Feed: Internet Marketing Tips and Techniques - AggScore: 50.1

There have been a lot of scary SEO myths flying all over on the internet forums and social media lately especially after the Penguin Update roll out by Google. If you don’t know what this Penguin Update is all about then click on the link to find out more.

April 24th 2012 would be etched in bold black letters in my memory, as that was the day when Google pushed out their bulldozer "Penguin" update and mowed down millions of websites on the internet in the name of killing link spam – and I was not spared too. For a person like me who had a decent education to differentiate between white hat and black hat SEO techniques and had been blogging successfully for over couple of years, wouldn’t foolishly put my reputation and site in jeopardy by resorting to spammy techniques, no way! But unfortunately one of my main websites was washed away in the tide and lost more than 60 percent of its traffic.

The days following the Penguin update were heavily panic driven just like they were for many thousand webmasters around the world, doing every knee jerk actions to bring back their battered websites to their original search engine rankings. I randomly started reading blogs after blogs desperately trying to find a solution to gain my lost traffic, and to reinstate my lost revenue. Invariably, majority of the blog owners bluntly claimed that the sites that were affected by Penguin were the ones that were over optimized like having a high Keyword Density, footer links, and Negative SEO factors like thousands of backlinks from spammy sites, anchor text spamming and so on only to prove them to be wrong later on. Those were outright myths propagated by misinformed gurus.

So what were those dreaded SEO myths that left thousands of blog owners scared and stranded?

Myth no.1 >> Too many links pointing to my website

“Hey my site has thousands of links pointing from a single domain, that’s the reason I am hit by Penguin”. Relax!  May be Google has just discounted those backlinks and you were not penalized or in other words your site just lost the already acquired link juice coming from those links, eventually affecting the ranking on the search results. This is one of the popular myths that are scaring the heck out of webmasters and bloggers on the internet. But in reality, this isn’t really going to kill your website or  rather Google is not going to penalize you for it unless the links are coming from highly spammy or manipulative websites, or  they were paid links or non-editorial links. Instead you might just benefit out of those links! If you were unaware of those links, just stop worry about it and chill out, Google won’t penalize you for that. End of the story!

Let me share my experience on this, my website had thousands of backlinks from hundreds of websites, not all were spammy but some of them were. I started off quite optimistically by contacting the site owners one by one asking them politely to take down those links, and the results? Some of them responded and even obliged to take them down completely, but majority didn’t even respond! So my humble advice to those who think they are hit by Penguin is not to waste your valuable time contacting the webmasters for bringing down your spammy links, instead sweat acquiring editorial links by creating original and unique content, or creating fantastic guest blogs and try creating a brand for yourself on the internet. Google love brands and Penguin just reaffirmed that fact. That’s really going to save you from all the spammy links pointing to your site.

Myth no. 2 >> My Keyword Density is too high

This is the second most dreaded SEO myth that’s draining out many webmasters and bloggers - - post Penguin. You need not worry too much about Keyword Density if you haven’t deliberately STUFFED keywords on your content, just to fool the search engines in order to rank high for your target phrases. If you have created content naturally without doing any intentional keyword stuffing, you are just fine. Google is never going come after you if you have exceeded the boundaries of the so called safe keyword density limits, if the content is unique, well written, provides value for your readers and flows naturally.

Myth no. 3 >> My website content is being scraped and republished elsewhere

“Scraped content”! This is the next biggest SEO myth scaring away webmasters for no reason. I have seen this in many forums where people are lamenting that “My content is being scraped by XYZ site, now I am in trouble and the reason why my site was mowed down by Penguin”. Don’t worry! Google is well aware of content scraping thing and aggregation much more than you do. So this is definitely not a reason that you might have got penalized by any kind of algorithm changes by Google, be it Panda or Penguin. In fact this is should be a matter of pride for you as a blogger that your content is being highly sought after by other webmasters over the web.

In my personal case, it was not scraping, but just republishing from Article Directories. I have found that many of the websites just republished the articles that I have published on Ezinearticles or Articlesbase and I have found that those scraper sites were kind enough to have all my links intact, which means the links that points to my website were untouched which is a big benefit for me rather than a disadvantage.

So you should be happy that your content is being distributed around the web with the links to your website.

Hope you found this article useful. I will be covering the rest of the myths in my future posts, so stay tuned! I am planning for a series of 3 or 4 posts to cover all of these myths.

