The Linklifter

Today we left our 80s image behind, along with the leather studs, spandex and Bowie DVDs (actually, those can stay) and brought a new face to the world.

Speaks for itself: linklift.co.uk / linklift.net

More on our extreme makeover soon.

…

How and when do people make money from their website or blog?

Recently I was reading an article on How Successful Mediapreneurs Monetize their Blogs/Podcasts. This article is interesting for anyone who is keen to make a living out of blogging, to see how others are doing just that. From creating nifty online stores to granting access to resources or archived posts, there are many ideas to keep a site real as well as lucrative. It may seem a long way off for many bloggers starting out, but it is important to have monetisation in your sight lines from the get-go. I was struck by an interesting figure originally given by Michael Stelzner:

10 000 subscribers.

This is one possible ‘magic subscriber number’ after which a blog could justifiably start making money.

According to Michael, not before 10 000 people are catching up with your website from time to time via RSS feeds should you use your influencing power to make some money from your online endeavours.

No one advocates making a general rule for all website owners to stick to when it comes to selling on their blog, but “it depends” answers just aren’t that useful sometimes. Of course, we need to understand the data and reasoning behind the number 10 000:

What is the number of blog subscribers an indication of?

In theory, having 10 000 subscribers means:

• 10 000 eyes: Subscribers revisit your site
• 10 000 opinions: Subscribers leave comments
• 10 000 mouths: Subscribers share your links and talk about you
• 10 000 likes: Subscribers have an interest in your content overall
• 10 000 hearts: Subscribers feel greater loyalty to you

These factors are also important to e-commerce websites too! Unsurprisingly, monetising your blog means that you have to treat your blog as a business and yourself as a brand.

How do you reach 10 000 blog subscribers?

If you receive one subscriber for every hour you put into your website (a conservative estimate) you would need to put in 10 000 hours of work in order to start being paid for your time and effort. This amounts to over 8 years (!), if you devoted 40 hours a week to your content, website upkeep and attracting subscribers.

Thankfully, the process of reaching 10 000 subscribers is more of an exponential curve; a good amount of luck is involved as well as expertise to make sure achieve a much faster rate of subscription.

First of all you will need to write spot-on SEO copy and then you will line up the guest blog posts by the shedload; with a combination of the two skills you can rack up the subscribers in a mere 8-12 months. Is there any end to the list of benefits of guest blogging?

Sounds like a long road ahead and if you are not doggedly dedicated to your site’s success, then stop now.

The Other Magic Number

However, if you are only daunted by a figure in the thousands, another magic number of subscribers is 25. Google seems to treat your posts as more worthwhile (ranking higher in their SERPs) once you have gained 25 subscribers.

Now this figure is more easily obtainable!

Enlist a few family members and close friends and you are half way to feeling like this. Then you can employ some more widespread strategies to ethically bribe, encourage, attract and garner new subscribers.

But most importantly don’t forget to make it SIMPLE for visitors to subscribe! I can’t emphasise this enough (I tried though).

The times I have confused ‘search’ bars with ‘subscribe by email’ boxes! How frustrating! Choose a widget that is clean, place it somewhere sensible within some posts as well as in the sidebar. Perhaps create a page just for subscribing. Above all, make it easy for readers to say with a single click ‘why don’t I get to know this blogger better?’

What’s more, get out there and subscribe to great blogs in your niche, make contacts and pick up ideas and returned favour subscriptions along the way.

What Would Google Do?

When it comes to beating a path towards making serious blog advertising moolah, take the lead from the big guns:

“Like Google, Facebook figured that if it got enough people on board and continually improved its social network, eventually it would figure out a way to make money.”

(from Todd Wasserman’s article on Mashable published 04.10.2011)

Prioritising Your Blog’s Growth

At LinkLift we work with those bloggers who believe that making money from blogging does not come at the detriment of retaining readership and interest in your content. We aren’t looking only for blogs with 10 000 subscribers, what we are looking for are diligent bloggers with an influential voice in their niche.

