Blue Falcon Marketing

5 Best Free Blog Directories 2010

Omar — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 15:56:55 +0000

Blog directories are great at growing your website traffic, especially if your blog is relatively new. The best blog directories are easy to use, have solid categories to get listed in, and include high quality websites. In 2010, quality matters more than quantity when it comes to blog directories. Unfortunately, many of the better ones out there are either not free, require a reciprocal link on your blog, or both. There’s a remedy for that:

Here are the 5 Best Free Blog Directories of 2010 :

1. blogcatalog

Out of all the blog directories I’ve submitted to (about 15), blogcatalog has driven the most traffic to my site. It is free, listing is fast, and the website design is excellent. Highly recommended for all bloggers.

2. Bloggernity

Bloggernity has tens of thousands of blogs listed. Many new blogs are listed on their site each day. It’s free with no reciprocal links required either; highly recommended.

3. Bloggapedia

Bloggapedia has specific categories which is always good for keywords you are targeting with SEO. It’s easy to search through and easy to use. You can sign up to submit a blog.

4. Blogadr

Blogadr is awesome. It’s relatively a younger directory meaning it won’t provide as much link juice as more mature ones. However the earlier you submit to a blog directory the better it is over time. Add your blog to Blogadr for a decent link back.

5. Technorati

Technorati’s popularity and effectiveness has been on the decline, however it is still a good place to submit your blog to if you are starting out. Easy to use, free, and no reciprocal backlinks required. A winning combination.

Which other free blog directories without reciprocal links required do you find effective in 2010? Please share your comments below.

The Best 6 Google Tools for Websites

Omar — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 13:00:55 +0000

Online marketing is a combination of people, processes, and technology. The technology component is especially important, as marketers are heavily dependent on marketing tools to plan, implement, and measure websites and campaigns. Google’s tools for marketers have the advantage of being free, easy to use, and very well designed. While certain paid solutions offer more functionality in various areas, Google’s tools are ideal for those on a budget or who don’t require more advanced features. This makes up the majority of internet marketers, as well as small and medium businesses.

Here are the 6 Best Google Tools for Internet Marketers:

1. Insights for Search

Google’s Insights for Search reveals patterns about terms and topics people are searching for by geography, categories, and other useful parameters.

This tool will help you plan the topic of your next blog post, which country to market your next product, how to shape your brand, and stay up to date with market trends. It is excellent for planning marketing campaigns and strategies.

2. Search Based Keyword Tool

The Search Based Keyword Tool provides you with meaningful keyword ideas tailored to your website. This is arguably the best free tool available for executing your Long Tail of Search keyword strategy.

3. Ad Planner

This tool is not only useful for planning your ad strategy, but for gaining valuable insights into how to better target and meet the desires of your website visitors. Enter some parameters that describe your website audience, and it will return a list of the most relevant websites they visit. Explore these websites with the mindset of one of your website visitors, and analyze the aspects that make it more enjoyable than your site. In this sense, the Ad Planner is an excellent tool for competitor research and insights for creating a better experience for your target audience.

4. Webmaster Tools

The Webmaster Tools provided are a must-have for any marketing strategy that depends on search engines. Although specific to Google’s engine, the feedback and overview provided help you optimize your website for other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing as well.

The interface provides you with a summary of the most important factors that affect your search engine rankings. It also highlights any problems it encounters with your site, allowing you to take action. This is the single best tool Google provides for search engine marketers.

5. Analytics

Google Analytics is the best free web analytics tool available today. It provides you with all the information you need to know about how visitors reached your website and how they interacted with it. Web analytics should be used for any online marketing strategy to measure your performance, and gain insights into how to improve.

6. Website Optimizer

Drive up your website and campaign conversion rates using Website Optimizer. This tool lets you test any combination of content on a web page to find out what works best. This ends up providing a better experience to your visitors, and a higher return on your online efforts.

Which Google tools do you use for your online marketing efforts? What other free tools besides Google’s would you recommend? Please share your thoughts below.

Viral Tweets - How to Transmit Twitter Bird Flu

Omar — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:30:00 +0000

Twitter is the most effective social network for viral marketing today. It is far easier to achieve viral success than Digg, and much less time consuming than YouTube. A viral campaign also spreads way faster on Twitter than any other network. Viral tweets can generate astronomical website traffic. How do you create tweets that are too irresistible to re-tweet? It’s not as hard as you may think, as long as you keep some key points in mind.