Every update of Google is aimed at improving the search results and to provide meat to the searchers. And from Google’s point of view it is beneficial for the users. However, people also witnessed some weird results, for instance, some empty sites were ranking well. But these issues were there earlier as well and not caused due to the recent spam fighting methodology.

Last year’s Panda Update was Google’s huge update that focused low-quality spam and in 2003 Florida Update was an another major Google update targeted to enhance the search quality. And both the aforementioned had a colossal impact on numerous sites than Penguin’s update. Besides, Google is highly confident that the Penguin Update can point out the professionals who spam.

There are certain spams that have managed to get through this update but Google claims that the algorithm is perfect and will target the intended ones.  The algorithm is quite precise and designed to rule-out the spam.

Here go through these techniques that will help you overcome the impact lent by Google’s update.

Prevailing according to the trend is the best method to survive rather mourning on the issue; if you are affected, make an impressive come back to gain the exposure. Besides, you should practice quality with SEO to prove your worth in the long run.

About The Author: Deepak Gupta is a top notch internet marketing professional and works with a well reputed SEO Company in India. With a keen interest to make people aware about the latest trends, the professional ensures that he provides the best SEO services to his clients.

It seems Google has unknowingly given a bad name for that cute looking flight-less bird called Penguin!

Google has tightened its rein again like never before against spammers with the roll out of its latest web spam algorithm on April 24th, nicknamed “Penguin”. Google seems to be obsessed with arctic creatures, lately, in a big way, first the Panda, now Penguin, huh! Though Google claimed that only less than 3% of the search results would get affected, it seems that a sizeable percentage of webmasters and bloggers with sites having top notch content have been hardly hit by this innocuous looking arctic bird! Including me - well I may not be part of that “top notch” echelon yet, but not bad either!

What is Penguin update anyway?

So what did Google really accomplish by rolling out this algorithm? Well, slitting out all the sites engaging in even the lighter form of spammy activities from their search results. Were they successful in eliminating all of them? No, but yes they will get rid of the rest, pretty soon. And did the search quality improve? No, because Penguin update was not meant at improving the search quality of the results, it was just a warning signal to force all the webmasters involved in manipulative and shady acts to play by the rules. But yes, Google will certainly reach their ultimate goals of fine tuning the search quality as well as web spam in the very near future. They are almost there!

Got pecked by the Penguin?

Have you seen a drop in your site’s rankings? Say from 1st spot to the 10th or from the 1st page to 5th? Then probably Google has discounted those backlinks to your site that were passing the link juice (or PageRank) earlier. Gone are those day when you could rank high by doing link exchanges, excessive blog commenting (or comment spam) or buying links. With the Penguin update, Google has come down heavily on such sites engaging in all kinds of manipulative link building practices, linking to bad neighborhoods, building back links by submitting spun articles on blog networks and article directories and so on.

Is there a remedy?

So if you have been engaging in any of these shady SEO practices then better clean up the mess as quickly as possible. It might not be possible to take down all the backlinks and nor it is practical esp. if it’s running into thousands, but you can certainly get rid of your outbound links linking to spammy sites or are part of link exchanges. So all you can do from now on is build good quality content, good linking portfolio and above all, absolutely top notch stuff on your website that is original and engaging. Stop doing a lot of SEO and stop building links, your site will acquire natural good quality backlinks if it has great content.

Google absolutely love those sites that look natural, easy to navigate, well-structured(categories and menus) both for their bots as well as for the web visitors, updated regularly, not overly optimized and has immaculately great content on them. So start focusing on building a great site from now on, that Google would love to rank high on their search results and refrain from all kinds of artificial link building, Black hat SEO practices like keyword stuffing, link cloaking and so on or even the most lighter kind of spammy SEO activities.

By the way there are a number of SEO myths and rumors doing the rounds on the web that you might get penalized for high keyword density, reciprocal links and negative SEO. This video by Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz is going to clear things up for you.

And also, please read this blog post by Matt Cutts on the latest Penguin update. It’s well worth the read.

We internet marketers know how crucial Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is for our websites and how it can affect our businesses. This is one of the most favorite topics on every internet marketing forums and discussion boards on the web for online entrepreneurs, affiliate marketers and almost every business owner having an online presence. And rightly so, because being unaware of the best practices in SEO will never give you an edge over your competitors to grow your revenue and accomplish your online business goals.

