Which is still pretty good. Because you know, we don’t just publish any old crap.

Here’s the last 12 months of articles that appeared in your inboxes if you’re a subscriber to the flyte log, our award winning web marketing email newsletter.

Rich Brooks: I’m here today with Derek Halpern who is the brains behind socialtriggers.com and we’re going to be talking a lot about what Derek has done with his website and blog. Derek, thank you for talking with me today.

Derek Halpern: Thanks for having me; really happy to be doing this.

Rich Brooks: Excellent. I don’t remember how I found your blog but I remember when I got there that I was immediately struck by a number of things that you were doing that were different than what other people seem to be doing. It definitely had a different look and feel, and I’m talking beyond just the fact that you have a lot of white space going on, which is always a refreshing change for any blog.

One of the biggest differences that I immediately noticed is what you call your feature box, which is the big box at the top of the homepage on your blog. Can you tell me a little bit about what you’re trying to accomplish by using that feature box?

Derek Halpern: Yes, so as you said, you noticed the white space, you noticed the different design elements, and a lot of those decisions were made originally as a way to make my site look remarkably different than my competitor’s websites. Not really competitors but competing blogs. I wanted to make sure that my site looked drastically different. As you know, most marketing blogs were running a magazine layout so I went back to the traditional blog layout. Other marketing blogs are focused on the color red as their main color; I chose the color purple. Other blogs have really fancy designs; I chose a minimalist design. Other blogs did not use this feature box.

Now what’s the point of this feature box? One, it looks different, but two, more importantly; it kind of orients every new visitor and tells them exactly what they should expect from my site within two seconds of loading my webpage up. There’s no reason why when you go to a blogs site you see the latest post but you don’t necessarily know what the blog is all about. That feature box kind of prepares all your new visitors and tells them exactly what they should expect from your site. And then they can choose to either subscribe to my mailing list or choose to read the articles that are on the first page.

Rich Brooks: Fantastic. And have you found that you are getting a lot of sign-ups from the feature box?

Derek Halpern: Yes, the feature box is one of the main ways I generate signups on Social Triggers.

Right now, I believe, in November, that feature box is averaging something like 33.6% conversion rate. Now I don’t think that everyone will have that same exact conversion rate as me but 33.6% for socialtriggers.com is quite amazing. I’m really happy with it.

Rich Brooks: Absolutely. I love those numbers. Now I noticed in your feature box you’ve got a picture of a head. Now did you purposely choose the image where the eye and the nose seem to be pointing to the ‘get updates’ or was that just by chance?

Derek Halpern: No that was completely on purpose. I’ve done a lot of research about images on the web and how people react to them. I actually wrote an article about it called “how images improve or destroy conversion rates”.

One of the main features of images on the web–there’s lots of eye tracking that is done and research has discovered–that people can’t resist to follow the gaze of other people or the line of sight of other people. I mean you kind of look at it as if you were walking down the street and you see four people looking up in the sky; chances are you’re going to stop and look up in the sky, too.

And it’s almost like reptilian brain mode where you see other people looking at something you can’t help but want to look to make sure you’re not missing out on anything. The same applies online. When you see eyes looking towards an options box or eyes looking at something, people will follow the gaze of those eyes towards where those eyes are looking.

Rich Brooks: Excellent. Now I also noticed that you’ve gotten rid of archives, categories, even a search box, which to me are what traditionally have made up a blog, even though on my own blog I have deemphasized some of that stuff. You’ve completely gotten rid of it. What’s the logic behind that?

Derek Halpern: Well I’ve had a lot of highly popular sites. I had one site in 2007; with something like 30 million hits or so. This was back in 2007. Now in all of my experience on a blog I never saw that many people using my search. I just didn’t see people using it. I couldn’t justify to myself to waste that space on my site for a search box when I knew that almost no one was using it. It didn’t make sense to me so I axed it.

Now archives are the same way. When people want to go find content on your site they’re not going to click on your date archives. They might click on a category page, but that’s not really the best way for them to find your best content. When you have a website or when you have a blog, you don’t necessarily want people to click around and only see your new stuff first. You want people to be able to click around on your blog and find your best stuff. And the way you can really spoon feed visitors your best stuff is by not using the archives pages but instead creating what I call resource pages.