Here are 8 very important tips to Create Viral Tweets:

1. Start With A Snappy Title

The title of your tweet is by far the most critical factor, and is 90% of the battle in creating a viral tweet. Without a title that instantly piques people’s attention, you are dead in the water. So how can you consistently create titles that draw readers in?

Learn by example, and learn from the best. Study and read through hundreds and thousands of titles on popular websites like Mashable. These websites’ posts are re-tweeted hundreds of times, and their titles are always engaging. You will find patterns in the titles that make them attractive. Keep applying these patterns on your own titles, and you will eventually succeed.

Two solid introductory articles on the subject are How to Create Effective Titles by Problogger and Optimize Blog Post Titles by Andy Beal. Although these describe how to write proper blog posts, they are equally applicable to titles on Twitter.

2. Make Re-Tweeting Easy

You’ve created a successful tweet that brings visitors to your post, they’ve read it and enjoyed it. What better way to encourage them to re-tweet your post than a button that automates the process? Answer: none!

If Twitter is a core part of your marketing strategy, you would be foolish not to integrate the TweetMeme Retweet Button into your website. This lets readers see your tweet count, and quickly re-tweet your post by clicking the button.

The button plays a significant factor in how often your posts get re-tweeted, and gives you a big advantage in achieving viral success.

3. Leverage Power Tweeters

So you’ve got a great title, and a post that is worthy of the hype it has created. What else do you need?

Power Tweeters are your followers that have tens of thousands of followers themselves. The more power tweeters in your network, the more likely and faster your tweet will spread.

A strong network of power tweeters is an important viral marketing component. What is even more important, is that they actually re-tweet your post.

I recommend creating a personal relationship with these power tweeters, and there is nothing wrong with requesting they re-tweet your message. Just make sure it adds value to their followers and is relevant to their profile.

All it took for my recent post on Twitter Spam to go viral was for Steve Farnsworth, TheRealPRMan, to re-tweet it. I have no doubt that without my tweet reaching his almost 15,000 followers, it would have never gone viral.

4. Put Lipstick On the Pig

Provide a fresh and unique perspective on a popular topic. Don’t be afraid to be controversial. If you are successful at opening or changing people’s minds on a certain topic, they will be enticed to share it with their friends.

Here’s an example. “Link Building for SEO” is a very boring title. However, “What the Simpsons Can Teach Us About Link Building” is an interesting spin on a common topic, and would have a far greater chance at going viral.

5. Solve A Problem

Find a pressing problem or a need that hasn’t been met, and tweet a link to the solution. I realized that Twitter has a big problem with spam, yet a Google search on Twitter Spam returned very few and low quality entries.

My post about how to Kill Twitter Spam met a pressing but unmet need, and became viral because it helped solve a problem on everyone’s minds.

Similarly, I believe most Twitter users would love to consistently create viral tweets. A Google search on the subject also did not return pages that adequately addressed this issue, and is the very reason I decided to blog about this topic.

6. Release Breaking News

The recently leaked Twitter documents by TechCrunch revealed that its management views it as a real-time news service. It is not surprising that tweets containing news make up the most volume on Twitter.

The opportunity to be the first to break news on Twitter does not come around often, and for most of us requires blind luck. But you don’t need to be the first to be successful.

Even tweeting an engaging or controversial response soon after news breaks on Twitter has a good chance of being re-tweeted. This strategy mirrors posting video responses on YouTube, and is equally effective.

7. Make Your Posts Scannable

Twitter users probably have the shortest attention spans out of any audience on the internet. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just the nature of Twitter itself.

That makes it critical to make your post easy and quick to read. A user should be able to understand what your post is about in under 5 seconds, or you risk losing their interest and desire to re-tweet it. How do you make your post scannable?

Organize your content into short and easy to read paragraphs. Keep your sentences relatively short. Use headers to divide out and describe the main sections of your post. And embed attractive and descriptive pictures throughout.

8. Tweet About A Celebrity

I was searching through the most tweeted messages in the marketing field this week, and one of the most popular happened to be a tweet about Guy Kawasaki. Among other things, Guy is a very successful and well known online marketer. People are interested in celebrities, and if there is tweet that provides new information on a different perspective on that celebrity, they are likely to click.

Celebrity in this sense is not confined to Hollywood. What I mean by a Twitter celebrity is anyone that is well known and respected within a certain niche.

What are your tips on how to get lots of re-tweets? What do you think of the advice provided? Please share your thoughts below.

How to Boost Website Traffic in 2009

Omar — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:30:08 +0000

Achieving sustainable website traffic growth is best done using a combination of strategies and communications channels. Especially in the last year, we have seen the effectiveness of Social Media at generating website traffic explode. Techniques that were useful only several years ago have become obsolete, so what is effective today?

Here are 8 Great Ways to Improve Your Web Traffic in 2009:

1. Social Media

The effectiveness of social media at generating website traffic is growing exponentially. Why? That’s where your potential website visitors are. Just take a look at the Google Trends for Social Media yourself. A successful profile Twitter, YouTube, or Digg has become one of the best ways to drive website traffic.

Visitors from social media websites tend to browse quicker and have shorter attention spans than others. Ensure your website content is relevant to your Twitter profile and tweets, YouTube videos, and Diggs to keep visitors engaged.

2. Be Active Online

Participating in relevant forums, Blog Comments, Social Sites, newsgroups, and places where you can give advice such as Yahoo! Answers can be very rewarding. People will associate you with the topic you are talking about, and often become interested in learning more about you. This will lead them to visit your website and other links posted in your profiles and discussions.

The key things to keep in mind are to make sure any links you have in your profile are useful to the communities you interact with, and to avoid linking to your own website too often. Focusing on helping others and adding value to conversations will get you more visitors than just trying to help yourself.

3. Personal Interaction

Establishing relationships online is great. Keeping them there is not. Building personal relationships with helpful people you meet online is highly encouraged. You will gain better trust and confidence, which are major factors that play into whether someone will link to, talk about, or recommend you.

When you see a certain referrer is sending you quality traffic from their website, Twitter, or any other channel, pick up the phone! Your discussion will lead each of you to see each other as humans, not just pictures and words on a browser. This will usually lead to tighter alliances, and more willingness to help each other out.

4. Attend Industry Events

This is related to the personal interaction point above. Attending functions and events in the topic area of your website will provide you more exposure offline, which leads to more relevant traffic online. It is also a great way to meet people and establish new relationships both on and off the web.

5. Pay Per Click Marketing

Depending on your website objectives and your budget, pay per click campaigns can be a great way of driving targeted traffic. There are a few important things to keep in mind when using PPC. The first is to explore the various pay per click providers and channels and find which ones work best for you.

Search engines, banner, website, and video ads all vary in the quantity and quality of traffic they drive. It is up to you to find out what works best for your website.

The second thing to remember is creating optimized landing pages for each ad. This means testing various landing page combinations using A/B and multivariate testing to find out which landing page your visitors respond to best.

6. Link Bait

Having a raffle, competition, prizes, and viral YouTube videos on or that link to your website can generate an explosive growth in visits. This is a great way to attract many new visitors and associate your website with the link bait.

If it is very funny, exciting, rewarding, or useful, that is what your website will be associated with as well. It is also a great way to add value to your site and keep your existing visitors engaged and happy.

7. Search Engine Optimization

The priority of your website should be creating a great experience and optimizing it for your human visitors, not search engines. That being said, there are many things you can do to make it more visible to search engines and drive up your traffic, without impacting your visitor experience. A comprehensive and well-written Overview of SEO was written by SEOmoz.

One thing I will say is that Link Building has become a very important factor to rank at the top of search engines you should focus on.

8. Web Analytics

What you should be using web analytics for is determining which strategies are driving the highest amount of visitor traffic. This lets you spend more of your time improving what is working for you, and avoid wasting your time on tasks that are producing poor results.

In my case, I’ve used web analytics to determine that Twitter is driving more traffic for me than my other strategies. As a result, I am presently using analytics to determine what content and articles my Twitter visitors read most, so I can optimize the site for this traffic segment.

How do you drive traffic to your website? What strategies and channels have worked best for you so far? How have they changed in the last few years? Please share your thoughts below

Five SEO Link Building Strategies to Drive Website Traffic

Twitter Spam - How to Kill It

Omar — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 11:30:24 +0000

The scourge of spam quickly finds its way into every single communication channel possible, from snail mail packed with pizza coupons you will never use, to emails promising million dollar prizes. Spam has now found its way into social media. Twitter’s major weakness today is inability to fight spam and spammers. Facebook and YouTube have been able to do it, so why not Twitter? There could be many reasons, lack of effort and resources being two, but until Twitter resolves the issue, spam is here to stay.

Here are 6 Ways to Eliminate Spam on Twitter:

Just before I get into this list, you should read 3 Ways Scammers are Filling Twitter With Junk by the folks at Mashable, its a great read.

So how to cut down on spam?

1. Be Selective in Who You Follow

You should establish some criteria for who you add on Twitter depending on your objectives. Remember that behind that pretty profile picture could be a cold, lifeless robot with absolutely no emotions.

Take time to explore the person’s profile picture, website, followers, who they follow, description, and their tweets. Unless you’re a spammer yourself, only add people relevant to the Twitter profile you have built.

2. Block Spammers

It may not be practical to filter through every follower or person you will follow, but there is a simple solution. When you receive tweets that sound spammy and contain a link, check out that page. If its is persuading you to buy something you don’t need, the person is most likely a spammer.

Especially in the marketing niche, there are countless accounts spamming about how to gain 30,000 Twitter followers in a few weeks or how to make $100,000 by internet marketing at home.

Use built-in functions on Twitter and other 3rd party platforms to block people you suspect of spamming.

3. Report Twitter Spam

I think its somewhat sad that Twitter’s anti-spam efforts simply involve a block feature AFTER receiving the spam, and an official Anti-Spam Twitter account. These methods still do help however, and are better than nothing.

To report a spammer and have their account suspended or liquidated, follow Twitter’s official Spam Watch profile and send them a direct message indicating who it is. If they are indeed found to be spamming, they will disappear from the Twittersphere.

4. Use TwerpScan

TwerpScan Identifies Twitter spammers on your list using the ratio of people who are their followers to the people they follow. A profile that has very few followers compared to how many people it follows is one indicator of spam. TwerpScan will filter through your Twitter list and notify you of possible spammers, allowing you to take action.

5. Wait

There are still no highly reliable and accurate anti-spam programs for Twitter available. I would have expected something similar to Akismet Anti-Spam which is a very popular and successful tool to eliminate blog comment spam to have come around by now.

Several Twitter platforms are looking to introduce better functionality to fight spam in future releases, I’m not so sure spam is one of Twitter’s priorities. What is needed is a Twitter anti-spam tool with configurable settings to identify spammers. It must be configurable because one person’s spam may be another’s dinner.

6. Build A Solution With Me

I see Twitter’s major weakness being the prevalence of spam, and addressing this issue would add a lot of value to the platform. I also sense a very high demand by users to eliminate this problem, and see Akismet’s success at eliminating blog spam as proof that it can be done by a third party extension.

The ultimate spam program I envision would have configurable settings to identify spammers using the following factors:

A) The ratio of followers to people following
B) Keywords or phrases in the profile description, and the destination pages of any links
C) The content, age, and links contained within the profile website
D) Frequency, content, and links in tweets
E) Number of followers
F) Number of people following
G) The age of the profile

By configuring the above variables, a person using Twitter can get a spam index profile of everyone.

In addition to cutting out spammers, this would be an excellent tool to determine how relevant other people are to you. I was using TweetDeck recently and its recommendations of people to add on Twitter were completely irrelevant.

Successfully creating a solution for Twitter spam would be rewarding for many reasons, but I cannot do it on my own. If you are interested in working on a solution and have programming experience, please Contact Me so that we can work on a solution.

Conclusion

Although there are ways to reduce spam on Twitter, they are manual, time consuming, and have no preemptive capabalities. The Twittersphere is waiting for a solution to liquidate Twitter spam once and for all. The question is, when will it come, and who will create it?

Do you think there is too much spam on Twitter? How do you deal with it? Are there any applications you recommend to fight it?