But now I have started hearing a new, intriguing and a bit scary “lingo” associated with SEO called “Negative SEO”.  May be you have already heard this term much before me and pretty knowledgeable about it. Good for you, I appreciate it! And I would be highly grateful if you may share your valuable comments and viewpoints on it after reading this article.

So let me recall and share what I could perceive on this topic, please do not hesitate to correct me if I am wrong somewhere!

So what really is this Negative SEO thingy?

• Black hat SEO done on your site, like pointing spammy links to your site, without your knowledge, that can cause serious drop in rankings on the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) causing loss of traffic and revenue!
• Subsequently getting penalized by the search engines or getting completely banned that can absolutely bring down your online business.
• Exploiting the vulnerable security lapses of your site - Hurting your website with malware, viruses, code injections for damaging your site, modifying your Robots.txt file for blocking the search engine robots from accessing (or crawling) your site which can result in de-indexing your site, causing it to completely vanish from the search results.
• “Spam reporting” done by your competitors or other internet users to search engines who may then closely scrutinize your site for malicious activities – so play safe and refrain from black hat SEO at any cost.

Precautions to take

• Refrain from all unnatural link building practices like link exchanges, directory submissions, firing up automated comment bots for building spammy links from blogs in an attempt to fool the search engines for boosting your rankings
• Never go overboard with SEO or avoid over optimization, be natural with your website content, titles, sub-titles, tags and descriptions. (e.g. keyword stuffing)
• Build a good reputation on social media
• Focus more on providing unique, high quality content for your visitors that they would love to share on social media and also point to from their websites (natural back links) and other online forums.

A major chunk of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) revolves around links and using them effectively on your website or blog. So if you want your website to secure the top slots in search results and acquire a better PageRank then you better know some crucial facts about link building and link building practices.

Here you will get an overview of 3 crucial SEO concepts related to links that will help you in optimizing your Internet Marketing website for improved traffic and revenue.

Dangling Links


Google and other search engines always expect that your website is easily crawl able. And it can only be accomplished by effective, efficient and search engine friendly interlinking of web pages within your site. But sometimes you can end up creating a link that is linked to a web page that doesn’t have any outbound links. Such links are technically known as “Dangling Links”.

You may unknowingly create a dangling link by using a re=”nofollow” tag in your hyperlink to a web page within your site or if you link to a web page that is blocked for indexing or following for the search engine bots. (You can block the search engine bots from indexing or following its links by a file called Robots.txt or using the Meta Tags in the following way.)



PageRank

PageRank (PR) is a web page ranking algorithm originally developed by Larry Page in Stanford University who then went on to form Google Inc.. PageRank was subsequently patented and used by Google to determine the importance of a web page with respect to others based on the quality and quantity of inbound links. It’s a numerical value ranging from 0 to 10, 10 being the highest. This is also known as the Toolbar PageRank which internet users can see, but Google uses another PageRank measuring system - called Actual PageRank – internally, which we don’t have access to.

When you receive a link from another website (backlink), it is treated as a vote or thumbs up from that site – by the search engines. And a certain amount of PageRank (or link juice) is transferred from that site to yours. And it is also equally distributed through the outbound links on your page. The exact mathematical calculations and algorithm for computing the PageRank and PageRank flow is quite complex and is only known to the Google. And as an Internet Marketer you need not scratch your head to know the PageRank computation in depth, unless you are heavily into SEO.

The higher the PageRank of the web page that is linking in, the more will be the flow of the PageRank to your site. That’s why it is always preached that the quality of the backlink is always more important than the quantity of backlinks.

For e.g. it is more valuable to get 1 backlink from a PR 7 site than to get 100 from PR 1 sites.

The most simplified formula to Calculate PageRank = (PR of the page / Number of links on the page) * dampening factor of .85. This formula is iterated multiple times until an accurate PR value is reached.

Always remember that PageRank is the indicator of the importance of a page and not keyword relevance. So, even if you manage to get a backlink from a high PageRank site, it won’t help in boosting your search engine rankings if that website or web page is unrelated to your topic.