Resource pages are essentially category pages where you hand pick articles to highlight and they’re not necessarily presented in a date base format. You could pick 5 articles; one article might have been written two years ago, another article may have been written 3 days ago. Let’s use social triggers as an example. I don’t have archives, I have these resource pages. An example is my List Building page. Where you can click on my list building page and you’ll see 3 or 4 articles about list building where I’m spoon feeding people my best content instead of letting them discover the content that they want to find.

Rich Brooks: Cool. I noticed at the bottom of those pages that you also have the call to action to join your list.

Derek Halpern: If you’re running a blog, the whole point [is list building], especially if you’re running a blog for a business.

There are two scenarios. You could run a blog as a business or you could run a blog for a business. And if you’re doing either of these things, you’ve got to gather the leads, gather names. The more names on your list the more sales you make, the more hits you can get.

You’ve always got to add calls to action. Ask if people are feeling really good about who you are and what you stand for. The resource page is because chances are the people that find that resource page are happy with the content. Alright, let me keep in touch and that’s why they have the option below my articles.

Rich Brooks: You mentioned that you can blog as a business or for a business and that’s fascinating. I haven’t heard that before. What do you mean by that?

Derek Halpern: When you blog for a business that means your blog is not your business, your blog is used to generate leads, or generate sales, or maybe make your existing customers happy. Right? That’s for a business. When you’re blogging as a business you’re really going the traditional medium model where you’re going to be creating content and you’re not necessarily going to be selling something but you’re going to be selling advertising where your blog is your business. Whereas a blog for a business where you might be selling a piece of software and that’s blogging for the business.

Rich Brooks: I see. One of the things that I’ve noticed is you spend a lot of time building your own lists but you don’t seem to be selling anything at your blog. And obviously you’re not doing this out of the goodness of your heart, even though you seem like a good guy. What’s the model that you’re using to actually build your business to ultimately generate revenue?

Derek Halpern: Social Triggers is where I educate people on how to improve their marketing and how to actually generate leads online and how to blog for a business.

But in the end Social Triggers is my business, too. I have released software: one software is called Webinar Bridge and that is a $97 WordPress plugin that’s sold through Social Triggers.

I occasionally sell education products, but you’ll never necessarily see that on my blog. You’ll see those types of sales pitches after you subscribe to my mailing list.

I’m not saying that I only sell things through my mailing list. I’m saying that if I write an article and I teach you about the power of landing pages, and you click to read that article, chances are you’ll get a follow up email offering a landing page software product or something like that.

The reason why I have sales on the backend–not on the frontend–is because it allows me to really target my sales pitches to the people who want to hear them. If you don’t want to hear them you’ll probably never see a sales pitch, but if you’re clicking around and you’re opening articles and your reading stuff about specific things, that’s when the targeted sales pitch come.

To answer your question, I don’t sell on the frontend of my website, but I might do something on the backend. You might get an email pitch. I might run a webinar where I’ll do 45 minutes of content and 15 minutes of sales pitch. I might do a follow-up email to people who click to read one specific article and only they’ll get a small sales pitch.

Rich Brooks: Is that happening through AWeber? What kind of tools are you using to track people and send them really targeted like you are.

Derek Halpern: I use AWeber right now exclusively.

Rich Brooks: Good to know. You talked a lot about ‘About’ pages. You’ve got a very specific strategy for bloggers, for their ‘About’ pages. What’s your philosophy on ‘About’ pages?

Derek Halpern: About pages are one of the most heavily pages on any blog.

People go to a blog. They’ll read a piece of content. They’re either going to click to your homepage or About page next. Since the About page is one of your hottest pages on your site, you’ve got to turn that into a lead generation page. Your About page really isn’t about you, it’s about what you can do for your visitor.

I have a simple About page formula. The first few paragraphs should be all about what your site offers your visitors. Then an opt-in form. If you tell them what you have to offer, you might as well ask them for their email.

Then you could talk about some testimonials or social proof that really shows you can satisfy these needs for your visitors. And then you could have other opt-in form.

Then finally that’s when you could tell your personal story. You could tell people all about you. But when you’re telling people all about you, you want to make sure that each thing you tell them will help reinforce the point that your site can help them solve their problems, and then you put in another opt-in form.

To break that down, first you address about your site and how you can help people, opt-in form. Next you address all about social proof and testimonials then opt-in form. Third all about how you can help your visitors or what makes you qualified to help your visitors. Then another opt-in form.

Rich Brooks: Fantastic. I know you do a lot of research and that’s really been one of the things that separate you from a lot of the other marketers out there. I also understand that you have a new service coming out. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?

Derek Halpern: When I launched Social Triggers earlier this year I started a blog about marketing.

As you know, marketing blogs, they’re not few and far in between. There are thousands of them. One of the ways I wanted to stand out was actually based off the complaints of other people. People kept complaining that blogs talk about tips and tricks but very rarely have data and research to back it up. I decided to take that to a new level where I was always providing data and research to back up all of my claims; that way I wouldn’t have those people complaining about the whole data and research thing.

Now I’ve got something new coming out which is really going to further hit home, where I’m going to be launching a podcast. I’m going to be featuring researchers on this podcast, and will be able to talk about the type of research their doing and how that might work on the Internet.

Rich Brooks: Are you ready to release any of the names of the researchers you’re going to be talking to or is that very hush-hush until you launch?

Derek Halpern: It’s very hush-hush until the launch date but I’ve got to say that we’ve got professors from prestigious business schools and some New York Times best-selling authors; we’ve got a lot of cool people lined up for this podcast. So it’s definitely something to take a look at.

Rich Brooks: That sounds great. Derek I want to thank you for your time today. Where can we find you on the web?

Derek Halpern: You can find me at socialtriggers.com and that’s the main way if anyone wants to reach out to me. There’s the contact form on socialtriggers.com and don’t hesitate to use that. I know a lot of people are scared to use contact forms but I read every email that comes through that contact form. Go to socialtriggers.com if you want to send me an email. If you don’t want to send me an email definitely subscribe to the mailing list.

Rich Brooks: Thanks for sharing your time and expertise.

Derek Halpern: Thank you for having me.

Today’s guest post comes from Gloria Maher, one of our web developers here at flyte.

The Goals: Learning, SEO and Social Media Experiment, (and possibly get some passive income without investing much money).

As a developer, I’ve probably built or worked on several hundred websites at my current job.

As the company has grown and our offices have become more spread out, the exposure to elements of a project that are not part of development has naturally narrowed. (I do sometimes miss our “one room schoolhouse” office). Flyte has been on the leading edge of Social Media and I’ve become a convert, but haven’t done a lot with it beyond my Twitter and Facebook pages.

I thought it might be fun and interesting to see what my learnings would be while working through a new project of my own.

Lesson 1:  Figure out your business first, then build a website for it. Not the other way around.

The idea:
Several friends and acquaintances have mentioned that while Amazon is a trusted online store, they feel overwhelmed by the busy home page and the number of choices. As a voracious reader, my friends often ask me what I’m reading and for suggestions. I also hear excellent book suggestions from friends and my boss.

My idea was to present selected choices through Amazon with quick pick book suggestions.  Once people find they like the site suggestions it can become a quick way of picking a book and ordering it though Amazon, usually within the framework of my cozy website.

Since this was a learning project, my approach was like that of a number of people with new, very small businesses – with a not fully defined idea for making some money, and a preference for spending my time worrying about what the site looked like instead of how effective it would be.

After going back and forth with my build (for much longer than I should have) because I waffled between direct links to Amazon or an iframe associates store, I decided to really go for the social media challenge and use the iframe store within my content area.  This means I’ll need to get really creative with Social Media, since search engines will not “see” the book content in the iframe store. Iframes are sometimes a necessary evil ­ but be aware of their limitations and build in other avenues to feed rich content to search engines.

Lesson 2:  Visual look of design is important, but know your content, strategy, and information architecture so it can guide the design.

(And lesson 2b, which I already knew but apparently had to learn again the hard way – make sure you have the design locked down before you start the build).

• A site that is pretty will not trump the lack of good content or non-intuitive navigation.
• You can be unique and creative without getting your budget off track.
• I’ve been using an app for turning photos into ink and water color drawings and decided to use this to create illustrations for my site. After buying a few stock photos, and taking a few myself, I used the app to give a cozy welcoming feeling to the pages with faux illustrations.