Patience, creativity and determination will first earn you subscribers, then a chance to earn money from your blog. There is no magic number of subscribers, but start off with a target of 25. If you want to get into the hundreds or even the thousands of subscribers, being business savvy with your site is a must. If you are able to interact with other influential bloggers as equals, and can get the most out of guest blog posts, your subscriber list will grow exponentially.

Hello! How ironic that the last post was on the subject of updating content and it has been a fair few months without any news from us on the LinkLift blog. A catch up is in order.

We have recently unveiled the new logo for the LinkLift brand as well as our client-facing website LinkLift.net.

For the logo we were inspired by the concept of a bridge bringing together two otherwise isolated places. We think that this is a great symbol for the link development process and our aim to facilitate mutually beneficial connections between brands and bloggers.

We hope that you find all the information on Linklift.net insightful and if you have any questions regarding our new brand image please do not hesitate to contact us.

Plans are underway to update the publisher site too. We are focusing on stream lining  the registration process for new publishers as well as providing a more no-fuss layout so it will be even easier to understand who we are and what we can do for publishers over the long term.

In a few months time there will be a fresh face for all LinkLift country specific domains. We look forward to continuing to bring together the highest quality publishers across the international blogospheres.

Everyone starts their blog or website off with the best of intentions about updating content. But too often a promise of updating content (both past and new posts) once a day, becomes a couple of times a week or even just a couple of times a month. Or worse, updating content often comes at the detriment of quality.

Often the difficulty isn’t only that we all don’t have enough hours in a day, but rather maintaining quality of content at busy times or in the small hours of the morning. How can you create interesting content that is well written all the time? As you know, creating content is not just important for your readers to keep up with your personal escapades or attracting new readers with news/hot topics in your niche, but new content on a blog is one of the most important Google search ranking factors.

In the post-panda update SEO world, content not only has to be new, the grammar and spelling must be good, and facts should be sourced appropriately. More than ever, bloggers must pay attention to the finer details when writing content.

Here are a few pointers that get down to the nitty-gritty of creating content:

• Don’t use bullet points unnecessarily – this can be a hint to Google that you can’t be bothered with writing and if you can’t be bothered with real sentences what kind of blog do you run? Obviously this is very subjective, but it is worth bearing in mind that a little effort to expand upon your ideas can be good for your site’s trust with Google.
• Don’t copy from MS Word (or if you do copy first into Notepad in order to make sure the mumbo-jumbo  formatting is eradicated) – If you copy from Word with traces of Word formatting then this suggests you may be outsourcing or mass producing content.
• Don’t ignore spelling and grammar checkers – how many news articles have you read that have had poor spelling and grammar? Exactly.
• Link out to trustworthy sites often – no one likes an overly opinionated person whose opinions have no reasonable substance or backing. Linking to newspapers or sites of your niche “experts” are indications that you know your stuff and your community and gives greater depth to your content.

Write with Google ‘Reading Level’ in mind

One of the most interesting recent developments concerning content creation is Google’s judging the “reading level” of webpages. If your readers expect an authoritative article on SEO they may search only for sites with an Intermediate or Advanced Reading Level. Whereas if you are looking to gauge some idea of how to link a laptop to a computer, then you might want a more basic explanation.

It would be normal to have a mix of reading levels for each of your posts if you write on a range of topics, but over time you may be able to see a pattern about the reading level of the posts that do particularly well.

Remember, good “basic” writing is no worse or better than good “Advanced” writing, it is up to you to decide what comes most naturally for you and what your readers would like to read.

Balancing Content Quality and Quantity

When writing new content, going into detail and making sure references stand up to scrutiny needn’t eat away at your writing efficiency. Copyblogger has some great tips on making the process of writing posts much faster. I particularly like the idea of uploading 5 or so photos in advance for 5 or so future posts. Sometimes the motivation of writing great content comes from having a visual cue and the details seem to simply fall into place.

Paying close attention to details instead of churning out new content every day without reviewing it means the difference between being an authoritative source, ranking highly and being just another blogger. But writing good content quickly and regularly doesn’t have to be stressful if you are up-to-date with the factors that Google uses to evaluate new content and if you do some planning in advance.

Guest blogging is fast becoming one of the few ways left in which you can gain legitimate, quality backlinks and traffic for your website. If you are considering opening up your successful blog to guest posts this can be a great way to gain new insightful content and increase readership on your own site and to become even better known among the other bloggers in your niche. You may end up finding new friends and natural promoters for your website along the way, but it can seem like you are opening Pandora’s box.

Advice for Guest Blogging Hosts

An article on by Ann Smarty on Search Engine People’ s blog outlines three sensible rules to abide by when considering a guest’s submitted article:

1. Get your quality standards straight from the outset – is the guest post original and interesting, well-written and useful?
2. Don’t be afraid to turn a lot of people down – get used to rejecting some guest bloggers who are only looking for link juice and have nothing to add to your site.
3. Remember to always look for the potential in a new blogger and invest time in making suggestions as to how to edit their guest post in order to improve it and be publishable.

Ann Smarty has set up one of the best and most widely-used sites for submitting guest posts and getting them published on relevant blogs who are registered there and looking for writers. In the coming few months, I predict there will be more sites like these in the place of your Ezinearticles or Suite101 (article directories that were hit by Google’s Panda/Farmer Update).

More than ever the focus is on quality of content not quantity of articles submitted – with guest blogging, it is natural for blog writers to consider carefully which articles to submit and which are approved. So far, writing a guest post and getting it published is a slow and organic process and as with many aspects of the web, the time and effort spent in writing the post or getting others to write posts for your blog is a worthwhile expenditure in order to gain either great content (Guest Blog Host) or good link juice and new readers (Guest Blogger).

Advice for Guest Bloggers

Writing more than 300 guest posts a year, Onibalusi has become a star guest blogger being interviewed left, right and centre and is asked to reveal all. He shares many hints about how to write guest posts in his ebook although I haven’t yet read it, so please let me know if you have or intend to do so but I am almost willing to bet that a lot of his success is down to good old hard work in writing excellent content and asking others out there whether they would publish it.

A lot of bloggers are touting guest blogging as having many benefits, but if you have had any less than outstanding experience with guest blogging then this article is very interesting. In it, Mark gives us an example of time he had written five guest posts but had only received 18 views from those published posts, he reflected upon what he could improve and tried again, this time with more success. The trick, according to Mark, is to make your guest post personal and to get the readers interested in your story and where you are coming from. A bit of self-involvement, whilst seeming like bragging, in fact builds trust with readers on another site and in turn makes it more likely for them to visit yours.

To sum up…

These days, article marketing via article directories is far from dead art if you use it as a form of marketing rather than purely for SEO benefit. But even so, guest blogging is going to be on the up and up for a long time yet. Pitching a guest post will become more and more the norm and bloggers will have more emails than ever to wade through to separate the wheat from the chaff so Google doesn’t have to.

Let’s go back to basics for this post. If you are keen to set up a new blog you are probably already aware of the most difficult part of the process…deciding what to call your blog.

At worst, a bad name will put people off ever going to your blog, while a great name will mean people are more likely to engage with you and revisit your site again and again and again.

I come across all sorts of blog names in my search travels that you may, or may not, find inspiring:

some unusual “Alcatraz Gardens”,

some funny “Chook Minder’s Quill”,

some clever “Paris (im) perfect”,

some self-deprecating “Dear Stupid Blog”,

some nonsensical “Flibbertygibbet”,

some straightforward, “Memoirs of a Food and Travel Addict”,

and some rather snappy, “The Pop Cop”.

We have all heard some good advice for choosing a name that is unique, creative, descriptive and memorable. Which is your favourite blog name? I think the most successful name of the above examples is “Paris (Im)perfect”, short and attention-grabbing but has some meaning to it beyond the obvious.

Put simply, I think the common factor of the greatest blog names are those that give me, a new reader, an instant insight into the person behind the blog before I have even visited the blog.

Chris G. points out that naming a blog with the SEO formulaic domain name of “keyword+blog” is in the long term a disingenuous strategy, people don’t search for ‘anything blog’ unless they are looking for your blog already and, let’s face it, you are not going to come across as all that likable if you are only after search rankings.

Google is also onto the old keyword domain stratagem, saying that they will reduce the ranking power they once had over other domain names.

Also don’t think you can get around having a domain name that is search engine optimised with keyword laden terms and then having a different blog name on the page itself. Having a different blog name to your domain name is confusing for searchers who only remember one or the other.

Instead, put SEO on the backbench and build a blog name as a brand name. Aaron Wall from SEO book has long since noticed that Google likes strong brands. A great blog name has character. And with a good brand comes loyal regular readership and ultimately steady reliable advertising revenue. Most of all have fun choosing a name that reflects what you are about not just what you want to rank for (everything in good balance though).

My advice for the blog naming process : put yourself in the position of someone who has never visited your site, would you go there based just on the blog name and would you be able to go back there easily should you like what you find?

If Alexander had a blog what would he have named it in order to put it on the path to victory?

Google has accused Bing of monitoring and copying of their search results. Here’s the full article on Search Engine Land explaining how Google experimented with unusual/nonsense search terms and manual changes to their results to catch Bing out. Although bear in mind that I believe the issue should be taken seriously from a legal perspective, it is kind of like listening to children teasing each other:

Google: ‘Stop copying me!’

Bing: ‘Stop copying me!’

Google: ‘Ah I know’

Bing: ‘Ah I know’

Google: ‘hiybbprqag‘ (Search equivalent of ‘I am stupid’)

Bing: ‘hiybbprqag‘ (….uhhh….’I am Stupid’)

In other words, Bing is (to some extent) living off of Google’s hard work and infringing on both their USPs…i.e. that Bing’s search results are Not Google’s.

What is interesting about this piece of news is the wider ethical implications of Google manually tweaking their search results. If they readily admit that they tweak the results, then to what extent are they reaching towards a more integrated approach to ranking and away from purely algorithm based results? And the more human input in judging which web page is better than another, the more the risk that subjectivity and biases will be able to skew search results.

Also what it comes down to is that Bing (and Google) are looking at what users click on to improve their search relevance.

Bringing this ever-present issue of privacy and online advertising once more into the fore are the latest pressures made by an EU security agency aimed at protecting and raising the awareness of internet users of the data stored by indelible cookies.  Should we mind that our clicks are not private?

Ever since the rise of Twitter hailed the birth of the Real-time Web, the world seems infatuated with (as close to) real time information about the current trends, the contemporary viewpoints, the newest products, the most recent changes, the fads that are in vogue; in short: everything that is happening now.

These days when the formula for success rides on the commonly-held belief that “Most Recent = Most Relevant”, how can a blog keep up with a microblog?

But a blog is very different to a Twitter stream! (I hear you saying), why do you need to reinvigorate your blog posts?

Keeping the information or opinion within each of your blog posts fresh, accurate and relevant to the present situation/readership will pay dividends in terms of readers, profit and rankings.

Editing your Archived Posts

Simple ways you can you shake off the dust of your older blog posts in your archives include:

• When you are planning a post, incorporate an aspect of feedback. The data you collect can be used in a future post ensuring that readers will return to both the old and new posts and are encouraged to comment on both.
• Update your older posts. There are many ways to do this, whether by changing the title to something more snappy and relevant, adding extra information or a different viewpoint, or adding a link within the old post pointing the reader towards a new post (or vice versa). If you add an internal link to an older post this has the added benefit of reopening the stream of link juice from the higher ranked page to the dusty dry one.

Choosing Contemporary Blog Topics

Editing your older posts might be more difficult if your blog topic has evolved greatly over time. Michael Gray warns about the long term problems of blogging about reality TV shows that are no longer on-air and so no longer attract traffic.

Reality TV shows are so passé, and so is the blog niche.

He presents a good argument for creating content that will not be dependent on changing fashions.

For example, a post on  family favourite recipes will not age as quickly or be less relevant over time than a post on Paris Hilton’s latest exploits which are of great interest one day but quickly replaced by other media sensations the next.