PageRank Sculpting

PageRank sculpting can be defined as a method to manually control the flow of PageRank from one page to the other with the use of rel=”nofollow” tag in a hyperlink and channelizing that saved PageRank to other desired webpages.

rel=”nofollow” tag is used for signalling the search engines that you don’t vouch for or trust a particular link hence don’t follow it. The best place to utilize this tag would be on the links left by your commentators – since you aren’t sure where you are linking out – may be bad neighborhoods, who knows? 

But when Google finally found out that webmasters and SEOs are extensively abusing this tag to hoard their PagRank, Google invalidated this practice a few years ago. Now you can’t block your PageRank using rel=”nofollow” tag to redistribute them – via other links - to your desired pages or in other words, you will simply lose the PageRank if you sculpt the link using this tag.

Conclusion

As an Internet Marketer, without a strong understanding of SEO friendly link building practices, you can never get your website on the top slots of the search engine ranking pages or improve its PageRank - to make it more valuable for both the search engines and your audience.

I hope that these tips on linking will surely help you follow the best practices in link building and maximize your SEO efforts in building a highly sustainable, profitable and search engine friendly website.

In this blog post you will learn how inbound links and anchor text are crucial for your website’s success as an Internet Marketer and are major factors in your SEO efforts. As an Internet Marketer or blogger it is very important that you choose a highly search engine friendly linking structure and the healthiest linking practices for your website. Links are a major SEO signal evaluated by the search engines for determining the overall value and relevance of your website. Links ultimately affects the overall ranking on the search results and page rank (PR) of your website.


Inbound Linking

Every link to a webpage is considered as a “vote” by the search engines. Inbound links or backlinks are a major factor that helps the search engines in determining the overall value or authority of your website. More than the numbers of links or “votes” it is the quality of the link or “vote” that help boost the ranking of your site. So before you try to get a link from a website make sure that the website is relevant to your topic or niche, reputed, ranks high for your desired keywords on the search engines and also has a good PageRank (ideally above 3).

“PageRank” is a ranking system exclusively devised and patented by Google that evaluates a web page’s importance on a scale of 1 to 10 in terms of the quality and quantity of backlinks or “votes” that it has acquired from other pages. 

Search engines like Google expect your backlinks to grow gradually and organically over a period of time, and also there must be a reason for other websites to link to your site. And that very reason is GOOD QUALITY CONTENT, which even Matt Cutts, (The Head of Google’s Web Spam team) keeps reiterating in every blog post, interviews and seminars- especially after the roll out of Panda Update. So more than going overboard on building backlinks rapidly, your primary goal as a website owner or blogger must be to provide immaculate content for your website for your audience that gives other websites or visitors to link to your site. This helps build backlinks automatically and your links start to grow organically. Organic link growth can be time consuming so it is only viable if you are running a personal blog or website that is not aimed at making money. You just cannot wait for the links to grow organically and naturally if you are running a business website having predefined revenue goals. You must have a quicker and more efficient way to build backlinks to boost your rankings, traffic and revenue.
Practical and Efficient Way to Build Backlinks

Guest Blogging - Though there are numerous ways to build inbound links or backlinks to your website, the most efficient and powerful way to do that is via Guest Blogging on reputed blogs. Unlike blog commenting or article marketing, Guest Blogging has numerous benefits. You not only get highly quality links from a relevant site, but also highly targeted traffic, exposure and a great chance to build your professional network.

Linking Text or Anchor Text

Linking text or Anchor Text are the keywords around which you create backlinks from other websites. And I cannot emphasize more on the importance of linking text or anchor text in your SEO efforts. It is a highly powerful ranking signal evaluated by the search engines to rank your website for a particular keyword or keyword phrases.

For e.g. If your site is about baby clothes and you want to rank high for the keywords “Baby Clothes” using your site, then you must try to get link backs from relevant, high quality sites with the anchor text “baby clothes” or “clothes for babies” or “baby clothes online” or other combinations of such keyword phrases having your desired keywords.

Conclusion

Links undeniably have a big role to play in optimizing Internet Marketing websites for the search engines. Hence it is highly essential for you as an Internet Marketer to have a solid understanding of the most search engine friendly linking structure for your website to rank high in the search engines as well as to acquire a higher page rank.

If you found this article useful please do share it with your friends using the social sharing buttons and spread the word. Thank you for reading! Also please do leave your feedback as a comment before moving on.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be performed in two completely different ways, one through the ethical, upright, White Hat way and the other through the shady, unethical, Black Hat methods. And if you want to build a sustainable, successful and reputed online business through your website, then you must turn your back on every kind of alluring Black Hat SEO techniques.

In this article you will get to know 2 of the most scorned upon SEO techniques that you must exclude from your SEO efforts.

Buying/Selling Links

A hyperlink from one website to another or from one webpage to another within a website are considered as a VOTE by the search engines and they help the search engines in determining the value, reputation or page rank of the website or webpage receiving that links or votes.  A web page or website’s reputation is calculated by the quality and quantity of these incoming links to it. It’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) are also partly determined by the quantity and quality of these back links.

But search engines expect these links to grow naturally and organically and not by buying or selling them out. If you buy back links from reputed, high PR sites by paying some money, then you can get hunted down by the Big G (or Google) pretty soon, which can get your site penalized or banned in the blink of an eye.

Buying or selling links are against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and are considered as outright unethical SEO practices. But not all paid links are in violation of Google’s guidelines, it is perfectly OK to buy or sell links for advertisement purposes, provided you add a rel=”nofollow” tag in the hyperlink that prevents the page rank to get passed to the destination site.

Link Spamming

Are you on a mission to increase your website’s page rank and search results ranking? To that end, would you be tempted to visit a blog and leave a spammy generic comment like “good job” or “good post” with an anchor text with your targeted keyword? Are you always tempted to join a forum just to get a backlink from it? If you are tempted by all or some of the above, then you are probably a link spammer, a comment spammer or a forum spammer. These are nothing but deliberate attempts to manipulate the page rank of your website by bombarding spammy comments indiscriminately on other related blogs with a link back to your website. Spammers these days also use automated software to make their job easy and quicker for them. Spammers target any web application that accepts and displays hyperlinks, like a blog, wikis, guest books, and other online discussion boards.

The sole intention of this kind of spamming technique is to manipulate the search engine rankings; page rank and eventually increase the traffic to the spammers’ websites in their desperate effort to make a quick buck from the traffic – which will never last longer.

Search engines hate any kind of spamming in any form and are capable of easily cracking them down on such spammy sites and get them banned for good.

So if you are serious about building a flourishing, sustainable online business empire, then always follow the search engine guidelines and never resort to any kind of unethical SEO practices, no matter how tempting or profitable it may be. Remember, results from unethical SEO practices are highly short lived and can ruin your business and reputation for good.

As a blogger it is highly important to leverage your effort to get the maximum efficiency and productivity by putting in the minimum effort. The main area where you need to leverage your efforts is content creation. This is one of the most challenging and critical tasks that you cannot avoid at any cost if you want your blog to be highly profitable and sustainable.

You must find multiple ways to potentially reuse or repurpose the content even before you create them. And In this post you will get to know 5 of those content creation techniques.


Repurposing your posts

Repurposing your content into different formats is the best way to leverage your content creation efforts.  An article can be repurposed into a video, slide show, an audio podcast or it can be converted into a newsletter to your subscribers or you can rewrite the entire article into a brand new one for an article directory or for another blog. You can reuse the content in as many different ways as possible as you want, only your creativity and imagination is the limit.

Different audiences have different preferences of taking in information. Some may be highly visual and prefer videos over an article to understand a concept; others may like to listen to an audio to learn something new. And there are some who are voracious readers who would love to read anything and everything that you write. So you as a blogger must try to know your audiences well, their likings and interests, likes and dislikes, and then try to present your content accordingly. One way to know that is through surveys and polls.

By the way I would like you to check out this useful tool called Article Video Robot that helps you convert your existing articles in highly professional videos in just few mouse clicks.

PLR Articles

Another easy and popular way to get regular content for your blog is by purchasing PLR articles. PLR means Public Label Rights, which gives you full rights to publish the content in whatever way you want on your blog and over the internet.  But here’s the problem, since PLRs come dirt cheap, there is a good chance that they are already published by others elsewhere on other blogs and article directories all over the web. So if you are just republishing a replica of them on your blog you are jeopardizing your business and your online reputation.  Publishing large amounts of duplicate content can get your blog penalized by the search engines, seriously affecting your traffic and revenue. I am sure you don’t want that, do you?

But if you are going to use PLR articles anyway, make sure you don’t cut and paste them on your blog as it is. Try to rewrite them in your own words and also improvise its quality by adding some additional points to it. At the least, you must rewrite it to make it 30 to 40 % unique - if not 100%. 

Break It Up

Breaking up a long article into smaller chunks is another great way to leverage your efforts. If you have written an article or a report that went into thousands of words, then you can very well break them into smaller pieces and post it as separate articles on your blog or on other article directories. Additionally, you can also package it as a report or white paper for your email subscribers or just give it away as a nice incentive for the highest commentator on your blog or as a freebie for new subscribers. You can use it in as many ways as you wish.

Shuffle ‘em Up!

This is yet another smarter way to leverage your efforts and make your content unique. Shuffle the paragraphs in your article to make it unique, by pushing the 1st one to the last position and the middle one to the first and so on. It’s up to you how you shuffle them up. But after you do that also make sure that the article still makes sense in its entirety and is humanly readable.

Rewriting Existing Articles

You can very well utilize your existing content in your blog for creating entirely new articles. You can do that by rewriting them fully or partially and converting them into brand new articles which you can then publish on your blog. Or you may even apply the previous techniques of shuffling or breaking them up to make them new.

I hope you found this article useful enough to give you innovative content creation ideas that you can utilize in your blogging venture. Please do let me know your feedback about this blog or article by leaving a comment.

This blog gets updated regularly with informative content and tips on various topics on blogging, internet marketing, SEO and other related areas. So please do not miss out and be the first to know when I publish by subscribing to the RSS feeds.

Finding unique and relevant content for your blog regularly can be the most challenging task as a blogger. But if you apply a bit of creativity to your thinking, you can find gold mines of content right at your fingertips on the internet. And you won’t ever have any dearth for rich content throughout your blogging career. You will learn couple of those techniques in this post.

Do not restrict your content to written words while researching on a topic for your blog. You must get a bit innovative and think out of the box and increase the scope to other type of content like videos, slide shows, recorded webinars and podcasts. Do you see the hidden opportunities already? Why not convert these content to articles or in to other forms that are more suitable for your audiences. Do you still say that you have run out of content ideas for your blog?

You see, content need not always be created afresh from your minds and brains ensued by an in-depth research. It can always be re-created, re-used, syndicated or aggregated from various sources into absolutely brand new and customized for your blog. Your imagination is the limit for creating unique and fresh content for your readers.

YouTube.com

YouTube.com is a great place to get some awesome content creation ideas - easily. Just give a search on the topic that you wish to gather information on. Believe me; you will be amazed at the results that you get. You can find videos on absolutely any topic, sub-topics and different angles on the same subject on YouTube. And you will get to know hundreds of point of views and opinions on the same subject.  Isn’t this enough to load your mind with fresh and rich content ideas? Then, all you have to do is watch some of those videos that are highly relevant to your topic. Watch out for the ones that have received the maximum views. Then analyze the information and take notes of the concepts that you never knew or found interesting. Now you need to dig deeper and search for more videos on the terms and concepts that were new to you and try to get more information about them. Then all you need to do is aggregate all of this information, collate it in your own writing style, with your comments, opinions and viewpoints, into a brand new article for your audience. The benefits of becoming a content aggregator are absolutely awesome.

You can even repackage this aggregated information again into videos or in other formats as per your audience requirements. It is a nice idea to conduct a survey on your blog to find out what type of content your target audience prefers. This helps you improve the quality of your content and draw more and more loyal visitors to your blog.

Aggregating Information from Different Sources

If you choose to be a content aggregator then there are opportunities galore for you as a blogger.

Your audience might be searching for an article or a video on a topic that is comprehensive, and complete with all related info, but unable to find them as they are scattered all over the web in different formats and sources. So you as a blogger have a great role here to play as a content aggregator. You can sift through chunks of information strewed apart in different websites and blogs, other offline publications and in different formats, compile all of them into a completely new article, video or a slide show perfectly customized for your target audience to consume. 

Your primary objective as a professional blogger must be to make any information absolutely complete and comprehensive with all relevant and related information before you publish it on your blog. Though this method entails much time and effort from your part, it’s all well worth the effort. A highly comprehensive article has the power to attract highly targeted and hungry visitors daily on your blog for a long time. And it will only grow day by day.

If you liked this article then you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed to get instant updates on useful articles and blogging tips published right here on this blog.