I went ahead and made the site live. After all, if you build it they will come, right?  My only promotion of it was to offer a sneak peak on my facebook page (soft launch) .   As expected, I’ve had very few hits (I check my google analytics daily – there was one weird day where I suddenly had 42 visitors, direct traffic from Hennepin County, Minnesota – I have a vision of an entire classroom of people being given a wrong URL!)

The better approach

Now to see if targeting search engines and using Social media can make a difference.

Coming up with keywords:  Word Tracker offers a free trial or you can use the free keyword tool at Google.  I put in my generic search term – Book Suggestions.  Wham!  immediately it returned something I’m embarrassed to admit I hadn’t given a thought to – using the phrase Book Club suggestions.  I was also surprised just how much difference a slight variation can make.  E.g.: “book club reading list” had low competition, and global search number of 4,400. However, “reading book club” had low competition, and a global search of 246,000.

I came up with several similar eye openers and went back to my site, rewriting some of the content, navigation and titles to incorporate the terms.  I admit, at times the text felt more awkward to me, but we’re giving keywords a try right?

Next I moved over some of my mainebabyboomer blog posts on books I’ve read to the new blog on The Cozy Library.  Since I’m using iframes, the blog is going to become the main source of content that the search engines can find. Starting out with several posts gives it a kick start, and I’ll need to blog regularly each time I read a new book.

I’m writing this guest blog post for the flyte blog, hopefully encouraging YOU dear reader to come visit my site. [Insert shameless self-promotion here - go to http://cozy-library.com].

Lesson 3 – Know when phase 1 is done and it’s time to start phase 2.

I could go on tweaking the site and adding content forever, staying in “soft launch” mode.  There will always be more SEO that can be done, more books added, more blog posts, more design tweaks. I want to comb through past flyte blog and Maine SEO blog posts culling out ideas to follow up. But that work can also be done after official launch.  It’s better to get this website out and start promoting it – while I continue to go on reading flyte articles on how to use twitter, facebook, blogging and SEO to promote it.  So….(drum roll)…Announcing the new site,  Cozy-Library.com.

Postscript Learning – the spike in my google analytics turned out to be because I was doing cross browser testing using Adobe BrowserLab – be sure to take their IP out of the mix if you don’t want to skew your results.

Gloria Maher
Web Developer, Reader

One of the most common excuses I hear from people on why their blog hasn’t been updated in weeks, months or even years is, “I don’t know what to write about.” Same is true for email newsletters and videos, but those seem to hid it better when the idea well runs dry.

Even though I have over 1,400 blog posts under my belt, I sometimes suffer from a lack of content creation ideas. To that end, and so that no one can ever again say, “I have nothing to write about,” I set out to create an exhaustive list of ideas, resources and tools for creating an endless supply of blog posts, email newsletters, YouTube videos, tweets, Facebook updates, and just about every other method of sharing content with your audience.

Of course, no list is “exhaustive,” especially one that includes Internet resources. So I included a call to action at the bottom of this post where you can share your best tips for content creation…just go ahead and leave a comment. Like the penny jar at the candy store, leave an idea, take five…it’s all good.

Now, let’s get started…

1. Google Alerts: Use this free tool to get blog posts, news stories, and even tweets about your targeted keywords delivered to your inbox every day. With just this one resource you’ll never run out of content again.

2. Tweet Beep: Think Google Alerts, for tweets.

3. Social Mention: A social search engine that measures sentiment, top keywords, and most active users for a given phrase. The results come from a wide variety of social media platforms AND include audio and video results as well.

4. OpenBook: Often hilarious, always unedited, this site is to show off how little privacy we have on Facebook. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it to see what your customers–or your customers’ customers–are saying.

5. Quora: Search this popular Q&A site for questions asked around your area of interest.

6. LinkedIn Answers: Choose an appropriate category and find great questions for blog posts, videos, emails, etc. Or, ask your own question and use the answers (with attribution) to create your own blog post.

7. LinkedIn Groups: Another source of questions on LinkedIn. Be sure to join local groups as well as groups that focus on your industry or your customers’ industries so you can hear your customers’ biggest concerns, problems and gripes.

