write every day if you can
  • Find Inspiration in anything you do

How Long Should I Make My Post?
For a beginner, we advise you to make your first few posts about 200-300 words, about something you are really passionate about. If you find you have a lot more to say, check if you could split it into two or more smaller articles. If you are a prolific writer, then you can make you posts longer, but for a start, aim to have just three bullet points.

How Frequently Should I Write?
Our advice is to publish small articles every day on your site if you can. That way the content stays fresh. If you find that too time consuming, try a small submission every two or three days, or once a week. If you have split a long article into two smaller segments, post the second part the next day

What Do I Do If I Get Stuck?
Anybody can get a block if they are a writer, it is par for the course. If you found yourself going too long without inspiration try this easy sequence:

  • Clear your mind and do something completely different for a while.
  • When you have had a complete break, go and read the newspaper, on-line news, watch TV or surf the net.
  • When you see something which interests you, imediatly write about it!

If you use this technique, you can find Inspiration in anything you do. It really is that easy! Good luck and happy blogging!

Improving Your Search Engine Results

Have you ever wondered how to get your business up to the top of Google or Yahoo! search results? Companies and individuals the world over have pondered this almost since Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with the idea of PageRank (after Larry Page) and founded Google. Some specialist companies charge hundreds of pounds a month just to help you keep your business at the top of the Google results.

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of measuring its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.

So how do you improve your position in the search results? Our advice is that if you want to reach the top of the Google search engine then you should build a Blog on your website, and start Blogging.

How do Blogs increase your placement in the Google search engine results? First, Blogs increase the amount of content on your website. Google spiders love to see content, and the more content you have the better. If you have enough content on your site, then Google will deem you an authority site on the topic. If you provide a service rather just having a page full of advertisements, then you get a better page ranking.

If you accept that Blogs are the way to go, the next question would be what Blog program to use? The top Internet Marketers in the world recommend WordPress, which is available at wordpress.org. For some options on starting a Blog see our WordPress Tags

Another advantage of WordPress is that it is a top pick for many search engines. WordPress creates site maps and automatically pings the search engines each time you update your Blog. The best news is that WordPress is FREE.

By making Blogging part of your daily schedule you can increase content on your site and help to improve your page ranking in the search engines. If you can increase your placement simply by writing a Blog, then why haven’t you started Blogging yet? We will be running a regular series of articles on Blogging, WordPress and Search Engine Results on this site to help you get started on the Internet. Why not come back every day and check us out?

For resources to help you get started with your first Blog, see the following links: