Notes From Mat Siltala’s E-Tourism Summit Presentation On Blogging
These are notes from a presentation that I did on blogging at the E-tourism summit in San Francisco. They are raw, but I feel there is some good info that can be taken from these notes.
1. Importance of blogging - The question I get asked while being here at this conference is; Why Blog? You do not want to make the mistake of setting up a blog for setting up a blogs sake. A blog can increase the health of your site, increase (what I like to call) your Google saturation (the more pages you have indexed the better, and help out rankings and trust if done right. If you are not willing to put the time into what it takes to run a successful, well thought out blog it really is going to do nothing for you but waste time. When you set up your blog correctly (and make it search engine friendly) it gives you the opportunity to be found and ranked for more long tail key phrases, such as “social media for Firefox” in this example - http://www.97thfloor.com/blog/announcing-new-tool-social-media-for-firefox-extension/
If you go to Google and do a site:http://www.97thfloor.com/blog you will also see how many pages that Google has indexed, and how many opportunities there are for ranking for additional key phrases.
The biggest struggle that I see people have with blogging is coming up with content, and ideas to blog about … especially in boring industries. You do not need to worry. The travel industry will be a piece of cake. For example if you are in charge of a tourism website for the Grand Canyon then you can do a weekly “10 of the most beautiful pictures you will see this week from the Grand Canyon” You can also work in a little link bait with a catchy blog title like “The 10 costliest places to spend the night” or “10 travel destinations where you get the most bang for you buck”
where to find ideas:
SERPH
Google Blog Search
Ezine Articles (find articles that have had most views and reviews/comments etc - you can do this easily by viewing the author details)
Google Alerts.
2. Setting up a blog
-no matter what blogging software you use - wordpress, typepad
-don’t do subdomain, or new domain … just do a directory - example 97thfloor.com/blog because if you get a popular story on digg (or any social sites you want your domain name getting credit for that story) THAT IS WHY its so important to have it in a directory rather then a sub domain or other domain etc…
-more important for branding because it can tie back into your site.
-help out the rankings (the site will rank better because any links you have inside the blog posts will help your site out)
-most blogging software categorizes blog posts through categories and dated archives and what it does is create a duplicate content issue. (basically same post shows up several places on your blog)
- you will want to tweak your blog so it categorizes one way or the other, or do a robots.txt files that does it all. If you do a Google search for robots.txt you will get some good sites explaining how to go about setting up that properly.
-blogging software does not generally come search engine friendly so you need to make sure that you are tweaking your blogging software to include things like search engine friendly URLs, and meta data and social media optimization tools like sociable.
3. RSS - What it stands for - really simple syndication
-blogging is even more important then Google rankings because you need readers.
-if you want people to read, you will need some way for them to subscribe to you.
-RSS is like the new newsletters/ opt in/email marketing from the old school days
-Google Reader - people use it as an aggregator to read all their subscriptions.
- its like subscribing to a newspaper. You can subscribe to 4 different newspapers in the same town, and they all go to your house (for example)
-Bloglines is another aggregator like Google Reader that you can use to read all of your feeds.
-if you get accounts at these places then there is a good chance the people subscribed to their services like (bloglines) will find you as well.
Use RSS for marketing by setting up profiles pages on social communities like SQUIDOO and MASHABLE and include your RSS from your blog to gain additional links pointing back to your site. (make profiles on these sites using your brand name because it will get them more exposure too.)
4. Blog Marketing
-finding top bloggers on sites like Technorati - do a search for your keywords and find the top bloggers, and use them to see what they are blogging about. If you have something good, you can send them an email to see if they will mention it on thier blog.
-Stumble Upon - Use the stumble upon toolbar (they will need to get firefox or IE to use SU) and start submitting stories related to the travel industry. Submit to correct category, and use proper keywords to tag it , and seperate wtih category. (use the drop down and find the best possible categories)
how to use stumble upon - add friends - build up - find related categories
stumble upon ads and how to use them if you are to lazy to build up an account - SU is so much better then like digg or reddit because you can pay for visitors 5 cents up to 3k a day and get people to start reading your blog that way. You need people to find out about your blog - you need readers/subscribers and this is how to do it.
- you can get 200 visitors in an hour with a stumble account that is built up….but if you dont want to do that then just use the SU ads.
-when you are popular on Stumble Upon you will get other people saving your stuff on del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site) and that helps search engine rankings because you are getting additional links.
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Great blog with good information. Will visit again
I tried to setup the wordpress blog as you mentioned in your presentation, but it seems that I ned to know programming languages just to set it up. Is it supposed to be this difficult
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