8. Your emails: Never answer a good question from a customer or prospect again! Well, what I mean is: take that question, turn it into a Dear Abby style post, then send the person a note thanking them for their great question; it was so great that you felt other people could benefit from it, so you turned it into a blog post (and send them the link.) Figure, if one person asked you, how many hundreds or even thousands of people are asking the same question at Google?

9. Wikipedia: Search for your keywords and use the Contents section for inspiration.

10. Wikipedia Part Deux: For even more inspiration, dig into the See Also section of the page.

11. Wikipedia, Threepeat: Still searching for content? Dig even deeper into the References section.

12. Competitor’s FAQs: Go over to that section of your competitor’s website that no one else is visiting. Go through their FAQs and breathe new life into them. Each one is another blog post that can be read, shared, and linked to. Repeat.

13. Yahoo Answers: This is one of the web’s more popular Q&A sites.

14. Twitter Search: Search for phrases and hashtags that impact your industry or your customers’ industries to uncover new topics and questions that need answers.

15. WeFollow: This site helps you find influential people on Twitter in your industry. They’ll regularly be tweeting out inspiration for new content ideas, so be sure to follow them.

16. Google Suggested Search: You know those “suggested searches” that popup as you start to type? Those are other people’s questions that have already been asked, and probably will be again. Gold, people, pure gold.

17. Google’s Related Searches: Now just scroll down to the bottom of the page and find even more related searches that may not have started with the same phrase.

18. YouTube’s Suggested Search: Same idea as Google, but using the world’s second most popular search engine.

19. Google Insights: This tool gives you loads of information on historical search data, but you want to scroll down to the bottom of the page to find top searches and emerging trends.

20. “Keyword/Industry” + “Discussion Forum” Search: Chances are there are plenty of discussion forums for your topic. Check them out with this formatted search. (Note that I used Bing this time around just to show I don’t always rely on Google.)

21. Google Analytics: OK, back to Google for a moment. Review the keywords that drove traffic to your website. If you see some promising keywords, or especially themes of keywords, create more content there.

22. Get Seasonal: Tie your regular old content to a holiday or season. The 10 Scariest Questions to Be Asked in a Job Interview for Halloween, or How to Perform Spring Cleaning on Your Inbox.

23. WordTracker’s Keyword Questions: This is a great tool for uncovering questions that people have already asked at the search engines. Tip: use just one word if possible for best results.

24. SlideShare: This is the YouTube of PowerPoint presentations. Use the search box to find your topic. Depending on your category you can view the handouts for dozens or even hundreds of presentations. Think there might be a blog post or two in there somewhere?

25. Google Trends: This nifty little tool tells you what’s hot right now. See how you can leverage hot topics into your own content.

26. ÜberSuggest: This site will generate related keywords for your topic; just the thing you need to create content that people are already searching on.

27. Ask.com‘s Related Questions: See, it doesn’t always have to be about Google. Ask serves up related questions to your searches, perfect for Dear Abby style posts and videos.

28. Ask.com‘s Popular Q&A: Don’t accuse me of going back to the well too often. It’s not easy coming up with 50 of anything! Below the Related Questions are Popular Q&A; sometimes it mines the same territory, but not always.

29. Alltop.com: This popular site highlights a wide variety of high quality posts from around the web. Use their directory to find what people are writing about in your industry and get inspiration and ideas.

30. Ezine Articles: Just because Ezine Articles and other article distribution sites got hammered by the Panda update doesn’t mean that it can’t be a great resource for creating content for your niche. Just search on your keywords and see what topics have been covered. Chances are these people already did your homework for you. (Just make sure you’re using them for inspiration only.)

31. Search: “Blog Content Ideas” for [Your Industry]: Works for almost every niche. Rinse and repeat for “Email newsletter content ideas” and “Video content ideas” for your niche.

32. Your Tweets, Retweeted: Chances are, if your tweets are being retweeted they’ve got some value. Use popular retweets as fodder for your next blog or video.

33. Review a Book In Your Niche: You are regularly reading books in your niche, right? Because otherwise the world is passing you by. By reviewing a book you pay more attention while you’re reading (or listening) to it, plus it grabs a bigger hold in your mind when you’re writing your review, plus it’s great fodder for your blog, ezine or video!