Having, as Michael calls it, ‘evergreen content’ will mean that traffic and hence revenue streams remain steady and reliable over time, earning you more in the long run.

Recent dates and Google Ranking

Most importantly, in regards to the problems with older posts even if they are still relevant, Google will use the dates of the comments to show when that post was published in your SERP listing. People are more likely to click on the link that is most recently published even if it is further down the results page. For example, I was searching in Google for the exact time to set my watch by, the first result  for ‘thetimenow.com’ was published 8 hours ago! One solution is to strip your blog of comments and post dates entirely so that a searcher will not be put off with the thought that (however illogical it may be) because the search term  is within a post that dates from 2004, for example, it is not relevant to 2011.

Bloggers have always kept their readers enticed with new and relevant content, but these days it is even more important to be aware of the effects that dates and topic relevance have on your rankings and traffic in the long term, and not just the instant.

The above words have been the mantra of real estate for 50 years but the concept that showing where your business is located helps your Google rankings more than any other factor is shaking up our old way of thinking for online businesses.

How will this effect the way that a site is search engine friendly?

In a big way by some accounts.

For one thing user reviews is widely purported to be a key factor that will influence rankings. And you are wise to make sure to follow this basic advice for ranking in Google local search results.

But all the old SEO work cannot be lost as Google would be throwing away all the good aspects of trusted websites along with the bad. Why would Google turn their backs on good quality website content?

This article outlines how getting first page ranking in Google Places is helped a lot by all of the other SEO trust factors: relevant inbound links, great content, consistent keyword matches and lots of visitors. For the time being it seems the old SEO rules still do have considerable bearing on rankings, but with Facebook on the scene with their own Places as of last August, as Gyratory Tech puts it:

“…social media has emerged as an important way to navigate through the Internet, a task that for years now has been synonymous with Google.”

…the question is for how long do we stick to the ‘traditional’ SEO tactics?

SEO Moz has just published an interesting summary of possible ranking signals that may (with great debate) rocket your site into the SERPs in 2011.

I wanted to share with you some of my thoughts on the overlooked ‘rank-worthy’ website features that the SEO Moz crew have highlighted and also to remark on some of the underlying changes to SEO strategy we may see as we enter into 2011.

Thoughts on SEO Moz’s Ideas

Firstly the old garnering NoFollow links actually does help in ranking.

Great news, possibly, for the optimistic. Most people don’t want to waste time on building NoFollow links quite yet whilst the jury is still out, but the announcement that social media mentions are now a part of Google and Bing’s ranking algorithms is a strong indication that NoFollow links are useful after all.

A high number of mobile visits means that people need your site whilst they are on the go and busy or looking for something good to read. i.e. they really want to go to your site and so your rankings should increase.

Measuring the number of mobile visits to a site would create a bias towards those sites with a readership with the means to access a smartphone, i.e. the richer people. How would that be fair on websites that are based in places where mobile internet access is not as developed as London or Washington DC? Yet almost everyone everywhere now has a mobile phone, so mobile searching is seeing a huge surge especially in Asia and therefore we can anticipate a whole new set of factors affecting search rankings where time and location are of the utmost importance and maybe, shock horror, links are less important.

The amount of rich media (videos, podcasts, pdf, Flash, images and graphics) indicates a trustworthy website because most spammers can’t be bothered with it whilst most ordinary people can.

Again, nice idea; natural, useful sites often have components other than words, but again, surely this means that the bloggers and website owners who have all the latest recording equipment and Photoshop editions get preference over a site that relies on written content? Perhaps these sites are the ones that will be searched for on PCs rather than mobile phones, so the two methods of getting online will be complementary parts of the search ranking algorithm.

Prediction Summary

Wherever you are in the world, mobile searching looks set to come into it own next year, and increasing your site ranking from being read on-the-go will see some new strategies emerge to take advantage of mobile internet traffic.

But don’t forget to place this in its wider context! At the moment, it seems the main new direction in SEO strategy is to integrate link-building with social media, particularly Twitter and Facebook. Links which were worthless for SEO are now counted.

For more predictions for link building in 2011, check out the Search Engine Journal’s great article.