World Wide Creative is fortunate to have Louis Janse van Rensburg on their team. Manager of the Johannesburg branch, Louis is highly passionate about the entrepreneurial cause. He has been involved with many successful online projects including Virgin Mobile, The Thabo Mbeki Foundation, Honda South Africa and Exclusive Books. Louis has also been involved with numerous bloggers such as Jay Naidoo. Heavy Chef got the chance to hear what he has learnt from working closely with successful bloggers.

Hi Louis. There is such a variety of blogging platforms. Are different platforms more appropriate than others, depending on your goal?

To answer that question I will point out the main players in the blogging industry. There is Blogger which is a Google product. WordPress has a very loyal following, and is a very relevant platform. It has done very well as a back end for content-heavy websites like magazines and newspapers . In recent years we have seen the rise of email-to-post websites like Tumblr and Posterous. These have come to the forefront because of their fast posting abilities.  Posterous and Tumblr are more for lifestyle blogging, while WordPress works for content heavy blogging. Blogger is the middle ground between WordPress and Tumblr.

How can one ensure that their blog stands out amongst all the others?

Well it is really difficult because there is so much competition. As a blogger you’re also competing with social networks and other blogs. It has become increasingly difficult and some people have taken extreme routes which are not sustainable . There is no quick way to build a reputation. My advice is write on a frequent basis and create quality content. If you want to launch a blog for a quick win then it is not the right platform for you. Take Seth Godin’s blog for example. Godin is a prominent marketing guy and his blog does really well. It has become a place where people can comment and interact. He didn’t set up his blog yesterday; through time he has delivered an innovative way of writing. He started as a writer, and his blog became a natural extension of that. A blog should be an extension of your brand and not the centre of it.

A local example is South African blog KEO which is very popular. It is run by a Rugby journalist and was started a number of years ago. This blog exposed the Rugby Kamp Staaldraad in 2001 and 2002. From this, he wrote a book which got a lot of attention and this attention led to a successful blog and a loyal community. It is one of South Africa’s most successful blogs with about 120 comments on each article. This blog picked up on something and went with it. The message is, creating a successful blog is a long process and requires a lot of hard work.

What about creating a general blog versus a niche blog?

Specialized blogs will always do better. A blog has to speak to certain people and say loud and clear what it stands for. A blogger needs to focus on a specific category.

Would it make sense to make your blog search engine friendly?

Yes it definitely makes a difference. All roads lead to Google, so focus your content on topics that people would want to read. You can also do off-site work like utilizing Twitter, Facebook as well as other blogs. If you want to get into the dark arts of blog marketing you would need to speak to an SEO guru, but on a basic level make sure your blog appears on Google and that you have links to other blogs.

Any other words of advice for keen bloggers?

Blogging gives a massive opportunity to set up a profile online. There is nothing more powerful than the written, or typed, word. I would advise students and graduates to set up a blog as a way to create your own portfolio and start building a brand. When you apply for jobs, people research you before they meet you and a prospective employer will Google you. Telling people to look at your blog is a compelling argument to prospective employers these days.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, Louis. We look forward to many hours of productive and successful blogging in the future. Follow Louis on Twitter here.

Let me talk to you about “Author Rank” for a few…

It’s one of the ways the face of SEO has dramatically shifted in the last 12 months.

What Google had admitted to is that WHO you are matters in SEO. Google is actively monitoring how much the blog posts YOU produce are shared, tweeted, linked on Facebook Fan Pages, etc. Google knows that if the internet as a whole isn’t listening to you and isn’t sharing your sites, it’s probably not great work. And if it’s not great work, it probably doesn’t deserve to be ranked highly in Google and get all that free SEO traffic.

That’s the situation in a nutshell. This kind of outside engagement via social media – and who YOU and YOUR blog are (and Google’s interpretation of your popularity in the marketplace) that are gonna matter more and more in 2012.

I’m super excited about these changes because it means that big corporate brands or the people with the biggest link building budgets won’t necessarily be the automatic winners in the top 10 of the SERPs.

Who’s going to win are the folks doing work that matters – the folks creating something worth sharing.

It’s where I’ve focused my 2012 business plan and where I hope you will too. I sincerely believe that if you don’t, your sites will be left behind, an ancient (in internet years, anyway!) but useless relic.

This idea – really putting your reputation (which Google is looking at) on the line and making a difference in your niche – is a lot scarier than buying some PLR articles, installing WordPress and adding Adsense to the mix. It’s dangerous. You could fail. It might be embarrassing.

But it’s deeply inspiring too.

If the idea of creating a legacy with your business resonates with you, take a look at the movement behind this page.

Invigorating, isn’t it?

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I’ve started a new site, in a new niche, and I want to share it with you today.

It’s a little fish in a big pond right now – but over time it will grow and become an authority in the niche. You’re invited to come along for the journey and watch the techniques I’m using to get there.