34. Google+: Head over to Google+ and do a search on your keywords. You can find posts, people and circles all about your topic of interest and generate new content ideas on what people have already voted as interesting (by sharing or commenting.)

35. Amazon: Do a search on your topic and find books that have been written in your industry. Very often you can “Look Inside” and check out the table of contents…a great resource for new content ideas.

36. Amazon Take Two: Look for products in your industry. These products could be great for review posts (always a popular topic) or you can read through customer feedback for more ideas. This VoIP phone generates ideas around how to setup a VoIP phone, how to configure a VoIP phone with Google Voice, Telephony in the Small Business Office and more…

37. Invite a Guest Blogger: Why should you have to do all the heavy lifting? Loads of people want to reach your audience and are happy to create (hopefully) quality content on your blog to do so. You should include a call to action on your blog somewhere where you have a form where potential guest bloggers can pitch themselves.

38. StumbleUpon: This popular site allows people to vote up and down on sites within a category. In short, it’s a great way of finding amazing content to inspire you. Heck, you could even just create a 10 Most Amazing Sites About Craft Projects blog post.

39. Delicious: Although this site’s best days may be behind it, it’s still a great source of content ideas, with active users organizing the web for you.

40. Digg: OK, this site’s best days are definitely behind it, but again: it’s got an active user base that’s curating the web for you, bringing you inspiration for your topics.

41. Focus: If you’re writing on business topics, check out this website for conversations, questions & answers.

42. Focus Part Deux: After you search, check out the related question in the right column for more content suggestion goodness.

43. Hunch: While it may not work for every niche, you can gain inspiration and get new topics to write upon from their categories…everything from art & design to tech to men’s fashion.

44. eBay: Depending on your niche, you can find inspiration (and good deals) for topics at eBay. Drill down into specific categories or just search on some of your keywords.

45. Flickr: Do some searches within your niche and drill down through some tags to find inspiration on this photo sharing site.

46. Know Your Meme: This site tracks the hottest Internet memes–viral ideas–and becomes more useful the hipper your audience is. You can try and tie the hottest topics into your niche or search for specific phrases. Keep in mind that a lot of what’s hot on the Internet may not be safe for work.

47. Blog Comments: Review your own blog posts that garnered a lot of comments and spin some of those comments off into their own posts or articles.

48. Interview an Expert: Whether it’s a local expert, recent author, vendor, client or someone you follow on Twitter, interviewing a subject is an easy way to create valuable content. Added bonus: they’ll often promote the interview once it’s posted.

49. Life: Document what you see, what you hear, and what you do, especially as it pertains to your audience’s needs.

50. Fiverr: When you absolutely, positively can’t come up with another idea, just go to Fiverr and get help from someone else for a measly $5.

Whew! As exhaustive as this list was to create, I’m sure I’ve forgotten plenty of websites, resources and ideas for content creation.

If you’ve got’em, please share’em! Just leave your suggestions in the comments below.

Oh, and feel free to share and link to this growing resource of content creation ideas. Thanks!

Rich Brooks
Now It’s Time for a Nap

Attend BlogWorld in LA with a Virtual Ticket and see more than you would if you were there.

I’ll be attending my 6th BlogWorld next week, and although I’ll miss the Vegas scene, I’m looking forward to connecting with remote friends and learning from the best and the brightest marketers out there.

I haven’t promoted my presentation there (more on that in a moment) because to be honest, I know LA is a long haul for most of you. Besides the cost of hotel, travel & food, there’s also all that time away from your business and family.

Even when I heard about the “Virtual Ticket“, it didn’t immediately grab my attention. I mean, many of these type of events are live streamed these days, so what makes BlogWorld’s Virtual Ticket any different?

But here’s why the BlogWorld Virtual Ticket totally rocks:

• You can attend all of the 100+ sessions, even when they’re on at the same time! Plus you’ll get bonus material, including speaker info, extra material, audio and video, and more!
• You’ll get behind the scenes extras, including exclusive interviews with speakers, attendees and more.
• You’ll get all of this at a fraction of the cost of a real ticket.
• You’ll get to attend the session I’m doing with Denise Wakeman entitled ‘Hey Bloggers!’ How to Package, Promote & Profit from Your Expertise .
• Did I mention the part about your pajamas?

