If you have ever felt like you were blogging to a wall, you know how difficult it can be to engage your audience. During the first few weeks or even months after starting your own corporate blog, there are going to be dry periods where you are writing for a handful of people. This is the most frustrating period and many bloggers pull up stakes. However, if you can begin writing more effective posts, you will start to see an increase in readers.

So, how do you that? There are many ways that you can gauge the overall effectiveness of your blog. We’re going to look at the two most important ways and provide tips on gauging and improving your effectiveness. Let’s get started!

Reader Effectiveness

This can be a tough one to gauge, at least at first, but you can learn a lot if you take the time to do your research. You will need to make sure that you have analytics software installed on your blog (Google Analytics is one of the best and it is free). This is going to be one of your main tools when it comes to figuring out how you are impacting your readers.

There are three main ways to gauge whether or not you are reaching your readers:

1. The amount of comments left on your blog
2. Whether or not your traffic starts to climb
3. How many links you are getting from other sites

All three are vital to your corporate blog – but it’s not always easy to improve this area. First, start by including your audience in the discussion. Ask them direct questions, encourage them to leave comments, and keep up the conversation with them. Little by little, you’ll notice more interaction and your blog will begin to pick up steam.

Search Engine Effectiveness

While the results from this can be a bit slow to realize, you should start to see something happening if you are blogging effectively for search engines. You can gauge this by:

1. How high your Google Page Rank is.
2. How many new links you have coming in to your blog
3. How well your blog does in results pages
4. How many people are entering your site from search engines (see analytics)

If you are using keywords and not seeing your blog anywhere in the search results for that keyword, there is something wrong. Either you are picking keywords that simply have too much popularity, or you are not using them the right way.

Density is vital when it comes to keywords. You’ll need to include the phrase in the title of your post, in the first and last sentence and throughout the post. A good rule of thumb is to shoot for 2 to 3% density on your keywords or phrases. This will make a big difference.

If you are using keywords where there are already millions of results, fine tune your approach. For example, instead of real estate, you can use the keywords Montana Real Estate. Focus on long tail keywords as well to start building up solid results.

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Originally posted 2008-09-17 05:46:26. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Spend a few weeks reading about search engine optimization and you’ll likely become obsessed with your Google page rank score. If you’re not familiar with this, it is a system employed by Google that determines the popularity of a site and then assigns a ranking to it. Many factors are used in calculating popularity, but generally, the amount of links, the frequency of new content additions and the overall traffic a site receives will have a major bearing on their Google page rank.

But does this really matter to your corporate blog?

The answer is yes and no, and it pretty much depends on how you look at it. While a low ranking can make it harder to get a good search engine results placement, it doesn’t make it impossible. However, if you are trying to take advantage of all of your promotional avenues, trying to raise your Google page rank is pretty important.

So, here are some easy tips that can dramatically affect your page rank score and as such, where you are ranked in search results.

1. Increase the amount of links coming in to your site.

These are called inbound links, but not just any links will work. You’ve got to have “quality” links that Google will approve of. This means that submitting to link directories or using black hat linking methods will not help you much. You need to increase the amount of real pages that link to you. You can do this the old fashioned way by contacting site owners to exchange links, or you can do it on your own by leaving your link in comment’s on blogs, sending out press releases and encouraging readers to link to your blog.

2. Page titles really do matter.

This is a huge factor in your overall Google page rank. You’ll want to make sure that you are using keyword rich post titles for every blog that you write. For example, Company News is a bad title for a blog post. You would want to use something like Company Name – Keyword and then News. Try to experiement with different blog titles, making them keyword rich but still useful for your readers.

3. Using keywords in your posts.

Every post you make needs to have keywords in it, but you don’t want to go overboard. Stick with mentioning your primary keywords two to three times, unless your posts are very long. The best density is around 3 to 4%.

If you are curious to see how your efforts are paying off, we recommend installing the Google toolbar which will contain your current page rank when you visit your own site. You can keep track of your progress this way and see how well you are doing. It won’t happen overnight, but these tips will help you improve your overall page rank and as such, your search engine rankings, blog discoverability and the overall popularity of your site.

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Originally posted 2008-09-25 05:16:48. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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Corporate

• The Korea Times presents Blogging for a Living.
• Photoshop Tutorial writes in with 5 Reasons Why Blogging is the New Marketing Tool.
• Become Online Marketing Guru Seth Godin’s Apprentice! Learn more at Squidoo Lens Alternative MBA. Hurry – deadline to expire soon (Dec. 14th).

General Tips

• CMS writes this How To: Running WordPress with SQL Anywhere.
• Top 10 Ways to Uglify Your Blog by Montoya Herald.
• Commenting on Blogs the Easy Way posted at Club Blogger.

Google Page Rank and SEO | Traffic

• Blog Your Own Business offers in Blog SEO 8: Things You Need To Know For Search Engine Submission.
• Daily Blog Tips posts Website Traffic Series Part 20: Leveraging Holidays and Big Events.
• What are the Characteristics of Traffic Generating Posts? Problogger takes a look.

Social Bookmarking/Networking

• Pro-Blogging 411 gives Five Easy Ways to Find People With Similar Interests on Twitter.
• Video Blogging Tips writes Increase Traffic Social Networking.
• Blogging Tips explains How to Get Noticed Online by “Big Name” Bloggers
• How You Can Use Social Bookmarking To Grab Free Traffic From The Search Engines over at Podcast Hunter.
• Understand Social Networks Better for Effective Business Promotion by Social Bookmarking Tips.

Writing

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• Copy Blogger says 10 Surefire Steps to Beating Blogger’s Block.
• Diligent Designs writes How to Always Have Ideas.
• Sayzlim posts How to Use Comment and Turn Visitor into Reader

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Corporate

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Google Page Rank

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Affiliate Marketing

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SEO | Traffic

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Microblogging

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Social Bookmarking/Networking

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Writing Tools and Tips

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