I’ve actually owned the domain for a while but never really got 100% clear on what I wanted to do with it, but I was very much inspired by what my cousin is doing at ChelseaWears (Always Be Shipping folks, you know exactly what I’m talking about!). I knew that I had a very different perspective and interests then she does, of course, but it reminded me that sometimes people just make blogs about things they love. (What a jaded, internet marketer kind of realization to have to have!).

One merchant I’ve always wanted to work with but never got approved for was Sephora. And a perfect storm kind of came together when Chelsea started blogging, I was inspired and California was booted out of the Amazon Associates program.

You see, I didn’t focus much of my income on the Associates program, but I did look for a replacement for those Amazon links I had out in the wild once I’d been canceled. I found Skimlinks, which allowed me to continue to use my existing Amazon affiliate links. Very cool – but when I logged in, I saw that they had quite a few – hundreds really – of other merchants I now had instant access to, and one of those was Sephora.

So here I had a domain name I’d wanted to use for years, some fun ideas for it (not just “business as usual”) and access to a merchant who’s also my favorite store ever that gelled so perfectly with the content I’d wanted to publish on the domain.

It all worked!

So I’m happy to share Redomestication with you today (boys, even you can learn something here – it’s the strategy, not the specific topic that’s important!).

It’s a bit different in that it’s not focused on a main keyword for the domain as a whole, but rather on individual keyphrases at the post level.

I am maintaining a separate Facebook Fan Page, a Twitter account and Tumblr account for the site, so if you want to keep up with what’s new, those are all great ways to do it (they’re linked from the Redomestication home page).

I’ll talk more in future posts here about how I’ve put the site together and what I’m doing to drive traffic and promote it, but if you have any specific questions as to how I’m approaching the site and the niche, please let me know in the comments below so I can answer in a future post!

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1. Skimlinks Review: An Affiliate Marketer’s Dream?
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Why is it that MaxBlogPress get tons of traffic, thousands of sales and become leaders in their field! It takes a lot time and hard work to be successful. Most of the people start blogging and end up in 3-4 months with no results.

To be a successful blogger you require Time, efforts and passion. In this post I’m going to talk about why maxblogpress is successful.

Mailing list – If you know MBP has 70000 plus email subscribers, they started building list from the beginning. Mailing list is very powerful way to get traffic, market your new product, make money etc! If you have got a big mailing list then you can direct traffic to anywhere you like.

Here are 6 Reasons why you should start Building your Mailing List Now.

• Connect – Emails give you an opportunity to make your fans feel more closely connected with you.
• Referrals – Put you in a position to receive regular referrals.
• Easier – Make your sales process easier and more productive.
• Start conversations with people you are targeting.
• This gives you a chance to build a good relationship with them and to show them that you will only provide them with quality products that can really help them.
• Another awesome reason is “The money is in the list”

MaxBlogPress knows what they are doing – If you see every single product mbp release are very useful, that they go viral. Why? because MBP is creating plugins, that you can’t find anywhere. Some of the most popular plugins are Subscribers magnet, Ninja affiliate, banner ads and many more!

If you can’t create a product then outsource it. Some great sites to get your work outsource are:

• Fiverr – Get any work done in $5
• DigitalPoint – One of the best marketplace to outsource your work!

Giveaway – MBP had given many products for free like ping optimizer, optin form adder, banners ads etc. By giving away something free, you can build your credibility, brand and reputation. There are so many benefits of giving something away for free :

• Build mailing list – This is the most important reason why people give something for free!
• Make some money
• Build your reputation – Very useful in long run

Providing great support – Pawan and his team is doing awesome work in providing great support with awesome plugins. They are providing full guide with every single plugin.

Pawan have a great team who is always up whenever you need help regarding wordpress plugins!

Are you successful with your online business? Are you providing value? Have you started building mailing lists?

Devesh is a Young Entrepreneur & author of Make Money Blogging Blog & WP Kube. He is also running a fast growing social  bookmarking site – Blokube. You can Follow him on Twitter @tnsblog

I’ve just spent the last day committing SEO suicide – and you should too.

Lemme explain.

This blog has been around since 2005. It’s gone through a lot – a domain name change, a move from a subdomain to the root URL. Not to mention countless product reviews, announcements and housekeeping posts being put up. Hundreds of articles had been written in this incredibly fast-paced world of internet marketing, where what technique is hot one month is old news the next and where sites, tools and resources join the deadpool almost faster than one can keep up.

One of the things I didn’t focus on when I got started 6 years ago was considering how evergreen my content would be. That is, if I put up a blog post, would it still be relevant in 6 months or a years time?

Inevitably, no matter how much you consider the future, some things will change in you rmarketplace and will eventually be out of date. And if longevity of your content is something you hadn’t considered (as I didn’t in the start) you’re likely to have a massive archive of articles that aren’t really all that relevant or actionable for your readers.

Consider the scenario of someone new landing on one of your articles for the first time. They find that the content is old and therefore doesn’t answer their question. There’s even a link you embedded to another resource that they click and get a 404. What will they do?

Most of the time, unfortunately, they’ll probably click “Back” and pick another listing from Google’s search results – gone from your site forever.

We want to avoid that.

And to do so, it’s important to keep out sites current so that when new folks land on our content they get good, recent and relevant actionable stuff.