Why is a blog more popular and effective than a static website or any other offline medium? You got it right, that’s just because it is highly interactive. You can leave your feedback as a comment for the author to acknowledge him for his work or for clarifying a point or asking a query based on their content.

As a blogger it is highly important to interact with your readers and know their feedback. This will help you improve and customize your blog and its content as per your readers’ requirements and needs. You can also make your blog more engaging, informative and relevant to your target audience. And It is also a powerful way to grow your blog on its own without having to put in much effort for creating content.

By interacting with your readers you can know them better and develop a good rapport with them, know their content preferences, how they want the content to be presented - whether they are ok with the written words or they want it to be published in any other form. Interaction with your readers help you know about the topics that they want you to cover, their concerns and apprehensions about a recent development or change in your niche, any product or book they want you to review, your blog’s relevancy to the niche and so on.


In short interacting with your readers helps you improving yourself and your blog by finding out whether your blog is helpful and interesting to your readers or not. In this blog post I have discussed couple of powerful interaction techniques that will give you a chance to know your target audiences better and also serve you with some fresh content to feed your blog.

Surveys and Polls

Seek your readers’ feedback to know their likes and dislikes, opinions, viewpoints, complaints and suggestions about your blog or other topics related to your niche. You can do that by asking questions through a blog post or asking them to cast a vote using a poll form having multiple options - embedded on your blog’s sidebar. If you have a list of email subscribers, you can collect their feedback too by sending them questions and reviewing their responses.

You can ask your audience for their comments on anything relevant to your blog’s content, or your niche. Ask them how your content needs to be improved, whether it is benefiting them, is it helping them to solve their problems, do they like your writing style. You can even seek their feedback on a current development, a recent change or a latest trend in your niche. You just need to be creative on what you want to know from your readers or subscribers.

You may publish the survey results to your readers and subscribers, as they will be glad to know what others think about the same problem or topic. To get a better response for your survey you can offer a freebie to your readers in return for their participation. By conducting a survey or poll, you just created a rich inventory of fresh and unique content that you can publish on your blog or build an interesting report or ebook out of it.

Reader Comments 

Asking your readers to post their feedback and suggestions as comments is also a great way to improve the interaction with your audience and a great chance to improve your blog based on their comments

You can collect your readers’ feedback in different ways. By asking them to comment on your blog posts using the comment form, by providing a link to send their views and suggestions to you through an email or by providing a feedback form on your blog that they can use to leave their comments that gets displayed on your blog - real time.

As a blogger, you must always keep this deeply engraved in your mind that your blog exists for your readers, to fulfill their needs and requirements, to solve their problems, and to address their queries. So if you are not ready to do that, your blog will soon be dead and forgotten. So be sensitive to your readers’ comments and ready act upon it if you really want to make it big as a blogging professional or online entrepreneur.

If you found this post useful and interesting, you may very well want to subscribe to the RSS feeds to get instant updates on more informative posts like this published right here on this blog.

If you want, you can choose to remain as a news aggregating blogger in your field by just sharing the latest events, developments and controversies in your niche. And here I am going to discuss few techniques to leverage that role.

Think out of the box

Creativity and imagination can give you many innovative ideas to generate unique and interesting content on your blog – regularly. Never restrict your thinking to just newly created content and depend solely on freshly written articles by you or your guest authors. Many bloggers are still living under the false notion that only new posts or articles are seen as fresh content by the search engines. They are scared of reusing existing content due to the fear of getting banned or penalized by the search engines. If that was the case then all the news websites on the internet would have got banned - long ago.

Let me ask you something, wouldn’t you find different version of the same news in more than one websites and blogs, with few changes done here and there in the wording? Are they banned by the search engines? Never! That’s because they aren’t doing anything wrong, and it is technically accepted as ‘news syndication’ by the search engines. 

So in a nutshell it is perfectly OK to syndicate and aggregate content from other news sources, rewrite them in your own style, add your feedback and opinion to it and republish it on your own website. But please do not just cut and paste the content as it is from other sites, you will run the risk of copyright violation and also this can seriously affect the ranking of your blog in the search results. Always try to give a unique flavor or personality and recreate a brand new content from an already existing one. That’s innovation or creativity, and these qualities are the mark of a smart professional blogger, which can immensely help you stand out from the crowd and reap greater benefits in your niche - with lesser effort.