Are you ready to learn more and purchase your virtual ticket?

Here’s the deal: while I can’t vouch for the virtual ticket because I have never missed a BlogWorld I can vouch for the event itself. Of all the conferences and events I attend, this is the event where I learn the most, get the best information, and have the most valuable takeaways. Period.

If you’re looking to increase your online visibility, improve your search engine rank, and build your business, you owe it to yourself to check out the BlogWorld Virtual Ticket.

Rich Brooks
BlogWorld Aficionado

Like jetpacks and flying cars before it, RSS still doesn’t have the market share we were promised.

For those of you who don’t know what RSS is, it stands for Real Simple Syndication.

For those of you who have no frickin’ clue what that means, you just need to understand that every time you update your blog, it updates a document with the new post. People can subscribe to your RSS feed and get an updated version of your blog post in their newsreader.

Unfortunately, that’s still confusing to most people. That’s why I created a blog post and how-to video called How to Subscribe to an RSS Feed. Still, you don’t need a how-to video to subscribe to an email newsletter, a magazine or to turn on your TV. RSS is too complicated and esoteric for the average Internet user.

But one nice thing about RSS is that it is extremely flexible. A few years back, some companies started offering automatic RSS to email conversions. This way, people who weren’t geeky enough to understand RSS could still subscribe to your blog via email.

Even though not everyone gets RSS, everyone gets email newsletters.

However, the functionality of most RSS to Email tools is lacking. In fact, it almost universally sucks.

Here’s a list of what an RSS to Email tool needs to be world class:

• Easily convert RSS > email (duh!)
• Allow the blog owner to create branded templates for the emails sent to subscribers
• Allow the blog owner to determine when the emails will be sent out; weekly, daily, or immediately after each blog post (my preference would be the last, because of the following bullet point)
• Ability to create a unique subject line for each email pulled from the most recent blog post title (this is critical for open rates!!!)
• Ability for subscribers to override the default delivery schedule (some people just want weekly digest)
• Ability to track where the signup took place (this will improve my marketing efforts and ROI)
• Allow the blog owner to send out additional messages to the subscriber base that don’t appear in the blog (special offers, downloads, events, etc.)
• Allow the blog owner to offer an incentive to sign up, like an ebook or free consultation. (This is how we built our email list in Constant Contact. See this post on email bait for more info.)
• Ability to use the same system for an email newsletter as the email feed, and cross-promote

I’m not suggesting this should be a free service. I’d happily pay for it. In fact, in a perfect world, it would all be offered by Constant Contact, who we run our regular email newsletters through as part of my monthly service fees.

Because they don’t (yet, I hope) offer RSS > Email I just dropped $200/yr on AWeber, because they come closest to offering everything on the list above. I’ll be switching this blog’s feed from Feedburner to AWeber in the next few weeks…unless Constant Contact is reading this and wants to make me happy and keep all my business.

What did I leave off? What would you like to see in a world-class RSS to Email tool?

Rich Brooks
Blog Marketing, Served Your Way

No, not really.

Today a link to a post passed through my inbox: Bruce Springsteen’s Guide to Social Media Marketing. The actual post title was titled Baby, We Were Born to Market: Springsteen on Social Media Marketing.

I’ve seen a number of this type of post recently, and before that, books such as All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Watching Star Trek and The Tao of Pooh. It got me thinking.

The faux-celebrity endorsement is a clever way to cut through the data smog of social media, and target to a niche audience. (Although I’d argue that these days neither Springsteen, Trek or Pooh are exactly “niche.”) There are only a gazillion (give or take) top 10 lists in the blogosphere right now, and your next one might not get noticed. That is, unless the Dark Knight, Daisy Lowe, or Chupacabra get behind it and give it a little push. (All three are trending topics on Google as I write this blog post.)

The format is simple: take an icon that is relevant to your audience and connect it to your business or message.

• Killer [blank] Tactics from [celebrity].
• Everything I Learned Came from [favorite childhood TV show.]
• [Disgraced politician's] Guide to How NOT to do [something].