So I just deleted 150 articles from this site. Some were about products and services that are no longer available (like a Web 2.0 property that I posted about as a source for backlinks, that’s since been killed). Some were announcements about a free call I was doing. Some were just comprised of information that was simply out of date and no longer interesting (like MySpace marketing!). There were also some articles that got a decent amount of search engine traffic that could be revamped to be current, and I’ve put those in a Simplenote list to update.

Now all that stuff is gone and the archives are looking pretty bare. I called it “SEO suicide” because it will result in less traffic. I’ve got less articles on my site to bring in those long-tail keyword searchers. But there’s a few ways to help when you’re dropping dead weight:

I 301′d all the pages that I deleted to point to the home page of the site. I manually updated my XML sitemap to let the search engines know. I’m running the Broken Link Checker WP plugin to remove any references to posts or outside URL’s that are no longer alive.

I want people to come here and find that absolute best, cream of the crop stuff so that they have a fabulous first impression. That way the traffic I do get is highly responsive.

As a market leader, you need to aim for that as well.

Leveraging existing content and building a foundation of evergreen content (and how to do both) are just two of the many techniques we talk about inside Always Be Shipping. If market leadership is what you’re aiming for in your market, it’s a course you’ll get a lot of value and insight from.

ACTION STEPS

1. Go though your archives and identify out-of-date and irrelevant content
2. Check Google Analytics to see which of it, if any, is getting search engine traffic
3. Rewrite or update the “old” content that’s still getting search engine traffic
4. Trash the old content that’s not getting any traffic and 301 redirect it’s URL’s to your homepage
5. Update your sitemap
6. Run Broken Link Checker to look for broken and dead links

Related posts:

1. Bing-Facebook Deal Rocks SEO to it’s Very Core
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When I first started playing around with Internet marketing and Blogging, I was overwhelmed by the technical components that were thrown at me.

I mean, I am a veteran of offline marketing and have built and sold a couple of small companies, so it’s not as though I have never been faced with new challenges…

Maybe it’s my age, maybe it’s just not a strength of mine, but the myriad different technological integration points from squeeze pages and HTML editors, to search engine optimization, to link building and anchor text…I mean that doesn’t even account for programming and graphic design.

What Is Internet Marketing Anyway?

One thing that has occurred to me over that period of time though, is that much of this “technology” takes our focus away from what “marketing” is.  Internet marketing is simply marketing…on the Internet.  Blogging is an online marketing strategy to build a loyal following in a niche which can be then turned into customers.

That doesn’t change the fact that we are still marketing to people with feelings, needs, pains and desires just like all of us.  It’s finding an audience and building trust and a relationship that makes the customers feel comfortable that if they buy from us, they will get value, they will not be taken advantage of, etc..

Is Link Building About Technology?

Link building was always presented to me as a technical endeavor whereby you found pages and sites to place links in and hoped that the site owner would reciprocate.  You also did keyword research and placed anchor text links in appropriate places and people would come and Google would reward your blog for being so industrious.

Finally there were ways to automate this process or outsource it and build link wheels and link farms…Up until recently, link building seemed like a necessary evil to me and perhaps it still is.

My point though, is that the Internet has evolved to a place where now the “Webmaster” has almost disappeared and the “control” over content and authority and decision making has shifted to the user, the customer, the gazillion teenagers and old people alike who are “blogging” and “liking” and “tweeting” and “sharing”…

What does this mean for link building for your blog?

It means that link building, although still a lot of work unless automated (and sometimes even then!), needs to be looked at quite a bit differently.  Who and what you are linking to has to be more relevant, more appropriate, more complimentary and even more interesting and entertaining, or the links either won’t come back to you or they won’t come back with any relevance or benefit…no “juice”.

It wasn’t more than a few years ago that black hat, spammy internet marketers were killing it online simply because it was the wild wild west and nobody knew any better.  Well the Internet marketplace has righted itself, as it always does in a free market capitalistic society….eventually.

The customers have clearly stated that your “stuff” has to be good, it has to be relevant, it has to be honest and it has be helpful.  otherwise WE DON’T WANT IT.

Salesmanship using things like urgency, scarcity, compelling headlines and copy will always work because these seminal appeals are at the core of human nature.  But they will only work consistently when the product or service is of true value.  Then people will come back for more and that’s where the real money is.

Link building as a search engine optimization technique for your blog will always be around, but it will only hold up moving forward if you look at your links as “personal” links to your peers, customers and potential customers in a supportive and collaborative approach to building your reputation as a trusted authority.

Put together a short list of forums and blogs in your niche and spend more quality time with fewer people making valuable and relevant contributions at a higher level.  Leave your links where you’d be proud to see them.

More isn’t always better anymore

This post was written by Mark Aylward. Mark is an offline marketing expert making the move online. If you would like to read more of his stuff, visit him at The Internet Money Map.

He is constantly trying to simplify the technological side of Internet marketing.  For a FREE guide to auto-responders and e-mail marketing grab a FREE copy of Autoresponder Domination

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