1. Create compelling content. You read this post because you think it’s useful. If you have compelling content people will reach you sooner or later. You can post your content on your blog, your company website, as a whitepaper, on other people blogs (guest posting) or on twitter (if it comes in short form). You can find ideas on what to write in different places. Search on forums to see what people are looking for, what problems need to be solved. Look on sites like HARO (help a reporter out) to see what subjects are researched. See what people are searching for  and write your post today.

2. Include your keywords in the title. The title is the most important. You need to make it interesting, to make people click on it. One of the most brilliant titles I’ve seen lately is “In bed with Seth Godin“. It is compelling, It lured me to read the post, to tweet about it and now, to tell you. It has the keywords embedded in it (Seth Godin). For your title to get found, you have to decide on your keywords (words that people will search for your content). For ideas on keywords you can use the Google keyword tool (Free) or a paid tool like Market Samurai.

3. Include keywords in the body of your article. Keywords should be repeated in the copy. In this way Google and other search engines will index your article. If you repeat too much these words, it may be considered as spam. You should keep them less than 5.5% of your copy.

4. Create a description that contains your keywords. This is also very important. You should fill in the meta description and meta title tags for your posts. If you do not find them use a plugin like All in one SEO plugin for WordPress blogs. These tags help your article to be indexed by search engines. You will want to include the words defined above in these tags so your article is indexed correctly.

5. Use social bookmarking sites such as Digg, delicious, StumbleUpon. After you’ve published the content you can submit it to Digg, delicious, StumbleUpon. You should use these tools regularly, not only for your posts but for the articles you find interesting on the web. Then you could summarize them and create a new post. You should give your readers the possibility to bookmark you content by including buttons on the bottom of your article.

6. Promote your post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social networking sites. Social networks are a great way to promote your content. You can leverage your audience and get back-links to your blog or website. These will increase your content’s ranking in search engines

7. Comment on related sites and forums. Comments and answers establish trust and show your expertise. Besides that you may get referred and linked back to your site helping you more on the search engine rankings. A great resource for this is  LinkedIn Answers.

8. Promote your content on directories. I use to promote my content on InboundMarketing.com. You can find similar sites for your niche.

10. Put your last post in your e-mail signature. You are reading a lot of e-mails daily. You also write some. Beside your contact information you can include your last post in the signature. This is an underutilized way to promote your content and help other find you on the internet.

If you want to learn more on how to be found on the internet listen to the free course bellow. Did you liked my 10 tips, do you disagree, have a question or just a comment? Leave me a note bellow.

SEO Crash Course to Get Found (GF102)

photo credits: dannysullivan

What defines a blog? A blog has two very important characteristics:

1. It offers the possibility to quickly and easily create and publish your content
2. Has a mechanism that allow readers to leave comments or another form of feedback

If you miss any of the above you do not have a blog. For sure you can argue that Seth Godin for example, does not accept comments. You are right but he accepts trackbacks which is a form of feedback.

Coming back to conversations or content discussion we can see that a blog has both. It has content created and published usually by the owner and it has the feedback mechanisms that spark the conversations. And that’s why blogging got so much traction. In 2008 13% of the US population was maintaining a blog. This will increase to 17% form the US population by 2013. The readers of blogs represented in 2008 45% of the US population and they will increase to 58% by 2013. This means that by 2013 128 million people in the US will read blogs while 38 million will blog.

When you start blogging the first thing you have to decide is what to blog about. If you are blogging for business you should ask yourself who are your customers and then figure out what are they interested about. Statistics show that you will find your blogging “voice” and you’ll figure out how to blog after creating the first 30 posts.

By now you should have a lot of questions: How to blog? Is blogging for me? What platform to use? What should I write about? What layout should my blog have? What theme should I choose? What domain name? Most of these questions will be answered in the first class of Inbound Marketing University that you can watch below. Learn how to blog, enjoy and if you have more questions or comments, post them below.

How to Blog Effectively for Business (GF101)

Photo credits by Courtney Bolton