You get the idea. You can take your own top 10 list and just filter it through the songs, episodes, or credo of your favorite band, celebrity or superhero. If possible, tie it into something that’s in the news, (Everything I Learned About Twitter I Learned by Ignoring Anthony Weiner), pop culture (Hal Jordan’s Guide to Sustainability: He’s not the Green Lantern for Nothing) or a holiday, (The 11 Scariest Hiring Mistakes for Halloween.)

Once your blog post (or video) is up, you could market this further by taking out a targeted Facebook ad. Did you just post The Where The Wild Things Are Guide to Corporate Events? Buy some Facebook ads of people who are in marketing and “like” Maurice Sendak or Spike Jonze. Rinse and repeat.

BTW, I was originally going to use Spider-Man’s name in this post–my personal favorite–until I found The Amazing Spider-Man Guide to Responsible Word Power over at Copyblogger.

Rich Brooks
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Photo Credit: Andy Roth

If you’re interested in increasing your online visibility, then you need to create quality content that engages your audience. There are many channels that you can use to distribute this content: your website, your blog, an email newsletter, online videos, photo sharing sites, social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, webinars, ebooks and more.

Many businesses struggle with how to create new content after they exhaust a few obvious topics. However, there are plenty of online tools that businesses can use to drill deeper, to find more long-tail search terms that they blog about or could create a webinar that would attract new business.

One of the tools that helps accomplish this–and is fun to play with as well–is Google’s Wonder Wheel. It’s a mashup of a mind mapping tool crossed with search results.

I created a short video of how to to use Wonder Wheel to create new content ideas for your own business.

You can watch the video below or check out How to Increase Your Online Visibility With Google’s Wonder Wheel on YouTube.

Rich Brooks
The wonder wheel goes round and round…

Contributor! 2x Better Than Participant

If you’re looking for the “ultimate guide to blogging for SEO,” look no further than this recent post that I contributed to the Social Media Examiner.

In it, you’ll find a whole bunch of great tips, tricks, plugins, resources and tactics so that your blog will rank higher, drive more qualified leads to your site, and allow you to conquer the universe. (Known universe–ed.)

The title they gave my post, Ultimate Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, was not my idea. The title makes it sound like this guide to SEO is from the Ultimate Blogger. I’m good, but ultimate? Not there yet.

In other news, they sent over this cool badge of “Scout,” the SME mascot for being a regular contributor to Social Media Examiner, which is pretty sweet.

They also asked me what my next topic will be, and I’m stumped. If you have any suggestions, please let me know! What’s the one thing in social media you’d like to know more about?

Best answer gets a hug or a tour of the flyte new media offices…your call.

Rich Brooks
Contributor

Dear Rich,

I’ve read that I should load my blog titles with targeted keywords to increase my blog’s search engine visibility. However, sometimes I just want to use a clever turn of phrase, or a slightly irreverent title that is appropriate for the blog post, but maybe not for Google.

How do I balance my needs to rank well at the search engines with my desire to put my BA in English to use?

Titling in Thomaston

Dear Titling,

I would argue that you don’t need to sacrifice your cleverness to create a keyword-rich title tag for your blog.

Here’s how you create titles that work for your search engine optimization and your end user:

My favorite technique for creating quality titles that pull in search engine results is to start with my keywords, add a colon, and then rephrase my title, perhaps being more clever the second time around.

This is what business books do all the time:

• Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
• All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World by Seth Godin

So, a post on jalapeños for your cooking blog might be: Jalapeño Recipes: Hot Stuff Coming Through! A post on hiring the right person might read: Hiring Tactics: Do Skills Trump Passion?

Also, if you have a WordPress blog (like flyte’s web marketing blog) you could install an SEO plugin like All In One SEO. By default, most blog platforms (like WordPress or TypePad) take the title of your blog post and make that your page title.

All In One SEO allows you to create a page title that’s independent of your blog post title. This plugin has a space below each post you create that you can craft your SEO title (as well as add a description and keywords):

This will allow you to target your audience at the search engines with a keyword-rich page title, all without giving up that clever blog title that will show up above your post.

And who said that concentration in English literature wouldn’t come in handy?

Rich Brooks
Clever to a Fault