Start from you

Before hunting for news and events elsewhere, you can take a look at yourself, within your own business, your skillets or knowledge-base to check if you have learned anything new or innovative. If you feel that is worth sharing with your audience, that can solve one of their most daunting problems, tell them. It can be anything - a smart discovery that you made lately while you were playing around with some device or it can be a cool time-saving method that increases productivity of your readers. Just share it and never hold it back. They will be grateful to you.

Keep this lesson engraved in your mind - anything new that you have learned or experienced in your life is worth money and absolutely worth sharing to someone. This is the very foundation on which your online business and blogging should be built. Nothing should be written off or discarded as useless or unimportant. 

If you want you can go a step further and build an entire information product or ebook based on your knowledge and skill-sets that your target audience would be eagerly willing to pay you for knowing it.

From your niche

Another great way to get fresh and informative content for your blog is by aggregating the latest news, happenings and events from your own niche. You can analyze them and take out the unimportant ones, segregate all the related ones together, give your opinions and comments to it and rewrite it in a fashion that is interesting and engaging to read for your audience. You can choose to be a little critical over certain controversial issues or news in your niche and ask your audience whether you were right or wrong about it. Ask them to share their views by leaving comments. This can very well kick start a heated debate on your blog with more and more people joining in to be a part of it. Search engines love such blogs that has a lot of user activity on them which ultimately helps in better ranking on the search results, resulting in increased traffic and exposure.

Conclusion

I am sure these techniques will surely help you step up your productivity as a blogger and give you exciting content creation ideas to make your blog a top blog in your niche.

If you liked this post why not share it with your friends and colleagues and spread the love. You can stay updated with this blog for new posts by subscribing to the RSS feeds.

Most bloggers make the costly mistake of restricting their articles to the plain old conventional style of monologues. Well, I am not arguing that style is bad or doesn’t work. It surely works! But to bring some uniqueness and freshness to your blog, you must try out different writing techniques and styles with your content on your blog. Test them out and see how they work!

In this post I am going to take you through 2 of those innovative techniques that you can incorporate in your blog content creation.


Editorials

If you have been blogging seriously for a while you must have surely got a bit popular with your audience and gained some goodwill and respect from them. Your audience should have definitely perceived you as a passionate guy/girl in your field. So take it to a level higher and prove that you are really an expert! Editorials are one such great way to assert your expert status.

You can share your views and opinions on a recent change or development in your field. Tell your audience what you feel about it! Was it good or bad? How did it affect the market? What are its benefits to them? And so on. You can also be a bit critical to draw some viral traffic, but stay within the limits and never malign any one. Ask your audience to open up their minds and scribble what they think about your views by leaving a comment!

If your editorial was exciting enough, it can really ignite a heated discussion on that topic and your audience will start giving their feedback as comments. More and more of your audience would join in to share their views and be a part of the discussion, which can set the stage for an interesting debate on your blog. This in turn leads to automatic content generation on your blog, all contributed by your readers, without you having to write a word! The blog will start to grow organically. Isn’t that a great way to create content for your blog?

Search engines love reader generated content and highly commented blog posts. This can easily push your blog posts to the top slots of the search engine results pages.

Did you see how easy it is to create compelling and engaging content for your audience on your blog? All you need to do is to get your audience involved in your blog by providing interesting and exciting stuff on a regular basis. Try this out and they will be coming back for more! It really works.

Re-publishing News

You need not always rely on freshly created content coming from your brain or by contributed by someone else. You can very well re-use the ocean of existing content available on the web, especially the news and latest happenings in your niche. I am not telling you to just cut and paste them on your blog. No! You need not do that. All you have to do is, rewrite the news in your own style, add your comments and feedback on it, recreate it, give it a new flavor and taste, be analytical and make it more interesting for your readers and give it a new twist. Don’t you think you can adopt this technique and make your content peppier and exciting on your blog? Wouldn’t this approach give you fresh supply of unique content on a regular basis, without having to pull your hair out to find new and interesting content – everyday?

Now do you still feel you need to always bind yourself to the conventional writing style for content creation? Wouldn’t that be monotony for you and your readers? Remember, the key to a successful career in blogging is to think out of the box and doing things differently. Add some tasty flavor to it. This will surely help you retain your readers and attract new loyal ones on the way.

If you liked this post, please do share it with your friends and also stay updated with this blog by subscribing to the RSS feeds.